Nine of the group stage games played in severe heat, analysis finds, as union points to lessons for the whole sport
Nine matches in the World Cup group stage were played amid potentially dangerous heat and humidity, a Guardian analysis shows, as global players’ union Fifpro warned that heat would have to “play a bigger part” in the sport’s future scheduling decisions.
The findings come as likely record-breaking heat and humidity will hit the midwest and eastern US this week and could make conditions even more challenging for players and fans at some games.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: South Korea's government and top tech companies are committing $1 trillion to several flagship megaprojects that could bolster global memory chip supply, build new AI data centers and spur commercial deployment of humanoid robots by 2028. [...] "We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country," said South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in a televised speech on June 29, as reported by BBC News and other media outlets. "Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward." [...] The most costly of the megaprojects involves Samsung and SK Hynix committing $585 billion to building new chip fabrication plants in the southwest provinces of South Korea, along with boosting semiconductor fab construction in the Seoul capital region, according to Reuters. The government's goal is to double South Korea's production of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) within five years. [...] The second flagship megaproject involves a $357 billion investment by the South Korean tech companies SK Group, GS Group, and Naver into building large-scale AI data centers in more outlying provinces, including South Chungcheong Province in the west, Gangwon Province in the east, and the North and South Jeolla Provinces in the southwest corner of South Korea. The third flagship megaproject revolves around the South Korean government assigning a "national strategic industry" designation to physical AI -- the AI systems that enable robots and self-driving vehicles to interact more autonomously with the real world. The government aims to develop a Korean "general-purpose foundation model" based on a world model to support robots within three years, according to The Chosun Daily. Hyundai Motor Company has also committed $5.8 billion to build a robot manufacturing facility and AI data center in the Saemangeum region of North Jeolla Province in the southwest, The Chosun Daily reported. The South Korean automaker has already been helping Boston Dynamics -- the US robotics company it acquired in 2021 -- use the South Korean supply chain in scaling up manufacturing to produce 30,000 Atlas humanoid robots each year by 2028. Similarly, the South Korean government announced it would aim to commercialize humanoid robots in 10 major industries by 2028, along with training 10,000 human workers as "AI robotics specialists" over the next five years, Reuters reported.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Updates from day two | Serena on her SW19 return
Swan glides through but Boulter beaten | Email Katy
Next no No 3: Alex de Minaur (5) v Roman Andres Burruchaga.
Next on No 2: Otto Virtanen v Ben Shelton (4).
Continue reading...Court rules against Trump administration on policy that people born in the United States are citizens
The US supreme court has upheld birthright citizenship, which provides nearly all people born in the country with citizenship, ruling against a central piece of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the ruling says.
Continue reading...Ruling to uphold birthright citizenship is blow to Trump’s agenda in a supreme court season that largely went his way
Supreme court upholds birthright citizenship in blow to Trump agenda
Justices allow states to ban trans women from female sports and strike down limits on federal campaign spending
The supreme court’s decision to reject Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook yesterday is part of a long-running battle over the independence of the central bank.
Trump repeatedly attacked former chair Jerome Powell for not lowering interest rates fast enough, calling him a “moron” on social media. Powell’s term ended in May this year, and he was succeeded by Trump nominee Kevin Warsh.
Continue reading...Keir Starmer earlier unveiled a £15bn plan but said defence spending cannot be ‘bottomless pit’ and MoD has to ‘spend better’
Keir Starmer is speaking now.
They are at Malloy Aeronautics, a firm that designs heavy-lift drones, and Starmer says this morning they showed him one of the heaviest drones he had ever seen.
Last year, I made the decision in the national interest to reprioritise aid spending towards defence and achieve the biggest uplift in defence spending since the end of the cold war.
That was the right choice because the world has changed. National security is economic security.
Continue reading...Justices voted to overturn judgments issued by lower courts in favor of trans students who sued after being barred from competing in West Virginia and Idaho
The US supreme court has upheld laws in two conservative states excluding transgender girls and women from competing in female sports in a far-reaching ruling likely to pave the way for similar bans throughout the US and handing Donald Trump a key “culture war” victory.
The court voted to overturn previous judgements issued by lower courts in favor of two trans students who had sued after being barred from competing in West Virginia and Idaho respectively.
Continue reading...PARIS, June 30, 2026 — Crédit Agricole CIB, the financing and investment banking arm of Crédit Agricole Group, and Pasqal, a global leader in neutral atom quantum computing, announced the signing of a strategic partnership to accelerate the transition from quantum research to operational deployment in capital markets activities.
Building on a collaboration initiated in 2019, the partnership enters a new phase focused on the industrialization of quantum computing applications, with initial production use cases targeted as early as 2028.
An Innovation Trajectory Validated by Concrete Results
Since 2021, Crédit Agricole CIB and Pasqal have conducted several major projects focusing on counterparty credit default risk measurement and portfolio optimization to improve the Bank’s capital efficiency. The results indicate that quantum algorithms can, under specific conditions and use cases, improve performance compared to classical approaches for capital markets and risk management applications, supporting the business case for production deployment. The partners believe there may be an opportunity to unlock additional value as quantum hardware and algorithms continue to mature.
A Clear Roadmap to Production: 2026–2028
The next phase of the partnership will focus on monitoring capital reserve consumption. linked with risk-weighted assets.
This roadmap is structured around three activities:
Structuring the Quantum Ecosystem: Three Action Levers
To achieve this industrialization, Crédit Agricole CIB is structuring its quantum ecosystem around three pillars: business teams trained in quantum technologies (software and hardware), strategic coordinators ensuring monitoring, and project managers ensuring production deployment. This is supported by access to Pasqal’s platforms (simulators and physical machines).
“Quantum computing has the potential to establish itself as one of the most structurally transformative technological breakthroughs of the next decade. This partnership marks our transition from an exploratory posture to an industrialization logic. By 2028, we aim to integrate quantum computing into some of our daily operational processes, offering our clients an unprecedented level of performance and precision in portfolio optimization. This ambition fully aligns with our technological innovation strategy and our determination to maintain our leadership in capital markets,” explains Pierre-Olivier Pagnon, Chief Information Officer of Crédit Agricole CIB.
“Quantum computing has reached a pivotal moment where its potential is translating into real operational value,” said Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Pasqal. “Through our long-standing partnership with Crédit Agricole CIB, we are accelerating this shift—combining advanced neutral atom quantum technology with real-world financial use cases to build a clear path toward production-scale deployment. Together, we are laying the foundation for quantum solutions that we believe will redefine optimization and decision-making in capital markets.”
About Crédit Agricole CIB
Crédit Agricole CIB is the corporate and investment banking arm of Crédit Agricole Group, the 10th largest banking group worldwide by total assets in 2024 (The Banker, July 2025). With over 10,000 employees across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, the Bank supports large and mid-cap corporates and institutional clients, helping them meet both local and global financial needs. Crédit Agricole CIB offers a comprehensive range of products and services in capital markets, investment banking, structured finance, commercial banking and international trade. The Bank is a pioneer in climate finance, and a market leader in sustainable finance providing a full spectrum of solutions to all its clients. For more information, please visit www.ca-cib.com.
About Pasqal
Pasqal is a global leader in delivering practical quantum computing at scale utilizing neutral atom technology and dedicated software for industry, science, and governments. Since its founding in 2019, Pasqal has leveraged Nobel Prize winning research to build high-performance quantum systems and cloud-ready software designed to address complex challenges in optimization, simulation, and artificial intelligence.
Headquartered in France, Pasqal employs over 275 people and serves over 25 clients and partners, including Aramco, CMA CGM, OVHcloud, Thales, IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network), and Sumitomo.
Backed by more than USD 300 million in total private funding from leading international investors, Pasqal is pursuing a listing on Nasdaq in partnership with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II (Nasdaq: BBCQ) and is accelerating the adoption of scalable, high-performance quantum computing worldwide.
Source: Pasqal
The post Pasqal and Crédit Agricole CIB Advance Strategic Partnership to Deploy Quantum Computing Applied to Finance appeared first on HPCwire.
The Supreme Court upheld state laws from West Virginia and Idaho that restricted participation by transgender athletes in girls' and women's sports.
Announcing creation of a maternity commissioner, James Murray says Amos report highlights ‘toxic’ culture in some NHS units
Valerie Amos’s devastating indictment of maternity care has to be a “watershed moment” for how the NHS treats pregnant women and babies, the health secretary has said.
James Murray pledged that Lady Amos’s report would lead to significant improvements and that “toxic dynamics” which damage relationships between hospital staff providing childbirth care would be dismantled.
Continue reading...The New Jersey congressman missed more than 140 votes since March 5 as those around him declined to give specifics about his medical issue.
The design-forward startup looks like it's getting bolder and more colorful with every product.
Cristina Guarda says delegation was denied access to cells in offshore detention facility, at which six people have attempted suicide
An Italian MEP has questioned whether the Italian government is trying to “hide the truth” about conditions at an offshore migrant detention centre in Albania after a delegation she was part of said they were prevented from conducting a full inspection.
Cristina Guarda, from Italy’s Greens and Left Alliance (AVS), said staff at the Italian-run facility in Gjadër had refused to give MEPs from the Greens/EFA group key information, such as how many people were being held at the centre, and that they had not been allowed to access their cells.
Continue reading...Mutantkind's greatest heroes face a battle across time against Apocalypse.
Manny Rutinel’s House campaign draws millions from big tech as pro- and anti-AI factions spar over regulation
Political groups funded by top tech executives have been homing in on one local race in Colorado, as the state’s Democratic primary vote gets under way on Tuesday. Democrat Manny Rutinel, who’s running in the competitive eighth congressional district for a seat in the House, has seen his campaign boosted with at least $2m in donations from committees led by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen.
Rutinel is a progressive candidate running against former state representative and centrist Democrat Shannon Bird. During his campaign, he has focused on his Latino heritage and centered his platform around affordability and regulating Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Continue reading...The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Trump's executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
Scott Bessent says he ‘encourages them to be good actors’ after Trump ranted about prices not dropping fast enough
Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, issued a veiled warning to oil and gas companies to lower their prices on Tuesday, a day after Donald Trump berated those retailers on social media for not dropping their prices fast enough and demanded they target $2.50 a gallon.
“I would encourage them to be good actors, especially in the 250th anniversary, because we’re watching,” Bessent said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday morning, addressing big oil, independent and international retailers.
Continue reading...The US manager has enjoyed a solid rapport with the media, but a key difference in custom has rankled the Argentinian
Mauricio Pochettino’s most recent press conference should have been a routine affair. The US had lost 3-2 to Turkey, yes, but they’d played well enough in the second-half aside from conceding the last-minute winner. What’s more, the match was statistically meaningless, with the US having secured top spot in Group D days earlier. It was their best ever World Cup group-stage showing
Instead, the team’s head coach went out of his way to chide those in attendance.
Continue reading...Authorities are still searching to identify the suspect of an alleged assassination attempt of a Ukrainian business tycoon
in Madrid
More than 1 million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers have applied to regularise their status in Spain under a government programme to harness and defend the benefits of immigration at a time when most European countries are pulling up the drawbridge.
“The fact that more than 1 million people submitted applications shows just how necessary this recognition of rights and responsibilities was.”
Continue reading...ONS confirms 0.6% GDP growth in first quarter, with services, production and construction sectors expanding
UK households suffered a drop in disposable incomes in the first three months of the year as price rises and extra wealth taxes hit average spending power.
The Office for National Statistics said a rise in the consumer prices index (CPI) measure of inflation in the first quarter and higher capital gains tax receipts reduced real household disposable income by 0.8% from January to the end of March.
Continue reading...The Supreme Court struck down federal limits on the amount of money a political committee can spend in coordination with federal candidates.
Sigfrido Ranucci had just returned home at the time of the explosion, and his daughter had walked by a half-hour before, his employer said.
The US motor company found that the hundreds of AI cameras being used for design and manufacturing checks were prone to pitfalls
Name: “Greybeards.”
Age: There’s a clue in the name.
Continue reading...Critics say the new focus could reshape LGBTQ+ healthcare, abortion access and vaccine policy
The Trump administration is moving religious freedom to the forefront of its health policies, a move that will likely affect reproductive health, LGBTQ+ healthcare, and vaccine policy.
“They are very much putting religious freedom front and center,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco. But “it tends to privilege a conservative form of Christianity and, for example, protect discrimination against LGBTQ people.”
Continue reading...Questions remain as to why somebody would want to kill Vadym Iermolaiev, who has a personal fortune of $225m
Nobody paid much attention to the man with the backpack, as he approached the entrance to a beige-coloured Monaco apartment building. It was 9pm, Monday evening. The street – rue Révérend-Père-Louis-Frolla – is located in a quiet hillside part of the wealthy principality, close to the border with France.
The man left his bag on the front steps. Soon afterwards, the Ukrainian-born oligarch Vadym Iermolaiev emerged, together with his wife and their 13-year-old child. There was an explosion and CCTV captured an image of the suspect, wearing a black jacket and a bucket hat, running from the scene towards the neighbouring French town of Beausoleil.
Continue reading...Order wants to set up its own scheme outside of court to pay survivors, who have been told they will not get what they are owed in full
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An abuse survivor feels as if he has been stabbed with a “sharp, long, bladed knife to the back” after his trial was aborted at the 11th hour due to an unprecedented legal tactic by the Christian Brothers.
Last week, the Christian Brothers sought a permanent halt to hundreds of cases lodged by survivors of abuse at its schools and orphanages, arguing it was about to go broke and could not afford to meet them.
Continue reading...The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 (PDF) in Chatrie v United States (No. 25-112) that geofence warrants sweeping up smartphone location data constitute searches under the Fourth Amendment. The Court found that individuals have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in such data, even when the tracking covers only a brief period or records movements in public. "An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information -- even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company," wrote Justice Elena Kagan. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 submitted the story. The Guardian reports: The use of geofence warrants is widespread, and gives law enforcement agencies the power to compel tech companies to hand over sensitive cell phone data from people at or near crime scenes. The warrants allow police and the FBI to collect this information from individuals within the radius of a virtual "fence" during a particular timeframe. But they are not restricted to requesting data for precise targets. The Chatrie case focuses on local police's pursuit of an armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google "location history" feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty. Chatrie's lawyers argued that this search was overly broad and violated his fourth amendment rights, which protects individuals from "unreasonable search and seizure." Lawyers said that police's use of geofence warrants amounted to an official "search" under the fourth amendment, and didn't meet the constitution's requirements for one. The government had argued that accessing only a short amount of cellphone location information means this tactic does not count as a fourth amendment search and accordingly, should not be afforded the same privacy protections. But the judges in the majority disagreed. The judges in the majority opinion also wrote that the government's characterization of generating location history as a voluntary choice is "meritless." They suggested that people aren't choosing to share private information with third parties and the government "just by doing the ordinary thing cellphone users do." "The point of carrying smartphones is to use what is on them," including the apps and services they provide -- many of which use location data to customize a user's experience, they said. [...] While the majority opinion noted that police conducted a fourth amendment search by accessing Chatrie's location history data, they noted that the court of appeals will weigh in on whether the "search was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause." Law enforcement has said they need geofence warrants to find suspects and witnesses -- after reaching dead ends. The US government, for its part, has argued that people can't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when they are in public and have allowed a third party company, such as Google, to collect and analyze phone location data.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Financing options to be investigated for first two subsea projects that would link Mainland with Yell and Unst
Councillors on Shetland have backed plans to build up to four tunnels to link some of the largest and most populated islands, after years of isolation and decline.
The council voted on Tuesday to investigate financing options for the first two subsea tunnels, which would link Shetland’s Mainland with the two large northerly islands of Yell and Unst.
Continue reading...Heat can be deadly. Here are ways to protect yourself during high temps.
New repayment rules and borrowing limits start this week. Here's who should pay close attention to the changes.
Officials say people and pets should keep a safe distance away from the water to limit the chances of an alligator encounter.
Thirteen countries with a free trade agreement with Brussels have their quota reduced by just one-third
The EU has halved the amount of duty-free steel it will accept from abroad, but has agreed higher import levels for more than a dozen trading partners, including Britain.
However, some steel producers have been hit harder than others with Tata Steel UK, Britain’s biggest producer, revealing its duty-free exports have been slashed by 60%.
Continue reading...PM hopeful tells meeting of women’s parliamentary Labour party that any staff who undermine female members of his team will be sacked
Andy Burnham has said he will end the culture of briefing against female ministers, promising Labour MPs he will sack any staff who undermine women in his team.
Speaking at a meeting of the women’s parliamentary Labour party in Westminster, Burnham also strongly criticised descriptions of him as “the first female Labour PM” in the Spectator magazine.
Continue reading...FORT MEADE, Md., June 30, 2026 — The Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) at the National Security Agency (NSA), in close collaboration with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Office (ARO), has announced the launch of the Quantum Ecosystem Advancement, Growth & Leadership (QuantumEAGLe) initiative in support of the President’s Quantum Executive Order. This new program aims to accelerate the U.S. quantum computing ecosystem and strengthen the nation’s leadership in quantum technology.
QuantumEAGLe focuses on five key areas to drive innovation and growth in the U.S. quantum industry:
“Building on LPS’s rich history in Quantum Information Science, which includes decades of foundational research and collaboration with the [Department of Defense], QuantumEAGLe represents a significant expansion of NSA’s quantum computing efforts,” said Liji Samuel, NSA chief of the Laboratory for Physical Sciences. “This initiative is designed to cultivate a resilient U.S. industrial base capable of delivering on the promise of quantum computing for national and economic security.”
According to ARO Acting Director Dr. Purush Iyer, by combining the strengths of LPS and ARO in fundamental research and technical innovation, QuantumEAGLe will accelerate progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and ensure the United States remains at the forefront of this critical technology.
“Together, we are building the foundation for future breakthroughs that will benefit both national and economic security and the broader scientific community,” he said.
Dr. Michael Metcalfe, NSA chief of Quantum Information Science, emphasized that the QuantumEAGLe initiative represents a significant step in strengthening America’s quantum computing capabilities.
“By working closely with the quantum industry, we aim to enhance our supply chain, develop cutting-edge algorithms, and overcome fundamental research challenges,” he said. “This collaborative effort will help us maintain U.S. leadership in quantum technology and ensure the security and prosperity of our nation.”
The initiative will leverage flexible contracting authorities and work directly with the U.S. quantum industry to help align research with commercial needs and support stronger domestic capability.
The QuantumEAGLe Special Notice has been posted by the Army Contracting Command on SAM.gov.
Source: NSA
The post NSA, DEVCOM Army Research Office Launch QuantumEAGLe Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.
CMA says developers should be able to steer users away from app stores for payments to increase competition
The UK’s competition watchdog is challenging Apple and Google’s “effective duopoly” over mobile platforms by allowing developers to steer users away from their app stores to make purchases.
The Competition and Markets Authority argues that consumers and app owners are being let down by Apple and Google restrictions on spending money outside their app stores.
Continue reading...Case stems from 2022 lawsuit challenging Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of limits on ‘coordinated party expenditures’
One of the last remaining barriers between wealthy donors sending unlimited funds to federal political candidates fell after the US supreme court struck down a lower court ruling that limited spending by political parties in support of their candidates.
The case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v Federal Election Commission, stems from a 2022 lawsuit by JD Vance, Republican former congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, challenging the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of limits on so-called “coordinated party expenditures”.
Continue reading...Powered by AWS, the University of Utah’s new Secure Research Enclave brings secure, scalable cloud computing to complex research involving sensitive data, AI-enabled analysis and NIST, HIPAA, FISMA and CMMC requirements.
SALT LAKE CITY, June 30, 2026 — The University of Utah has announced the launch of the Secure Research Enclave (SRE) through the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research. The governed, cloud-based research environment, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), expands the University’s portfolio of research computing resources and provides an additional option for researchers working with sensitive, regulated, controlled-access, and sponsor-restricted data.
Credit: Shutterstock
The SRE builds on and complements established capabilities across the University, including the Center for High Performance Computing and the Price College of Engineering Secure Computing Environment. Together, these resources give researchers a broader set of secure computing options and help match projects to the environment best suited to their data, security, compliance, and computing needs.
Through the collaboration of the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and AWS, the SRE provides secure-by-design cloud infrastructure for projects that require advanced security, compliance documentation, and scalable computing resources. The environment is intended to support research involving clinical and genomic information, protected health information, Controlled Unclassified Information, controlled-access datasets, sponsor-restricted data, AI-enabled analysis, and other research subject to increasing sponsor, collaborator, data-provider and federal expectations for secure data stewardship.
“Research competitiveness increasingly depends on our ability to support complex projects responsibly,” said Erin Rothwell, Senior Vice President for Research at the University of Utah. “The Secure Research Enclave helps our researchers say yes to more ambitious work by providing a clearer institutional pathway for secure, compliant, and data-intensive research.”
The SRE addresses a practical challenge facing faculty and research teams: sponsor, federal, and data-provider requirements can delay or limit projects when appropriate controls, documentation, or computing environments are not readily available. Rather than leaving individual laboratories or projects to solve those requirements independently, the SRE creates a shared route through the University’s Research Security Office.
The Research Security Office helps researchers navigate the growing security expectations tied to sensitive data, external sponsorship, research partnerships and federal research security requirements, including NSPM-33. In addition to helping teams identify appropriate secure computing options, the Office supports requirement interpretation, project planning, data stewardship, security review and realistic budgeting for cloud, storage, computing, security and compliance costs in proposals and contracts. The goal is to help researchers pursue grants, contracts, restricted datasets and collaborations that require strong research security and data stewardship.
“The Secure Research Enclave creates a practical bridge between research ambition and research security,” said Lisa Young, Research Security Officer, University of Utah. “As research becomes more data-intensive, collaborative and technology-enabled, researchers are navigating more complex expectations for sensitive data, external partnerships, AI-enabled analysis and controlled-access datasets. The enclave provides a secure cloud environment and a clearer institutional path for meeting those expectations in ways that support discovery rather than slow it down.”
AWS is will provide cloud services, technical expertise and support for the initiative. The collaboration helps lower the initial cost barrier for researchers who need to move sensitive, regulated, or data-intensive work into a secure environment, while helping teams understand the requirements of secure cloud research so they can plan more effectively for future grants and contracts.
In addition to cloud infrastructure and security capabilities, AWS is supporting approved research computing and AI tools, as well as workshops and training to help researchers and technical teams develop secure, cloud-enabled workflows. This enablement role is intended to help the University build not only a platform, but a repeatable model for supporting complex research responsibly and at scale.
“AWS is proud to support the University of Utah in building a secure, scalable research environment that helps researchers move faster from proposal to publication while meeting the most demanding security and compliance requirements. This collaboration gives the research community at the University of Utah a clearer, more supported path to pursue grants, partnerships, and discoveries that were previously out of reach,” said Kim Majerus, Vice President of Global Education and Local Government at AWS.
The Secure Research Enclave is designed to support a broad range of research needs, including externally sponsored research, regulated data, clinical and genomic research, multi-institutional collaborations, controlled-access datasets and emerging AI-enabled research workflows. By expanding the University’s secure research computing portfolio, the University of Utah reduces friction for researchers, strengthens readiness for complex research opportunities, and supports responsible stewardship of sensitive and regulated research data.
The launch builds on the University’s ongoing work to expand secure research capacity and follows the inaugural Secure Research Days, co-hosted by the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and AWS on May 27–28, 2026. The event brought together faculty, researchers, scientists, and technical professionals to explore secure research workflows, cloud-enabled research, and emerging requirements for data-intensive and regulated research.
About the University of Utah
The University of Utah is the state’s flagship institution of higher education, with 18 schools and colleges, more than 100 undergraduate majors and graduate programs and an enrollment of more than 36,000 students. It is a member of the Association of American Universities—an invitation-only, prestigious group of 71 leading research institutions. Ranked No. 1 public university in the West by the Wall Street Journal, the U strives to be a model public university in delivering unmatched value in higher education and health care while making social, economic and cultural contributions that improve the quality of life throughout the state, the nation and the world.
About Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is guided by customer obsession, pace of innovation, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. By democratizing technology for nearly two decades and making cloud computing and generative AI accessible to organizations of every size and industry, AWS has built one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses in history. Millions of customers trust AWS to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and shape the future. With the most comprehensive AI capabilities and global infrastructure footprint, AWS empowers builders to turn big ideas into reality.
Source: University of Utah
The post University of Utah Launches Secure Research Enclave Powered by AWS appeared first on HPCwire.
They offer 100+ hours of listening on a single charge, and you can grab a pair at an all-time low price right now.
As the the shocking heatwave continues, our European environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan answered your questions about which countries have responded best, who is being held to account, and why people are surprised after decades of warnings
sloth_101 asks: Most reports still talk about this issue in terms of “records”? Technically, that might be correct but it feels like it’s missing the urgency of the matter. “Records” are meant to be broken. These records clearly are not. Isn’t there a better way to describe it? For example, how “climate change” is often replaced with “climate emergency” or “climate breakdown”?
Ajit: I had never thought about it like that before but I can see how it can be read that way. It is partly a limitation of the language and partly an issue of accuracy. Ideally, I would spell it out – “Germany has been hit by heat it has never seen before” – but, because we are talking about measurements since records began, rather than over a longer period of history. I prefer to speak of “record-breaking” heat. The urgency can still be conveyed by describing the damage that hot weather does to our bodies and stating the death toll, which comes to tens of thousands of people across Europe in a typical summer. Each year heat kills 10 ten times more people than murderers in Europe.
Ajit: So far there has been fairly little evidence of this happening. Far-right parties talk a lot about migrants and climate, but almost exclusively as separate issues. One recent exception is Switzerland, where a referendum this month on capping the country’s population at 10 million people linked the impact of migration on the Alpine nation’s natural resources, but the link here was more about environmental degradation than climate breakdown.
Some data suggests migrants tend to pollute about as much as the native-born population – flying more but driving less - so there is no obvious avenue by which they would hold foreigners responsible for increased temperatures. What seems more likely is that, as temperatures rise to intolerable levels in North Africa and the Middle East, increased migration to Europe will force far-right parties to confront the paradox that the migration they want to stop will be exacerbated by the fossil fuel pollution they support.
Continue reading...Does anyone seriously think this kind of amplification is harmless?
Elon Musk has long described himself as a “centrist”. He likes to pretend that he hasn’t changed his views; it’s the Democrats who have lurched to the left. He’s merely a free speech advocate; a self-styled “moderate” resisting the excesses of the “woke mind virus”.
But when you pay attention to his actual digital footprint – the tweets, the retweets, the algorithmic amplification – a very different, much darker picture emerges. The world’s richest person clearly isn’t interested in cultivating a neutral marketplace of ideas; rather, he has turned Twitter/X into a platform where far-right and racist content is repeatedly rewarded and amplified.
Continue reading...AI tends to "play it safe within a user's preferences," nudging people toward more conventional choices, according to computational social scientist Sandra Matz.
ENSCHEDE, Netherlands, June 30, 2026 — QuiX Quantum today released its vision of universal photonic quantum computing with logical qubits through Dedalo, the company’s new system architecture designed to achieve practical, fault-tolerant systems that work seamlessly with classical supercomputers.
Useful quantum computing depends on more than qubit performance. To become practical computing infrastructure, fault-tolerant universal quantum systems must be manufacturable, energy efficient, modular and room-temperature to co-exist alongside supercomputers where real workloads will be developed, tested and executed. This makes system architecture a determining factor in whether quantum computers can support real-world applications and deployment.
In a new white paper, QuiX Quantum says the key to this future is building advanced photonic components and bringing them together into a fault-tolerant architecture that can scale. To do so, the company is connecting logical qubits, photon-loss protection, modular photonic hardware and data center deployability into one system-level roadmap.
“A broader adoption of quantum computers requires systems which do not need specialized and hard-to-maintain environments,” said Dr. Ing. Stefan Hengesbach, CEO at QuiX Quantum. “The industry needs architectures that can both scale efficiently and fit into the infrastructure where real workloads will run. Dedalo is our blueprint for that future.”
“Companies, researchers, and technical leaders evaluating how to get from today’s quantum prototypes to practical systems should download our white paper now to see how we can help them achieve this long sought-after industry milestone,” Robin Wittlan, CCO at QuiX Quantum said.
What Practical Quantum Systems Require
The Dedalo white paper presents QuiX Quantum’s vision of the system-level requirements needed to move quantum computers toward practical computing infrastructure. Specifically, the white paper organizes those requirements around six priorities for building quantum systems that can scale:
Why Photonics and Logical Qubits
QuiX Quantum’s architecture focuses on combining uniquely integrated photonics technology, discrete variable qubit encoding and room-temperature operation, which the white paper positions as the best path to fault-tolerant-scale universal quantum computing. Key advantages include silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits that can be produced using established semiconductor fabrication processes; fiber-based and telecom-compatible interconnects that support distributed architectures; minimized dependence on extensive cryogenic infrastructure; and modular scaling through interconnected photonic modules rather than a single monolithic processor.
A central focus of Dedalo is the use of logical qubits as a path toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing. Logical qubits encode information across multiple physical qubits so that errors can be detected and corrected without destroying the computation. For photonic systems, the dominant error is typically photon loss. Dedalo is designed to address this and demonstrate the generation, manipulation and measurement of photonic logical qubits, along with logical-basis measurements protected against photon loss.
“Photon loss is one of the defining challenges for photonic quantum computing,” said Emlyn Stephens, Head of Quantum Science at QuiX Quantum. “By focusing on logical qubits and loss-error tolerance, we are building toward an architecture that can support reliable computation as photonic systems scale.”
Designed for Hybrid, Fault-Tolerant Systems
The white paper emphasizes data center readiness as a core design principle. QuiX Quantum’s photonic approach is designed to take advantage of semiconductor manufacturing and standard telecom components with the goal of supporting quantum systems that can operate alongside classical HPC, AI and data-center infrastructure.
QuiX Quantum says Dedalo is intended to demonstrate a key step in that path by showing universal photonic quantum computing based on logical qubits protected against photon loss. The paper gives readers a more detailed view of how that system comes together, from photon generation and resource-state preparation to switching, feed-forward control, logical qubit operations and measurement. It also outlines the technical requirements that still matter for fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing, including low-loss photonic components, fast modulation, efficient photon sources, and scalable error-correction strategies.
“Dedalo reflects our view that the path to useful quantum computing is architectural,” said Andrew Roos, VP of R&D at QuiX Quantum. “It is about bringing together photonic hardware, control systems, error correction and deployment requirements into a coherent system design. That is what will determine whether quantum computers can move from laboratory systems to practical computing infrastructure.”
The full white paper, “Toward Photonic Quantum Computing with Logical Qubits: Dedalo Architecture White Paper,” is now available from QuiX Quantum. Readers can download the paper here to explore the Dedalo architecture in detail, including its approach to logical qubits, photon-loss tolerance, modular photonic system design and the requirements for bringing fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing into future data center and HPC environments.
About QuiX Quantum
QuiX Quantum is a European photonic quantum computing company founded in Enschede, the Netherlands, in 2019. The company develops integrated photonic quantum computing hardware and describes its approach as full-stack and fabless, with systems designed for modularity, scalability, and compatibility with data center and HPC environments. QuiX Quantum has offices in the Netherlands and Germany and is developing universal photonic quantum computing systems based on its silicon nitride photonic technology.
Source: QuiX Quantum
The post QuiX Quantum Details Dedalo Roadmap for Logical Qubits and Hybrid HPC Integration appeared first on HPCwire.
Police allege the 75-year-old tried to meet someone he believed was a 15-year-old boy after explicit online chats
A New Orleans man who legally changed his name to Santa Claus was jailed recently on allegations that he tried to use a dating app to sexually prey on someone he believed to be an underage boy.
Claus, 75, initiated contact through the app with an undercover detective who was posing as a 15-year-old boy as part of a sting operation being carried out over the weekend to arrest potential child predators, said a statement from police in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner.
Continue reading...Officials say 31-year-old woman’s arm was severed in attack at a river in Seminole county’s Little Big Econ forest
A woman swimming in a Florida river was killed recently in a rare alligator attack that severed one of her arms, state officials said.
The deadly attack took place at Seminole county’s Little Big Econ state forest, about 25 miles north-east of Orlando, on Sunday as the 31-year-old victim was in the Econlockhatchee River.
Continue reading...The markets are souring on artificial intelligence, but is this the bubble being burst? Meanwhile, California proposes a tax on billionaires
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you after fending off sunburns at the beach. Today, we’re discussing a rocky week for the AI industry’s finances and how California’s proposed billionaire’s tax is changing the political posture of the state’s governor.
Impact of social media ban for under-16s in UK hinges on how firm it is
UK under-16s social media ban: which apps will be blocked and how will it work?
‘Tech firms are losing the public’: social media age bans near tipping point
OpenAI staggers AI model release after Trump administration request
Meta pauses employee tracker for AI training amid privacy concerns
Continue reading...Diocese officials in south Texas say a nun was released after members of Congress intervened
A Roman Catholic nun was released from the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the agency arrested her while she walked to mass in her habit in south Texas.
Sister Leticia Ugboaja was walking to Our Lady of Sorrows church in McAllen, Texas, just a few miles from the US-Mexico border on Sunday when she was detained by ICE officers, the church said in a statement on social media.
Continue reading...D-Wave to provide its dual-rail gate-model quantum computing technology for NSF project focused on foundational technologies for fault-tolerant quantum computing
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 30, 2026 — D-Wave Quantum Inc. today announced it has been selected to receive a $1,566,250 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) through the agency’s National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NQVL) program. The funding will support D-Wave’s role as a key industry partner in ERASE (Erasure Qubits and Dynamic Circuits for Quantum Advantage) – a project focused on developing foundational technologies for fault-tolerant quantum computing and strengthening U.S. leadership in quantum innovation.
Led by Yale University, the ERASE project brings together researchers from leading academic institutions and industry organizations to advance dual-rail gate-model quantum computing hardware, software, error correction, and applications. D-Wave, through its New-Haven, Connecticut-based subsidiary Quantum Circuits, LLC, will give ERASE researchers access to its superconducting dual-rail gate-model quantum computing resources. The award moves ERASE into the second phase of the NQVL program and underscores the NSF’s continued support for the project’s approach to scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing.
“NSF’s continued support for the ERASE project highlights the national importance of accelerating progress toward scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “We believe that D-Wave’s dual-rail technology can play a meaningful role in that effort, while building the technical foundation and skilled workforce needed to sustain U.S. leadership in quantum computing.”
Through selected development interfaces and APIs, ERASE researchers will be able to explore new software, compiler, and error-correction approaches on D-Wave’s platform, supporting the development of technologies needed to scale gate-model quantum computing. The project will also broaden workforce development efforts with academic and industry partners, helping strengthen the talent pipeline for quantum technologies.
“We believe that some of the most important breakthroughs in quantum computing will come from deep collaboration across disciplines, institutions and industry,” said Mowaffak Midani, principal investigator and head of gate-model quantum solutions at D-Wave. “By giving researchers access to our technology and working alongside leaders from academia and industry, we’re creating an environment where new ideas can be rapidly tested, refined and translated into real-world impact.”
The NSF-funded project builds on growing U.S. government support for D-Wave’s quantum computing technologies, including the Company’s recent announcement that it signed a Letter of Intent for $100 million in proposed CHIPS and Science Act funding to accelerate the development and scaling of its annealing and gate-model quantum computing systems. The project also deepens D-Wave’s relationship with Yale University, where the dual-rail technology underlying its gate-model program was pioneered and advanced through Quantum Circuits, Inc., the Yale startup acquired by D-Wave.
Learn more about D-Wave’s gate-model quantum computing here.
More from HPCwire
About D-Wave Quantum Inc.
D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services. It is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the first and only to offer dual-platform quantum computing products and services, spanning both annealing and gate-model quantum computing technologies. D-Wave’s mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum today through enterprise-grade systems available on-premises and via its Leap quantum cloud service, which offers 99.9% availability and uptime. More than 100 organizations across commercial, government and research sectors trust D-Wave to address complex computational challenges using quantum computing. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how D-Wave is shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: www.dwavequantum.com.
Source: D-Wave
The post D-Wave Selected for NSF-Funded ERASE Project on Scalable Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
El Tri have made a habit of qualifying from the group stage and then falling at the first hurdle. They are hoping the memory of 1986 will help end the curse
In Mexico, the phrase ya merito (“almost there”) is closely linked to the country’s men’s football team.
In Mexican Spanish, it’s a colloquial, almost affectionate expression; a way of describing something that’s close enough to touch, but that can never quite be reached. Now the phrase seems to capture something more profound about Mexico’s national team – shorthand for El Tri’s habit of not exactly failing, but always just falling short.
Continue reading...Ford estimates that 1% of the vehicles have the defect, according to the recall notice.
Lisa Nandy to ask regulators to assess mega-merger involving Channel 5, CNN and TNT Sports on grounds of media plurality and competition
The UK culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, intends to ask Britain’s media and competition watchdogs to examine Paramount’s $110bn (£85bn) acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery.
The WBD takeover deal will create a media powerhouse controlling assets ranging from: the Hollywood studios behind franchises including Superman, Batman and Top Gun; the UK’s Channel 5; the news channel CNN; TNT Sports, which broadcasts Champions League, Premier League and the Olympics; and the Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services.
Continue reading...Four men are accused of stealing more than half a million dollars from ATMs in Connecticut, in a "jackpotting scheme," authorities said.
Shark's new Transformer three-in-one vacuum combines an upright vacuum that breaks out into a cordless stick and handheld model to tackle your cleaning needs.
Government hopes for 30% of city’s fleet to be electric by 2030, in move hailed as ‘gamechanger’ on air pollution
The unruly chaos of Delhi’s roads would be unrecognisable without the rickshaws and scooters that zip through India’s capital in their millions, emitting toxic fumes in their wake. But now, ambitious policies aim to give the city’s most recognisable vehicles an environmental makeover.
On Monday, Delhi’s government announced plans to eventually ban petrol scooters, motorbikes and autorickshaws in favour of those running on electricity, in an attempt to bring down dangerously high pollution levels in the city by the end of the decade.
Continue reading...One week after Democratic insurgent victories in New York, the focus is now moving to Colorado, where challenges in a trio of races are threatening candidates backed by the party establishment.
A long-term U.S.-Iran peace deal may depend on a separate agreement between Israel and Lebanon. Analysts say that presents a problem.
A heat wave will blast much of the eastern U.S. this week, and forecasters say temperatures will feel even hotter because of the high humidity that's arriving with it.
The Kremlin had framed the Anchorage summit as a turning point for the war in Ukraine. Now, Putin admits there was no deal, perhaps to get U.S. to help to broker a new one.
Apple TV's got some big projects landing this month, including a new, original Ben Stiller-produced pickleball movie.
The Iran war has accelerated the fraying of ties. An end to unconditional US support would force a reckoning with reality
A generational shift is under way in the relationship between the United States and Israel. Tensions were already palpable because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu’s role in pushing Donald Trump to join a counterproductive war against Iran was the last straw.
Stopping unconditional US support for Israel would certainly be important for curbing US complicity in Israeli war crimes. It may also be the best thing for Israel if it is to have any hope of avoiding the dangerous dead end of relentless military escalation. And it is a prerequisite for Palestinians to have any prospect of escaping Israel’s endless occupation.
Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
Continue reading...‘Living historians’ have stepped back into the spotlight as US prepares to celebrate its semiquincentennial this week
In 1972, a young man named Joe Ryan was teaching his middle school class in northern Westchester about the American Revolutionary when one of his students posed a question.
“Mr Ryan, were our ancestors stupid?” he asked.
Continue reading...Its first exhibit translates rainforest data into a sumptuous audiovisual experience, but without a strong thesis about data as art.
Dinosaur fossils are rare to find in Antarctica because of the unforgiving ice caps. But millions of years ago, the region was populated by lush forests.
Finding, accessing and deleting the biggest files on an iPhone isn't the easiest. Thankfully, there's a workaround to simplify things.
Acquisition by Axel Springer ends three years of uncertainty over ownership of 171-year-old titles
The European media group Axel Springer has completed its £575m takeover of the Telegraph, ending three tumultuous years of uncertainty over the future ownership of the 171-year-old titles.
The Germany-headquartered company, which gazumped the owner of the Daily Mail by tabling a blockbuster offer at the 11th hour, said it had now received all regulatory approvals in the UK, Ireland and Austria to take full control of Telegraph Media Group (TMG).
Continue reading...Starting July 1, the government will cap what graduate students may borrow in federal loans, forcing many toward private lenders with higher interest rates.
The guard was once touted as the future face of the NBA. Now, after off-court problems and injuries, he has been hustled out of the city that made him a star
When Ja Morant jumps into the air, he levitates past the natural apex of his arc, as if gravity decided to give him an extra half-second of respite. Men a foot taller or with 50 lbs more muscle don’t have as much spring as is packed in his 6ft 2in frame. He can end up almost fully horizontal when he dunks. He is hardly a one-dimensional player though: he sees the game in higher definition than his peers too, zipping passes to teammates a beat before his opponents process the situation. Morant is rarely the best player on the floor at a given moment, but he often seems to be having the most fun. His highlights invite smiles. What could be cooler than a little guy outperforming giants with craft? Imagine if, in the NBA finals, Jalen Brunson had dunked over Victor Wembanyama. Morant knows what that would feel like, because he’s done it.
The Memphis Grizzlies drafted Morant second overall in 2019. They watched him blossom into 2020 Rookie of the Year and a two-time All-Star as the franchise player on a semi-reliable playoff team. In 2022, he scored 47 points in a playoff win against the Golden State Warriors, the eventual champions that year. As a young star with such a particular style, Morant figured to reach even greater heights, on the Grizzlies and as one of the faces of the league.
Continue reading...The companies have teamed up on the new offering, but don't expect a bundle.
Decision overturns decades of precedent curbing executive power. Plus how one man survived eight days lost in the Pacific
Good morning. Yesterday the US supreme court handed Donald Trump – and all future presidents – the power to fire leaders of independent agencies or commissions, overturning 90 years of court precedent curbing executive power.
While Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social as a “big win”, labor advocates, unions, and consumer advocacy groups criticized the decision on the case, Trump v Slaughter, and warned of the long-term impact on democracy in the US. Rebecca Slaughter, the federal trade commissioner fired last March, said she was “profoundly disappointed about today’s decision”. Our columnist, Moira Donegan, says the court’s verdict has again undermined the power of Congress.
What have lawyers said about the verdict? Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, wrote: “There’s no sugar-coating [it]. It’s an enormously important ruling. It’s a huge win for Trump/the executive. And it’s going to have massive ramifications for the functioning of the government long after Trump is gone.”
What other decisions did the court make? The supreme court sided against national Republicans and Trump’s administration to allow mail-in ballots that arrive after election day to be counted, upholding the law in more than a dozen states. It also ruled that law enforcement’s use of sprawling warrants that sweep up smartphone location data requires privacy protections under the fourth amendment, in a boost to critics who view their use as an unconstitutional dragnet.
How did Trump and Carroll react? The US president wrote on Truth Social: “Surprisingly, the supreme court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me”. Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, also issued a statement in response to the decision, saying: “Today’s supreme court decision affirms once and for all the jury’s unanimous verdict that President Donald J Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E Jean Carroll.”
Continue reading...These hidden gems buried in your wireless headphones' settings can supercharge your listening experience.
Beijing, whose stockpiles and renewables industry allowed it to withstand energy shock, is now gaining from global solar and EV push
China has emerged as the sole winner in Asia from the strait of Hormuz crisis, according to a report published on Tuesday.
The report by the geopolitical consulting firm Asia Group concluded that China had weathered the storm of the global commodities crisis resulting from the closure of the Middle Eastern waterway, and also stood to gain from the economic and geopolitical trends sparked by the wider conflict.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Pentagon files suggest some new facilities will store nuclear arsenal, with $163m also earmarked for secretive spy base
More than $4bn (£3bn) is to be spent upgrading the US government’s military and spy bases in the UK, according to official documents that shed light on the UK’s apparent role as a secretive site for American nuclear weapons.
The construction plans include building new bunkers in Suffolk, which will seemingly be used to store nuclear weapons, and modernising facilities to help covert units run secret operations.
Continue reading...Climate campaigners question choice of James Evans for role given past criticism of green energy projects
The appointment of a Reform UK member of the Senedd Cymru as the chair of a key Welsh environmental committee could “undermine the hard graft of ministerial scrutiny”, a green thinktank has warned.
James Evans, a former Conservative party MS who defected to Reform UK in January last year, has been appointed chair of the Welsh climate change, environment, sustainability and rural affairs committee.
Continue reading...Explosive AP story based on whistleblower testimony suggests agents ‘sat back and watched’ in hopes of securing larger drug-trafficking bust
Did the Drug Enforcement Agency break the law and gamble with public safety when it permitted large quantities of fentanyl pills to be trafficked in New Mexico in the hopes of getting a larger drug-trafficking bust?
That is the question at the heart of an explosive story published in the Associated Press, based on information provided by a former DEA agent turned whistleblower; the whistleblower filed a complaint in 2023 that claimed agents had allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills into Albuquerque – a city still reeling from the opioid crisis while many others across the country are seeing overdose rates decline.
Continue reading...So-called "shadow AI" can do more than cause headaches for your friends in IT.
The Millennium is a behemoth with great fundamentals, but it benefits from some judicious configuring before you buy.
This year's Fourth of July celebrations in D.C. — marking the nation's 250th birthday — will include hours of military flyovers and a massive fireworks display that could stretch late into the night.
Police say there are similarities but no evidence of links between Thunchanok Donhomla’s alleged murder and two other deaths in past two years in same region
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Thai police are investigating whether an Australian man charged with murdering a 17-year-old girl could be linked to two unsolved cases in the region.
Police colonel Anek Srathongyoo, a superintendent of Pattaya City police station, told the Guardian on Tuesday that although there was no evidence linking Simon Peter Carman to the cases in neighbouring regions, they were investigating the possibility given similarities between the cases.
Continue reading...Slashdot reader joshuark summarizes this walk down memory lane from the tech site MakeUseOf: Facing real competition from Digital Research's DR DOS, Microsoft secretly embedded a sabotaging mechanism known as "AARD code" into beta versions of Windows 3.1 to prevent it from running on Digital Research's competing DR DOS operating system.This code triggered fake, alarming error messages to convince developers that DR DOS was unstable... Although Microsoft disabled the feature in the final retail release, the California-based firm Caldera, Inc., which had acquired DR DOS assets, sued Microsoft for anti-competitive practices.Microsoft settled the lawsuit out of court in 2000 for $280 million, a figure that remained sealed until it was unsealed in 2009.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It took less than a day for the detective to give up on the case. A patrol officer had reported a harrowing, violent midnight rape in a Syracuse, New York, park. Hospital records recounted that the victim, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was “crying uncontrollably.” Her face was bruised, and she had scratches on her neck. Her hymen had been lacerated in two places. Her urine was “grossly bloody,” according to the hospital report, and there was semen inside her.
At 8 on the morning after the assault, after the victim looked fruitlessly through books of mug shots in hopes of identifying her assailant, Syracuse detective George Lorenz interviewed her. She had been awake most of the night for a first police interview, followed by forensic and medical exams: everything from gathering physical evidence of the rape to X-rays of her skull because the attacker had pounded her head on a brick walkway. To alleviate the pain from her injuries, she had been given Demerol, a powerful opioid.
Lorenz, a burly 17-year veteran of the department who had worked as a meat cutter and truck driver before becoming a police officer, seemed annoyed that she had trouble staying awake, according to her subsequent account. “That’s inconsequential, just the facts,” he barked when he thought she was providing extraneous detail.
The detective was dubious that a rape had occurred, according to his preliminary report. “It is this writer’s opinion, after interview of the victim, that this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual,” he wrote. After speaking to the male student whom the victim had been visiting before she was attacked, the detective checked the crime scene for anything his colleagues, who had recovered a knife and the victim’s glasses, might have missed.
That was the totality of Lorenz’s investigation. Five hours after receiving the case, in a report marked 13:00 on May 8, 1981, he placed it in the “inactive file pending further info.” The consequences of that decision are still playing out nearly a half-century later.
Alice Sebold returned to campus for the fall semester that year, aware that nobody was looking for her rapist. She happened to encounter a man on the street and, with a jolt of terrified recognition, was certain she recognized her attacker. Sebold brought him to the attention of the police. Her testimony convicted the man, who spent 16 years in prison and nearly 23 more as a registered sex offender.
Sebold was no ordinary survivor. At a time when few even reported rapes, she publicly described her experience in searing detail — in op-eds, on “Oprah” and then in a memoir about the attack and its aftermath — inspiring others to speak out rather than live in silent shame. That memoir, “Lucky,” was published in 1999, then sold a million copies after her first novel, “The Lovely Bones,” became a publishing phenomenon and, later, a Hollywood movie. Years after that, an attempt to turn “Lucky” into a movie led screenwriters and producers to examine the badly flawed police work and prosecution stemming from the assault of Sebold. The details had been sitting in plain sight in Sebold’s memoir.
The case publicly disintegrated in 2021 when a judge vacated the conviction of Anthony Broadwater and Syracuse’s district attorney said in court that the prosecution “should never have happened.” Involving, as it did, a white woman accusing a poor Black man of rape, and coming back to court a year after the convulsions caused by the murder of George Floyd, the news detonated in the media, with Sebold vilified even after she apologized to Broadwater. The case was yet another reminder, if reminder was needed, of the racism in the U.S. justice system. And what had once been a central identity for Sebold — a person who had built a voice and a career out of standing up to sexual violence — suddenly turned on its head.
As all of those details unspooled in court, on television, and in the pages of The New York Times and the Syracuse press, two former colleagues of mine began to report on the case. One detail lost in the frenzy raised the question of how many other victims had been left behind and what else the police might have missed: The district attorney said in court that there had been other rapes in the same park where Sebold had been attacked, including one a little over a week after Broadwater’s conviction. The DA expressed frustration that “nobody might have put two and two together back then.” My former colleagues moved on to other projects and publications.
Eventually my editors asked me to pick up where they left off. What could we uncover if we tried today to investigate the case that the Syracuse police never truly investigated — Sebold’s — as well as any others that may have been related? Could we untangle how things went so wrong and perhaps even point to a potential culprit? And if the authorities had bungled the case this badly, what mistakes had they made in other cases and what could be learned from those errors?
As an investigative reporter with almost two decades at ProPublica, many of those years focused on criminal justice, I have delved into countless cases gone wrong. On one occasion, I set out to report an article on a man unjustly convicted of murder — a case where an appeals court had belatedly found prosecutorial misconduct serious enough to overturn his conviction — only to have the man confess to me that in fact he had pulled the trigger. He recounted the victim’s dying words and told me, “I did what I had to do.”
Sebold’s case would turn out to be far more complex than that one, and its layers and effects far broader than what emerged in the wake of the exoneration. There were even more turns — including civil litigation that continues to this day — in what was already a baroque narrative.
Or so I would learn after I embarked on what became two and a half years of reporting, trying to excavate the Syracuse criminal justice system in an era before DNA evidence and cellphones, before the Police Department even had computers, a time in which cities all over the country were grappling with a massive rise in violent crime. Reconstructing the truth decades after the fact, needless to say, is even harder than trying to pin it down in the moment.
What’s clear is that no part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And one of the most powerful institutions in the city, Syracuse University, seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it. There were police reports of sexual assaults near the campus marked “no press.” A former detective testified that the files were marked that way at the university’s request.
In this atmosphere, at least one serial rapist was on the streets — and sexual assaults that closely resembled Sebold’s continued for years, even while Broadwater was behind bars. Meanwhile, the case gnawed at former Syracuse detective Paul Clapper. He wondered whether the wrong man had been sent to prison. After he left the force, he raised the name of a confessed and convicted rapist who closely matched the physical description of Sebold’s assailant but committed most of his crimes indoors rather than outside.
That man’s record was lengthy and violent. I eventually found myself knocking on his battered door, wondering whether, at long last, I had found the true perpetrator. Or was I falling into the same trap that the Syracuse criminal justice system had tumbled into when it wrongly convicted Anthony Broadwater 44 years ago?
When Alice Sebold arrived as a college freshman in 1980, Syracuse was a city in decline. It had risen a century and a half earlier because of its proximity to the Erie Canal, then for decades was the site of factories for companies like General Electric and Carrier Corp. By the 1970s, those companies were closing facilities. Poverty climbed and the city’s population dwindled, emptying rows of Victorian homes that had housed generations of working-class families. Syracuse’s downtown, already severed by the interstate highway, withered.
One institution, however, was flourishing: Syracuse University. Enrollment surged, its sports teams excelled and new buildings rose. The university was a bubble inside the city, according to former students.
Sebold was drawn by the school’s distinguished poetry program. Raised in a household of voracious readers in suburban Philadelphia, her father a professor of Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania and her mother having worked for magazines, Sebold disdained the university’s frat culture. She preferred to skip the keg parties in her dorm and instead lounged in the basement of the art building, drinking endless cups of instant coffee and reading Emily Dickinson.
Just after midnight, on May 8, 1981, the last night of her freshman year, she was attacked. Sebold was crossing through Thornden Park on her way back to her dorm from a friend’s apartment. A stranger grabbed her from behind as she walked along a brick path. He put one hand over her mouth and threatened her with a knife. “I’ll kill you if you scream,” he said. Over a period of more than an hour, according to police reports and Sebold’s memoir, the assailant bludgeoned Sebold with his fists, pounded her skull into the brick and choked her.
Sebold frantically searched for words to deter him: She told him she was a virgin, then an orphan. She offered him the $8 she had in her back pocket. He laughed and said he wasn’t interested in that.
He forced her to kiss him, then to undress. He made clear she was not his first victim. “You’re the worst bitch I’ve ever done this to,” he said.
Then, when he was done, he fell asleep on top of her. She tried to escape, but he woke up and offered a tearful apology. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He told her to kiss him good night and called her beautiful. “It was a date to him,” she wrote in “Lucky.”
Just as quickly, he reverted to hostility. The attacker pocketed her $8 after all. He let her go, then asked her name as she walked away. “Alice,” she told him, writing later, “I didn’t have a name other than my own to say.”
“Nice knowing you, Alice,” he said. “See you around sometime.”
Thornden Park, where Sebold had been assaulted, was both a refuge and a menacing locale adjacent to the university. Once the estate of a salt baron, the rolling 76-acre park had broad fields — with tennis courts, a pool and an earthen amphitheater — as well as dense clusters of maple and oak trees that provided dark, isolated enclaves where an attack might go unnoticed.
The park had been the site of two sexual attacks seven months before Sebold’s rape. A third had occurred a block away. The reports in those cases had also been quickly consigned to the inactive file.
One woman had told police that a man dragged her into a wooded section of the park. When she resisted, the report stated, he “began to punch her in the face” and “ordered her to remove her pants.”
As with Sebold’s case, the police report was dismissive. One officer asserted that the victim was “retarded” and had run away from a nearby halfway house. The staff there said that she had complained of a similar incident two weeks prior and that she was having “difficulty adjusting.” The case was put on ice just hours after it had been reported.
Four days later, another young woman was making her way across Thornden Park when a man in a ski cap grabbed her by the neck and put a knife to her face. As she squirmed and tried to push him off, the man struggled to pull off his pants and hers. The woman suddenly realized the weapon was just a table knife, so she screamed as loud as she could and he ran away.
There was no indication in the police reports that these attacks might have been connected. Nor was there much evidence of public alarm. I found no articles about any of these October 1980 assaults in newspaper archives.
Trying to piece this information together was daunting and complicated. My colleagues and I made more than two dozen requests for all manner of law enforcement records from the Syracuse district attorney’s office, Police Department, the state prison system, local jails, archives and courts. Many were initially denied. After appeals, I wound up with thousands of pages of documents. There was little or no organization among them, and some were scrawled in barely decipherable handwriting. Even the redactions were haphazard, with some names still visible.
I started to map out the attacks around Thornden Park, using police reports and stray newspaper clips for some of the later ones. The numbers and proximity were jarring. More than a dozen women reported being raped or attacked by strangers within half a square mile over four years.
Women were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and in student apartments, walking out of grocery stores or on their way to the library. A nursing student was attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators were often eerily similar. They frequently carried a knife. And several were roughly the same height, weight and race.
It appeared that there was a public safety crisis emanating from the park area, with no sign of urgency from law enforcement.
Syracuse’s criminal justice system was chaotic during the 1980s and ’90s. One prosecutor would get into a scuffle, on live TV, with a candidate who had just won the race for DA. The police crime lab would lose its accreditation. The doctor who led the county medical examiner’s office resigned after an investigation found he had routinely removed organs from corpses without consent from the victims’ families. His employees had posed playfully for photos over the body of a woman who had died by suicide.
Given the level of dysfunction — and the fact that DNA evidence hadn’t yet come into use in the early ’80s — rape was particularly difficult to investigate. Survivors were wary, corroborating evidence hard to find. The Syracuse Police Department had no separate sex crimes unit at the time, and officers were still using typewriters.
“We were doing everything from homicide to robberies,” one supervisor of detectives during this era told me. He remembered nights with 18 felonies and fewer than a dozen detectives to work them. “A person with a knife in their back or a guy who got shot is going to take priority over a two-week-old rape case,” he said.
“A person with a knife in their back or a guy who got shot is going to take priority over a two-week-old rape case,” one supervisor of detectives said.
There was another impediment in those days: Syracuse University. I found a police report from 1980 on which someone had scrawled the words “NO PRESS.” A 19-year-old university student had been walking near Thornden Park when she, too, was attacked by a man with a knife. She got away by biting him when he tried to force her to perform oral sex.
The “no press” designation on police reports was not unusual, according to deposition testimony by Clapper, the former Syracuse detective, who would play a crucial role in the Broadwater saga. “No press,” Clapper testified in 2025, “means that Syracuse University put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.”
The university had influence in the Police Department, according to Clapper, and an obvious interest in making the campus seem safe: “If your little daughter wants to go to school at SU and calls the police, and says, How is the crime around Syracuse University? ‘No crime around there.’ There’s five girls raped within, let’s say, a six-month period … between campus and Thornden Park. And if it’s marked ‘no press,’ it’s like it never happened.”
Sebold’s case had been placed in the inactive file. That meant the police weren’t searching for her assailant. But she couldn’t help herself. According to Sebold’s memoir, she walked the university campus, “looking for Him.”
“I was very aware that he could be around any corner,” she told me decades later. A sense of “hypervigilance” coursed through her like “a bunch of electrical wires,” she said.
Five months after the crime, Sebold saw a man on a street filled with restaurants and bars near the university. She felt a sudden, visceral certainty: “right height, right build, something in his posture.” She wrote that the man walked up to her and said, “Hey girl, don’t I know you from somewhere?” He then began nonchalantly chatting with a police officer across the street. (Both Broadwater and the officer would testify that they said “don’t I know you” to each other.)
When Sebold reported the sighting to the authorities a few hours later, Clapper recognized himself as the cop she saw and Anthony Broadwater as the man he was talking to. Broadwater, then 20, had grown up as one of six children of a janitor who worked for Syracuse University. After a brief stint in the Marines, he was working as a telephone wiring installer. Growing up, Broadwater told me, he’d had run-ins with the police and had served time in juvenile detention for theft. (Clapper had known Broadwater since he was a boy, he would testify years later. When asked if he had ever known him “to be involved in anything like rape,” Clapper replied, “No.”)
Broadwater was arrested. He vociferously protested his innocence and did whatever he could to prove it. He volunteered a pubic hair for comparison to one found on Sebold after the rape, and he agreed to participate in a lineup.
When Broadwater saw the other lineup participants, he began to worry. None of them looked much like him. They were all too tall or had a lighter complexion or both. He suggested that another inmate closer to his height and build be included to make it more fair. Broadwater’s court-appointed lawyer got the jailer to bring another man down from the detention facility above the police building.
Sebold looked at the row of men and picked the person who had just been added to the lineup. The man was standing next to Broadwater.
The case should have ended then and there, in the view of the DA today. “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy. She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony,” Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick told ProPublica. “Case is over. Stop.”
But it didn’t stop.
The prosecution of Broadwater had been assigned to a young assistant district attorney named Gail Uebelhoer (pronounced EE-bull-hair). Sebold wrote that she felt an immediate connection to Uebelhoer, whom she described as “solid and female” with “sparkling, intelligent eyes.” As Sebold put it in “Lucky,” “She wanted what I wanted: to win.”
After Sebold failed to identify Broadwater in the lineup, she could sense that Lorenz, the detective who had overseen the process, was unhappy. (Lorenz died in 2017.) Sebold said she had been scared and confused, torn between the men in positions 4 and 5. Instead of seeking out additional evidence, Uebelhoer asked Sebold to draft an affidavit on the spot, explaining what had happened. Sebold wrote in the affidavit that she had picked No. 5 because that person had been looking at her. Broadwater was in position 4.
The prosecutor then told her it was only natural that she would make such a mistake, according to Sebold’s memoir. “They really worked a number on you. He uses that friend or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do,” Sebold said Uebelhoer told her. “They’re dead ringers.” Both men are adamant that they had never been in a lineup before.
Within three hours of the botched lineup, Uebelhoer presented the case against Broadwater to a grand jury. Sebold wrote that she put on “the best show” of her life and several grand jurors “fought back tears.”
At least one of them was uneasy about the manner in which Broadwater had been identified, according to a transcript. “When someone is picked out of the lineup, doesn’t it have to be absolutely sure that the person that they picked out of the lineup is the one they’ve seen before?” one grand juror asked Clapper while he was on the witness stand.
“That’s correct,” Clapper said.
Uebelhoer quashed the discussion. “He really can’t give you an opinion on that,” she told the juror, adding that Clapper hadn’t been present for the lineup.
The juror asked about it two more times, but Uebelhoer kept deflecting. Broadwater was indicted on every count she had presented, including rape, sodomy and robbery.
When Broadwater’s case was set for trial, Uebelhoer was visibly pregnant. It was passed to William Mastine. Mustachioed, 6’6” and pugnacious — Mastine is the prosecutor who would scuffle with the DA-elect a few years later — he was known for his swagger and courtroom theatrics. Fitzpatrick, then a fellow assistant district attorney, would dub Mastine the “Garbage Man” in a newspaper profile for his ability to bring cases with scant evidence or, as Fitzpatrick put it to me more pungently, “take shit and make it hit.”
This was no minor consideration. Acquittals in rape trials were common at the time in Syracuse. At one point in the 1980s, a local news article reported that the district attorney’s office had suffered nine trial defeats in a row. Uebelhoer was quoted saying “juries are looking for a perfect victim, but they don’t exist.” She saw Sebold as a standout, writing in a memo as the case was transferred to Mastine: “Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.”
Sebold’s testimony would be crucial at trial, since it was nearly the entirety of the evidence. Mastine repeatedly emphasized that she was a credible witness. She had been a virgin, he pointed out, arguing that it would more firmly cement the image of her rapist in her mind. He said her study of drawing as a high school student equipped her to remember facial characteristics. She was shaken during the lineup. The identification on the street was what mattered, he argued.
Uebelhoer saw Sebold as a standout, writing in a memo as the case was transferred to Mastine: “Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.”
Aside from Sebold’s identification, the only other piece of evidence was the pubic hair Broadwater volunteered, which was compared to a hair found on Sebold after the rape. The two hairs were examined under a microscope by a lab expert who testified that they were “consistent” with each other. That essentially meant that both had come from a Black person. There were approximately 27 million Black Americans at that time. (In the absence of DNA technology, the prosecution could have tested the semen found in Sebold to determine its blood type, but it never did. That would have narrowed the list of possible perpetrators to only those with the specific blood type.)
