TW: This article includes mentions of eating disorders.
For my 16th birthday, my mom bought me a cake. Every year, she made me a cake for my birthday: angel food cake with fresh fruit, lemon coconut cake with lemon curd in between the layers, red velvet cake with buttercream frosting and rainbow sprinkles on the top.
But for my 16th birthday, I stumbled down the stairs with my backpack digging into my shoulders, still bleary-eyed from snoozing my alarm clock three times, to find a tall cake with pastel colors, wrapped in fondant that was pressed elegantly to fit the curves of the pastry, topped off with French macarons in shades of pastel purple, blue and pink.
My mom hadn’t made this cake; it was the kind that was made specifically for a person from a high-end pastry store and cost a lot more than it should but made you feel super special. I should have felt super special.
As any 16-year-old would, or should when being gifted such a cake, I beamed. I presented the biggest smile I could muster. I hoped my mom couldn’t tell that my cheeks didn’t quite rest on the corners of my mouth the way that they should. I hoped she couldn’t tell that my palms had gone shaky and that a line of sweat had started to drip down my back. I hoped she couldn’t tell that I didn’t feel special.
My heart raced as I sat down at the kitchen island to open cards and blow out the 16 candles that were placed expertly on the cake. I laughed at the right parts of the goofy card that my dad had given me, and pouted at the card my mom had given me about growing up so fast. I hugged my parents and my siblings, thanking them a multitude of times for making me feel so special.
“It’s a special day,” my mom said.
Really, the entire time I was in a trance: simply going through the motions, my head detached from my body. I had gotten good at acting, though.
I had a lot of practice.
So when my mom went to cut the cake, I sat on my hands to hide the shaking. I bit my lip and continued to present the best closed-mouth smile I could. All eyes were on me. I couldn’t nonchalantly spit my bite into a napkin under the table when no one was looking, or pretend to blow my nose and fold my food into the tissue.
I took a bite of the cake, and I swallowed. I took another bite of the cake, and swallowed. It was good. Like melt-in-your-mouth-I-would-eat-the-whole-cake-if-I-didn’t-have-self-restraint good, but my brain was screaming at me for eating that single slice. I attempted to steady my breathing when I hopped down from the high chair, excusing myself to the bathroom.
Routinely, I went to the one upstairs so that no one could hear me, turned on the fan and the sink, put back my hair and knelt before the toilet bowl. I had gotten so used to this routine that I had forgotten to feel for it. This time, though, I felt. Tears pricked at my eyes as I heaved into the bowl, the porcelain cool beneath my fingers.
My mom had bought me the most beautiful cake; I should have felt so special, but instead, I couldn’t stop feeling like a failure. My brain applauded me, but my heart wrenched. I brushed my teeth, wiped my mascara and headed back downstairs.
For roughly a year, I became really good at acting. As far as everyone around me was concerned, I was content. Happy even. I deserved an award. I masked the exhaustion that came from not supplying my body with enough energy, the headaches that came with the times spent over the toilet bowl.
It’s so funny how I didn’t realize that when my mind applauded me for eating less and exercising more, for those times spent over the toilet bowl and invitations out to lunch or dinner that I declined, I never felt truly happy.
I guess that’s what happens when your mind is at war with your body; when you convince yourself that being empty makes you feel more whole.
As my wrists got thinner and my clothes got looser, my common Google searches became filled with “lowest calorie meals” and “how to be less hungry.” During one of my searches for bread alternatives, Google led me to a girl just like me, whose mind was also at war with her body. As I read her story, I felt understood at a time in which I had conditioned myself to feel nothing. Her words comforted me, and I finally let myself feel what I needed to, rather than what I thought I should. I realized that what I was experiencing wasn’t ridiculous or dramatic, but justified.
I wish I could go back to that time sometimes, to check in. To tell myself that I could die any day, and no one would remember if I was a size two in jeans. They would remember my hugs and my laugh; my brain and the way I cared for others. They would remember my smile, the one that I had allowed to dim all that time.
For my 18th birthday, my mom made me another cake before school. It was a chocolate mocha cake with brown buttercream frosting and brown chocolate sprinkles that looked like glitter scattered across the top. I beamed at my parents and enveloped them both in a big hug. I blew out all 18 candles and when my mom offered me a slice, I asked for seconds. I ate both slices and left my steady palms on the table. I didn’t think once about going to the bathroom. Instead, I sat there and beamed.
A study commissioned by CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, estimates that the EU's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could impose 115 billion euros ($128 billion) in costs over a decade as governments and companies migrate workloads and rewrite software. The figure is more than six times the European Commission's upper estimate. However, roughly 80 billion euros ($89 billion) of it comes from a modeled scenario assuming sovereignty rules are extended to 25% of cloud workloads in essential private-sector industries.The Register reports: The report specifically targets Article 31 of the proposed legislation, which it says could allow the Commission to extend sovereignty requirements into essential private-sector services. CCIA argues that forcing businesses to move away from existing cloud infrastructure could trigger expensive software redevelopment projects, with code rewriting and re-architecting accounting for 69 percent of its estimated costs.
Luxembourg would apparently take the biggest hit, with the study putting the cost at 1,711 euros per worker over ten years. Denmark (905 euros), Austria (900 euros), and Finland (864 euros) also face hefty bills, as does Ireland (856 euros), which hosts the European headquarters of several US tech giants. CCIA is urging EU governments to overhaul the proposed legislation, limit sovereignty restrictions to sensitive workloads, and abandon requirements based on corporate origin or personnel nationality in favor of what it calls risk-based technical safeguards.
"Member States cannot rely on the Commission's incomplete estimates when deciding CADA's strict sovereignty requirements for cloud and AI providers," said Mitchell Rutledge, CCIA Europe's policy manager. "Taxpayers and businesses will foot the bill, yet the official assessment missed 70 percent of CADA's true impact." For AWS and Google, offering European customers greater control over their data also helps retain business that might otherwise migrate to European competitors. It's a rather convenient arrangement: sell customers sovereignty on one hand, while an industry association representing your interests warns governments against imposing too much of it on the other.
PITTSBURGH, Oct. 14, 2026 — Axe Compute Inc. today announced a strategic partnership with Penguin Solutions, adding Penguin’s deep technical expertise, technology, and services to Axe Compute’s partner network, accelerating Axe Compute Build, the company’s build-to-order program for delivering enterprise-grade AI infrastructure at scale.
This multi-year strategic partnership with Penguin Solutions is intended to speed time to market as Axe Compute works to bring more than $3.45 billion in contracted customer AI infrastructure projects to production globally. Axe Compute has selected Penguin for multiple sites, with the collaboration focused on AI infrastructure deployments that are designed, owned, and operated by Axe Compute. These sites include large GPU clusters where Penguin’s expert-led services will help support AI infrastructure deployment. With Penguin’s team working alongside Axe Compute, the company expects to add capacity to accelerate delivery and take on more Build projects to meet demand in its pipeline.
Through Axe Compute Build, customers co-engineer large AI infrastructure deployments, giving them choice in a constrained market. From there, Axe Compute serves as their end-to-end partner and orchestrator, delivering dedicated AI infrastructure configured to their workloads, performance requirements, hardware preferences, and geographic needs. Penguin will add expert-led deployment and operational services for specified GPU cluster sites. This includes Penguin Solutions’ ClusterWareAI operating system software for managing GPU cluster operations at scale, along with 24×7 network operations center coverage from a Penguin team working alongside Axe Compute.
“Penguin Solutions is a natural fit as we scale our neocloud business. Demand for Axe Compute Build has been exceptional. Customers choose Axe Compute Build because they gain dedicated AI infrastructure tailored to their requirements without the complexity of designing, deploying, and operating it themselves,” said Christopher Miglino, Chief Executive Officer of Axe Compute. “With partners like Penguin adding delivery capacity to our program, we expect to deploy faster and take on more builds, and our customers can activate and sustain high-performance AI infrastructure within the flexible, reliable, and end-to-end operational model that defines Axe Compute.”
“Axe Compute is addressing a critical need in the market by bringing enterprise-grade AI infrastructure online quickly, reliably, and at scale, and our AI Factory Platform is helping enable that growth,” said Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Penguin Solutions. “What sets our Platform apart is its rare combination of OEM-like differentiated products and deep systems integration expertise. That helps customers like Axe Compute accelerate project delivery and bring additional capacity online to meet growing demand and generate revenue faster while meeting service-level agreements. We look forward to bringing our expert-led services to Axe Compute as it scales AI infrastructure for customers around the world.”
About Axe Compute Inc.
Axe Compute Inc. (NASDAQ: AGPU) is a neocloud AI infrastructure platform built on a fundamental premise: AI innovation should not be constrained by hardware choice or availability. The company provides enterprises and AI innovators with flexibility across hardware, geography, and deployment models. Axe Compute provides the design, deployment, ownership, and operation of large-scale, dedicated AI infrastructure worldwide, supported by enterprise-grade SLAs and operational expertise.