The trial was peppered with irregularities. Broadwater and his lawyer had opted for a bench trial, hoping that a judge would see the paucity of evidence and wouldn’t be swayed by emotion. But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. During a break in the proceedings, he spoke to Sebold privately, according to her memoir, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. Had a juror done such a thing, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared. (The judge died in 2009.)
In a final, highly unusual turn, Uebelhoer took the stand herself, as a witness for the prosecution. She testified that Broadwater was unhappy with one of the people in the lineup and that he managed to swap that person out for the man Sebold picked. She seemed to imply that Broadwater was responsible for any confusion in the lineup process.
When it was over, the judge didn’t even leave the bench to deliberate. He found Broadwater guilty directly after Mastine finished his closing argument.
Mastine defends the trial and the verdict. When I reached him by phone, he noted that he was brought onto the case after the indictment had been handed up. Mastine otherwise repeated what he’d said at the time: that Sebold’s identification of Broadwater on the street trumped the one in the lineup room, so it was appropriate to take the case to trial.
Mastine said that Fitzpatrick anointed him the “Garbage Man” after his work on the Sebold case and congratulated him on the victory. Mastine denied that he felt any pressure in light of the defeats his office had endured. “A trial lawyer has to have a bathtub mind,” he told me. “During trial, you fill the bathtub up. When the verdict comes in, you empty the bathtub and start all over again.” (Years after the Broadwater trial, Mastine, by then in private practice, pleaded guilty to possessing a check on which he forged a client’s signature. He agreed to give up his law license.)
Through her lawyer, Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she could remember little of the Broadwater case. She said repeatedly that she could neither admit nor deny what Sebold had recounted in her memoir. But Uebelhoer emphasized that she had no way of knowing whether the man Sebold picked had appeared in a lineup with Broadwater before. “How would I know that?” she testified. “I’m not down there for every lineup.”
Responding to Fitzpatrick’s assertion that the case should have been dropped after the lineup, Uebelhoer testified that he likely would have been at meetings where the case was discussed but “registered no objection.” (Fitzpatrick denies this. “I’m not saying I don’t have a recollection of the meeting,” he told me. “I’m saying that meeting did not take place.”) Uebelhoer, for her part, added, “I thought that I did my job by putting it all in front of the grand jury to let them hear and see if they found her to be believable or not.”
Two months after the guilty verdict, Broadwater was sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in state prison.
Broadwater was sitting in the local jail after his trial, he told me, when a Syracuse newspaper reported that another woman had been raped in Thornden Park. “I told you it wasn’t me! It never was me,” he said he told his attorney. “That guy is still out there doing it.”
A police report seems to line up with Broadwater’s description. The attack happened on May 27, 1982, and resembled the rape Broadwater had been convicted of just nine days earlier.
At about 9 that evening, a 19-year-old actress was jogging through a wooded section of the park when she heard someone behind her. Suddenly she was in the grip of a man dragging her by the neck behind a cluster of trees. He forced her to perform oral sex, then pulled her sweatpants down and raped her. She reported that her assailant was Black, about 5’9”, 140 pounds, muscular and around 16 years old.
Those details did not draw a lot of notice at the time. But they fit the description of a rapist who would soon become well-known to the Syracuse police. Only four months after Broadwater was found guilty, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women. The crimes had begun in late 1981, he said in a statement taken by Clapper. Four of them occurred less than a mile from Thornden Park. Weakfall, according to police reports, had provided “certain facts only the perpetrator would have known.”
“I told you it wasn’t me! It never was me,” Broadwater said he told his attorney. “That guy is still out there doing it.”
Weakfall seemed at war with himself, conscious of the brutality he inflicted. “I go to sleep Tommy Weakfall,” he would say in one confession, “and then in the middle of the night I wake up in a cold sweat. … I feel this pressure pushing me to go out side and do something.” He admitted burglarizing houses and raping women. When he was done, according to an account Clapper gave years later, Weakfall would “wrap them in a blanket, hold them in his arms and tell them he was sorry he did it.” Many of the police reports I examined, including Sebold’s, noted that the rapist had apologized to the victim.
There’s no evidence that Weakfall assaulted Sebold, but there’s no denying he matched key elements of the description she gave. Sebold had told police her rapist was Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports. Broadwater was 20, stood 5’6” and weighed about 175 pounds.
Despite Weakfall’s confession, the rape case against him collapsed. Officers learned — after taking his statement without a defense lawyer present — that he was being represented by an attorney on an unrelated burglary charge. Weakfall’s confession wouldn’t be admissible in court.
He ended up pleading guilty to second-degree burglary. Weakfall’s sentence wouldn’t require a single day of jail time. He got five years of probation and remained on the streets.
On the morning of Sept. 29, 1983, a man matching Weakfall’s description led police on a dramatic foot chase through downtown Syracuse after being interrupted while attempting to rape a woman inside her car.
Records show Weakfall was arrested for the offense and released on Oct. 11, 1983. Four months later, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, attempted sexual misconduct, and was sentenced to one year.
During the four months that Weakfall was still free, there was another notable assault. Sebold’s roommate was raped that November in the apartment they shared. She was one of five women attacked in the same cluster of blocks over five months, according to news accounts at the time. Police suspected that one man had committed the crimes. The homes had been burglarized and the women had been raped at knifepoint and beaten; some were also bound and gagged.
These elements matched Weakfall’s methods, though the reports suggested a noticeably taller, older perpetrator. Several survivors were asked to look at a photograph of Weakfall as part of an array of mug shots, but they didn’t identify him.
Sebold’s roommate told police that after the rapist broke into the apartment, he gagged, bound and blindfolded her, then became “very gentle” and “took his time.” She added that “he didn’t talk street talk either. He had a good use of the English vocabulary.”
He led her into Sebold’s room, put a “thin metal object” to her throat and told her, “I just want you to be good.” When he finished raping her, he tossed her jeans to her and covered her with a blanket.
The roommate also reported an exchange that suggested her rapist may have encountered Sebold in the past. After the assault, she tried to get him to leave by yelling out that her roommate was coming home. The assailant replied: “I know her, we had a thing, we had a deal in the past.”
Clapper viewed this as significant enough that he put it down in capital letters in his report. But he never followed up, Clapper testified years later. The perpetrator was likely fabricating a connection that didn’t exist, he said. Clapper never suspected that it was Weakfall or that the same man raped both Sebold and her roommate. He said the description didn’t match Weakfall, and Broadwater was locked up by then. He acknowledged that victims sometimes get these descriptions wrong, but he had another reason for ruling Weakfall out: “I think he was incarcerated then,” Clapper testified. But the records I had seen showed that his memory was incorrect: Weakfall had been a free man at the time Sebold’s roommate was attacked.
In 1985, three years after Broadwater’s conviction, Clapper encountered Weakfall again. The detective identified him in a surveillance photograph of a man using a stolen bank card at an ATM. Clapper interviewed him again. Once again, Weakfall confessed.
The police reports, along with the signed confession, spelled out in chilling detail how Weakfall had raped at least three women between September and November of 1985. He would spot a vulnerable location — an accessible window, a woman home alone — and climb in quietly, first ransacking for valuables, then threatening them with a knife, sometimes beating or tying them up if they resisted.
When Weakfall was done, some women got an apology. One said he was “soft spoken” and did not use “slang or street type language.” He kept calling another one ma’am. Others got nothing but raging hostility. He told one woman that he felt understood by her, then threatened to burn her house down if she called the police.
Weakfall went on to say, effectively, that he had raped so many women in so many different places that he couldn’t remember them all. In the final paragraph, he made a garbled cry for help. He described sexual violence as a compulsion. The rapes were “accidents,” he said, and the courts “haven’t helped me at all.” He hoped that the next judge would get him some counseling.
This time Weakfall’s confession held up. He pleaded guilty to three rapes and a burglary and was sentenced to a maximum of 18 years. He served 12. While in prison, Weakfall participated in a treatment program intended to stop people from committing sexual violence.
Accusations against prominent men eventually began bringing the issue of sexual assault to the forefront in Syracuse. In 1986, a star Syracuse University football player was accused of rape. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was initially allowed to remain on the team. An uproar ensued, prompting the university’s chancellor to intervene and suspend him for five games.
Then, in November 1988, came another attack with a notable defendant, a crime that would inspire a second rape memoir by a Syracuse University student. The book describes how Laura Gray-Rosendale, a 20-year-old sophomore, had fallen asleep while studying in her bedroom when 23-year-old Michael Holm broke in, then bound and beat her. “He raped me every way someone can be raped,” she told ProPublica. “It was excruciating to be in my body.” A roommate called the police and officers kicked down Gray-Rosendale’s door, finding Holm with a screwdriver in his hand, standing over Gray-Rosendale, as he pulled his pants up. Her hands were tied and she was naked from the waist down. Holm tried to flee, injuring three officers, before they finally subdued and arrested him.
The defendant was white, the grandson of Melvin Holm, a former chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees who had been the CEO of Carrier Corp., one of the city’s largest employers and the eponym for the university’s domed stadium. In her book, “College Girl,” Gray-Rosendale recounted getting a phone call from a university administrator who told her the Holm family made major donations to the university. “I’m like, why are you telling me this?” she said. “But I know why. … She’s trying to dissuade me from testifying.”
In an interview, Gray-Rosendale described having a “complete breakdown” in the months after the assault and said that seeing “anyone who resembled [Holm] physically would be like a trigger and send me into a full out panic attack.” Through years of therapy and writing her memoir, she eventually found healing. But, she said, “I was never the same.”
Despite being caught mid-assault, Holm pleaded guilty to burglary. The word rape did not appear in his plea allocution. He ultimately served eight years in prison. (ProPublica could not locate him to seek an interview. His lawyer declined to comment.) “I was very glad that he got jail time,” Gray-Rosendale said of Holm. “But … that term, burglary. It did not in any way account for the multiple crimes that he committed, and that stuck with me then, sticks with me now.”
Pressure was building in Syracuse. In 1989, six rapes had been reported in the first two months of the school year, including one on the chancellor’s front lawn. Students began marching, organizing nighttime campus patrols and pressuring university officials. Gray-Rosendale told the university’s trustees at a campus meeting on sexual violence that she had been raped by one of their grandsons. “I’m not a statistic,” she said. The turmoil attracted the attention of media ranging from talk show host Geraldo Rivera to The New York Times.
Finally, that year, the university convened a task force and began to implement security measures that advocates had been demanding for years, including improvements to transportation services off-campus, the expansion of “blue light” emergency phones and the provision of counseling services and public speaking events on sexual assault.
In response to detailed questions regarding events from the 1980s, a spokesperson for Syracuse University said in an email that “we are not in a position to speak to the actions or decisions of prior administrations,” but the university is now equipped with “comprehensive policies, a steadfast commitment to preventing sexual and relationship violence and robust support structures to help every survivor that comes forward.”
By this point, the city had become the leading edge of a national issue. In March 1990, a Syracuse University student named Kristin Eaton-Pollard testified before a congressional subcommittee in Washington. She described being raped as a freshman in 1988 in Thornden Park, which she “later learned was notorious for its frequent occurrence of violent crime, located only about 100 yards from my residence hall.”
Eaton-Pollard criticized the university for being too slow to appreciate the need for the new security measures. “The programs at Syracuse University should have been initiated of their own accord a long time ago,” Eaton-Pollard said. Her testimony helped inspire the passage, that same year, of the Jeanne Clery Act, legislation named for a Lehigh University freshman who was raped and murdered by a fellow student. The law requires all colleges that accept federal financial aid to publicly report campus crime statistics every year.
Broadwater was unaware that the issue of sexual violence was roiling Syracuse. He remained in prison and had never stopped trying to prove his innocence. He kept a transcript of his trial with him as he was shuttled among 13 prisons in the 16 years he served for the Sebold conviction. He would show it to gang leaders to prove he shouldn’t be there.
“Rape charges here,” a cousin and fellow inmate had warned him when he entered Attica state prison, “they kill you.” As Broadwater puts it, “I caught holy hell” while incarcerated. He took to wrapping his torso with copies of National Geographic magazine in case an inmate came at him with a knife. In a riot, he saw a friend stabbed to death, took 12 stitches and nearly lost an eye trying to defend himself.
He filed myriad appeals and requests to reexamine the evidence, some without the help of a lawyer. Each was rejected. One petition was handwritten, laying out his logic in angled handwriting across lined notebook paper. Broadwater raised some of the arguments that eventually got him exonerated. He wrote, for example, that Uebelhoer’s testimony missed the point: “Whether or not I know the man … or was happy about the composition of the lineup had nothing to do with the victim’s failure to pick me out.”
“Whether or not I know the man … or was happy about the composition of the lineup had nothing to do with the victim’s failure to pick me out.”
Four times Broadwater came before the parole board. Four times he was denied. He refused to go to his fifth scheduled appearance. Commissioners wanted an admission of guilt, not claims of innocence, and Broadwater wouldn’t apologize. He didn’t come home until Dec. 31, 1998. He was 38.
Broadwater was free but unable to escape the shadow of a rape conviction. Even members of his family shunned him. He was required to register as a sex offender, which made it impossible to get any but the most menial job. Broadwater eventually managed to get a position on an assembly line, stamping the logo of Syracuse China on dishware from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. He liked that he had to punch in, and that the factory was filled with security cameras. Broadwater wanted to work at a place that always documented his whereabouts in case anyone tried to accuse him of something.
For her part, Sebold had struggled to get her life on track over the years. Rootless and experimenting with drugs in her 20s — heroin was her favorite, by her own account — it was only as she confronted the consequences of the attack that she slowly began to grapple with her trauma. She began by writing an op-ed for The New York Times on the rape in 1989, then later appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” By the mid-’90s, she had started work on a memoir about her assault and the aftermath.
Sebold returned to Syracuse to research the book. She nervously walked around Thornden Park while her then-boyfriend stood by and took snapshots. And Sebold met with Uebelhoer at the district attorney’s office.
Uebelhoer helped her gain access to records, including a box of evidence from the original case. Both Uebelhoer and Sebold recall seeing the clothing Sebold had worn the night of the attack, and Sebold remembers seeing the pubic hair that was key to Broadwater’s conviction. (It was yet another example of the scrambled Syracuse justice system: An evidence log stated that all of the evidence in the case had been destroyed in the late 1980s, but both women have said they saw the box of materials years after that.)
The prosecutor helped promote Sebold’s memoir when it was published. Uebelhoer’s sister created a packet of publicity materials that, according to Sebold, included a glossy 8-by-10-inch photograph of Uebelhoer. Uebelhoer, who had left the district attorney’s office by this point to clerk for a judge, spoke at book clubs and introduced Sebold to discuss the book on a panel at a law enforcement conference in New York City. “She was incredibly proud,” Sebold said.
Sebold and Broadwater weren’t the only people who couldn’t let go of the case. There was a third person: Clapper, the veteran Syracuse detective who’d been chatting with Broadwater when Sebold first identified the man she thought had assaulted her.
Lanky with striking red hair and a cocky demeanor, Clapper was dogged and respected by his fellow cops. He would stay on cases for months, scouring for witnesses, checking in with informants, interviewing anyone he could find. Clapper’s work was threaded through the wave of Syracuse rape cases. He had investigated many of the attacks in and around Thornden Park and elicited Weakfall’s confessions.
Clapper initially indicated he was open to an interview for this article, then demurred, saying he’d had only tangential involvement in the Broadwater case. When I kept pressing, he eventually sent me a sprawling, 13-page statement that spanned the 50-odd years of his career. It was filled with brackets and parentheticals, written in different fonts and colors, much of it in capital letters, at once detailed and cryptic.
Clapper emphasized that he had been through a lot since Sebold was assaulted. Over the years, he had worked undercover, participated in hundreds of drug busts, been stabbed and “struck over the head with bats, wine bottles, and fallen down several flights of stairs.” He spent the better part of nine years caring for his sick wife and today, at age 74, his hair still thick but now snowy white, he works as an investigator for a district attorney in another county. Given all that, his statement maintained, it would be “close to ridiculous” to assume he could recall the particulars of Sebold’s case or other crimes with much specificity.
Still, the document provided revealing details, including one that hinted at the disturbing scale of Weakfall’s crimes. Not long after Broadwater’s conviction, according to Clapper’s statement, he had become aware of Weakfall’s “first series of rapes” and gotten him to confess. He had driven Weakfall around Thornden Park, during which Weakfall pointed out 23 buildings where he had raped and robbed women. Weakfall wasn’t charged in multiple cases, Clapper explained, because many of the survivors “just wanted to forget it” and refused to cooperate.
Clapper said Weakfall willingly admitted raping women inside buildings near the park but “flatly denied any involvement” in crimes outdoors at the park. Clapper found that distinction persuasive. Noting that the crimes Weakfall committed indoors involved rapes, burglaries and stabbings, he said, “Why would Weakfall honestly admit to all of these other [more serious] cases and not take credit” for those in Thornden Park?
Weakfall was always under scrutiny, Clapper would say in a 2025 deposition. “I know this guy better than I know my own brother,” he testified, repeating that Weakfall never admitted to any rapes in the park.
One by one, the attorney questioning Clapper got him to acknowledge the similarities between Sebold’s rape and those that Weakfall had confessed to: that she had been threatened with a knife, that her rapist took a small amount of money from her, that the rape happened blocks from others that he said he had committed at around the same time, and that afterward, her rapist held her and apologized to her.
The lawyers asked Clapper about four other cases of sexual assault in or near the park, three within months of Sebold’s, the other nine days after Broadwater was convicted. All involved Black assailants, at least three aged between 15 and 20 and nearly the same height and weight as Weakfall or Broadwater. Clapper pursued several of them but never thought to connect any to Sebold’s rape.
“Why would I?” he said.
It’s one of the many oddities of this decades-long saga that Sebold’s memoir of her assault — a 1999 book that portrayed Broadwater’s conviction as righteous — is what would ultimately lead to the unraveling of his conviction.
Sebold’s memoir, which ultimately sold 1 million copies after “The Lovely Bones” became a hit, eventually generated interest in Hollywood. Producers wanted to make a film version of “Lucky,” and several contacted Clapper as part of their research for writing a script.
Laurie Parker, a producer then working with director Jane Campion as part of a project that Sebold was cooperating with, reached Clapper in 2013. Parker said Clapper emailed her that there were questions about the case: No. 1, was the right person arrested? No. 2, was Sebold a good witness? No. 3, if DNA testing had been available, would there have been the same outcome? Parker tried to get him to elaborate, but he didn’t respond.
Clapper himself looked into getting a DNA test done on the pubic hair more than 20 years after Broadwater’s conviction, according to his statement. But when Clapper called the Syracuse police crime lab, he was told the hair had been destroyed.
Parker, tasked with writing a script based on “Lucky,” became increasingly consumed with doubts: “I had a feeling, a very strong feeling, that at best it was an illegal conviction and at worst, they got the wrong person,” she said. Her script was rejected in 2014. (The director had gotten busy with other projects, according to Sebold.)
The next year, in 2015, came an unrelated event — unknown to Broadwater — that further undermined the credibility of his conviction. The FBI, working with the Department of Justice and two advocacy groups, released the findings of a national review of cases in which hair evidence had been used. The study reported that expert hair testimony in 90% of the 500 trial transcripts they’d examined included “erroneous statements” and noted that the FBI no longer used such evidence. The study “strongly” encouraged states to review past convictions in which hair analysis had played a role.
At the time, Fitzpatrick was on a state commission that sets standards for crime laboratories. He was also feuding with the Syracuse Police Department. The two sides publicly savaged each other, with dueling allegations of mishandling forensic evidence, among other things. The Police Department, Fitzpatrick told me recently, was run by “fucking morons” back then and its lab was antiquated. Shawn Broton, a deputy police chief at the time, said Fitzpatrick had used the state commission as a “weapon” against the Police Department and worked to consolidate power for himself.
As a result of the FBI review, Fitzpatrick’s office examined New York cases that had used hair evidence. But that effort did not unearth Broadwater’s case. It relied on electronic searches for the word “hair” in appeals court opinions. The appeals court opinion in Broadwater’s case — all of two paragraphs long — didn’t mention the word. Fitzpatrick told me that his staff had also reviewed all the cases in which the hair analyst in Broadwater’s case had testified, but it concentrated on defendants who were still incarcerated. Broadwater had been out of prison for more than a decade by then. Another chance to reveal the flaws in his case had been missed.
The study reported that expert hair testimony in 90% of the 500 trial transcripts they’d examined included “erroneous statements” and noted that the FBI no longer used such evidence.
Eventually, a second movie producer got interested in Sebold’s story, and like the first producer, he began delving deep into the case. The producer got suspicious enough that he ultimately hired a private investigator to look into it. (The producer in question, Timothy Mucciante, has a backstory that could fill its own movie: He is a disbarred lawyer who served time in prison on an array of bizarre fraud charges. He promised money to finance the movie version of “Lucky” but never delivered, then tried to make his own documentary about the debacle called “Unlucky,” which also fell apart. Mucciante did not respond to requests for comment.)
The private investigator, Dan Myers, called Clapper, who left him with the strong impression that he thought Broadwater was innocent and Weakfall was guilty. Clapper denies he went so far as to say Broadwater was innocent. Still, Clapper acknowledged in his statement that he spoke “cop to cop” with Myers, a former officer, and told him, “Like ANY investigator, you wonder ‘if’ Weakfall was involved.”
That conversation had a domino effect. Myers got two Syracuse lawyers, David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, involved. (Swartz had previously worked in the DA’s office under Fitzpatrick.) They were shocked by what they read in the book and the trial transcript. They filed a motion to vacate the conviction in 2021.
In a matter of weeks, the long-stalled process of examining the conviction was resolved. Fitzpatrick joined in the motion to vacate the conviction, and in a brief hearing on Nov. 22, 2021, the judge agreed.
At the defense table that day, Broadwater, wearing a gray pinstripe suit, choked back sobs and hugged his lawyers. At 61, with hints of gray in Broadwater’s cornrows and a cane in his hand, it was hard to picture the 21-year-old he had been when a judge had found him guilty.
Unlike Broadwater, who has no criminal record since his release in 1998, Weakfall found it harder to stay out of trouble. He got out of prison in November 1997. Six months later, he was caught stealing speakers and cash from the apartment of a woman he had just met. He told police the burglary was “meant as a joke.” Weakfall pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass and served 135 days in jail. He was arrested four more times through 2015, pleading guilty on separate occasions to patronizing a prostitute and resisting arrest. Records show police responded to multiple allegations of domestic violence against him through 2017, but the victims all declined to press charges. His record shows no involvement with the police since then.
Weakfall still lives in Syracuse, in an area some former officers refer to as “the Gut.” I made my way to his door on a Saturday in the fall of 2024. His apartment was on the ground floor of a clapboard building along a block of dilapidated homes surrounded by overgrown weeds. A gaggle of stray cats curled up against one another around the corner from his front door, which had a bumper sticker on it that read “Let’s Pray for America.”
After a few knocks, the face I recognized from the New York state sex offender registry poked out. He was bald with a full beard. Well-built for a man of 60, with a scar across his upper abdomen, Weakfall was wearing nothing but royal blue boxer-briefs. He said he had just gotten out of the shower.
I knew I might never get another shot to speak to him, so I started talking without giving him a chance to get dressed. We spoke for more than an hour. He never opened his door more than a foot.
Weakfall was, quite reasonably, skeptical of me. He kept saying, “You’re catching me off guard here, dude.” He said he carried a lot of guilt over his crimes and was “disgusted” with himself. He told me he had found religion and wasn’t inclined to revisit a period of his life that he had left behind. Weakfall also said he realized during his 12 years in prison that he may not have served as much time had he not been so open with the police. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again. I assured him I wasn’t a cop.
After a while, Weakfall seemed to relax. He spoke softly in gushes of information followed by sudden pauses. He described growing up without a father in a tough neighborhood; the pressure of bad influences leading to drugs; a graduation of sorts from shoplifting to home invasion, then sexual assault, or, as he put it, “violating someone” when he happened to find a woman home alone.
He acknowledged raping women. But he said that once he began to make admissions, the police saw him as a scapegoat and tried to put “all the load on one person just to satisfy the community.” Once in custody, he said, he was “scared out of my boots.” He said the police had dragged him out of his cell repeatedly, driving him to places he had never been and asking him about rapes he said he hadn’t committed. “Man, they had me admitting to things that I know I did not do,” he said.
Full of contradictions, Weakfall spoke in loops that were hard to follow. He said that he had confessed honestly to the rapes he committed in 1985, but that the confession in 1982 was coerced by the police. (He later said something that seemed to undercut that assertion: “What they didn’t understand in 1982 is that if you’re not really giving me any counseling … it’s bound to happen again.”)
When I started to ask about Thornden Park, describing what happened to Sebold, he cut me off. “More of my encounters was invading a home, if you do the search,” he said. He vociferously denied assaulting any woman in a car and said the police “mixed me up with other people that were doing things at the same time.”
This did not strike me as implausible, given what had happened with Broadwater and all I’d learned about the Police Department at the time, not to mention the sheer volume of assailants and assaults back then.
I kept pressing, asking if he would be willing to go through each case with me. He said no. He wouldn’t be able to remember them anyway, he said. I brought up the rape of Sebold’s roommate and several others, but the whole exercise began to feel futile. I thanked him for his time, handed him my card and asked if we could speak again after he had some time to think. He said he’d pray on it.
Weakfall called me the next morning. He was rattled and rambling. More aggravated this time. He started denying things that he had either confessed to or that were well-established in the criminal records: He claimed he had never stolen anyone’s ATM card; he had never taken property from anyone’s home; he had never apologized to any of his victims.
I returned to Syracuse twice more in 2026 and spoke with Weakfall each time. He got more sweeping and more adamant in his denials. By the third visit, he was insisting that he had confessed to only one rape and that the police had embellished or fabricated the rest.
When I called Fitzpatrick, the Syracuse DA, to discuss what I had learned in my broader reporting, he was at a loss. “It escapes me, honestly. I mean, it’s just staggering,” he said of the police and prosecutorial failures in the 1980s. “The level of misattention to detail. I just don’t have an explanation.”
But now it was too late. The best shot at making a conclusive determination on who raped Sebold would come through DNA analysis of the physical evidence. But the evidence from her case is gone.
Even if evidence that implicates a perpetrator were to turn up in a hidden corner of a dusty warehouse, Fitzpatrick couldn’t do anything. The statute of limitations on these rapes expired decades ago. Prosecution would be out of reach, he said.
As it happens, one legal proceeding continues in the Broadwater saga. After his conviction was vacated in 2021, Broadwater filed two civil lawsuits, one against the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment and a second against Syracuse and its surrounding county for constitutional rights violations in his prosecution. The state settled its case in 2023, agreeing to pay Broadwater $5.5 million.
But the city and county are contesting the claims. The lawyers declined to comment for this article, citing the litigation. But expert witnesses they have retained are defending the conduct of the police and prosecutors, questioning the accuracy of Sebold’s book and arguing that there was no pattern of rapes in and around Thornden Park worthy of disclosure to the defense.
I met Sebold on a recent, drizzly morning at her home in San Francisco. We sat in a room appointed with an ornate rug, fine photography and rare works of literature hugged by striking geode bookends.
Always an introvert, Sebold sank deeper into isolation after Broadwater’s exoneration. She went from hero to villain overnight. Strangers yelled at her on the street. A tabloid reporter badgered her on camera as Sebold, wearing a COVID-era mask and gingerly carrying a bag of dog poop, walked her sick French basset to the vet.
Afterward, she said, she didn’t step out of her house for a month. Even now, five years on, she can’t bring herself to leave the city limits. “There’s something about the safety of being near my home,” she said, “which has become increasingly important to my sense of mental health.”
As I laid out what my reporting had uncovered, she betrayed little surprise at the number of sexual assaults in Syracuse; she thought there might be more. “It’s my nature to believe that there’s more violence than people like to admit to, especially back then,” she said. It provided no comfort to learn that the police had failed other women, too.
Now fully convinced of Broadwater’s innocence, Sebold looks back on the entire episode with deep mortification. She feels shame that she was ever raped. And she now questions her decision to go to the police. “What if I hadn’t reported my rape?” she said. “None of this would have happened.”
Sebold recently completed a letter to Broadwater. She declined to share a copy but described its contents. It’s more personal and considered, she said, than the apology she released right after the exoneration, which was criticized as tepid and which she said was hastily written. Sebold said the letter takes responsibility for her role in Broadwater’s wrongful conviction and offers details about her recent life, her dog and the Dao, the Chinese philosophy she has come to rely on. The letter describes, she said, “the deep sorrow I hold for what happened.”
It took her four years to compose those three pages. “I’ll never write anything good enough,” Sebold said. It is “probably, in my mind, the most important thing I’ll ever write.”
Through intermediaries, Sebold and Broadwater have broached the possibility of meeting. Like Sebold, though, Broadwater is fearful of traveling. He is worried something bad will happen if he leaves New York state. He has floated the idea of meeting in Niagara Falls. Neither of them have been there before.
I last met Broadwater at his lawyer’s office in Syracuse. Now fixing up a modest farmhouse he bought outside town, he had taken a break from his hobby of barbecuing and still smelled faintly of sweet smoke from a batch of baby back ribs.
He keeps his distance from people, too. He told me that some who shunned him after he went to prison are now reappearing in his life. They tease him about all the media attention he received. Their questions also trigger his paranoia, making him think they got word of his civil settlement and want a piece of it.
Broadwater said the stigma of being a convicted rapist was still hard to shake, even after his exoneration. “I’m still embarrassed that I was convicted and sent to prison for rape for 16 and a half years,” he said, his gentle voice catching as he reached for a Kleenex. He likened the experience to being scalded with boiling-hot water. The exoneration, the celebrity, the settlement, it’s like “a skin graft” over a festering wound, he said. “Still ain’t normal. Ain’t never gonna be normal. How could it be normal?”
The post “That Guy Is Still Out There” appeared first on ProPublica.
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“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
The supervillain Two-Face, in the movie The Dark Knight, is the alter-ego of former District Attorney Harvey Dent, one-time friend of Bruce Wayne and ally of Batman. Dent’s face is badly burned in an explosion engineered by the Joker, who later manipulates him into becoming a force for evil. What is it about this character that reminds me of J.D. Vance?
Like Dent, Vance arrived on the public scene with sterling credentials (a diploma from Yale Law School) and presented himself as a crusading good guy: his book Hillbilly Elegy sought to explain working class anger to the liberal elite, and, during the 2016 presidential campaign, he declared himself a “never-Trump guy,” saying, among other things, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” But, scarred by the acid of Trumpism, he has like Two-Face become a force for evil, reinventing himself in a way that causes anyone with a shred of common sense to doubt his sincerity, and wonder if there’s anything he won’t do to attain power.
With this background in mind, it’s not really surprising that Vance has come out as an advocate for the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon who, prior to Trump’s ascension, was the modern avatar of presidential ruthlessness and criminality. Speaking last week at Nixon’s Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, he opined that the Watergate scandal “would be like a 12-hour news story” in today’s media environment. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy!” Criminal conspiracy, bribery, suborning perjury, and abuse of power are business as usual in the Trump World where Vance operates. He admits as much, and sees common injustice in how the two presidents were treated: “If you look at the story of how the ‘deep state’ took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration.”
Who was the “deep state” that took down Nixon? Vance, of course, didn’t name them, allowing the members of his audience who are ignorant of history to imagine a rogue’s gallery like the shadowy villains Batman is up against. In fact, the “deep state” opposing Nixon included a unanimous Supreme Court (in United States v. Nixon), a Republican-controlled Congress, his own White House Counsel and, most tellingly, Nixon himself talking his corrupt head off on tape. Not to mention Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters and bestselling authors who chronicled his wrongdoing in All the President’s Men.
When Hamlet says, “God hath given you one face, and you have made yourself another,” he is himself practicing deceit, pretending to be mad in order to drive Ophelia away before she is caught in the whirlwind of his revenge plot. The motivations for Vance’s duplicity are nowhere near as noble. He is just another political chameleon, ratcheting up his insincerity to the degree necessary to exist in Trump’s White House. It doesn’t take a Shakespearean level of genius to reach the obvious conclusion: Something is rotten in the District of Columbia.
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Down a dirt road in northwest Oklahoma, only a few hundred yards from where the city of Enid draws its drinking water, a company injects the toxic byproduct of oil production deep underground.
That close proximity violates a state rule meant to protect public groundwater supplies from oil field wastewater, which can be saltier than the sea and laden with toxic metals. Injection operations are banned within a half-mile of public water wells unless regulators hold a hearing to ensure that such activity will not pollute the water.
But in 2018, without a hearing, state regulators approved this injection well, an apparatus that applies pressure to dispose of wastewater down a steel tube. And in the years since, the well, named the Flying Monkey, has repeatedly failed structural integrity tests, signaling a potential leak.
The Frontier and ProPublica mapped every injection well in the state to determine how close they are to public water wells. We identified at least 114 injection wells in communities across Oklahoma — including the Flying Monkey and two others in Enid — that are located within a half-mile of a public water supply well. More than 300,000 Oklahomans live in communities that rely on these water wells, according to our analysis.
Explore our analysis of Oklahoma oil field wastewater wells near public drinking water wells on ProPublica’s website.
The city of Enid has complained to the state about the threat to its water. In Oklahoma and beyond, toxic oil field fluid has spread underground and threatened municipal supplies. Midland, Texas, is still cleaning up groundwater polluted by a leaking injection well more than two decades ago.
But Enid officials are powerless under state law to pass their own rules governing these wells. And so they are appealing to the same Oklahoma agency that had approved the Flying Monkey to now revoke the permit that allows the well to inject wastewater. The city is also asking the state to impose stronger protections against pollution from injection, as more oil and gas companies seek permission to drill wells that dispose of their wastewater nearby. It’s a rare example of pushback against one of Oklahoma’s most powerful industries.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which is responsible for ensuring that industry operations do not pollute groundwater, has approved thousands of orders for waivers or adjustments to state rules in recent years, according to the agency’s administrative court database. These include nearly 400 orders granting exceptions to injection regulations alone since 2022, agency records show.
The agency has repeatedly declined to punish oil and gas companies for causing widespread pollution, according to an earlier investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier. The news outlets also found that the agency chose not to pursue stronger rules for wastewater injection following industry opposition. In response to that reporting, the agency told the news outlets that the state is committed to “doing the right thing, holding operators accountable, protecting Oklahoma and its resources, and providing fair and balanced regulation.”
Enid’s case will be heard in the agency’s administrative law court later this year. Neither city leadership nor their attorney agreed to be interviewed before the matter is resolved. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing case, as did the Flying Monkey’s current operator, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings LLC.
Ben Ezzell, a former Enid city commissioner, said he hopes the state recognizes that the community is asking for “reasonable” protections against catastrophic long-term damage to its water supplies.
“It’s ultimately all one big aquifer,” he said. “You can’t just pee in part of the pool. If any of the aquifer is tainted, all of the aquifer will be tainted.”
A row of hulking grain elevators sits just outside Enid’s main commercial district, evidence of the prolific local farm economy that earned the city of 50,000 the nickname “Queen Wheat City.” But in the heart of downtown, a large art deco building gestures at one of Enid’s other vital, long-standing industries: It was once the office for Continental Resources, now the world’s largest private oil company.
Although Continental outgrew Enid more than a decade ago, pumpjacks pulling up oil still seesaw up and down near town. Oil production inevitably means wastewater. And dozens of injection wells west of Enid blast the industry’s byproduct underground in the same area where many of the city’s water wells are located.
The nation’s bedrock water protection law — the Safe Drinking Water Act — singles out oil and gas injection of wastewater as a particularly urgent threat to drinking water. And it requires oil states to draft specific regulations to protect public water wells.
Oklahoma, however, has not always followed its own rules. In 2018, a small company called Hinkle Oil & Gas applied for a permit for an injection well — the Flying Monkey — less than a quarter-mile from two of the city’s water wells, according to publicly available data.
But on its application, the company had checked a box attesting that the injection well was not within a half-mile of a public water supply well — the distance that, under state rules, should have triggered a hearing to evaluate the Flying Monkey’s pollution threat. “This was demonstrably false,” Enid’s lawyers wrote in a September 2025 court filing.
The commission approved Hinkle’s application for the well without a hearing, giving the company the green light to inject more than 800,000 gallons of wastewater into the earth each day. Hinkle declined to answer questions about the Flying Monkey. The commission did not respond to questions about whether it verified the distance before approving the permit. Nor did it respond to The Frontier and ProPublica’s offer to show agency officials our mapping of the 114 injection wells across the state that are located within a half-mile of a public water supply well.
Later in 2018, Hinkle transferred the well to another small company, which applied for a new permit to convert the Flying Monkey to a commercial well to dispose of the wastewater produced by other oil companies, too. By approving the permit, the city contends, regulators allowed the company to violate another state rule meant to protect public water wells from commercial disposal sites. The new company’s application also failed to acknowledge the close proximity of the public water supply well. The company has since filed for bankruptcy.
Both of these permits were ultimately signed by Patricia Downey, the manager of the agency’s underground injection control program, and read: “decision without hearing.” Downey did not respond to any questions sent directly to her, including whether she knew about the Flying Monkey’s proximity to public water wells.
In the last five years, the state has shut down the Flying Monkey repeatedly — for months at a time — for failing mechanical tests required by the state that evaluate the well’s structural integrity. Failing these tests can indicate a problem with the well that may be allowing wastewater to escape. The well has failed five of these tests since 2021, including one in March due to a leak in the well’s tubing that the company had reported to the agency, according to state records. The agency’s report about the March incident does not reference an investigation into whether the leak reached nearby groundwater. The agency typically notes when an investigation is conducted. It did not answer questions about whether it investigated the well for potential pollution.
In the court filing last fall, Enid’s lawyers described this pattern of violations as “a significant compliance red flag, especially given the well’s immediate proximity to Enid’s public supply well.” The city wants the state to terminate the Flying Monkey’s permit. After a period of inactivity last year, the well began injecting wastewater again last summer, only to be shut down again this March. State records indicate that the Flying Monkey’s operator, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings, repaired the tubing leak in April, and the well’s status is listed as active; the company declined to comment.
Neither the company’s nor the commission’s court filings include responses to Enid’s accusations. In June, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings refiled a permit application for the Flying Monkey, acknowledging the proximity of the city’s water supply wells.
Close by the Flying Monkey, another wastewater injection well — Estill #8 — sits roughly a quarter-mile from three of Enid’s water wells.
In its application, submitted in August 2012, an affiliate of the U.S. Energy Development Corp. acknowledged the proposed injection well’s proximity to the city’s water supply but subsequently urged state regulators to approve an emergency order to allow the well to begin injecting wastewater immediately. Waiting for the required hearing, the company wrote, would result in “irreparable financial harm” because any delay would deprive it of a way to get rid of the wastewater generated by its nearby oil wells. In general, oil companies want their wastewater disposal sites to be as close as possible to their producing wells to reduce the cost of transporting the fluid. The commission approved the emergency order on a temporary basis while it considered whether to issue a permanent permit, and the well began injecting wastewater in November 2012.
In February of the following year, the company returned to the commission to renew its request to continue injecting without a standard hearing. The commission approved the second request in March and two weeks later authorized the well’s official permit without a hearing. The commission did not answer questions about the permitting process for Estill #8.
The well has been operating ever since, injecting more than 12 million gallons of wastewater into the earth last year. (A third injection well also operates within a quarter mile of a city water well, but that one was permitted in the 1970s, before modern regulations were established.) The state has tested these injection wells every few years and has not identified problems with either one.
In this arid part of Oklahoma, where surface water is scarce, Enid has become a vital source of drinking water for a dozen smaller, more rural communities as well as Vance Air Force Base. Even after the recent completion of a 70-mile, $400 million pipeline to bring water from Kaw Lake, Enid will continue to rely heavily on its groundwater wells.
“In the 21st century, water is going to be the new gold,” Frank Baker, an Enid city commissioner, said in an interview.
Driven by increasing concern over water scarcity and the potential for contamination, the city’s effort to protect its water has stretched for two years but has received scant attention around town. The issue hasn’t previously been covered in the media. The City Council hasn’t discussed it in public meetings. And few follow the obscure quasi-judicial system of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.
If residents knew how close injection wells operate to their drinking water supply, they would be concerned, said Elizabeth Betchan, a barista at a downtown coffee shop. “I would feel more comfortable if there was more of a buffer there,” she said.
Enid is asking regulators to impose a ban on oil and gas wastewater injection within a half-mile of its water wells, with no possibility of exceptions. It also wants the state to require additional testing, pollution monitoring and mechanical safety measures for wells within 1 mile of an Enid water well, according to its application to state regulators.
“I think a mile is probably too close,” said Eddie Mack, a retired manager of a rural water district who also served on Enid’s planning commission.
Pollution from high-pressure wastewater injection can radiate much farther than a mile. Oil companies have acknowledged that their injection wells can impact one another’s operations that were 3 miles apart, according to agreements between companies on how to respond in such scenarios. The Frontier and ProPublica identified more than 400 wastewater injection wells across Oklahoma that are within 1 mile of a public water supply well.
Regulations for this issue vary widely among oil states. Colorado and Ohio set a minimum buffer of 1,000 feet between injection wells and public water supplies. Many states do not have fixed setbacks, instead relying on belowground geological evaluations to ensure that injected fluid does not contaminate aquifers.
A leak from one injection well can cause severe pollution that lasts decades. That’s what happened more than 20 years ago in Midland, Texas, which has no fixed buffer requirement between injection wells and public water wells. After the company responsible went bankrupt, cleanup fell to the city, which has spent millions of dollars trying to stop the pollution from spreading, according to an investigation by Inside Climate News.
But Enid’s bid to protect its groundwater faces numerous obstacles.
Five companies have formally opposed the city’s request for stronger rules to protect its groundwater. Those include Flying Monkey owner BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings, Estill #8 owner U.S. Energy Development Corp. and two others — D&B Operating and Royalty Energy Development LLC — that have pending applications for new injection wells near Enid. Neither of the latter two companies responded to requests for comment.
Matthew Allen, an attorney representing U.S. Energy Development Corp., argued in a May procedural hearing that the city’s proposed changes would “significantly increase the regulatory burden” and costs to companies. He also said that the administrative court was the incorrect venue for the city to pursue such a significant change. Neither Allen nor other company representatives responded to requests for comment.
Kaylee Davis-Maddy, Enid’s attorney, emphasized during the hearing that the city was not trying to establish a statewide rule. Rather, she said, Enid wants the rules to apply within a geographic boundary to protect its freshwater. Davis-Maddy declined to be interviewed.
Enid has to bring its appeal to the state agency in large part due to a 2015 law that forbids cities and counties from establishing their own regulations on oil and gas operations.
That matters because even if the administrative law judge sides with Enid, such a decision must be approved by the regulatory agency’s three elected commissioners. Right now, two of them are former state legislators who in the past have opposed efforts by Oklahoma municipalities to restrict oil and gas operations.
Before winning election to the commission in 2024, Brian Bingman served in the state Senate, where, as the Senate president pro tempore, he was the lead author of the bill to ban local governments from regulating the oil and gas industry. Kim David, another commissioner, voted for the bill as a state senator. All three commissioners were elected with significant financial support from the oil and gas industry. Neither Bingman nor David responded to requests for comment.
At the time the preemption law passed, several local governments were considering restrictions on hydraulic fracturing amid a wave of earthquakes caused by oil and gas injection. The legislation mandated that any regulation of the industry be approved by the corporation commission.
The state Supreme Court upheld the law in its 2022 decision nullifying a requirement by the city of Norman, about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City, that oil and gas companies maintain extra liability insurance.
“Municipalities no longer possess a broad police power to regulate oil and gas,” the court wrote in its unanimous decision.
The post To Protect Its Drinking Water, This City Has to Appeal to the Oil Regulators That Put It at Risk appeared first on ProPublica.
Why should Delaware care?
Artificial intelligence forms the backbone of the hottest industry in the world right now. Its use also has sparked questions about whether the technology can be utilized safely and for the benefit of society. Delaware officials now say they may create a testing ground to allow AI agents to run whole companies.
A Delaware committee that has been studying the business uses of artificial intelligence proposed legislation earlier this month to temporarily ease state regulations on companies deploying the fast-growing technology.
The proposed legislation would create a testing ground for companies to use what are called AI agents to autonomously complete business tasks typically done by humans. The AI agents would oversee whole business operations under the umbrella of a new kind of entity, called an Artificial Intelligence Company, or AIC.
Supporters say the resulting regulatory “sandbox” would allow Delaware to test how autonomous AI businesses operate, and provide lawmakers with key data to develop rules governing their use within the state’s prominent corporate franchise.
The legislation is likely to be introduced in the General Assembly next year.
Its drafting this month emerged after tech companies plowed billions of dollars in recent years into the AI industry — much of it to build data centers across the country to power the technology.
The proposed legislation also comes just as Delaware seeks to retain its status as the preeminent legal home for companies, even in the wake of attacks on its brand from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and others.
The principal drafter of the proposed legislation, John Mark Zeberkiewicz, said the measure could allow AI agents to engage in just about any business activity — from providing coding services to signing contracts, or even filing and defending lawsuits.
He also noted that it seeks to protect owners of new Artificial Intelligence Companies from facing legal liability from actions the AI might take.
“Anything that a company can do, the AIC can do as a company,” said Zeberkiewicz, a corporate attorney at Wilmington’s Richards Layton and Finger.
But exactly how an AI might work in the testing ground remains unclear – reflecting an larger uncertainty surrounding the broader AI industry.
Asked whether an AI company could take on whole operations of even risky businesses, such as a small nuclear power plant, Zeberkiewicz chuckled, then said “fair enough.”
But he said he does not believe that is something a company would do in the real world.
Supporters of the sandbox argue that Delaware cannot wait for such questions to be completely answered because businesses are already deploying AI agents to perform autonomous work. They say the legislation would allow the state to develop legal standards before the technology becomes more widespread.
During a June meeting of the Delaware committee that studied the issue over the past year, committee chair Patrick Callahan stated that the investment bank Morgan Stanley is already granting AI agents access to stock trading platforms.
He said the future the committee is planning for “is actually here right now, and it’s arrived through one of the largest financial institutions.”
While AI agents are already transacting, Callahan said there is no clear party being held accountable when things go wrong.
“Technology companies will operate regardless. It is a problem for the ordinary Delawareans and counterparties on the other side of those transactions,” he said.
It is not immediately clear whether any large company or lobbying group asked Delaware to propose its AI testing ground. Still, in April, the prominent billionaire Mark Cuban posted on the social media site, X, that a U.S. state should allow anyone to form a company using an AI agent and a stablecoin digital currency.
In response to the post, Gov. Matt Meyer stated “On it!” He then provide a link to Delaware’s AI sandbox initiative.
The incentive for a company to enter into the Delaware’s proposed regulatory sandbox would be to test an autonomous entity with a liability shield, Zeberkiewicz said.
“It’s like any limited liability company – you form it for the purpose of making sure that the owners of the business are not automatically liable for the debts and obligations of the entity,” he said.
Any entity formed in Delaware could apply to be a part of the testing ground, which would officially be called an “Artificial Intelligence Regulatory Sandbox.” In the application, the company could ask a future oversight committee to be exempted from any Delaware regulation, code provision, or licensing agreement.
The future committee — which would be composed of the Delaware Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and others — would then accept or deny the applications for the testing ground.
Allan Kyle, a member of Delaware’s AI committee, said he can’t foresee which regulations applicants might ask to be exempted. Callahan said the same.
“We’ll find out when people apply and say, ‘Hey, we’re being prevented from doing commerce because of this one Delaware regulation that we’re required to do and we want to look for a waiver for that,’ “ Callahan said.
State Representative Cyndie Romer, who sits on the sandbox subcommittee, told Spotlight Delaware the proposal would not be considered by the general assembly until next year.
Generative AI–which includes big name chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google Gemini – is typically what most people think of when they hear AI.
Sunita Chandrasekaran, associate professor of computer and information sciences at the University of Delaware and director of the First State AI Institute, said that for larger and more complex tasks, generative AI would need to be prompted numerous times and require many “iterative back-and-forths”.
“You won’t get what you want in the first iteration,” Chandrasekaran said.
Chandrasekaran said an AI agent is the “doer,” while generative AI answers questions.
“You’re asking more than a question – you’re asking it to do a job for you,” Chandrasekaran said.
Among Chandrasekaran’s ongoing research is a project to build AI agents to write code. The agents can generate about 10,000 codes in a matter of a few minutes, which Chandrasekaran said she could not do manually.
“It would take me maybe a couple of years to write that many codes,” Chandrasekaran said. “The agent is now giving me more output than a human can ever possibly do in a given point of time.”
Many companies have announced layoffs related to new AI efficiencies. Some specifically cited new AI agent programs that fill in for customer service, support engineers, and management jobs.
But along with efficiencies, AI agents have also introduced new risks for businesses.
Kevin Bhimani, a software engineer on Chandrasekaran’s team, said the risks could range from sending an email to the wrong person to deleting a whole database or disclosing data to the wrong people.
“It could hack into systems and access data that it wasn’t meant to access,” Bhimani said.
During a Delaware AI Commission meeting this month, Delaware Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said the program would allow Delaware to be on the “cutting edge of technology,” if the testing goes well.
And, just like the state charges fees for LLC formations, Patibanda-Sanchez said Delaware would benefit from fees paid to form Artificial Intelligence Companies.
Currently, the collection of taxes and fees on the more than 2 million companies that maintain their legal home in Delaware contributes more than $2 billion to the state budget, or about a third of all revenue.
“Should a new entity form be created out of it, that’s really a huge benefit to our state’s revenues,” Patibanda-Sanchez said during the June meeting.
Patibanda-Sanchez said “we want to be able to exit the AIC Act out of the sandbox” and into state’s laws, if AI agents prove to be a beneficial and responsible use.
“That’s the whole reason to test it, instead of just trying it out for the first time and not knowing what’s going to happen,” Patibanda-Sanchez said.
The post Delaware committee drafts plan to test companies run by AI appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The White House routed a $500 million no-bid contract through a White House office that typically handles repairs and furnishings and is exempt from competitive bidding requirements.
Democratic socialists need to do more than win in the big American cities. And they can, with the right message
I joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in April 2007 at the age of 17. DSA back then was a small group with an ageing membership and an almost negative amount of buzz. If you’d told me its candidates would someday sweep primaries across New York City, I would have been surprised to say the least.
Last week, they did. Darializa Avila Chevalier, an organizer in her early 30s, beat the five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in an uptown-and-Bronx seat. Claire Valdez, another socialist, took the open seat Nydia Velázquez is leaving in Brooklyn and Queens. Add the state races, and DSA will seat at least 15 of its endorsed candidates in Albany next year. The movement that made Zohran Mamdani mayor is starting to look less like a pressure campaign and more like a bloc that can govern.
Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist. He is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
Why Should Delaware Care?
A recent shooting of a 19-year-old has quickly become one of Wilmington’s highest-profile police use-of-force cases in recent years. With differing accounts from police and community members, a Delaware Department of Justice investigation is expected to be closely watched as residents look for answers.
Days after a Wilmington police officer shot and killed a 19-year-old during a foot chase, calls are growing louder from some elected officials and community advocates for a stronger response from the city, including the release of police body camera footage.
In response, Mayor John Carney and the chief of police said investigators need more time before details can be made public about the fatal shooting of Kadir Skinner.
The lack of information has fueled frustration, fear and anger in Wilmington, where residents and City Council members say the mayor’s response has been inadequate. The shooting has become one of the city’s most closely scrutinized police use-of-force incidents since the 2015 fatal shooting of Jeremy McDole, a man who used a wheelchair.
“It’s just a continuous ongoing thing, and the people are tired and the people are fed up and we can’t take no more,” community activist Mahkieb Booker said.
The shooting took place in northeast Wilmington, near 24th and Jessup streets. It is currently being investigated by the Wilmington Police Department and the Delaware Department of Justice.
According to police, officers were monitoring a large crowd in the area prior to the shooting when they observed Skinner leave a home. Police say he then pointed a gun toward the crowd.
When officers approached Skinner, he began to run, police said, leading to a foot pursuit that ended with one officer shooting Skinner. He later died after being transported to a hospital, according to the public alert from the Wilmington Police Department.
Police said they recovered a loaded firearm from Skinner.
The police officer who shot Skinner is on administrative leave, according to the Wilmington Police Department.
In the days since the shooting, many have posted videos to social media of the aftermath of the incident, showing neighbors gathered near the scene as police officers blocked off the street with caution tape.
Some of those videos also included witness accounts that differ from police statements.
In one bystander video recorded at the scene, a woman can be heard claiming that an officer picked up spent shell casings and placed them in his pocket. That allegation has circulated widely on social media.
Spotlight Delaware also spoke with a woman in the neighborhood on Monday who similarly said she witnessed a police officer picking up shell casings shortly after the shooting. The woman, Latiya Greene, said the officer picking up the casings was not the shooter.
“It was a detective, with a bald head and caucasian,” Greene said. “He came and swooped up all the shell casings from off the ground, put them in his pocket.”
City and police officials have not responded to the specific claim.
Skinner’s family members have also spoken out in recent news articles about the shooting, urging police officials to provide more details about what happened during the altercation.
“The community is saying something different than what the police officers gave me. Make it make sense to me,” Durell Dollard, Skinner’s father, said in a video on social media, a day after his son’s death.
Community advocate Jakim Mohammed also told Spotlight Delaware that several area residents have contacted him to express a belief that “this was not only an unjustified shooting and an unnecessary shooting, but definitely too much use of force.”
In the days following the shooting, advocates and elected officials expressed disappointment in what they said was the city’s lack of communication. Before Monday evening, Carney had not released a statement beyond a short Facebook post, letting residents know he was aware of the situation.
In response, City Council President Earnest “Trippi” Congo posted a statement to Facebook on Saturday criticizing the mayor and city police for what he said was an inadequate public response to the situation.
“If an officer had been seriously injured or killed, we would have addressed it immediately,” Congo wrote in his social media post. “Release the Body Cam Footage. Say something.”
By Monday, Carney issued a public statement, expressing his condolences to Skinner’s family, and noting that the investigation remains ongoing, and urging anyone with information about what happened to come forward.
Carney acknowledged that the community has questions but said “answers must come through a thorough, independent, and transparent investigative process.”
He said neither he nor members of his administration would comment further while the investigations remain active and ongoing.
Before Carney’s response, City Councilwoman Shané Darby released a statement calling on the city to conduct an independent assessment of the Wilmington Police Department to determine whether its officers are adequate and aligned with the needs of the community.
“The community cannot be expected to place full confidence in a process where police investigate police,” Darby said in the statement.
Zanthia Oliver, who represents the district where Skinner was killed, said she is also hoping for a full and transparent investigation into the shooting and expressed confidence that the investigation will be handled properly.
“I do think the family deserves answers, but I do also believe in due process for the full investigation,” she told Spotlight Delaware.
Nearly a dozen residents who live in the area around the shooting scene spoke to Spotlight Delaware on Monday. They shared how their community, which is predominantly Black, is both angry and scared following the shooting.
Joanne Williams, who has lived in the area for several decades, said the surrounding streets have been largely calm in recent days. Some children could be seen playing nearby while she spoke. Elsewhere a group of people sat around a card table on a sidewalk in front of their house.
Williams said she felt that the neighborhood’s normal chatter had been muted.
“Something like that happens, it gets quiet out here,” Williams said.
Several other residents said that much of the reaction among neighbors has been about the lack of information released.
One resident Jeff Hill contrasted the city’s response to Skinner’s shooting with one that followed a shooting at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington hospital earlier this month.
“On the 6 o’clock news that evening, they had the mayor, the hospital CEO, [Delaware Attorney General] Kathy Jennings, everybody up there, gathered all them together for this news conference,” Hill said. “Why did they just wait until today to make a statement [for this]?”
On June 30, community advocates and several City Council members will host a town hall to discuss next steps following the shooting and outline the community’s demands for greater transparency and police reform.
Advocates will be joined by City Council members, including Congo and Darby, to hear from residents and discuss potential actions moving forward.
The meeting will be held at Mohammed Mosque in Wilmington at 6 p.m.
The post Wilmington neighbors, advocates demand details about police shooting of teen appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Last year’s first-in-a-generation property reassessment and its lasting fallout have echoed throughout the state – and particularly New Castle County – over the past year. But as lawmakers propose more reforms and the clock winds down on this year’s legislative session, a last minute bill with the Governor’s backing raises questions about what exactly comes next in Delaware’s property tax saga.
A late-in-the-session bill that could create sweeping changes to Delaware’s property tax system has been endorsed by Gov. Matt Meyer, but it faces opposition from each of the state’s three counties as well as the financial directors of every school district in New Castle County.
In a letter to the General Assembly obtained by Spotlight Delaware, Gov. Meyer encouraged lawmakers to pass Senate Bill 350 – which would establish a framework for dividing properties in the state into four distinct classifications that could be taxed at different rates – before gaveling out for the year on June 30.
The bill, introduced by Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola (D-Newark), would create a pathway for apartments to be considered residential property for tax purposes, potentially ending the cacophony of objections by landlords and property developers to the state’s introduction of split tax rates last summer.
But the bill, introduced with just four working days left in the legislative session, has not yet been voted out of the Senate Executive Committee. It also faced opposition from county and school district leaders during a committee hearing last week.
As lawmakers face the final working day of this year’s legislative session today, it remains unclear whether they have the time – or the political will – to enact the reforms before the clock strikes midnight.
“[Senate Bill] 350 needs work,” Sokola said after last week’s Senate Executive Committee hearing. “But we’re going to work until we’re done.”
Senate Bill 350 would allow Delaware’s three counties to separate properties within their jurisdiction into four separate tax classifications.
Those tax classes are outlined specifically in the bill:
The bill would allow counties, school districts and vocational-technical school districts to charge different tax rates to these different property classes – with certain guardrails. It would also allow counties to create more property classes than the original four outlined in the bill.
Properties in Class B – apartments and other multi-family housing types – would now be considered residential for tax purposes. They could not be taxed more than 120% of their residential counterparts in Class A, according to the legislation.
The original split tax rates enacted last summer capped taxes on commercial properties, which included apartments, at 200% of residential properties. A new proposal looking to indefinitely extend that split in New Castle County, House Bill 462, lowers the commercial cap to 185%.
It is unclear how SB 350 would interact with other property tax reforms, like HB 462, that are being considered ahead of the close of the 153rd General Assembly.
According to the bill, a county would not be required to adopt the state’s new tax classes. County leaders could instead charge a single, uniform tax rate across all properties.
In his letter urging lawmakers to enact SB 350, Gov. Meyer called on the General Assembly to address the “gross inequity” of apartments being taxed more than single-family homes.
“We need to get this right for the Delawareans counting on us,” he said.
The higher tax bills on apartment complexes, Meyer argued, disincentivize more dense types of housing developments at a time when the state is attempting to add to its housing stock.
Meyer also seemingly took aim at HB 462, which looks to extend the current split tax rate system in New Castle County.
“Asking renters to carry a commercial tax burden and locking that treatment in permanently isn’t consistent with the values I know we hold in common,” he said.
While renters themselves do not pay property taxes, Meyer said higher tax bills on landlords can lead to other consequences like higher rents and deferred property maintenance.
It is unclear, however, if lowering taxes on landlords would directly correlate to lower rent costs.
And while Meyer has thrown his weight behind SB 350, the bill also faces opposition from county and school district leaders.
During a Senate Executive Committee hearing last week, A representative from the Delaware Association of Counties spoke against the bill. He said that all three counties have submitted “in-depth letters” detailing their opposition to SB 350.
“In short, the bill creates a myriad of significant, likely unintentional consequences,” said Lincoln Willis, the Delaware Association of Counties representative.
Chief among those consequences was the potential for tax revenue losses for counties, municipalities and school districts, Willis said.
Emily Falcon, the chief financial officer of the Colonial School District, also spoke against the legislation. Her comments in opposition, she said, were on behalf of every school district in New Castle County.
Falcon said SB 350 would further complicate an already fraught tax rate setting process for school districts as they grapple with a slew of other reforms that have already been enacted or are currently being considered by the General Assembly.
The bill, she said, would ultimately result in higher tax rates for other property types outside of multi-family homes.
Falcon also told Spotlight Delaware that school district financial officers in New Castle County were not part of the bill drafting process for SB 350, a departure from previous property tax reform bills.
Senate Bill 350 has not yet been formally voted out of committee, but that does mean it will not advance during the last day of the legislative session.
Lawmakers could theoretically vote the bill out of committee and immediately add it to the Senate agenda. It would then need to pass through the House before it could be signed into law.
The likelihood of those possibilities, though, is unclear.
None of the lawmakers sponsoring SB 350, including Sokola, Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Glasgow), Senate Majority Whip Elizabeth “Tizzy” Lockman (D-West Wilmington) and Rep. Cyndie Romer (D-Newark), returned requests for comment about the status of the bill on Monday.
The post Last minute property tax proposal raises questions ahead of final legislative day appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Each year, the Delaware General Assembly allocates its giant-in-aid funding, a bill that provides extra money to nonprofits. Many recurring recipients got more money for the next fiscal year, notably fire companies and housing services. But one Dover homeless shelter got cut short.
Funding cuts included in this year’s grant-in-aid proposal could effectively shutter a controversial Dover homeless shelter.
While hundreds of organizations are slated to receive more money this year from state lawmaker’s annual funding allocation meant to bolster private nonprofits, The People’s Church – a Dover homeless shelter that has faced resident and local official scrutiny – will go without funding for its winter overnight shelter and meal service program.
The grant-in-aid bill still must pass both the House and Senate during the final day of this year’s legislative session on Tuesday, June 30, and could be subject to change during the floor debate in both chambers.
Nonetheless, the lack of funding for one of few homelessness service providers in Delaware’s capital city represents a blow to the city’s unhoused population. It also marks the latest development in the debate over loitering that has overtaken the city for nearly a year.
Lawmakers allocated $55,000 to the church, but the bill specifically limits that funding to be used for after school child care programs, and not homelessness services.
The organization received $85,000 last fiscal year toward its overnight shelter and meals program, and grant-in-aid funding has always served as the church’s financial lifeline, lead pastor Rev. Derrick Hodge told Spotlight Delaware.
Hodge described the funding news as “horrific” and “foolish.”
The grant-in-aid proposal comes after the Dover City Council targeted the People’s Church this spring, as residents in the downtown neighborhood cited the shelter as the reason people were sleeping, trespassing and using drugs in the area.
The city council voted in March to deny the shelter funding to expand its workforce development program, and later that same month threatened to shut down the shelter for improper zoning to operate an overnight shelter.
State Sen. Trey Paradee (D-Dover), chair of the powerful Joint Finance Committee (JFC) that makes grant-in-aid funding allocations, represents a district that includes the People’s Church.
Hodge said he believes the funding decision is state lawmakers “caving to pressure” from Dover residents claiming that the church is causing the homelessness and drug use issues, instead of listening to rational arguments.
“We will continue to do the best we can, within the limits of our available resources to help people get back on their feet and help the neighborhood hungry survive during this terrible time,” Hodge said. “I don’t know what that’s going to look like.”
Sussex County also saw a shift in funding for homelessness services, as faith-based service provider Love Inc. of mid-Delmarva received a more than 1,300% increase in state dollars from $11,000 last year to $150,000 this fiscal year.
Love Inc. currently operates winter overnight shelters across Sussex County and provides case management services to individuals, associate director Kathryn Alban said.