About Penguin Solutions
Penguin Solutions (NASDAQ: PENG) is the AI Factory Platform Company. We design, build, and manage next-generation data centers for enterprises, sovereign AI initiatives, and neocloud providers. With deep design expertise at the intersection of data center AI infrastructure and memory solutions, our Full-Stack AI Factory Platform combines differentiated infrastructure software, advanced memory, compute systems, end-to-end services, and industry-leading partner technologies to help customers accelerate deployment, optimize token economics, and maximize the return on their AI investments.
The Justice Department has ordered California to review a list of people who the federal government believes may have received mail-in ballots for the upcoming election despite not being U.S. citizens.
Trump will rally in Arizona and Montana this afternoon; The Senate Majority Pac puts millions of dollars toward competitive races in Michigan and Maine
Donald Trump has yet to weigh in on the late night ruling from a federal judge that blocks him from barring CNN, MS Now and Politico access to the White House grounds.
Previously, the president had blasted Judge Timothy Kelly – a Trump appointee – for issuing a temporary pause on his media ban. That expired on Tuesday, and Kelly handed down a preliminary injunction that stops the administration from blocking the outlets while the litigation plays out.
Party faces fresh crisis as three councillors quit after ITV undercover filming exposed violence, misogyny and racist views
Reform UK has been rocked by a fresh crisis after councillors and election candidates for the party were caught on film making graphic threats of extreme violence and expressing racist and misogynistic views.
Three councillors have already stood down from the party, which said it was conducting an investigation over the first revelations from an ITV undercover investigation that aired on Wednesday.
Ukrainian president accused US president of picking the other side over four years of war
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he feels personally betrayed by Donald Trump after it emerged that Ukraine’s military has had its access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite squeezed raising doubts about long-term US support for Kyiv.
The Ukrainian president, on a visit to London, accused Trump of picking the other side after over four years of war, risking a breakdown in relations already strained by the US agreeing to buy diesel from Moscow.
Climate change has pushed the planet's environmental systems "deeper into uncharted territory," researchers said in a new report centered on the state of Earth's climate in 2026.
The Michelin Guide announced 470 new Key hotels across 79 destinations on September 18, 2026. More significantly, hotels in 10 countries received Michelin Keys for the first time. But can Michelin's influence help put lesser-known alternatives on travelers' radar?
Exclusive: Israel has not permitted US-led project to house 150 international troops to move forward
Israel is refusing to allow a key military outpost project for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to proceed in Gaza, the Guardian has learned.
In early August, the Board of Peace, the international organization authorized in 2025 by the UN and chaired by the US president, issued its first construction contract for Gaza: Louisiana-based Arkel International would construct a military outpost for 150 international troops that would be the vanguard of an international stabilization force.
Accounts for the Westminster-based company behind ChatGPT show that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares last year
OpenAI’s London staff each received £2,318,181 on average last year, as the ChatGPT-maker poured Premier League football salaries into its bid to dominate the global AI race.
Accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd, which is based in Westminster but is opening a new HQ in London’s King’s Cross area, showed that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the company, which is aiming to list on the stock market at a valuation of about $1tn.
Katie Zacharia describes herself as a lawyer but no public record shows she has been licensed in the US states where she resided
Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, has repeatedly described herself as a lawyer. But when asked after her inaugural press briefing on Tuesday to name the state where she passed the bar exam, she replied curiously: “when I moved to China”.
No public record shows she has ever been licensed to practice law in the US states where she resided, and her answer to reporters’ questions on Tuesday only deepened scrutiny.
(The Center Square) - Senate President Warren Petersen and U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs are vying to give Republicans back control of Arizona’s executive branch.
Article in Atlantic claims The Blue Fighter was artificially generated, days after it won Caine prize for African writers
The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated.
Kundizeza’s story The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, The Atlantic published an article by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled: “Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI.”
Google has made Android's phone-number verification opt-out, automatically verifying and associating a device's phone number with every Google account signed in on that phone, including secondary and work accounts. Android Authority reports: As spotted in a recent Reddit thread, users report receiving confirmation emails out of the blue from "noreply-phone-verification@google.com" stating that their phone number has been verified. The feature, known in Google settings as "Phone number verification," links your active phone number across all Google accounts signed in on the same phone, including secondary profiles, work accounts, and throwaway handles.
Google's support documentation has long noted that it periodically re-verifies your device's phone number to keep communication and recovery features up to date. However, this support page was updated sometime between August and October 2025 to add this rather aggressive behavior of turning on phone number verification by default, as well as adding all phone numbers to all Google accounts signed in on the device. To disable automatic phone number verification on Android, open your phone's Settings app, tap Google, and select the All Services tab. Under Privacy & Security, find Phone number verification and turn off Verify phone numbers automatically.
"[T]urning off the phone number verification toggle only prevents future linking," notes the report. "If Google has already attached your number across secondary accounts, you will need to open your Google Account Personal Info page, head to Contact info > Phone, and manually remove the number from each profile where it doesn't belong."
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LAGUNA HILLS, Calif., Oct. 14, 2026 — BrainChip Holdings Ltd., a global leader in ultra-low-power, fully digital, event-based neuromorphic AI, today announced BrainChip Sequora Core IP, a processor IP core that runs generative AI, including large language models (LLMs), directly on battery-powered edge devices.
The next step in BrainChip’s edge AI roadmap, Sequora builds on the strengths of the company’s Akida platform. Its efficiency comes from model structure: a state-space design keeps memory use fixed no matter how long the data stream or conversation runs. As a result, Sequora scales from models of a few million parameters up to 3 billion. Devices that once could only recognize a signal can now understand, explain and respond — at the power levels customers expect from BrainChip.
“Our commercial and aerospace/defense customers are designing AI into many of the next-generation edge systems that provide real-time processing and decision-making in congested and contested environments with minimal footprint in size, weight and power,” said Frank Ferrante, chief executive officer at ForwardEdge ASIC. “Sequora puts generative AI in a low-power IP core that fits many of the demands of the custom silicon we build. It gives us a path to add on-device intelligence to mission-critical edge ASICs.”
What Sequora Does
Sequora removes the memory and power bottleneck that has kept generative AI out of battery-powered devices such as earbuds and sensor nodes. Paired with Akida, it brings two workloads together in one solution: Akida processes streaming sensor data — vibration, audio, radar, raw radio-frequency (RF) IQ data and biological signals — while Sequora runs generative and sequential AI, including on-device LLMs, voice-to-voice interaction and AI agents.
Markets from consumer voice and wearables to aerospace and defense, automotive and industrial radar, industrial IoT, and medical and biomedical devices need conventional inference and generative inference in the same product.
“The edge is where AI becomes useful in everyday infrastructure, from utility meters to mobility systems,” said Jay Kim, CEO of edgeAI Inc. “BrainChip saw early that efficiency would decide who wins at the edge. Now they’re applying that same thinking to generative AI, bringing language and reasoning capabilities to devices that run on a small battery.”
Key challenges Sequora addresses:
Generative models stall on memory bandwidth
Per-word cost that climbs as the conversation (context window) and its cache grow
Memory traffic caps model size on battery power
Make run-time branching predictable for automotive, medical and avionics certification
On-device per-query latency and privacy
Sensing and Generative AI on One Device, One Battery
“Customers are not asking for just a signal classifier or a language model,” said Sean Hehir, chief executive officer, BrainChip. “They want both, in the same product, on the same battery. Akida and Sequora together deliver exactly that.”
Because Sequora runs generative and sequential AI without sending data off the device, it addresses a growing market priority: keeping data and AI models sovereign while minimizing size, weight and power.
Availability
Sequora is available now as licensable semiconductor IP. Customers integrate the design into their own system-on-chip (SoC) and manufacture it at the foundry and process node of their choice. Delivered as process-portable, fully synthesizable register-transfer level (RTL) code, the Sequora package includes verification IP and testbench, synthesis scripts and timing constraints, and an SDK with a static graph compiler, a C++ runtime library and a model zoo.
About BrainChip Holdings Ltd.
BrainChip (ASX: BRN, OTCQX: BRCHF, ADR: BCHPY) is the worldwide leader in edge AI on-chip processing and learning. The company’s first-to-market, fully digital, event-based AI processor, Akida, uses neuromorphic principles to analyze only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition, processing data with unmatched efficiency, precision and energy economy. BrainChip’s Sequora is an efficient digital AI processor for GenAI and other large models using state-space architectures. BrainChip’s technology is deployed across industries including aerospace, defense, industrial IoT, healthcare, consumer devices, and wearables. Explore more at www.brainchip.com.
Throttling of mobile internet system will affect Kyiv’s air defences more than its strikes on oil refineries. Now Zelenskyy must be hoping that US intel holds
In Ukraine the situation was already jittery enough. Donald Trump has been inventing ceasefires and buying Russian diesel to shore up his flagging popularity, while a sinister new wave of faster, jet-powered drones are breaking through Kyiv’s stretched air defences. Casualties are rising as the weather turns.
Overnight, Russia bombed three power plants that supply Kyiv, aiming to cut off heating and electricity to the city. According to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for a second night in a row no warning came from Ukraine’s western allies of the incoming ballistic missiles – and so no air raid alert was issued.