The organization has been lauded by town leaders in Georgetown as a more accountability-focused approach to ending homelessness that they would like to see brought to Georgetown, as a group of residents have spent the past year criticizing the effectiveness of existing resource providers in the county seat.
Alban said Love Inc. is currently “in conversations with leadership in Georgetown,” and the funding increase could help them expand to have more of a presence in town.
However, she said Love Inc. does not have any intention of taking over current service providers, like Springboard Delaware, but rather would like to work alongside them.
Other housing services, including the Central Delaware Housing Collaborative, Sussex Community Crisis Housing Services and First State Community Action also received large funding increases.
The Ministry of Caring, which also provides sheltering, received a $208k increase.
A new homeless shelter in Kent County, which recently announced its plans to convert Delaware State University dorms into housing, also received a one-time grant for the project.
Compared to last year, the bill proposes a modest increase in funding allocations to government agencies and senior centers, county funds and paramedic operations.
The bill proposes awarding a total of $99.4 million, a slight increase from last year’s $98.2 million.
The biggest appropriations are slated for statewide government programs, the largest of which being $40 million for government units & senior centers. That allocation is followed by $22 million for public health emergency medical services and $19 million for paramedic program operations.
The Wilmington Senior Center, which abruptly closed its doors in March without an official statement as to why, is slated to receive more than half a million dollars to be put toward reopening.
A Spotlight Delaware report found the center had struggled with financial difficulties in the past.
Funding for volunteer fire companies also is set to increase across the board. Every Delaware fire company will receive $1,500 more than last year, totaling a $90,000 increase across all three counties.
The bill includes a specific set of provisions for the Marydel Volunteer Fire Company, which was recently found to have been spending tens of thousands of dollars without oversight, according to a state audit.
These extra requirements include Marydel Fire Company leadership submitting a written report to the Joint Finance Committee about how they are addressing the allegations in the auditor’s report, and whether they have completed an independent audit of the fire company.
Completing these steps will allow Marydel to receive its roughly $300,000 in grant-in-aid funding.
The General Assembly’s grant-in-aid bill will first be heard in the Senate, which is set to convene for the final time this year at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. It must then pass in the House of Representatives.
Funding disclosure: Spotlight Delaware received $50,000 in grant-in-aid as part of this year’s bill.
The post Dover homeless shelter effectively shuttered by grant-in-aid cut, others see increases appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Roque had been in the Army for just over four years when a man fatally shot her in the head.
Roque wasn’t in a war zone, and the killer wasn’t an enemy combatant. It was Wooster Rancy, a fellow soldier stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who had gone to Walmart for trash bags on the last day Roque was seen alive in October 2024. The Army found her body in a dumpster behind the barracks.
“Even now, I still can’t believe it,” her mother, Ana Roque, told The Intercept. “That murderers could exist in one of the supposedly safest places in the country.”
A first-of-its-kind analysis by The Intercept found that in the Army, women are more likely to be killed by their fellow service members than by enemy combatants, in a reversal of the threat soldiers are trained to face. Between 2011 and August 2025, at least 41 women died by homicide in the Army — more than half of them at the hands of other service members or veterans. Using Defense Department manpower data to calculate per capita death rates, The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers, the opposite of national and global trends.
The Intercept found that active-duty Army women face a higher risk of homicide than male soldiers.
In many cases, women in the Army are killed by current or former romantic partners. Over 70 percent of victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at one point, and the rate of homicides among women soldiers from intimate partner violence is at least three times higher than the national average. In others, like Roque’s case, it’s unclear how male soldiers chose their victims.
“There was no connection between Sarah and Rancy. They never spoke, never texted, and their paths never crossed,” said Ana Roque. Given that Rancy was convicted of murder in February, Roque added, “I can’t complain about the prosecutors, they did their job. But my grievance is that they didn’t push to uncover the truth behind why he did it.’”
Research points to the military’s hypermasculine culture, which historically devalues women, as a contributing factor to high rates of violence against them. But the existing scholarship is insufficient, said Erin Siegal McIntyre, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has spent years digging into the hidden structures of militarized institutions.
“There’s no way to know how bad the problem really is,” Siegal McIntyre said. “There is an abysmal amount of data collected on domestic violence perpetrated by law enforcement officers, for example, many of whom are former military.”
Analyzing over 14 years of Defense Department death data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept’s investigation is the first to compare rates of violence against women in the Army to factors like duty location, jobs, and relationships with perpetrators. The FOIA data also reveals deaths not previously announced by the Army and the Department of Defense.
Violence against women in the military also appears to take a mental toll. In addition to the 41 women who died by homicide, another 128 died by suicide, the majority of them lower-ranking enlisted soldiers. From 2011 to 2024, the last complete year of data, homicide and suicide rates for women in the Army were double their equivalents for women nationwide.
The Army doesn’t make any of this public, and the Intercept’s investigation has found flaws in what data collection currently occurs: Homicide and suicide death rates are not separated by gender or calculated per capita, preventing deeper analysis and comparison.
There’s also nothing publicly accessible on how many homicides are committed by service members, who their victims are, or where homicides occurred. The Defense Department’s annual suicide report doesn’t note how many of the deceased had experiences with sexual assault or harassment.
Meanwhile, systems meant to protect women are being rolled back and dismantled.
In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. It had existed for nearly 75 years, focusing on issues including sexual harassment and assault. In January, he ordered a six-month review of women in combat roles. In April, a woman who had been a whistleblower on sexual harassment within the Army Special Operations community was accused of sharing classified information and arrested by the FBI. Hegseth has also intervened to block the promotions of women officers.
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Army denied that its protections were insufficient.
“The Army has several programs and policies to protect service members who experience sexual assault or domestic violence,” said Army spokesperson Heather Hagan.
When Spc. Mayra Diaz was assaulted on the Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, she was lucky to survive.
Diaz was blindfolded, with her hands bound over her head, having water poured on her face — “waterboarding me and causing me to choke,” Diaz later wrote. Her attacker “then wrapped a cord around my neck in an attempt to kill me.”
The assailant was a superior, Sgt. Greville Clarke, who knocked on her door at the barracks before threatening her with a pistol and raping her during the attack. The Army knew two other women had been assaulted at the barracks in similar attacks; officials chose not to issue a public warning, citing concerns about compromising the investigation and causing potential panic.
The problems of homicide and suicide among women in the Army are inextricable from the prevalence of sexual assault. In some cases, like Diaz’s, a sexual attack involves an attempt on a woman’s life. Rape and sexual abuse are known to be detrimental to mental health, increasing the risk of suicide or self harm.
“There’s a huge correlation between sexual assault and suicide rates,” said Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for victims of military sexual trauma. “It’s unambiguous — sexual assault rates are higher than in the civilian world.”
The Intercept’s investigation found suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.
Male soldiers faced a smaller increase in suicide rates compared to civilian men than Army women did compared to civilian women, and men in the Army have a lower risk of dying by homicide than their non-military counterparts.
In fact, The Intercept’s investigation found, suicide is the leading cause of death of Army women.
Some cases have made national headlines, such as the March 2023 death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood, who took her own life at 20 years old after reporting sexual harassment.
For Ruiz’s family, the timing of her death raised troubling questions, echoing fellow Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillén’s infamous 2020 murder by an Army specialist. A subsequent Army inquiry into Ruiz’s case, reported by Telemundo, pointed to a “persistently toxic culture permissive of harassment.”
Years earlier, in the wake of Guillén’s death, an independent review revealed “a total disregard and disrespect for female soldiers.” Investigators issued 70 recommendations, including a sweeping overhaul of the military’s sexual harassment and assault prevention programs.
But the violence didn’t stop. Women at Fort Hood continued to experience a grim roll call of harm: Homicide. Sexual assault. Suicides.
Three deaths at Fort Hood were never reported publicly by the Army but appeared in the data obtained by The Intercept.
Counting Guillén and Ruiz, there were nine fatalities from homicide or suicide among women stationed at the base in five years. The Defense Department’s most recent suicide report does not provide data on how many suicide decedents experienced sexual trauma, although the Pentagon has provided this data in previous years.
From 2001 to 2023, nearly 1 in 4 women service members experienced sexual assault, according to the Brown University’s Costs of War project, much higher than the numbers annually reported by the Pentagon. Research identifies those experiences as a key driver of suicide risk. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among women veterans have risen faster than among men.
In Diaz’s view, institutional failures were a key factor in her assault.
“Because the Army took no action to address the string of female soldiers attacked in their barracks,” Diaz wrote in a federal tort claim, “Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”
Clarke assaulted five women before he was apprehended October 2022 and convicted in 2025 of charges including attempted premeditated murder. He died by suicide in custody.
Diaz was “in a U.S. Army base in a locked barracks, opening the door to someone in uniform. It was very reasonable for her to think that that was a safe thing to do,” Christine Dunn, an attorney representing Diaz, told The Intercept. “You don’t expect someone who’s in a uniform to be a serial predator.”
“Sergeant Clarke was empowered to continue preying on the female soldiers at Fort Hood, including me.”
Diaz wrote that leadership denied repeated requests to move her into family housing off-post, and only after she and her sexual assault representative made clear that remaining in the barracks was “an untenable environment” was she finally allowed to leave.
“I suffered from extreme paranoia, exacerbated by my attacker remaining at large,” Diaz wrote. “I abused alcohol in an attempt to forget what happened to me. … I began going to weekly therapy but have stopped going because I still find the attack very traumatizing to talk about.”
The Army did not provide comment on Diaz’s case or reports of Clarke’s predation specifically.
The anxiety, Diaz wrote, has never fully gone away.
“What happened to me was a result of the United States Department of the Army’s and the Department of Defense’s negligence,” her complaint stated. “It was entirely preventable.”
Last year, Pete Hegseth directed the Army to change its 15-6 regulation, which governs the process for investigating military-related misconduct like sexual harassment. Now the first step is verifying the “credibility of accusers with new disciplinary measures for soldiers who submit knowingly false or frivolous complaints.
Some fear the rule may discourage those experiencing sexual harassment from reporting incidents, perpetuating a “culture of victim blaming,” according to Protect Our Defenders’ Connolly.
While Hegseth rolls back protections, the issue of violence against women in the military appears to be getting worse. The Intercept’s analysis shows that from 2011 to 2020, the per capita rate of women dying by suicide or homicide in the Army was 15 per 100,000. From 2021 to 2024, following the Army’s attempted reforms in the wake of Vanessa Guillén’s killing, the rate increased over 35 percent, to 21 per 100,000.
And deaths continued their pace in 2025.
Siegal McIntyre, the UNC professor studying domestic abuse, pointed to cases like that of Sgt. Francine Martinez, who was just weeks away from her 25th birthday on a night out at Fort Hood in September 2021, when she ran into the father of her child. He was a fellow soldier with whom she had recently separated, and Martinez had filed for child support weeks earlier.
An argument broke out, and when Martinez got into a car to leave, he followed, and eventually shot her in the head. She was hospitalized for two weeks before dying from her injuries, leaving behind her 1-year-old.
Research and Pentagon data indicate that rates of domestic and intimate partner violence in the military, particularly in the Army, are higher than the civilian population. Most victims are women, who also make up most of the homicide cases tied to that violence.
Martinez’s death was one of three cases the Defense Department reported in 2021 in which service members killed someone in a domestic or interpersonal dispute.
But data compiled by The Intercept identified at least seven cases that year in which service members were suspected of killing a spouse or partner in acts of domestic or intimate partner violence — more than double the official count.
“When the situation involves a marriage or partnership between agents and service members, it only complicates reporting,” said Siegal McIntyre.
A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report from 2021 suggests the number could be higher still, identifying several additional domestic violence-related homicides. The Intercept’s investigation also found other years’ congressionally mandated reports also have data tracking problems.
A Project on Government Oversight investigation revealed thousands of abuse cases involving Army personnel were mishandled, many never entered into tracking systems. Investigators could only look at 10 out of more than 60 Army installations. A Government Accountability Office report found the Pentagon doesn’t reliably screen for sexual assault when service members seek care or leave service and lacks systems to prioritize treatment or ensure confidential, long-term support.
“I don’t think there’s a mechanism within the Army for holding itself accountable,” said Dunn, who is also representing some of the 80 victims suing Army gynecologist Maj. Blaine McGraw, who was assigned to Fort Hood in 2023; he has since been accused of recording and making harmful physical contact with women during gynecological exams. (The Army did not comment on McGraw’s case, which remains ongoing.)
Some women who came forward had gone to McGraw seeking rape kits for sexual assault and say his actions further traumatized and distressed them.
“When the institution is facilitating the assaults and allowing them to happen, the institution needs to be held accountable,” Dunn said. “Almost every client who comes to me wants to come forward so that this wouldn’t happen to other women.”
In response to questions from The Intercept, the Army acknowledged having recorded more homicides than were noted in the dataset provided based on The Intercept’s FOIA request.
Between 2021 and 2023, the Army recorded a total of 16 homicides among active-duty women, Hagan told The Intercept. The data provided to The Intercept for its FOIA request counts only nine.
Hagan did not respond to follow-up questions on the discrepancy, and the Army did not provide data outside the years 2021 to 2023.
But the additional homicides would make the disparities found by The Intercept’s investigation even wider. If the same pattern of undercounting extends across the full 14-year span of our data, the true toll could be substantially higher.
After the independent review of Fort Hood following Guillén’s killing, Hagan said, the Army “implemented a series of major reforms to strengthen prevention, reporting, and accountability for sexual harassment and assault.” It shifted its criminal investigations division to civilian leadership, requiring more independent investigations, establishing stricter missing-soldier response protocols, and expanding data-driven oversight of cases.
But the deaths have continued, including another homicide at Hood last year. To advocates, there are other solutions to address these failures.
“You have to call DoD into Congress and demand answers on why progress hasn’t been made,” said Connolly. “Congress could scrutinize the data on domestic violence and other issues. They can appropriate more resources to DV investigations and hold hearings.”
“The potential solution lies with how funding is or isn’t tied to oversight,” Siegal McIntyre said. “Without Congress doing its job, nothing can change.”
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a House Armed Services Committee member and Air Force veteran, said The Intercept’s findings reflect a broader failure of leadership and oversight.
“This report is staggering, and unfortunately, unsurprising,” she said. “Servicewomen consistently bear the brunt of harassment, assault, retaliation, and systemic failures within the ranks, and it is costing them their careers, their safety, and in far too many cases, their lives.”
In a 1995 Defense Department study on homicide victims by gender, female service members across active-duty branches were killed at higher rates than both their male counterparts and women nationally. A Marine Corps and Navy-specific study covering 1995 to 1999 found similarly elevated risks.
The Pentagon never did further analysis. Ana Roque believes that change would fundamentally start with how the military builds itself to protect women like her daughter.
“I understand that the country needs soldiers, but recruiters need to be more careful regarding where these individuals come from,” Roque said. She called for more police and camera surveillance on bases, arguing that if it had been present, “they could have seen him moving my daughter’s body in broad daylight.”
She wishes she could have her daughter back.
“She always had a smile, no matter how difficult her day was,” Roque said. “She made time to help colleagues with various issues and never said no. I have many stories written in my notebook from soldiers and civilians who knew her and told me, ‘She saved me,’ simply by taking a minute to listen to them. She loved her family; we would talk three times a day: at 7 a.m., during my lunch break, and at night, when she would always say ‘Good night, Mommy.’”
Reporters working for The Intercept submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the Pentagon seeking data on all U.S. Army active-duty noncombat deaths from 2011 through August 2025. In response, the Department of Defense provided a spreadsheet detailing 5,285 U.S. Army deaths over the 14-year period categorized by rank, gender, military occupation, and cause of death. The latter was classified as either illness, self-inflicted, accident, pending, or undetermined.
To calculate the per capita suicide and death rates for women in the U.S. Army in this time period, The Intercept pulled manpower data from the Defense Department for each year in our analysis to provide the total number of women in the Army. National and international data on homicide and suicide was pulled from the FBI Crime Data Report, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to compare suicide and homicide rates.
There is no publicly available equivalent data for Army veterans, nor has such an analysis been done for the Navy, Air Force, or Marines.
The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.
The post Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants appeared first on The Intercept.
Normally safe principality left reeling from apartment blast, which also injured Vadym Iermolaiev’s wife and child
Police in Monaco are searching for a suspected bomber after a Ukrainian-born business tycoon, his wife and their child were injured in an unprecedented attack that has shaken the normally ultra-safe principality.
The Monaco government said a suspect had left a parcel bomb in the lobby of a residential building that exploded shortly before 9pm on Monday, causing what officials described as a “powerful explosion”.
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Last year, when the Trump Justice Department dropped its oversight of troubled police departments in cities such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, it argued that the reform efforts were “factually unjustified.”
But according to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, officers in those places were continuing to engage in the very behaviors that attracted federal scrutiny in the first place, including using excessive — and dangerous — force against people experiencing mental health crises.
The ACLU reviewed hundreds of police use-of-force reports in four communities where, under the Biden administration, the DOJ had found evidence of unconstitutional policing. In their review, ACLU investigators found agencies continuing to misuse Tasers and failing to properly review their officers’ use of force.
In one case, Minneapolis police repeatedly shocked a man with a Taser after he complied with their orders. In another, a Louisville officer broke a man’s car window during a mental health call while a second officer pointed his gun, escalating the encounter, according to the report. That officer then pulled the man from the car, at which point the man brandished a knife. The officers hit him with a baton and shocked him seven times.
The records primarily span from late 2024, after President Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, to early 2025, as the new administration began to shift the Justice Department away from its traditional focus on civil rights enforcement.
The report also cites reporting by ProPublica, which has detailed police misconduct and reform efforts in Louisville and Memphis, Tennessee. In the fall of 2025, Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard troops, U.S. Marshals and immigration officials to Memphis because, he said, “of the crime that’s going on.” The operation, ProPublica found, ensnared innocent residents of the majority-Black city who said they were targeted and harassed because of their race. The U.S. Marshals Service, which led the effort, disputed the claims of racial profiling.
The aim of the ACLU effort, the authors said, was to hold local police accountable in the absence of federal oversight and to keep reforms moving in communities where investigators found or had concerns of excessive force and racial targeting. To do that, the nonprofit made public records requests for reports detailing officers’ use of force and other records from police or sheriff departments in Phoenix; Louisville; Worcester, Massachusetts; Minneapolis; Mount Vernon, New York; and Memphis.
“We did this project because we feared the Department of Justice was abandoning communities that needed help to ensure that reforms were made in their communities, and our analysis of the records unfortunately proves that to have happened,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director on policing for the ACLU.
The ACLU also sought records from Rankin County, Mississippi, where in 2023 members of the
Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, calling themselves the “Goon Squad,” beat and tortured two Black men. The officers were convicted and sentenced to decades in prison in 2024. Biden’s DOJ launched an investigation into the sheriff’s department, and reports indicate that the Trump administration is continuing the probe. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s department told Mississippi Today that the agency “will continue its cooperation with the investigation in order to show that all aspects of the department’s policing are within constitutional boundaries.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed the ACLU’s findings as “partisan talking points” from an organization that she said “suffers from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” She also defended the administration’s approach. “President Trump is a champion for our great law enforcement officers and has encouraged them to arrest criminals and enforce the law — unlike the Biden Administration,” Jackson said.
The ACLU report spotlights Louisville and Minneapolis in particular because they had signed reform agreements with the Biden Justice Department before the Trump administration dropped the underlying lawsuits and quashed the cases in 2025. The two cities were also more forthcoming than the others in response to the ACLU’s records requests.
According to the report, officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department used excessive force, including striking people in their face, head or body while they were handcuffed, and failed to adequately review incidents of force, mischaracterizing facts during those reviews to make force appear more reasonable. A spokesperson for the Louisville police department told ProPublica it “reviews use-of-force incidents through multiple layers of supervision, and when policy violations are identified, appropriate corrective action is taken.”
Police also escalated encounters with people experiencing mental health crises by pointing their guns at them, the ACLU found. The issue has been particularly pronounced this year.
In March, Louisville police officers fatally shot and killed a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall in her apartment while she was experiencing a mental health crisis. The incident is still under investigation, but police have said Hall posed a threat to officers because, they said, she was holding a piece of broken porcelain.
Two months later, a Louisville police officer shot and killed 27-year-old Martin Nitzken Jr., who was unarmed and naked in the street. A caller reported Nitzken was having a “mental break,” according to local reports. The officer who shot Nitzken was indicted on charges of manslaughter and reckless homicide. He has pleaded not guilty. The officer’s lawyer did not respond to a request to speak to his client.
The Minneapolis Police Department’s records showed evidence of excessive force, improper use of Tasers and poor reviews of use of force, the ACLU report says. The police department didn’t provide comment.
Both Louisville and Minneapolis have adopted local versions of the reform agreements they had inked with the Biden administration, and local leaders have pledged to institute changes, which are being overseen by independent monitors. A spokesperson for the city of Louisville noted that its leadership “voluntarily” took on the reform effort after the DOJ “abandoned” federal oversight.
But, as ProPublica has reported, progress has been slow in Louisville, and the results have been mixed there, particularly in the area of mental health.
“That the problems are still persisting in the same way is suggesting to me that the police departments are not doing enough to improve that conduct,” Borchetta said.
After the killings of Hall and Nitzken, Louisville’s mayor, Craig Greenberg, told local press the city was “moving as rapidly” as it can to change the way police respond to mental health calls by allowing behavioral health experts to help officers during such incidents.
The ACLU’s findings were “not all bad,” though, the authors wrote. The nonprofit credited Louisville for its transparency and for instances in which the review process worked “to identify, correct, and improve possible misuses of force.”
The organization had intended to produce a more expansive report but said that proved impossible due to the resistance and delays by the other local police departments it was scrutinizing. The Justice Department had investigated those cities and issued reports finding evidence their departments had engaged in unconstitutional policing. But the cases had not progressed beyond that when Trump was elected.
Memphis and Phoenix refused to turn over the use-of-force records, the ACLU said, so the organization turned to the courts. The nonprofit sued Memphis in February for the documents. “Only then did Memphis finally agree to respond. This production is continuing, as is the ACLU’s review,” the report states. A spokesperson for the Memphis Police Department blamed the delay on the ACLU’s initial request, which they said was “overly broad” and lacked specificity and was thus denied.
The nonprofit sued Phoenix earlier this month for its records. The litigation is ongoing. The police department there did not respond to a request for comment.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, where the DOJ had previously found officers engaging in sex acts during undercover investigations, the ACLU said officials initially withheld a substantial amount of records, citing a statute meant to protect the privacy of sexual abuse victims. Worcester eventually relented and provided more records, the ACLU said, but still withheld reports for more than a dozen incidents. “Reliance on the statute to exempt records of police activity from public scrutiny thus turns a protection for survivors into a sword against them,” the report states.
A spokesperson for the city of Worcester rejected the ACLU’s assertion that the reports were withheld to protect the police department. “To conclude that the reports were withheld to protect the WPD when the law allows no discretion in determining whether such reports are public or not is an egregious misrepresentation of the law and of the city of Worcester’s appropriate response in accordance with the law,” the spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement.
Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has criticized the use of federal reform agreements, known as consent decrees, saying they represent an expensive form of micromanagement and “divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs.”
Notably, in its report, the ACLU found that a number of the law enforcement agencies’ use-of-force records were not detailed and thorough, making it difficult for the public or the agencies themselves to identify problems or prevent excessive-force issues.
Borchetta said that the ACLU’s review is ongoing and the organization will take whatever action is needed to unlock more public information.
“You can make real change when people in the community want change and are pushing for it,” she said. “So we expect and hope that we can continue to work with communities and support them with this information, so that they can get the reform the DOJ tried to deny them.”
The post Trump’s DOJ Said Police Reform Was “Factually Unjustified.” A New Report Shows Otherwise. appeared first on ProPublica.
One of the men then smashed our photographer's camera while the other smashed the windshield of our news truck.
What does Algeria's election result mean for its people and its politics? 8 July 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Online
Experts unpack the results of the 2 July election, and what turnout says about the state of Algerian politics.
Experts unpack the results of the 2 July election, and what turnout says about the state of Algerian politics.Seven years after the pro-democracy Hirak protests, Algeria’s parliamentary elections come with limited expectations of structural change. Turnout is expected to be low, signalling a lack of public confidence in the political system. In this context, the results will reflect both the resilience of Algeria’s state and longer-term pressures on its legitimacy. This event will take place once the results are in, with analysis of the outcome by our panel of experts.
The Trump v Slaughter decision allows the president further influence over agencies Congress itself created
What is Congress for? According to the supreme court, not very much. On Monday, the supreme court overturned Humphrey’s Executor, a 91-year-old precedent, nullified the Federal Trade Commission Act, a 112-year-old law, and presumed to settle a 250-year-old debate on the scope of presidential authority when it reapportioned power away from the people’s representatives in the House and Senate and gave it instead to Donald Trump. In Trump v Slaughter, the court ruled that the heads of independent agencies that Congress created cannot be protected from arbitrary firings by laws that Congress passed. Instead, Donald Trump is now free to fire agency heads at will and to replace them with political loyalists, regardless of what Congress has said about it.
The ruling has one key exception: Donald Trump does not, according to the justices, have the ability to fire members of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve without cause and without proper procedure. A separate decision found for Lisa Cook, the Joe Biden appointee who was the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, and who was fired via social media post by Donald Trump last year. In addition to Cook’s job, the decision protects the independence of the Federal Reserve and the health of financial markets, to say nothing of the considerable personal wealth of the justices themselves.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Continue reading...Trump administration faces an escalating controversy over handling of ‘Jane Doe 4’ documents in Epstein files. White House has called her allegations ‘completely baseless’
A woman known as Jane Doe 4 in the Jeffrey Epstein files is “staying off the grid” and lives in fear of retaliation from the Trump administration amid an escalating controversy over its handling of her case, according to a family member.
“Trauma is brutal. Chronic trauma destroys,” said the relative, who described the woman’s life as layers of abuse dating back to early childhood. “She’s coping as best she can.”
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This spring, Father Dustin Feddon began waking up in the middle of the night. Heart racing, he would stand at the bathroom sink in the dark, splashing cold water on his face until the feeling passed.
For about a dozen years, Feddon had visited prisoners on Florida’s death row as their appeals wound their way through the courts. Some had waited for decades, but the priest learned, more or less, how to accompany people through years of confinement and isolation without losing himself in their desolation. Then in January 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at an accelerated rate. What followed was the busiest period of executions in more than eight decades in a state that has long been a stronghold of capital punishment.
In November, DeSantis set the execution date for Frank Walls, one of the men Feddon was counseling. Walls was moved from death row, at Union Correctional Institution, about an hour west of Jacksonville in the northeast part of the state, to nearby Florida State Prison. There he was placed in one of the three cells, known as death watch, that sit 30 feet from the execution chamber. And with that, Feddon was drawn into the strange, intimate work of accompanying a condemned person through the final weeks of his life.
Seven days before Christmas, he sat beside Walls in the execution chamber, his hand resting on the man’s leg. Walls, with whom he shared communion just hours before, lay strapped to the gurney, his head freshly shaved, intravenous lines running into his right arm. His chest began to heave as he gasped for air for several minutes. Feddon watched as the man’s eyes rolled back and his body went slack and then fell still.
He was the 19th man put to death that year, shattering the state’s annual record of 11, first set in 1936; the Sunshine State accounted for 40% of all executions in the United States in 2025.
Soon there were more prisoners who sought out the priest. One received an execution date in February, another in May. With each new death warrant, Feddon felt the panic rising in his chest. The pace of executions had upended the nature of his work; no longer was he ministering to men living under sentences of death; he was preparing them to die.
Feddon spent years getting ready for this role without quite knowing it. He entered the seminary in his 30s after temporarily taking a break from a doctoral program in religion, and during a year of hands-on ministry before his ordination, he began visiting prisoners. He went on to found Joseph House, a reentry home in Tallahassee, where he lives alongside men newly released from prison and often scarred by years in solitary confinement. There, he helps residents rebuild their lives — driving them to jobs, doctor appointments and therapy sessions; helping them obtain ID cards and open bank accounts; refereeing the inevitable dramas of communal living. There were no off days. He spent one Christmas waiting with a resident in an emergency room.
By the spring, he was ministering to the two men on death watch. As often as allowed, he came to see them, spending four hours on the road, round trip, to talk and pray with the men as they awaited execution. Some mornings he drove to Florida State Prison after only a few hours of sleep; and some days he returned to Joseph House so drained that the demands and small crises awaiting him there seemed strangely distant. At a spiritual retreat one afternoon, he suddenly became preoccupied with the idea that the priest who stood before him speaking was on the verge of collapse. Searching for an explanation, he told me he had become “hypervigilant of mortality — of other people dying, not me dying, but other people dying right in front of me.”
Florida has executed nine men this year, more than all other states combined. The pace has transformed death watch, which had typically been empty or held one man at a time. Now all three cells are often occupied, with the next man scheduled to die housed closest to the chamber. After each execution, the prisoners advance one cell closer; then another condemned man receives an execution date and is moved into the vacant cell. Death watch, once a lonely way station, has begun to resemble an assembly line.
Florida’s renewed embrace of the death penalty has unfolded against the backdrop of a decades-long national retreat from capital punishment. Thirty-three states have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in at least a decade. New death sentences have dropped even more precipitously, with prosecutors in capital cases seeking them less often and jurors more likely to choose life in prison. Just 23 people were sentenced to death in the United States last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, compared with 307 in 1995.
Support for capital punishment has been worn away by an accumulation of forces. The mounting number of death row exonerations — more than 200 since the early 1970s — has made the risk of executing an innocent person impossible to ignore. The steep cost of capital prosecutions has forced many prosecutors to think twice before seeking death; the years of litigation required to obtain and defend a death sentence can add millions of dollars to a case. Decades of declining violent crime have further blunted the public appetite for executions. Support for the death penalty now stands at its lowest since 1972; a Gallup poll last year found that a majority of Americans under 55 opposed it.
This July marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty, making it a defining feature of the American criminal justice system. But capital punishment has since lost its hold on the political imagination, with executions persisting in only a small number of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Missouri.
That retreat from capital punishment is apparent in governors’ offices across the country. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a Republican, declared a moratorium on executions, after the exoneration of 13 men who had been on death row; before leaving office, he commuted nearly all death sentences in the state to life in prison. More recently, Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania imposed or maintained moratoriums. In June, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican and a former prosecutor who helped write his state’s death penalty statute, called for abolishing capital punishment there, concluding that it did not deter murder and abandoning his belief that it was morally justified.
President Donald Trump, by contrast, has long been one of the death penalty’s most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone of his law-and-order agenda. He resumed federal executions in 2020, ending a 17-year hiatus and reviving a punishment that had become an increasingly rare exercise of federal power. Before Trump took office, the federal government had executed just three people since 1963; in the final six months of his first term, it executed 13. He returned to the issue repeatedly on the 2024 campaign trail, calling for broadening the categories of crimes eligible for execution by proposing death sentences for drug dealers, human traffickers and migrants who kill American citizens.
Hours after taking office in January 2025, he signed a sweeping executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety” — signaling that the White House intended to put the full weight of the federal government behind the revival of capital punishment. He instructed the attorney general to pursue death sentences more aggressively, called on the Justice Department to challenge Supreme Court decisions limiting the death penalty, directed federal officials to help states obtain the increasingly scarce lethal injection drugs needed to carry out executions and encouraged state prosecutors to seek capital punishment more often.
Nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida, thanks to an unusual concentration of power in the governor’s office. In most states that still carry out executions, the process follows a familiar legal path: Once a condemned prisoner has exhausted their appeals, courts — not governors — set execution dates. In Florida, however, the decision rests entirely with the governor, who decides whether — and when — to sign a death warrant for one of the state’s eligible prisoners.
DeSantis, like his predecessors, makes execution decisions behind closed doors; the state’s Supreme Court has long held that setting execution dates is an exercise of the governor’s executive authority, putting it beyond the reach of the state’s otherwise expansive open-government laws. As a result, there is no way to know what criteria DeSantis uses when he chooses who will be put to death, a Tampa-based attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, Maria DeLiberato, told me. “He could be deciding who is next to die by throwing darts at a list of names,” she said, “or spinning a roulette wheel.”
The secrecy surrounding those decisions has left victims’ families, prisoners and their lawyers searching for clues about what principles, if any, guide DeSantis’ selection process. How long a prisoner has spent on death row does not appear to be a deciding factor; DeSantis has bypassed prisoners who committed their crimes as far back as the 1970s, scheduling the executions of men convicted of murders committed decades later. With no obvious overarching logic governing who is chosen next, the process has become a contest to attract — or avoid — his attention. Hoping to prompt him to issue a death warrant for Ronald Heath, convicted of the 1989 robbery and murder of a traveling salesman, the victim’s family sent DeSantis custom blue Sharpies — his pen of choice for signing both legislation and death warrants. DeSantis subsequently did so, and Heath was executed on Feb. 10.
In March, after the execution of a man named Billy Kearse by lethal injection took roughly twice as long as usual, lawyers for another man on death row, Chadwick Willacy, filed a public records request seeking information about the state’s execution protocol. A week later, DeSantis signed Willacy’s death warrant. That timing introduced more fear and uncertainty into an already opaque process. Lawyers representing condemned prisoners were left to wonder whether every legal challenge they raised risked drawing the governor’s scrutiny — and whether vigorous advocacy, intended to save a client’s life, could instead move them closer to death.
DeSantis has offered little public explanation for the record number of executions carried out since 2025 on his watch. The acceleration is particularly striking because it came after years of relative inactivity. In 2019, the first year of DeSantis’ governorship, Florida carried out two executions, and then three years passed without another. Though six men were executed in 2023, just one was put to death the following year before the pace abruptly ramped up in 2025. At a news conference in Jacksonville last November, a reporter asked him to explain the sudden increase.
DeSantis blamed the disruptions of the pandemic as well as bureaucratic challenges for the slow pace at the start of his governorship. Meeting with victims’ families, he said, had reinforced his determination to see old death sentences carried out. “There’s a saying: Justice delayed is justice denied,” DeSantis said. “We’re doing it to be able to bring justice to the victims’ families.” When I asked his office for comment, the head of communications, Alex Lanfranconi, sent a short response: “My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people.”
Some observers see a different calculus. DeSantis is term-limited and will leave office in January, but his political future remains an open question. Since ending his campaign for the White House in 2024, he has worked to repair his relationship with Trump; in April, Axios reported that he was lobbying for a position in the administration, with an eye toward attorney general. Few who follow Florida politics believe he has abandoned his presidential ambitions. The sheer number of death warrants, wrote the editorial boards of the Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun Sentinel last summer, “gives rise to wonder: Why the sudden rush? Is it another sign that he’s planning another run for president in 2028? Would he campaign as the governor who tried to empty his state’s death row?”
When DeSantis signs a death warrant, no one on death row knows who among them has been selected until prison officials arrive at the condemned man’s cell. Of the 242 prisoners on death row, roughly half have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for a warrant. The routine is always the same: A cluster of officials in dress uniforms suddenly appears, the arrival announced by the heavy cadence of boots on concrete and the metallic jangle of handcuffs and restraints. “The warden is first, followed by the colonel and the major and the captain and about four of the biggest guards you’ve ever seen in your life,” a former death row inmate, John Buzia, who was resentenced to life in 2017, told me from prison. “They come walking down the wing and it’s dead silent, because they’ve got their game faces on.”
The men listen as the footsteps pass one cell, then another. From inside their cells, they can see little beyond their immediate neighbors, unless they slip a mirror between the bars in violation of prison rules. Somewhere along the way, the footsteps stop. The warden informs the man whose name appears on the piece of paper he carries that the governor has signed his death warrant. The prisoner is placed in restraints and led back down the wing before being transported to Florida State Prison and placed on death watch.
Even before the ramp-up of executions in 2025, waiting for this moment was an exercise in near constant close listening. “You become very ear-sensitive, sound-sensitive,” Buzia said. Years spent in near total isolation and the same monotonous routine sharpen the senses, lending the smallest break from the ordinary an outsize and terrifying significance: the unmistakable sound of several officers approaching, a certain rattle of keys, the wing suddenly falling silent.
Feddon saw the effects of this last July, when he went to visit Walls, who had been sentenced to death for killing an Air Force airman and his girlfriend during a 1987 robbery. Ten death warrants had been served in the previous seven months, and Walls was visibly on edge, telling the priest that he was barely sleeping because he was sure that his death warrant was going to come down at any moment. “They kind of know there’s this mysterious list,” Feddon said, “and they know they’re on it.” Walls, usually animated as he talked about whichever saint or prayer had most recently captured his imagination, struggled to collect his thoughts, and they sat in silence while he tried to focus. Feddon watched as exhaustion eventually overtook Walls and he nodded off.
The lawyers who represent condemned prisoners, most of whom work for Florida’s Capital Collateral Regional Counsel — a state-funded agency responsible for representing death row inmates in their final rounds of appeals — live with the same uncertainty, never knowing which client will suddenly be scheduled to die, or when. Until a warrant is handed down, they can only guess which of the many cases they juggle will become their most urgent.
Texas, which has historically had the most active death chamber, requires at least 90 days to pass between the setting of an execution date and the execution itself. But in Florida, the period between the signing of a death warrant and an execution is roughly one month, on average. When a warrant arrives, it can set off an all-consuming race against the clock to determine whether there is any legal or factual reason the execution should not go forward: Were there witnesses who were overlooked? Or leads that earlier attorneys failed to recognize or fully investigate? Newer, more sensitive forms of forensic testing — which may have been unavailable, or less reliable, just a few years earlier — can shed light on old evidence. Advances in science and research can alter how courts view a prisoner’s long-standing claims of mental illness or intellectual disability. The imminence of an execution can prompt witnesses who have remained silent for years to speak.
This spring, a prisoner named James Duckett, convicted of the 1987 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, received an execution date. Five days before Duckett was to be put to death, the Florida Supreme Court stayed his execution while last-minute DNA testing and analysis in the case were completed.
Cases like Duckett’s illustrate why the period between a death warrant and an execution is so important, serving as a final safeguard against an irreversible punishment. Florida’s own history of wrongful convictions in capital cases underscores what is at stake. No state has exonerated more death row prisoners, 30 men in all.
Now, with the added strain of one death warrant following another in rapid succession, the burden on the lawyers who are responsible for these cases has grown even heavier. “You have an execution, and then within a week or two, you’re working on a warrant again,” says Linda McDermott, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Office of the Federal Defender in Tallahassee, which represents Florida death row prisoners in federal court. Last year, eight prisoners represented by her office were executed.
The state’s accelerated pace leaves little room for error, or for the demands of life beyond the courtroom. When DeSantis signed a death warrant for Kearse on Jan. 29, Kearse’s lead attorney of more than 20 years, Paul Kalil, was grappling with a family crisis: His father, who had been hospitalized for several months, would enter hospice care less than a week later. As Kalil worked to prepare the final challenges to Kearse’s death sentence, his colleagues sought additional time, explaining in one court filing that “due to his ethical obligations to Mr. Kearse,” Kalil had not been able to spend sufficient time with his father in the final days of his life. The courts granted only 48 additional hours.
Kalil’s father died on Feb. 8. Afterward, Kalil’s colleagues again asked for more time, explaining that the lawyer with the deepest knowledge of the case was now grieving his father’s death and making funeral arrangements. The Florida Supreme Court denied the request, and three weeks later, Kearse was executed.
On April 21, the day Florida was set to execute Willacy, I made my way to the vigil that would be taking place outside Florida State Prison, near the small town of Starke. Across the two-lane highway that leads to the prison, a few dozen people were unfolding camping chairs on a sunbaked field, carrying signs with messages like “Execute justice not people” and “Thou shalt not kill.” A single, broad-canopied oak tree provided the only shade. There were no satellite trucks or television crews, no signs that something momentous was about to take place, other than a single counterprotester: a death penalty proponent who held up a sign listing the names of every man executed since early 2025, each name crossed out with a red X. Every so often, a lone car or pickup would come barreling down the highway, hurtle past the protesters and vanish.
The relative invisibility of executions — the sense that they take place with little public awareness — was what prompted Melanie Verdecia, a Jacksonville attorney, to start writing a newsletter on Substack, “Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty,” that chronicles everything from new capital prosecutions to last-minute death warrant litigation, in real time. Years ago, Verdecia told me, she was driving to the Florida Supreme Court, where she was clerking, on the day of a scheduled execution, having spent weeks immersed in the legal battle over whether it would proceed. As she sat in traffic looking at the commuters around her, she realized none of them had any idea that a man was slated to die that day.
Verdecia is one of a small number of Floridians who meticulously track the state’s use of the death penalty, trying to make sure executions — and more recently, the ramp-up in death warrants — do not pass completely unnoticed. On the afternoon of the Willacy execution, Grace Hanna was sitting in a doughnut shop in Starke, keeping a different kind of record. Hanna, the 29-year-old executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, sat at her laptop as she communicated with a network of people who were affected, in one way or another, by Florida’s death penalty, including capital defenders whose clients were under active death warrants and the state’s many death row exonerees, to family members of condemned prisoners who were preparing for final visits or grieving in the wake of an execution. Hanna told me that one of the most haunting parts of her job is when she is needed to collect the ashes of a condemned man and deliver them to his family.
When Hanna was 8 years old and growing up in Tallahassee, a cousin who worked the overnight shift at a convenience store in North Carolina was beaten to death during a robbery. The crime spurred long-running conversations in her home about crime, punishment and how society should respond after someone commits an act of violence. Her parents, Baptist deacons who ultimately left the church over its refusal to ordain women, raised their children to wrestle with such questions. “Clearly, something stuck,” Hanna told me. She went on to become a social worker, her brother a public defender. The man who killed her cousin received a sentence of life without parole, a punishment that spared her family from the many years or even decades of appeals that often accompany a death sentence. Justice, she said, had not demanded putting another person to death.
That day, Hanna was drafting a news release, as her team did every execution day, to be sent out after Willacy was put to death. It began by acknowledging the victim at the center of the case, Marlys Sather, who was 56 when she returned to her home in Palm Bay during her lunch break one day in 1990, interrupting a burglary. Court records show that Willacy beat her, bound her and set her on fire before fleeing.
These news releases try to hold two realities at once: the suffering caused by the crime and the complicated path that led there. Drawing on court filings, prison records and years of discussions with the lawyers and family members who know these men best, Hanna writes about forces that shaped their lives before prison: mental illness, intellectual disabilities, addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and childhoods marked by neglect. She also looks at the decades of incarceration that follow their convictions, during which sometimes profound transformations take place. “This is often the only obituary these men will get,” she said.
Yet that was not the central focus of the Willacy release she was writing. Hanna devoted much of it to his unsuccessful effort to force the state to disclose records about its lethal-injection protocol. “Every Floridian,” she typed, “should be asking themselves tonight: What is the State of Florida hiding in those records?”
The execution went forward that evening. Shortly after 6 o’clock, around the time the lethal-injection drugs began to flow, the protesters gathered around a large metal bell. One by one, they stepped forward. “Not in my name,” each said before striking it. The sound was low and resonant, reverberating after each blow. The counterprotester, meanwhile, a lean retiree named Bill Campbell, tried to drown out the sound with a boom box blasting “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Above them, the sky stretched to the horizon, luminous in the early evening light. “Whenever we’re here for an execution, something wild happens in the sky, like a torrential downpour or the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen,” Hanna told me. She often takes a photograph of the sky and sends it to the prisoner’s family if they cannot bear to be there.
Soon a convoy of white vans emerged from the prison gates carrying witnesses, two members of the media and prison officials. The Florida Department of Corrections announced Willacy’s time of death as 6:15 p.m.
The protesters folded their chairs and gathered their belongings. A half-hour later, the vigil site had emptied out. Across the road, there was no visible sign that a man was put to death there that evening.
Another execution was already scheduled for nine days later. James Hitchcock, one of the longest-serving prisoners on Florida’s death row, was set to die on April 30. As Hanna headed to her car, she called out to another woman: “See you next week.”
Last December, with Florida on the verge of carrying out its 19th execution of the year, a retired warden named Ron McAndrew sat down to write an opinion piece for the Tampa Bay Times. A two-time DeSantis voter and self-described “law-and-order guy,” McAndrew was troubled by the rapid increase in executions. “That pace matters,” he wrote, “because executions depend on human beings performing complex, high-risk tasks under extreme pressure.” He warned of the potential for a serious error and the toll on those responsible for carrying out death sentences. “When something goes wrong in an execution chamber, it is not elected officials who absorb the consequences,” he wrote. It is prison staff members “who carry the memories long after the chamber is cleaned and the state moves on.”
McAndrew served as warden of Florida State Prison in the mid-’90s, when Florida still used the electric chair. He walked three men to the execution chamber and gave the signal that sent electricity coursing through their bodies. The last execution he oversaw, on March 25, 1997, would help hasten the end of Florida’s reliance on the electric chair. Moments after that prisoner, Pedro Medina, received the first jolt of electricity, his head caught fire and flames leaped into the air. Smoke filled the chamber. Medina’s chest heaved until he was pronounced dead.
McAndrew threw out the uniform he wore that day, which smelled of burning flesh. Afterward, Gov. Lawton Chiles sent him to Texas to study lethal injection, the primary method Florida uses today. The cumulative weight of the executions followed him. He drank heavily, sometimes downing a bottle of Johnnie Walker in a single day. At night, he often awoke to find the men whose executions he had overseen sitting on the edge of his bed. “They’re haunting me,” he told his wife.
Thirteen years of therapy allowed him to regain his footing. Now retired, he lives in the small town of Dunnellon, roughly 70 miles southwest of Florida State Prison, where he had hoped for a quiet life, puttering along the Withlacoochee River on his pontoon boat. But as executions accelerated last year, he found himself worrying about the people inside Florida State Prison who were being asked to shoulder the burden he once carried, and of the effect on them of so much killing. He knew what it was like to stand inside the execution chamber, and what it was like for the other prison officials and staff members who were required to see the process through to the end. “It was damaging, and I mean very damaging, to the people in that room.”
I thought of the emotion with which McAndrew said “damaging” — as if he were describing an injury that never fully healed — when I spoke to Feddon on June 3, the day after a prisoner named Andrew Lukehart was executed.
Feddon had accompanied Lukehart, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 killing of his girlfriend’s 5-month-old daughter, through the final month of his life. The crime, the remorse he carried and the abuse that had marked his childhood were not the subjects to which Lukehart most often returned. Again and again, he spoke of the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that winds across northern Spain, imagining that one day he might somehow walk its dusty roads. He and Feddon recited prayers, which the priest had found for him, that pilgrims have spoken for generations along the Camino.
Late in the afternoon on June 2, Feddon had been brought into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison, where he took a seat beside Lukehart, who was strapped to the gurney, and rested his hand on the man’s leg. Lukehart’s execution was the third that the priest would witness at Florida State Prison, and his voice was heavy as he spoke to me the following morning. “To begin the sacrament of last rites for an otherwise utterly healthy man …” he said, trailing off.
He told me he had been flooded with images of the execution since waking before dawn. The scenes returned one after another: Lukehart’s face, flushed with pooled blood, as if he had been doing a headstand; a doctor leaning over the gurney, raising Lukehart’s eyelids to verify that he was dead; the prayer rope Feddon laid across the man’s still chest. Before Mass that morning, the images looped in his mind. “I just was seeing it, and seeing it, and seeing it.”
The priest was struggling to reconcile what he believed he was called to do with what that calling now required of him, and how to move forward as death warrants continued to be signed at a relentless pace. How could he keep doing this work? And yet, how could he abandon the men who had asked him to walk beside them? Inside the death chamber with Lukehart, Feddon told me, he felt a tension between the privilege of being with the condemned, he said, “to speak words of healing, of love, of God’s mercy” at their hour of greatest need, contrasted with the taking of a life. “Everything makes you want to cry out to the people around you, ‘Why are you making me do this?’” he said.
Lukehart was gone, but another prisoner he was counseling, Duckett, whose execution had been put on hold for DNA testing, remained. The testing yielded no clear answers, and prosecutors were now asking the Florida Supreme Court to lift its stay so that the execution could proceed. The machinery of death had paused for him, but only briefly. Feddon would return to Florida State Prison to see him in just a few days.
The post Florida Is Executing Prisoners at a Record Pace, Even as Most of the U.S. Abandons the Death Penalty appeared first on ProPublica.
American workers' share of the nation's income is at its lowest point in almost 80 years, as more of the economy's gains flow to corporations and investors.
Use either of Samsung or Apple thin flagships and you'll wonder how you ever tolerated a thick phone. Here's how these two compare.
Rep. Diana DeGette has had a tough few weeks.
The Colorado Democrat is facing her first competitive primary in her 30-year House career on Tuesday. After a series of confrontations with voters — including a public meltdown in a coffee shop — an unfavorable poll kept out of public view, and speculation that she called on powerful allies to pressure venues to cancel planned participation in a rally for her opponent, a slew of new super PACs swooped in to keep DeGette’s campaign afloat in the final weeks of the race — including one funded by the pro-Israel lobby.
While DeGette has spent the campaign’s home stretch defending her record as a progressive, her leading opponent, democratic socialist Melat Kiros, has never been more optimistic.
After leftist candidates rode to victory in New York last week on a growing wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, Kiros said her campaign saw a major uptick in donors and volunteers. A coalition of leftist organizations backing her has run an aggressive field campaign and say they’ve out-organized DeGette, who didn’t take the challenge seriously at first and was almost kicked off the ballot in March. In a district full of the kinds of young voters who helped socialists win last week in New York, Kiros’s backers say a similar coalition could power another socialist challenger to topple the Colorado incumbent on Tuesday.
“While the Democratic establishment reveals its contempt for its own voters by lashing out against the candidates their base elected, our candidates keep winning by taking on the corporate interests raising our prices to deliver a positive vision to make life more affordable for working class voters — from Medicare for All to ending taxpayer-funded genocide,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros.
DeGette’s challenge is emblematic of a wake-up call for many Democratic incumbents this midterms cycle, Andrabi said: Even being relatively “progressive” is no longer enough to fend off a challenger from the left, let alone to keep your seat.
“Voters are done watching Democrats take corporate PAC money and then wonder why nobody trusts them to fight,” Kiros said in a statement to The Intercept. “They are done with representatives who show up six weeks before a primary because a challenger finally scared them into it. The energy that showed up in New York is the same energy that’s showing up in Denver and we are ready for Tuesday night.”
Another progressive strategist who works with congressmembers and candidates and requested anonymity in order to speak freely said DeGette’s backers were worried. “Across multiple districts we’re seeing Dem primary voters unwilling to accept the usual platitudes from incumbents about their work ‘standing up to Trump’ as sufficient to earn their support,” they said.
“Voters across the spectrum are deeply frustrated with the Democratic Party’s ineffectiveness, and feel like many of these incumbents have been all talk and no action in this term,” they said. “There is broad anti-establishment sentiment that creates real opportunity for a next-generation challenger like in CO-01.”
The influx of super PAC spending for DeGette in the final days of the race came even as she had painted herself as further to the left. The incumbent has name-dropped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for example, in campaign ads, a candidate forum, and an interview.
And while DeGette has said repeatedly she isn’t backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, pro-DeGette super PAC money came from one of several groups used this cycle by United Democracy Project, the super PAC for AIPAC, to back its preferred candidates without publicly getting involved in races. United Democracy Project provided more than a third of the money raised this year by the group behind the ads.
“AIPAC’s desperation to stop the pro-Palestinian movement’s momentum and our candidates bringing this fight forward proves just how much they are losing the Democratic Party,” Andrabi said.
DeGette has banked her reelection on reminding voters that she’s a progressive. Pointing to her three decades in Congress and a late endorsement from her Congressional Progressive Caucus colleague, former chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., DeGette has warned that electing Kiros — who was born the year after DeGette was first elected and who the incumbent says has no political experience or capital — comes with risks.
Kiros’s backers are using DeGette’s long record against her. They argue she has little to show for her 15 terms in Congress and say the wave of young voters turning out to oust incumbents and back leftist candidates across the country will work against her.
Throughout her time in Congress, DeGette has expressed her support for all the right marquee progressive priorities. She’s reminded voters that she helped write the Medicare for All bill and is the top Democrat on the committee that could make it a reality, and led fights to protect healthcare, the right to abortion, and the environment.
But her critics, including Kiros, say she’s rested on those laurels and done little to leverage her seniority in the Democratic caucus to pass meaningful legislation on those issues — and that part of her inaction is tied to her donors.
“The DeGette team clearly was not in the community talking to voters, because that is the only way they could have missed the energy behind our campaign and the hunger for leadership that is unbought and unafraid,” Kiros said.
Kiros and others have pointed to DeGette’s longtime support from the pharmaceutical industry, one of Medicare for All’s greatest foes, as a major reason she’s allowed the legislation to languish. DeGette has promised voters that if they reelect her and Democrats win the House this year, she’ll finally take over the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, where she has served as ranking member since January 2025 and been a member since 2017, and bring the bill up for a vote.
There’s also the issue of Israel and Palestine. Despite naming her progressive bonafides, DeGette has described herself as pro-Israel and has a mixed record on related legislation. She’s not endorsed by AIPAC, but its super PAC is funding one of the groups spending against Kiros, an outspoken critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza who was fired for writing a post criticizing big law firms, including her employer, for blacklisting pro-Palestine protesters.
The group running the ads, Pro-Choice Majority Action, formed in May as an affiliate of EDW Action, which received $1 million from United Democracy Project between April and May. That’s about a third of the $2.7 million EDW Action reported since January. Another pro-Israel group, DMFI PAC, gave EDW Action $37,750 in April.
A spokesperson for the groups has said their support is not tied to a candidate’s position on Israel. United Democracy Project and DMFI PAC did not respond to requests for comment.
“Their support for a 30-year congresswoman who they don’t even publicly endorse is far less about Diana DeGette and far more about the extremes they have to go to blunt the momentum of first-time candidates like Melat who represent the will of the Democratic majority,” Andrabi said.
“We are seeing a new generation of leaders elected by a new generation of young people who are approaching politics with moral clarity,” said Denae Ávila-Dickson, a spokesperson for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which is backing Kiros. “These elections make one thing clear: Candidates who are unapologetic about opposing the genocide in Gaza, willing to take on billionaires and corporate power, and committed to fighting for working people are the ones inspiring young voters.”
The winner of the Democratic primary in heavily blue Denver is almost certain to be elected in November. And if Democrats win the House — the party in power tends to lose midterm seats, but Republicans are pushing forward aggressive plans to gerrymander and pass new voting restrictions — DeGette says Democrats will finally have the leverage they need to really stand up to President Donald Trump.
The DeGette campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
DeGette’s detractors say a lack of urgency beyond just Medicare for All characterizes her record — and that she’s only been beating the M4A drum because she’s facing a credible challenger. Only seven bills she’s sponsored over her 29 years in Congress have become law or been enacted through other bigger bills, according to GovTrack. Most representatives pass zero or one bill each term, and Congress is in an era where historic levels of partisan gridlock mean it’s passing fewer bills than it ever has.
While legislation passed is only one of several measures of a member’s activity in Congress, DeGette’s Colorado colleague, Rep. Joe Neguse, a member of House Democratic leadership first elected in 2018, had 22 bills enacted in his first two terms — the most of any member last session. In 2024, the four Republican representatives with more than 10 years in office who had the most legislation enacted into law passed six bills each.
“No seat is safe when an establishment Democrat is taking millions from corporate PACs and calling it representation,” Kiros said. “The voters are ahead of the party establishment, and they have been for a while. The question is whether the party is finally ready to listen or whether they’re going to keep learning this lesson the hard way.”
The post Socialists Are Surging. In Colorado, a 29-Year Incumbent Is Sweating. appeared first on The Intercept.
French and Ukrainian media say an explosive device left in a Monaco apartment building seriously wounded construction magnate Vadym Iermolaiev and his wife.
After suffering the schadenfreude of gamers online, the Tony-winning Broadway musical offered redemption to Cliff Bleszinski
‘It was utterly heartbreaking, to be honest, and it certainly didn’t help with my drinking. I’ll leave it at that.” Cliff Bleszinski is recalling the launch of LawBreakers, the arena first-person shooter he put out in 2017. It had been his first project as the CEO of his own studio, Boss Key Productions. Before that, he was the creative figurehead behind hugely successful sci-fi shooter series, Gears of War, when he was known to millions of gamers as CliffyB.
“I retired from Epic and all of it, and I missed making neat stuff,” he says. “And my agent at the time was needling me: ‘Come on, you want to get back in, have your own studio? Look at what [Hideo] Kojima’s doing.’ And I was like: ‘OK, if Kojima can do it, so can I.’ Such hubris, right?”
Continue reading...The last thoroughbred racetrack in New York City went dark after its final races on Sunday, closing the book on 132 years of history and one of the city’s last great communal spaces
For the better part of a century, the subway ride to Aqueduct Racetrack followed a familiar rhythm. The closer the train drew to Ozone Park, the more animated the conversations became. Men with folded racing forms debated trip notes, overlays and bombs. Regulars swapped tips while newcomers eavesdropped, hoping to catch a profitable whisper. By the time the doors opened at the Aqueduct-North Conduit Avenue stop, thousands of New Yorkers had arrived at what many considered the city’s most democratic sporting venue.
That ritual took place for the last time on Sunday. After 132 years, Aqueduct hosted its final day of thoroughbred racing before closing for good, marking the end of the last racetrack within New York City limits and a fixture of city life that had endured since the Gilded Age.
Pictured above: A towering 60ft-by-80ft mural depicting Secretariat, painted by renowned Los Angeles street artist David Flores, has welcomed visitors to Aqueduct for years. Pictured below: Scenes from around Aqueduct on Sunday’s closing day. All photographs by Lauren Caulk.
Continue reading...Diplomats from around world meet in Sarajevo in second attempt to agree on top envoy, as US pushes for its choice
Diplomats from around the world are due to meet in Sarajevo on Tuesday in an attempt to resolve a deep rift between the US and Europe over a top envoy appointment that could have a powerful influence on the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Disagreement has erupted over who should become the next high representative for the international community, a post with significant powers, in an overt test of political wills. The Trump administration is assertively pushing a business-driven agenda, potentially at the expense of Bosnia’s delicate postwar political balance.
Continue reading...Europe has the oldest population of any continent while also warming the fastest, leading to a dangerous and deadly situation.
Slimmer, longer lasting and much easier to live with, new Oura sets a very high new bar for health-tracking wearables
Oura’s new Ring 5 is a massive upgrade for smart rings, dramatically shrinking in size and weight to bring them right into line with standard wedding bands and other jewellery. It is finally a smart ring you can genuinely forget you’re wearing.
The Ring 5 is a straight replacement for the popular Ring 4 and costs from £399 (€399/$399/$A649), though it requires a £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/A$9.99) a month subscription to access anything but basic daily metrics. An Oura is not a cheap proposition.
Continue reading...The Alaska Supreme Court ruled Monday that a man with the same name and party as Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan can challenge the sitting lawmaker in the state's Senate primary in August.
Ford executives said they've hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them former employees — after AI and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality, reports TechCrunch: Bloomberg reports the company's chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems" with disappointing results. So the company "brought back technical specialists," and those specialists "hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor." Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product." The article points out that Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to train younger staff — and, to reprogram its AI tools.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ukraine has intensified strikes on Russia recently, targeting energy and logistics infrastructure.
After two devastating quakes, first responders were fishermen, doctors, and emigres returning from abroad — a grassroots campaign filling a government void.
Guo Wengui, who gained fans for criticising China’s Communist party, was found guilty in 2024 on nine charges including money laundering
A US federal court has sentenced exiled Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui to 30 years in prison, after he was convicted of defrauding thousands of people out of more than $1bn.
In July 2024, a jury unanimously found Guo, also known as Ho Wan Kwok and Miles Guo, guilty on nine of 12 charges, including securities offences, wire fraud and money laundering. The FBI arrested Guo, who is in his fifties, in March 2023 at his luxury Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park.
Continue reading...Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?
In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one.
Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls “enthusiastic” rock climbing. The eldest son of a Greek management professor and a British documentary maker, Gabriel split his time between teaching and international development work. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John’s College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of “yuppie ethics” and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn’t there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon.
Continue reading...The cost of falling behind on climate adaptation.
The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday delivered a death blow to ballot measures aimed at handing Democrats seven of Colorado's eight Congressional seats.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 30.
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Key cases today: Trump can fire federal regulators; Lisa Cook firing unconstitutional; bid to appeal $5m E Jean Carroll verdict; mail-in ballots arriving after election day
The supreme court is due to release some of its final opinions at 10am ET, with major decisions including on Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship and to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook still to come.
Last week the court handed the Trump administration huge wins in major rulings on immigration. It gave the administration a green light to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system. And it also ruled in favor of the administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, who were legally in the US and protected from deportation. The decisions, powered by court’s conservative justices, saw the supreme court accused of advancing a white supremacist agenda.
Continue reading...Carl Rinsch requested $11m for never-finished sci-fi series but diverted money to personal account, prosecutors said
Hollywood writer-director Carl Rinsch was sentenced on Monday to two and a half years in prison after being convicted of defrauding Netflix out of $11m for a never-finished sci-fi series. Supporters including Keanu Reeves had asked the court to show him leniency.
Rinsch, best known for the 2013 samurai fantasy film 47 Ronin, was convicted in December of federal wire fraud and other charges. According to prosecutors and trial testimony, he told Netflix he needed $11m to finish a show called White Horse but diverted the money into a personal account and ultimately spent whopping sums on luxury cars, watches, clothes and household goods, including $638,000 on two mattresses.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 30, No. 645.
The 2023 verdict found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer and then defaming her – key US politics stories from Monday 29 June at a glance
The US supreme court on Monday declined Donald Trump’s request to review a New York jury’s 2023 verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll, and then defaming her.
The justices did not provide an explanation or reasoning, and no public dissents were noted. The decision leaves intact the $5m civil judgment against Trump that was returned by the jury after the two-week trial in 2023.
Continue reading..."South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms," reports Ars Technica: The goal is to make drones a "universal combat tool" for all troops by training them to use drones like a "second personal weapon," said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea's Minister of National Defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons. Meanwhile, South Korea's former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times. The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies... Ukraine's use of drones and military robots as a force multiplier to offset its numerical disadvantage on the battlefield versus Russia's larger military may carry special resonance for South Korea, given that the South Korean military's current active-duty strength of 450,000 personnel faces a numerical disadvantage against North Korea's active-duty military consisting of more than 1.2 million soldiers... The defense ministry is starting out by providing 11,000 "training drones" to military personnel this year, with the goal of eventually deploying 60,000 drones across the military by 2029. An additional complication comes from the South Korean military looking to procure drones with 100 percent domestically produced components and no Chinese components due to security concerns, according to the defense minister's comments reported by Reuters... South Korean companies are building new military attack drones, but the defense ministry may struggle to find enough commercial drones made without Chinese components to train hundreds of thousands of military conscripts, said Min-Cheol Jung, a cofounder of the Team Retriever counter-drone red team based in South Korea, in a War on the Rocks article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The 51-year-old daughter of late president Alberto Fujimori secured the top office after authorities spent weeks reviewing contested ballots
Peru’s conservative president-elect Keiko Fujimori has vowed to restore “order and hope” after defeating left-wing candidate Roberto Sanchez, in the latest victory for a resurgent Latin American right.
Fujimori won the 7 June presidential runoff by the slimmest of margins, outpolling Sanchez by fewer than 50,000 votes out of the more than 18 million ballots cast, the final results showed.
Continue reading...Sonderling is filling in as acting secretary after Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced she was leaving in April
Donald Trump announced he is nominating Keith Sonderling to serve as US secretary of labor, a role he is currently filling as acting secretary after Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced her departure in April.