The one I worry about most is voter anger – which both parties are not taking seriously enough
That chill in the air you are feeling is not the weather, it is the Republicans freaking out about the 2026 midterm elections. Midterms are always referendums on the incumbent, though the party in power usually would rather they weren’t.
This midterm feels less like a referendum on Trumpism than a dirge. It’s easy to see how Republicans got here, lulled into thinking that their guy, Donald Trump, could once again defy political gravity. Trump certainly thought he could.
Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the Fast Politics pod, contributing writer for the times and an analyst for MS Now
In the experiment, gaps of just a few millimeters between pairs of coral fragments – one bleached, one healthy – prevented the bleached fragments from recovering. (Danny Collins via SWNS)
BOCA RATON, Fla. and HOBOKEN, N.J., Oct. 14, 2026 — INmune Bio Inc. and Quantum Computing Inc. (QCi) today announced a collaboration to apply quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to identify new potential applications for XPro (XPro1595), INmune Bio’s investigational treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and other disease conditions.
The collaboration brings together INmune Bio’s data from pre-clinical research through four clinical trials and understanding of disease biology with QCi’s Dirac-3S quantum optimization machine. Working with clinical and publicly available biomedical datasets, the companies intend to use quantum computing alongside AI and conventional data analytics to uncover relationships that could help find diseases driven by the same biology XPro targets, and to prioritize those with the greatest potential for success.
The Stage 1 engagement represents QCi’s first commercial customer in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology market. The agreement also provides options for additional work as INmune Bio advances its clinical development programs.
“We’ve built a large clinical dataset on Alzheimer’s and other diseases, backed by years of work with XPro,” said David Moss, Chief Executive Officer of INmune Bio. “This collaboration allows us to examine patient populations and biomarkers most likely to predict responses by analyzing large data sets. We’ll look for the diseases with the greatest potential for success, those whose human biology matches what we’ve already seen XPro do, starting with rare diseases where trials can be smaller, faster and more capital-efficient, and where qualifying pediatric approvals may earn a Priority Review Voucher.”
Together, the companies will build on INmune Bio’s research into XPro to explore where its approach to targeting inflammation may offer the greatest potential. XPro is designed to selectively inhibit soluble tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a protein involved in inflammation, while preserving other TNF functions important to the immune system. INmune Bio is investigating its potential in neurological and rare diseases where this targeted approach may offer a therapeutic benefit.
Using its Dirac-3S entropy quantum optimization machine alongside AI and conventional analytics, QCi will look for patterns and relationships across these datasets that could help researchers better understand treatment responses, identify promising patient populations and prioritize new indications for further study.
“This is a great example of what practical quantum computing can look like today,” said Yuping Huang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of QCi. “INmune Bio has a complex scientific problem and a substantial body of clinical and biological data. Our job is to bring new computing capabilities to that problem and see what we can learn. The potential to help researchers make better decisions about future treatments is exciting, and it opens an important new market for QCi.”
An important part of the program will be testing where quantum optimization adds value. The companies plan to compare results from QCi’s quantum optimization machine with appropriate conventional statistical and machine-learning methods, evaluating which approaches are best suited to different parts of the analysis.
The work is also intended to establish a repeatable discovery process through quantum computing that INmune Bio can use with additional datasets and potential disease indications.
For INmune Bio, the collaboration offers a new way to evaluate the broader potential of XPro and prioritize future development opportunities. For QCi, it represents an opportunity to showcase how its room-temperature, low-power quantum computing technology can be applied to complex, real-world problems in pharmaceutical research.
About INmune Bio Inc.
INmune Bio Inc. is a publicly traded (NASDAQ: INMB), late-stage biotechnology company focused on developing treatments that target the innate immune system to fight disease. The Company’s clinical-development strategy centers on advanced precision medicine, matching drug mechanisms directly to patient biology to optimize clinical outcomes. To learn more about INmune Bio’s pipeline and its approach to harnessing the innate immune system, please visit www.inmunebio.com.
About Quantum Computing Inc.
Quantum Computing Inc. (Nasdaq: QUBT) is an integrated quantum photonics company developing and manufacturing technologies that use light to compute complex information, capture hard-to-detect signals and communicate more securely. QCi brings together quantum optics, integrated photonics, semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging to create a more direct path from advanced science to practical products.
QCi’s portfolio includes quantum machines, photonic chips, components, modules and subsystems, as well as foundry and advanced manufacturing services. Its technologies are designed to operate at room temperature and low power, without the specialized cooling infrastructure required by many quantum approaches. These advantages enable deployment across computing and AI, secure communications, sensing and imaging, aerospace and defense, and other demanding applications.
Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, QCi has operations across the United States. By combining advanced physics, device engineering and scalable manufacturing, QCi is working to make quantum and advanced photonic technologies more accessible and useful in the real world.
To learn more about QCi and its approach to harnessing light for practical quantum computing, please visit www.quantumcomputinginc.com.
PARIS, Oct. 14, 2026 — As Europe accelerates investments in AI infrastructure, Bull is extending its NVIDIA rack-scale portfolio with NVIDIA Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72, a liquid-cooled platform designed to meet the growing needs of cloud service providers, NeoClouds and AI factories to help them train and serve increasingly large reasoning and agentic AI models.
Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72 follows Bull’s Vera Rubin NVL72 program, which Bull is industrializing in Europe: trays are produced in Europe with final rack integration in Angers, France. Bull intends to build Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72 on the same European line, giving European customers a local path from one NVIDIA generation to the next.
Powered by NVIDIA Vera CPUs and NVIDIA Rubin Ultra GPUs , Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72 brings 72 GPUs together in a single rack through seventh generation NVIDIA NVLink. The same architecture scales to NVL576, joining eight racks into a single NVLink domain over direct optical links.
Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72 keeps the rack footprint and maximum rack power of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, so data centers designed for Vera Rubin can plan for the Ultra generation without reworking their power distribution. It supports both AC power and 800 VDC, and integrates Caliptra, the open-source root of trust from the Open Compute Project, with post-quantum secure boot – helping customers keep control of their data and infrastructure.
Bull Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72 is planned for the first half of 2028.
“The rapid emergence of AI factories is creating demand for infrastructure that combines scale, performance and trust,” explained Cédric Bourrasset, Bull’s head of AI and Cloud infrastructure. “By extending our European production roadmap to NVIDIA Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72, we are giving clients a clear path to the next generation of AI systems, built on advanced NVIDIA technology and supported by industrial capabilities anchored in Europe. This is about helping organisations deploy AI at scale while retaining greater control over how their infrastructure is designed, integrated and operated.”
“AI factories are driving a transformative shift that will serve as the fundamental engine of growth across the European industrial economy,” said Dion Harris, Sr. Director of HPC and AI Infrastructure, NVIDIA. “Bull’s plans to bring NVIDIA Vera Rubin Ultra NVL72 to its European production line will empower businesses with a locally integrated path to scale their AI infrastructure and accelerate this new industrial revolution.”
Leveraging nearly a century of innovations, Bull is a global leader for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies with c.720m€ in revenue and 3,000 professionals operating in 32 countries. Built on an open, end-to-end and trusted approach, Bull designs, deploys and operates hardware, software and strategic services that unlock enterprise value, accelerate scientific research and advance society. Driven by world-class R&D, backed by 1,600 patents, manufacturing excellence and data sciences expertise, Bull enables nations and industries to fully control their AI and data and to drive progress for the benefit of the planet.
College Democrats and Republicans join forces to organize Senate debate after UD’s traditional program fails to materialize; Katz plans Oct. 19 town hall.
NEWARK, Del. — A bipartisan effort by University of Delaware students to organize a U.S. Senate debate has become the latest point of disagreement between Democratic Sen. Chris Coons and Republican challenger Dr. Mike Katz, raising questions about whether Delaware voters will have an opportunity to see the candidates debate before the Nov. 3 election.
The College Republicans and College Democrats at UD worked together to propose a campus debate after the university’s traditional Delaware Debates program did not materialize this election cycle.
According to statements from the College Republicans and Katz campaign, Katz accepted the invitation and offered to participate in any format, at any time and location on campus. The student Republicans said the Coons campaign declined.
The development follows an earlier debate proposal from WDEL and CoastTV that Katz accepted and his campaign says Coons declined.
The competing decisions have renewed a question for both campaigns: How will Delaware voters be able to compare the candidates’ records, positions and proposals before casting their ballots?
Students seek bipartisan solution
The joint proposal represented an unusual example of cooperation between student organizations representing opposing political parties.
College Democrats President Sophie Douglas and College Republicans President Tim Schugsta helped lead the effort to create a forum where voters could hear from both candidates.
“The proposal showed that College Democrats and College Republicans at UD can work together in a good-faith effort to serve our state,” the College Republicans said in a statement.
The organizations have previously cooperated on campus activities, including a Sept. 11 remembrance and discussions about political polarization.
Katz praised the students for putting aside political differences.