“It is my Great Honor to announce that I am nominating Keith E. Sonderling, the outstanding Acting United States Secretary of Labor, to be permanent,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Keith previously served as Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer and, during my First Term, worked at the U.S. Department of Labor as the Acting and Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.”
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 30, No. 1,837.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 30
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 30, No. 849.
Exclusive: Activist tells of his life as one of India’s most prominent political prisoners and his opposition to the government of Narendra Modi
Prison is hardest at sunset. As the thousands of prisoners incarcerated in Delhi’s most infamous jail are cast out of their cells and forced into the dank yard until darkness falls, prisoner number 626714 feels the punishing dread begin to rise.
Yet the inmate – better known as Umar Khalid – was recently moved to discover that another political prisoner, exiled at a camp thousands of miles from India, wrote of the very same feeling more than 150 years ago.
Continue reading...The new requirement is rolling out to Netflix profiles, and only Kids profiles are exempt.
Sonderling was elevated to the role in an acting capacity after Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer left the position in April.
There’s something poetic about the World Cup taking place in North America while Microsoft keeps scoring own goals like this.
Microsoft updated its Surface buying guide to describe 8GB RAM as “great for everyday use like browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps.” A companion FAQ adds that 16GB or more is what unlocks Copilot+ PC features. No acknowledgment that, for two years, Microsoft was the loudest voice telling everyone that 16GB was non-negotiable for a good Windows 11 experience.
What makes this infuriating is that Microsoft is one of the biggest reasons why the RAM situation got so bad in the first place.
↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest
This industry is a joke.
More than 100 people removed on ICE flight were being held in hotel in La Guaira when earthquakes struck
More than 100 people just deported from the United States were being held in a hotel when earthquakes struck Venezuela, setting off a scramble to find survivors and bodies buried in the rubble, according to survivors.
A deportation flight from Miami arrived in Venezuela hours before Wednesday’s earthquakes. Onboard were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, an initiative of Human Rights First, which tracks deportation flights. They were transported to a hotel in La Guaira.
Continue reading...A big majority say the nation has succeeded in achieving its founding ideals, at least a fair amount, if not a great deal. But Americans also see a nation facing challenges today, according to CBS News' most recent poll.
Amos review sets out recommendations for government, but falls short on systemic racism and traumatic births
The findings of Lady Amos’ review into maternity and neonatal services across England, which state the system is ultimately no longer fit for purpose, are unsurprising. The systemic failures and inadequacies of these services have been uncovered in several reports already, including Donna Ockenden’s review of the “toxic” Nottingham NHS trust published last week.
But what this report does offer are a set of recommendations for the government to implement. Amos states that if they were to be delivered in full then “the overall safety and quality of maternity and neonatal care in England will be materially and sustainably improved”. But how far do these recommendations go, and what will it take for them to be implemented?
Continue reading...City regulator will require booming industry to prove its resilience to risk from October next year
Crypto firms operating in the UK will be forced to prove they can weather market shocks and hold capital against risky assets as part of sweeping new rules announced by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
The regulations will increase supervision of the crypto industry, which has so far has faced minimal oversight despite a boom in popularity linked to social media influencers and a legitimisation drive under the US president, Donald Trump.
Continue reading...The 6-3 ruling slaps down law enforcement's wide-ranging "geofencing warrants" that pull phone data of anyone in an area.
The HPC world is changing, according to Jack Dongarra, who delivered his first ever ISC keynote here in Hamburg, Germany on June 25. From changing hardware and software to the emergence of AI-based scientific techniques, the old order of HPC is being replaced by something new. The question is, how can HPC professionals chart a path forward?
The first way that HPC is changing is the emergence of hyperscalers, who impose large gravitational forces on the rest of the market. The large clusters on the TOP500 list, such as the Frontier machine installed at Dongarra’s Oak Ridge National Lab are dwarfed by the massive systems being installed by Web giants and AI companies.
“There’s a computer in Tennessee, not at the lab, over in Memphis called Colossus2, which is being put together and it’s going to have a one million of these Nvidia Blackwell 200 GPUs,” Dongarra told the audience at the Congress Center Hamburg. “The cost of that machine is around $30 to 45 billion. And if we take a look at the power consumption, the energy used by these systems. It’s really staggering. So just that system in Memphis will consume about 200 gigawatts, and the cost is about $1.8 billion per year just to fire it up.”
The hyperscalers’ net worth is an order of magnitude bigger than the traditional tech firms that have patrolled the HPC waters. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all have valuations measured in the trillions of dollars, while companies like Intel, AMD, HPE, and IBM have hundreds of billions to work with. Nvidia is in a league all its own with a $5 trillion valuation.
“AI investment is now a situation which is plagued with hundreds of billions of dollars,” Dongarra said during his keynote, which was titled “High Performance Computing in Transition. “It really challenges even some of the largest nations.”
xAI’s new Colussus 2 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, will house 1 billion GPUs (Image courtesy SELC)
The Colossus-style gigawatt-scale data factories are being built to train and run frontier AI models that serve a range of use cases, from generating content for consumers to helping to power scientific discovery. It is the latter, of course, that interests the Turing Award winner.
“We have an incredible situation in terms of these companies and HPC is now really being put together with generative AI,” he said. “We have this deductive world of physics-based modeling, PDEs, discretization that’s being augmented with this inductive world of surrogate models.”
These surrogate AI models can be quite useful, Dongarra said. They excel at exploring a parameter space, thereby speeding up the traditional modeling and simulation runs. They’re also being set loose by themselves on some problems and are starting to show their worth.
“AI can predict pretty good a 10-day forecast, and it can do it in seconds, rather than having that be done in hours using the more traditional deductive way of doing business,” he said. “And in biology, we know about protein folding. There was a Nobel Prize given for AlphaFold and other really impressive results for accurately predicting 3D structures.”
These AI-based scientific techniques can be useful, as long as they’re used in a problem area that’s well understood. But applying AI techniques in an area of novel research is a danger zone, Dongarra warned. “When the ideas are applied to familiar ideas, everything works fine,” he said. “But once we get outside of that domain, we actually end up with many problems.”
The AI boom is impacting the development of processors too, and Dongarra tracked the evolution of Nvidia GPUs, from the Hopper chip released in 2022 to Blackwell in 2024 and Rubin today. He showed that Nvidia has been goosing lower precision hardware, specifically the FP16 Tensor Cores and BF16 Tensor Cores. However, Nvidia customers see essentially no change with 64-bit FMA (fused multiply-add SIMD instruction) capability from Hopper to Rubin, while FP64 Tensor Core performance has decreased by half.
“So the hardware situation is not in good shape, I would say, from the standpoint of 64-bit floating point operations,” Dongarra said. “We don’t see an enhancement in terms of performance in that situation.”
At the same time, performance for other operations has gone up considerably–except for INT8, which has decreased in Nvidia’s latest chips, “because they went out of favor with AI,” Dongarra said. “The real estate of course on the chip has gone into some of those other operations. So that’s sort of the situation today with Nvidia, and it really drives the point home that we need to use some of our technology in terms of mathematics to help us in designing algorithms that can effectively drive through that.”
Hardware performance is changing too
The good news is that raw floating point power is not the critical thing for HPC that it once was. Instead, what’s going to make or break many HPC workloads are energy consumption and data movement.
“The data movement is the key thing, which is inhibiting processing,” Dongarra said. “The other situation is that as the system scales, so does the power requirement.”
This imbalance among floating point operations (flops) on the one hand, and data movement bottlenecks and the energy wall on the other, are reflected in the HPCG benchmark, which was developed to reflect real-world HPC workloads, as opposed to the Linpack benchmark, which reflects raw computing power.
Dongarra lamented the extremely low scores leading the HPCG benchmark, the vast majority of which system utilization rates below 1%. The two exceptions to that are a pair of Japanese machines, including Fugaku, which hit 3% of theoretical peak, and another system that hit 2.5%.
In terms of energy, the world currently spends 5% of its power budget on data centers, a rate that’s expected to increase to 7% to 12% in the near future, Dongarra said. “Maybe we need a new metric to look at. And maybe that metric could be joules per trusted solution, rather than looking at flops as a way of doing business,” he said.
“Benchmarks are really looking behind,” Dongarra continued. “They’re not looking forward. They provide us with mirrors to look at where things have been. And they don’t provide us with levers that tell us what, what we should be doing in the future.”
LineShine is number 1 on the TOP500 list
Today’s popular benchmarks, such as the TOP500 list, have an influence on how supercomputers are requisitioned. They set expectations for what a new system should be and give decision makers something to shoot for. Unfortunately, these benchmarks are also holding back progress, Dongarra said.
“We put out an RFP for a machine, and vendors put together a system that meets that dollar amount and meets that peak performance level, and that that is really what we get,” Dongarra said. “And they do that using off the shelf components because that that minimizes the cost and, and potentially can drive the performance level high.”
While supercomputing labs must make do with commercial off-the-shelf components, the hyperscalers have the funding and wherewithal to build custom processors to meet their specific needs. Microsoft has Maia, Amazon has Trainium, and Google has TPUs. Thanks to their valuations measured in the trillions of dollars, they can afford to pursue co-design. This appears to be one of Dongarra’s pet peeves.
“Everybody talks about doing a co-design system. Co-design refers to simultaneously developing a machine that has hardware, software, and applications in consideration, getting the architects together with the mathematicians, along with the computer science people and having them, along with the domain scientists…design a machine that meets the needs of the domain scientists,” he said. “And rarely does that situation really take place…[I]n scientific settings, those designs are really the exception.”
Dongarra pointed to the new LineShine system out of the Chinese supercomputer center in Shenzen as an example of co-design. The Chinese modified the ARMv9 processor to handle SVE and SME extensions to deliver vector and matrix capabilities that were required to support the AI and modeling workloads that LineShine was to run. This could form a model for how to build powerful HPC systems without GPUs, Dongarra said.
The cookie-cutter nature of many HPC systems and the lack of an appetite for taking risks by exploring new computer architectures is another concern of Dongarra’s.
“When I was a student, there were many experimental machines that looked at different architectures that were done at universities that were done to help drive the architecture forward,” he said during the Q&A at the end of his talk. “Machines like the ILLIAC machines, like the systems that came from MIT or from Stanford or from Washington–many places were engaging in hardware architecture design which was considered radically different. And I don’t see that today.”
We need more experimentation in hardware design and a little bit more risk-taking, Dongarra said. “I think more experimentation like that is necessary, experimentation where I don’t know the answer,” he said. “Some of those are going to fail, and it’s okay to fail in this situation.”
The post Jack Dongarra Discusses a Changing HPC World in ISC 2026 Closing Keynote appeared first on HPCwire.
Two people said to be in critical condition after CCTV shows man dropping backpack at residential building lobby
An explosion in Monaco has triggered a police hunt for a man suspected of detonating a makeshift bomb that injured three people.
The blast occurred on Monday evening in the semi-enclave famous for casinos and superyachts, French media reported.
Continue reading...The company said listeners should know whether the content they are listening to is AI-generated.
Iran denied its negotiators would be meeting with U.S. officials in Qatar after President Trump announced the talks would resume at Tehran's request.
Former Louisiana death row inmate Jimmie “Chris” Duncan is officially a free man following a unanimous ruling Monday by the Louisiana Supreme Court. In the opinion, justices upheld a lower court’s decision to toss out Duncan’s 1998 conviction for killing his former girlfriend’s toddler, Haley Oliveaux, citing flawed forensics practices used to convict him.
Justice Cade R. Cole wrote on behalf of the seven-member court that new evidence presented by Duncan’s legal team left no doubt that his conviction should be overturned.
“The post-conviction evidence undermined the core factual premises on which the state depended,” Cole wrote in the official opinion.
Two other justices, including Chief Justice John Weimer, issued opinions concurring with Cole.
“I am flooded with relief,” said Chris Fabricant, a member of Duncan’s legal team and director of strategic litigation with the Innocence Project in New York, in an interview. “It would have been a moral outrage for the conviction to be reinstated.”
The court’s ruling came after a 2025 Verite News and ProPublica investigation examined the reliability of the key forensic evidence used to convict Duncan, now 57. At the time, he faced the possibility of being put to death as Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, made moves to expedite executions after a 15-year pause.
Duncan’s conviction was based largely on now-discredited bite mark evidence presented by forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Steven Hayne. Their analysis, which was critical to Ouachita Parish prosecutors securing Duncan’s conviction, claimed to match marks on Haley’s body to Duncan’s teeth.
But experts have since deemed such evidence, fairly common at the time of Duncan’s 1998 trial, to be junk science. Meanwhile, the longtime partnership between West and Hayne has come under scrutiny from civil rights attorneys, forensic experts and the courts over concerns about the validity of their techniques.
In the 28 years since Duncan’s trial, nine other prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Three of those men were on death row. Duncan was the last person awaiting an execution based on the pair’s work.
In his opinion, Cole reexamined the use of supposed bite marks, which were the only physical evidence tying Duncan to the alleged crime. Cole pointed to a video of West’s 1993 examination of Haley, which was not shown to jurors at trial. In that recording, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body, seemingly creating bite marks where none previously existed. Referencing previous testimony from a defense expert, Cole wrote that “it was ‘scientifically indefensible’ to identify those marks as having been made by Duncan, and that the angles shown in the West Video were physically impossible for a human bite.”
West has previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique — in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks.
Weimer wrote in a concurrence that the bite mark evidence used to prosecute Duncan was similar to “trial by water” tests used by witch-hunters in the 17th century, in which suspected witches were bound with rope and lowered into a body of water. If they floated, they were considered guilty of witchcraft, while those who “passed” the test by sinking often drowned.
“We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “The bite mark evidence and the sexual abuse evidence used in the trial against the accused has proven to be similarly specious.”
Duncan’s prosecution “demonstrates we cannot be too careful in determining whether the death penalty should be implemented in cases such as this case because of the finality of the sentence and the impossibility of rectification,” Weimer wrote.“Such an irreversible and tragic consequence is inimical and deleterious to our system of justice if carried out based on evidence that is devoid of legitimacy.”
Police arrested Duncan on Dec. 18, 1993. He was babysitting Haley that day in the home he shared with the girl’s mother in West Monroe. Duncan told law enforcement he had put the child in the bath, then went downstairs to wash dishes. When he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, he rushed upstairs to check on her and found Haley floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.
Duncan was initially booked for negligent homicide, but prosecutors upped the charge to first-degree murder after Hayne and West conducted Haley’s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence, including the purported bite marks, that she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Following two weeks of testimony during the trial in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.
While Duncan awaited an execution date, his new team of postconviction attorneys uncovered evidence that pointed to his innocence, including an expert witness who said that the child’s death was not a homicide but the result of an accidental drowning. In addition, investigators working for Duncan’s legal team interviewed a jailhouse informant who recanted his earlier trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime.
Duncan’s conviction was overturned in April of last year by former Ouachita Parish Judge Alvin Sharp. He was let out of prison on bail in December, but he continued to await a final decision on his case after prosecutors appealed Sharp’s ruling.
Steve Tew, district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, has never wavered in his insistence that Duncan was guilty of murder and that he should be put to death. His office appealed Sharp’s decision to the state Supreme Court.
During oral arguments in April, Tew said that since Duncan was the only person with Haley at the time of her death, his guilt could not be debated. “We don’t need the bite mark evidence to put Mr. Duncan in the apartment alone with this child,” Tew said.
Haley’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, has publicly supported Duncan’s release from prison and the overturning of his conviction; so have family members of Haley’s father, Lloyd Donald Oliveaux, who died in 1996. They have excoriated the state’s tactics, claiming they repeatedly asked for a meeting with prosecutors to express their concerns, but never received a response.
Tew, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, said at the April hearing that should the Supreme Court refuse to reinstate Duncan’s conviction, he would retry him, though he did not say what charge he might pursue.
When asked about the prospect of Duncan being retried for murder, Fabricant, the Innocence Project attorney, said, “If there is any sense of fairness and justice left, this should be the end of this case.”
In addition to the Innocence Project, Duncan’s legal team includes the Mwalimu Center for Justice in New Orleans and the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner law firm in Atlanta.
The post Louisiana Supreme Court Frees Death Row Prisoner, Calling Evidence Against Him “Scientifically Indefensible” appeared first on ProPublica.
Over 70 million Americans are expected to hit the roads and airports this holiday week. How to make the most of your Independence Day.
According to prosecutors and testimony, Carl Rinsch told Netflix he needed $11 million to finish a show, but spent whopping sums on luxury cars, watches and other goods, including $638,000 on two mattresses.
Settlement requires archbishop to write apology letter to each survivor and implement child protection reforms
The San Francisco Catholic archdiocese has agreed to pay $395m to settle more than 500 lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse by church officials, plaintiffs’ attorneys said Monday.
Salvatore Cordileone, the San Francisco archbishop, will have to write an apology letter to each survivor as part of the settlement.
Continue reading...The prospective new prime minister will need to deliver on his ability to communicate – and get the big decisions right
When Keir Starmer welcomed Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, outside No 10 on Monday, the attire fitted the moment: dark formal suits, polished leather shoes. Almost 200 miles to the north, when Andy Burnham strode into the engine hall of the People’s History Museum in Manchester, the vibe could not have been more different.
Dressed in his trademark dark T-shirt and jacket, Burnham could just as easily have been walking down the street outside. He even began with a joke about his thigh-skimming running shorts, after he was pictured going for a jog the morning after announcing his return to parliament, telling the assembled audience he had bought a new pair as it was “either do that or change the decency laws”.
Continue reading...Once Russian soldiers reach certain parts of the front lines of the war in Ukraine, they can expect to live an average of just 20 to 35 minutes, according to a grim estimate by Russian military bloggers.
If you're looking for an elevated sound experience, these are CNET's current picks, including a few budget options, for earbuds that deliver the best sound quality.
ELMSFORD, N.Y., June 29, 2026 — SeeQC, Inc., a quantum computing infrastructure company, today announced that it has publicly filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) relating to a proposed initial public offering of shares of its common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. SEEQC intends to list its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol “SEQC.”
Cantor and BTIG are acting as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.
The proposed offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.
The proposed offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the preliminary prospectus relating to the offering may be obtained from: Cantor, Attention: Capital Markets, 110 East 59th Street, 6th Floor, New York, New York 10022, Email: prospectus@cantor.com; or BTIG, LLC, Attention: Syndicate Department, 65 East 55th Street, New York, New York 10022, Email: ProspectusDelivery@btig.com.
A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
About SEEQC
SEEQC is a quantum computing infrastructure company building scalable quantum computers on a chip. The Company develops and manufactures digital technologies designed to make quantum computing scalable, energy efficient and commercially viable. SEEQC’s platform combines superconducting Single Flux Quantum chips, cryogenic CMOS electronics, room-temperature control systems, firmware and software to reduce system complexity and enable scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing. The Company’s digital quantum control technology, published in Nature Electronics, demonstrated the first integrated qubit control system operating at millikelvin temperatures, achieving gate fidelities exceeding 99.9% at nanowatt-scale power consumption. SEEQC works with leading organizations across the quantum computing ecosystem, including collaborations with NVIDIA, IBM and major government research institutions, and operates advanced chip development and fabrication facilities in the United States and Europe. More than half of SEEQC’s workforce hold Ph.D. degrees across physics, electrical engineering, materials science, computer science and related disciplines.
Source: SEEQC
The post SEEQC Files Registration Statement for Proposed Initial Public Offering appeared first on HPCwire.
Dan Jarvis persuaded Rachel Reeves to reduce £18bn funding gap that led to predecessor resigning
The new defence secretary has secured an extra £1.5bn to the UK’s long-delayed defence investment plan, with the bulk of that to be spent on drones to deter Russia and Iran.
Rows about closing an £18bn funding gap had led to the resignation of John Healey and raised questions about Britain’s commitments to Nato – though on Monday the head of the alliance told the Guardian he believed the UK would honour its commitments.
Continue reading...Grizzlies land Grant, Murray as rebuild rolls on
Portland add Morant, eye another big move
Ja Morant is headed to the Portland Trail Blazers in a trade that would end his volatile run with the Memphis Grizzlies, according to multiple reports Monday.
Pending NBA approval and physicals, the teams agreed to a swap that sends Morant to Portland for Jerami Grant and Kris Murray.
Continue reading...Cornerback’s bail set at $1m by judge of Florida
Prosecutors say player believed he was robbery victim
The Detroit Lions have released cornerback Terrion Arnold, only days after his arrest over allegations that he orchestrated the abduction and beating of three men. Prosecutors believe he wrongly suspected the men of having stolen luxury goods and $100,000 in cash from him.
The Lions made the announcement on Monday. The team did not give a reason, but the announcement came the same day that a Florida judge set Arnold’s bail at $1m.
Continue reading...Former Barcelona striker joins for two and a half seasons
37-year-old’s 697 goals is third best total for current players
The Chicago Fire on Monday officially announced their acquisition of Robert Lewandowski through to the 2027-28 season. Poland’s record goalscorer will occupy a designated player slot pending the approval of his visa as well as the completion of an international transfer certificate.
The club described Lewandowski, 37, as “a global soccer icon” in social media posts. He was a free agent after spending the last four seasons with Barcelona, scoring 83 goals with 19 assists in 134 league matches (114 starts) while contributing to three La Liga titles.
Continue reading...There are now more rumors about Apple's next flagship phones that point to a new foldable, a variable-aperture camera, more RAM, improved battery life and, yes, higher prices.
Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson and Sydney Watson killed working to contain raging fires on Utah-Colorado border
The US Department of Interior on Monday released the names of three firefighters who were killed while working to contain wildfires along the Utah-Colorado border.
Two other firefighters who were part of the specialized helicopter-deployed crew were also injured in the blaze, although authorities did not identify them.
Continue reading...June 29, 2026 — Finland’s new national supercomputer Roihu is now open for researchers’ use. Roihu will replace Finland’s previous supercomputers Mahti and Puhti. Puhti will continue to support research and education at Finnish universities, universities of applied sciences and research institutes.
Roihu Supercomputer. Credit: Mikael Kanerva, CSC
The acceptance testing phase for Roihu supercomputer has been successfully completed, and the system is now ready for full deployment. During the spring, Roihu was piloted through 28 projects, testing a variety of workloads and use cases.
Roihu will triple Finland’s national computing capacity and will fully replace the Puhti and Mahti systems by the end of the summer 2026. The system is based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 hybrid architecture.
In the latest Top500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, published at the ISC26 conference in Hamburg on June 23, 2026, the Roihu-G partition ranked 91st and the Roihu-C partition 193rd.
In the Green500 ranking, which measures the energy efficiency of supercomputers, Roihu placed 12th. The system runs entirely on renewable hydropower, and its excess heat is utilized in the district heating network of Kajaani.
Puhti Continues to Serve Science
After its service at CSC, Puhti supercomputer will continue serving science, as CSC will donate it to Finnish universities, universities of applied sciences, and research institutes for research and education.
Puhti’s computing services will be shut down one month after the general availability of Roihu, but earliest by July 31, 2026, at 12:00 EEST. Puhti’s storage will remain accessible until October 15, 2026, at 12:00 EEST.
Puhti will be donated in smaller units to 11 universities, 9 universities of applied sciences, and two research institutes.
For the air-cooled Puhti, applications were received from 18 organizations, and the total requested capacity corresponded to approximately twice that of Puhti. Puhti’s high-memory nodes and GPU nodes were particularly in demand.
Puhti will be used, among other things, for:
Maintaining the liquid-cooled Mahti is more demanding, and its possible donation is negotiated directly with potential recipients.
More from HPCwire
Source: CSC
The post Finland’s Roihu Supercomputer Now Open for Research Use appeared first on HPCwire.
June 29, 2026 — The Advanced General Intelligence for Science Program (AGIS), Transformative Research Innovation Platform of RIKEN platforms (TRIP) Headquarters, and RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) have selected “RIKYU” as the name for their new AI for Science development supercomputer.
According to the selection committee, the name was chosen “because it reflects a computing platform designed to uncover the fundamental principles and laws governing nature and using AI and supercomputing, and to support a wide range of research from basic science to applied studies. The name was also considered to be well aligned with the purposes of AI for Science. In addition, its pronunciation resembles that of RIKEN, making it easy to pronounce and familiar to both Japanese and international users.”
The two characters used in the name are both found in the Japanese name of RIKEN. The first, RI (理), means science or logic, and the second, KYU (究), means pursuit. Additionally, following the international trend of naming supercomputers after people, the name sounds like Sen no Rikyū, the 16th century tea master who is known for having perfected the art of the tea ceremony.
In the Rikyu Doka, a collection of poems that are said to convey the teachings of Sen no Rikyu, there is a waka poem describing the well-known concept of shuhari (follow, break, transcend), which describes a Japanese philosophy of the stages of learning. The poem states: “follow the rules and forms completely; even if you break them, even if you transcend them, never forget the foundation”. Following what one has learned from a master is akin to AI extensively learning existing knowledge through machine learning. Breaking knowledge by re-examining what has been mastered in comparison with other insights and one’s own perspective, is analogous to the trained AI actively engaging in research and pioneering new knowledge. Transcending existing frameworks reflects a future in which humanity and AI jointly pioneer new frontiers in science through the broad exploratory scope of AI for Science. With this philosophy in mind, and while pursuing wide-ranging exploration, we have entrusted the name “RIKYU” with the meaning of “transcending while never forgetting the true purpose of science.”
RIKYU is a computing system being introduced at the RIKEN Kobe Campus on Port Island in Kobe, with the aim of innovating scientific research through AI. It delivers exascale-class computational performance, 1018 operations per second, using the 16-bit and 8-bit floating-point operations that are widely used in AI training and inference. RIKYU is currently undergoing the necessary preparations for full-scale operation, scheduled to begin in July 2026.
To advance AI for Science in the future, we will establish a user support framework that enables the system to be widely utilized not only for the development of scientific research infrastructure models under the AGIS program but also for AI for Science research through domestic and international collaboration.
RIKYU comprises 400 compute nodes equipped with the NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 (1,600 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in total). The nodes are interconnected by NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking, enabling high-speed communication of up to 3.2 terabits per second (1 terabit = 1012 bits per second). It delivers performance of over 64.16 PFLOPS (1015 operations per second) in double-precision floating-point arithmetic (FP64) and over 15.539 EFLOPS (1018 operations per second) in 8-bit floating-point arithmetic (FP8).
The collaboration between RIKYU, which specializes in massively parallel computing for AI, and Supercomputer Fugaku, which specializes in large-scale scientific computing, is expected to contribute to the development and utilization of advanced scientific research infrastructure models.
The Naming Process
The centers launched a public call for naming proposals for the new “AI for Science Development Supercomputer,” based on the following naming criteria: (1) it should convey that the supercomputer is used for research that benefits society; (2) it should be familiar and appealing to people in Japan and around the world; (3) it should contain or evoke an element related to science; and (4) it should evoke the image of AI assisting scientists in their research.
A total of 1,019 proposals were received during the submission period from November 20 to December 22, 2025. When duplicate submissions and identical-name entries were removed, a total of 856 valid candidates remained.
Subsequently, the entries were considered by the AI for Science Development Supercomputer Naming Committee, which was composed of (in alphabetical order) Yutaka Akiyama (Senior Visiting Scientist, RIKEN Center for Computational Science), William Dawson (Unit Leader, Materials Science Application Interface Platform Development Unit, AI for Science Platform Division, RIKEN Center for Computational Science), Koichi Takahashi (Team Director, Laboratory for Biologically Inspired Computing, RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research/ Project Director, AGIS, TRIP Headquarters), Shuntaro Tani (RIKEN ECL Team Leader, Digital Twin for Light-Matter Interaction RIKEN ECL Research Team, RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics), and Toshiji Hase (External Member, Science Fiction Writer), with Makoto Taiji (Director, AGIS, TRIP Headquarters) and Satoshi Matsuoka (Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science/Division Director, AI for Science Platform Division, RIKEN Center for Computational Science/ Project Director, AGIS, TRIP Headquarters) acting as observers. The Committee selected the name RIKYU taking into account input from researchers involved in AGIS.
The entry submitted under this name was from Mr. Seizo Kawai, to whom we plan to send a commemorative gift as a token of our appreciation.
More from HPCwire: RIKEN Brings ROQUO Online to Advance Quantum-HPC Hybrid Computing
Source: RIKEN
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LONDON, June 29, 2026 — NTT DATA, a global leader in AI, digital business and technology services, today released Can Data Centers Keep Pace with AI? A Global Data Center Outlook, a report examining whether the infrastructure required to support the next wave of artificial intelligence can scale fast enough to meet demand. Developed in partnership with NTT Global Data Centers and economic consultancy ThoughtLab, the report models three scenarios for global data center expansion through 2030. It finds that while demand is expected to grow between 23% and 30% annually in the most likely scenarios, capacity constraints across power, equipment supply chains, land availability and labor could create a capacity crunch if not addressed through coordinated action.
Credit: Shutterstock
“AI demand is accelerating faster than many parts of the underlying infrastructure system can respond,” said Doug Adams, CEO and President, NTT Global Data Centers. “The challenge now is not simply scaling capacity, but removing the operational and supply-side constraints that delay deployment and erode the economics of AI investment. This report is intended to help the market move from recognizing the challenges to acting on practical solutions.”
In its stress test of likely growth paths, NTT Global Data Centers found that:
The report argues that these constraints are addressable and provides a roadmap for enterprises, operators, investors and policymakers to unlock capacity and improve the performance economics of AI infrastructure. Among its recommendations:
“AI infrastructure demand is no longer a future scenario. It is here now,” Adams added. “The organizations that move fastest over the next several years will be those that understand where the real constraints are, act early to mitigate them, and build with efficiency, resilience and long-term value creation in mind.”
About NTT DATA
NTT DATA is a $30+ billion business and technology services leader, serving 75% of the Fortune Global 100. We are committed to accelerating client success and positively impacting society through responsible innovation. We are one of the world’s leading AI and digital infrastructure providers, with unmatched capabilities in enterprise-scale AI, cloud, security, connectivity, data centers and application services. Our consulting and industry solutions help organizations and society move confidently and sustainably into the digital future. As a Global Top Employer, we have experts in more than 70 countries. We also offer clients access to a robust ecosystem of innovation centers as well as established and start-up partners. NTT DATA is part of NTT Group, which invests over $3 billion each year in R&D.
Source: NTT DATA
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The program aims to accelerate quantum technologies from the lab into the real world.
June 29, 2026 — SRI, a leading nonprofit R&D institution, today announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has expanded its collaboration with SRI to ensure U.S. leadership in quantum manufacturing. SRI will establish the Quantum Manufacturing Engineering Center (QMEC) to accelerate the manufacturing of scalable, high-performance quantum components and systems to drive significant growth in the U.S. quantum industry.
“NIST is a world leader in quantum science and technology based on decades of fundamental research that helped launch the U.S. quantum industry,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Arvind Raman. “This public-private partnership with SRI will accelerate the development of America’s quantum industrial base — the foundation upon which the quantum revolution is being built.”
The QMEC will recruit quantum experts and companies to engage in R&D to advance manufacturing and strengthen supply chains to enable quantum technology production at scale. Initial focus areas include cryostats and lasers – critical enablers of quantum sensors and computers. An early goal is to advance the manufacturability of quantum-enabling components within three years.
“SRI has been at the forefront of quantum technology development, from precision sensors to integrated systems,” said David Parekh, CEO of SRI. “QMEC builds on this deep expertise and our proven ability to translate breakthrough science into real-world impact. Through QMEC and our leadership of QED-C, SRI is positioned to bridge the gap between quantum innovation and industrial-scale production, ensuring the U.S. maintains its competitive edge in this critical technology domain.”
SRI’s role in QMEC is built on demonstrated leadership in driving the quantum ecosystem. Established in 2019, the NIST-funded Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), managed by SRI, is the leading voice for the quantum industry in coordinating research priorities and accelerating technology adoption.
“Quantum technologies promise to revolutionize entire industries, but realizing this potential requires overcoming major engineering challenges that have limited the ability to scale manufacture and grow the market for quantum products,” said QED-C Executive Director Celia Merzbacher. “This new partnership with NIST will leverage SRI’s relationships with the broad quantum ecosystem, removing critical barriers to quantum technology production and ensuring U.S. leadership in this transformative field.”
SRI brings deep experience in quantum technology development. For more than 20 years, SRI has been developing precision quantum sensors to enable next-generation systems, from chip-scale clocks to cold-atom–based sensor systems, including sophisticated integration expertise required to transfer sensors out of the lab.
QMEC will align closely with NIST’s mission to promote U.S. innovation and competitiveness. Key objectives include:
“Our approach is results-driven and timeline-focused,” said Lawrence Lee, SRI’s QMEC Program Director. “Each project we undertake will have clear goals, defined milestones, and measurable outcomes that are informed by collaborative discussions with quantum technology companies, value chain partners, and end users. We’re not just conducting research – we’re delivering critical quantum components that will be manufacturable at scale in terms of volume, performance, quality, and cost.”
Source: SRI
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June 29, 2026 — Two new labs will back British researchers to develop next generation artificial intelligence (AI) systems, helping secure the UK’s position as a global leader.
Backed by a £60 million investment, one lab will focus on creating open-source AI that can run on widely available hardware. The other will pioneer new approaches enabling AI to learn without vast centralized computing power. The two UK AI research labs will be led by University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford. The labs will work in collaboration with partners including the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Imperial College London.
£60 Million Cutting Edge Labs
They will share up to £60 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to rethink:
The labs will build and expand partnerships across academia, industry and the public sector, helping translate fundamental advances into real-world impact.
Transform Sectors
The breakthroughs they pursue could transform sectors across the economy and society, from healthcare and education to small businesses, public services, science and advanced industry.
The technology they develop will help the UK’s tech industry.
It will focus on areas where the UK has a real chance to lead globally, such as:
Support for Entrepreneurship and Spin-outs
Both labs will actively support the commercialisation of the research with targeted support for entrepreneurship and spin-outs.
This investment backs British research to:
Unlocking AI’s Huge Potential
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said: “We are only just beginning to unlock AI’s huge potential to grow our economy and improve our public services. With our world-leading universities and deep pool of AI expertise, Britain can set the agenda for what comes next. These new labs will lead the world in the fundamental work that is set to make AI cheaper, more practical and easier to adopt so more businesses and public services across the UK can benefit. And by building this capability here at home, backed by our world leading universities, we’re strengthening our own expertise, reducing reliance on others and securing Britain’s place at the forefront of this technology – fittingly announced on what would have been Alan Turing’s 114th birthday.”
World-Leading AI Research
Professor Charlotte Deane, Senior Responsible Owner for the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) AI Programme and Executive Chair of EPSRC, said: “The UK is already one of the world’s leading nations in AI research. We are one of the few countries in the world with all the right ingredients, from a deep pool of top AI experts to world-class universities. These labs will put that advantage to work, backing the bold, high-reward ideas that can shape the future of AI. We look forward to working with the labs to maximise the benefits for the UK.”
New Open-Source AI Technologies
Professor David Barber of UCL, who will lead the SOFAIR Lab, said: “We’re very excited that UCL will be leading the new SOFAIR Lab. While current AI systems are impressive, many still suffer from basic issues such as inaccurate responses to questions. These systems often use similar underlying architectures, so SOFAIR will bring together the broader sciences and fresh ideas to create a new generation of open-source models. This will reduce dependency on the small number of model providers, boosting UK sovereignty and its position as a global player in AI.”
Signalling Ambition
The labs are the first major investment under UKRI’s AI strategy, which sets out an ambitious vision for fundamental AI research that works for the UK economy and society. The program will initially provide around £8 million to each lab, with further funding released following an assessment in autumn 2026. This will ensure early progress and robust plans are in place before the remaining investment is confirmed.
This announcement goes further than first planned by doubling the number of labs from one to two and increasing total investment from £40 million to up to £60 million. This reflects UKRI’s recognition of the significant opportunity identified through this program.
Backing the Brightest Minds
Both labs will work alongside leading players in the UK AI ecosystem, including The Alan Turing Institute and UKRI’s AI research hubs. The labs will build on existing centers of excellence, major research investments and strong links with industry partners.
Developing a pipeline of talent is also central to both labs’ missions, with £2 million per lab earmarked to support a minimum of ten doctoral students.
The labs will invest in researchers at every career stage, from doctoral training through to postdoctoral support and academic staff.
The teams bring together internationally recognized expertise across disciplines and sectors, positioning the UK at the forefront of fundamental AI research and innovation.
Further Information
SOFAIR Lab
The Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab is led by UCL, with the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh also involved.
The SOFAIR Lab will develop next generation open-source AI technologies.
Modern AI relies heavily on a small number of popular architectures trained on vast data, requiring immense computing infrastructure.
Led by Professor David Barber from UCL, SOFAIR will bring together researchers from across computer science, mathematics, statistics and neuroscience.
The lab will explore new AI architectures and those designed to run on widely available hardware.
This will mean cutting-edge AI will be more widely accessible for everyone, including researchers and institutions.
BOLD Lab
The British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab is led by the University of Oxford, with UCL and Imperial College London also involved.
The BOLD, led by Professor Jakob Foerster at the University of Oxford will fundamentally rethink how AI systems learn.
Where today’s AI can struggle with real-world complexity, BOLD will develop systems capable of working alongside humans, navigating physical environments and operating without vast centralised computing power.
The lab will be built around three ambitious research pillars, new learning algorithms, human-centred AI and embodied systems like robots.
The lab will translate breakthroughs into open-source tools, and it will be a breeding ground for commercial spin-outs.
Source: UKRI
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Astral is a hobby operating system written in C for 64bit architectures, with a collection of ported software like X.org, fvwm, the xbps package manager, and tons more. I think it’s quite a neat system – the code’s on GitHub – made even neater by the fact it can run not only Minecraft, but now also has a working port of Wine that can run a few games.
A few months ago, I posted about Astral, a hobby OS I have been working on over the years, running Minecraft. Since then, others have gotten modern versions of Minecraft to run as well as Factorio (using a glibc compatible libc). However, while these games are made or packaged in a way that makes it easier to get them to run under a new OS, most games are not. A lot of games are closed source and compiled for Windows, which makes something like Wine a necessity for playing them.
One of my favorite games, Cogmind, falls under that umbrella. It is a 32-bit Windows only roguelike, and it became my goal to run it under Astral. While there was already an existing Wine port, it was extremely incomplete, as not even
↫ Blog post on the Astral websitenotepad.exeworked properly. To run Cogmind, the Wine port had to be finished, which also meant adding the ability to run 32-bit code on an otherwise 64-bit-only OS.
This process obviously is quite involved, but in the end, they managed to get it working. Quite impressive.
ISC26 in Hamburg delivered its usual mix of benchmark drama, big ideas, and uncomfortable questions, but this year had one story that hit different.
The LineShine system scoring the top spot on the TOP500 was the biggest story to break out of this conference, and for good reason. The CPU-only, 2.198 exaflop machine is China’s first system to hit number one since 2017 and marks the end of a years-long absence of Chinese systems from the list.
LineShine’s all-CPU architecture is explicitly optimized for double-precision floating point, which puts it in a category of its own relative to the GPU-accelerated systems that have dominated the upper half of the list for years. Those systems trade FP64 efficiency for throughput across mixed-precision AI workloads. LineShine made the opposite call.
It’s got a full proprietary stack, from the LX2 processor built on ARMv9 architecture to the LingQi interconnect and Kylin operating system. It was quite reminiscent of the proprietary nature of the Fugaku system.
LineShine was the headline, but the rest of the conference was the context.
LineShine is number 1 on the TOP500 list
The Fishbowl Panel hosted by Intersect360 Research CEO Addison Snell is one of the more interesting formats at ISC. This discussion starts with Snell and two other speakers on stage and as the talk progresses, Snell sends someone away and asks an audience member to step up and give their opinion.
The title of this year’s talk was What is Truth, Anyway? (And Does It Matter?), an eerily relevant question to ask in the era of AI. Hoping to spark discussion, Snell pointed out how quickly the world has decided to jump headfirst into AI data center deployment. More specifically, he’s trying to think about what happens to these facilities in the near future.
“Let’s go build a gigawatt data center,” said Snell. “I’m going to level a field. I’m going to hook up all the power and water, and it’s 2026. Now I’m going to come back, and it’s going to be 2030. This thing’s four years old. And now what? Do I upgrade it? Is the power still right? Is the water still right? Can I lift and shift those technologies or do I just build a new one?”
For me, the room didn’t have a satisfactory answer. One panelist who rotated in from the audience invoked the horse manure crisis that faced New York in the 1890s. Engineers apparently ran the math on population growth in the city and decided that New York would be buried in manure. Of course, these engineers couldn’t imagine the invention of the automobile.
A reasonable answer, but it ignores the fact that fossil fuel-guzzling automobiles have contributed to a catastrophic climate crisis. I simply don’t buy that the only way forward for humanity is bouncing from catastrophe to calamity without a thought, a plan, or a prayer.
Much of the ISC community had sustainability on their mind during the conference. ISC Program Chair Rosa M. Badia from Barcelona Supercomputing Center called energy efficiency “more important than ever” in her opening remarks on Monday morning.
That’s true in multiple dimensions. Operations costs are skyrocketing as energy-hungry AI cycles become more commonplace. But on top of that, much of the world is watching their own electricity bills go up, along with news of data centers slurping up their water supplies. Energy and resource efficiency are operational problems, but they’re also a PR nightmare if we as an industry don’t rein them in.
A Kaytus model of a liquid cooled data center at ISC 2026 (Image courtesy Kiwi Callahan)
On another sustainability track, the kilometer-scale climate modeling session included a talk from Sun Yat-Sen University on AP3ESM. The talk covered a one-kilometer resolution global Earth system model running on Chinese exascale systems, including LineShine. This includes hybrid AI-phys
ics parameterization, fully coupled atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice, at one-kilometer global resolution.
This is the kind of work that justifies building the machine in the first place. A fully coupled Earth system model at one-kilometer resolution was not computationally feasible until systems like LineShine existed.
Martin Schulz, a professor at the Technical University of Munich and director of the Leibniz Supercomputing Center, delivered the opening keynote on Monday morning. Schulz laid out his vision for the future of heterogeneous computing, arguing that the industry is moving toward a world where classical, HPC, AI, and quantum all coexist in the same portfolio rather than competing for dominance.
On quantum specifically, he was clear that quantum computers will not replace HPC, but that they are real accelerators with a genuine place in the stack alongside GPUs. This is the exact conclusion that we at Intersect360 Research came to in our recent State of the HPC-AI Market report on Quantum Computing.
The conversations around quantum computing have often been boiled down to seeing it as a revolution that will replace classical or as the fever dream of mad quantum scientists. Schulz made the case that neither framing is useful. The more productive discussion concerns where quantum fits, and he responded that it fits in the same place as every other accelerator.
This universal view of the stack carried into another session, chaired by Sagar Dolas, Program Manager at SURF. Dolas, who moderated a session on Next Generation Application Workflows and HPC Infrastructure Platforms, has been thinking deeply about how to actually measure scientific productivity.
The core tension he framed for the session is that the exascale era is transformative for science, but making effective use of that capacity is becoming increasingly challenging as the complexity of the technology outpaces the ability of domain scientists to actually use it.
The AI boom and growth of HPC are raising questions of sustainability
It’s a topic he and I have explored previously on the Scaling Intelligence podcast from Intersect360 Research, and it’s a conversation we hope to continue in the future.
Kyle Chard, a research associate professor at the University of Chicago, presented the ACADEMY agentic framework, which deploys autonomous agents across federated scientific computing environments so that researchers can focus on the questions rather than the mechanics of how those questions get answered.
Taina Coleman, a postdoctoral fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, came at the same problem from the other direction, arguing that the gap between capability and productivity is widening because these systems are being optimized for peak performance by people who are not the ones who ultimately need to use them. The gap between what these machines can do and the scientists who rely on them to make discoveries is widening.
The machines are getting faster, the scientists who can use them are not keeping up, and in four years – when Snell’s hypothetical gigawatt data center is obsolete – that gap is still going to be there.
AI has shoved our industry onto the world’s main stage. Data centers are popping up in communities that have never had to deeply think about grid load or water rights before.
We have a very short window to get a few pieces of information about AI across to the general public. What do we want to say to them?
You don’t have a right to your own water?
Don’t worry too much about your power bill going up, AI will somehow figure out how to get it back down later?
You didn’t want a massive concrete building sitting empty in your community? You should have thought about that before living somewhere with cheap land and power.
AI is one of the most important technological revolutions our species has ever seen, on par with the internet and possibly the Industrial Revolution.
Let’s not mess it up with some next-quarter-focused shortsightedness.
About the author: Kevin Jackson is an analyst at Intersect 360 Research, a market intelligence, research, and consulting advisory
practice focused on HPC data center trends, AI, cloud, big data, and hyperscale. He is the former editor of AIwire.
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Prime Day might be over, but these standout discounts on tech, home and everyday essentials are still live.
For the first time, Medicare will cover GLP-1 drugs prescribed solely for weight loss for eligible beneficiaries at a $50 monthly copay.
Imagine your favorite team just scored an incredible, last-second goal at the World Cup. So you log online to celebrate with other fans. But, using data it’s already collected on you, the social media platform you like to post on wrongly guesses that you’re under 16 so it forces you to go to a third-party verification app and provide images of your face or your government-issued ID. You don’t really know much about the verification app, what country it’s based out of, what happens with your information, and whether you’re protected from hackers or data breaches. You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your passport and hope it doesn’t come back to haunt you.
Now imagine that instead of posting about sports, you’re criticizing a powerful politician, or talking about your experiences with abuse or addiction, or discussing embarrassing medical issues you’re facing. Suddenly this “papers, please” approach to the internet sounds even more invasive, right? Unfortunately, that’s the direction we’re all headed — even here in the United States — and we have good reason to be wary of the global rush to sacrifice user privacy on the altar of age verification.
↫ Sarah McLaughlin at Expression
The insane push for age verification on the internet is the biggest threat to whatever’s left of the free internet. I have two young children – 3 and 5, currently – and I’m diametrically opposed to any kind of creepy verification processes that they claim are designed to keep kids like mine “safe”. Not only is their safety not predicated on giving up their privacy, my children are also not my or anyone else’s property; they have rights, and the right to privacy is one of them.
Nobody mentioned in the Epstein files has been charged, by the way.
German police say a suspect was in custody and six were killed in a rare shooting that took place at a youth center in Stade, near Hamburg.
In today's still-elevated interest rate climate, savers need to avoid making these three critical mistakes.
 | I am completely shaken up right now. My daughter just fell off her Onewheel Pint (only has about 600 miles on it), and instead of disengaging, the board ghosted. When I tell you it flew, it was literally like a rocket. It shot straight into a wall, completely busted the front footplate off, and looking at it, it seems like it needs both a new footpad and a controller module. [link] [comments] |
Jonathan Morgan claims he provided player welfare
Doctor says Maddy feared mental health stigma
The most significant cause of the deterioration of the late Sheffield United footballer Maddy Cusack’s mental health was the behaviour of Jonathan Morgan, the team’s manager at the time, her father, David Cusack, has told an inquest.
During a tense exchange with David Cusack, Morgan, who is representing himself at the inquest, accused the player’s father of relying on hearsay to form his opinion of him.
Continue reading...Expected next prime minister focuses on restoring faith in politics, cost of living and devolution in major speech
Andy Burnham has set out his blueprint to transform the UK with a promise to improve living standards and restore faith in politics through the “biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen”.
The person widely expected to be the next prime minister said the current system was “broken” and that “more of the same” would not be enough to tackle the significant challenges faced by the country.
A long-term ambition of greater public control of essential services such as water, housing, energy and transport to help curb the cost of living.
A No 10 North hub to oversee the distribution of power and resources from Whitehall across the country, which the Guardian revealed would be run by his former chief executive in Manchester.
The biggest council housing building programme since the postwar period, and a high street “renaissance” through reform of business rates.
Rebalancing an education system that he said had been too focused on the university route and putting academic and technical courses on an equal footing.
Continue reading..."Amid growing public anger over A.I. and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors and foundations has raised $500 million to try to answer some of those questions themselves," reports the New York Times. "Just how many jobs will AI upend?" asks the Wall Street Journal, reporting that the new coalition says it's time to ready the U.S. workforce for a "major" disruption — no matter how large it turns out to be. The coalition "has so far raised more than $500 million — about half of its multiyear goal — from companies and nonprofit groups. It will initially work with state governments in Arkansas, Maryland, Utah and Connecticut. OpenAI and Anthropic are also involved, and academics including MIT economist David Autor sit on an advisory board." [The new "RAISE US" coalition] will be led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who served under former President Joe Biden, and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican. Its mandate, they said, isn't just to build retraining programs but also to reconsider decades-old policies such as unemployment insurance and act as a working lab for testing the most effective ways to transition workers to new fields. The group will explore corporate incentives for employers to hold on to workers whose jobs are disrupted by AI and prep them for new roles... The mission of the group is to "pull all the levers at once," Raimondo said. That means teaming up with employers to find ways to help workers gain skills or new roles and joining with educators to roll out different types of training. It also plans to propose policy changes such as tweaking unemployment benefits to let displaced workers continue to get them while they, for instance, start new businesses with AI... In Maryland, the group plans to expand a service-year option in the state to help people gain exposure to such growing fields as healthcare. An effort in Arkansas will focus on supporting "an AI-powered career navigation platform." More from New York Times: The organization will work primarily with governors... The theory: States generally control their community college systems, which can translate work force policy through course offerings and industry partnerships. The bulk of the budget will fund pilot programs overseen by about 15 staff members and consultants. For example, Maryland will expand a "service year" for recent high school graduates to provide experience in fields where there are shortages, such as health care. In other states, Raise Us hopes to offer "wage insurance" for workers who take lower-paying jobs rather than dropping out of the work force entirely. The group plans to furnish technical assistance for companies that want to retain workers as A.I. changes their roles, rather than eliminating them. Microsoft, one of the companies backing the organization, said it had already found a promising model: cross-training its entry-level lawyers in different parts of the organization and equipping them with A.I. skills in order for them to be repositioned as technology evolves. "You can think of doing that with almost any job we have," said Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft. "It creates an opportunity to transfer people from jobs that are being eliminated to jobs that are being created...." Ms. Raimondo and her colleagues are not fans of a universal basic income, an idea that has gained popularity in Silicon Valley as an answer to job disruption. They emphasize that work provides more than just wages, and plan to focus on helping people find pathways to new jobs. But it's unclear whether A.I. will create jobs at the rate that it will destroy them. Jack Malde studied work force policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center and is now going to work for the Windfall Trust, another A.I.-focused think tank. He said long-term income support might be necessary, even if better models for transitioning workers were found. "The truth is, there's still a lot of uncertainty," Mr. Malde said. "What we think is resilient now might not be resilient later. We're not going to get everything right, so we're going to need those strong safety-net programs." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If you think you've seen this movie before, prior to "partnering with governors, employers, and training partners to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy" with RAISE US, Raimondo and Holcomb partnered with governors, employers and training partners to help U.S. K-12 students make a successful transition to a CS economy with the Governors for Computer Science coalition.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft's free Extended Security Updates program has been extended by a year.
The Archdiocese of San Francisco is officially filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the wake of numerous claims of child sexual abuse allegedly committed by priests filed against it, according to an announcement Monday.
Half a decade later and I still remember his voice. A young man lies on the ground, begging, pleading, screaming as another man, swinging a machete, forces him to place his right arm on a small wooden bench. The attacker wants to make things easier on himself.
But it was never going to be easy.
The assailant begins hacking away. Swinging the panga again and again and again, taunting his victim as he delivers the blows. It unfolds slowly. You learn that even for a strong man with a large, sharp blade, it’s difficult to amputate an arm. Excruciatingly difficult.
It’s got to be the longest 1 minute and 18 seconds ever. After the final swing, you see the victim kicking his legs back and forth — in a way I’ve never seen another human move — writhing in agony on the ground.
For a while, my sources in conflict zones, and others who knew I investigated atrocities, would regularly send me such gruesome videos. There was the man lying in a street in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an assailant with a machete attempts to cut off his leg below the knee; I can still remember the exact sound of his cries. There’s the video of the captured Kurdish fighters. I recall how the second woman to be killed — just before she’s shot, point blank, in the head — watches the execution of her comrade. She doesn’t plead or cry or even flinch.
I would dutifully watch the videos, analyze them, and then pitch an article if I could make something of the footage. “You are going to die,” said a Cameroonian soldier, speaking to a group of women he referred to as “BH” — shorthand for the terrorist group, Boko Haram. In that video, which I reported on for The Intercept back in 2018, soldiers force their victims to kneel, including a woman with a toddler strapped to her back. One of those men directs the tiny girl to stand next to her mother. He then pulls the little girl’s shirt over her head, blindfolding her. You can guess what follows.
Videos of war zone violence, from Myanmar to Ukraine to the Middle East, have proliferated even more in the years since. Drones chasing panicked soldiers, or even toying with their quarry, before killing them, have grown into a popular modern motif. And graphic video of ambushes, executions, and traditional trophy “photos” are a commonplace. This type of footage, which used to lurk at LiveLeak and deeper recesses of the internet, is now more ubiquitous, circulating in more accessible online locales like Reddit.
Watching footage of such slaughter comes with a price. In 2015, Eyewitness Media Hub conducted a survey of people who often work with graphic “user-generated content.” Even back then, more than half of the 209 respondents reported that they viewed distressing media several times weekly. Twelve percent of the responding journalists and almost a quarter of the human rights and humanitarian workers said they viewed such traumatic content daily. Forty percent of respondents said that viewing such distressing images and video had a negative impact on their personal lives, leaving them with feelings of isolation, flashbacks, nightmares, and other stress-related symptoms. One quarter reported high or even very high “professional adverse effects.” More recently, a 2023 study of 300 Pakistani journalists found more than 66 percent reported experiencing indirect trauma.
“Intrusive recollections — re-seeing traumatic images one has been working with — are not unusual,” wrote Gavin Rees at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, where I was once a fellow. “Our brains are designed to form vivid pictures of disturbing things, so you may experience images popping back into consciousness at unexpected moments.”
Strange as it may sound, some gruesome videos have had more staying power than horrors I saw in person.
I’ve certainly found this to be true. As a conflict and crisis reporter, I saw some disturbing things in the field which lodged in my brain. But strange as it may sound, some gruesome videos have had more staying power than horrors I saw in person. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve also encountered among other journalists, soldiers, veterans, and witnesses of war violence. I once knew a man who saw something incredibly traumatic — an almost unthinkable atrocity — which his mind blocked out almost entirely. He watched a movie where nearly the same type of murder-spectacle played out and was horrified. He told me that after watching the film, he couldn’t believe someone would do such a thing — and yet, he had seen exactly that same horror show.
In recent months, my laptop has been filling up with a different type of snuff film. The footage is very similar to those Cameroonian clips: defenseless people being slaughtered as the murderers film. In these cases, however, the videos are shared not by some low-ranking murderer or accomplice-in-arms. The first of them was posted on social media by the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, President Donald Trump. Several later videos were posted online by self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The most recent clips have been shared by a military command headed by a four-star Marine Corps general, Southern Command chief Gen. Francis L. Donovan.
Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 200 civilians, since September 2025.
Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings. These summary executions are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial. After each of these double or triple or mass murders, Trump, Hegseth, or SOUTHCOM have posted a video of those civilians being executed from above.
Snuff films have become a signature of the second Trump administration. Just eight days after Trump took office for a second time, Sebastian Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on the National Security Council, said he presented Trump with a target in Somalia. “Kill him!’” Trump replied, and the man was slain in an airstrike. “He declassified the video because the president wanted to post it. So he posts the video of the hammers of hell being dropped on this ISIS leader,” Gorka recalled with a laugh. “President puts it on Truth Social. … He got 120 million likes in like 18 hours. And at the bottom of that post, he wrote, ‘We will find you and we will kill you.’ Which we have made into the motto of our directorate.”
This cavalier attitude toward turning murder into online content stands in stark contrast to past U.S. military responses to videos of killings released by foes. Twenty years ago, U.S. military officials condemned terrorist “snuff films” — snipers filming their kills — in Iraq. And when it came to a video of two dead American troops shared online, the U.S.-led Multinational Division Baghdad “condemn[ed] the release of the video in the strongest of terms.” The command added: “It demonstrates the barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life.”
A decade later, as the Islamic State group released shocking execution videos, one of Hegseth’s predecessors — Chuck Hagel — expressed revulsion at the group’s spectacle of slaughter. “I think regardless of your background, your experience, just as a human being with having some sense of decency and respect for human life and other people, it makes you sick to your stomach,” he said of the group’s videos of the killing of defenseless civilians. “But it again reminds of the kind of brutality and the barbarism that is afoot in some of these areas of the world.”
But Gorka — back then the national security editor of Breitbart News — had a different takeaway. He also mentioned ISIS’s brutality but seemingly with more than a hint of admiration. “Every American, everybody who stands for the values of this republic needs to watch these videos because then you understand the nature of the threat of the brutality of the people we’re facing,” he said of ISIS’s snuff films in 2014. “It’s very, very slick. Think about one thing — just two weeks ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda, issued a 55-minute lecture in Arabic. … That’s not going to bring you recruits. That’s not going to further your cause as a jihadist. These people do instant little messages. They do these short videos. They have a very, very professional audio/visual social media crew.”
Whether or not Gorka has been the driving force behind the snuff film fixation, the Trump administration seems to be larded up with MAGA minions channeling their inner ISIS. When the Iran war began, military officials began spoon-feeding Trump so-called highlight reels of strikes on targets, according to reporting by NBC: “The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of ‘stuff blowing up.’”
The White House has then taken such footage and spliced in clips from action films, TV shows, and video games to create online content. In one, the White House combined clips from Nintendo’s Wii Sports with videos of attacks on Iran. Another — captioned “STRIKE” — featured a former professional bowler, anthropomorphic AI bowling pins labeled “Iranian regime officials,” a fake fighter jet, and real airstrike footage. Videos of airstrikes were also combined with short clips — “Gladiator,” “Braveheart,” “John Wick,” “Superman,” “Better Call Saul,” “Dragon Ball Z” — to create “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” a video posted by the White House and eagerly shared online by top administration officials. It ends with a voiceover saying “flawless victory” — an audio clip from the video game “Mortal Kombat.”
“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie,” Ben Stiller, who directed and starred in the movie “Tropic Thunder,” featured in the aforementioned Justice video, wrote on social media. Three months later, the White House’s murderous mash-up remains on X.
The White House employs a media strategy that melds influence operations with influencer culture, muddying the news cycle, laundering lies, and countering critical coverage by flooding the zone with shoddy propaganda, TikTok-style memes, rancid AI slop, and music videos. “We’re here. We’re in your face. It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic,” Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital media team, told the Washington Post last year, after countering criticism of its brutal anti-immigrant policies with social media that turned federal viciousness into a joke. The Trump administration’s viral war porn provides another layer of calloused cruelty obscuring the human costs of America’s global killing spree.
In a 2002 New Yorker essay on images of the suffering wrought by war or torture, Susan Sontag reflected on photographs of Black victims of lynchings from the 1890s to the 1930s. “The lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhumanity. They force us to think about the extent of the evil unleashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it,” she wrote. “The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens, as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree.”
The Trump administration’s snuff films are no less dehumanizing or shameless — even if the victims are censored in the footage — and the cheering replies on social media celebrating the boat strikes and murder memes are the modern-day equivalent of those churchgoers’ grins. But unlike the singular images of horrific violence meted out on black victims across the U.S., we are — 100 years later — drowning in endless videos of boat strikes and drone attacks and impacting missiles and bombs dropped on apartment buildings. The voyeuristic nature of the content dehumanizes the victims and debases us all.
Trump, Hegseth, Gorka, and Donovan might be immune to any shame, regret, or guilt. Serial killers — people who murder a series of victims over a period of time — often lack empathy or remorse. But the entire kill chain involved in strikes and the propaganda apparatus that transforms footage of murders into social media content is filled with thousands of people — military personnel, members of the intelligence community, White House workers, and others — for whom these videos might not be so easy to dismiss and forget.
Most of the Trump administration’s boat strike footage plays like the movies of his childhood, flickering black-and-white footage, and the movies of his parents’ youth, silent films. You don’t hear the explosion of a missile’s impact or the cries of the wounded and dying. In that respect, it’s different than a homemade video of a young man having his arm hacked off with a machete. Those sounds, those cries got stuck in my head — more so than even the visual horror. The Americans who make the snuff films possible might be spared this. But in the end, that might actually be worse.
A veteran once told me of a murder he replayed again and again in his head for the rest of his life. Like the boat strike footage, he said there was no sound. That’s what he said was so terrifying. This veteran always saw the victim, mouth agape, screaming in agony. But he could never conjure a soundtrack. It was awful. Unnerving. Maddening. Agonizing. It caused his head to ache, his chest to tighten, and his guts to twist into knots. This horrific hush was deafening. He told me that, decades and decades later, it was — above all — this “silent scream” that tortured him.
The post The Trump Administration’s Shameless Snuff-Film Fixation appeared first on The Intercept.
Now 40% off, this fast-drying and lightweight hair dryer will be the only one you reach for.
The first full moon of the summer gets its name from a Native American source.
Police found man, who died of a heart attack, next to his girlfriend by abandoned vehicle in wooded area of Alabama
A man recently died in Alabama from a heart attack while trying to discard his girlfriend’s body after fatally strangling her, according to authorities.
At the center of the unusually macabre case was Daniel Robbins, 44, and Jessica Folds, 47.
Continue reading...Tim Ream not feeling additional pressure for knockouts
USA play Bosnia and Herzegovina on Wednesday
It’s easy to assume that the onset of the World Cup knockout rounds brings immediate tension. These are the games where legacies are crystalized in a zero-sum manner – every heroic turn paired with a Baggio-like blemish. Then again, the round of 32 is new. The field doesn’t truly feel like it’s been narrowed down yet.
So maybe the ho-hum start of the tournament had brought the temperature down as Tim Ream fielded questions from the press on Monday, hours before boarding a plane to the Bay Area and ending the team’s lengthy stay here in southern California. The knockout round journey is about to begin.
Continue reading...Arbitrator rules California State University system violated law when it dismissed Sang Hea Kil, who now plans to sue
A tenured professor who was fired last year over her pro-Palestinian activism has won her job back and is suing her university over the termination.
Last November, Sang Hea Kil, a justice studies professor at San José State University in California, became the first tenured faculty member to be dismissed from a US public university following nationwide campus protests over Israel’s enduring war in Gaza. After several appeals, an arbitrator last week ruled that the California State University system had violated the law and ordered it to reinstate her. Kil had previously filed a lawsuit against CSU, which it accused of “discriminatory and retaliatory attempts to silence her”.
Continue reading...Report says once-in-a-generation changes needed to tackle why such children are lowest-performing large demographic
High-performing primary and secondary schools in England should be encouraged to admit more disadvantaged pupils from white working-class backgrounds to help reverse a continuing crisis in underachievement, an independent inquiry has said.
The independent inquiry into white working-class educational outcomes concluded the current education system was “not set up to serve white working-class children and families”.
Continue reading...US president posts that meeting will take place on Tuesday in Qatari capital after exchange of fire in strait of Hormuz
Donald Trump has claimed that Iran has agreed to hold talks in Doha after the US and Tehran traded fire in the strait of Hormuz this weekend, threatening the collapse of a ceasefire meant to keep the strait open and pave the way for peace talks.
In a terse post on Truth Social, the US president claimed the meetings would take place in the Qatari capital, as US media reported that the two sides had agreed to halt strikes after tit-for-tat attacks that once again cut off shipping through the crucial waterway.
Continue reading...AALBORG, Denmark, June 29, 2026 — VAST Data has announced that Aalborg University (AAU), one of Denmark’s leading research institutions, has selected the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS) as the data foundation for a new on-premises AI research environment, delivered in collaboration with Advania Denmark.
As research teams increasingly rely on AI and data-intensive workflows, Aalborg University is addressing the growing challenge of managing large, complex datasets across fragmented systems, an issue that can slow experimentation, limit collaboration, and delay real-world outcomes. By adopting the VAST AI OS, AAU is establishing a unified, multi-petabyte-scale environment in which data is continuously available, enabling researchers to move faster from data to insight across critical domains including sustainability, healthcare, and advanced engineering.
Designed to keep GPU-intensive workloads continuously fed with data, this new system will support real-time analytics and secure, multi-tenant research environments. By bringing data, compute, and AI services together into a unified system, the VAST AI OS eliminates the need to move and stage data across different infrastructures, reducing operational overhead and enabling efficient and scalable research workflows.
“AAU works strategically to future-proof its HPC infrastructure,” said Jacob-Steen Madsen, Deputy Director IT Services, Aalborg University. “Over an extended period, we have analysed different platforms and selected the solution that best matches researchers’ needs – with a particular focus on security and digital sovereignty.”
As part of its IT modernization strategy, Aalborg University will consolidate its legacy system into a single, unified environment powered by the VAST AI OS. This includes the migration of several petabytes of data from an aging CEPH-based research storage platform, reducing operational complexity while introducing advanced data services natively within the system.
By moving to a unified operating model, AAU gains a scalable foundation for AI and research workloads, enabling researchers to work with data more efficiently while improving total cost of ownership and simplifying infrastructure management.
“AI is no longer constrained by models alone, it is constrained by systems,” said Christopher Huggins, Managing Director of AI & HPC, EMEA, VAST Data. “By constantly moving data between tiers and pipelines, you’re slowing everything down. With VAST, Aalborg is building a system in which data is always available at full performance, researchers can focus on what matters most to them, discovery, instead of wasting precious time on IT infrastructure.”
Advania Denmark played a central role in delivering the solution, working closely with Aalborg University to align the deployment with its operational, security, and governance requirements.
“Universities are increasingly being asked to support AI workloads alongside traditional research computing, often on infrastructure that was never designed for both,” said Tommy Nielsen, Sales Director AI Foundation, Advania Denmark. “Aalborg University is taking a forward-looking approach by creating a platform that can support data-intensive research, AI development, and future innovation within a single environment.”.
With the deployment expected to become operational in August, Aalborg University establishes a modern AI-ready research environment designed to accelerate discovery, support advanced AI workflows such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and vector-based analysis, and provide a future-proof foundation for continued innovation.
More from HPCwire
About VAST Data
VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.
Source: VAST Data
The post VAST Data Powers Aalborg University’s AI Research Cloud with Advania Danmark appeared first on HPCwire.
Two sides agree to try to make bilateral relationship ‘more balanced’ after weeks of threats
The EU and China have agreed to enter three months of talks to try to avoid a trade war over the bloc’s €360bn (£310bn) annual import/export imbalance.
In their first joint statement in seven years, the two sides agreed in Brussels to open a formal trade consultation after weeks of threats and recriminations from China if the EU imposed any measures to stop the flood of goods and components into the bloc.
Continue reading...Plans include greater regional power, public ownership of utilities and the end of trickle-down economics
Andy Burnham’s speech at the People’s History Museum in Manchester was the first time we saw the man likely to be Britain’s next prime minister set out his vision for power.
He promised “good growth in every postcode” in a speech that focused on a significant transfer of power out of Whitehall to local communities and a new economic vision. But what might this mean in practice?
It will be about offering new opportunities to extend devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by taking power deeper down.
They require radical change if the country is to get back on track.
All parts of the UK should now be given the chance to develop … focusing on the things that most matter to them.
We will ensure all parts of the UK are able to take greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport …
Britain has lost almost 1.5m council homes since the 1980s and around the same number of people are now on housing waiting lists and have been there for a very long time.
Shouldn’t we make our high streets the symbols of Britain’s renaissance?
We will support every region to set clear and credible industrial ambitions – and provide the support to achieve them.
We need a complete rethink of how we support the next generation to succeed, and it has to start with the education system.
We will set out 10-year plans to bring down the cost of … essentials to individuals, families and businesses.
All of it backed by the stability that comes from sound public finances, as I said before, and the discipline of our current fiscal rules.
Continue reading...If you're planning a summer vacation, you'll need a good book as a companion.
Interest earnings made with an $80,000 CD account will be substantial and available relatively quickly.
Draymond Green declines player option, freeing up space
Curry and James’s battles defined NBA for years
Draymond Green declined his $27.6m player option on Monday, signaling the Golden State Warriors could be preparing to make some big moves.
ESPN reports that the Warriors needed some financial flexibility if they are going to pursue free agent LeBron James and complete a trade for Anthony Davis with the Washington Wizards.
Continue reading...Court sides against Republicans after deciding earlier this term to let Louisiana effectively dismantle Voting Rights Act
The US supreme court sided against national Republicans and Donald Trump’s administration to allow mail-in ballots that arrive after election day to be counted, upholding the law in more than a dozen states.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) had challenged a Mississippi state law allowing mailed ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of election day, so long as they were postmarked by election day.
This article was amended on 29 June 2026 to correct some misspelled names
Continue reading...The Iran war has significantly driven up the cost of fuel, airfare and other U.S. goods, according to Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.
RoseMarie Terenzio, who was JFK Jr.'s former chief of staff and planned his secret wedding to Carolyn Bessette, said she doesn't think Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are getting married at Madison Square Garden.
AutoLabs is a new agentic AI system that translates experimental goals into robot-specific language
RICHLAND, Wash., June 29, 2026 — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) use a slew of autonomous robots for designing and implementing experiments. However, setting up an experiment on an autonomous lab robot is surprisingly slow. The effort requires a lengthy back-and-forth between a scientist and an engineer to design the experimental steps—a process that can take weeks.
Systems engineer Heather Job works with autonomous laboratory robot Big Kahuna. Job helped develop a new AI program that can help researchers seamlessly design experiments for the robot to conduct.
Photograph credit: Andrea Starr | PNNL
To help researchers work more efficiently, a PNNL team developed a generative agentic AI that can quickly translate experimental goals into instructions for a laboratory robot. The translation agent, called AutoLabs, is currently designed to operate with Big Kahuna, an automated robot built by Unchained Labs that researchers use to study new and existing battery materials. The system can carry out multi-step experimental workflows, including mixing, heating, stirring and filtering samples with minimal human intervention. By automating these processes, researchers can perform 5 to 10 times more experiments than would be practical by hand.
The team published a paper in Scientific Reports about AutoLabs on June 25, and the software is also available for other researchers to download on GitHub.
“AutoLabs helps pave the way for a new generation of AI-driven automatic assistants for chemistry research,” said Gihan Panapitiya, a data scientist at PNNL and lead author on the paper. “Agents like AutoLabs can act as automated assistants, as well as reliable, self-correcting partners in the complex and creative process of scientific discovery.”
From Design to Experimentation
Autonomous science is not new, but it can get complicated. To design an experiment for an instrument like Big Kahuna, the scientist and instrument engineer must have an equal understanding of the experimental goals. The engineer has specialized knowledge about the instrument, while the scientist has specialized knowledge about the experiment—but this knowledge doesn’t necessarily overlap.
The collaborative effort to design an experiment that Big Kahuna can conduct can take weeks while the scientist and engineer work together to refine the steps.
This is where paper coauthor Heather Job comes in. As a systems engineer at PNNL, Job’s role is to operate and program Big Kahuna and train others how to use it. She would work with a scientist to design an experiment for Big Kahuna.
“We’re lucky in the fact that we have software that goes along with our robots. But unless you have a lot of training and you know what the robot is capable of, it can take a really long time to translate what you’d like to do into the robot’s specific operations,” Job said.
So Panapitiya and colleagues Emily Saldanha and Olivia Hess set out to explore whether they could create AI agents using readily available large language models to make Big Kahuna more accessible to more scientists. The result, AutoLabs, is an agentic AI system built on an OpenAI model. Agentic AI systems operate with several specialized “sub-agents” that are programmed with unique sets of expertise. Once given a task, they all act under one “supervisor” agent.
Think of a computer program that could book an entire vacation for you: it might have sub-agents that check plane ticket prices, hotel deals, even the weather over the dates of travel. For AutoLabs, the sub-agents work together to analyze a user’s experimental request and translate that request into specific instructions for Big Kahuna.
Putting AutoLabs to the Test
Once Panapitiya and the team built AutoLabs, it was time to test whether it could successfully translate a desired experiment into instructions compatible with Big Kahuna.
The team developed five different experiments for Big Kahuna, with each experiment increasing in complexity. They then told AutoLabs what tasks they’d like Big Kahuna to complete. All the tasks involved mixing, heating or stirring different chemicals together, but the more complex experiments involved more chemicals, more constraints and more math.
For instance, the simplest experimental task involved creating and mixing combinations of naphthalene and methanol in a single set of vials, with each sample containing a different amount of each chemical. A more complicated task involved multiple sets of vials and performing a chemical reaction using more than two chemicals, with other steps like heating and cooling at specific temperatures, stirring at specific rotations per minute and transferring chemicals from one vial to another.
In every instance, AutoLabs successfully translated the descriptions of the experiments into steps for Big Kahuna, Panapitiya said. That means it’s performing nearly as well as a scientist who is well trained to use the laboratory robot.
“With AutoLabs, human experts can learn to use Big Kahuna quickly and guide the overall experimental strategy while the AI agent manages the granular implementation and validation,” Job said. “The collaboration creates a partnership that’s more robust than either a human or robot could achieve alone.”
She added that AutoLabs is not meant to replace a scientist, but to enhance the scientist’s process with speed and efficiency.
The team is now building out AutoLabs to conduct literature reviews and to learn over time, which means adding memory, Panapitiya said. AutoLabs is also flexible in its design and can be adapted to any kind of autonomous laboratory system.
“This iteration of AutoLabs was developed to generate hardware files for Big Kahuna, but its experiment design capabilities extend beyond this one robot,” Panapitiya said.
The work was supported by PNNL’s Generative AI for Science, Energy, and Security Science & Technology Investment under the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program.
About PNNL
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Source: JoAnna Wendel, PNNL
The post PNNL: Agentic AI Bot Helps Scientists Speak to Robots, Speed up Experiments appeared first on HPCwire.
The USDA says almost 11% of SNAP payments contain errors, almost double the threshold set by Congress. Here's what is going on.
Negotiations are typically less stressful if you know how to improve the odds of reaching a settlement agreement.
Four women among the dead and two people arrested after incident in city west of Hamburg
Four women and two men have been killed in a shooting at a youth welfare facility in northern Germany, police said. Two people including the suspected shooter were arrested.
The incident took place in Stade, a city close to the port city of Hamburg, on Monday afternoon. Police said the victims, employees of the shelter, were all shot inside the building. Five died at the scene and the sixth died in hospital. Police said the death toll could rise.
Continue reading...CNET's latest data shows our readers prefer two providers that avoid hefty fees and lengthy contracts.
The bipartisan committee said it "did not find evidence that your actions violated federal law, Senate rules or related standards of conduct."
In two separate decisions on Monday, a divided Supreme Court considered the president’s power to remove executive officials. In one ruling, the Court held that President Donald Trump has the power to remove a Federal Trade Commission member. However, in a separate narrow ruling, it said the administration failed to allow a Federal Reserve director to argue her case when Trump fired her for cause. Chief Justice Roberts authored the majority opinion in each case.
In Trump v. Slaughter, President Trump removed Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from her position as a commissioner for the FTC. Slaughter countered by suing Trump and others. She claimed her dismissal violated the terms of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which said that FTC commissioners could only be removed by the president for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that Slaughter’s firing violated a New Deal-era precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which established the constitutionality of the removal protections in the act.
On Monday, the Court’s majority officially overturned Humphrey’s Executor in a 6-3 decision from Chief Justice John Roberts—affirming the president’s broad power to remove executive officials from office. “The FTC’s for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution,” Roberts determined. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the chief’s decision.
“Humphrey’s framework . . . has not withstood the test of time,” Roberts wrote on Monday. “We long ago abandoned the notion that there are some powers that are only partly executive.”
The circumstances changed in recent years, Roberts said. “We recognized that the FTC exercises executive power,” Roberts added. “And more than 200 years have passed since we recognized that the Constitution ‘vests the whole executive power in the President’ alone.’”
“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it. Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale,” Roberts concluded.
In a concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the majority but worried about the delegation of too much power to federal agencies. “Congress has endowed formerly independent agencies not just with executive authority, but with enormous legislative and judicial powers as well. And now the President enjoys control over all those powers too. From here, the only sure path is to finish the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor worried the Court’s recent decisions in similar cases concentrated too much power in the executive branch. “The majority’s decision continuing that trend today is egregiously wrong. In this case, the Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time. That decision does not just overrule precedent; it all but ignores that precedent exists.”
“In granting the President this unbridled authority, the Court upends its precedent, misconstrues our history, and sheds any pretense of judicial modesty,” she concluded. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.
For now, Fed governor remains in the job
Also, in Trump v. Cook, the Supreme Court faced a decision about a government request to stay a district court ruling preventing President Trump from firing Lisa Cook. She started serving a 14-year term on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2023. Trump tried to fire Cook this year, alleging mortgage fraud by Cook before her appointment. Under the Federal Reserve Act, the president can only remove members of the Federal Reserve Board “for cause.” The administration sought to lift a preliminary injunction.
In his 5-4 decision for the Court’s majority, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that the District Court’s order should remain in effect pending the conclusion of litigation over Cook’s attempted removal. “The Government has not shown that it is likely to prevail on the legal arguments advanced in its stay application,” he determined. “Acceptance of the Government’s position would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”
Roberts also noted that the Court’s decision was on narrow grounds to allow Cook the opportunity to respond before her termination. And in a telling comment, Roberts said the Court did not need to address Cook’s due process argument, “for the statute alone makes it unlikely that the Government will prevail on appeal as to the validity of the procedures used to fire Cook.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority decision.
In his concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the decision did not rule on the President’s ability to lawfully remove Cook for cause, and any debate about the Fed’s independent status was for Congress to decide. “If the Federal Reserve’s for-cause removal protections are to be eliminated, that change must occur through the legislative process,” he concluded.
Justice Jackson in her concurrence said she joined “the Court in reaching a merits conclusion in this case. Still, on the most important stay considerations (the risk of irreparable harm and the equities) this application is not a close call. The Government misses the mark by a mile.”
In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority ruling was flawed. “The statute authorizing the President to remove Cook for ‘cause’ says nothing about notice or a hearing, so it does not require notice and a hearing. Any other result would violate Article II of the Constitution, under which the President may remove executive officers at will.”
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said the Court acted too soon in accepting the case. “What is before us is simply an application for a stay pending appeal, and the Court should have granted or denied that application in a brief order last fall,” he wrote. “Had we adhered to this well-worn path and decided this application in October, the parties could have continued litigating this case in the lower courts.”
Finally, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with some points made in the other dissents and voiced another concern. “The District Court’s order blocks the President from removing Cook for mortgage fraud, and that is so even if he satisfies the requirements that the Court’s opinion sets out. Under our precedent, that significant interference with the President’s removal authority clears the ‘irreparable harm’ threshold.”
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
A natural disaster provides unforgiving clarity in a country already reeling from years of crisis and the unlawful US seizure of Nicolás Maduro
The devastation wrought by an earthquake is shaped by what happened before and after it as much as by the shock itself. The twin tremors that hit Venezuela moments apart last Wednesday were its biggest since 1900, at 7.2 and 7.5, and were shallow temblors, which often cause more destruction than deeper ones of similar magnitude. Aftershocks continued on Monday. At least 1,450 people have died, with tens of thousands reported missing and more than 3,000 injured. The UN estimates that there has been $6.7bn of damage – equivalent to 6% of the country’s GDP – including key infrastructure; 38 hospitals are said to need repairs. Unicef says that 1.8 million people need aid.
The toll of such disasters reflects the condition of the nation before they struck, and the state’s capacity to respond. While remarkable rescues in the last few days have brought joy even after the 72-hour window judged crucial to saving lives had closed, the picture is not kind to Venezuela’s leaders.
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Continue reading...Both home equity borrowing options can be smart card debt payoff tools, but it's important to know which one is best.
Caracas and La Guaira affected by 4.6-magnitude tremor as death toll passes 1,700 and humanitarian crisis grows
A strong aftershock has rattled northern Venezuela, sending terrified residents racing on to the streets five days after the twin earthquakes that killed 1,719 people, left tens of thousands missing and triggered a growing humanitarian emergency.
The aftershock early on Monday – which the US Geological Survey measured at a magnitude of 4.6 – shook the capital, Caracas, and the devastated port city of La Guaira, where rescue crews are still hoping to pull as many survivors as possible from the rubble. Colombia’s geological survey put the aftershock’s magnitude at 5.1.
Continue reading...Alaska state officials may have released the greatest sigh of relief on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that federal election laws do not override a state law that permits counting ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days later.
The state law at issue in the high court was actually a Mississippi law. But Alaska’s relief stems from the fact, as noted in its brief filed to support Mississippi, that nearly all Alaskan voters vote by mail. At least 18 other states and territories have similar laws permitting counting of late-arriving ballots.
The decision in Watson v. Republican National Committee is a defeat for Republicans and President Donald Trump who have tried to eliminate or restrict mail-in ballots because, they contend, despite a lack of evidence, that those ballots are rife with fraud.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett led the majority in an unusual lineup that included Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and, in part, Brett Kavanaugh.
In her opinion, Barrett explained that the “defining element” of an “election,” the term used in three federal statutes, has always been the electorate’s choice of a candidate.
“That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote– as it is in Mississippi,” she wrote. “But the [federal] Election-Day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”
Barrett noted that the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) reinforced her view that while federal law dictates when ballots must be cast, “state law dictates when they must be received.” UOCAVA permits the late receival of overseas military and absentee ballots.
In his dissent, Alito agreed that the defining element of an election is the electorate’s choice of a candidate, but that’s where his agreement ended. He and Barrett sparred over history, text, and court precedents.
“The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement,” he wrote. “Election day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days.”
Alito said that “two centuries of historical practice” reinforce his arguments. “From this country’s founding until the late 20th century, election-day ballot collection was the near-uniform practice, with only a few late-arriving exceptions.”
He also warned that the majority’s decision “spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans’ confidence in election integrity.
But Barrett countered, “as we have said time and again, however, policy arguments are properly directed to legislatures, not courts. The question today is not whether requiring ballots to be received by election day is a good or bad idea; the question is whether the idea has made its way into the United States Code.”
Congress is currently enmeshed in another election-related battle over the so called SAVE Act that would require voter ID and other steps before accessing the right to vote. Mail-in ballot restrictions were at one point also part of the legislation.
The justices have one final election-related case to decide. In National Republican Senatorial Campaign v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign is challenging limits on spending by political parties in coordination with candidates.
On Tuesday, the justices will issue the remaining decisions of the term, including Trump v. Barbara, the Trump Administration’s challenge to the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause.
Marcia Coyle is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily. She was the Supreme Court Correspondent for The National Law Journal and PBS NewsHour who has covered the Supreme Court for more than three decades.
Party’s old guard abandons ‘blue no matter what’ banner to push for a more formal break with progressive wing
After a string of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) primary victories, the loudest response from much of the Democratic establishment’s old guard was not reconciliation, but escalation.
Over the last few days, prominent party figures have moved away from unifying under a “blue no matter who” banner to push for a more formal break with their left flank, and said the moment may have arrived for Democrats to confront their more socialist wing.
Continue reading...Mangione, accused of killing health executive Brian Thompson, has pleaded not guilty in state and federal cases
Luigi Mangione ’s Manhattan federal court trial related to to the murder of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson is scheduled to start in January 2027.
Mangione stands accused of the 4 December 2024 killing of Thompson on a New York City street. He faces murder and weapons charges in his state-level case, and stalking counts in the federal proceedings.
Continue reading...Legal and labor experts say Trump v Slaughter decision upends settled constitutional law in favor of ‘loyalty test’
As a reality TV show host, Donald Trump rose to fame with the catchphrase: “You’re fired!”. On Monday, the US supreme court handed him – and all future presidents – the power to fire leaders of independent agencies or commissions, overturning 90 years of court precedent curbing executive power.
While Trump celebrated the decision on Truth Social as a “big win”, labor advocates, unions, and consumer advocacy groups criticized the supreme court decision on the case, Trump v Slaughter, and warned of the long-term impacts for democracy in the US. Rebecca Slaughter, the Federal Trade Commissioner fired last March, said she was “profoundly disappointed about today’s decision” during a press call.
Court rules Trump can fire leaders of independent agencies
Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional privacy protections
Court rules Trump’s firing of Lisa Cook from Fed was unconstitutional
Court upholds law to count mail-in ballots arriving after election day
Court rejects Trump’s bid to appeal $5m E Jean Carroll
Continue reading...Cloudflare says AI agents now generate most web traffic, marking a historic shift that could reshape how websites, businesses, and people interact online.
The political action arm of a Jewish anti-Zionist group best known for staging sit-ins to protest genocide in the halls of power is endorsing its first-ever candidate for U.S. Senate: Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
Jewish Voice for Peace Action is building off of the momentum from a string of victories for the insurgent left in Democratic primaries, where voters have repeatedly chosen outspoken pro-Palestine candidates to represent their party in the November midterms. The nominations signal a sea change in the Democratic Party and its electorate — adding a new class of members to Congress willing to question the United States’ unconditional support for Israel and putting heat on an entrenched political establishment.
“Abdul has been a stalwart and unapologetic defender of Palestinian rights and freedom, and his campaign has demonstrated a moral consistency that centers justice and equality for all people,” said Beth Miller, JVP Action’s political director. “This campaign is a historic opportunity to bring a leader into office who will fight for our communities here at home, and to reimagine a US foreign policy that supports freedom and justice, not genocide and apartheid.”
Ahead of the August 4 primary, El-Sayed is locked in a contentious three-way race with Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., a centrist lawmaker with the backing of the Democratic establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, including its flagship warhawk lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a self-styled progressive who has drawn endorsements from figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the liberal pro-Israel group J Street.
El-Sayed, who has the endorsements of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., as well as progressive Squad members in Congress like Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, has positioned himself to the left of both his opponents and has been a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since long before he launched his campaign. While many voters cite affordability and economic pressure as their top electoral concerns — especially amid rising prices spurred by the U.S. and Israel’s unpopular war on Iran — Israel’s genocide and apartheid conditions for Palestinian people have continued to animate political organizing across several congressional races this cycle.
That’s at least in part thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been instrumental in drawing public attention to the genocide in Gaza by organizing a wave of anti-genocide demonstrations across the U.S. – from college campuses to Wall Street and the Capitol. Its political advocacy and lobbying arm is a main backer of the Block the Bombs bill in the House, which has become a litmus test for progressive candidates in congressional races.
“There is a marked shift in the way that movements, organizations and voters are showing up to send a very clear message: that Palestine cannot be removed from a broader progressive agenda,” Miller said.
It’s considered harder to elevate a more radical candidate to the Senate, where a politician has to win statewide election, than it might be in a deep-blue congressional district with a progressive electorate. But Miller said El-Sayed was a standout — in the seven years since its 2019 establishment, Jewish Voice for Peace Action had never seen a Senate candidate that seemed worth its endorsement. JVP Action also backed candidates in the recent House races where the left won in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, though its preferred candidate lost in San Francisco. In Colorado’s primary election on Tuesday, JVP Action is also supporting Melat Kiros, an anti-war House candidate who was fired from her job as an attorney for refusing to take down her post on the genocide in Palestine.
The bulk of El-Sayed’s platform focuses on affordability, championing Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires, and labor protections against the AI industry replacing jobs. Yet his position on Israel has drawn perhaps the most scrutiny from his opponents.
Moderate Democrats condemned El-Sayed’s decision to invite influential streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker to a pair of campaign rallies at Michigan universities in the spring, claiming that appearing with the vocal anti-Zionist streamer was insensitive to the Jewish community in the wake of a horrific March shooting at a Michigan synagogue. McMorrow, whose husband and daughter are Jewish, compared Piker to the far-right, neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes in an interview with Jewish Insider, and she repeated that it was insensitive for El-Sayed to stump with Piker after the synagogue attack on CNN last week.
“I believe in freedom of speech,” she told CNN, “but we have a very diverse population here in Michigan — we have the largest Arab American population in the country, alongside a very significant Jewish population. We need to keep everyone together, not just to win, but to govern and represent this state appropriately.”
El-Sayed has repeatedly condemned the synagogue attack and decried the use of actual antisemitic violence as a cudgel to deflect criticism of Israel’s violence against Palestinians. “He knows our community intimately and cares for it,” said Miller of JVP Action, pointing out that El-Sayed grew up in close proximity to the Jewish community in Michigan, attending bar and bat mitzvahs and Seders and spending time at shul.
“Many candidates, many in the establishment of both parties, treat Palestinian safety, treat Jewish safety like political footballs that they can use to divide our communities in order to score political points,” Miller said. “What I have seen from Dr. El-Sayed, he is not going to play into bad faith smears and attacks.”
El-Sayed had not only weathered the political storm but may have benefited from the added attention. In polls over the past several months, he has consistently led Stevens and McMorrow, though margins remain slim in the tight three-way race. One recent poll by Zenith Research showed El-Sayed outperforming his Democratic opponents in a November general against the likely Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, largely due to El-Sayed’s popularity among progressive and younger voters.
The June poll also found that a plurality of Michigan voters — 46 percent — showed support for ending all U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, in accordance with El-Sayed’s campaign position. McMorrow says she supports blocking offensive weapons shipments, leaving room for so-called “defensive” systems like the Iron Dome, and Stevens supports continuing the unconditional flow of arms to Israel.
“At a time when too many have tried to pit communities against one another,” El-Sayed said in a statement, “JVP Action has shown that standing against antisemitism and standing up for the lives and dignity of Palestinians are rooted in the same commitment to our shared humanity. I’m deeply humbled and energized by their support and the movement they’ve built.”
The post Abdul El-Sayed Becomes First Senate Candidate Backed by Pro-Palestine Jewish Group appeared first on The Intercept.
No damage reported in 4.6 magnitude aftershock; At least 1,450 people are known to have died in initial quakes but number is expected to rise
In an update to X, El Salvador’s president has said that after hours of intensive work rescuers have freed Aaron Levi Cantillo Vargas, 21, who was trapped under a building in Caraballeda, La Guaira, calling the operation “a miracle”.
“This rescue was made possible thanks to the coordinated effort of the rescue teams from Venezuela, Mexico, and El Salvador, who worked tirelessly to reach Aaron,” Nayib Bukele wrote in a social media post, adding that the 21-year-old is now receiving specialised medical attention.
Continue reading...The move follows the media giant's spin-off of Versant as a separate business.
Tehran believes it should control the shipping route but its neighbour has its own plans for reopening it
The strait of Hormuz is Iran’s chief bargaining tool in the negotiations with the US and so it was always likely to be the greatest point of contention. Every inch of the 24-mile-wide waterway is being contested in a test of wills and patience.
For Iran, the continuation of the dispute is not a problem so long as it does not lose control.
Continue reading...Former NBA players Malik Beasley and Ed Davis have been indicted on illegal sports gambling charges, authorities announced Monday.
The Supreme Court overturned a 90-year-old decision that allowed Congress to shield members of certain independent agencies from being fired by the president at will.
The Supreme Court allowed Lisa Cook to continue in her post as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors while legal proceedings over President Trump's attempt to fire her continue.
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states can count mail ballots that are cast by Election Day but arrive later, rejecting a GOP challenge to a Mississippi law.
Both sides will “stand down for now,” a U.S. official said, as talks are set to continue in Qatar. Iran hasn’t publicly confirmed the meeting.
Jury found Trump liable in 2023 for sexually abusing former magazine columnist and defaming her
The US supreme court on Monday declined Donald Trump’s request to review a New York jury’s 2023 verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll, and then defaming her.
The justices did not provide an explanation or reasoning, and no public dissents were noted. The decision leaves intact the $5m civil judgment against Trump that was returned by the jury after the two-week trial in 2023.
Continue reading...YouTube's subscription hub expands with this latest addition.
Red warnings issued in Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Balkans, with authorities urging people to stay indoors
Parts of central, eastern and southern Europe sweltered on Monday as the “heat dome” behind last week’s record-breaking temperatures shifted east, bringing dangerous conditions to a new swathe of the continent.
Budapest is forecast to exceed 40C on Tuesday, according to models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
Continue reading...Former parliamentary private secretary to Rishi Sunak admits offence relating to betting on date of 2024 election
A former Conservative MP who was Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide when he was prime minster has pleaded guilty to cheating at gambling with bets on the date of the 2024 general election.
Craig Williams, who was the MP for both Montgomeryshire and Cardiff North, admitted in court to using confidential information to place bets on the timing of the contest.
Continue reading...Makerfield MP and hopeful prime minister says he will ‘bring about biggest rebalancing of power the country has ever seen’
Asked what she thought of Andy Burnham not taking questions this morning, Badenoch said:
Andy Burnham doesn’t like questions. Nigel Farage doesn’t like questions. Even Keir Starmer in parliament, he doesn’t like questions here.
If you want somebody who can answer questions, please come to me. I will answer all of your questions.
I know that it should not be Ed Miliband. He is the single person who has done the most to deindustrialise our country and make us poorer. He should not be rewarded with an even more powerful job where he can completely bankrupt the country.
Continue reading...Credit cards can bridge the budgetary gap when paying for vet care, but they're not the best long-term option.
Law enforcement’s use of warrants sweeping smartphone location data requires privacy protections, court rules
The US supreme court has ruled that law enforcement’s use of sprawling warrants that sweep up smartphone location data requires privacy protections under the fourth amendment, in a boost to critics who view their use as an unconstitutional dragnet.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion, which held that the sensitive data scooped up by “geofence warrants” counts as a fourth amendment search, and offers individuals a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, even if they may be in a public area.
Continue reading...Caroline Simpson worked closely with Burnham when he was Greater Manchester mayor
Andy Burnham has asked the current chief executive of the Greater Manchester combined authority to be his deputy chief of staff, leading the new No 10 North, if as expected he becomes prime minister in three weeks’ time.
Caroline Simpson, who worked closely with Burnham when he was mayor, will be based in Manchester to oversee the devolution of power and resources across the UK that he promised would transform the country.
Continue reading...The Supreme Court declined to take up former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz's case alleging CNN defamed him.
The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether Arizona can impose voting rules, including a measure that requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote on a state form.
The dispute arose after New York's Department of Health issued an emergency rule that required healthcare workers to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
Move comes amid growing outbreak in Texas and after two-month halt on mandatory shots
The US military is racing to vaccinate new recruits after a two-month halt on mandatory flu shots – but it’s a temporary reprieve, as the shots will soon expire and new doses will not be available for months.
Officials will need to lean on other prevention measures to contain the growing flu outbreak at Lackland air force base in San Antonio, Texas, experts say.
Continue reading...German police say two people were apprehended after ‘numerous’ shots were fired at a youth care facility in Stade
Meanwhile, Ukraine is bracing to absorb the impact of the heatwave on its energy network, already pummelled by Russian attacks over more than four years of war, AFP reported.
Grid operators in at least five regions – from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west to Zaporizhzhia on the frontline in the south – announced temporary restrictions on energy usage would be in force during parts of Tuesday.
Continue reading...NSW transport minister says growth in shared schemes is a positive development but pedestrians are ‘crying out for order’
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Shared ebikes cluttering Sydney footpaths will be kicked to the kerb in the coming months under funding to establish marked parking bays, the New South Wales government says.
On Tuesday, the state government announced $6.6m in funding for Sydney local councils to nominate and paint dedicated parking areas. Each council will be given up to $200,000.
Continue reading...Chrome has been automatically downloading Gemini Nano (a 4GB AI model) to users' computers without notification or an easy way to prevent it.
In the space of a week, two major musicals, Waitress and Beetlejuice, and a $20m opera were forced to cancel shows amid skyrocketing costs, putting hundreds out of work
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Australia’s theatre industry is in desperate need of tax reform to keep it alive, experts have warned the federal government, after two major touring musicals and a $20m opera cancelled shows in the space of a week, citing skyrocketing costs and soft box office sales.
Broadway musical Waitress, starring Rob Mills and Natalie Bassingthwaighte, announced on Sunday that it would end in Melbourne on 19 July and will not tour to Sydney in August as planned.
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Continue reading...Gabriel Garland, 24, was involved in New Year’s Eve altercation but not charged with any offence
A Love Island contestant has reportedly left the programme over his connection to a stabbing in London.
Gabriel Garland, 24, was removed from the ITV2 dating series after briefly featuring in an episode on Sunday night as a Casa Amor villa boy.
Continue reading...A unanimous federal jury found that a preponderance of evidence supported Carroll's claim that Mr. Trump sexually abused her.
Former Titans RB was diagnosed with disease in 2025
Johnson was NFL offensive player of year in 2009
Chris Johnson, one of the few players to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single NFL season, says he has been diagnosed with ALS.
The 39-year-old made the announcement during an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America. He spoke to the show’s co-anchor Michael Strahan, a former NFL player himself, using a speech device.
Continue reading...
Four years after Congress narrowly approved the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican Senate hopeful in Georgia, blamed the measure for worsening inflation and pointed voters to incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff’s support for the legislation.
Ossoff "cast the deciding vote for the inflation disaster that cost Georgia families at the gas pump, the grocery store, and the border," Collins said in a television ad released June 17.
Collins spokesperson Corbin Keown clarified that the ad referred to the Inflation Reduction Act but did not respond when asked for the campaign’s reasoning that Ossoff cast the "deciding vote."
PolitiFact has a long history of parsing how politicians use the phrase "deciding vote" in election messaging, going back to passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. A "deciding vote" implies that some votes count more than others. Ossoff’s vote for the bill was essential to its passage, but it was no more unique than the votes of 49 other Democrats who voted with him.
Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote — a pivotal role Collins’ GOP allies acknowledged during the 2024 election.
Despite the Inflation Reduction Act’s name, the bill had little to do with inflation. As PolitiFact has reported, economists said an earlier Biden-era law, the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, had a greater impact on inflation, with its pandemic-era infusion of cash directly to Americans and localities while supply lines were disrupted. The year-over-year inflation rate had declined by more than two-thirds since the 2022 bill passed, and many of the bill’s provisions were designed to be phased in over years..
The Inflation Reduction Act is a major piece of legislation that affects climate change initiatives, healthcare and corporate taxation.
Republicans have said the law was "green corporate welfare" standing in the way of free market ideals. Democrats touted how it limited insulin costs and invested in American alternative energy companies.
When asked for comment about Ossoff having the "deciding vote," Ossoff campaign spokesperson Ellie Dougherty said, "Through the Inflation Reduction Act, we capped the cost of insulin and out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors. The IRA has also created tens of thousands of new jobs across the state and supercharged economic development in Georgia."
Ossoff wrote bills to close loopholes created by the legislation, including a portion of the law that provides a production tax credit for American solar energy manufacturers.
The vote was strictly on party lines, with 50 Democrats voting for the measure and 50 Republicans against. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on Aug. 7, 2022.
Republicans emphasized Harris’ role in ensuring the law’s passage during the 2024 presidential election.
With Harris as the Democratic nominee, the House GOP issued an August 2024 press release titled "Kamala Harris Owns the Inflation Expansion Act After Casting Deciding Vote."
Vice President J.D. Vance in September 2024 said: "Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote on the Inflation Explosion Act."
Harris took credit, too, for breaking the tie. In an August 2024 post on Facebook, Harris wrote: "As Vice President, I was proud to cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act."
Republicans, including Collins, have blamed the law for inflation. But inflation peaked around 9% annually in the summer of 2022, which was before the law passed. After the Inflation Reduction Act passed, inflation fell, though mostly for reasons other than the act itself.
An earlier law passed by Democrats — the American Rescue Plan Act, which Biden signed as a pandemic relief bill shortly after he took office in 2021 — is generally blamed for exacerbating inflation. Economists assigned more blame to post-pandemic supply chain backups and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Collins said Ossoff "cast the deciding vote for the inflation disaster," referring to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Ossoff supported the Inflation Reduction Act. Every Democratic vote was needed, but he was not the "deciding vote." Harris, as vice president, came in to break the tie.
Despite its name, the law had little effect on inflation. Inflation had peaked by the time it passed, and many provisions required phasing in over several years.
We rate the statement False.
PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.
Parcels of goods worth under €150 will no longer enjoy ‘de minimis’ exemption, exploited by platforms such as Temu and Shein
The European Commission has said it hopes to prevent the “desertification” of Europe’s high streets, as it prepares to introduce a customs tax on small parcels in an attempt to curb cheap Chinese imports.
Consumers have been able to buy up to €150 (£129) worth of goods, including fast fashion, cosmetics and toys, without any customs charges as part of a “de minimis” exemption, a tariff break meaning too small to matter.
Continue reading...IBM has unveiled "what it says is the world's first sub-1-nanometer chip technology," reports ZDNet, "designed to pack nearly 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-size die, roughly doubling the density of IBM's earlier 2-nm test chip, first shown in 2021... Today, the smallest, most powerful chips top out at about 80 billion transistors." At the heart of the announcement is NanoStack. This is a three-dimensional, nanosheet-based transistor design that scales vertically, or along the z-axis, by stacking and staggering CMOS devices. Unlike today's nanosheet architectures, which IBM also pioneered and which are being adopted by leading foundries at 3 nm and 2 nm, NanoStack bonds two nanosheet transistors into a single vertical structure, with each tier optimized independently and contacted from opposite sides. Each transistor in the demonstrated structure uses three sub-5 nm-thick nanosheets, about "15 silicon atoms" across, separated by roughly 9 nm spacers. Two such devices are then bonded vertically using an ultra-thin dielectric process IBM describes as a key innovation. Because the top and bottom devices can use different channel materials, dielectrics, and metals, IBM argues NanoStack is less a single trick and more a transistor platform that can be extended through multiple generations: 7 angstrom (Å), 5 Å, 3 Å, and potentially down to 1 Å in its internal roadmap. An angstrom, by the by, is one ten-billionth of a meter. In terms of chips, an angstrom is a tenth of a nanometer. "This is the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology with a new transistor architecture," said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, during a press briefing. "We're not just making smaller transistors, we're reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency...." Based on internal benchmarking against its 2 nm node, the company said its new chips will deliver up to 50% higher performance at the same power, or up to 70% lower power for the same performance. Big Blue also highlighted a 40% improvement in the scaling of static random-access memory (SRAM) cell area relative to its 2 nm technology. This is a change IBM described as a "step the industry hasn't seen in over a decade" and one that could be particularly important for AI accelerators that live or die on on-chip memory bandwidth... According to Huiming Bu, IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D, NanoStack is a new paradigm. It's moving chips to scaling fully into three dimensions and giving the industry at least "another decade" of logic advances as it crosses from nanometers into angstroms... The 40% SRAM density bump could also help architects push caches and on-die memory closer to compute units, cutting data movement overhead in training and inference workloads. IBM sees a path to production use "in as early as the next 5 years", according to the article, and "expects NanoStack to eventually underpin CPUs, GPUs, mobile SoCs, and SRAM arrays." IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D says the new innovation "can improve performance by 50% compared to the best available chip today, and at the same time can reduce power by 70%."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Current shareholders would receive shares in both companies under the planned split, Comcast said Monday.
Tens of thousands of people are still presumed to be missing after two powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela last week.
Case focused on White House’s March 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter
The US supreme court has ruled that Donald Trump can fire leaders of independent agencies or commissions, ending 90 years of court precedent that curbs executive power.
The vote in the case of Trump v Slaughter is 6-3, with dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
Continue reading...Apple just raised prices across several iPads, Macs and home devices. Here's why and by how much.
Dealing with the summer heat can be as easy as using a reliable tower fan. I tested 14 of the newest tower fans to see which has the best airflow, sound profile, energy efficiency and features.
Asad Hussain, 36, from Cheadle in Greater Manchester, found guilty of stalking involving serious alarm or distress
A man has been jailed for eight years after he set up a fake Tinder profile for his ex-partner and enticed multiple men to her house with the intention of raping her.
Asad Hussain, 36, also known as Ash Hussain, from Cheadle in Greater Manchester, appeared at Chester crown court on Monday, where he was also handed a 15-year restraining order. He had previously been found guilty of stalking involving serious alarm or distress and assault by beating.
Continue reading...Justices find president does not have constitutional authority to fire Federal Reserve governor without cause
The US supreme court has refused Donald Trump’s attempts to immediately fire a Federal Reserve governor, in a landmark ruling that limits a president’s authority over the central bank.
In a 5-4 opinion, the court said that Lisa Cook can stay on as a governor while she fights unproved allegations of mortgage fraud made by the Trump officials.
Continue reading...Entertainment arm to split from mobile and broadband in move that raises questions over future of Sky News
Comcast is to spin off its media operation, which includes Sky and the Hollywood film studio, TV and theme park business NBCUniversal, into a separate publicly listed company.
The move comes eight years after the US group, which said the separation will take a year to complete, acquired Sky’s European operations for £31bn.
Continue reading...Educators are finding engaging ways to teach the Declaration of Independence on the 250th anniversary of its signing.
Mary Evelyn Nicole Manning-Kellione’s death was among at least five reported amid floods in Tennessee and Kentucky
A 39-year-old woman died in Tennessee while trying to save her son from high flood waters on Sunday morning, according to officials.
The death of Mary Evelyn Nicole Manning-Kellione was among at least five reported during flooding in recent days in a region encompassing Tennessee and Kentucky.
Continue reading...Teresa Ribera blames ‘ideologically driven’ falsehoods, driven by those with vested interests in fossil fuels, for attacks on green policy
The heatwave wreaking chaos across Europe is a “dramatic warning” to reject climate naysayers, a European Commission vice-president says.
Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for a clean, just and competitive transition, lambasted those who listened to the “vested interests” of the fossil fuel industry rather than scientists and their own citizens.
Continue reading...Former NFL running back Chris Johnson announced that he was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, in a "Good Morning America" interview.
Exclusive: Safety campaigners concerned about plan for widespread deployment on already crowded pavements
Large numbers of autonomous delivery robots could be coming to towns and cities across England after ministers signalled they were likely to support a change in the law allowing their use, prompting concern from safety campaigners.
Low-speed robots, which mainly deliver groceries or takeaway food, are already in use in a handful of places but they operate in a regulatory grey area. The 1835 Highways Act bans “carriages” from pavements.
Continue reading...UK telecoms group’s 50/50 venture ends more than 18-month search for a buyer of its international operations
BT and the US mobile company Verizon are to combine their international businesses, ending the British telecom group’s more than 18-month search for a buyer.
Verizon will pay a $625m (£473m) “equalisation” fee to BT to guarantee equal voting rights in the new 50/50 joint venture, the companies announced on Monday. The deal is expected to create a company with more than 3,000 business customers across about 180 countries and $4bn in combined annual revenue.
Continue reading...NEW YORK, June 29, 2026 — SharonAI Holdings Inc. today announced the closing of its previously announced, oversubscribed US$1.6 billion private placement financing. The transaction was comprised of a private placement of approximately US$900 million, split between 6,719,896 shares of the Company’s Class A Ordinary Common Stock and pre-funded warrants to purchase 6,374,823 shares of the Company’s Class A Ordinary Common Stock, and a private placement of US$700 million aggregate principal amount of 4.75% Convertible Senior Notes due 2032 to qualified institutional buyers as defined in Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.
The transaction was anchored by Situational Awareness L.P. and funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management, L.P., along with new and existing institutional and strategic investors.
As previously stated, the Company intends to use the proceeds from the offering to support Sharon AI’s previously announced six-year strategic compute collaboration with NVIDIA, where the Company intends to deploy one of Australia’s largest AI Factories, including up to 40,000 Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs, as well as broader expansion plans.
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC acted as lead placement agent for this transaction. Lucid Capital Markets also acted as placement agent. Macquarie Capital served as financial advisor. Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP served as legal counsel to Sharon AI in connection with the private placement.
Additional details regarding the transaction will be disclosed in a Form 8-K to be filed by Sharon AI with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”).
This press release does not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any state or jurisdiction.
Disclosure Information
Sharon AI primarily uses its Investor Relations page to disclose material non-public information and to comply with its disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. The Company also notes that, at times, it uses other communication mediums including, but not limited to, its X account (sharon__ai) and/or LinkedIn account (sharon-AI) to disseminate information about the Company, and can be additional sources of information outside press releases, regulatory filings with the SEC and any other conference calls, webcasts, investor days, etc. that the company may hold.
About Sharon AI
Sharon AI, a leading Australian Neocloud, is a High-Performance Computing company focused on Artificial Intelligence and Cloud GPU/CPU Compute Infrastructure. Our AI Cloud platform and compute infrastructure is accelerating the build of AI factories and sovereign AI solutions, powering the next wave of accelerated computing adoption. For more information, visit www.sharonai.com.
Source: Sharon AI
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Lucas Trejo of Argentina loses wife and two children while Héctor Bello’s partner dies saving their daughter
Family members of two professional footballers are among those killed by the twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela in a catastrophe that has claimed at least 1,719 lives.
Among the reported victims are the wife and two children of Lucas Trejo, an Argentinian footballer signed to Club Sport Marítimo of La Guaira. He searched through rubble in the coastal city for his wife, Yanina, and their children, Aaron and Ainhoa, for three days before their bodies were recovered by rescue workers.
Continue reading...A 12-year-old was injured by a bison while visiting Yellowstone National Park last week, the National Park Service said.
MADRID, June 29, 2026 — Openchip, a company specializing in the design and commercialization of high-performance, energy-efficient chips, has secured the backing of the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT), under the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function, through a €115 million investment. The operation was authorized today by the Council of Ministers.
This investment will allow Openchip to accelerate the design of high-performance and highly energy-efficient chips intended for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Additionally, it will contribute to generating highly skilled employment in the semiconductor design sector and consolidating an innovative business ecosystem in Spain.
The objective of the operation is to reinforce Europe’s strategic autonomy in critical technologies by developing open and efficient chip architecture solutions. It also aims to expand the Spanish and European presence in the microelectronics industry and strengthen the continent’s technological and industrial capabilities.
Entry of the Generalitat de Catalunya
The SETT investment complements and coordinates with the authorization granted last week by the Government of the Generalitat for the regional administration’s entry into Openchip’s shareholding.
Under this agreement, Openchip’s registered office, operational center, and business activities will remain in Catalonia. The Generalitat will also hold a seat on the company’s board of directors.
This equity stake seeks to consolidate a strategic project for the development of a European semiconductor industry, the generation of technological knowledge, and the creation of skilled employment within the territory.
Open and Energy-Efficient Chips
Openchip was founded in 2021 as an initiative driven by the Catalan engineering group GTD and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS).
The company currently employs approximately 300 professionals and develops processors and accelerators based on the open RISC-V architecture. Its solutions are designed to deliver high performance with lower energy consumption, thereby helping to reduce the energy requirements of data centers and supercomputing infrastructures.
Openchip operates under a fabless model, focusing its activity on semiconductor design and outsourcing fabrication to specialized foundries. This model avoids the need for the company to operate its own manufacturing facilities, allowing it to concentrate resources on the research, development, and commercialization of its solutions.
Financing Through Next Tech
SETT is executing this operation through the Next Tech facility, financed with funds from the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan. This facility aims to boost funding for startups and scaleups within the deep tech sector.
SETT also manages two other facilities aimed at strengthening the Spanish technological business ecosystem: PERTE Chip, focused on microelectronics and semiconductors, and Spain Audiovisual Hub, designed to drive digitization and competitiveness in the audiovisual sector.
About Openchip
Openchip is a European systems company developing a unique portfolio of RISC-V-based accelerators, infrastructure hardware, and full-stack software for next-generation AI and HPC applications. Headquartered in Barcelona with a growing footprint across Europe, Openchip brings together world-class silicon and software engineering talent with a strong focus on AI. Its end-to-end optimized products drive digital sovereignty and deliver top-tier performance for Europe’s most critical computing needs. For more information, visit https://openchip.com.
Source: Openchip
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FREMONT, Calif., June 29, 2026 — Penguin Solutions, Inc. has announced its latest ClusterWareAI AI Factory Platform Operating System Software. The updated ClusterWareAI software enables AI operators to optimize AI factory performance, improve workload resilience, and simplify operations across an entire AI factory.
As enterprises, sovereign AI initiatives, and neocloud providers scale infrastructure to support AI inference at scale, maintaining performance, resilience, and service-level objectives becomes increasingly complex. The latest ClusterWareAI release from Penguin Solutions addresses these challenges with new capabilities that enhance hardware-level visibility and helps maintain peak performance across GPU clusters running inference workloads.
“At scale, AI infrastructure demands a new level of operational intelligence,” said Ian Colle, SVP and Chief Product Officer at Penguin Solutions. “The ClusterWareAI AI Factory Platform Operating System Software from Penguin Solutions provides the unified operational control plane that helps transform compute, memory, networking, storage, and software into an AI factory. This release advances our vision of intelligent, self-managing AI infrastructure through AI-driven operations, automated remediation, and deep infrastructure awareness.”
ClusterWareAI software is the operating system for AI factories, providing a hardware-agnostic control plane that unifies deployment, observability, automation, governance, and performance optimization across training, inference, and Agentic AI environments. This gives operators a single view to manage the entire AI infrastructure lifecycle. By combining deep infrastructure telemetry, operational intelligence, and AI-assisted workflows, ClusterWareAI software enables organizations to accelerate AI deployment, improve resilience, scale operations efficiently, and reduce total cost of ownership.
The new AI Factory Operations Agent provides administrators a conversational interface for gaining insight into GPU cluster performance using natural language queries. The agent accelerates root cause analysis, streamlines troubleshooting, and reduces reliance on specialized expertise, enabling faster issue resolution and improved operational efficiency. It is the first in a planned family of AI-powered agents designed to simplify cluster operations and increase administrator productivity.
This release also extends automated remediation capabilities to Kubernetes-based inference environments and expands its built-in hardware-level monitoring, ensuring that only GPUs operating at optimum performance are available in inference worker pools. Leveraging precise bare-metal telemetry, ClusterWareAI software delivers real-time visibility into cluster health and proactively detects and resolves hardware degradations before they impact application performance. The timely identification of “fail-slow” conditions, where components degrade without fully failing, helps maintain consistent performance and maximize GPU utilization. Together, these advancements reflect a critical shift in how operators manage AI at scale.
As organizations scale generative AI models from model development and training to production inference and Agentic AI, maximizing infrastructure availability and GPU utilization becomes critical to achieving business value and return on investment. By automating diagnostics, remediation, and performance optimization, ClusterWareAI software helps organizations maximize GPU utilization, reduce operational overhead, and operate AI factories more efficiently at scale.
Learn more about the general availability of this latest release of Penguin Solutions ClusterWareAI AI Factory Platform Operating System software here.
About Penguin Solutions
Penguin Solutions is a leading provider of memory and AI infrastructure, powering the AI factories of the future for enterprises, sovereign AI initiatives, and neocloud providers. Built on decades of engineering expertise at the intersection of memory and AI/HPC infrastructure, we bring together differentiated infrastructure software, advanced memory, compute systems, end-to-end services, and industry-leading partner solutions in a full-stack AI factory platform designed to help customers deploy and scale AI workloads with speed and precision. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, we operate globally through our network of R&D, manufacturing, and sales locations. Learn more at PenguinSolutions.com.
Source: Penguin Solutions
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The O1 Omni printer is an all-in-one desktop printer capable of printing on “virtually any material.” Preorders are now live and include special perks.
Pakistan says strikes were aimed at a terrorist group while Taliban condemn ‘cowardly act of aggression’
Pakistani airstrikes in three eastern provinces of Afghanistan killed 36 civilians and wounded 163 others, Afghan officials have said, as attacks between the two countries showed no sign of abating.
Pakistan’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, said the operations on Sunday night were aimed at a terrorist group his country blamed for a deadly militant attack in Karachi that killed three security personnel over the weekend.
Continue reading...Organizers of the four-day Electric Forest festival are appealing for attenders to come forward with information
A newborn baby was found dead in a portable bathroom at a Michigan dance music festival on Sunday, and organizers are now appealing for festivalgoers to come forward with information.
“It causes us so much pain to have to share this difficult news with you,” Electric Forest festival organizers wrote online on Sunday night. Saying the organizers were “heartbroken”, the statement added: “Michigan state police continues to investigate this tragic event, if you can assist in any way.”
Continue reading...Western states experience unseasonally low temperatures but New York and Washington DC could reach 40C by end of week
Unseasonal snow has fallen in some parts of the US, while other parts of the country brace for a heatwave this week.
A strong cold front spread into the western US from the northern Pacific over the weekend, bringing an abrupt change in conditions to a region that had been experiencing high summer temperatures amid drought. Temperatures from the Canadian border to California have widely been 5-10C below the norm since Friday, and more than 10C below in some parts farther north. The pattern is expected to remain for much of the coming week.
Continue reading...Value of some chip manufacturers have tripled, or more, driving Asia Pacific stock markets sharply higher
Shares in chipmakers have surged in the first half of this year as investors piled into companies that make the hardware underpinning the AI boom, according to analysis.
Investors have driven up the value of semiconductor and memory chip manufacturers, whose profits have soared during 2026, at the expense of some large software companies, which have fallen out of favour this year.
Continue reading...The wife and two children of Argentine soccer star Lucas Trejo died after powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela, his team said.
Pakistani security forces Sunday carried out an intelligence-based ground operation along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, followed by "calibrated strikes."
The FBI cut off Russian access to thousands of compromised US routers, but that fix is temporary without these five steps from individual device owners.
Modern AI systems are, in effect, a universal adviser to help people do harmful things. We’ll need to harness AI for defense, too
Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes – that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club – jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more measured than some of the breathless headlines about it, and the advice they gave is pretty much the standard advice everyone gives – albeit with newfound urgency.
Internet risks are nothing new, and cyber-attacks – both large and small – have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models.
Bruce Schneier is a security technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and University of Toronto’s Munk School
Continue reading...US commerce department accuses state of ‘environmental terrorism’ and plans to evaluate its coastal agency
The Trump administration plans to evaluate the performance of the California Coastal Commission, in the latest escalation of a dispute between the state’s Democratic leaders and the federal government over energy production.
Per federal law, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) is required to conduct reviews of federally approved coastal management programs, which take into consideration “the extent to which the State of California has implemented and enforced the program approved by the [commerce] Secretary”.
Continue reading...CNET Lab exclusive: We've been testing charging speeds for years and now see that newer phones can get plenty of power in just 30 minutes.
These filters, apps and other pro tricks can help you get those vintage film vibes from your phone camera.
Track your glucose with these CGMs.
Starship Technologies six-wheelers could soon become a more familiar sight across the country under new laws
Driving down an endless string of identical roundabouts in the dead heat with hardly a human in sight, you see robots roving around on grassy pavements, whizzing past obstacles to hurriedly reach their final destination. This isn’t a scene from a Philip K Dick novel, however, but an average Thursday in Milton Keynes.
The robots aren’t a new arrival to the Buckinghamshire city, the UK’s largest new town and a longtime marvel for city planning enthusiasts fascinated by its American-influenced layout and postwar history. They’ve roamed its streets since 2018 – and could soon be coming to a town or city near you.
Continue reading...New York City mayor says Democratic candidates he endorsed speak to people struggling to make ends meet. Plus the best pictures from weekend Pride events across the US
Good morning. The New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, said on Sunday that he and a slew of Democratic socialist allies who prevailed in recent primary elections were carrying a “national message” to struggling working Americans hungry for a new kind of politics “coast to coast”. His endorsed candidates won Democratic nominations in three races for New York congressional seats, as well as for five state legislature positions in Albany.
He said collectively they were carrying a “New Deal understanding” of Democratic politics to Congress and on to the “national stage”. It spoke, he said, to Americans feeling exhaustion at struggling to make ends meet “every single day”. Mamdani said: “We don’t have to nationalize that message. That is a national message – it’s a national crisis.”
How did other members of the Democratic party react? Fifteen self-labelled “moderate” Democrats in the US House signed an open letter that, though it did not mention Mamdani or his endorsed allies, was clearly targeted at them. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” they said. “We are mainstream, not extreme. We are proud, not ashamed, of America.”
Who is affected by the supreme court decision? Thursday’s ruling is set to affect an estimated 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian immigrants who now face detention or deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as protections end. The US first provided temporary protected status (TPS) to Haitians after a devastating earthquake in 2010, and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.
Continue reading...Plan to limit scrutiny of polluters and shift financial risks to taxpayers is attack on democracy, advocates say
The Trump administration is attempting to shrink public comment periods for fossil fuel leasing on federal land while shifting the financial risks of cleanup to taxpayers and allowing for more planet-warming emissions. It’s part of a broader effort to dismantle public input processes and save polluting companies money, advocates say.
“By ignoring public comment [requirements] while propping up companies,” said Alexa Dietrich, research director at the science advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists, “they’re really attacking democracy in a very clear way.”
Continue reading...Some long-time subscribers could see a price increase of around $4 a line.
After one round of air fryer bacon, the stovetop method feels like an unnecessarily messy way to get the same result.
Jacob Wulfson, who strangled woman he met online, was allowed to be tried at airbase court martial instead of facing UK justice
A police force in England is facing mounting questions over its decision to allow the US military to prosecute the case of a woman who was strangled by an American fighter pilot in his apartment in Cambridge city centre.
Cambridgeshire police has acknowledged that in the days after the assault in 2023, it allowed the US military to take “investigative primacy” in the case, despite the fact the crime took place within the force’s territory and when the pilot was off duty.
Continue reading...Trump, laying siege to freedoms and truth itself, is twisting America’s milestone birthday into a joyless occasion
This is the room where it happened. The assembly room at Independence Hall in Philadelphia where, 250 years ago this week, a group of sweating, treasonous men broke from the most powerful empire since ancient Rome. Amid a summer of trial and error, delegates including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson ratified a flawed but aspirational document to declare their independence from the British crown. The date was 4 July 1776 – but it took nearly a month for all 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress to formally sign on.
“I don’t blame them,” Maggie Burkett, a park ranger, told a group of about 40 tourists as they gazed at green baize tables adorned with books, letters, pipes and candles one recent afternoon. “These words on this page are treason, just as much as burning the king’s coats of arms was. By signing this document, you are literally risking your life. The 56 men who signed this document were brave. In my opinion, they were heroes.”
Continue reading...Muslims say anti-Islamic rhetoric making everyday life difficult – and threats and harassment not uncommon
Following a brutal Republican primary runoff in which Islamophobia took center stage, anti-Muslim hatred continues spilling into public life in Texas.
Texans say that the hate speech shared by elected officials is increasingly echoed by people in their everyday interactions, including discussions about education or interactions at a store, in a park, at university and at elementary school. In one case, students at the University of Houston were praying when a man approached them and burned a Qur’an. In other cases, people have been verbally attacked for wearing traditional garments.
Continue reading...Research shows that reducing sentences for women could save tax dollars with virtually no increase in violent crime
Two new reports raise questions about the economic tradeoffs of incarcerating women – a prison population that has grown more than 600% in the United States since 1980.
Imprisoning women costs as much as 75% more than incarcerating men, but some of those costs could be offset by halving the amount of time women spend in prison with minimal impacts to public safety, according to new reports from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan thinktank.
Continue reading...Apple's got a treasure trove of must-watch shows.
Two independent reviewers of terrorism legislation call for safeguards for NGOs and journalists before bill becomes law this week
British foreign correspondents could be at risk of prosecution if they use sources within state-backed groups in countries such as Iran under national security legislation being rushed through parliament this week.
David Anderson, a former UK independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has warned that unless the bill is amended it could accidentally pull journalists working in danger-zone countries into prosecutions for terrorism.
Continue reading...The incoming minister's father, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, was serving as justice minister in 1984 when he was gunned down in Bogota on Pablo Escobar's orders.
The challenge was undertaken to raise awareness for a charity she has been involved with since her own cancer treatment.
Can Iraq’s new government survive Middle East instability? 21 July 2026 — 14:30 TO 15:30 BST Anonymous (not verified) Online
Learn how the new administration in Baghdad is navigating regional tensions and internal divisions under a fragile political settlement.
Learn how the new administration in Baghdad is navigating regional tensions and internal divisions under a fragile political settlement.
Iraq’s new government enters office after months of paralysis, shaped by domestic rivalry and external pressure. The incoming administration faces early challenges, as conflict involving Iran, Israel and the United States has intensified economic pressure through disruption to energy markets and supply. Can Iraqis be confident in Prime Minister Ali al Zaidi’s ability to crackdown on corruption, stabilize the economy and assert Iraq’s sovereignty?
Team hope 30 of hours of footage held by three countries will be enough to bring to life film-maker’s vision
More than 70 years after he shot the first few frames, Orson Welles’s ambitious project to put Don Quixote on the big screen may finally be completed thanks to a consortium of European film archivists.
Oja Kodar, the American film-maker’s partner and collaborator, has given her blessing to the project led by archives in France, Spain and Italy, along with the Munich film museum, to produce a coherent film out of 30 hours of footage scattered among them.
Continue reading...The court’s TPS decision is devastating for those whose countries of origin are deemed unsafe. Congress must act
On Thursday, the US supreme court authorized the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS), facilitating the largest single assault on immigrants in contemporary United States history.
While the case concerned the 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian holders of this status, the decision could expose more than 1.3 million people to potential deportation to countries that the United States has recognized as unsafe.
Heba Gowayed is an associate professor of sociology at Cuny Hunter College and Cuny Graduate Center and author of the book Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential
Continue reading...Ulric Ulroan charged on 47 criminal counts amid allegations he sexually assaulted teenage girls from 2009-2025
The former mayor of a city in Alaska – who has also coached high school girls basketball and won a parent of the year award – has been criminally charged on allegations that he sexually assaulted several teenage girls over a yearslong period, according to authorities in that state.
Ulric Ulroan, 48, first drew scrutiny from Alaska’s bureau of investigation in January, when the agency received a tip that he had purportedly inflicted sexual abuse on a 17-year-old girl in the village of Chevak between 2009 and 2010. The tip prompted an investigation which brought forth more reports of Ulroan having “sexually assaulted and/or abused various teenage girls” between 2009 and 2025 in Chevak as well as the Alaska communities of Anchorage, Mountain Village and Nome, officials said in a news release published on Friday.
Continue reading...Research suggests 41,800 premature US deaths in 2024 were attributable to road pollution
Roughly five Americans die every hour due to exposure to toxic road vehicle pollution, a new study has found.
It’s the latest warning showing fossil-fueled transit is a major driver of mortality.
Continue reading...President says attacks on infrastructure are causing ‘obvious’ problems but that they are ‘not critical’
Vladimir Putin has admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages as Ukraine steps up its long-range drone campaign, with repeated strikes setting oil refineries ablaze and forcing multiple regions to introduce unprecedented petrol rationing.
Speaking to Russian state television late on Sunday, the Russian president acknowledged for the first time that Ukrainian attacks on energy infrastructure were affecting domestic fuel supplies. “Of course, they create problems, that’s obvious,” Putin said. “Right now we’re observing a certain shortage, but it’s not critical.”