“When the UD College Democrats and College Republicans put aside their political differences to promote open debate, elected leaders should applaud their leadership — not shut them down,” Katz said.
The College Republicans also thanked Douglas and her leadership board for helping organize the proposed event.
The organization said it hopes to continue working with the College Democrats on future opportunities for civic engagement.
The College Democrats’ independent account of the debate discussions was not included in the statements provided to Delaware LIVE.
Coons campaign has not provided an explanation
Coons, who has represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate since 2010, has not publicly explained his decision to decline the student proposal in a statement located by Delaware LIVE.
Candidates frequently consider scheduling, format, moderators and other factors before agreeing to debate invitations. Declining a particular invitation does not necessarily mean a candidate is unwilling to participate in other public forums.
Both candidates have participated in individual interviews and other campaign appearances. Katz’s campaign also acknowledged that the candidates appeared at a September forum at the Jewish Community Center, although the format did not allow direct exchanges between them.
Still, a traditional debate provides an opportunity for candidates to answer identical questions, respond to criticism and defend their positions in front of the same audience.
For voters, the distinction is meaningful. Coons has a nearly 16-year Senate record to defend, while Katz is asking voters to consider a change in representation.
“Senator Coons has served in Washington for 16 years. Delaware voters deserve to compare our records, our positions, and our plans for the future before voting begins,” Katz said.
Delaware LIVE has not located a public statement from the Coons campaign explaining its decision to decline the proposed student-led debate or responding to allegations concerning interactions with student organizers. Delaware LIVE contacted the Coons campaign headquarters by telephone and left a message requesting comment. As of publication, the campaign had not responded directly.
Student Republicans raise concerns about campaign interactions
Beyond the debate invitation, the College Republicans raised concerns about how the Coons campaign responded to students involved in the organizing effort.
In their statement, the College Republicans alleged that representatives of the Coons campaign “scolded individuals for simply reaching out to gauge interest in this debate.”
The Katz campaign separately criticized Coons campaign manager Matt Schoonmaker, alleging that a College Democrat involved in the proposal had been reprimanded.
Those allegations have not been independently verified by Delaware LIVE.
Neither the precise communications between the campaign and student organizers nor the circumstances surrounding the alleged exchange have been independently established.
The Coons campaign has not provided its account of those discussions.
The distinction matters because there may be differences between a campaign declining an invitation, expressing concerns about the organization of an event and discouraging students from pursuing a bipartisan debate.
The student organizations’ statements raise questions deserving clarification, but the allegations should not be treated as facts without additional information.
Traditional Delaware Debates absent from election calendar
The controversy follows uncertainty surrounding the University of Delaware’s longstanding Delaware Debates program.
The university has hosted candidate debates since 2010, providing a forum for Delaware voters to hear from candidates seeking statewide and federal office.
In September, Delaware LIVE reported that the university had not announced debates for the 2026 election cycle, although the university’s website continued to describe the program.
At that time, Delaware LIVE could not independently confirm that the university had formally canceled this year’s debates.
Katz subsequently called on Delaware Republican and Democratic leaders and media organizations to help organize a televised debate.
On Sept. 29, Katz’s campaign announced that he had accepted an invitation from WDEL for a debate that would also be broadcast on CoastTV. The campaign said Coons declined and WDEL’s offer remained open.
The latest student proposal would have provided another opportunity for the two candidates to appear together.
Katz questions media scrutiny
Katz also used the announcement to question whether Delaware news organizations have provided sufficient scrutiny of the debate decisions.
His campaign specifically mentioned The News Journal, Delaware Online and Spotlight Delaware, arguing that declining debate opportunities should receive greater attention.
“Delaware already has a limited number of major news outlets. That makes independent, investigative journalism more important than ever,” Katz said. The criticism reflects the candidate’s view of media coverage. It does not establish that the organizations deliberately avoided the issue.
The broader accountability question applies to both candidates.
“Voters have an interest in understanding why Coons has declined the reported debate opportunities, including whether alternative formats were offered,” stated a spokesperson from the Katz Campaign. “A debate could provide an opportunity to question both candidates about federal spending, economic policy, immigration, health care, foreign affairs and other issues affecting Delaware residents.”
Katz plans Oct. 19 campus town hall
With the proposed joint debate off the calendar, the College Republicans plan to host Katz for a town hall Monday, Oct. 19, at the Trabant University Center in Newark.
The organization has invited College Democrats and other political student organizations to attend.
“I look forward to meeting with students — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike — listening to their concerns, answering difficult questions, and discussing Delaware’s future,” Katz said.
The event will provide an additional opportunity for students to question Katz, although it will not offer the same direct comparison available when both candidates participate in a debate.
Early voting in Delaware begins Oct. 22, giving voters limited time to evaluate the candidates before ballots can be cast. The general election is Nov. 3.
Whether another organization can arrange a debate before Election Day remains uncertain.
For Delaware voters, the unanswered issue is not simply which campaign accepted or declined an invitation, but whether the candidates will appear together to answer questions, explain their differences and defend their records before the election.
TO GO: Senate candidate town hall and voting information
Event: U.S. Senate candidate town hall featuring Republican nominee Dr. Mike Katz
Date: Monday, Oct. 19, 2026
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Trabant University Center, University of Delaware, Newark
Organizer: College Republicans at the University of Delaware
Participation: College Democrats and other student political organizations have been invited.
Early voting: Begins Thursday, Oct. 22, and continues on designated dates through Nov. 1.
General election: Tuesday, Nov. 3. Polls open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Expanding plume of fuel exhaust crystalized in the sky and reflected sunlight off frozen particles after Florida launch
A SpaceX rocket provided a stunning pre-dawn display over Florida as a massive, luminescent “jellyfish cloud” spread for miles, caused by an expanding plume of fuel exhaust crystalizing in the sky and reflecting sunlight off the frozen particles.
The phenomenon occurred shortly after Tuesday’s 6.33am ET launch of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AI company Anthropic is warning that advances in small AI models could soon usher in a new era of self-replicating malware that's capable of infecting smart fridges, vacuum cleaners, and a wide range of other Internet-of-things devices and is more resistant to takedown. By next year, smaller AI models may be able to autonomously self-replicate on all kinds of IoT devices, the company said. Eventually, the capability could enable computer worms, which propagate without requiring human interaction and are capable of infecting unfamiliar IoT devices. An experiment the company performed recently revealed significant challenges in bringing such an AI malware replicator to fruition, so the finding is necessarily tempered. Still, the results do raise concerns about the possibility of new forms of computer worms.
Anthropic further warned not only about the new potential malware, but also that it could be difficult to stop. In its blog post, it wrote that "a replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there's no centralized point to shut off -- though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own." Smaller AI models require much less powerful hardware to run than do frontier models. Anthropic ran small open-weight models on real or simulated low-cost, off-brand Android TV boxes and other types of IoT hardware. Company researchers found that by using quantization to represent the models using fewer bits and splitting the workloads into "shards" running on each device, the models were able to establish inference, meaning that the model weights loaded and could generate output.
[...] This finding was the starting point for further research that asked: Would it be possible for small models to create self-replicating infections that run themselves on IoT devices the way traditional IoT worms, like Mirai, install DDoS code and other payloads? Unlike Mirai, these AI worms could pose a much higher threat, since the models could tailor exploits and payloads dynamically, depending on the target. Once such an infection chain began, it might also be harder for defenders to stop it. "Such an 'AI worm' could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware," Anthropic said. "Effectively, the weights would become part of the malware payload." Further reading: Anthropic Bans Cruelty Toward Claude
Blow for Trump administration as Dawn and Taag hail ‘important step in unraveling the ICC sanctions regime’
A US federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from placing sanctions on two US-based human rights groups for working to help the international criminal court’s (ICC) investigations into war crimes in Gaza.
In a 30-page order issued on Tuesday, Jesse M Furman, a judge at the US district court for the southern district of New York, granted a preliminary injunction to the two groups, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) and Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (Taag).
LEIPZIG, Germany, Oct. 14, 2026 — SAXON Q, a leader in NV-center quantum computing, today released a paper showing that its room-temperature diamond-based system can perform on par with superconducting quantum computers cooled to near absolute zero.
Running Grover’s search algorithm, a standard benchmark test for quantum performance, a SAXON Q system identified a single target state 77.3% of the time using three qubits, rivaling the best published superconducting result of 78%, which required a temperature roughly 15,000 times colder.
“The assumption in quantum computing has been that you trade performance for convenience. These results show that tradeoff isn’t necessary,” said Marius Grundmann, co-founder and CEO of SAXON Q. “Our system ran a complete quantum algorithm in an ordinary room at a customer site, and the results were similar to those of machines that require extensive infrastructure to cool them to near absolute zero.”
Grover’s algorithm — also known as the “quantum search algorithm” — has been used for years to benchmark quantum computers. It finds a marked item in an unsorted list, using fewer steps than any classical computing method can, and it is a building block for how quantum applications will approach optimization work, financial analysis, cryptography and more. It uses a sequence that includes the qubits, single and multi-qubit gates, repeated operations and a final readout, all of which work together. That means that it can measure the full performance of a quantum computer, as opposed to going component by component.
In the test, SAXON Q’s system used a three-qubit Grover search to look through a list of eight items. In the first test, it looked for a single target, and its quantum processor succeeded 77.3% of the time — by comparison, a conventional computer could only succeed in the same task 37.5% of the time, at best. The next test had it search for two targets. The result was a success rate of 87% for the quantum processor, compared to a conventional computer’s limit of 46.4%.
The results mark the highest three-qubit Grover search performance reported to date for any quantum computer at room temperature, and the first demonstration of this size on NV-center hardware.
The benchmark ran on a SAXON Q system installed at Fraunhofer IWU in Dresden, Germany, in June 2025. Fraunhofer IWU researchers co-authored the paper. The system operates at room temperature, all without special infrastructure such as cryogenic cooling or vacuum equipment.
“Our researchers worked on this benchmark alongside SAXON Q’s team, so we know exactly how these results were measured and what they mean for our work,” said Albrecht Hänel, head of Digital Production Twin at Fraunhofer IWU. “Seeing the system perform at this level on our own site gives us confidence to take on more demanding work in industrial optimization and robotics.”
The result came within a single percentage point of the best result ever published using a superconducting quantum computer, all with a fraction of the overhead. The SAXON Q system that was tested operates at room temperature and runs on roughly 600 watts. Superconducting quantum computers, by contrast, can demand upwards of 25 kilowatts and must be cooled to near absolute zero inside dilution refrigerators that require specialized facilities and chilled-water cooling. Trapped-ion and neutral-atom systems need ultra-high vacuum chambers and laser cooling.
SAXON Q’s systems offer a significant improvement over earlier electron-spin NV-center demonstrations by computing entirely on the nuclear spins of atoms within a diamond and storing quantum information roughly 1,000 times longer. The experiment was conducted on a previous-generation SAXON Q quantum computer, which predates its new SXQ128 and SXQ512 quantum computers announced in July. The SXQ128 is available to order now, and SXQ512 deliveries are scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2027.
SAXON Q is a quantum computing company founded at the University of Leipzig by the research team that pioneered nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center technology in diamond over three decades of scientific work. The company was built on a simple premise: that quantum computing would only achieve its potential when it could be deployed like any other computing technology — without cryogenic infrastructure, specialized facilities or dedicated engineering staff. SAXON Q systems operate at room temperature on standard electrical power and are manufactured using semiconductor-compatible processes protected by more than 220 patents and pending applications. Headquartered in Leipzig, Germany, SAXON Q serves research institutions and commercial customers around the world.
A fresh wave of protests by India’s youth-led Cockroach movement has been met with a brutal crackdown by Narendra Modi’s government and the closure of a historic protest site in Delhi. Two of the movement’s leaders have been imprisoned for five days for violating suppression measures. The protests, which began over frustration about education and unemployment, are now focused on voting rights. Modi’s government denies claims it is seeking to disenfranchise millions of voters. But its treatment of protesters has been criticised by the UN and Amnesty International and raised concerns that India is sliding further into autocracy. Lucy Hough speaks to South Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen – watch on YouTube
Two-mile stretch of Huntington Beach closed after sighting at location popular with surfers and swimmers
A popular southern California beach was closed after a great white shark was reportedly spotted “exhibiting aggressive behavior” on Tuesday afternoon.
The Huntington Beach fire department said there was a “credible report” of a 10-12ft great white shark circling near a lifeguard tower, which is considered aggressive behavior according to the city’s marine safety division’s “shark response protocols”.
Experts say the technology could help terrorists and nation states with production but that significant hurdles remain
In his annual speech on threats to the nation, Sir Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s intelligence service, MI5, warned that AI had the potential to “change the stakes” on existing and even new bioweapons. Here we look at how AI might help in the development of bioweapons and the hurdles that remain.
Senior Care Options: Technology is expanding what is possible at home. Assisted living communities are shifting their focus from managing decline to promoting wellness and a sense of purpose. And specialized advisers are helping families navigate the increasingly sophisticated choices. Image created on 10/14 using AI.
Artificial intelligence, purpose-driven assisted living and new approaches to care planning are giving Delaware families more ways to keep aging parents safe, independent and engaged in life.
WILMINGTON, Del. — When Mom begins forgetting medications, struggling with daily routines or becoming less comfortable living alone, families face a familiar question: Can she safely remain at home, or is it time for assisted living?
The answer is changing, and families have more choices than ever.
“We’ve also shifted from reactive to proactive, anticipating challenges and guiding families to avoid pitfalls — delivering greater value and peace of mind,” said Lynn Paxson, owner of Oasis Senior Advisors of Delaware, reflecting on how her business has evolved over the past decade.
Technology is expanding what is possible at home. Assisted living communities are shifting their focus from managing decline to promoting wellness and a sense of purpose. And specialized advisers are helping families navigate the increasingly sophisticated choices.
For caregivers, the transformation offers opportunities to anticipate problems, preserve independence and potentially improve an aging parent’s quality of life while reducing some of the burdens on family members.
Artificial Intelligence Makes Staying Home More Practical
One significant advance involves artificial intelligence systems that can monitor a senior’s safety even when a professional caregiver is not present.
Griswold Home Care, which serves Delaware families, has partnered with Wisdom to introduce technology-enhanced services through its Griswold Care Plus program.
Small audio-sensing devices installed throughout a home use artificial intelligence to recognize patterns and identify possible falls, calls for help, unusual activity or changes in daily routines. The system does not require cameras or wearable devices.
Patrick Gray, who operates Griswold Home Care serving Wilmington, has described how the technology gives professional caregivers information they previously lacked.
In one example, repeated falls were identified during a client’s morning routine, allowing the care team and family to recognize the need for additional assistance.
The technology can help determine whether caregiving schedules should change or whether more intensive support is necessary.
Combined with hands-on assistance for bathing, meals, transportation and companionship, these tools can make remaining at home a more practical option for some families.
For adult children, they can provide greater awareness of what happens between visits and reduce uncertainty about a parent’s safety.
Easterseals Lets Families See the Technology for Themselves
For families uncertain about what technology might help an aging parent, Easterseals Delaware & Maryland’s Eastern Shore offers a practical place to explore the possibilities.
Its Resource and Technology Demonstration Center at 61 Corporate Circle in New Castle features hundreds of assistive devices designed to help people remain independent.
The approximately 3,000-square-foot center demonstrates everything from adaptive clothing, specialized eating utensils and medication aids to mobility equipment and voice-activated household controls.
Families can see how relatively simple tools might make eating, dressing, bathing and other daily activities easier and safer.
The center can also demonstrate Griswold’s AI-supported home monitoring technology for caregivers interested in understanding how newer systems can supplement traditional home care.
Easterseals staff help visitors explore appropriate options and understand where equipment can be obtained. The nonprofit does not sell the products, and virtual tours are available for people unable to visit.
The center provides a useful starting point for families who may not realize how many technologies and everyday adaptations are available.
Not every solution requires an expensive electronic system. Sometimes a modified utensil, adaptive clothing or simple home safety device can make a meaningful difference in a senior’s independence.
Assisted Living Shifts From Managing Decline to Encouraging Purpose
Assisted living is undergoing a different, but equally important, transformation.
Historically, many families considered assisted living primarily when an older adult could no longer manage independently. The emphasis was often on meals, medications, personal care and supervision.
Today’s model increasingly includes helping residents remain physically active, socially connected, and engaged in meaningful activities.
Harmony Senior Services, which operates communities in Delaware, is among the providers promoting this approach.
Its Living Life in Harmony programming emphasizes physical wellness, intellectual stimulation, social relationships, and opportunities to contribute to the community.
The emphasis on purpose is particularly important.
An older adult who spent decades working, raising a family or volunteering may struggle with isolation after retirement, the death of a spouse or the loss of the ability to drive.
Assisted living can provide opportunities to build friendships, participate in activities, mentor others, and rediscover interests that have become difficult to pursue independently.
Instead of spending the day managing household chores, meals, and transportation, residents may have more time for relationships and meaningful activities.
The approach also changes the conversation about when to move. Rather than waiting for a medical crisis, some families are considering assisted living earlier, while their parent can fully participate in community life.
For other seniors, remaining in familiar surroundings will continue to provide the greatest independence and quality of life.
AI Is Improving Memory Care, Too
Artificial intelligence is also finding a role inside residential communities.
Arden Courts, which specializes in memory care for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, has introduced AI-supported fall detection in select communities.
The optional technology uses cameras and artificial intelligence to detect falls and preserve a short video record of the incident for authorized caregivers to review.
This can be particularly valuable for residents who may have difficulty explaining what happened.
Rather than simply responding to a fall, caregivers can review the circumstances and consider whether changes to furniture placement, mobility assistance or supervision might prevent another incident.
The technology can become part of an individualized care plan, combining specialized memory care with additional information about safety.
Arden Courts operates a memory care community in Wilmington, although availability of the technology at that location requires confirmation.