Continue reading...
Aron D’Souza, the brainchild behind the lawsuit to kill Gawker Media, says he wants to fix journalism. To that end, in the spring he launched a platform that he described as a “private AI tribunal” to adjudicate the veracity of media claims.
“Today, anyone can publish allegations. Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media,” the platform’s homepage read until late May. Then, the site was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept’s interview with D’Souza.
“Due to feedback we’re rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future,” Objection’s site, which features an uncanny AI-animated image of a painterly woman’s shifting eyes, now reads. “Stay tuned for updates.”
The platform itself was something of a mishmash between Snopes.com for right-wing culture war issues and a private defamation arbitration service marketed to the everyman. Among the claims it was adjudicating was whether Joe Rogan promoted the use of “horse dewormer” ivermectin as a Covid-19 cure and claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.
It’s deeply unclear how many everyday people need easy access to defamation remedies; the lawsuit that eventually killed Gawker was brought on behalf of the professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is also one of the backers of Objection. But when I caught up with D’Souza, an Oxford-educated lawyer, to discuss the project which has been criticized for its possible impacts on press freedom, he was awash in populist rhetoric.
“I don’t think anyone is actually happy with the state of journalism,” he told me. “My view is that someone needs to structurally fix journalism.”
When I asked why he shuttered the site, D’Souza pointed to sky-high demand.
“After launch, we received many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay),” he said. “As such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website.”
When I first spoke with D’Souza shortly after launch, he was fresh off ringing the opening bell for the IPO of his other venture, which includes the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics where all manner of performance-enhancing drugs were allowed. We spoke about his views on the press and how he hopes his controversial Objection AI platform will reform the media.
There isn’t much that D’Souza points out that isn’t already obvious to most casual observers of the state of news media. Journalists are underpaid. “It’s kind of unimaginable why you would go to Columbia Journalism School and get half a million dollars in debt and then get paid $50,000 to write at The Huffington Post,” he said. The business model for most publishers “has completely fallen apart.” And “the people who are being written about,” he said, “aren’t very happy because they feel like they’re being represented incorrectly.”
On top of all of that, the editorial boards of the largest mainstream media outlets, owned by a handful of elite families, reflect their own biases — whether it’s the Sulzberger family, who owns the New York Times, or the Murdochs, the News Corp scions who own Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
“You walk into that building on 6th Avenue in New York and you feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch, as you’re aware. You walk into the Daily Mail building on Kensington High Street in London, you feel the presence of the Rothermere family. In a more subtle way, you walk into the New York Times building, and you feel the presence of the Sulzbergers,” D’Souza said.
According to him, that concentrated, elite media ownership class has contributed to a compounding, historic crisis that threatens the credibility of journalism as a whole. Just 28 percent of Americans trust the media, according to a 2025 Gallup survey, the lowest it’s ever been. Republicans, who are traditionally the partisan group with the lowest trust in media, have remained that way (6–17 percent) but curiously, now only a slim majority of Democrats — 51 percent — say they trust traditional media. For all intents and purposes, D’Souza’s got much of the diagnosis right. It’s his solution that’s the problem.
The centerpiece of Objection is what the company calls its “Honor Index,” a rating system that purports to tell how credible a journalist is. Here’s how it works: For a fee of $2,500 to $5,000 (depending where on the website you looked), anyone can file an Objection. After that, your case is investigated by what the platform describes as “the most qualified researchers,” which it says include award-winning investigative journalists, former CIA and FBI agents, and military intelligence officers.
The resulting investigation purportedly identifies the factual claims that require investigating, and adjudicates evidence by its “proximity to the underlying event.” Primary sources, documents, court filings, emails, and transaction records are valued at the highest premium. Anonymous sources “lacking a traceable origin” rank lowest. Once the investigators have gathered their “evidence” and offered the journalist in question an opportunity to reply, a proprietary AI system makes a judgment on the quality of the claim. The goal, ostensibly, is greater transparency into the business of newsgathering.
“The actual article you publish,” he told me, referring to this Intercept story, “will only include a very small percentage of the actual data that has been transmitted to you. We live in this world of infinite cloud storage, infinite AI comprehension capability. So why isn’t that underlying data available?”
On first blush, D’Souza’s critiques mostly track, but for the fact that much of what he is asking for is already standard practice in many newsrooms. Pick through the archives of the once formidable, now-defunct BuzzFeed News data investigations team and you’ll find the underlying code for the publication’s award-winning investigation into surveillance aircrafts used by the military and law enforcement agencies, among other stories. Most newsrooms that practice data journalism host GitHub pages where people can audit their code and datasets.
Anonymous sources are D’Souza’s biggest gripe. They are “one of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.”
Anonymous sources, however, are D’Souza’s biggest gripe. They are, he said, “One of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.” By his reasoning, science doesn’t use anonymous sources and is subject to peer review, so why isn’t journalism held to the same standard of external oversight?
It doesn’t take much to realize that the power differential exists in much the opposite direction. Who’s more of a threat: a whistleblower speaking out about the dangers of some of the biggest companies in the world, or the powerful company with the $300 billion market cap sitting on some of the most sophisticated surveillance architecture in the world?
When Objection launched in April, and up until after our conversation, D’Souza said the company had seeded a list of active cases it was working on adjudicating. One case under active “investigation” before the site went dark was “The Public v. Hannah Broughton,” over the statement made in the U.K.-based outlet The Mirror that “Amazon workers were forced to work around a dead colleague and told ‘don’t look.’” However, Broughton wasn’t the originator of that claim; it was originally made by the investigative journalism outlet The Western Edge. The Mirror had merely aggregated the publication’s reporting and sourced it to the original reporter.
When I asked D’Souza about the claim and why, while it was under investigation, the company decided to reach out to the aggregator, he responded, “Repetition is not a defense to defamation in law.” Publications are generally liable for republishing defamatory content. But scrutinize that investigation further, and among the evidence listed is other stories, including by People magazine, that also aggregated The Western Edge — but not the actual Western Edge story.
But the real irony is that the person investigating that claim for Objection is listed as an “anonymous investigator.” When asked about fighting anonymity with more anonymity, D’Souza again gestured to the “power imbalance to be reckoned with.” While the case is being investigated, he said, Objection doesn’t want to “disclose the name of the investigator because a rich and powerful individual might say, oh, ‘I’m going to go bribe that investigator.’” The investigator’s name, he said, would be published when the investigation concludes.
It would take an awfully credulous person to believe that the businessman behind the shuttering of Gawker has an authentic stake in “fixing” journalism — especially considering that D’Souza described in an editor’s letter once live on the site that he views Objection as a “natural extension” of his and Thiel’s invasion of privacy lawsuit. Even so, one might wonder how the infamous sex tape story that was Gawker’s undoing would fare through Objection’s proprietary AI adjudication process. After all, Hulk Hogan did have sex with Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife, and Gawker did have the receipts, namely the video, to prove it.
Objection’s AI arbitration system, in which both the aggrieved figure and the journalist would need to agree to, also seems to have a fatal flaw. In promoting the use of AI judges, D’Souza cites a paper by two University of Chicago legal scholars that suggests AI adjudicators apply the law more consistently than human judges. In one test case, AI cited judicial precedent 99 percent of the time in its decision-making versus 61 percent for human judges. But that paper also critiques that level of accuracy. The paper’s authors write, “Another possibility is that GPT is actually a better judge than humans are. While many readers have argued that this is the proper reading of our results, we believe that this theory is decisively contradicted by the fact that GPT made decisions like law students.”
“If you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man.”
Real judges, the authors say, don’t make decisions in a legal vacuum but also through the broader human context of their decisions. Asked about that conclusion, D’Souza questioned whether “the goals of the law” should be more “interpretive” or more by “the letter of the law.”
“If you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man,” he said. “I firmly believe that we should be reducing human bias.”
But that area of human judgment is also arguably how the legal profession moves the law forward and how unjust laws are overturned. The seeds of this country’s freedom of the press law were laid when a jury defied the British crown’s judges and refused to convict the publisher of a small New York printing press of libel for publishing material that offended the then-governor of the state. Jurors would nullify the convictions of those who helped fugitive slaves flee violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the 1970s, when the Camden 28 were tried for breaking into their local draft board offices and destroying their draft cards, the jury again acquitted the group based on their moral conviction. It’s hard to imagine that AI, trained on the letter of the law as it’s written, could easily navigate the murky moral waters that those laws may produce.
“Human judges are able to depart from rules when following them would produce bad outcomes from a moral, social, or policy standpoint,” the paper’s authors write.
A more basic mark against the AI arbiter the paper’s authors point out is fundamental to how these systems work — or don’t: “No one understands how they make decisions, and some people speculate that their decisions are literally unintelligible for humans.”
D’Souza is asking a question as old as the oldest democracy: Who watches the watchmen?
One doesn’t have to look farther than the appalling double standard the mainstream press has applied to its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to see the relevance of that question. But in a world where American press freedom is already backsliding in favor of the wealthiest, it’s hard to see how a black-box AI “fact-checker” backed by the billionaire owner of one of the world’s biggest military tech company is a better solution than a well-funded public media ecosystem buttressed by press freedom laws that are designed to hold the most powerful among us accountable.
The post The Peter Thiel Ally Who Helped Kill Gawker Wanted to Save Journalism. Then His Site Went Dark. appeared first on The Intercept.
The planets Neptune and Uranus may be better described as "magma-ocean giants" rather than "ice giants," according to a team of researchers from the University of California. Gizmodo reports: While the Voyager flyby confirmed the planets' classification as ice giants... [a]s the least explored planets in the solar system, the two planets have never been thoroughly investigated. Therefore, scientists aren't sure where the planets originally formed in the early solar system or the reason for their wildly chaotic magnetic fields. A long-standing hypothesis suggests that both worlds have a hydrogen/helium atmosphere that covers a vast mantle of ices, made primarily of water, ammonia, and methane, with a rocky core. The new study, however, notes that the three-layer model of an ice giant's interior structure is not the only way to explain the properties of the two planets. The researchers also point out that objects found in the Kuiper Belt, which are thought to preserve evidence of the material in the outer Solar System where Uranus and Neptune formed, are primarily composed of rock rather than ice. For the recent study, the researchers simulated different models for the interior processes and composition of Uranus and Neptune. The model that best fits Uranus's and Neptune's different properties suggests the two planets have a well-mixed magma ocean with dissolved hydrogen at the bottom and a hydrogen-dominated envelope at the top. The model suggests that at high pressures, hydrogen gas can dissolve into magma, forming a well-mixed fluid. This mixing might help explain Uranus's and Neptune's density, which has traditionally been interpreted as evidence for an ice-rich interior. The article notes that the theory "could also help scientists understand the interior structure of sub-Neptune planets in the Milky Way, which have thus far remained a mystery."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Punchlines on president’s thwarted bid to have building named after him come thick and fast at Washington DC gala
Outside the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a giant tarpaulin remained in place to conceal Donald Trump’s humiliation.
Guests entering the national arts complex on Sunday night could not see the section of its marble facade where Trump’s name was recently erased to comply with a court order.
Continue reading...When it comes to drinking water, your senses aren't reliable guides. Here's what experts say is most commonly lurking in the tap.
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A deal to bring Colorado River water to Native American communities in northern Arizona, where a third of homes lack running water, is being blocked by neighboring states, caught up in a broader battle over how to divide the dwindling river.
The largest tribal water rights settlement in U.S. history — the product of decades of negotiations to secure water for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe — was on the verge of being realized before Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming stepped in to oppose it being codified by Congress.
“We have significant unresolved concerns with the legislation that may affect each of our states’ rights to and interests in Colorado River water,” negotiators for Utah and Wyoming wrote in March to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in a previously unreported letter. New Mexico and Colorado sent similar letters.
Those four states, known collectively as the Upper Basin, are at a stalemate with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada over new rules governing how they share the Colorado River, a key water source for nearly 40 million people. Congress and the White House, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, have declined to approve the settlement until all parties reach an agreement.
For 83-year-old Marilyn Tewa, the stalemate means her family will continue to go without running water. Tewa serves on the Hopi Tribal Council, where her duties include working on the water rights agreement, but her village of Mishongnovi, on the tribe’s northern Arizona reservation, lacks indoor plumbing.
Every other day, she loads 5-gallon buckets into her pickup and drives 5 miles to a windmill originally built for livestock that draws untreated water from underground.
“That’s what keeps us alive,” Tewa said, tapping the spigot on a May afternoon.
Back home, Tewa bustled about her kitchen while her daughter kneaded dough for dinner. There’s no faucet in the kitchen, which is decorated with a framed American flag and a painting of a katsina, a figure with spiritual significance in Hopi culture. Instead, the family stores water in large plastic containers. Because of the lack of indoor plumbing, the Tewa family and its neighbors use portable toilets that stand among the houses.
If passed into law, the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act would resolve the largest outstanding claim on the Colorado River while providing about $5 billion in federal funding to build infrastructure to transport the water across the reservations. The legislation would also go beyond water rights, creating a reservation for the San Juan Southern Paiute. The tribe’s effort to secure a permanent homeland was added to the settlement due to their difficulty getting it through Congress independently.
“That’s my prayer,” Tewa said, “that we get this settlement through for all three tribes.”
The tribes need pipes, pumps and treatment plants to use the water secured through the settlement. To defray the cost beyond the federal government’s expected contribution, the Navajo and Hopi plan to lease some of their water rights, almost certainly to growing towns around Phoenix. The towns would pay to use the tribes’ water for a set number of years.
While the Lower Basin states support the settlement, the Upper Basin states have latched onto this provision in particular as they stand in the way of the settlement.
The Colorado River’s upper and lower basins don’t precisely follow state borders. Some states have portions in both sections, and the line dividing the two basins cuts across northeastern Arizona and directly through the Navajo reservation. If water moves across that line, they argue, the rules governing the river give them veto power over the settlement. (It’s an open legal question whether approval from all seven states is necessary.)
The Upper Basin states fear that, in the future, water they currently control might be leased on an open market. They view any monetary transaction that moves water downstream as setting a precedent that could allow the highest bidder — possibly thirsty cities with money such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas — to buy vast quantities of their water.
In an effort to assuage that concern and close the deal, the Navajo and Hopi made major concessions over the volume of water and length of time they could lease. The tribes also offered to leave some of their water in one of the river’s drought-depleted reservoirs to help keep water levels high enough that it could continue flowing downstream. But the Upper Basin has not wavered in its opposition.
ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix reached out to the governor, senators and lead negotiator from every Upper Basin state for comment. Utah’s and Wyoming’s lead negotiators deferred to the letter they co-signed. A spokesperson for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that the tribes addressed most of the state’s concerns but that questions remain as to whether the water that the tribes would lease to Arizona cities could be counted as part of what the Upper Basin states are legally required to send to the Lower Basin. “New Mexico remains committed to finding a workable solution,” the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also said the state is “committed to finding a path forward” and pointed to the letter that Becky Mitchell, the state’s lead river negotiator, submitted to Congress. Mitchell wrote that the settlement’s leasing provisions violate laws governing the river and that the state was concerned about what the sale of water across the basin would mean for “the security and certainty” of Colorado’s share of the river.
Heather Tanana is an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s law school, where she focuses on federal Indian law. She is also a citizen of the Navajo Nation and said the Upper Basin is “trying to hide behind” how the river has traditionally been managed rather than find a way to give the tribes access to a resource that is rightfully theirs and one that they need to survive.
“It’s a fundamental human rights issue,” she said.
While negotiations drag on, the three tribes continue waiting for water they say will help them to build more housing, grow sustainable economies, better protect public health and preserve cultural practices.
The Hopi believe their ancestors return as clouds to bring the rain that nourishes their corn, but drought is wracking the region. An overreliance on groundwater has dried up springs that have been used for ceremonies and agriculture for centuries. When the settlement brings more water to the reservation, Tewa said, aquifers will have a chance to recharge, restoring the springs.
“I’m speaking on behalf of my children, my grandchildren and their children that haven’t come yet,” she said. “I hope, in the future, that they will have water.”
That the settlement even reached Congress seemed like a small miracle to those involved.
The 30 federally recognized tribes with land in the Colorado River Basin are estimated to have a right to at least a quarter of the river’s flow. But there’s little incentive to hand tribes the water to which they are entitled. Their rights are the most senior on the river, meaning in times of shortage everyone else would see their water cut before the tribes. But because the tribes currently use a fraction of their water, farmers, cities and businesses are able to use the rest for free.
If the tribes were to use every drop to which they are entitled, the system of sharing the river that supports more than $1 trillion in annual economic output would collapse.
“Everybody’s getting free Navajo, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute water right now. The seven basin states are all benefiting in the absence of a settlement,” said Ethel Branch, a former Navajo attorney general who was involved in the negotiations, adding that the water had been “stolen for over a century.”
In 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that, if the federal government confined tribes to reservations, then it owed them enough water to sustain an agrarian economy on that land. But securing that promised water, referred to as “Winters rights,” has proven arduous.
Tribes were excluded from the compacts that apportioned the river. The Navajo in particular were barred from joining a seminal case quantifying other users’ rights, and members of the tribe themselves rejected a proposed settlement in 2012 when they viewed the deal as unfair. So the tribe went back to the Supreme Court, asking that the justices force the federal government to quickly settle the claims. The Navajo once again lost, with the court’s majority deciding that their treaty with the U.S. didn’t require the government to take any “affirmative steps” to deliver the water it owed the tribe.
“At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again,’” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote of the Navajo in his dissent. “When this routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Arizona politicians and tribal leaders have since concluded that they needed to combine all three tribes’ claims to finally settle their rights.
That was no simple feat. The Navajo and Hopi have long had a contentious relationship. Underlining their thorny partnership, leaders of various tribes around the region have accused Navajo, the largest tribal nation in the U.S., of flexing their political strength to the detriment of other tribes.
Arizona also historically clashed with local tribes over water. The state often inserted unrelated provisions into proposed settlements, which some tribes viewed as poison pills and had the effect of stalling the agreements.
But Navajo and Hopi struck a deal, and Arizona moved off its bargaining position. Now in lockstep, the settlement’s supporters turned to Congress, only to hit more roadblocks: The House of Representatives balked at the spiraling price tag to fund the deals; presidential administrations were unwilling to expend political capital on such settlements; and more than a dozen settlements are in the works, clogging the system. (No settlement has been enacted since 2022.)
“Partisanship has gone to a new low in this country, and Indian water settlements have gotten swept up into that,” said Pam Williams, who spent about two decades as director of the Secretary’s Indian Water Rights Office in the Department of the Interior before she retired last year.
In November 2024, as President Donald Trump prepared for his return to the White House, the tribes believed they had an opening to get their settlement through Congress while President Joe Biden was still in office.
Navajo leadership had supported the Democratic presidential ticket and feared the incoming administration would be vindictive toward them.
Every basin state’s lead negotiator, tribes’ staff and a federal representative descended upon the Arizona Department of Water Resources’ offices in Phoenix for what several attendees described as a “Hail Mary.” At the meeting, the Navajo offered a major compromise: limiting how much water they could lease and for how long they could lease it.
But the Upper Basin states showed up with a list of grievances, multiple attendees told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix, and weren’t interested in negotiating over the Navajo leasing concessions.
“It’s difficult for the Upper Basin to wrap their heads around this settlement,” said Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River lead.
In March 2026, leaders from the tribes traveled to Washington for a Senate hearing where they made an impassioned plea for Congress to pass a version of the bill that now included the concessions they had offered in the Hail Mary meeting. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who ran the hearing, expressed support for the settlement but worried its $5 billion price tag was too high, a concern echoed by an Interior Department official who testified. (The tribes and department are currently negotiating to shrink that cost.)
All four Upper Basin states submitted comments opposing the settlement. Their main concerns were about the ability to lease across the basin and whether the water for the settlement would be counted against the upper or lower division of the river.
Leasing would last only as long as it’s needed to pay for infrastructure to distribute their newly acquired water, said Navajo President Buu Nygren. It would not set a precedent, he said, because no other tribe straddles both basins.
“We shouldn’t be punished for being in two basins,” Nygren said, “because other tribal nations, other settlements have been able to lease water.”
During the decades that the tribes fought to access their water, they helped quench the thirst of growing cities in the Colorado River Basin.
A water intake plant on Navajo land drew from Lake Powell to cool the nearby Navajo Generating Station. The coal plant powered pumps for the Central Arizona Project, the 336-mile series of canals that sends Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.
The power station shut down in 2019, and the intake plant was handed over to the Navajo for the iiná bá-paa tuwaqat’si pipeline, which means “for life” in Diné and “water is life” in Hopi, to deliver water to the three tribes. But for now, the massive pumps remain mothballed, the building sitting musty and dark like a tomb, and the pipeline remains an engineering schematic, waiting for funding from the stalled settlement.
The irony is not lost on tribal leaders, they told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix: After helping deliver water beyond their lands, they are now blocked from using that same water and infrastructure to sustain their communities. The insult is compounded, they said, by the fact that water use is drastically lower on reservations.
“It’s not about green-grass lawns or golf courses or swimming pools,” said Crystalyne Curley, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council. “It’s just basically turning on the faucet and getting water to boil eggs for your children or turning on a faucet to wipe and clean the table or washing your hands after butchering a sheep.”
For the San Juan Southern Paiute, the settlement is also about having a permanent homeland. They have no reservation but struck a deal with Navajo in 2000 to transfer some of its land. Since the tribes already reached an agreement, it’s an uncontroversial proposition. But, without political clout to get Congress to take it up, the land transfer was pulled into the water settlement.
“During the COVID era, it took a lot of the tribal elders, and there are only a handful that saw the treaty signed and are really wanting to see this before their time is up,” said San Juan Southern Paiute Vice President Johnny Lehi Jr., whose father signed the 2000 agreement. Finally securing a reservation, he said, means the ability to build housing and develop an economy for a tribe that currently rents its government building.
Nearby, on the Hopi reservation, Councilmember Marilyn Fredericks grabbed a pair of hiking poles, donned a hat with a roadrunner pin on it and set out from her village on a recent spring afternoon. To stay fit as she grows older, she walks up and down the hand-carved steps of a terraced garden that used to produce food for her community.
Seven natural springs once fed the garden, but only two still flow. Ponds that stored their excess sit dry, stains on the rock now just a memory of the water. It’s been six years since there was enough to plant.
The settlement would fund a pipeline that would be “our umbilical cord,” Fredericks said. Future generations of Hopi have a right to clean, reliable water, she said. “This is evidence of how precious water is to us.”
The post Native American Tribes Came Together to Secure Their Rights to Colorado River Water. Four States Are Stalling the Deal. appeared first on ProPublica.
The internet is fawning over an injured doe caring for three baby deer.
Dunhill maker to cut about a fifth of workforce, aiming to reduce costs and become more ‘technology enabled’
British American Tobacco (BAT) will cut about a fifth of its 47,000-strong workforce this year, as the cigarette-maker looks for ways to push down costs and become more “technology enabled”.
BAT, which is one of the biggest tobacco groups in the world, has announced it will cut 5,500 jobs by the end of the year and outsource a further 3,500, affecting a total of 9,000 employees.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
ChristianaCare is Delaware’s largest healthcare system and its largest private employer. In recent years it has faced external challenges from elected leaders and internal ones from its own employees, culminating in a unionization movement.
Hundreds of physicians at ChristianaCare ratified their first union contract with the healthcare system, marking a milestone for the industry in the First State.
The three-year contract, negotiated with Doctors Council Service Employees International Union and ratified by 97% of members, marks the first time any employee of Delaware’s large healthcare sector has reached a collective bargaining agreement.
It covers more than 500 physicians working at ChristianaCare’s four hospitals, making the union the country’s largest among private-sector physicians.
The contract includes a mutual prohibition on strikes or lockouts, but also creates committees for physicians to have a greater say in system operations along with payscale adjustments.
“This physician-centered agreement advances key shared priorities that support our physician workforce while protecting uninterrupted, high-quality care for the communities we serve. It reflects a mutual commitment to collaboration, stability and long-term partnership,” ChristianaCare said in a statement.
Notably, the healthcare system is still in negotiations on another contract with resident physicians, which includes doctors who have completed medical school but are still working toward their licenses
Physicians voted in June 2024 to unionize and enter negotiations. Those have been ongoing for two years.
Dr. Nisha Gandhi, a cardiologist at ChristianaCare and member of the bargaining team, told Spotlight Delaware the two-year period was not an unreasonable amount of time considering it was their first contract.
As physicians have increasingly become employed by healthcare systems rather than operating independent, affiliated practices, Gandhi said they have increasingly felt their voices were lost in the debate with administrative leaders.
The creation of committees with physician members will strengthen their ability to advocate for themselves and the patients they serve, she said.
“There’s a very clear pathway for our collective voice to be escalated now,” she said.
In terms of payscales, the new contract has shifted from an employer-focused model to more of a market-rate model, resulting in pay increases and decreases depending on what market averages are paying, Gandhi said.
It also creates ceilings for how many patients some specialty physicians could be expected to see in a day. Others – such as surgeons – wouldn’t have maximum patient loads, but would be limited by other factors such as the nurses, technicians and operating rooms that are necessary.
“I think one thing that holds true is that safety is paramount for the physicians who sat at the bargaining table. How many patients should we see or how many patients can we see in a day is what really guided our requests and compromises,” Gandhi said.
The ratification of the contract comes just days after the murder of an intern and shooting of another within the halls of ChrisitanaCare’s Wilmington Hospital by a coworker. Gandhi, who works at the hospital, said it was an “absolutely shocking tragedy.”
“I think we’re all still reeling in many cases when gun violence occurs. Healthcare actually is one of the most dangerous places to work, not just from gun violence or physical violence, but you know the care that is provided can lead to impacts on mental or physical health for physicians,” she said.
Gandhi said that under the terms of their contract, physicians will be able to demand an evaluation of what can be done better to protect physicians. She expects that would have spillover benefits to other caregivers and the public.
“It is a little bit more reassuring that, as a collective voice, when we raise our voice and ask questions, that is taken more seriously than an individual physician questioning whether they are safe when they come to work,” she said.
The post In a first for Delaware, ChristianaCare, physicians’ union ratify contract appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware’s annual Bond Bill funds large capital projects, such as road improvements, new schools and upgraded state facilities. It also often features a parade of more eyebrow-raising expenditures. But part of its surprise this year comes from where it receives money, rather than where it directs it.
Delaware’s capital budget, unveiled last week with a string of pricey construction projects, relies heavily on a pot of money derived from unused gift cards, forgotten stock dividends, and other types of abandoned property previously held by companies across the globe.
While it is a uniquely Delaware way to pay for public construction projects — including an expansion of the Port of Wilmington — it comes as the unclaimed property program faces mounting legal scrutiny. In March, a federal judge remarked that the only thing clear about the Delaware fund was its lack of clarity.
Lawmakers publicly released the $1.26 billion Bond Bill on Thursday evening, giving the public only a few days to review the spending plan before an expected vote Tuesday — the final day of the legislative session.
If passed, the legislation would draw more than one-quarter of its funding from Delaware’s practice of scooping up unclaimed assets held by companies that maintain their legal home in the state.
The remainder would come from the state’s General Fund, bond sales and a transportation trust fund.
The 103-page bill includes scores of spending items, including traditional appropriations for roads, parks and school buildings.
There are also several one-time outlays, including $110 million for cost overruns at the Port of Wilmington expansion; $35 million for a Legislative Hall renovation; $30 million for the state’s purchase of a marina and parking garage; and $17 million to cover unforeseen renovation costs at a downtown Wilmington office building.
The bill also includes a $1 million appropriation for renovations at The Queen, a Wilmington music venue owned by a nonprofit.
Asked why lawmakers are earmarking money for the private venue, Senate Democratic spokeswoman Sarah Fulton said the facility draws people into downtown Wilmington, benefiting nearby restaurants and hotels. She described it as a venue that “puts Delaware on the map.”
Beyond construction spending, the Bond Bill also makes several policy directives. Among them is an authorization for the Delaware Department of Correction to demolish a shuttered work-release facility and transfer it to the Wilmington Housing Authority for $1.
Corrections officials closed the facility earlier this year despite objections from former inmates, Wilmington-area politicians, and prisoner advocates, who said the closure would force inmates to live farther from their jobs and families as they transition back to society.
Notable in this year’s Bond Bill is the state’s reliance on a one-time appropriation of $328 million derived from Delaware’s practice of collecting unclaimed or abandoned property.
The process, known as escheatment, is based on a legal precedent that stretches back to medieval England and allows government officials to collect dollars or other assets that they deem to be unclaimed by their rightful owners.
Because of Delaware’s unique role as the legal home to more than 1 million companies, the state’s collection of this money funds an outsized portion of government business. In recent years, it has amounted to more than $400 million.
But some of that money also flows to a separate fund the state holds in reserve to resolve what it calls extraordinary claims on its unclaimed property operations. That fund is known as the escheat special fund.
“We had unusual revenues in the escheat special fund and, in kind, we were able to allocate those to the port and to schools,” Fulton said.
Delaware’s Controller General Ruth Ann Miller also noted during a legislative committee hearing last week that a “significant balance” of unclaimed property money would allow the state to pay for public school construction projects that had been delayed in recent years.
“We’ve been hearing a lot from districts that they have been getting turned down for (construction),” she said.
While state officials pointed to the surge in escheat revenue, the long-term viability of relying on those dollars may be in jeopardy.
Attorneys for Delaware faced a deadline on Thursday to file a response to demands that they reveal details about the escheat pot of money that is funding the Bond Bill. Thursday’s deadline is part of a lawsuit filed in 2024 that seeks to upend the way Delaware brings in unclaimed property revenue.
The lawsuit, filed as a class action, explicitly challenges the “constitutionality of Delaware’s escheatment scheme set forth in its Unclaimed Property Law.”
The suit follows a separate legal challenge to Delaware’s collection of unclaimed Moneygram checks that resolved in 2024.
As part of that settlement, Delaware paid out $102 million to several other states that had argued its aggressive collection of those checks was unlawful.
Around the time of Moneygram settlement, Delaware officials under the Carney administration were preparing to transfer $195 million from the unclaimed property pot of money to kickstart an expansion of the Port of Wilmington by building a new container terminal along the Delaware River in Edgemoor.
For a decade, the port expansion has been a goal of state officials who said a new container facility could bring in thousands of new jobs to the Wilmington area.
But plans for the development had been beset by obstacles and blunders committed by port officials in the past. They also faced opposition from regional ports in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and from Edgemoor residents concerned about environmental impacts.
Most recently, port officials announced in April that the state must pay an extra $110 million to cover its share of the updated projected costs for the new port terminal.
At the time, Delaware Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez declined to disclose where the state would draw the money from — even after officials signed a contract to commit the new dollars to the project. It is not immediately clear if her reticence was a result of the lawsuit challenging the state’s unclaimed property program.
Nevertheless, Patibanda-Sanchez finally disclosed the source of funds last week to lawmakers during a committee hearing. In her remarks, she defended Delaware’s decision to expand the port, stating its current facility on the Christina River would become obsolete amid expansions by competing regional ports.
“If we don’t compete in order to allow for containers, then our port is going to be unfortunately just left to oblivion,” she said.
The post Controversial pot of money will fund Delaware’s port expansion, other construction projects appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The seven-time Wimbledon singles champion who ‘evolved away’ from tennis shares why she’s back
For two long weeks, since her return to the courts of a professional tennis tournament at the Queen’s Club, a clock was ticking in Serena Williams’s mind. She had already committed to making her comeback in doubles at 44 after four years away from the sport, but doubles only requires a player to cover half a court with the help of a partner. The real question was whether she would dare to put herself on the line again in singles against the best tennis players in the world.
Williams’s decision to supercharge her comeback by taking a singles wildcard into Wimbledon, it turned out, was exactly as last minute as it appeared. She was only announced as the final wildcard for the women’s singles draw on Sunday 21 June, one day before the qualifying draw was made: “I had until Monday to decide. I think it was like Sunday. I just wasn’t sure up until then. Honestly, I’m still not even sure, but we’ll see,” Williams says, smiling, in her pre‑tournament press conference.
Continue reading...Research suggests travel scams are on rise as experts advise doing some detective work to make sure holidays are real
Holidaymakers have been advised to carry out amateur detective work to ensure they do not book into fake accommodation this summer, as research showed a third of travellers had seen an increase in potential travel scams on social media.
Consumer experts have urged holidaymakers to do a reverse image search on photographs of holiday homes and check their locations on an online map to verify they are real.
Continue reading...Show at Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin is biggest ever celebration of an East German female artist in a state museum
Gabriele Stötzer remembers the days when she had to decide: “Am I buying a sausage, or film for my Super 8 camera?”
Stötzer was one of the most radical artists in communist East Germany, and her desire to create was born in defiance of and in spite of the material conditions and oppressive restrictions of the GDR regime.
Continue reading...Camera, wifi and design updates bring welcome upgrades to Ring’s top model in wired or battery flavour
Ring’s recent revamp of its popular video doorbells with a more modern design is led by the top-of-the-line Video Doorbell Pro 3, which gains much-needed upgrades with a 4K camera and better wifi plus new interesting AI features.
The new doorbells are sleeker but keep the unmistakable two-tone Ring colour scheme, button, logo and ringtone. Battery models start at £80 or equivalent, with the top model costing £219.99 (€249.99/$249.99/A$329.99) with either a battery or wired, which is roughly in line with the competition.
Continue reading...Donald Trump shuttered the web site Climate.gov in 2025, cutting off public access to climate information from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But "former members of the site's team have brought much of it back at a new domain," reports The Register: "Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change," Climate.us managing director Rebecca Lindsey said of the new platform in a press release. Lindsey, who previously served as the Climate.gov program manager and lead editor, told The Register in an email that she and one of the web developers responsible for the site were the first to be caught up in government purges when DOGE swept through the department in late February 2025... Created in cooperation with sustainability nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, Climate.us aims to be an independent alternative to its old .gov, and many of the former NOAA crew behind the previous website have teamed up for the new initiative to "keep climate information accurate, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful for the people who rely on it." Climate.gov, which now redirects to a NOAA page about climate but which hosts none of the data the shuttered site used to contain, was taken offline in July 2025 following a Trump executive order prioritizing "gold standard science...." arguing that prior climate science models relied on worst-case scenarios, which somehow meant the public availability of 15 years of climate data and reporting ought to change... All of the content that was purged from the .gov is now back, along with blogs from experts, climate status reports, maps and data pathways, and national assessments of climate change as well. Lindsey told us that rapidly changing political winds have led her to believe that the government isn't the right place for that mission to continue, and that she would have concerns about returning the site to federal management if a future administration changed its position on climate change... Lindsey said that the Climate.us team will continue with the same mission it had before the Trump administration attempted to quash it: Getting climate science in front of the public in a manner that's understandable so they can make their own decisions about how to respond.
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A Newark company on Friday unveiled a system that takes waste heat from data centers and other large industrial sites and uses it to extract drinkable water from the air.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 29.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 29, No. 644.
Drifting from America, the continent Is rearming and reordering itself.
In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global
When Erin Brockovich woke to find 30 emails from people from the same town, she realised something was going on. People email Brockovich all the time because of what happened in 1993, when she was instrumental in suing Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) on behalf of residents of the town of Hinkley, California, whose groundwater had been contaminated. The case resulted in a settlement of $333m – then the largest ever payout for a direct-action lawsuit. When she was immortalised by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, she became the hero we didn’t know we needed, a modern day Joan of Arc. She had won against PG&E with no formal legal training.
The emails she received a few weeks ago were about datacentres. In April, she put a callout on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied. Tech companies have needed datacentres to power their technology “for ever”, she says, but the new ones being built to power AI? “This feels like Hinkley on steroids.”
Continue reading...Iran launched drone and missile attacks targeting Kuwait and Bahrain on Sunday after the U.S. and Iran traded attacks earlier over the weekend.
Hey guys, so I have an XR+ that only ran up about 700 miles on it. It had sat for a few years, but I started riding to work and put an extra 330 miles on it, but then one day I got an error 16 and it hasn’t worked since. Onewheel wants over 800 for shipping and repair, and I’m curious if independent shops can get it running again? I cant afford a new one, but it’d be a shame to lose it. Im currently in Hawaii and there are no shops to call which is why im asking here, Im moving back to California soon though, so figuring if its worth shipping it there, or just tossing it
President says ‘we always hold onto hope’ as discovery of earthquake survivors spurs fresh search efforts despite dwindling chances of survival
A man and his teenage son were found alive under the rubble in Venezuela on Sunday, in a town about 40km north of the capital Caracas, AFP journalists reported, as the death toll from last week’s twin earthquakes passed 1,450.
The discovery of survivors in Caraballeda was made by French and American rescue teams nearly four days after back-to-back quakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck, completely destroying nearly 200 buildings in the area.
Continue reading...  | Hey dear community, so someone if selling his pint with problems, he don’t know what happened he said he didn’t use it for a while and then was with this issue, but looking at the video he sent me I think it could be the controller box, maybe offering 100-150 bucks and fixing it myself, the pint doesnt charge or recieve battery while charging, what do you think? is it worth buying it or I stay away from this pint, i would be glad to recieve some help, thanks as always [link] [comments] |
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 29, No. 1,836.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 29, No. 848.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 29 No. 1,114.
Americans weighed in on what's best about the U.S., its greatest invention, most representative food and more in latest CBS News poll.
Adding more processors and accelerators alone is no longer enough to support modern AI and HPC environments. Performance increasingly depends on how efficiently compute resources interact with storage, networking, software, power delivery, and cooling across the entire infrastructure stack.
Large AI models and scientific datasets are exposing data movement as a primary bottleneck, leaving expensive GPU resources underutilized when storage and networking cannot deliver data fast enough.
At the same time, organizations must support a growing mix of traditional HPC simulations, AI training, and inference workloads on shared infrastructure, making intelligent resource management and application-aware optimization as important as raw compute performance.
Taken together, these challenges point to a new priority: maximizing total system efficiency rather than simply adding more hardware.
As AI pushes high-performance computing toward denser racks, larger clusters, and unprecedented power demands, the industry’s defining challenge is no longer simply generating more FLOPS. As a result, organizations are finding they need to focus on total system efficiency. Such criteria are influencing how organizations select, design, and implement their HPC infrastructures.
One company advocating this perspective is xFusion. The company offers an integrated architecture that aligns infrastructure decisions with specific workload requirements and business outcomes.
Specifically, xFusion is taking a different course than traditional HPC solution providers. The company’s focus is on a systems-engineering philosophy that maximizes every watt of power to produce more useful FLOPS.
Achieving that goal requires optimization across the entire infrastructure stack, from power delivery and liquid cooling to storage, interconnects, and application performance.
This shift, essentially from watts to FLOPS, captures the new economics of HPC, where overall system efficiency determines scientific throughput, operational costs, and ultimately the value organizations extract from every computing investment.
A deeper look at the xFusion offering puts the benefit of its approach into perspective.
To start, its architecture supports 240kW/rack, 20 compute slots and 8 switching slots, and single-sided horizontal insertion. That far exceeds the industry standard of 100 to 150kW/rack. It touts >98% efficiency and a 60kW/2U Power Shelf to meet the power demands of systems running modern workloads. Such power can produce enormous heat; to address that, xFusion uses a 200W/cm² chip-level cold plate rated for 10 years of operational life, with three-tier reliability protection validated by TÜV Rheinland’s leak-proof certification.
Central to the design is xFusion’s proprietary three-bus blind-mating technology, which integrates power, network, and liquid-cooling buses into a single blind-mate interface — enabling zero internal cabling, tool-less maintenance, and robot-assisted unmanned operations. And the company’s systems support next-generation interconnects.
A key factor in modern workloads is that storage has become a defining factor in overall HPC performance.
As AI models continue to grow and datasets expand into the petabyte and exabyte range, storage architecture increasingly determines whether expensive compute resources operate at peak utilization.
To address this challenge, xFusion positions FusionOne DFS as a core component of its end-to-end HPC architecture. The platform unifies file, object, and block storage while supporting POSIX, NFS, CIFS, HDFS, and S3 interfaces through a single namespace. Company benchmarks report up to 200 GB/s read bandwidth, 100 GB/s write bandwidth, 1.58 million read IOPS, and 5.7 million write IOPS, enabling AI and HPC applications to move data at speeds that better match those of modern accelerator-based systems.
Infrastructure alone, however, rarely delivers maximum application performance.
Drawing on more than a decade of optimization experience, xFusion employs a structured five-step tuning methodology covering hardware, operating systems, MPI, compilers, math libraries, I/O, and application parameters. The company reports workload-specific improvements, including 38% higher performance with GATK and 27% with WRF, demonstrating that systematic optimization can unlock additional value from existing infrastructure.
Efficiency improvements begin at the data-center level.
xFusion’s FusionPoD for AI is a modular, prefabricated computing platform that simplifies deployment while optimizing total cost of ownership through integrated planning for compute, networking, storage, cooling, and facility infrastructure. Its fully integrated liquid-cooling architecture is engineered to achieve a pPUE of 1.06, reducing cooling energy consumption by up to 40% compared to traditional air-cooled systems and helping operators reduce energy overhead while accelerating deployment of new AI and HPC capacity.
The impact is visible at scale. In one recent deployment, an AI cloud provider building a 10,000-GPU training cluster reduced its footprint from over 300 cabinets to under 200 using FusionPoD — a 30% reduction in floor space, 25% less cooling power, and model training that began two months ahead of schedule.
Within those deployments, rack-level design becomes equally important.
The FusionPoD architecture combines CPU nodes, GPU nodes, and supernodes through high-density liquid cooling, high-speed interconnects, advanced power-delivery technologies, and workload-optimized system design. By integrating these components into a common architecture, xFusion aims to increase usable compute density while enabling future scaling as processor and accelerator power requirements continue to rise.
Underpinning this flexibility is xFusion’s Wuji architecture — a three-section modular design that achieves up to 90% component sharing across x86 and ARM platforms. Rather than locking customers into a single silicon vendor, the architecture supports diversified accelerators within a common hardware platform, enabling organizations to deploy the right chip for the right workload.
Supporting these high-density systems is an increasingly sophisticated power infrastructure. xFusion’s portfolio spans high-density power supplies, centralized power shelves, and vertical power delivery technologies capable of supporting deployments from kilowatt- to megawatt-scale. The company reports 98% peak power efficiency, more than five million power supplies shipped worldwide, and certifications including CE and TÜV, providing both operational efficiency and deployment readiness across global markets. Across deployments, the company reports over 50% improvement in rack utilization and 15–20% lower total cost of ownership over a five-year lifecycle compared to traditional air-cooled alternatives.
At ISC High Performance 2026, xFusion showcased its continued investment in benchmark-driven system optimization, with demonstrations highlighting application-level tuning across representative HPC and AI workloads. The company has now deployed over 100,000 liquid-cooled nodes in production environments across telecommunications operators, internet companies, and financial institutions worldwide — an operational track record that underscores its readiness for mission-critical HPC and AI workloads.
Beyond infrastructure, the company is expanding its AI software portfolio with TokenBox
, an enterprise token generation platform designed to simplify the deployment and management of generative AI applications within secure enterprise environments. The self-contained appliance supports large parameter models up to 1.6 trillion parameters and uses data-center-grade liquid cooling to operate below 35 dB — quiet enough for standard office settings. With diversified, scalable hardware packs and ready-to-use full-stack AI software, TokenBox targets use cases ranging from AI-assisted coding and code generation to full-lifecycle enterprise AI, including intelligent customer service, financial approval, and administrative automation — all while maintaining full data sovereignty on premises.
For the HPC community, the broader message is clear. The future of high-performance computing in the age of AI will not be determined solely by the next processor generation or the next accelerator architecture. Competitive advantage will increasingly come from the ability to optimize the complete infrastructure stack, from power delivery and cooling to storage, networking, software, and application performance.
Looking ahead, xFusion’s roadmap points toward support for over 128 GPUs per cabinet, broader multi-vendor accelerator compatibility, and AI-driven predictive maintenance — continuing the journey from watts to FLOPS.
As AI workloads become a more critical part of HPC workloads, organizations that embrace a total-efficiency mindset will be better positioned to maximize both outcomes and infrastructure investments. With such goals in mind, xFusion provides modern systems for the most demanding HPC and AI workloads today.
Stay tuned with xFusion
Homepage: https://www.xfusion.com/en
Customer Stories: https://www.xfusion.com/static/en/cases
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xfusion-global/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xFusion-Global-100472719293901
X: https://x.com/xFusion_Global
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqwN6fbzONtrquKA6UEQfMw
The post From Compute Stacking to Total Efficiency: Building the Next Generation of HPC Infrastructure for the AI Era appeared first on HPCwire.
The New York Times alleges Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal its copyrighted work, reports Ars Technica, citing a new (and heavily redacted) court filing Thursday: NYT's motion comes after the [U.S.] Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard... A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that the company views the amended complaint as "a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings..." The updated complaint seeks to specify that [Microsoft's] supercomputer was tailor-made to help OpenAI infringe and allege that it was built for the explicit purpose of training AI on copyrighted works without permission. And as the NYT alleged, its articles were more heavily weighted by this system, as both firms hoped to train models on the highest-quality journalism possible, so that level of writing could be confidently mimicked in outputs. By building this "unusually complex" machine, Microsoft not only helped select the works that were infringed but also provided a means to seize copyrighted works without permission, the NYT alleged. "Microsoft specifically designed it for the purpose of using essentially the whole Internet — curated to disproportionately feature Times Works — to train the most capable LLM in history," the NYT alleged... Similarly as problematic for the NYT are hallucinations where Microsoft and OpenAI models falsely cite the NYT for content that they never published... "Users who ask a search engine what The Times has written on a subject should be provided with neither an unauthorized copy nor an inaccurate forgery of a Times article, but a link to the article itself," the NYT alleged... In a statement provided to Ars, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri reiterated the AI firm's often-repeated claims that AI training on copyrighted works is indisputably fair use... OpenAI has argued that "ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription," the NYT reported, partly because "they transformed the material for a different use." An OpenAI spokesperson told Ars Technica that OpenAI's models "empower innovation," while a New York Times spokesperson insisted that Microsoft "actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works... [O]ur core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit — that Microsoft and OpenAI stole millions of The Times's copyrighted works to compete with our products and illegally enrich themselves." The article speculates that the case's most extreme outcome "could require OpenAI and Microsoft to wipe models and start over. The NYT has also asked for permanent injunctive relief to prevent future infringement, as well as extensive damages..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Commissioner calls for overhaul of state support after reporting 10% rise in young patient referrals last year
More than 1 million children were referred to mental health services across England last year, with referrals up 10% from the year previous, according to a report by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza. She said the country faced a “crisis” in young people’s mental health.
The number of patients who had an active referral to children and young people’s mental health services across England surpassed 1 million for the first time in 2024-25. This was almost double the number recorded in 2018-19, and an almost 10% rise on the previous year.
Continue reading...British Heart Foundation expects about 45 people a day to die over next decade if current trends continue
About 170,000 people are expected to die from heart-related conditions linked to obesity – one of the leading causes of preventable illnesses – by 2035, according to a leading charity.
The analysis, conducted by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), found that about 45 people a day are expected to die from cardiovascular disease linked to excess weight and obesity in England over the next decade, as long as current trends in obesity rates continue. In the UK, about two in three adults are living with obesity, and worldwide, more than half of adults and a third of children and young people will be overweight or obese by 2050.
Continue reading...Spending watchdog says high-speed rail project must be put on stable footing to avoid repeat of costly past failures
Revised plans for HS2 should not be put into action until the government is confident they can be delivered, according to the public spending watchdog.
The project to build the high-speed railway must be put on a stable footing to avoid a repeat of past failures, the National Audit Office (NAO) said in a report.
Continue reading...The Happy Valley actor is lined up as the lead in German director Thomas Ostermeier’s first Shakespearean play in English
James Norton is to take on his first major Shakespearean stage role and play Hamlet in the West End next year.
The King & Conqueror star said it was a “privilege” and “pretty terrifying” to be cast as the tragic prince in the acclaimed German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production next autumn. Norton was last on stage in 2023 in the harrowing A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, which the actor described as the hardest thing he has ever done.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Sadiq Khan plans to use new powers after local council opposes city scheme for seasonal pedestrianisation
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, plans to override opposition to al fresco dining in Soho after the local council failed to apply to a scheme for seasonal pedestrianisation that is being introduced across the capital this summer.
From 2027, restaurants in London’s entertainment district will be allowed to put chairs outside in the warmer months despite a longstanding local row on the issue.
Continue reading...Prediction market users are profiting from bets on war. Analysts say suspiciously timed bets, and the high win rates of wagers on military outcomes , are likely signs of insider trading.
Looters stole thousands of priceless artifacts from religious sites across Cambodia. An American lawyer is working with the country to bring them home
Crowns and precious jewels believed to have been worn by ancient Khmer royalty were tracked down to an unlikely place: a pub parking lot outside London.
Across the US, cities wrapped up Pride month with parades and festivals on the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, which underscored the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. This month’s celebrations unfolded as Trump works to roll back trans rights and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. This year’s theme for NYC Pride was ‘For All of Us’. Attender Carlos Duarte said: ‘It’s very important for us to be here … all together for love, peace and to show the world who we are.’
Continue reading...Delaware Sen. Chris Coons was injured in a crash that involved several vehicles in Sussex County Sunday afternoon, he announced on social media.
Spanish startup FOSSA Systems "has raised about $10.5 million to expand its connectivity constellation," reports Space News, noting some funding is backed by Spain's government: The support from the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT) comes a year after the fund injected 14 million euros into Spain's Sateliot , which is also developing a satellite connectivity network with security and defense applications. Spanish private investment firm Kibo Ventures led FOSSA's funding round, the six-year-old venture announced June 24, bringing its total raised to date to nearly 20 million euros. The proceeds will help fuel FOSSA's push beyond the tiny picosatellites it once used to connect low-power monitoring devices toward larger cubesats in low Earth orbit, enabling additional sovereign communications and space-based intelligence capabilities... The company's funding round follows a wave of investments this year in European ventures planning to develop sovereign space capabilities, including Austrian propulsion startup Gate Space, which secured 6.3 million euros earlier this month from a European Commission-backed accelerator program. "Our goal is to establish FOSSA as a European benchmark in sovereign space infrastructure," said Julián Fernández, FOSSA's CEO and cofounder.
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 | Or rather I was given one! Went over a speed bump awkward and my board ghosted over my body. The wheel gave me tire burn up both my legs but even after scrubbing I can’t get the black out of the wound. Guess I got my first ink! [link] [comments] |
Chinese AI systems "have matched the performance of Anthropic's powerful model Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios," reports the Wall Street Journal. They call it "a development poised to reset the global tech race and pressure the White House in its overhaul of U.S. AI policy." Security researchers said that a new AI model, released this month by China's Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, can match the latest U.S. models when it comes to finding security bugs, although it still lags behind Anthropic's and OpenAI's products in other tasks. Overall, the capability gap between top U.S. models and those built by Chinese companies has narrowed significantly, and use of Chinese AI systems has surged as businesses seek to rein in runaway costs. A host of companies, including Microsoft, are weighing how they can offer Chinese models on their platforms, a development that is set to alter the balance of power among tech companies... Unlike models from Anthropic or OpenAI, Zhipu's GLM-5.2 is open-weight. That means it can be downloaded and run on hardware operated by anybody and can be modified and used without supervision. Open-weight models are ideal for users who want unfettered access to systems they control, but they are also ideal for hackers, who can run them in the shadows. GLM-5.2 has ranked as one of the 10 most-used AI models, according to data from OpenRouter, a company that provides access to more than 400 AI models. In some benchmarking tests, according to the cybersecurity company Semgrep, GLM-5.2 bested Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 model, which was released in May. When given further instructions, Opus 4.8 and GLM-5.2 can match Mythos in bug-finding ability, according to researchers... "Banning Fable while selling chips China needs to develop its own version is a gift to China," said Saif Khan, a distinguished technology fellow at the Institute for Progress think tank who worked on export restrictions in the Biden administration. The U.S. needs to maximize the use of Mythos and comparable models to harden its cyber defenses while it can, he added. Among the Mythos 5 and Fable 5 users that had lost access before Friday's decision to restore Mythos 5 access for some trusted entities: the National Security Agency, which had been testing the tools and found them impressive in trials, according to people familiar with the matter... "It is incentivizing companies across the globe to use cheaper but very capable Chinese open-weight models, while at the same time undermining the U.S. AI industry," said Niels Provos, a researcher who led security teams at Google and Stripe. "I don't understand it." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Forecasters expect days of high temperatures in central and eastern US before Fourth of July and World Cup festivities
A long and dangerous heatwave will blast a large swath of the central and eastern United States for the upcoming week, the National Weather Service (NWS) said on Sunday – with temperatures rising ahead of the Fourth of July holiday and feeling even hotter because of high humidity also arriving.
Already parts of the US, especially Phoenix and central Texas, and much of the south-west were experiencing temperatures of about 100F (38C) on Sunday, while the NWS warned of severe wildfire conditions developing across much of the west as new fires popped up across the region.
Continue reading...Tehran attacks Bahrain and Kuwait amid efforts to open strait of Hormuz without Iran’s direct oversight
A new round of escalating strikes between Iran and the US has continued, further undermining the fragile interim peace agreement between the two countries, and prompting Donald Trump to threaten violence that would ensure Iran “will no longer exist”.
On Sunday, Tehran launched drone and missile attacks against Bahrain and Kuwait after new US strikes on sites in southern Iran, and threatened a “complete halt” to negotiations to end the war. Trump said that a moment might come soon when he abandoned talks and the US would “militarily finish the job”.
Continue reading...The New York Times tells the story of a 63-year-old retiree who wrote a check for several thousand dollaras to pay her taxes. But she discovered much later that her taxes were never paid because that check had been intercepted and then altered to be payable to someone else: In some cases, thieves may pilfer one or more checks from local mailboxes. Adam Rust, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America, said thieves sometimes "fish" for checks at free-standing drop boxes, using long tools with sticky pads on the ends to grab letters. In other cases, more sophisticated criminals may steal large batches of checks, copy them and then sell them on the internet. Often, the purloined checks are chemically altered in what's known as "check washing" to remove the name of the recipient. The thief replaces it with a fraudulent name, and often increases the amount of the check, before cashing or depositing it. The 63-year-old retiree's bank told her she'd waited too long to recover the funds: Schwab's "security guarantee," outlined on its website , says that "Schwab will cover losses in any of your Schwab accounts due to unauthorized activity." But fine print at the bottom of the page notes that reimbursement "requires your timely reporting of unauthorized activity to Schwab," and that Schwab "will not be liable for additional or increased losses resulting from a failure to report unauthorized activity in a timely manner." It notes that more details are available in account agreements... Notify your bank as soon as possible, said Scott Anchin, senior vice president of strategic initiatives and policy at the independent bankers association. Banks generally allow at least 30 days and sometimes up to 90 days from the time your statement is made available to you to report suspected check fraud, he said. So how can you avoid check fraud? Adam Rust, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America, just suggests that "No one should ever mail a check." If you must write a check, he said, try to deliver it in person or take it inside a post office to mail rather than relying on your own mailbox or public drop boxes. The American Bankers Association recommends using permanent "gel" ink pens when you do write checks to reduce the risk of tampering... And if you don't already, consider using your bank's online bill payment service. The article notes that even the U.S. federal government "has been moving away from paper checks for things like benefit payments and income tax refunds, saying digital payment methods are more secure."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Heat records of over 40C set as extreme weather spreads east, with more than 191m in Europe enduring 35C or above
Germany, Czechia, Poland and Hungary reached record temperatures of more than 40C on Sunday as a heatwave linked to hundreds of deaths in western Europe spread east.
More than 191 million people in Europe faced temperatures of at least 35C, with extreme heat warnings across the region.
Continue reading...About 31 in every 1,000 facing haemorrhage or severe tears, NHS figures show, in trend described as ‘national crisis’
Women in England are at their highest risk of suffering a serious injury while giving birth since records began in 2020, NHS figures show.
The rate of women sustaining the most serious type of tear during childbirth rose to 31.1 in every 1,000 in January, February and March – the highest since monitoring began in 2020.
Continue reading...Markwayne Mullin’s remarks come after controversial supreme court ruling to strip TPS from over 350,000 people
Migrants in the US on temporary protected status should seek permanent residence or leave, Markwayne Mullin, Homeland Security secretary, said in the wake of last week’s supreme court decision that stripped humanitarian protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
The remarks to CNN’s State of the Union program comes after a decision that could allow Donald Trump’s administration to deport Haitian and Syrian immigrants to home countries plagued by conflict and destitution.
Continue reading...On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Sens. Bill Cassidy and Tim Kaine join Margaret Brennan.
Five years ago, Alan Jackson shared that he has a degenerative nerve condition that affects his balance called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which he was first diagnosed with a decade prior.
Mayor says progressive peers who swept primaries speak to Americans ‘coast to coast’ as moderates have reservations
Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, said on Sunday that he and a slew of democratic socialist allies who prevailed in recent primary elections are carrying a “national message” to struggling working Americans hungry for a new kind of politics “coast to coast”.
Mamdani made that triumphant clarion call on ABC News’s This Week just five days after he had seen his endorsed candidates win Democratic nominations in three races for New York congressional seats, as well as for five state legislature positions in Albany. He made no effort to disguise his delight that his clean sweep marks a dramatic shift in Democratic politics – not just in New York City, which he has led since January, but also across the US.
Continue reading...Matthew Ashley Foster-Smith, from Dorset, is accused of killing Natalia Villalba in an apartment in Bogotá
A British man has been arrested in Ecuador after the body of a woman was found inside a suitcase in Colombia.
Matthew Ashley Foster-Smith is alleged to have caused the death of 36-year-old Natalia Villalba in an apartment in the Chicó neighbourhood of Bogotá on 18 June, local authorities said.
Continue reading...America's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has "canceled its contract for a surveillance tool that enables warrantless tracking of mobile devices," reports the Associated Press. They note the move comes "after lawmakers, a prosecutor and a judge raised concerns about the legality of the tool in criminal investigations." ATF, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation's gun laws, told The Associated Press that it discontinued what it called a "pilot" program using a tool called Webloc after Rep. Michael Cloud, a Republican from Texas, and Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, expressed reservations about the agency's use of bulk commercial location data. Webloc, which is made by a vendor called Penlink, sources data from consumer apps and advertising networks, which collect the location of mobile devices from consumers who download apps or browse the web... The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that police needed a warrant to obtain historic movement data from cellphone companies on a criminal suspect. But it has never addressed the growing practice of commercially acquired data. Other users of Webloc include the U.S. military and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement but also local law enforcement agencies such as police in places like Elk Grove, Calif. and Durham, N.C. The technology has also expanded around the world, with the national police in El Salvador and Hungarian intelligence agencies as customers, according to a report from earlier this year from Citizen Lab, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto who investigate digital threats to civil society. The article notes that other U.S. law enforcement agencies continue to buy commercial geolocation data, "including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sen. Tim Kaine said guardrails on Pentagon firings could see bipartisan support in Congress, following a string of high-level officers exiting the military during the second Trump administration.
The following is the transcript of an interview with Sen. Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on June 28, 2026.
Mayor Mathieu Klein said the victims "died in full view of their loved ones, who were preparing to film the tandem skydives."
In these fiercely-polarized times, the presidential historian reminds us that Americans' freedom has been tested – and has survived – much worse.
Firefighters were involved in joint response to Knowles and Gore blazes as wildfires ravage western US, fire agency says
Three firefighters were killed and two others were hurt while responding to wildfires along the Colorado-Utah border, the US Wildland Fire Service announced on Sunday.
The agency, which was established in January to coordinate wildfire suppression and prevention efforts across public lands, said the firefighters were involved in a joint response to the Knowles and Gore fires on Saturday.
Continue reading...The comic icon behind "Curb Your Enthusiasm" brings his own perspective to America's storied past in a new HBO sketch comedy series – finally making use of his history major from college.
Deal could be announced in July and vow will safeguard future of shows such as Coronation Street and Love Island
Sky has committed to spending £2bn on ITV’s studios business over the next five years as it hammers out a takeover of its broadcasting arm, a move that will safeguard the future of popular programmes such as Coronation Street and Love Island.
Sky, owned by the US telecoms company Comcast, has been in talks for months to buy ITV’s media and entertainment operations, which include its free-to-air TV channels in the UK and the ITVX streaming platform. The £1.6bn takeover deal could be announced in early July, the Sunday Times reported.
Continue reading...Students are using AI-powered smart glasses to cheat on tests, reports CNN. "And in East Asia's test-obsessed societies, where a single exam could impact the trajectory of a student's future career and social status, educators are scrambling to get ahead of the problem." Already, countries are stepping up inspections for test-takers. For China's grueling annual college entrance exam earlier this month — which more than 10 million hopefuls take each year — authorities required screening of all glasses. In the United Kingdom, the head of England's exam watchdog warned earlier this month that AI glasses and smart devices like earpieces could worsen cheating in exams... [T]wo incidents in South Korea were the country's first reported cases of cheating with AI glasses... In Taiwan, the university where a prospective student was caught cheating is now reviewing rules and standard operating procedures for AI eyewears during examinations. But experts worry these individual cases point to a more widespread issue. "If we're seeing a few cases being reported, we're seeing a lot more cases not being reported," said Thomas Corbin, lecturer at Deakin University in Australia, who has conducted research around the usage of AI-powered glasses and other smart devices in academic assessment. With the rapid development of AI technology, however, smart glasses are becoming slimmer, less noticeable, while integrating AI models that can operate independently with connectivity, raising concerns not only about exam integrity, but also about broader privacy risks... "Wearable AI is as much of a challenge to exams as ChatGPT was to essays in 2022 and I just don't think there is any real way that we can reliably have exam practices moving forward," Corbin said.
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Hundreds of U.S. search and rescue workers are on the ground in Venezuela after deadly quakes struck the South American nation.
Almost £24.4bn of government money went to private equity-run firms in year to April 2025, Guardian analysis shows
‘Treating children like cattle’: what happens when private equity takes over a UK care home?
Nurseries, vets and shops: the sectors where private equity plays a big role
One pound in every £11 of UK government spending on contractors went to private equity-controlled companies last year, research shows, including key services such as transport, waste management and healthcare.
Politicians and economists have raised concerns over the “financial fragility and sharp cost cutting” created by private equity-backed firms, which often have high levels of debt, and the “conflicting interests” in running public services for maximum profit.
Continue reading...Five students and five instructors dead along with pilot after plane fell suddenly near aerodrome, says prefect
A skydiving plane has crashed in north-eastern France, killing all 11 people onboard, according to the region’s prefect.
The parachuting-school plane crashed near Nancy at 11am, said Yves Séguy, the prefect of the Meurthe-et-Moselle region.