The larger development is that technology is no longer simply a tool for helping seniors avoid moving into assisted living. It is increasingly becoming part of improving care inside residential communities as well.
Senior Care Consulting Is Changing With the Choices
As options multiply, the professionals helping families make decisions are changing their approach, too.
Traditionally, senior placement services often focused on identifying assisted living communities, comparing costs and arranging visits.
Those services remain valuable, but determining where Mom should live is increasingly only part of the challenge.
Families may first need to understand whether home monitoring, adaptive equipment, professional caregivers, or household modifications could help a parent remain independent.
Others may need to evaluate cognitive changes, mobility limitations, or whether a residential community could improve their parent’s social engagement and quality of life.
Paxson said her Oasis Senior Advisors team now includes professionals with years of experience in physical therapy, social work, hospice care, assisted living and cognitive therapy.
Those backgrounds bring different perspectives to care planning, helping families consider physical limitations, memory changes, safety, emotional well-being and the practical responsibilities of family caregivers.
The advisers help families understand available services and appropriate next steps, while clinical evaluations remain the responsibility of qualified health professionals.
The growing range of options is also making early planning more important.
A family might begin with relatively inexpensive assistive devices demonstrated at Easterseals, add AI-supported home monitoring and professional caregiving as needs increase, and eventually consider an assisted living community that emphasizes wellness and social engagement.
Another family may decide that moving sooner will offer a better quality of life.
The decisions remain personal, and costs, safety needs and individual preferences all matter.
But the changing models give families something they did not always have: more opportunities to address challenges before they become emergencies.
For Delaware caregivers, the question is no longer simply whether Mom can stay home or needs to move.
It is what combination of technology, professional care, purposeful activity and experienced guidance will help her remain safe, independent and engaged in life.
TO GO: Resources for Delaware Caregivers
Oasis Senior Advisors of Delaware
Professional guidance for families evaluating senior living and care options.
Website: oasissenioradvisors.com
Easterseals Resource and Technology Demonstration Center
61 Corporate Circle, New Castle
Explore hundreds of assistive devices, adaptive equipment and technology solutions. Virtual tours are available.
Government building and two banks set on fire as tens of thousands take to streets over education costs and corruption
Tens of thousands of students have taken to the streets of Tirana, the Albanian capital, setting alight a government building and two banks and hurling stones at police during a protest over rising education costs and corruption.
Police responded with water cannon and teargas to disperse protesters who started a fire at the ministry of education building, overturned bins and smashed the fronts of local businesses. A branch of Raiffeisen Bank near the education ministry also caught fire.
Facing a tight reelection campaign, U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, said she owns no individual stocks.
Amid public discussion of tightening rules on lawmakers’ stock trades, Miller-Meeks said in a Sept. 2 Facebook post, “I don’t own a single individual stock, and members of Congress shouldn’t either.”
Miller-Meeks’campaign referred PolitiFact Iowa to her congressional financial disclosure forms, which require her to list the assets she owns and the income she earns. They show that she owns broad funds composed of many different companies’ shares, but no individual company stocks.
Meeks’ attention to curbing congressional stock trading
A 2025 report by Campaign Legal Center, which tracks campaign finance and ethics, found 48% of members of Congress who filed financial disclosures in 2025 reported owning stakes in individual corporations.
Stock trading in Congress is problematic because lawmakers can reap benefits from owning stock in industries they have policy sway over, according to the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. Lawmakers may have access to information that is not publicly known but which can impact public markets.
Miller-Meeks supported H.R.7008, which would have prohibited members of Congress and their families from purchasing individual financial assets and would have introduced a framework for selling shares. Itpassed in the House on July 22, but later failed in the Senate in a procedural vote.
Miller-Meeks’ 2020 through 2025 forms show she has mutual funds and retirement accounts — and no individual shares in corporations. There were errors, however, in Miller-Meeks’ 2019 and 2020 candidate disclosures which misstated her earned income, according to Bleeding Heartland.
Miller-Meeks holds a Vanguard Healthcare Fund Admiral Shares account, a healthcare sector-specific mutual fund, along with a Vanguard Healthcare Fund IRA, and a Dimensional Fund Advisors, or DFA, Global Real Estate sectoral fund.
Other mutual fund accounts include DFA Global Two Year Fixed Income, a Vanguard short-term treasury fund, and a TD Ameritrade Money Market fund.
Generally, individual stocks are considered more ethically problematic for a lawmaker, because they could buy or sell a company’s shares based on private information they know from their role in Congress. That’s not as significant a risk for a broad mutual fund made up of a wide array of stocks from different sectors.
Lawmakers, regardless, have the information about what companies are included in a given mutual fund.
Campaign Legal Center’s 2025 report evaluated members of Congress based on their ownership of different classes of financial assets, identifying Miller-Meeks as a holder of a “widely held investment fund,” and not a stock owner or holder of a qualified blind trust.
Thomas Rietz, a University of Iowa professor of finance, said having a stake in particular companies could tempt a politician to support particular bills that could benefit their holdings.
Mutual funds create a barrier between the investor and the specific company in which they invest, Rietz said.
Mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, raise fewer ethical concerns than individual stocks, said Kedric Payne, Campaign Legal Center’s senior director of ethics. As a result, mutual funds and ETFs have not become part of the conversation over tightening restrictions on lawmakers.
Our ruling
Miller-Meeks said, “I don’t own a single individual stock.”
Miller-Meeks’ financial disclosure forms show she owns mutual funds, pensions, and retirement accounts but no individual stocks.
Ben Norris says cost-cutting measure that means show will be recorded outside its home city risks ‘extraordinary burden’ for crew
A cast member of The Archers has said its actors have been angered by the BBC’s decision to axe the show’s new studio, in a move that could lead to it being recorded away from its home in Birmingham.
Ben Norris, who plays Ben Archer in the world’s longest-running soap opera, said the decision risked having a real impact on the quality of the show and placing an “extraordinary burden” on its crew.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly said the White House's revocation of hard passes for CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists likely violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights.
Vessels were hit by missiles as rise in strikes suggests Iran is trying to close waterway before US midterm elections
Two container ships near the strait of Hormuz have sunk after being struck by missiles, amid the sharpest rise in Iranian attacks on shipping since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran.
The increase in attacks suggests Iran is trying to fully close the strategic waterway in an attempt to frustrate Donald Trump’s efforts to bring down fuel prices before the US midterm elections on 3 November.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s newly appointed press secretary, Katie Zacharia, is facing a request for a California State Bar investigation over repeated claims that she is a lawyer despite no public record showing she is licensed to practice law in the United States.
The nonprofit Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint Wednesday asking the State Bar of California to determine whether Zacharia violated state law by presenting herself as an attorney without a license.
Zacharia earned a law degree from Pepperdine University in 2011 and has described herself as a lawyer during television appearances. She also previously held the title of general counsel for Fix California, a conservative nonprofit founded by Trump ally Richard Grenell.
The California State Bar says it has no record of Zacharia being licensed under either her current or maiden name. Reviews of attorney databases have similarly found no admission in other U.S. jurisdictions.
Questions intensified Tuesday when a reporter asked Zacharia which state’s bar examination she passed. Her response appeared to reference moving to China rather than identifying a U.S. jurisdiction. Foreign nationals generally cannot qualify as licensed Chinese attorneys.
The White House maintains that Zacharia performed international transactional legal work in China with appropriate credentials but has not produced evidence of a U.S. law license.
No finding of wrongdoing has been made, and the California Bar has not said whether it will open a formal investigation.
International alliance of China-sceptic legislators warns of risks inherent in misjudging bilateral relationship
The UK’s approach to China is “beset by incoherence” and plagued by a lack of senior expertise, according to a report warning of the risks inherent in misjudging the bilateral relationship.
An audit by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac), an international grouping of China-sceptic legislators, says past engagement with Beijing has often exposed the UK to the risks of interference without delivering the opportunities promised.
Google Play is adding support for private personal Android apps, allowing users to build an app with tools like Google AI Studio and run it on their own devices without publishing it publicly to the Play Store. "These personal apps won't show up in Google Play's search or listing pages, and won't be shared with anyone except for the app's creator," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The idea comes as more people are experimenting with building their own applications via AI for specific, personal needs. However, being able to use that app on their own Android device has meant publishing to Google Play, making it accessible to the Play Store's some 3 billion users. That led many to limit their vibe-coding efforts to web apps that could run on any device instead of something built natively for Android.
Now, Google says Android device owners can vibe-code an app using Google AI Studio, then launch it for their own use. These apps are still required to comply with Google Play's existing policies but allow users to experiment more directly with building apps for Android. Initially, the feature will be available to users in the U.S., age 18 and up.
[...] In the months ahead, the company said that users will be able to share their vibe-coded creations with a network of trusted friends. That means the apps you built for family or friends, or maybe your child's T-ball league, could be used with a small group of people, without having to go public on the Play Store. And if the app ever really becomes popular, there will be a way to shift the personal app to one that's published on the Google Play Store for everyone to try, after completing the trust and safety reviews.
The protests around an anti-ICE T-shirt show that politics can never be separated from sports, especially now
On 26 September, Daniela Silva was expelled from Austin FC’s match with San Diego FC for wearing a T-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”. She says she was banned from Q2 Stadium for a year (Austin FC said that the ban was issued by the Austin Police Department, not the club, and that they offered to rescind it but that Silva declined).
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
This article was amended on 14 October to reflect MLS’s clarification that, though the wordings of the league’s fan code of conduct and the Q2 Stadium fan code of conduct are identical, the league’s does not govern articles of clothing while a stadium’s may.
I'm wondering if anyone has tried the Fusion Core by VOW? What are the thermals like?
I really want a build with the Cannoncore V3, Fusion Core to mount the VESC inside the axel, and 20S4P 21700 (using his custom boxes) in both front and back. I know it would be heavy but it would be so cool!
The multi-year agreement will establish the largest quantum applications hub in the region and one of the largest in the EU
IAȘI, Romania, Oct. 14, 2026 — Classiq, a leading quantum computing software company, and FreeYa Mind Campus by S.C. Extensive Network SRL today announced a strategic commercial agreement to build quantum application development, education, enterprise and national capabilities at the campus’s hardware-enabled Quantum AI center in Iași, Romania.
Under the agreement, FreeYa Mind Campus will offer access to Classiq’s enterprise-grade quantum software platform, both on campus and across the Romanian ecosystem. The platform brings together Classiq’s agentic AI interfaces, Qmod high-level modeling language, circuit synthesis and hardware-aware execution, helping researchers and enterprise teams design optimized quantum applications faster.
The center was developed to provide on-campus access to quantum hardware, including an IBM Quantum System Two. It is now adding Classiq’s software, expertise and training to further develop and scale quantum innovation and industrial applications.
The initiative will draw on FreeYa Mind Campus’s network of enterprises, research institutions, public-sector organizations and academic partners, including more than 12 partner universities. It will also be open to government organizations and participants in European Union-funded programs.
Classiq will also provide an enhanced training layer for the center, spanning introductory quantum curricula, high-level modeling and advanced algorithm design. Working with the campus team, Classiq will connect quantum innovation to real-world industry applications. The campus will offer university curriculum materials, practitioner training, enterprise onboarding, advanced application development and Classiq certification resources. To support customer engagement, project execution and application delivery, Classiq will establish its Romania regional headquarters at the campus.
By combining Classiq’s software engineering platform and education with FreeYa Mind Campus’s quantum infrastructure, the partnership strengthens the Romanian and wider European quantum ecosystems, developing the skills, workflows and applications needed to put that infrastructure to effective use.
“Europe’s quantum ambitions depend on pairing powerful software with advanced hardware. Building on the success of FreeYa Mind Campus, we are bringing those elements together, and Classiq will provide the scalable software foundation that lets universities, enterprises and public institutions develop quantum applications,” said Regev Yativ, CRO at Classiq. “This partnership fast-tracks ecosystem training and establishes a clear path from business and research problems to executable quantum solutions.”
“FreeYa Mind Campus is being built as a focal point for advanced infrastructure, academic expertise and industry demand,” said Cristian Berariu, founder and CEO of FreeYa Mind Campus. “Our partnership with Classiq will connect on-campus and cloud quantum hardware with a leading application-development and education environment that can serve universities, businesses and public institutions. This will help Romania build lasting quantum capability and contribute to Europe’s broader technology goals. I am confident that our collaboration with Classiq will benefit the entire region and boost talent in Romania.”
The agreement builds on Classiq’s momentum with organizations establishing large-scale quantum hardware and software centers, application hubs and localized technology infrastructure. It follows Classiq’s partnership with TEA TEK to establish a quantum computing hub in Naples and its work with QAI on Korea’s first-of-its-kind local Quantum-as-a-Service offering.
Together, the initiative allows the campus to support its own hardware strategy while introducing a model for building quantum capability. Hardware provides the computational infrastructure, while Classiq’s software layer enables researchers, domain experts and developers to learn, build, optimize and execute applications on it.
The partnership reinforces Classiq’s role as a software partner of choice for organizations building quantum centers of excellence and application hubs. It also cements FreeYa Mind Campus’s position as a leading end-to-end quantum hub in the region, with a complete offering that supports education, research, enterprise projects and public-sector programs alongside quantum hardware.
About FreeYa Mind Campus by S.C. Extensive Network SRL
Located in Iași, Romania, FreeYa Mind Campus is a dedicated educational and research hub designed to bridge formal academic training with high-demand industry capabilities. By cultivating a vibrant ecosystem of scientists, university partnerships, and tech startups, FreeYa Mind Campus provides direct access to modern research tools, including quantum computing and AI, and high-standard training in emerging scientific disciplines.
About Classiq
Classiq, a leading quantum computing software company, provides enterprise-grade technology that makes it practical to develop scalable, efficient quantum applications. Used by dozens of global enterprises, the Classiq platform combines AI agents, a high-level quantum programming language and design automation to accelerate the development of optimized, hardware-ready quantum software. The platform also supports hardware benchmarking, cost and performance optimization, and execution at scale of quantum solutions.
Global human rights commitments adopted by government extend reach to enablers of unlawful activity
The UK is expanding its sanctions powers to freeze assets and target entities enabling illegal Israeli settlements, obstructing humanitarian aid or unlawfully holding prisoners.
The statutory instrument introducing the global human rights and international humanitarian law sanctions adds three new grounds to the 2020 regime: serious violations of international humanitarian law, obstruction of humanitarian assistance and serious violations of the right to liberty and security of person.
Jason O’Connell’s suspected use of the specs to aid his speech in Senedd reignites debate over AI-enabled devices
It was a flowing speech packed full of precise statistics – but Jason O’Connell, a Reform UK Senedd member, was not quite the gifted orator he had first appeared. The periodic flashing in his spectacles seemed to give the game away as he spoke for five minutes in the Senedd chamber without a glance at his notes.
“Cardiff reviewed 192 roads, following 933 requests, and only four routes have returned to 30mph,” he said as he led the party’s charge to abolish 20mph traffic zones. “£38.3m wasted to implement this policy and up to £8.9bn in an act of economic self-harm.”
A fossil discovered 100 years ago in the U.K. has been identified as a previously unknown cousin of the T. rex, and it "definitely would have chased us."
It was dark and cold when I first spotted him, sitting serenely, bathed in soft light. The statue of Abraham Lincoln at his memorial in Washington, D.C., sits 19 feet tall and weighs 120 tons — a white marble monument dedicated to one of the nation’s most intelligent, eloquent, and moral presidents.
I hadn’t come to gaze upon Lincoln but at the reflecting pool that bears his name. It’s been transformed into a different kind of landmark by the inane, inarticulate, and completely immoral man who now holds that same office Lincoln did.
President Donald Trump wants to remake the landscape of Washington D.C., tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a monstrosity of a ballroom; adding his name to the Kennedy Center or demolishing it if he can’t; and installing a 250-foot-tall “Triumphal Arch” that will “house … large numbers of drones, plus snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.” This past weekend, the administration even defied a judge’s order and ripped up 430 mature trees at East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal course in southeastern Washington that Trump wants to refashion into a championship-level course, like those of his personal properties.
Trump’s rehabilitation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — planned to be complete for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4 — should have been the easiest lift of his planned remodel of the nation’s capital. But it quickly became a monument to failure.
Back in April, Trump said adding a bargain-priced “industrial-grade swimming pool topping” in “American flag blue” to the reflecting pool would leave it looking “gorgeous, beautiful” and would “last for 40 or 50 years.” Instead, the renovation — awarded via a no-bid contract and announced as America 250 festivities on the National Mall approached — started to fail within days. This was followed by a bright green algae bloom and finally a catastrophic lining failure that saw Trump’s chosen coating blister, peel, and then separate from the concrete.
When I visited, the only water in the iconic national landmark — which Martin Luther King Jr. overlooked as he made his historic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — was a stagnant puddle that stretched out toward a mass of rotting leaves, a motley collection of plastic beverage bottles, a silver-and-blue aluminum can of RAIN spring water, and a pair of heavy-duty spray bottles often used for commercial cleaning chemicals.
Nested Failures
What I witnessed was emblematic of a White House far out of its depth and completely overwhelmed by disasters — large and small — of its own making. From Washington, D.C., to the Middle East, the Trump administration has been humiliated. It’s a disaster wrapped in fiascos inside a swirling catastrophe, to riff off Winston Churchill’s famed line. These nested failures are legion. The attack on the elementary school in Minab — which killed more than 150 people, most of them children — within the larger failure of the Iran war. The extrajudicial executions of defenseless, shipwrecked survivors within the murderous boat strike campaign. The killings of unarmed people by federal immigration agents and deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody during the larger administration project of anti-immigrant cruelty.
The brutal deportation operations have spawned endless wrongdoing: military occupations of American cities; the arrest and detention of American citizens, the heartless expulsions to third countries; the shootings and beatings of protesters and immigrants, the targeting of Kilmar Abrego Garcia; the swirl of corruption allegations around then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; and on and on.