Continue reading...The Onion joked the new movie Supergirl is about a hero who must single-handedly save the world "after the catastrophic collapse of interest in the genre." Unfortunately, The Hollywood Reporter says the film's reviews "range from negative to tepid praise (averaging a 58 percent Rotten Tomatoes score)." Many point fingers at the film's script, with Variety's line — "a comic-book movie with the worst script I can remember" — going viral... Not to pile on, but there's another recurring gripe from the reviews that stood out: Critics bashed the film as being murky, dark and gray, with poor VFX: "Muddy CG sludge" wrote one. Another said the film was full of "sludgy browns and grays" and "the visual murkiness of the settings makes it hard to follow the already unintelligible action sequences." A third wrote the "VFX is so rough it makes The Flash look like Avatar." Moviegoers increasingly despise murky, dark visuals (often used to hide weak effects), along with obvious CGI and incoherent action. They've seen it so many times they've become allergic. The Bulwark agrees that the action sequences are "terribly lit, incoherently staged, and just generally weightless and ugly... [I]t's reminiscent of the disaster that was The Flash: It's just very obvious during certain sequences that everyone was in a big green-screen warehouse and the camera was whipping around with the knowledge that everything would be painted in later, so who really gives a crap how anything looks on the day of." But they also call the movie "a tremendous slog of a film, a real step backwards for the James Gunn-overseen DC Universe of movies and TV shows" that's "neither fun nor exciting" and "feels empty." The film does have one bright spot: Lobo, who is played by Jason Momoa as something like Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice by way of Jason Momoa's Aquaman. He's blustery and cantankerous and saucy and just a little menacing; it's a perfect piece of casting and a really nice performance. Unfortunately, it's the only spark of life in what is otherwise a deeply dour, deeply boring piece of filmmaking... Supergirl is just a misfire on nearly every level, one that lacks the sincerity and fun of last year's reboot of this universe or the comic pathos present in Gunn's Peacemaker series on HBO Max. Reason calls it "dark, depressive, and dull" and "a downer of a movie in nearly every way." It's not fun. It's barely even righteous. It's just miserable. At one point, Supergirl flat-out murders a guy by pushing a giant sword through his neck. Somehow, I suspect even Zack Snyder would be appalled. Time argued fans of last decade's superhero movies "should be demanding more, not less." Though "Will there be rioting in the streets once audiences get some idea of how lousy Supergirl is? Probably not."
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⚽ All the latest news from as we reach the knockouts
⚽ Player guide | Power rankings | Golden Boot | Mail us
England reaction from our writers in New York/New Jersey.
Bellingham can be dismissed a little by some as a player of moments. Is that bad? Moments win games. Bellingham is 22 and still finding his final form. He promises to do these things, walks and talks like he might do them. But then he also does them, which seems important. With England paddling here, he had the will and the craft to take out the spoons and rattle something off on his knee just when they needed it most.
Continue reading...At least seven people have died in water-related incidents during record-breaking June temperatures
The body of a 15-year-old boy has been recovered from a reservoir near Manchester, as police renewed warnings about the dangers of swimming in open water during soaring temperatures.
Greater Manchester police said officers had been called to reports of a boy getting into difficulty in the water near Cowbury reservoir in Stalybridge at about 6.30pm on Saturday. A body was recovered later that evening, and was identified as the missing teenager.
Continue reading...Document appears to have been subject to conflicting interpretations on key issues of Lebanon ceasefire and strait of Hormuz
The sudden eruption of fresh hostilities in the Gulf – just 10 days after Iran and the US signed a memorandum of understanding to end the conflict – threatens to put the two countries back on the path to war.
It appears the deliberately opaque wording in the memorandum has been unable to withstand the pressure of conflicting interpretations, and as a result supporters of the deal inside Tehran are on the back foot. Statements to the effect that Iran’s government should never have agreed to reopen the strait of Hormuz are proliferating – and not just among the country’s hardliners.
Continue reading...Out-going Louisiana senator’s rebuke over Iran war is rare instance of a Republican politician standing up to Trump
Bill Cassidy, the Republican senator from Louisiana who is being ousted from his position after Donald Trump successfully backed a challenger in May’s primary, has accused the US president of treating Congress as “merely an appendage” in his handling of the Iran war.
In an interview on Sunday with CBS News’s Face the Nation, the out-going Cassidy explained his recent face-to-face row with Trump over the president’s failure to brief Congress on the prosecution of the hostilities with Tehran. In a fleetingly rare instance of a Republican politician directly standing up to Trump, Cassidy let rip at a Capitol Hill lunch over the senator’s support for a war powers resolution that was a symbolic rebuke to the White House.
Continue reading...The Humboldt County Sheriff's Office said they found 600 dog collars in an area where they suspect dozens of dogs were killed.
Pugnacious speech invokes Trump’s ‘vanity projects’ to makeover Washington and the ‘brazen, blatant corruption’
Joe Biden called Donald Trump “a loser” in a pugnacious speech on Saturday that invoked his presidential successor’s attempted makeover of Washington DC to portray him as incompetent, corrupt and vain.
He delivered those remarks while giving the keynote address at a gala in Hanover, Maryland, hosted by the state’s Democratic party, which is hoping to help wrest control of Congress away from Trump and his Republican allies during November’s midterm elections.
Continue reading...As our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, "Sunday Morning" asked some notable Americans to name their favorite songs by American artists. The result: A diverse list of 250 songs from all musical genres that reflects a beautiful representation of America itself.
Iran attacked Bahrain and Kuwait after US strikes, and threatened a ‘complete halt’ to talks
We will soon be closing this liveblog, but you’ll be able to stay up-to-date with our ongoing coverage of the Middle East here.
Here is a summary of today’s events:
Iran launched drone and missile attacks Sunday targeting Bahrain and Kuwait in response to US airstrikes that hit the Islamic Republic, and threatened a “complete halt” in negotiations to end the war if Washington continues its attacks.
US president Donald Trump accused Iran of violating the ceasefire agreement in a post of social media and said the US may be “forced to militarily complete the job”. Iran also accused the US of violating the ceasefire agreement.
JD Vance continued to reiterate the administration’s triumphant line on the war with Iran hours before the latest round of strikes were exchanged. “America wins either way,” he said.
Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi was in Baghdad for a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart. He called for a security framework to be established with the Gulf nations after it struck US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain in retaliation to US strikes.
The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps IRCG has said on state-run SNN TV that it will respond with more force if there are any more blow-for-blow attacks from the US.
Countries including Jordan, the UAE and Italy all condemned Iran’s attacks.
Continue reading...Labour deputy leader says she thinks energy secretary would suit Treasury but ‘tittle-tattle’ over posts ‘unedifying’
Ed Miliband would make a “good” chancellor to Andy Burnham, Labour’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell, has said, before the likely next prime minister’s first major speech on the economy since he returned to Westminster.
Powell, who served as Miliband’s chief of staff in opposition and is close to the former party leader, appeared to endorse him to run the Treasury – although some in Burnham’s camp acknowledge such a move could be politically risky.
Continue reading...The step, which still needs approval in Parliament, reflects deteriorating ties between Israel and Turkey.
Adm Sir Tony Radakin says UK currenly ‘falls short’ of level required to keep Russian threats at bay
The former head of the armed forces has told Andy Burnham that plans for defence spending must meet a “Moscow test” to keep Russian threats at bay, warning the UK currently “falls short” of that level of commitment.
Adm Sir Tony Radakin, who was the chief of the defence staff until last year, said that if the government’s defence investment plan (Dip), expected to be published this week, was “not enough” then the probable next prime minister would have to find more funding before the general election.
Continue reading...The latest work buzzword describes feeling under-stimulated at your job – but you can break free from workplace monotony
There is a woman I know who works in the accounts payable department at one of my clients. She’s in her late 40s and she’s been doing the same job for at least 10 years. Entering payables, reconciling expense accounts, matching documents, calling suppliers.
Sound boring? Not to her. She’s happy, enjoys the routine and appreciates her employer. She’s not “rusting-out” – the latest workplace buzzword.
Continue reading...Samsung Messages stops working for US users this July. Here's the fastest way to move your texts and message history to Google Messages before the cutoff.
An Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – guaranteeing rights to all Americans regardless of sex – was first proposed to Congress in 1923. More than a century later, the ERA still has not become a formal part of our nation's bedrock of laws.
The following is the full transcript of an interview with Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on June 28, 2026. This interview was conducted on June 25, 2026.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy said of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "If you build public health upon a foundation of lies, then you're going to have the absence of adequate public health."
Chef Trong Nguyen came from Vietnam as a teenager in the 1980s, and discovered that the clean bright flavors of Vietnamese food he grew up with paired perfectly with, of all things, the earthy, smoky spice of Cajun cuisine.
Though long bypassed by interstates, the historic "Mother Road," stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles, remained a place for drivers to "get their kicks." Today, marking its first 100 years, Route 66 continues to attract travelers searching for an America of yesterday.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were flawed, but what they did in the summer of 1776 changed the world forever – and their fight for equality continues today.
Quarterly Ofgem price cap rises to equivalent of £1,862 a year from 1 July amid growing consumer energy debt
Ministers are facing growing pressure to lower energy costs as households in Great Britain face the steepest rise in summer bills in four years this week.
The quarterly cap on gas and electricity charges will rise by 13% from Wednesday to the equivalent of £1,862 a year for an average household, just days after figures revealed that consumer energy debt had reached record highs.
Continue reading...The $30 million salvage operation gets underway as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver.
The main pillars of the founding narrative have fallen on hard times. Today, its meaning is up for grabs
Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.
In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations in the country’s history, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence would seem to affirm this judgment. Our moment, defined by the mobilization of market frenzy, machineries of war, deportation deliriums and nativist passions, echoes Bourne’s; it is a time of social fracture, moral failure and hegemonic collapse, with cynical reason ascendant.
Continue reading...IOPC confirms complaints from three survivors of alleged sexual misconduct by late Harrods owner in addition to ongoing investigation
Survivors of abuse at the hands of the late Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed have complained to a watchdog about how the Metropolitan police handled allegations.
More than 400 claims of sexual misconduct have been made against Al Fayed, including rape and human trafficking, dating between 1977 and 2014.
Continue reading...The U.S. Wildland Fire Service said the firefighters had been part of an interagency response to the Knowles and Gore fires near the Colorado-Utah border.
The $350 lower-cost phone gets a punch-hole front-facing camera and a new processor over last year's model.
I just wanted to store my files safely. I ended up opening a Pandora's box of complications.
Commentary: Phone cameras are amazing, but as a professional photographer, I need more from my camera.
Up to 4,000 community banks fear looming legislation to regulate digital cash will deprive rural firms and farmers of $850bn-worth of loans
On a quiet summer morning, above a small mid-western town, an American flag is waving in the breeze. The camera cuts to a father helping his son at the wheel of a tractor, and flits to a smiling couple on a grass-lined pavement, moments before flashing to grainy images of “crypto insiders” in suits.
“American families don’t want experiments with their money,” a voice booms. “They want jobs, growth, and available credit. When crypto gets a free pass, communities pay the price.”
Continue reading...Church sues excommunicated member over Mormon Stories podcast but John Dehlin says name free for all to use
Trademark changes and copyright infringement disputes take many forms. Dunkin’ Donuts changed its name to Dunkin’ because Donuts did not suggest the vigorous, on-the-go attitude the coffee company wants to project.
But what happens when a church changes its name, but former adherents continue to use the original term in ways it may not like?
Continue reading...Universities looking for a fix to relentless controversy are flocking to ‘civility’ initiatives. Critics say these efforts mask a darker project
US college campuses have long been associated with the country’s fraying social fabric. Beset by so-called “cancel culture”, mass protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and mounting conflicts over free speech, a notion has taken hold that colleges and universities represent a convergence of the country’s broader ills.
To meet what’s been widely described as a “polarization” crisis, a veritable industry has emerged, booming since 7 October 2023 and the protests that followed. Dozens of organizations have cropped up promising to foster “civic discourse”, “dialogue across difference” and “viewpoint diversity”. Together, they make up a fast-growing ecosystem that has ballooned, by some estimates, into a $200m a year business some skeptics have billed the “civility industrial complex”.
Continue reading...For most Americans, riding a bus means abandoning expectations of basic dignity – but with an increase in ridership, that could change
“It’s a grueling experience,” Greyhound bus enthusiast Miles Taylor explains. “You’re not treated very well. Everyone is yelling at you the entire time. When the bus is late, they blame you for it, like somehow you’ve done something wrong. You just get screamed at for wanting to know what’s going on, because no one says anything.”
Taylor is obsessed with public transit. “I never really grew out of my little boy train phase,” the 26-year-old said. He works as a scheduler for Boston’s MBTA and runs a popular YouTube account documenting the bus trips he takes for fun in his spare time. Taylor traveled across the country by Greyhound twice; a Boston to Seattle route took 104 hours. But even he admits that America’s bus system is far from luxurious – or even comfortable.
Continue reading..."Enterprises may soon be paying as much for their developers' AI token usage as they do for their salaries," writes InfoWorld: According to Gartner, these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer's monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers are increasingly adopting generative AI and agentic tools, it reflects a trend toward consumption-based licensing models as vendors balance infrastructure investments with profitability... Gartner senior principal analyst Nitish Tyagi explained that it's important to note that Gartner's prediction is based on a global average salary of $2,000 per month; it doesn't mean AI token usage will exceed all salaries. For instance, in the US, yearly pay rates can be six digits or more. However, that kind of spend is not out of the realm of possibility, Tyagi emphasized. "I have heard scary numbers like 'My developer consumed $20K last month,' or 'A business user consumed $32K'." If these amounts sound shocking, that's the point. "The goal is to alarm the industry about the impact of token cost if it is not governed and controlled," he said... AI coding vendors have yet to deliver "mature, built-in cost optimization capabilities," Tyagi said, and prices will likely only continue to rise as vendors further build out their models while at the same time trying to remain profitable. Thus, enterprises struggle to forecast and control costs, and, because AI is moving so fast, many organizations lack the "maturity and frameworks" to determine ROI, he noted. Agent-driven workflows are difficult to govern, context windows become bloated, budgets are wiped out earlier than anticipated, and token spend becomes hard to justify.... "Without a governed engineering operating model, costs can escalate faster than the productivity gains these tools are designed to deliver," Tyagi said.
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Commentary: The boom in artificial intelligence is causing a memory chip shortage. Apple decided to make us pay for it.
Urn with loving messages to ‘Gary Bonsor’ to be buried in local churchyard as efforts to find family draw a blank
It is a puzzling story with a still unsolved mystery at its heart: just who is the individual whose cremated remains were left on the counter of a burger van at Newbury racecourse?
And why – despite the cremation urn being labelled with a name and a message that hints at a loving family – has no one come forward to claim it?
Continue reading...Children-centered organizing is on the rise in New York as families navigate ICE in neighborhoods, the Iran war and climate crisis
On a recent Sunday morning at Judson Memorial Church in New York, seven-year-old Nova stood in the middle of the congregation and read from the children’s book We Are the Builders.
“Raise our voices, banners and beats. Meet and march out in the streets,” she told the dozens of congregants, many old enough to be her grandparents, as the summer sun poured through the stained-glass windows. “Who wants to join the disrupters?”
Continue reading...Any new tax on the rich won’t raise much money unless many of the exceptions and loopholes are dealt with
In this new era of rampaging oligarchs, nothing may seem as satisfying as slapping a tax on Elon Musk’s new trillion-dollar fortune. What most bothers Americans about federal taxes is that billionaires don’t pay their fair share. As the race to develop artificial intelligence mints more billionaires, policymakers’ temptation to directly tax their brobdingnagian wealth is becoming unbearable.
The first state out of the blocks is California, where voters in November will decide whether to impose a one-time tax of 5% on fortunes worth more than $1bn. Given the ease with which plutocrats avoid paying income taxes, the case for this sort of direct tax on their stash appears unassailable.
Continue reading...What are the essential American songs? Ahead of the nation's 250th birthday, we asked that question to Sunday Morning's familiar faces, from performers to artists and writers to community leaders.
The National Design Studio, staffed by Doge veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal websites
An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law.
The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans.
Continue reading...The US military has released footage purportedly of strikes on 27 June. It said it struck Iran hours after a tanker was hit in the strait of Hormuz.
It is the worst escalation since the two sides signed an interim peace deal two weeks ago
Continue reading...Reports claim replacement being lined up for co-founder amid concern over high pay and company’s struggling share price
The boss of Ocado has collected nearly £100m since the online grocery company floated on the stock market in 2010 despite its share price now languishing below its flotation level, analysis has shown.
Tim Steiner, a former Goldman Sachs trader who co-founded the British technology company in 2000, is thought to be in discussions over his future after it emerged Ocado had approached at least one potential replacement.
Continue reading...Rep. Julia Letlow was endorsed by President Trump in the state's Republican Senate runoff to replace Sen. Bill Cassidy, who did not receive enough votes in the primary to advance.
UK is latest country to set minimum age for social media access but big tech is fighting back globally against curbs
Arturo Béjar, a former employee turned whistleblower at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has talked to parents around the world. He says they share the same perspective: they dread the day their children are old enough to go online.
Governments appear to be listening too. This month the UK became the latest country to state that it would set a minimum age of 16 for accessing major social media platforms. Social media bans are becoming a legislative trend after the precedent set by Australia last year, when it imposed an age limit on platforms including Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Elon Musk’s X, TikTok and Snapchat.
Continue reading...On the American right, there is an unbroken lineage of Watergate propaganda going back to the 70s from today
When JD Vance spoke at the Richard M Nixon presidential library last week about his new book on his journey from atheism to an allegedly devout Catholicism, he raised eyebrows by minimizing Watergate. “The idea that it [took] down a presidency is crazy,” he said. He said it was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon”– not the 37th president’s implication in serious crimes.
Commentators were shocked. Did the vice-president not know that the investigation proved Nixon directed a conspiracy to bribe the men who broke into the Democratic party headquarters to lie in court from a secret, illegal slush fund?
Continue reading...Citizens in Minnesota using lessons learned from migrant crackdown to protect elections from president’s threats
When thousands of immigration agents flooded Minnesota earlier this year, a loose network of neighbors sprang into action. They fed each other. They got kids to and from school safely. They tracked the surge that tore through their communities.
After organizing, block by block, to monitor Donald Trump’s extraordinary crackdown on their state, the same neighbors are shifting their focus to a different threat. What if the US president tries to steal an election?
Continue reading...These are the best indoor TV antennas for watching sports and live events in 2026.
The president promised to save “Black jobs,” but his policies have resulted in fresh pain for the Black middle class as the employment gap widens.
 | Really cool doc on Future Motion and their right to repair saga as well as legal stance on competition. [link] [comments] |
As extreme weather events become more common, economists say government will need to take more active role to protect consumers
Anyone attempting to notch up a productive day’s work in the searing heat of southern England this last week was left in little doubt about the impact of extreme weather.
But the economic effects of the climate crisis for the UK are not confined to the many hours lost to quietly perspiring – or fetching kids dismissed early from scorching classrooms.
Continue reading...Marco Rubio is scrambling to provide effective disaster response to country whose president US deposed in January
This week’s dual earthquakes in Venezuela are a test for the new era of American power in the western hemisphere, as the Trump administration scrambles to provide an effective disaster response mission to a country that it now calls an ally in Latin America, after a US special forces raid in January deposed the country’s strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro.
The US is marshalling what secretary of state Marco Rubio called a “big, fast, effective” and “whole-of-government” response as the state department sent three specialised urban search and rescue teams and pledged a $150m assistance fund that one former disaster relief expert called the largest he had seen within 24 hours of an incident.
Continue reading...
Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.
At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity.
That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly.
That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.”
Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources.
Age verification laws will create a new pool of data that the government can demand when it’s hunting for information about the people who may have spoken to the press.
Trump’s administration has made no secret of the fact that it wants to destroy journalism that holds it to account, including by unmasking sources and punishing them. This week, for instance, news broke that the Department of Justice had unsuccessfully subpoenaed reporters from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, likely as part of a leak investigation.
But what if it could skip the journalists and simply demand that tech companies identify sources who may have spoken to reporters using their platforms?
The risk isn’t hypothetical. The first Trump administration abused its authority to spy on journalists to figure out who they’re talking to, including online. The second Trump administration has already repeatedly attempted to unmask its critics online and raided a journalist’s home and seized the devices she used to communicate with her sources.
In the face of these risks, using secure communication methods, like Signal or SecureDrop, can help. But some sources may still reach out to reporters through social media. As a result, age verification laws will create a new pool of data that the government can demand when it’s hunting for information about the people who may have spoken to the press.
The most common methods of age verification rely on the collection of government IDs to verify a user’s date of birth with certainty. The KIDS Act says it won’t require platforms to collect government IDs, but at least some platforms will likely choose this route to comply with the law or offer it as a fallback approach when other methods inevitably fail.
But online anonymity isn’t assured even if platforms use other ways to verify users’ ages. Even so-called “privacy-preserving” approaches risk exposing users’ identities and undermine anonymity. All of the methods ultimately require platforms to collect, process, and retain more data on all users, raising the risks for anonymous sources who use online platforms to contact reporters.
Age verification laws will also make it difficult or impossible for journalists to use anonymous social media accounts to gather information, like sock puppet accounts used to infiltrate and report on online extremist groups, or to avoid surveillance by the very Big Tech companies they’re reporting on. Reporters outside the U.S. who publish anonymously on platforms like X or Facebook to avoid the wrath of autocratic regimes will also find those entry points vanish.
Requiring platforms to collect less data, not more, is a better approach.
Pools of incredibly sensitive identity data also creates an enticing “honey pot” of information that malicious actors could use to target, intimidate, and chill journalists from pursuing certain stories or sources from speaking to them. Already, many age verification providers have been breached, leaking users’ sensitive data and allowing others to link online activity to users’ offline identity. Age verification companies may also grant access or sell the data they collect to others, like payment processors, creating another avenue for data breaches.
Many Democratic lawmakers recognize that journalism is under threat from the Trump administration. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the ranking member of the House committee that reached the deal on the KIDS Act, has rightfully blasted the Federal Communications Commission for abusing its power to destroy press freedom and free speech, for instance. So why would he and other Democrats now support legislation that serves the same anti-press agenda?
Proponents of the KIDS ACT, and similar bills in the Senate, say these laws are necessary to protect children. But the truth is that age verification requirements are bad for everyone, including children. Why should we trust platforms with even more personal information, including from kids, when so many companies already use that data to target ads or share materials with law enforcement agencies that users believed was private?
That’s not to say that platforms shouldn’t be required to do more to actually protect children online — they should. But comprehensive privacy legislation that protects everyone and requires platforms to collect less data, not more, is a better approach.
Mandating age verification, in contrast, effectively hands Big Tech and the government a skeleton key to the identities of every whistleblower, dissident, and investigative reporter who uses online platforms, not to mention everyone else, including children. This kind of surveillance on steroids that surrenders our right to speak, report, and read the news anonymously won’t make anyone safer.
The post Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing appeared first on The Intercept.
Duke says he fears his children will not get to meet king after government declines request for police protection
The Duke of Sussex fears his children will not meet King Charles in the coming days after their UK visit was “pulled out from under their feet at the 11th hour”.
Prince Harry and Meghan were planning their first trip to Britain as a family in four years for events related to the Invictus Games, due to be held in Birmingham in July.
Continue reading...Mayors such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani show leftwing ideology can go hand-in-hand with effective governance
A trio of Democratic socialist victories in mayoral contests in three of the largest cities in the US has unleashed a new wave of hope on the left of the party. Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson took office in New York and Seattle, respectively, this year. Janeese Lewis George is set to follow in Washington DC.
As momentum around leftwing candidates appears to build, focus will turn to Los Angeles over the coming months, where another member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will attempt to continue this winning streak.
Continue reading...Despite a deadly heat wave at home, many say they won’t permanently embrace Americans’ electricity-guzzling amenity.
New champion embraces hostile crowd after Zayas win
Fighter says toughest test only sharpened ambition
Jaron “Boots” Ennis left Barclays Center on Saturday night with the WBA and WBO super-welterweight titles, the signature win of his career and answers to questions that had dogged him for years.
What would happen when he finally faced a truly elite opponent? What would happen when he was finally hurt? And could he do it in front of a hostile crowd?
Continue reading...From Algeria to Uzbekistan, we assess the standing of the 48 nations after the group stage of the tournament
It took a little over an hour for Kylian Mbappé to find his groove. Irked by a poor refereeing decision, he scored twice in France’s opener against Senegal. Ably supported by a stunning cast, Mbappé will already have his sights on winning the competition. Michael Olise has shown his class throughout, while Ousmane Dembélé dazzled with a hat-trick against Norway. We’ll see if anyone can stop Didier Deschamps’ team.
Continue reading...Tehran said it launched strikes on U.S. interests in the Middle East, and Bahrain and Kuwait said they were targeted, as clashes continue to threaten the ceasefire.
Jack Nekhala had a business selling on Amazon — and in December he received an unusual offer, reports Bloomberg. A woman said she could bribe an Amazon employee "to help him retrieve $90,000 in funds that the e-commerce giant had frozen after suspending him over an alleged violation of review policy." Hoping to ingratiate himself with the company and restart his business, Nekhala offered to provide evidence, including recorded conversations and screen shots, that he said proved Amazon personnel were peddling inside information and influence. The smoking gun, Nekhala told the representative: information about his seller account. Only certain Amazon employees are supposed to have access to such details, but Nekhala had received them from the woman on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Nekhala's experience, which he documented and shared with Bloomberg, provides a rare glimpse into an international black market that has been a persistent scourge of Amazon's online store. On one side are sellers looking for a variety of favors: a competitive edge over their rivals, information on how to boost sales, a way to get themselves unsuspended. On the other are middlemen who lurk on message apps like Telegram, WeChat and WhatsApp offering access to people inside Amazon who can get things done for a price... It's impossible to determine the scope of the illicit activity, but it's an open secret among Amazon sellers and consultants, who are frequently approached on social-media platforms and messaging apps. "The message is always the same: 'I'm going to show you screenshots to prove I have inside access,'" said Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee who runs a seller consulting firm... In 2020, federal prosecutors exposed an international bribery scheme involving Amazon sellers and employees. The ring allegedly extracted about $100 million in unfair advantages by bribing Amazon employees in Asia to help them sell more products and sabotage their competitors. Five people in the US were convicted and received jail terms or probation. Last year, law enforcement officials in India began investigating more than 20 former Amazon employees suspected of accepting bribes from trucking companies in exchange for routes, according to The Times of India. After Nekhala reported his own experience to Amazon, the representative committed to "do some digging" and to email him instructions on how his evidence could be shared, according to a recording of the conversation. But Nekhala said he never heard back. The employee who leaked his personal information had already been fired for unrelated misconduct, according to Amazon. Amazon told Bloomberg employee involvement was "very rare," and that "We invest heavily in this area and have dedicated teams and systems in place to prevent all types of fraud, including by our own employees."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Across region there is a push to disarm militia and reinforce state authority but the temptation to use proxies remains
As Marco Rubio ended his brief visit to the Middle East on Friday, he sought to cast in the best possible light his discussions with leaders of the Gulf states. Those leaders are deeply anxious that the deal agreed earlier this month between Iran and the US fails to address their worries about continued Iranian efforts to project power and influence throughout the region.
“They’ve shared with us some very concrete concerns,” the US secretary of state admitted, and insisted that any definitive agreement will require Tehran to not only restrict its nuclear programme but also halt its support of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, militia in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.
Continue reading...Reginald Reed Sr. said he was playing video games with his son, Reginald "Reggie" Reed Jr., when his wife, Selonia Reed, was killed. But detectives doubt his story.
A niche type of fraud is lucrative enough for criminals to set up fake websites with dodgy software to harvest your data
After holding them for a few years, you have decided it is time to cash in your cryptocurrency holdings. The problem is, it is so long since you set up the digital wallet which manages them on your laptop, you have forgotten the lengthy access code.
Stressed at the thought of losing thousands of pounds, you search and download a program which promises to recover the 24-word “seed phrase” which gives you access to your cypto assets.
Continue reading...Search for survivors continues with nearly 70,000 people reported unaccounted for by their family members
The death toll in the twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela earlier this week has risen to 1,430, according to one of the country’s top politicians, Jorge Rodríguez.
Another 3,200 people were injured and 3,100 left homeless by the disaster, the National Assembly president added, speaking on state television.
Continue reading...IBM spent a decade "building, testing and improving" quantum computing, reports the Wall Street Journal. "This year, the company is laying the groundwork to turn that technology into a fully-fledged, scalable business from an expensive science project." IBM said last month it plans to form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry to produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors. The venture is seeded by a $1 billion investment from the Trump administration and another $1 billion of IBM's own cash. Anderon will give the company a new line of business in selling wafers to other quantum-computing companies. It will also provide a steady stream of wafers to continue developing its own quantum technology, positioning IBM to capture part of what the Boston Consulting Group projects will be a $90 billion to $170 billion market for quantum-computing providers by 2040... The company also plans to spend an additional $9 billion over five years to advance the final stages of its quest to build a quantum-mechanics-powered computer capable and reliable enough for widespread use, a goal known as fault tolerance. That computer, named Starling, is being targeted for 2029. With Anderon, IBM is thinking beyond Starling, or even a more powerful quantum computer planned for 2033.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 28.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 28, No. 643.
For most of his life, Reggie Reed has wondered who murdered his mother Selonia Reed decades ago in Hammond, Louisiana. A fresh look at the evidence ultimately implicated the man he called his "rock" — Reginald Reed Sr., the man who lovingly raised him.
Flare-up in tensions comes as Washington and Tehran have been negotiating a memorandum of understanding to end an unpopular war
The US military has launched further strikes on multiple targets in Iran, a day after it struck Iran in retaliation for a drone attack on a cargo ship in the strait of Hormuz.
US Central Command (Centcom) said its strikes were in “direct response to continued Iranian aggression against commercial shipping” and that it had targeted Iran’s “military surveillance infrastructure, communication systems, air defense sites, drone storage facilities, and minelayer capabilities” in response.
Continue reading...  | I don't know why, but my board won't turn on any of the LEDs. I didn't change any of my refloat settings, and they were working just fine on my last ride, so I don't really understand what I may have done? Even the option to turn them on and off isn't there in the control tab. [link] [comments] |
Election will determine balance of power in New Caledonia before fresh negotiations with France on the territory’s status
Polls opened in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia on Sunday for the archipelago’s first provincial elections since 2019, after the vote was delayed as talks stalled over its political future.
The election, initially planned for 2024, will determine the balance of power in New Caledonia ahead of fresh negotiations with France on the territory’s status, with independence remaining the defining political issue.
Continue reading...America generated 10.06% more energy with renewables in the first four months of 2026 than it did in the same period the year before. That's according to new figures from America's Energy Information Administration, cited in this report from Electrek: The growth was led by utility-scale solar (+21.3%), hydropower (+15.7%), small-scale solar In April alone, wind and solar each produced more electricity than US coal plants, while the combination of solar and wind produced 57.0% more electricity than nuclear power. The mix of all renewables, including biomass and geothermal, accounted for 30.0% of total US electrical generation during the first third of 2026 — up from 27.8% a year earlier... EIA reported that, in April, utility-scale solar capacity surpassed wind capacity for the first time (160,208.1 MW vs. 160,100.6 MW). Further, utility-scale battery energy storage capacity increased by 17,703.5 MW, or 58.1%. Nuclear added just 18.4 MW. The combined capacity growth of all utility-scale renewable energy sources for the 12-month period (55,980.3 MW) is two-thirds more (i.e., 67.6%) than that added during the previous 12 months (33,392.0 MW). "EIA projects no new nuclear generating capacity and a net decline of 5,200.5 MW in fossil fuel capacity."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Four people have died due to flooding from thunderstorms in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said Saturday, and he issued a state of emergency with additional rainfall expected.
Vice-president JD Vance says US holds all the cards in conflict with Iran – key US politics stories from Saturday 27 June
Hours before fresh military strikes were exchanged in the strait of Hormuz, vice-president JD Vance continued to reiterate the administration’s triumphant line on the war with Iran.
“If we make the final deal, then great,” the US vice-president told HBO’s Bill Maher.
Continue reading...Anthony Cohen has spent his life bringing attention to the Underground Railroad, secret routes once used by enslaved people seeking freedom.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 28, No. 1,835.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 28 No. 1,113.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 28, No. 847.
Venezuelans have taken the search for missing loved ones into their own hands, citing a scarcity of government rescuers.
⚽️ Kick-off time: 7.30pm EDT/12.30am BST/9.30am AEST
⚽️ Third-place table | Player guide | Group tables | Mail Bryan
⚽️ Colombia v Portugal – live updates also in Group K
3 min DR Congo fashion their first attack. Wissa, the goal-scorer against Portugal, drops deep to collect before trying his luck from range, but he drags his shot well wide.
1 min After a moment of silence for the victims of the earthquakes in Venezuela, we’re off and running. Uzbekistan kick off and are attacking from left to right in their all-white kits, while DR Congo go from right to left in the all-red strips.
Continue reading...⚽️ Kick-off time: 7.30pm EDT/12.30am BST/9.30am AEST
⚽️ Third-place table | Player guide | Group tables | Mail Beau
⚽️ DR Congo v Uzbekistan – live updates from Group K
Peep! We’re off. Colombia in their typical yellow; Portugal in red. Nice change of pace from all the third jerseys we’ve been seeing here.
The teams observe a moment of silence for the 1,400 dead in the earthquake in Venezuela. Fans do not. Come on, folks. We don’t even do a full minute in the USA. You can be quiet for about 15 seconds.
Continue reading...Floods caused by thunderstorms that have dumped inches of rain on Kentucky and Indiana, with more possible
Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor, says four people have died as a result of flash floods from thunderstorms that have brought as much as 7in (18cm) of rain to the state.
Beshear confirmed the four deaths in a social media post, noting three people were from Madison county and one was from Jackson county. “Please join Britainy and me as we pray for their families during this difficult time,” Beshear said.
Continue reading...Speaking on Desert Island Discs, the Grammy-nominated musician referred to his alcoholism as a parasite
Fatboy Slim has said he felt paralysed and “rigid with fear” at the prospect of DJing sober after spending time in rehab to deal with his alcohol addiction.
The artist, whose real name is Norman Cook, referred to his alcoholism as a parasite and said getting sober was “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done” during an appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs with Lauren Laverne.
Continue reading...Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Florida International University researchers have developed a technique called JaiLIP (Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation) that uses subtle image modifications to bypass AI safety guardrails. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that rely on carefully crafted prompts, the attack works through images that appear normal to human viewers. The researchers tested the technique against BLIP-2, a multimodal AI model, and found that manipulated images significantly increased the likelihood of harmful responses. According to the study, the approach outperformed previous image-based jailbreak methods and nearly doubled the number of unsafe outputs generated during testing. The findings highlight a potential security risk for businesses deploying AI systems that process both images and text. While most discussions about AI safety focus on prompts, the research suggests that seemingly harmless images may also serve as an attack vector.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Add health benefits to your workday with a standing desk.
Put the best desk in your office and make it feel like new.
A man with the same name and party affiliation as Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan is eligible to challenge the senator in the August primary, a judge ruled Friday.
There's a deadly, record-breaking heat wave spreading east across Europe, reports the Washington Post — and it's even worse than a dire earlier forecast: The forecast was recorded in 2014 as part of a campaign coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that invited about 60 presenters worldwide to imagine a weather report from the year 2050. In one clip, Ãvelyne Dhéliat from French television network TF1 presented a hypothetical scenario of high temperatures 36 years into the future — during a heat wave in a warmer climate in 2050... One of the maps that Dhéliat shared was lit up in shades of orange, filled with temperature predictions of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), reaching as high as 43 degrees Celsius (109.4 degrees Fahrenheit). But it turns out, it didn't take 36 years for those imagined temperatures to be reached — and even exceeded. The heat on Wednesday alone, when the temperature soared as high as 112.3 degrees Fahrenheit (44.3 degrees Celsius), exceeded the 2050 projections in 19 out of 34 locations across mainland France — far sooner than some may have expected. Some places surpassed those hypothetical future temperatures by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It's part of a dramatic shift in heat wave frequency across the country. Half of the heat waves observed since 1947 have occurred since 2010. "By 2100, heat waves could last up to two months continuously," the country's weather agency, Météo-France, said this week. It was hotter in France on Wednesday than in Las Vegas and Phoenix and just two degrees Fahrenheit shy of what was observed in Death Valley, California. An estimated less than one percent of the planet was hotter than France's hottest place... [T]he heat dome, which will linger into early next week, is only part of the story. This type of extreme heat is becoming more common as the planet warms, especially in Europe. Climate scientist Robert Rohde said in a post explaining the heat wave's causes that France and Western Europe should expect many more heat waves like this over the coming decades. "This isn't a fluke, but simply part of the new normal," he said. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President Trump on Saturday said he has nominated Lance Schroyer to be the next director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Schroyer, whom Trump calls ‘a patriot’, led deportation campaign in Oklahoma under ICE-partnered program
Donald Trump said on Saturday that he will nominate Lance Schroyer as the next director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), succeeding David Venturella, who had been performing the duties of the director.
Trump said in a Truth Social post that Schroyer “has over 29 YEARS of Law Enforcement experience in Oklahoma — A State where I WON all 77 Counties in 2016, 2020, and 2024! Lance is a former Oklahoma State Trooper, and United States Marine”.
Continue reading...Max Planck won 1918's Nobel Prize for physics. Yet two of his papers were retracted — a move now being criticized by Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec and Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. Science reports: The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled "Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft" ("Meaning and Limits of Exact Science"), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered "self-plagiarism" and frowned upon today — the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars' publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives "copyright violation" as the reason for the retraction. Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. "Science was more fragmented" then, Khelfaoui says. "You wanted different audiences ... to have access to your work." The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions). Springer Nature's "anachronistic" application of modern standards to a 1942 paper "distort[s] the historical record," Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries. Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, "This article has been withdrawn due to article violation." Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95. Suzanne Scarlata, a chemist and biochemist at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, as Naturwissenschaften is now known, had not heard about the retractions before being contacted for this story... Scarlata suspects Springer Nature's internal policing software removed the paper and posted the retraction notice unilaterally, without human supervision: "I think it just happened with their algorithm," she says. "It's a mistake they should probably rectify." A second Planck paper was apparently removed because its response to a 1940 paper had used an identical title. Thanks to our long-time Slashdot reader He Who Has No Name for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Suspect held after five people injured, including three who were taken to hospital, in Ealing on Saturday afternoon
A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a vehicle hit multiple pedestrians on a busy London road before driving away, police have said.
Five people were injured, including three who were later taken to hospital, during the incident in Ealing Broadway, Ealing, west London, at about 2.30pm on Saturday.
Continue reading...Next250’s Declaration of Interdependence, a new art gallery that features Americans’ collective values and hopes for the future, will open in McPherson Square
More than a thousand people gathered on a block away from the White House on Saturday to unveil their vision for the US’s future, organizers said, with thousands more attending other events around the country.
At the Next250 All of US rally, held a week before the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, organizers launched their Declaration of Interdependence, an art installation featuring the collective values they believe should define the next 250 years of America’s story. The pledge – a take on the declaration of independence, the country’s founding text – aims to build a country where everyone can earn a living wage, have access to green spaces and feel safe in their communities, activists said.
Continue reading...When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried hundreds of papyrus scrolls. They were rediscovered in the mid-1700s, remembers Smithsonian magazine, "the only surviving collection of its kind from the Greco-Roman world..." "But when scholars tried to unroll them, the carbonized manuscripts crumbled to dust." Every generation that followed faced the same dilemma: They could wait for technology to advance, abandoning hope of reading the ancient texts in their own lifetime. Or they could try to open the scrolls themselves — and risk destroying them. In recent years, researchers have settled on a third option. Using advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, they're deciphering the scrolls without needing to unroll them at all. The Vesuvius Challenge has accelerated the process by turning it into a public competition, complete with cash prizes. In 2023, a student won $40,000 for deciphering a single word — "purple" — from an unopened scroll. Later, contestants would identify 2,000 Greek characters from one scroll ($700,000) and the title of another ($60,000). Now, for the very first time, researchers have recovered all surviving text from a single scroll. The nearly five-foot-long segment includes roughly 20 columns of ancient Greek philosophy, accessible for the first time in nearly 2,000 years. "The tech actually does look like magic, but it's not," Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said at a press conference. (The article points out that Seales partnered with two Silicon Valley investors in 2023 to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, and is now hailing "the restoration of lost voices from the ancient world." Seales has been working on virtually unwrapping the scrolls since the early 2000s. The process involved imaging the bundles of papyrus using technology similar to CT scanners, isolating thin layers and then stitching them together.... "We've developed a systematic and a repeatable approach," Seales told the audience. "Now it's only a matter of time until we read all of the scrolls."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Reaction from day 17 at the World Cup as we built up to the final group games and covered news from France, Iran, Spain and beyond
Amid all the joy, there’s the treatment of Iran. They were denied permission to stay in Seattle after their draw against Egypt, reports Ben Fisher.
We’ve got to have another look at Cape Verde’s celebrations.
Continue reading...Firefighters are battling the blaze in Fishlake national park that was stoked by strong winds and low humidity
Hundreds of firefighters in Utah have struggled to suppress a wildfire that scorched an additional 20,000 acres (8,000 hectares) as of Saturday, as low humidity and strong winds accelerated the fire spread, according to state officials.
The Cottonwood fire erupted on Monday in the Fishlake national forest, located in central Utah. The blaze intensified overnight, growing from about 70,000 acres (28,000 hectares) to more than 92,000 acres (37,000 hectares) on Saturday morning, according to the US Forest Service. The fire is at a 0% containment level and is the largest blaze currently burning in the US, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Continue reading...The Los Angeles Police Department says about 1,500 police agencies across America have drone programs, reports SFGate, and 58 of those drone-using police agencies are in California. The Sacramento County sheriff's office recently posted drone footage on Instagram set to theme from "Mission: Impossible," claiming "a nationwide first" where their drone successfully disarmed a felon "seen earlier with a firearm" (though now not moving, but holding a knife while lying face down in a garage). In the video the "not responding" suspect continues not moving as the drone dangles a magnet which catches on the knife. The drone then pulls multiple times until it comes out of the unmoving suspect's hand. The sheriff's office says their footage shows their drone "disarm an armed suspect, helping bring the incident to a safe resolution," in their post on Instagram, "rather than rush into a potentially deadly encounter..." Was he pretending to be dead or simply lying in wait for deputies to approach...? It's also worth noting that our drones are labeled as "military equipment" (even though anyone can purchase them at their local Walmart), but are really just another piece of technology helping deputies resolve dangerous situations safely. Their use protects both law enforcement personnel and suspects. SFGate offers more reports from around California: In Yucaipa, officials launched a Drone as First Responder (DFR) pilot program on May 28, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department announced this month. According to the release, drones have already been used to respond to over 100 calls for service, arriving before deputies for 71% of them. "The drones also contributed to 12 arrests, assisted in locating persons of interest on 37 occasions, and provided aerial overwatch during 44 incidents," it continues, though details on how they assisted the police are unclear. The drones, manufactured by Skydio, were also used to locate a young person experiencing a mental health crisis and another person launching illegal fireworks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Democrats called plans for commemorative passport and gold coin with Trump portrait ‘more befitting a monarchy’
Donald Trump’s efforts to brand the US government with his name and image advanced on Friday when the White House unveiled new images of a passport watermarked with his portrait to mark America’s 250th anniversary.
The White House called it simply the “patriot passport”, while on Truth Social the president introduced it as “The U.S.A.’s New Passport, which says, ‘Welcome, but be good!’”
Continue reading...  | I was told that the fungineers BMS with a GTFO adapter was the same thing as the vbms just with an adapter thrown on it It’s about $25 cheaper so maybe someone ordered the GTFOBMS and just pulled off the adapter I already ordered the VBMS32 [link] [comments] |
Two Flint Township, Michigan, parents, are facing several charges, including second-degree murder, in the death of their 7-year-old son, who was 255 pounds and abused and neglected, according to the Genesee County prosecutor.
The Jerusalem Post reports that doctors at Haifa's Rambam Health Care Campus "have successfully treated their first Israeli opioid addiction patient using an experimental noninvasive brain technology, easing him through withdrawal in just 20 minutes..." [T]he team of specialists at the Haifa medical center intervened in the electrical activity of an area of the patient's brain called the nucleus accumbens, the core of the brain system responsible for feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, and reward. The treatment, based on technology from the Israeli company Insightec, is similar to the one used to treat symptoms of essential tremor and Parkinsonian tremor, under MRI control. In this case, the treatment was carried out with the help of a new technology that performs noninvasive neuromodulation, without heating or burning tissue, and allows stimulation in the same area of the brain to increase or suppress activity... "Tests carried out a week later produced negative results for opioids and other substances," [said Dr. Lior Lev-Tov, director of the functional neurosurgery unit in Rambam's neurosurgery division and the one leading the new study at the medical center.] "The patient himself reported a craving score of zero out of 10 for using the drug, and even another side effect, a drastic drop in the desire for cigarettes, from three packs a day to just a few cigarettes, and with no urge to use alcohol. In other words, in a treatment that lasted about 20 minutes net, our patient was completely freed from an extreme dependence that had accompanied him every day for years. This is nothing less than a medical and therapeutic revolution." Dr. Lev-Tov added that "This experience opens doors for us to treat a wide range of very serious illnesses such as PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, other addictions, severe depression, severe pain disorders, and I hope we will also be able to reach cognitive areas and treat attention deficit disorders, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SOFIA GUIDETTI
Managing Mosaic Editor
I would like to start this review by saying that I have always been a fan of Ryan Gosling. I defended him when he was cast as Ken in “Barbie” (2023), since people were in an uproar about it before the movie even came out, and he showed everyone that he was the perfect choice for the role.
Once again, he was the perfect choice to play the main character, Ryland Grace, in “Project Hail Mary,” which was adapted from the book of the same name. I had no idea that the movie was based on a book, but after watching it, I would love to read the source material since I had such an amazing time watching the story on the big screen.
The premise of the movie follows Grace, a middle school science teacher recruited by the government in order to help study a microorganism that seems to be eating away at the sun. He is soon promoted and becomes one of the astronauts on a suicide mission to space. His understanding of the organism makes him one of the only people who can save Earth from extinction.
The movie is long, around two and a half hours, but it didn’t feel like it whatsoever. Every scene had me captivated and at the edge of my seat waiting to see what was coming next. Gosling is on screen for the majority of the time since he is stranded in space on a small spaceship, but I never got tired of watching him. He is so moving in this role and I would even go as far as to say he deserves an Oscar nomination for it.
What made him so touching to watch is that, for more than half of the movie, his only scene partner was an intergalactic alien that he names “Rocky” due to his rock-like appearance. Behind the scenes, Rocky is operated by a team of puppeteers instead of relying solely on computer-generated imagery (CGI), which allowed for a more emotional connection between Gosling’s character and the alien. This approach was definitely the best decision — almost every beautiful and wholesome interaction between Grace and Rocky left tears in my eyes.
Throughout the movie, you get to see how the past and present play out, and it only makes you more attached to Grace and Rocky’s relationship as it develops over the course of the story. I never thought I would feel so connected to a human-alien relationship — I’m usually not a fan of space-centered movies — but Grace and Rocky truly blew me away and have easily become one of my favorite on-screen pairings.
Moving away from the characters and plotline and toward the cinematography, this is definitely one of the most gorgeous movies I have seen in 2026 so far. Philip Lord and Christopher Miller, the directors of the film, avoided using green screens so that they could have the most realistic lighting on Gosling possible. Instead, they used practical sets, practical lighting and visual effects (VFX)/CGI to create the realistic setting of being stranded in space.
Many movies and TV shows nowadays make the mistake of relying too heavily on green screens, which creates unrealistic lighting on the actors and makes the background stand out more than it should. Lord and Miller definitely made the right decision on avoiding green screens altogether since it didn’t even feel like Gosling was on a movie set; it felt real.
I could feel the stakes of this movie and I experienced real fear whenever the characters were in any type of danger. It actually felt like I knew these people personally, and I love it when movies are able to invoke that feeling in me, because it shows how the filmmakers and actors took their time to develop the storyline and these characters. It probably helped that they had a book to base things on, but there have been many instances where book adaptations have been very subpar; this movie was not one of them.
With that all being said, I recommend going to see this film as soon as possible. I could definitely see it being nominated for many awards, and even if it is not — which would be a huge snub — the emotions it’ll make you feel are worth it. I can’t remember the last time I cried at a movie and I definitely cried over five times during this one. Go see “Project Hail Mary” as soon as you can!
 | Fastest I’ve gone on a onewheel It’s an XR+ [link] [comments] |
No immediate reports of damage after Bahrain hit by ‘number of drones’ as ship in strait of Hormuz also targeted
Bahrain has said it was attacked by Iran with drones on Saturday, apparently in response to overnight US strikes on Iran. A ship in the strait of Hormuz was also attacked.
Bahrain’s foreign ministry said a “number of drones” were launched at the country, though there were no immediate reports of damage. It condemned the attack and described it as a “flagrant threat to the security of citizens and residents”.
Continue reading...Title says it all…
A little background - I just recently bought an XL to replace a first gen GT. The XL is great. Ride it for a month, no problems. Intense work week, plug it into the charger and didn’t get the opportunity to ride for 5 days. Weekend comes around, unplug from charger and the board is dead. Like totally dead. It’s a month old! The green light on the charger is on, but nothing from the board whatsoever. The charger is cool to the touch. Shouldn’t it be warm?
I still have the old GT board and charger. Should I try the old GT charger? It’s 75w, the new one is 113w. Ugh. Anyone have any advice?
Thursday the Free Software Foundation blogged about this year's 47 'LibreLocal 2026' meetups, highlighting 10 that took place in Australia, Mexico, the United States, New Zealand, Cameroon, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, China, and Iran. "Far from each other in many parts of the world, they came together around one unifying belief: free software." We envisioned LibreLocal as a collage of in-person community meetups that would bring people together to swap ideas, learn from each other, and celebrate free software. When we asked the free software community to organize LibreLocals last year, the response was very inspirational: 29 different meetups were hosted. After we made the global call this year, we were greeted with an even more enthusiastic response... Organizers hosted LibreLocals in cafes, bars, restaurants, libraries, universities, a computer repair shop, and even as part of a field trip to the System Source Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of computing in Hunt Valley, Maryland, USA. We also learned that a LibreLocal was organized inside Vakil Abad Prison in Mashhad, Iran by a free software supporter. Originally planned to be held in Shiraz, we were informed of this change in location on the LibreLocal wiki page set up for listing all LibreLocals. The updated entry, by another free software supporter in Iran, reads: "This year, one of our dedicated activists organized a LibrePlanet event from within prison in Iran. Currently serving a sentence for "cyber-crimes" related to his promotion of free software, he continues to introduce the principles of software freedom to his fellow inmates. We have placed this banner to honor his resilience and the community of individuals in prison who continue to stand for technological freedom. His identity will be revealed when it is safe to do so." Advocating for user freedom should never result in a prison sentence. We especially admire and respect the bravery and strength of those who fight for software freedom in the most dangerous and oppressive of environments. 50 people attended the LibreLocal meetup in Switzerland, according to one of the organizers, "forging connections between several local free software stakeholders and strengthening their cohesion." But the FSF's blog post stresses these are "ten stories among many more of free software supporters from across the globe... We also thank you our donors and associate members for the support that makes such meetups possible." The GNU Press Shop is now open through July 19 for their biannual fundraiser, offering a variety of freedom-respecting novelties including an FSF-branded antisurveillance webcam guard and both technical and philosophical books, like Richard Stallman's Free as in Freedom (which allegedly has turned up in Anthropic's training data). Other items include a slick new FSF logo sticker, a brass and zinc GNU "emblem" pin with real gold plating, and a cheeky sticker reminding everyone that "There is no cloud." And there's even a plush GNU toy.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Police say they also found more than 600 dog collars in area where they suspect animals were killed
Investigators uncovered 117 dead dogs at a northern California animal rescue sanctuary, with many of the canine remains having evidence of gunshots.
Miranda’s Rescue, a sanctuary outside Fortuna, California, described itself as a “no-kill” facility. Investigators said the organization accepted hundreds of dogs each year from shelters across the San Francisco Bay Area in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding.
Continue reading...Locals and visitors of the Golden Heart City have a plethora of food choices to choose from – Thai, Chinese, Korean and even Moldovan cuisine
Charlie Boonprasert and Tutu Navachai arrived in Fairbanks in the 1980s, when their friend offered them jobs mining and cooking at a gold lease. The pair, originally from northern Thailand, soon realized there was almost no south-east Asian food available in Alaska’s remote interior.
But they did find a small Thai population in Fairbanks yearning for a taste of home, and a chance to meet up and gossip.
Continue reading...I have been looking at purchasing a one wheel GT for the range, after reading all the problems about ghosting, repair issues, and it bricking - I’m now nervous about buying one, and the overall problems with future motion. I plan to leave it stock and just use it a fun commute option to work and back.
I have looked at fungineers X7 Long range but they are out of stock at the moment. And I like the specs of the X7 better than the GT.
Are there other brands I should look at? Does the GT still have its problems? Is the X7 Long range better than the GT and worth the wait?
 | I got Armordilloz onewheel tire sealant for my gt way back when it had s slow leak and it worked great, so when my X7LR tire started losing pressure daily, I grabbed a bottle. I didn't really examine the tire, I just thought it was a slow leak, same as the GT. It took a few days, (the guys even sent me a free bottle for when I replace the tire bc initially I thought it didn't work) but somehow sealed this lol. The tire has been holding pressure for over a week now. Do yourself a favor and put some armordilloz in your tire, forreal. Also I did buy a new tire that's on the way, I know I need to replace this thing. [link] [comments] |
Agreement could also end hopes of ICC jurisdiction in Lebanon, which advocates pushed for to prosecute Israel
A new agreement between Lebanon and Israel could block victims of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon from pursuing accountability and hinder future efforts to give the international criminal court jurisdiction in the country, legal experts have said.
Lebanon and Israel signed a 14-point framework agreement in Washington on Friday designed to work towards an end to fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Continue reading...I have some board riding experience and am looking for something to use to commute on the crazy SF hills. From reading a couple threads, seems like the GT might be the choice. What should I be looking out for if I'm buying used? Does mileage matter? Better to buy new?
Here's a pretty cheap one I'm considering but wonder if I should be sketched out by how cheap it is.
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1598525111215526/?mibextid=dXMIcH
I'm 170 lbs, ~12 mile commute per day
Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s sixth prime minister in a decade, has resigned. Even allowing for the weariness of repetition, this should theoretically be a big deal.
Within that benighted kingdom, it will be for some — the John Fetterman-esque cartoon Andy Burnham, now widely considered Starmer’s all-but-inevitable successor, looks set to grip the poisoned chalice that is leadership of the British Labour Party, for all the good it will do him. The ascendant far-right outfit Reform U.K. will likely regard Starmer’s downfall as another stepping stone to turning Oswald Mosley’s deferred dreams of Anglified fascism into reality.
The Greens, who have enjoyed some recent success with their novel proposal that left-wing people might actually want a left-wing party to vote for, may see this as further proof of the once-verboten idea that — whisper it — maybe the Labour Party doesn’t need to exist. And those constituent nations of the U.K. which are not England but are nevertheless forced to abide by its whims will be reminded that the British state they are bound to has not enjoyed stable government for quite a while.
The question of whether the wider world should take heed of the U.K. and its travails remains open, and for good reason. The centuries long legacy of Britain’s various eccentric neuroses being imposed outside of its island isolation is horrifically grim, and I would not blame anyone for wishing to see it quarantined like patient zero in a zombie outbreak. Yet there are lessons to be learned from Starmer’s short, sad tenure, especially as the international left will continue to face manifestations of the worldview he represented — not least the U.S. Democratic establishment, as New York primary voters will need no reminding this week, who seem stubbornly resistant to learning them.
Starmer pursued the credo of centrism by meeting his government’s increasingly psychotic right flank where they were.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that Starmer’s rise was not achieved on his own merits. As Labour leader, Starmer’s role was essentially pest control: He was installed as head of a party that has historically, if intermittently, pretended to belong to a species of socialism, and was tasked with disinfecting Labour of any threat it might genuinely embody that ideology. In this mission, he was nominally successful, purging the party of anything associated with his leftist predecessor Jeremy Corbyn (whose specter continues to haunt Britain’s commentariat, despite achieving precisely zilch). Starmer, the best that central casting could produce, was then delivered to Downing Street with a ridiculous majority by an electorate exhausted by more than a decade of Conservative government.
In power, the Tories had alternated between brutality and incompetence, and Starmer did not buck that trend, reaffirming Gore Vidal’s contention that trying to find much difference between Labour and the Tories was like bringing “a measuring rod to Lilliput.” At every turn, Starmer pursued the credo of centrism by meeting his government’s increasingly psychotic right flank where they were, and was somehow shocked and dismayed to find this only made him more despised, while also emboldening and empowering reactionary forces.
Under Starmer’s health secretary and supposed human being Wes Streeting, trans youth in the U.K. were stripped of gender-affirming healthcare, and Britain’s frothingly transphobic “gender-critical” lobby — from which their equally exterminationist American sympathizers have taken much inspiration — fumed that young trans people still existed.
Starmer’s government saw Palestine solidarity activists criminalized under a dubious interpretation of anti-terrorism law, yet British right-wing media continued to grumble that pro-Palestinian protests were still possible at all. Within a year of Starmer vowing his government would curb legal immigration and “take back control” of the U.K.’s borders, immigrants in Britain were subjected to pogroms and firebombing.
It should not need to be spelled out, but Starmer and his backers have shown time and again that it still does — if the mythic Overton window shifts to the right, and you obligingly follow suit, it will simply move further toward that extreme, and reward only the tip of the spear. Those in the U.S. who saw Kamala Harris struck mute on trans rights and blind in the face of genocide in Gaza know too well the stakes of “moderating” to the right in the interest of “consensus.”
Since his resignation, a small and desperate coterie of British pundits have urged their dwindling readership to focus on the positives of Starmer’s reign by emphasizing those instances in which he stood firm on the rock of not-quite-fascism, particularly in foreign affairs. After all, they point out, he recognized a Palestinian state (while simultaneously offering precious little resistance to killing the people who would otherwise live there). But whether in the United States’ kidding-but-not-really bid to colonize Greenland, its pursuit of regime change in Venezuela via the enactment of a lousy ’80s action movie, or a war with Iran — the sheer sloppy-drunk incompetence of which stunned even its most vociferous critics — the Starmer administration never achieved any greater fortitude than weakly suggesting, “I say, steady on …”
There was never any realistic hope that this erstwhile human rights lawyer was going to seriously confront a sclerotic superpower ruled by a meat-headed fascism which treats human rights as a laughable suggestion. It is appropriate that in his resignation speech, Starmer expressed pride in supposedly protecting Britain’s youth from social media; this feat of Herculean self-aggrandizement was, in its own way, telling of Starmer’s entire premiership. Given the choice between taking on the entrenched power of social media platforms (to which the U.K.’s political class remains unashamedly addicted) or restricting the liberties of a constituency not particularly useful to him, Starmer inevitably chose the latter.
Less than a decade ago, the idea that the American progressive left might be in a healthier state than its British equivalent would have drawn hoots of derision from those smugly confident in Corbyn’s brief ascendance. Yet the left in the United States — from the days of Occupy Wall Street through Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, and on-the-ground anti-ICE resistance — has wised up to the idea that it must move in an independent and extra-parliamentary manner. They may take heart in developments such as the rise of figures like Zohran Mamdani, but they seem to understand that real political change requires mass organizing beyond party structures and a willingness to break with the accepted norms and niceties of the political process.
This understanding passed entirely by all those on the British left who invested in Labour, along with those centrists and liberals who warned against the insidious influence of identity politics and “culture wars” that would require giving a shit about the rights, liberation, and lives of embattled and persecuted minorities. Starmer’s premiership, and its ignominious end, are the consequence.
The lesson of Keir Starmer’s undistinguished spell as prime minister is that — in the U.K. or anywhere else — if you throw red meat to a bloodthirsty right, it is only a matter of time before they are devouring your own flesh. You will not defeat fascism, or even delay it — you will simply make sure that when it arrives, much of its work has already been done.
The post Keir Starmer’s Downfall Is the Only Reward for Simpering Centrism appeared first on The Intercept.
The 46-year-old was stopped at about 9.30pm on Friday while preparing to board a Jetstar flight to Perth, according to police and local media
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An Australian man has been arrested at a Thai airport in connection with the alleged murder of a 17-year-old girl whose naked body was found in a suitcase, according to local police.
The man, 46, was stopped at about 9.30pm on Friday while preparing to travel on a Jetstar flight to Perth, according to local media.
Continue reading...  | My x7lr arrived about 2 weeks ago. When I started charging it stayed red for about 10 minutes then would flash green for a fraction of a second every few seconds. It slowly progresses to the point where it was mostly green and would flash red for a fraction of a second every few seconds. The batteries are decently out of balance, I’ll post a picture below. When I contacted fungineers they recommended to adjust my “charge range value” “charge start/charge end settings” they recommended to make sure it’s a difference of .2 and that should solve the issue. When I asked where the settings were they just referred me to some videos and pdf manual thing. I had already used that exact video to setup the board and didn’t remember it going over that. I watched it again and didn’t see anything specifically about those settings. Anyway I can’t find any setting in Vesc tool or floaty that adjust the charge start/charge end voltage. I haven’t really been able to ride it since I wanna get the cells balanced before I really trust it. Any help is appreciated thank you in advance! I added a photo he sent me with “important settings” in the comments. [link] [comments] |
June 26, 2026 — On June 25, the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) welcomed a delegation of about 25 people from China. The visitors had previously attended the ISC High Performance Conference in Hamburg and took advantage of their stay to tour leading German high-performance computing centers.
Credit: DKRZ
The delegation consisted of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as well as representatives from the company Sugon. The visit focused on current developments in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as their applications in research and science.
To kick off the visit, Prof. Dr. Thomas Ludwig presented the DKRZ’s scientific focus and mission, as well as the center’s HPC systems and data archiving infrastructure. Dr. Christopher Kadow then presented application examples from the fields of Earth system sciences, climate modeling, and the use of HPC and AI in climate research. In a subsequent panel discussion, participants exchanged views on current developments in the field of HPC, applications in climate and climate research, and international perspectives on scientific collaboration. In addition, the company Sugon presented its activities in the field of high-performance computing.
The event concluded with a guided tour of the data center. During the tour, guests gained insights into the DKRZ’s supercomputers and data archiving infrastructure. At the Klimaglobus, Michael Böttinger also presented visualizations of kilometer-scale climate simulations that vividly demonstrate the capabilities of modern climate modeling.
About DKRZ
The German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum, DKRZ) is a central service center for German climate and earth system research. Its high performance computers, data storage and services form the central research infrastructure for simulation-based climate science in Germany.
Apart from providing computing power, data storage capacity and technical support for models and simulations in climate research, DKRZ offers its scientific users an extensive portfolio of tailor-made services. It maintains and develops application software relevant to climate research and supports its users in matters of data processing. Finally, DKRZ also participates in national and international joint projects and cooperations with the aim of improving the infrastructure for climate modeling.
DKRZ was founded on November 11, 1987 and took up its services on January 1, 1988. It is a non-profit and non-commercial limited company with four shareholders: The Max Planck Society, The Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, represented by the University of Hamburg, The Alfred Wegener Institute – Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, and the Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon.
DKRZ is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres.
DKRZ provides its resources (computing time, hard-drive storage and archive capacity, consultancy and visualizations) free of charge. Any scientists conducting research in the field of climate and earth system science in Germany, and requiring HPC resources for their work may apply for resources at DKRZ.
Source: DKRZ
The post Chinese Scientists and Sugon Representatives Visit DKRZ Following ISC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
June 26, 2026 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is contributing AI-enabled payload optimization and advanced modeling and simulation expertise to Aires Tide, a collaborative National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) demonstration exploring new ways to design flight test vehicles.
Developed in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Kansas City National Security Campus, Aires Tide brings together expertise across design, manufacturing and flight testing in a single cross-enterprise effort. The project is also an early example of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission in practice, illustrating how AI can help connect those capabilities in a more integrated engineering workflow for national security applications.
A collaboration of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Kansas City National Security Campus, Aires Tide brings together expertise across design, manufacturing and flight testing in a single cross-enterprise effort. The project is also an early example of the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission in practice, illustrating how AI can help connect those capabilities in a more integrated engineering workflow for national security applications. Photos: Garry McLeod/LLNL (left); Craig Fritz/Sandia (center/right).
The project reached an important milestone with a successful May 19 drop test of a half-scale Aires Tide vehicle at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The test generated flight data that will help the team assess performance, validate modeling and simulation results, and refine future designs.
For LLNL, the project centers on using AI-driven optimization, physics-based modeling and large-scale simulation to evaluate payload configurations and engineering tradeoffs more efficiently. In the project’s design workflow, LLNL researchers applied advanced computational tools to explore complex design spaces and support a co-design approach in which components are developed as part of an integrated system rather than in isolation.
“Aires Tide reflects the kind of mission innovation that Livermore and its nuclear security enterprise partners are advancing for the nation’s security,” said Lab Director Kim Budil. “For LLNL, this effort demonstrates how we can bring our advanced capabilities in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI, design and engineering to this collaboration to accelerate development cycles and support future national security needs.”
The project moved from concept to multiple prototype builds in about five months, a process that would traditionally take years, according to researchers. Across the collaboration, researchers designed, built and tested several versions of the vehicle, including smaller-scale test articles and a full-scale 11-foot prototype planned for display as part of the Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair” event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., later this summer.
The cone-shaped fuselage was printed as nested parts that could be separated and reassembled, an approach that significantly reduced production time and cost. The final display version was manufactured using laser powder bed fusion, an additive manufacturing (3D printing) process suited for producing complex, high-performance metal structures.
LLNL focused on optimizing payloads for various performance characteristics, while Sandia and LANL contributed complementary design and integration expertise. That work helped the team assess how internal payload elements could be arranged and optimized for performance under demanding flight conditions.
“One of the most important aspects of Aires Tide is its potential to accelerate the full engineering cycle for strategic deterrence and stockpile modernization, from initial design work through production and experimental validation,” said LLNL Deputy Director for Strategic Deterrence Brad Wallin. “That ability to connect AI-driven optimization with simulation, fabrication and test data will help us move faster while making better-informed decisions at every stage.”
Researchers and engineers created Aires Tide as a concept demonstrator rather than a production system. For LLNL and its NNSA partners, the project is a tangible exemplar of a broader goal: connecting AI-enabled design, HPC, advanced manufacturing and experimental feedback in a closed-loop process that will accelerate development across the national security enterprise.
More from HPCwire: DOE Unveils AI-Designed Aires Tide Flight Vehicle Built Under Genesis Mission
Source: LLNL
The post LLNL Helps Advance AI-Driven Design and Simulation for NNSA Aires Tide Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.
June 26, 2026 — To address the rapidly growing computational demands driven by generative artificial intelligence (AI), Taiwan’s National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) under the National Institutes of Applied Research (NIAR) officially launched its newest AI supercomputing system, “Nano4” (Chip Innovation 26), on June 1, 2026. The new system provides enhanced AI computing resources for academia, government agencies, and industry users.
NCHC’s Nano4
Nano4 is a key outcome of the “Chip-Driven Industrial Innovation Upgrade: Next-Generation High-Performance Computing and AI Evaluation Environment Project” (Chip Innovation Program). Designed specifically for large-scale generative AI model training, inference, and high-performance computing applications, the system is equipped with the latest NVIDIA H200 GPUs, featuring eight GPUs per server, a 400 Gb/s high-speed network, and 2 TB of memory per node. This advanced architecture significantly improves performance for AI development, scientific simulations, data analytics, and other compute-intensive workloads.
The deployment of Nano4 further strengthens Taiwan’s sovereign computing infrastructure and supports research and innovation in key fields such as AI, semiconductors, biomedical sciences, climate modeling, digital twins, and smart manufacturing. It will help accelerate technology development and real-world applications across academia, government, and industry.
To encourage users to explore the new AI computing platform, NCHC will offer a free trial period throughout June, followed by the start of full commercial operations in July. This phased rollout will allow users to familiarize themselves with the system and optimize their workflows.
Looking ahead, NCHC will continue expanding Taiwan’s national computing capabilities by integrating AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and cloud technologies, providing a robust computing foundation for scientific innovation and industrial transformation.
NCHC welcomes research institutions, government organizations, and enterprises with needs in AI, HPC, and large-scale data analytics to leverage these national computing resources and help drive Taiwan into the next era of intelligent technology.
More from HPCwire: LineShine Debuts at No. 1 as the TOP500 Enters a New Global Exascale Era
Source: NCHC
The post Taiwan’s NCHC Launches Nano4 AI Supercomputer to Power Next-Gen AI Innovation appeared first on HPCwire.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The WuXi STA Pharma campus in Middletown has been hailed as a major economic development win for Delaware and it was backed by the largest taxpayer-backed grant of the Carney administration. Now concerns from the Pentagon over its alleged ties to the Chinese government could essentially prevent it from doing business with American companies in many scenarios.
One of Delaware’s largest economic development projects could be in jeopardy after the Pentagon blacklisted the developer over alleged ties to the Chinese military.
On the southern edge of Middletown, Shanghai-based WuXi STA Pharmaceuticals is nearing completion on a massive, $500 million pharmaceutical manufacturing campus. The company – one of the largest global contract pharmaceutical manufacturers – has eyed the facility as part of its major expansion into the United States. It plans to open it later this year.
But for the plant to survive long-term, it may need to find a way off of the so-called 1260H list, or a list of companies that the U.S. Department of Defense designates as “Chinese military companies.”
Earlier this month, the company sued the Pentagon in federal court to overturn the designation.
The decision came as a bit of a shock, considering WuXi’s parent company, WuXi AppTec, avoided being included in a 2025 federal bill known as the BIOSECURE Act that would have placed the limitations on its clients last year. The bill extends the same prohibitions to any company that the Pentagon places on its 1260H list.
“We are confident this designation is wrong and not supported by the facts or legal criteria and a full and fair review of the facts will vindicate our position. WuXi AppTec is not a ‘Chinese military company,’ and we are working with our advisors to pursue every available remedy,” a company spokesperson told Spotlight Delaware this week.
In 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives established a specially organized bipartisan committee, known as the House Select Committee on the CCP, to examine the economic and national security threats imposed by the Chinese government.
Through its first year, it helped to push a ban or sale of the social media platform TikTok, expose the forced labor concerns in low-cost, e-commerce companies Shein and Temu, and argued for the revoking of tariff breaks on a variety of Chinese products.
In early 2024, the committee’s leaders introduced the BIOSECURE Act, which aimed to prohibit federal contracting with certain biotechnology providers connected to foreign adversaries. The bill expressly named five companies, including WuXi AppTec.
The bill claimed that WuXi AppTec “presents a national security threat to the United States” because it has sponsored events featuring military and civil leaders, received investments from a military-linked fund, and granted awards to military researchers.
U.S. intelligence officials later informed senators that they believed WuXi AppTec had also transferred intellectual property to the Chinese government, according to a Reuters report.
The company has adamantly denied all claims that it compromised technology or data, or has any relationship with the Chinese military.
Through negotiations of much of 2024, WuXi AppTec was eventually removed from the BIOSECURE Act that was approved with the annual National Defense Authorization Act and the company’s future looked bright.
But about a year later, it was back in the Pentagon’s crosshairs.
According to WuXi’s lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of D.C., the company met with Biden administration officials at the Pentagon in August 2024 and reportedly presented evidence that it is not connected to the Chinese government, military or academia.
When the 1260H list was published in January 2025 at the tail-end of the Biden era, WuXi was no longer targeted.
Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the company once again sought an audience with the new Pentagon leaders. That meeting was delayed to November 2025 due to the government shutdown, but weeks before that meeting Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg had reportedly already argued to Congressional leaders that WuXi should be added to the 1260H list.
When company leaders read that Bloomberg story, they asked the Pentagon for an explanation and offered to answer any additional questions. The Pentagon told WuXi that it had no comment on the story and never reached out again.
Three months later, WuXi officials were shocked to see the company named on an updated 1260H posted on the Federal Register that was taken down after less than an hour. Nonetheless, the list was spotted and became an international story – one that WuXi argues served an ulterior motive.
The list was posted while Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had been negotiating a trade deal and a first state visit of Trump’s second term.
“The lack of justification and the haphazard posting of the 1260H List illustrate the arbitrary and capricious manner in which the [Department of War] is managing [Chinese military companies] designations amidst political pressure,” the company wrote in its lawsuit. “The slapdash posting demonstrates that the 1260H List is being used as a political pawn during negotiations with China, rather than a legitimate, evidence-based national security determination.”
On June 8, WuXi once again wrote to Feinberg to deny allegations of its ties to the Chinese government and offered to meet. Instead, within hours of that email, the Pentagon posted its final 1260H list naming WuXi among the problematic companies.
U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) told Spotlight Delaware last week that he has not been briefed on what evidence the Pentagon may have to defend the designation, but has asked for a classified update.
“If there is concrete evidence that WuXi is utilizing biological or other sensitive or private data of Americans in the United States, then I will voice my support for this designation. But at the same time, I welcome investment in manufacturing in Delaware so I think we have to be cautious,” he said.
If WuXi cannot convince a judge to reverse course on the designation, it could be significantly damaging to the company’s operations.
As a named 1260H company, WuXi now faces Pentagon contracting restrictions, but its bigger issues lie with parallel clauses in the BIOSECURE Act.
Under the BIOSECURE Act, WuXi would be prohibited from receiving government contracts, grants or loans – and critically extends those prohibitions to clients of WuXi. That means pharmaceutical companies that receive federal dollars for research, development or manufacturing of a drug could not work with WuXi on it.
But, WuXi also received some relief when legislators exempted Medicare and Medicaid agreements from the prohibitions. Simply manufacturing drugs, or ingredients for drugs, that would be purchased by the federal insurance programs would not violate the law.
The company will also have time to launch a legal defense, because the BIOSECURE Act has not been put into force yet. It could be up to three years before it clears the necessary federal compliance regulations, depending on how quickly the Trump administration wants to advance it.
And even at that point, WuXi would be allowed to work with existing clients for up to five years as part of a grandfathering period.
But the reality is switching contractors to work on manufacturing and testing new drugs is a lengthy and expensive process. That’s why the mere threat of future prohibitions has convinced many clients of Chinese-based biotech companies to begin exploring alternatives – a 2024 survey of the industry, taken at the height of BIOSECURE Act concern, found that more than two-thirds of companies were looking.
Congressional leaders are also now threatening companies to advance those searches too.
“This updated list of Chinese military companies is a warning to American businesses, all levels of government, and the American people. These Chinese companies are working with the Chinese military against our national interests,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Michigan), the chair of China Select Committee, said in a statement after WuXi was added to the 1260H list.
Prohibition, or even diminished market share in the U.S., could be particularly damaging for WuXi, which saw two-thirds of global revenue come from America last year.
Indeed, WuXi says as much in its lawsuit, writing, “The limitations of the BIOSECURE Act will likely cause many of [WuXi’s] customers to consider taking their business to companies without the limitations, which would be detrimental for the company.”
Over the last four years, WuXi has been building a 1.74 million-square-foot campus in Middletown where it plans to employ nearly 500 people.
The state’s economic development team worked for years to land the project at a 190-acre parcel in the fast-growing town. After all, the company is a heavyweight in its field, working on blockbuster drugs like AstraZeneca’s diabetes drug Farxiga or Pfizer’s COVID drug Paxlovid.
To lure WuXi to the First State, officials approved $19 million in taxpayer-backed grants for the project. It was the largest grant approval made during former Gov. John Carney’s term, totaling nearly four times that given to Amazon for its massive Boxwood Road fulfillment center.
Earlier this month, WuXi hosted an open house at the Middletown facility for industry executives, according to a social media post. The company has been hiring for months to launch its drug research facility this winter for clinical and commercial drugs.
Following the initial building, the Middletown site is expected to continue growing next year, adding sterile manufacturing space for vials, cartridges and pre-filled syringes.
A WuXi spokesperson dismissed concerns that a BIOSECURE Act-spurred financial hit could impact the Middletown project, saying, “Our U.S. presence …reflects a long-term strategic commitment to U.S. patients, U.S. jobs, and U.S. innovation. This commitment does not rest on the outcome of this legal proceeding.”
When asked about the situation, Gov. Matt Meyer’s office told Spotlight Delaware only that it was unaware of any developments that would prevent the opening of the facility on schedule.
The post Pentagon blacklists WuXi, putting major Middletown project at risk appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Chris Casad awakens each day before dawn on the Central Oregon property he bought nine years ago, the farm where he once grew tons of potatoes before water shortages forced him to fallow fields and take a job feeding someone else’s cattle on someone else’s land.
At 38, he’s got tractors older than he is. His two kids are under 5. His wife, Cate, has two jobs. They’re staring down a pile of debt from their 85 acres and its unending supply of things in the process of breaking.
The crisis for their farm started in drought — three summers during which starving grasshoppers descended on the area’s remaining crops, tepid reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry and the springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest recorded flow.
But the death knell for Casad’s crops was Oregon’s century-old law, which protects some water users at the expense of others.
The couple saw the state cut their community’s share of irrigation water from the Deschutes in the name of that law. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. “There were a number of suicides, let alone people who closed up shop, older farmers just not wanting to waste their life’s worth of work and their savings on just trying to keep it going,” Casad said.
At the same time, a few miles upstream, state law encouraged landowners to soak some of Oregon’s most expensive real estate and least productive farmland, a ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting analysis of water use has found. These water-rich Oregonians live in the Central Oregon Irrigation District, a quasi-municipal corporation — part public utility, part homeowners association — that manages and distributes the lion’s share of the Deschutes’ water.
Six irrigation districts together take more than 90% of the river in Bend from May to September. COID is, by far, the most powerful. It has rights to more than half of the volume of the river because when the state was carving up the Deschutes, back in the early 1900s, COID was near the front of the line with a plan to use the water. And in Western water law, that place in line — senior rights — guarantees that when drought hits, your share is protected.
That same law also says COID can keep taking all that water as long as it can prove that landowners in the district are putting it to “beneficial use.” Waste is forbidden.
But Oregon policymakers have such loose definitions of what’s beneficial and what’s waste that, during the drought, our reporting found, only 1 of every 4 gallons COID took from the river was absorbed by crops.
The news organizations shared our analysis of state-commissioned satellite data with both officials who manage water for Oregon and with COID. While the state did not dispute the numbers, irrigation district leaders said they didn’t trust the state data, which Oregon lawmakers created to study water availability. COID also said that the drought years were anomalous; however, our analysis across wet and dry years showed crops drank a similar share of the diverted water each year.
Other records from the district and the state describe how most of the water percolated into the ground, evaporated into hot, dry air, or drained off fields into scrubland and desert. Some fed the aquifer. Some went back into the river downstream, where environmental regulators have found waterways warmed and polluted.
And that one gallon that quenched crops? Almost all of it went to grass and pasture.
Casad grew up in Bend, the region’s biggest city, where he watched developers slice farmland into subdivisions. The lumber mill became a shopping mall anchored by an REI. An economy once dependent on timber and agriculture turned instead toward tourism and recreation.
Canals from the Deschutes still wind through Bend’s neighborhoods of single-family homes, and then to the estates, farms, ranches and destination resorts on the city’s outskirts. Among those sits a horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike fame, one of the wealthiest families in the world and, our analysis found, one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, its website shows. A manager declined to comment on how it manages water.
Another long, gated driveway leads to an 80-acre property that was once dry scrubland. Cinematographer Byron Garth bought water rights from another landowner through COID a decade ago to irrigate part of the property.
The water helped him transform a rocky hillside into an “exclusive compound paradise,” as an auction listing last year put it, with a 6,300-square-foot mansion with radiant heated floors, three guest houses, a 10,000-square-foot garage and a swimming pool — all surrounded by a carpet of soft green grass.
For a few years, Garth used his water rights to grow hay for about 15 alpacas and goats, but in the end, he said, “it was cheaper to just mow it.” Garth said he did have reservations about using so much water during the drought, but he reasoned that somebody had to use it.
“For the aesthetic value,” realtor Jen Bowen said about the grass last year, as she gave OPB a tour of the estate shortly before Garth sold it for $4.8 million.
“I think most of us would agree — it’s nicer to look out over a lush pasture than it is the high desertscape,” Bowen said.
One of the district’s thirstiest developments is Ranch at the Canyons, a gated subdivision of dozens of multimillion-dollar Tuscan-style mansions whose residents mutually own an equestrian center, a luxury wedding venue, a winery and a nonprofit farm run by “dedicated ranch management and local farmers.” A development manager did not respond to a request for comment. Its website promises homeowners “the peaceful rhythm of agricultural life — without the work.”
A similar property listed for $15 million invites its future owners to imagine more than a residence or a cattle ranch, but “a Playground for Ambitions, for Imagination, for Dreamers, and for Doers.”
Our analysis of the most recently available state data, covering 2015 to 2022, found that more than 9 out of every 10 acres in the district were growing grass — pasture and hay fields for livestock as well as landscaping.
Casad started his life as a farmer in the district, but he was not one of those grass growers. He began leasing land near his hometown in 2010, and within a matter of years was turning a profit, annually growing thousands of tons of organic potatoes, pulling them from the earth with a gargantuan harvester he called “the white whale.” He liked the idea of farming in a region that once sold 1 of every 4 bags of potatoes in the state. He leased more land, sold out at farmers’ markets, supplied a local brewery with spuds for its fries, and welcomed school field trips, “just to show kids what a working farm is, where their food comes from.”
COID’s water was a boon.
“It was just always on,” Casad said.
But the glut of water became a problem. He couldn’t just cut off the flow without risking his landlord’s water rights. So he did what others in the district do: figure out a way to use the “overabundance” or capture it in ponds. When one pond was full, Casad started digging a second one so the excess water wouldn’t inundate his neighbor’s property.
On more than a third of COID’s acreage, landowners irrigate their crops by intentionally flooding the fields. Water flows directly from ditches across the land — saturating plants, pooling and running off as it evaporates or seeps into the ground.
Water experts are quick to point out that water running off fields or leaking out of canals filters into aquifers or drains back to the river. That is not waste, they say, because it recirculates in the river basin.
This recycling takes time, while the consequences on the Deschutes are immediate. Farmers are drying up acreage and, for about 40 miles downstream of Bend, fish habitats suffer, state scientists told us. Once irrigation districts take their 90% of the river during the growing season, average remaining flows over the last decade have been about half what the ecosystem needs, according to stream gauges and state conservation targets. “The river always loses,” former state biologist Brett Hodgson said.
The fact that much of the irrigation water is, in some form or fashion, recycled elsewhere doesn’t put COID landowners like David Fisher at ease either. Fisher said he flood irrigates about 60 acres of his property to grow hay and pasture for cattle.
“We’re just wasting water. Really. We are,” remarked the 72-year-old butcher shop owner. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tree hugger or one of those people that think that we should stop this for the frogs or the fish. But there’s got to be a middle of the road.”
Most of it leaked from open canals, percolated into the ground or ran off fields before returning to aquifers or to the river downstream.
Both how much water the district uses and what its landowners are growing have the state’s blessing. Oregon, like other Western states, says that as long as irrigation is put to “beneficial use without waste,” no one can take your water rights.
But growing anything is considered a beneficial use as long as it’s planted, irrigated and not a native species or noxious weed. Policymakers and courts have labeled so few uses as waste that one of the most well-known legal precedents was set 90 years ago by a California court, said Colorado-based water law attorney Sarah Klahn. The case forbade the use of irrigation water to drown gophers.
Water rights are a form of property rights, Oregon-based water law attorney Karen Russell said, and although the law is designed to adapt to changing times, the courts have typically allowed past practices to dictate how much water landowners can use.
In the eyes of Oregon courts, “waste is like pornography,” she said: “You know it when you see it.”
So it doesn’t matter if landowners are watering the prized crops that decades ago were celebrated by the Deschutes Basin’s annual potato festival, when local women vied to be crowned “Miss Spud,” or the grass and hay for today’s “Playground for Ambitions.”
This is the point COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell, who is in charge of the district’s day-to-day operations, tried to drive home at a town hall meeting in Redmond last March. The moderator read a question asking about incentives that might make “hobby farms” more efficient. Horrell bristled at the term, calling it a label intended to “shame and coerce us into change.”
“We as district managers don’t get to decide whether we like somebody growing carrot seed or somebody having two llamas and a Prius in the driveway,” he shot back. “If you’re using your water beneficially and growing a beneficial crop, that is what we manage. We don’t have the right to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
The district is vigilant about ensuring one thing — that landowners are growing a non-native crop, which the district checks through field visits and by aerial reviews, COID’s Deputy Director of Water Rights Jessi Talbott said in a recent interview.
Every summer, a COID-hired plane flies over the district’s more than 70 square miles of fields, an area larger than Salem, Oregon’s capital city, looking for brown patches. If landowners aren’t using the water exactly where they are supposed to at least once every five years, the state can cancel unused water rights. Oregon regulators have canceled irrigation water rights just four times since 2020, and none of those were in the COID.
“Nobody else in the state does what we do to try and encourage use,” Talbott said.
Since 2021, the district has sent more than 1,000 letters to landowners warning them they were in danger of losing water rights. The intent of the letters isn’t to scare people, but to educate them about water stewardship, Talbott said. If landowners suspected of not using water don’t take action, COID can and will confiscate rights itself, she added, but this rarely happens.
Casad’s landlord got a letter from COID in 2016, after aerial surveillance spotted “specific dry areas” on the property, district records show. Casad and his wife, Cate Havstad-Casad, had turned one rocky corner into a compost pile and parking area for their equipment.
“In order to satisfy the powers that be seeing that we’re using the water, there was an entire season where we had to water that compost pile and equipment yard,” Havstad-Casad said.
By the next year, a COID inspector’s report noted “enough growth to avoid confiscation.” In 2023, on another property, Andria Truax and her husband Dan Baumann got a COID warning letter that sent them into “panic mode,” they said. The couple owns a nursery raising drought-tolerant landscaping plants on a 10-acre property near Bend.
“We’re supposed to keep some of these areas green that are next to impossible to grow anything on,” Truax said.
They didn’t want to douse rocky soil and fight back the weeds that immediately sprang up. The irony struck her because “farmers are getting cut off from water downstream and meanwhile we’re being told to water more.”
Still, to protect their water rights and property values, they turned on the sprinklers.
COID doesn’t tell people to water rocks or compost piles, Talbott said in an interview last year. In a more recent interview, she said OPB and ProPublica’s finding that only about 25% of the district’s diversion was consumed by crops was “infuriating.”
“We do so much to educate our patrons and for them to use the water right and make products out of it, feed the community, feed cows, whatever is in alignment with water law,” Talbott said.
In the same meeting, Horrell said the district not only doesn’t overdeliver water, but some properties don’t get enough. COID doesn’t directly measure how much water landowners use, only how much land they’re irrigating.
In its water management conservation plan, which covers 2015 to 2020, COID approximated how much water crops required, based on surveys of its landowners about what they were growing — largely pastures — and federal weather data. Those averaged estimates showed crops required about 27% of what the district took out of the river annually. That roughly mirrors our own finding of what crops actually drank, based on the state’s study of satellite data.
Horrell and other district officials did not respond to multiple questions about the numbers in COID’s own conservation plan.
State leaders have long wrestled with how to divvy up the Deschutes Basin in the face of increasing drought, booming population and growing demand. Bend and Redmond, the basin’s two largest cities, are facing uncertain future supplies; during the drought of 2022, COID diverted over 12 times more water than both cities combined, with their then roughly 132,000 total residents. While farms are, by far, the biggest water users in the nation, the COID’s contribution to the state’s agricultural economy is among the lowest in Oregon. The region leads other Oregon counties only in horse sales.
Republican state Rep. Mark Owens, a hay farmer from Eastern Oregon and one of the state’s leading voices on water management, said the district’s hobby farmers are getting excess water “which they do not need, should not have to utilize and should not be delivered to them.” Oregon, he said, is long overdue to look again at how it manages water.
The beneficial use rule was designed, he said, to build up rural economies, and “it’s what allowed some of our communities to prosper.” But now, “you have a group of folks that employ nobody, harvest nothing, so how are you actually providing a public benefit for that water?” he said. “So is there something broken? Yeah, there is.”
How, he asked, “do you get the most crop per drop?”
Rather than mandates, the Legislature has turned to incentives, like authorizing programs that pay people to leave water in the river without losing the right to it. Baumann and Truax eventually did just that with a sliver of their water rights. But the state doesn’t dictate how irrigation districts use those incentives. COID’s board of directors has capped participation so that very few properties are eligible.
Horrell said the district has to limit enrollment in water-sharing programs because its 120-year-old delivery system will fail if the canals aren’t brimming full.
The district’s hundreds of miles of open, unlined waterways rely on gravity to push huge volumes out of the river and propel the water that ends up on fields more than 30 miles away. When COID has reduced the volume of this “carry water” too much in the past, Horrell said, farms at the ends of the system suffered.
But the district acknowledged in public meetings and in our interviews that all the water leaking and evaporating along the way is wasteful. To change that, it’s seeking more than $700 million in public funding to replace the canals with new, pressurized pipes. It’s already gotten more than $65 million for piping since 2015.
“There is no dispute that we all want a better, more equal, more balanced water delivery system that benefits our river, our partners, districts, cities. That’s a given,” Horrell said, “How we get there is what we argue about.”
COID is a business, he emphasized, one that he said does need to become more sustainable as the climate changes.
COID’s rights allow it to take even more water from the Deschutes than it does. Even so, Horrell pointed out, it has voluntarily scaled back over the last decade of droughts. Thanks to piping, he said, it sends some water to downstream farmers when it doesn’t have to.
But, he said, that “doesn’t mean that it is not ours.”
The Deschutes, like rivers across the country, is owned by the public, and taxpayers are spending big to conserve it. But irrigation districts still have all the power, said environmental advocate Yancy Lind, who contributes to a state-supported water planning group with districts, cities and state managers.
“We live in the West and in the West, water is power and the irrigators have the water. It’s that simple,” he said. “They have all the cards. We’re just trying to pull little crumbs out from them.”
After seven years of leasing land in the COID, Casad headed north to nearby Jefferson County and the North Unit Irrigation District, where he now lives. He moved because he could afford to buy there and the land was more fertile — it produces more than half the world’s supply of carrot seed. Plus he wanted to live among people like him, dedicated farmers, someone like Jos Poland, “a tough dude” and the lifelong dairy farmer who became his new neighbor.
The move came with one big tradeoff. Casad went from a district with plentiful water to one that has long had to make do with less. North Unit is the first to be cut off during a drought. Compared to the COID, even in a wet year, North Unit promises half as much water per acre, and it loses an even higher percentage in leaky delivery canals, but its crops still consume a much higher percentage of what the district takes out of the river, our analysis found.
North Unit’s farmers pride themselves on that efficiency. Drive through Casad’s neighborhood and you’ll see rows of water-saving sprinklers, and pumps churning to recycle and reapply the runoff captured by specialized ponds. “It’s the only way we’ve been able to survive,” said one of the district’s longtime farmers, 80-year-old Gary Harris.
Casad knew this, so he calculated that half as much water on fertile land would be enough.
And it was, until the drought hit in 2020. To keep his farm going, he started drying up two acres of land for every acre of potatoes he planted. Down the road, Poland’s organic cow pastures died. He had to sell half his herd.
“I was losing money so fast that I couldn’t afford to feed my animals,” Poland recalled. “That threw me in a big depression.” He struggled to get out of bed. Casad started helping him with the dairy, working through the night on his own farm.
“I remember watching the lights of the tractor out the window,” Cate Havstad-Casad said. She was pregnant with their first child, sitting in the bathtub having contractions, she said, but she waited hours to call her husband inside “because I understood the pressure on his shoulders.”
Casad wept as he dredged up memories of the drought. “Some of this stuff you just bury,” he said. “You bury it down deep.”
During those years, which overlapped with the pandemic, Jefferson County Commissioner Kelly Simmelink said he heard from farmers dealing with falling commodity prices, rising operational costs, “and then the real fact of water availability — I don’t know how you continue.”
As the drought wore on, the suicide rate in Jefferson County nearly doubled. “Our farmers and ranchers face immense pressure,” he told the Legislature in early 2023, successfully urging it to launch a state-funded suicide prevention hotline for agricultural producers.
Two years into the drought, Casad learned at North Unit’s spring meeting that he would have to cut back his water use even more. For every acre of vegetables he could plant, four would have to go fallow. He called his wife to break the news when she was out of town.
After she hung up, she sat alone in her hotel room and broke down.
“It doesn’t have to be this way” she said through tears in a video diary she recorded at the time. “It is Oregon water law which will give a very wealthy person with a hayfield that they literally mow and leave in the field and do nothing with because their life has nothing to do with the land, … that person will get twice as much water as any professional farmer will get in North Unit.”
Casad no longer grows potatoes. The bins where he once stored them sit empty in the barn. Now he grows mostly hay and grass for cattle — crops that he said need less water.
But rough years are coming for farmers in the Deschutes Basin. This year Oregon’s snowpack is one of the lowest it’s been in recorded history. That snow takes years to percolate and it’s what feeds the mountain springs powering the river. More than half of Oregon counties have already declared droughts.
The Casad farm is still paying down the debts from the last drought. Chris Casad worked part-time at a feedlot this winter. Now he’s a school bus driver.
To his two young children, his “whale” of a potato harvester has never been anything other than a slide, their playground for make-believe.
The post An Oregon Law Lets One Wealthy Region Turn the Desert Green. When Drought Hits, Farmers Pay the Price. appeared first on ProPublica.
Every year, about 90% of Central Oregon’s Deschutes River disappears into networks of canals and pipes traversing high desert. Between April and October, what’s left in this major river — one of the largest spring-fed waterways in the U.S. — looks more like a creek trickling out of Bend, Oregon.
Six irrigation districts — quasi-public corporations — divert the water to green up the properties of about 7,500 landowners in one of the state’s driest regions. Of the six, none is as powerful as the Central Oregon Irrigation District. It has rights to use more than half of the Deschutes’ volume — more than all the other districts combined. And under state law, in times of scarcity, most of the others must cut back to protect COID’s share of the river.
During the last drought, state water law forced commercial farmers downstream to fallow their land while COID diverted four times what its landowners’ crops consumed, an Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis of state data found.
Our analysis showed similar ratios across both wet and dry years, roughly aligning with estimates of what COID told the state its crops required. While state water managers did not dispute our analysis, the irrigation district said it didn’t trust the satellite-based data we used, which Oregon lawmakers backed to study water availability.
COID landowners are doing exactly what the law encourages them to do, state legislators said. To keep rights to the water, districts have to prove to the state that their customers are consistently using it “beneficially.” In the district, our reporting found, more than 9 out of 10 acres were pasture — grass for grazing or landscaping, or hay for livestock — considered beneficial under the law.
Oregon and other Western states have so far rejected any legislation that restricts what people can grow or how efficient they must be: Opposition to change is strong because water rights are a form of property rights. Water rights also raise property values and can bring agricultural tax breaks.
If lawmakers took on bedrock water law, “we’d get crushed by the powers that be and we might even not be reelected,” said state Rep. Ken Helm, the Democratic co-chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources and Water.
“What should we do? I think we should leave more water in the river. Legally speaking, that doesn’t have to happen,” he said. Helm, a land-use lawyer, grew up in Bend and has watched the region transform. “Affluent people are moving into Central Oregon for reasons that have nothing to do with growing a crop,” he said.
As things stand now, COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell said he “can’t tell people what they can and can’t farm, if it’s allowed.” The district’s job is to distribute water to its customers and to “deliver it much more efficiently and sustainably in the future,” he said.
The question is how.
Oregon has pushed three main solutions:
COID delivers most of its water through open canals built 120 years ago. Blasted from porous lava rock, the canals have to be completely full for gravity to push water across the district’s more than 42,000 acres. Nearly half the water evaporates or seeps into the ground under the canals before reaching its destination. COID’s state water rights factor this in.
Replacing the canals with pressurized pipes could save a lot of water. It could also take 50 years and cost more than $700 million. The district is in the final planning stages of what could be a $360 million project to pipe a main artery leading to more than a thousand landowners between Bend and Redmond, Oregon. Few make their living as farmers, our reporting found. In exchange for federal and state funding for piping, COID has pledged to send water downstream to farmers outside the district.
The plan has gotten broad support, especially from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley: “Repeated severe droughts make every drop of irrigation water highly valuable, and the best way to preserve irrigation water is to pipe it,” he told OPB and ProPublica.
The catalyst for focusing on COID, he said, was a threatened species of frog, which lives exactly where irrigation districts have long siphoned water, destroying its habitat. To stave off lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act, the districts agreed to leave more water in the river over time.
As it switches from canals to pipes, COID is supposed to send the water it saves to a neighboring district that will have to take less from the river as part of the plan to restore the frog’s home. That district, North Unit, serves a valley famous for commercial farms, but it’s already water-poor. It has rights to far less water from the Deschutes than COID does. Evan Thomas, a fifth-generation farmer and leader of North Unit, put the stakes plainly at a March public meeting in Redmond: “This pipe has to go in the ground by 2028 or North Unit, all of Jefferson County, basically quits farming.”
But even those who acknowledge that piping is a critical solution note that it won’t stop COID from diverting more water than its customers need — or from sending that water to a lot of residential properties growing grass and pasture. Last year, the nonprofit Central Oregon LandWatch pushed for a bill to put limits on overwatering. Helm and Republican state Rep. Mark Owens started drafting legislation, but they never introduced it. Owens, a hay farmer in Eastern Oregon, said irrigation districts weren’t happy with the proposal. “I weakened,” he said. “We weren’t going to get it through the building. We lived to fight another day.”
The Deschutes has never had enough water for all the landowners who laid claim to it more than a century ago, said Deschutes River Conservancy Executive Director Kate Fitzpatrick. Leaving water in the river for fish and wildlife wasn’t even considered a legal, beneficial use of the resource until the 1980s.
“So that’s what we’re working with,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re not going to win the game by pointing fingers at who’s doing what with the water.”
With more demand than supply, her nonprofit works with irrigation districts to roll out incentives for landowners to be more efficient or share voluntarily. One program pays landowners to dry up land so COID will leave more water in the river. But the district limits participation, and the program’s efficacy has plateaued for decades, state data shows.
State lawmakers last year also created a pilot “water bank” program. The concept marks a big change in the law and could allow COID landowners to keep what water they need and rent out the excess to farmers downstream without losing rights to it.
But since Oregon’s governor signed the bill into law nearly a year ago, COID and other key players haven’t signed anyone up. That’s because the canal system fails if it doesn’t have enough water in it, Horrell, the district’s manager, said. Piping could allow the district to scale up these other solutions in the future, he said.
There’s another problem, too: To rent out part of a water right without completely drying up their property, landowners would need to measure their use precisely — something many don’t want to do.
COID said it doesn’t measure or report the volume of water it delivers. This is typical across Oregon, where the vast majority of water goes to agricultural lands. But policymakers and experts have long said the state can’t tackle water shortages unless it knows how much the people with irrigation water rights use on their properties.
The Legislature’s attempts to require meters on all individual farms and wells have faced fierce public backlash. “At one point my office was getting a call a minute,” Owens, the state representative, recalled of an effort last year. The fear, he said, is that the state will use data to take away water rights or to try to charge by the gallon.
Owens has given up on trying to force statewide metering for now, he said.
On his own Eastern Oregon hay farm, he started a pilot project that uses a weather station and satellite data to track how much his fields drink. He can look on his phone and see how many days he should irrigate the following week, he said. He also led the charge for Oregon to invest in a cutting-edge study to apply this technology to statewide water planning. Scientists with the Oregon Water Resources Department co-authored a report with researchers from the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute. It provides estimates over nearly 40 years of how much water crops consumed on every irrigated field in Oregon. The data, which OPB and ProPublica used in our reporting, was published last year. Horrell said such data has too many variables and is not ready to guide how the district monitors water use.
State managers are not currently using that data to regulate how water is used, but instead to account for where it goes, Oregon Water Resources Department Director Ivan Gall said in a recent interview. He said tight state budgets have so far kept his agency from sharing it “with the public and decision makers in a way that is understandable and meaningful.”
Owens and Helm said they tried and failed to make it easier to learn from critical data about Oregon’s water — how much there is, how clean it is, where it’s coming from and where it’s going — but a pilot project ground to a halt after state funding dried up last year.
The post Oregon Leaders Are Trying to Save the Deschutes River. Here’s Why That’s So Hard. appeared first on ProPublica.
New Ark United Church of Christ has selected HDC Mid-Atlantic as its development partner to turn the Main Street church property into an affordable housing complex.
The Newark branch of the NAACP has awarded scholarships to three local students in honor of the late athlete and civic leader Gary Hayman and his wife, Barbara.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals for damaging the new blue lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is now peeling, as well as for algae in the water. But the administration has not provided evidence to back up the president’s claims. Experts say the pool’s ills have a variety of plausible explanations that do not involve intentional harm.
Installing linings on pools and making sure they properly adhere is challenging, experts in pools and waterproof coatings have told news outlets, and improper surface prep or water intrusion can cause peeling, they said. Meanwhile, algae would be expected in a shallow, still, unshaded pool fed by nutrient-rich water that had been painted dark blue, Steven Chapra, a water quality modeler and professor emeritus at Tufts University, told us.
Despite these competing explanations, Trump has repeatedly asserted that vandals are to blame. “You know, we have 100- … I think 290-, 300-foot slit right through it,” Trump said at a June 22 press event, after news reports surfaced of blue pieces of the pool’s lining separating from the bottom. “Probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.”
He claimed at the same event that someone may have put fertilizer in the pool, part of a series of claims that someone had poured in some substance or chemicals. “They did something to create the algae,” he said.
Trump’s comments on vandals cutting the pool’s coating with a knife echoed theoretical statements he had made on May 4, before reports of damage to the pool. “It’s very strong. You couldn’t — if you had a knife — I don’t want to give anybody ideas,” he said, referring to the pool’s new coating. “If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it, so strong, so powerful.”
The president has since spoken or posted about alleged cuts in the pool at least daily, with the “gash” — or “numerous slashes” — growing to cover a length of 350 feet and the possible implements used including “a very sharp knife or razors.”
On June 24, Trump posted a photo of the dark blue bottom of the empty pool, stating, “This is the hard rubber surface — No Paint — Before the Vandals cut and pulled it apart!” On June 25, he specified that the vandals had gone to the “bottom” and “started ripping it up,” as well as cut “this very expensive stuff” at the “side of the pool right at water level.”
The White House replied to our request for more information on the vandalism with a June 25 press release claiming to have surveillance video, previously shared by the Department of the Interior with Fox News, of someone vandalizing the pool. The June 19 video, taken in the middle of the afternoon after news had broken of the damage to the pool, appears to show a person reaching into the water and pulling something out. However, it is unclear whether this individual was engaged in vandalism. The White House has not provided evidence of people causing long gashes or a series of gashes. The press release also included links to images of damage to the pool, including a jagged line on the bottom of the pool posted by a TMZ DC reporter on X, but it was unclear what had caused it. Nor has the administration provided evidence someone illicitly dumped something in the pool to cause algae growth.
The White House press release linked to a court filing from Frank Lands, deputy director of operations for the National Park Service, stating that police on June 9 responded to an “NPS report of damage to the reflecting pool, including a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material.” Lands also said that “approximately 70 fence post tops were thrown into the pool.” It is unclear who is alleged to have made these cuts or thrown the fence post tops.
The Department of the Interior sent us a link to one of its X posts, which said, “Six individuals have been arrested for vandalism at the Reflecting Pool.” The post added that seven others were given federal citations and that 17 police reports for vandalism had been filed. The department would not give us further information about these arrests and citations, including any details of the individuals’ alleged infractions. Nor did they provide the names of the alleged vandals. The White House press release said that there had been at least seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed but again did not provide more details, other than to link to multiple news stories mentioning an Olympic canoeist who has disputed that he vandalized the pool. Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department referred us to the NPS.
Brady McCarron, a spokesperson for the United States Marshals Service, told us that as of the morning of June 24, “we are showing 5 arrests” listed as being by the DC Safe Task Force, including one on June 19 for “vandalism (attempted destruction of property/defacing public property)” and four on June 20 for “Destruction of government property.” He did not provide further details on these arrests. The DC Safe Task Force is a multi-agency federal body created by Trump “to surge law enforcement presence in public spaces, strictly enforce ‘quality-of-life’ laws, and maximize federal immigration enforcement within the District.”
Meanwhile, experts in pools, waterproof coatings and algae have said that there are many possible causes for the reflecting pool’s issues that have nothing to do with vandalism. Below, we will discuss competing explanations.
Despite Trump’s claims of vandalism to the more than 100-year-old reflecting pool, it’s not clear what caused damage to its new lining. When pressed on June 22 on whether he had proof that vandals had made cuts in the pool, the president seemed to suggest the cuts themselves were the proof.
“Well, let’s put it this way. When you have a 350 — I think it’s 350, not 250 — a 350-foot slit from one end to the other, you think that’s proof? You think that’s proof?” Trump said to a reporter. He later suggested that there was photographic evidence, but when a reporter asked the president to release those photos Trump said, “You’ll see it in court.” He also suggested contacting the Interior and Parks departments.
What is known is that the Department of the Interior awarded a no-bid contract on April 3 to Atlantic Industrial Coatings to paint the reflecting pool, with supplemental agreements issued through June 15 to total $14.7 million. The agency justified not getting bids from various contractors by saying the project was urgent and needed to be completed by July 4.
The plan was to install an epoxy primer on top of the pool’s concrete slabs, followed by a polyurea lining tinted “American flag blue,” Superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks Kevin Griess explained in May 18 court filings.
“The rehabilitation incorporated a combination of repair materials, epoxy priming technology, elastomeric waterproofing systems, and protective finish coatings,” a June 18 press release from Rhino Linings, the company whose products were used for the new liner, said.
The idea of installing the lining over the full bottom of the pool was first suggested by the Trump administration, Griess said, and not initially by his staff. The original focus was on replacing the failed expansion joints, a major source of leakage. The project did not address the pool’s leaking pipes.
On June 18, around two weeks after the pool was refilled following the renovation, news outlets began reporting that blue material was peeling off the pool’s bottom. The New York Times later reported on June 23 that workers had identified the peeling at least two days earlier, while also noting separate damage to foam in the pool’s expansion joints as of June 9. These joints — which go around the perimeter of the pool and horizontally across it in several places — allow the pool’s concrete slabs to expand and contract as the weather changes.
However, experts in pools and waterproof coatings have said that there are many possible reasons that a coating can improperly adhere.
“You have to account for ambient conditions like rain, sun, humidity, moisture control in your substrate, thickness, evenness, and chemical compatibility,” Steve Goodale, a swimming pool consultant, told Wired, speaking about the difficulty of applying a waterproof pool lining. “There are so many things that can go wrong with that process. If the material hasn’t bonded to the substrate for any number of reasons, then ultimately, the entire system will fail.”
Goodale told the Washington Post that improper surface preparation or water seeping into the lining from the pool or from under it could also contribute to the peeling. He also said that the hydrogen peroxide that the Interior Department had used to try to treat the algae in the pool could have had an impact on the coating, although he said that this would be more likely to lead to “fading, hazing or breakdown of the material” than peeling. News outlets reported that the department had said it was using hydrogen peroxide to treat the algae starting as early as June 16.
David McFayden, CEO of the paint and inspections services company KTA-Tator, told Scientific American that the available information was too limited to blame any one factor for the peeling, but he said issues worth investigating include how the surface was prepared before applying the coating and the water chemistry.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor for the project, said in a June 21 statement that it and the NPS had “identified some areas in the Reflecting Pool that require repairs,” which will be done under warranty, and that these “do not indicate a failure of the liner.” The following day, Rhino Linings, the company that made the pool’s liner, said in a statement that the issues constituted “localized areas of finish coat separation,” and not an issue with the “underlying waterproofing membrane.”
“Was it manual intervention that made those few places peel, or was that the chemical composition of what was in the water?” Rhino Vice President Francois Rivard told Politico. “We don’t know until we have further results at this point, but it is not problematic,” he said, explaining that the peeling only appears to affect the outer blue layer that is for aesthetic purposes.
Concerns about the pool’s new coating predate the most recently identified peeling issues.
Tim Auerhahn, chairman of the pool training and consulting company the Aquatic Council, told the New York Times for a May 8 story that he would want to look closely at the impact of Trump driving his motorcade over the newly coated surface of the pool the day before. The Times reported May 12 that Department of Interior staff had expressed concerns about bubbling and small holes in a layer of the waterproofing material. And the Times report from June 23 and court document linked to in the White House press release indicated that Park Police were aware of damage to or near the pool’s foam expansion joints by June 9.
This timeline indicates the new material in the pool had problems before the June 19 and 20 arrests the U.S. Marshals spokesperson mentioned, and before the June 19 surveillance video of someone removing something from the pool the White House press release linked to.
Few details are available about the arrests. An Olympic canoeist, David Carter Hearn, told news outlets that he was arrested on June 19 for alleged destruction of government property. He said a piece of the blue lining had already partly peeled off and he touched it out of curiosity. He said he did not destroy anything.
There are some images and videos from reporters that indicate people on June 19 — once the peeling pool was already a major news event — broke off already-peeling coating or held pieces in their hands. However, there isn’t evidence of people making gashes with a knife.
The Washington Post also reported on June 20 seeing a U.S. Marshal detain someone for allegedly taking paint out of the pool and on June 21 seeing a Park Police officer issue someone a citation for allegedly removing something from the water.
Beyond stopping leaking, Trump’s reflecting pool project aimed to reduce algae, which has been a recurring issue for the reflecting pool.
The project included $1.7 million in funding to Greenwater Services to install a new system for algae control. Nanobubble systems for algae control, such as the one installed by Greenwater Services, work by introducing tiny ozone bubbles to a body of water, which can kill algae.
But despite efforts to mitigate the algae, an analysis done for the Washington Post indicated that the level of algae on June 13 — the week after the pool was refilled — was higher than in other June images going back to 2021.
Trump claimed that someone may have added fertilizer to the water to cause the algal growth, but he didn’t provide any evidence for this claim.
Chapra, the water quality modeler from Tufts, told us that the reflecting pool represents “the recipe for growing algae,” without needing to invoke vandalism.
The pool is “shallow, there’s no flushing, they don’t run water through it on a permanent basis,” he said. “There’s no mixing, because they want to keep it nice and flat, so you get a reflection.” Furthermore, he said, “there’s no shading anywhere to keep solar radiation out, and somebody decided to paint the bottom dark blue,” even though this makes the pool retain more heat. The pool probably also uses high-nutrient water, he added.
The president has blamed the pool’s past algae problems on a change to the pool’s water source made under former President Barack Obama. In 2012, the government switched from filling the pool with municipal DC water to ozone-treated water from the Tidal Basin, which is fed by the Potomac River.
“He took the water from the river,” Trump said of Obama on June 22. “It turned out to be putrid and it destroyed the whole thing. Spent over $100 million.”
That total is incorrect. As we previously wrote, the Obama-era restoration, which also reinforced the pool’s sinking foundation and replaced its concrete bottom, cost around $35 million.
When the reflecting pool was refilled in early June, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told us, it had been filled with “DC Water,” or municipal water. Even after the Obama-era renovations, the pool had periodically been filled with city drinking water when there was substantial algae in the Tidal Basin.
Chapra said that feeding the pool from the Tidal Basin would be the “worst” in terms of algae, given that the Potomac River has “plenty of nutrients” and algae.
However, using DC Water does not eliminate the potential for algae. Ashley Bair, a researcher at the water treatment company Usalco, told Vox that a type of phosphorus added to municipal water to form a coating on the inside of lead pipes could feed algae if the water were not treated properly. DC Water has added orthophosphate since 2004, according to its website, after a switch in disinfectant and a change in water chemistry caused lead to be released into the water from pipes.
Chapra also said that regardless of water source, feces from animals and fine particulates with phosphorus in the air can add to the nutrients in an open pool. He added that he was skeptical of the ozone nanobubble technology for the project. “High enough concentrations of ozone will break the cell walls of the algae, but that releases the nutrients back into the water, and it’s not going to kill all of them,” he said. Ozone also breaks down in sunlight, he added.
Given all these factors, he said, vandalism simply “wasn’t the first thing that popped into my mind” upon seeing the algal growth in the pool.
“Like I said at the beginning, shallow, no flushing, no mixing, high-nutrient water, no shading, dark blue bottom, go figure,” he said.
Update, June 29: After this story was published, the New York Times reported that prior to the noticeable algal growth in the pool, NPS had asked Greenwater Services on June 12 to remove several large nanobubbler machines from the edge of the reflecting pool. This occurred in advance of an event at the Lincoln Memorial promoting Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship birthday party. The machines, which were temporary because a permanent system wasn’t yet ready, were reinstalled within 36 hours. Algae, however, had already bloomed in the meantime — although it is unclear what role the machines’ removal played. A permanent system, located farther away from the pool, took over in full on June 25, according to CNN.
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The post Trump’s Unsupported Claims About Reflecting Pool Vandalism appeared first on FactCheck.org.
A law enforcement intelligence hub in New Jersey fretted that the growing class divide in the U.S. could drive a wave of lone-wolf attacks on high-flying corporate executives, according to a report obtained by The Intercept.
The New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, one of the so-called fusion centers that serve as intelligence clearinghouses for cops, warned in a bulletin earlier this year that disaffected Americans were increasingly blaming society’s ills on rich people and corporate bigwigs.
The report specifically cited the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 — allegedly by Luigi Mangione — as an expression of anti-fat-cat rhetoric. To the analysts at the New Jersey fusion center, Thompson’s killing hinted at a larger trend.
“Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives,” the fusion center memo says.
By warning corporate security outfits of the danger posed by average Americans who blame their problems on the actions of corporate executives, the report effectively dedicates public resources to securing a private system that has made the few extremely wealthy at the expense of the many.
“The report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting.”
Michael German, a former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism and longtime critic of fusion centers, said that by warning CEOs of threats, the bulletin was effectively taking the side of the rich and powerful over ordinary people who are critical of inequality — a typical dynamic at fusion centers.
“The way it’s written, the report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting,” German said. “All the resources of the national network of fusion centers, which includes federal resources along with state and local resources, are devoted toward providing security information to private entities.”
The “Quarterly Executive Threat Watch” bulletin warned corporate bodyguards to switch up the daily routines of execs, limit information on public engagements, and remove bosses’ personal information from the web. The report says bosses should “remain vigilant of lone offenders with personal grievances.”
“Following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the current political climate, there is a heightened threat environment surrounding corporate executives,” the report says. “Online glorification of the murder of Brian Thompson and calls for violence are still apparent and further create a risk for a lone offender attack.”
A spokesperson for New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the agency that oversees the fusion center, did not respond to a request for comment.
Days after Thompson’s killing in late 2024, Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder, allegedly motivated by injustices in the healthcare system. The then-26-year-old quickly became a cause célèbre for a wide array of supporters and a bête noire of right-wing figures, including those at the Trump administration, who branded him as a violent extremist.
Mangione’s legal team declined to comment on the fusion center report, but has in the past decried attempts to tie him to unrelated acts of violence.
The report went on to cite a list of seemingly disparate incidents to highlight a possible surge in threats to the wealthy, including a satirical Christmas wishlist that called for sabotaging CEOs; a handful of 4chan posts calling for violence against executives at Netflix and elsewhere; a “far-left forum” calling for a campaign against people tied to a mining project in Michigan; and an act of vandalism by pro-Palestine activists at the home of a New York Times executive.
Another incident that made the list was the federal case against the so-called Turtle Island Liberation Front, a group of left-wing activists arrested last year whose alleged bomb plot appears to have been largely driven by a member of their group who was a longtime paid FBI informant.
“The problem with a lot of these fusion center reports is that they take a handful of incidents, not necessarily related to one another, and use them to justify and amplify these threats without any kind of analysis,” said German. “Rather than actually looking at data, their performance is measured by the number of reports they produce.”
Fusion centers, which bring together state and federal law enforcement agencies to share intelligence on potential terror threats, rose to prominence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The centers operate under state authority, often with grants from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.
While data on any terror plots actually foiled by fusion center operations is scant, they have been roundly criticized for compiling surveillance and data on protest movements, communities of color, student organizers, and, recently, critics of AI data centers.
New Jersey’s only fusion center, officially known as the New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, has been criticized for operating outside the typical oversight to which most state agencies are subject.
A 2023 report by Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights warns of the potential for abuse in the New Jersey fusion center. The report cited the fusion center’s practice of drafting dossiers on “known troublemakers” and its reliance on so-called “intelligence-led policing,” a practice of surveilling and data collection that the American Civil Liberties Union has cited as a potential violation of the right to due process.
The Quarterly Executive Threat Watch, the bulletin that included the warning for CEOs, appears to be internally categorized as terrorism-related intelligence and was later disseminated by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer to recipients across the country. (CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Then there is the issue of the center’s shadowy public-private partnership. The New Jersey fusion center does not make public which private agencies or organizations it partners with, or to whom it disseminates reports.
“It’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible.”
The January report drew heavily on the work of SITE Intelligence, a for-profit firm that has come in for criticism because of its labeling Islamic charities as terror fronts and mistakenly identifying video game footage as terror propaganda.
Like its counterparts across the country, the New Jersey fusion center feeds its reports into a national network of public and private agencies dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of information about potential threats — a practice that frequently crosses the line into surveillance of political speech, according to German and other critics of fusion centers.
“There is a lack of public accountability here,” German said. “Because they’re joint enterprises, it’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible for ensuring that the participants within these centers are acting in accordance with the law.”
The post Cops Warn CEO Bodyguards That Luigi Mangione Fever Could Spark Class War appeared first on The Intercept.
This story works better on ProPublica’s website.
Global leaders are banking on tech advances to solve climate change.
One leading idea is to capture carbon pollution from the air and then bury it underground forever.
It may sound practical.
There is no conceivable way it can work.
For more than 40 years, oil companies have been funding research at prestigious universities into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Among their favored fixes is carbon capture and storage.
An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that boosters of CCS have ignored evidence of the technology’s limitations, or overstated its potential, and convinced the world it could be effective.
They’ve promoted this idea despite the fact that for CCS to work at the scale now envisioned, the world would need to devote almost unimaginable resources. Even if that were done, it might still prove impossible to trap so much carbon dioxide inside the earth.
Optimism has reigned, however, because small tests have worked and because slow global response to climate change has left few other options.
In 2008, the International Energy Agency projected that to stave off dangerous levels of warming, we would have to be burying around 1.6 billion tons, or 1,600 megatons, of CO2 per year by 2025.
Since then, its optimistic projections have continued. But deployment of the technology has never come close to those ambitions.
Right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.
Some experts point to the CO2 that gets pumped into the ground to help extract oil as proof CCS works. But that process, called enhanced oil recovery, isn’t designed to function the same way and isn’t monitored as stringently.
Global leaders are betting on carbon capture working now more than ever.
The models used in the latest United Nations assessment presume the technology succeeds.
IEA representatives and U.N. modelers say their projections reflect what the world has to do to achieve its goals of averting extreme warming.
Trap it from smoke stacks.
Absorb it from the air with fast-growing grasses or trees, then capture it from those plants when they are burned for fuel.
Scrub it from the air, often using giant fans.
Then we would pump all of it into porous rock deep beneath the earth’s surface.
The U.N. analysis now suggests that countries must inject 6 billion tons of CO2 underground each year by the middle of the century.
Imagine the neighborhoods and parks near oil, gas or coal-fired industrial plants. We would need to add equipment to capture the CO2 from each facility, in some cases doubling its land footprint.
And we would need to devote about 768,000 square miles of land worldwide to growing those carbon-absorbing plants. That would cover an area roughly the size of Mexico — and compete for valuable land used to grow food or sustain forests.
In the U.S. alone, this could require building more than 68,000 miles of new pipelines in a little more than two decades.
That’s more than double the distance to fly around the earth.
And longer than the country’s entire interstate highway system.
Globally, pipelines could tally in the hundreds of thousands of miles.
To cross the oceans, we would need at least 85 specially built tankers to move the high-pressured gas. As of April, there were only three ships in the world equipped to do that.
Today, just 12 large-scale geologic reservoirs have attempted to permanently store CO2 pollution — but we would need more than 2,000 reservoirs of that size for CCS to work, each requiring years of study and engineering before it could be used.
That means we would need to open a brand new geological waste site somewhere on the planet every four days for the next 25 years.
Every site would need constant monitoring for decades to ensure the CO2 doesn’t leak.
Right now, U.S. taxpayers are paying oil and gas companies $85 for every metric ton they put underground.
At that rate, by 2050, the world could be spending half a trillion dollars — more than China’s military budget, and 10 times more than the U.N.’s humanitarian and development aid budget — each year.
Since 1996, while the 12 large-scale geological storage projects have opened, plans for another 12 have been scrapped. Many CCS sites in operation — in Norway, Algeria, Australia and the U.S. — have been mired in problems, pointing to enormous challenges ahead.
Some rock layers can hold far less CO2 than experts have estimated.
Finicky pipes and injection systems can get clogged or break down.
The rock that seals CO2 in place can crack, risking a leak. In one instance, injected CO2 caused the ground above it to bulge.
In another instance, CO2 escaped from an old oil industry well nearby.
Thorough, long-term monitoring can be expensive, but without it, such leaks could be missed.
Yet many of them have continued to boost the technology even as they have downplayed solutions showing greater progress.
For example, the same modelers who overestimated the potential of geological carbon storage repeatedly underestimated solar power — one of the energy technologies that would allow more oil to remain in the ground.
Over the last several decades, solar power is the technology that has thrived.
Carbon capture and storage remains elusive.
The post Why Carbon Capture Can’t Conceivably Solve Climate Change appeared first on ProPublica.
FMC has reached an agreement to sell its sprawling Stine Research Center near Newark, though the agricultural sciences company intends to lease back a portion of the property.
A new gym opened last week in Newark’s Market East Plaza.
China sets out its vision for a new global order – but will it commit the resources to match its ambition? Expert comment LToremark
China’s new white paper on global governance highlights its balancing act between global ambitions and financial restraint.
With the world’s attention fixed on wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, Beijing last week published a sweeping statement on the future of international order. The 45-page white paper, ‘More Just and Equitable Global Governance: China’s Principles, Proposals and Actions’, appeared just as the G7 published its own prescriptions for global affairs. It signals China’s evolution from a mere participant of the existing international system to the architect of a new global order.
It would be easy to dismiss yet another long policy document from Beijing. However, the white paper is significant not because it contains revolutionary new ideas, but because it consolidates Beijing’s long-standing diplomatic themes into a coherent vision for reshaping global governance. It integrates development, security, culture, technology and institutional reform under a single conceptual framework.
Watch the event ‘What is China’s vision for a new world order?’
At its core, the white paper advances three connected propositions. First, the world should move toward a more genuinely multipolar order. Second, the United Nations should remain the central institution of international governance. Third, the Global South should have greater influence in setting global rules and priorities.
These ideas are a clear call for a redistribution of power within the current international system. Yet the document also reveals a striking contradiction. While China increasingly presents itself as a champion of global governance reform and a defender of multilateralism, it remains reticent to commit the scale of financial resources historically associated with global leadership.
The timing of the white paper is no coincidence. It arrives at a moment when Washington appears increasingly less willing to shoulder the burdens of international leadership. The US remains the world’s most powerful country, but domestic political divisions, the Trump administration’s apparent disregard for international law, and its erratic approach to foreign policy have raised questions about the future of American stewardship of the international system.
China clearly sees an opportunity here. The white paper repeatedly positions Beijing as a defender of the UN-centred order against unilateralism and power politics. Unlike rising powers of the past that sought to overturn existing institutions, China insists that the UN remains indispensable. The message is that global governance should not be dismantled but rebalanced.
This distinction matters. Beijing is not proposing an alternative to the UN. Rather, it seeks to reshape the existing system in ways that better reflect contemporary power realities. In Beijing’s mind, the post-1945 order does not reflect today’s world in which developing countries account for the majority of the global population and an increasing share of economic output.
The beneficiaries of this rebalancing would be the countries of the Global South. Throughout the document, China portrays itself as both a member and representative of this broad constituency. Calls for greater representation of developing countries in international institutions and enhanced participation in global decision-making, feature prominently. While Global South cooperation has traditionally focused on economic development, the white paper seeks to extend it to other areas of global affairs, including security and technology.
There is considerable appeal in this message. Many developing countries have long argued that global financial institutions and rule-making processes remain disproportionately influenced by advanced economies. China’s emphasis on inclusiveness and representation therefore resonates with genuine grievances that extend well beyond China’s closest circle of partners.
Yet leadership in international affairs requires more than ideas and rhetoric. It also requires resources.
Historically, every major architect of international order has paid a substantial price for that role. After the Second World War, the US financed European reconstruction through the Marshall Plan, underwrote international institutions, guaranteed security arrangements, and supplied global public goods. Whether one views American leadership positively or negatively, it was backed by enormous financial commitments.
China’s white paper is noticeably less specific on this front. It speaks extensively about principles, cooperation and institutional reform. But there are no major new financial commitments to help realize these ambitions.
This omission is particularly striking given China’s own economic circumstances. Slower growth and the domestic pursuit of technological prowess have constrained Beijing’s willingness to undertake expensive overseas commitments. The era of government-led spending on its Belt and Road Initiative has ended and been replaced by a more cautious approach focused on smaller, more targeted projects.
As a result, China appears caught between ambition and restraint. It increasingly fills the diplomatic space created by American retrenchment – whether by choice or by default – but it does not yet appear willing to bear the costs traditionally associated with hegemonic leadership.
However, this may be how China wants it. Chinese policymakers have long insisted that China does not seek hegemony and should not be expected to assume the responsibilities once carried by the US.
This means the white paper should perhaps not be judged against the American leadership of the past. Beijing is not proposing a Marshall Plan 2.0, nor is it offering to underwrite a global order through vast financial transfers or open-ended security guarantees. Instead, China appears to be pursuing a different form of influence: one rooted in its past development experience and existing institutional legitimacy.
Viewed through this lens, the white paper is less about financial hegemony and more about projecting normative power. China is seeking to shape how others think about sovereignty, development, security and the distribution of authority in international affairs. Its ambition is not necessarily to replace the US as the world’s chief provider of public goods, but to redefine the principles by which those goods are governed and allocated.
The Friends of School Hill Association marked Juneteenth on Saturday with an event celebrating the history of the historically Black community that was centered around New London Road and Cleveland Avenue.
The Blood Bank of Delmarva has declared a blood emergency as supplies drop to less than a two-day supply overall and under one day for Type O blood, the most critical blood type used in emergency care.
Newark soon will offer a limited number of free parking spaces for visitors making a quick stop downtown to grab coffee or pick up a takeout order.
They claim to fix fine lines, blemishes and redness – but which stand up to scrutiny? We asked dermatologists and put them to the test to find out
• The best anti-ageing creams, serums and treatments
LED face masks are booming in popularity – despite being one of the most expensive at-home beauty products to hit the market. They claim to either reduce the appearance of fine lines, stop spots or calm redness, with some even combining different types of light to enhance the benefits.
However, it’s wise to be sceptical about new treatments that are costly and non-invasive, and to do your research before you buy. With this in mind, I interviewed doctors and dermatologists to find out whether these light therapy devices work.
Best LED face mask overall:
CurrentBody Series 2
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