Then there is the debasing of democracy and the undercutting of the rule of law through politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department; turning federal law enforcement into a presidential goon squad; gutting of civil rights protections; targeting of political opponents; relentless attacks on the independent judiciary; executive overreach; and the pardoning or commuting of the prison sentences of insurrectionists.
Other scandals and revelations of wrongdoing have been legion: the failure to release the full Epstein files; the settling of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS; the floating of the “anti-weaponization” fund; the cover-up of the U.S. death toll of the Iran war; Signal-gate; the $400 million Qatari jumbo jet that turned into a security liability; crypto-grifting; quid pro quo tariff reductions; brazen self-dealing; and reckless actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which could result in more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030 — including approximately 4.5 million deaths of children under 5 — all to save Americans about 17 cents per day.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is blocked off to the public on Oct. 13, 2026, in Washington, D.C.Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
A Presidential Crime Scene
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — dry and barren behind a bevy of barricades — looked to me like an open-air prison. At its head, the west end by the Lincoln Memorial, several black metal crowd-control fences and a similar lone orange metal barrier guarded two layers of chain-link fencing. The rest of the perimeter was hidden behind a single layer of metal fencing supplied by National Rent-A-Fence.
Some of the fencing — which stretched a little less than a mile — was covered in a dark mesh screen that hid the waterless pool. In other areas, the fabric had fallen or was torn down and lay in unsightly heaps. Closer to the east end, one small section of fence lay on the ground — a crumpled mess of metal mesh, poles akimbo, looking like a victim at a crime scene — behind a wall of yellow tape: 27 crisscrossed strands reading “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” Beyond that, where the water should have been reflecting the rays of the rising sun, pickup trucks rolled through and workers slowly paced, nodded their heads, and stared out on the hardscape, as if waiting for a factory whistle to sound.
In the face of this fiasco, Trump — as always playing the victim and blaming perceived enemies for his shortcomings — has repeatedly claimed knife-wielding vandals slashed the pool’s liner. Several people, including former Olympian David Hearn, were arrested and charged with felonies and misdemeanors, but those cases fell apart. The Interior Department provided documents to the U.S. attorney’s office “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings.” The Justice Department also called it a “rushed and botched installation” and in July dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the monument. On October 1, a judge said federal prosecutors cannot refile charges against Hearn. But just last week, Trump was still pushing the lies. “We had vandalism there,” he told the press. “Only sick people do that, and we have their pictures.”
Not far from Lincoln’s statue, the administration offered up these same excuses, complete with Trump’s “filthy dirty” language and vandalism falsehoods. A lone laminated sheet of paper affixed to the fencing read:
The National Park Service staff and contractors are repairing areas damaged by vandals and completing a historic effort to clean, fix, and beautify the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Since 1922, prior administrations have neglected this iconic national landmark, evidenced most recently by more than half of the pool’s pipes being clogged and the sidewalks and granite coping stones being filthy dirty. The Reflecting Pool will remain drained while this work proceeds so that it can truly reflect the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital.
“Work Won’t Love You Back,” by Sarah JaffeAvailable on Bookshop.org
Last week, Atlantic Industrial Coatings announced on its website that: “All warranty repairs were completed Friday, 10/2/2026!” The company added: “It has been an honor to serve our great nation!” Trump followed by claiming that the reflecting pool re-do was nearly finished. “I think they’re gonna fill it up this week,” he said on October 6. “The Reflecting Pool is totally complete.”
The National Park Service did not respond to numerous detailed questions from The Intercept about the work by Atlantic Industrial Coatings and whether the pipes were completely unclogged and the granite completely clean. Atlantic Industrial Coatings also failed to respond to questions.
On Monday, a new sign appeared on the fencing as water began flowing back into pool. “The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being refilled as the National Park Service and contractors put the final touches on a historic effort to clean, repair, and beautify this iconic national landmark,” read a sign without any attribution. It also contained a caveat: “As part of the normal refilling process, the water may temporarily appear cloudy before clearing.”
Whether the Reflecting Pool will again stand as a fitting reflection of “the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital,” or suffer another catastrophe that leaves it looking like an eyesore, it is symptomatic of the larger issue of unforced errors heaped upon failures which the Trump administration is powerless to fix and can only sometimes, after multiple attempts, contain. It has become a pitiful, helpless giant, unable to achieve even its most modest goals with the power to do little more than spew out misinformation; cloak misdeeds in secrecy; undermine, sabotage, and destroy government institutions; and unleash pain on the most vulnerable and defenseless, like school children in Iran and undocumented immigrants in America.
With Malice Toward All
Trump promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption but instead supercharged it and managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency.
In late August, Trump took to Truth Social to claim he was “six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln” — a reference to a poll of present-day Republicans, of whom 53 percent said the president they most admire is Trump, compared to 8 percent who named Lincoln. That same month, he ranked himself above Lincoln and all other presidents. It’s somehow fitting that Trump wrecked the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the same way he has soiled the office Lincoln once held.
Trump promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption. He managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency.
Whether Lincoln could have imagined a president as depraved as Trump is unknowable but he did fear, in his own time “something of ill-omen, amongst us … the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.” He couldn’t have anticipated the boat strikes, the term human trafficking victim, or the fact that the U.S. might kill the latter during the former, but in that same 1838 speech — when he was just 28 years old — he understood the perils of such summary executions, noting “when men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer.”
Trump is, however, content to kill without compunction and even recently appeared to invite the nuclear annihilation of Los Angeles and San Diego, although it’s increasingly impossible to divine meaning from Trump’s incoherent ramblings. (He has, though, threatened both cities in the past, deploying troops to LA and threatening to do so in San Diego.) Even Lincoln’s armies — turning to “total war” to end a long, brutal, and costly civil war — did not annihilate the South and decimate its people. And at its close, he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” with words Trump would choke on: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”
Lincoln did not believe that the U.S. could be felled by a foreign power but did foresee the possibility of America sealing its own fate. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said in that 1838 speech. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” The reelection of a craven criminal who sought to subvert what remains of democracy in America certainly appears to be more than a mere cry for help.
“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855. Some 171 years later, it may well be complete.
The suffering meted out by Trump has been immense. And his penchant for failure may now be his essential quality. He may ultimately be remembered for turning a reckless military “excursion” into a forever-war failure or as the most debased reprobate to hold the office of the presidency. But Trump’s micro-mismanagement of a local construction project that turned a functioning national monument into a fenced-off blight might be his most illustrative disappointment: a small failure of epic proportions and, in some way, a sorry reflection on all Americans.
Michael Kotlikoff addressed his administration’s handling of the 2024 allegations as he faces calls for his resignation
Michael Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell University, has spoken to the New York Times about sexual assault allegations at the school, acknowledging for the first time that he knew a student had reported being sexually assaulted in November 2024, but did not follow up with the Jane Doe involved in the months after learning about the alleged assault.
He also revealed that he did not know she had dropped out of Cornell until she filed a lawsuit last month.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
Launch of Russian ballistic missiles on Ukraine, with no US warning, coincides with outage of Starlink managed by Musk’s SpaceX
Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately.
The terminals, which are produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX but managed by the US government, are a key component of Ukraine’s military operations and the sudden restrictions on the terminals travelling at high speeds on Tuesday evening led to the failure of several combat missions, said an adviser on military technology to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
‘Seniors have spent years watching their expenses outpacing their benefits’ advocate says
Social security recipients will see a 3.6% cost-of-living adjustment (Cola) in 2027, increasing retirement benefits by an average of $75 a month as millions of Americans continue to grapple with rising prices.
Nearly 72 million social security beneficiaries will see higher payments beginning in January 2027, while approximately 7.3 million supplemental security income (SSI) recipients will receive increased payments starting on 31 December 2026, according to the Social Security Administration.
Dispute related to claims London mayor blocked US tech firm from £50m police deal because of concerns over its values
Palantir and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, have called off their legal fight over claims the Labour mayor was blocking the US tech company from signing a contract with the Metropolitan police because of its values and ethics.
Palantir and the mayor’s office for policing and crime (Mopac) announced on Wednesday they had withdrawn allegations against each other, heading off a high court trial scheduled for January.
The Trump administration sharply criticized a legal complaint filed in Lebanon against the country's ambassador to Washington over her reported outreach to her Israeli counterpart.
Netflix is laying off about 1,000 employees, or 6% of its workforce, in its largest round of cuts since 2022. The company says its business remains strong, but it is facing growing pressure from YouTube, TikTok, and other rivals. Reuters reports: The bulk of the job cuts would be in Netflix's product, tech, legal and human-resources teams, the email Co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos sent to employees on Wednesday showed.
"Our mission -- to entertain the world -- is ambitious, and delivering on it requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people âand resources," they said in the memo. "Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full-year forecast."
Pontiff has begun walking in his hospital room and is eating normally after operation to remove growth, doctors say
Pope Leo’s recovery from a lung cancer operation is progressing as planned, his doctors have said, as the pontiff received good wishes from around the world, including from Britain’s King Charles.
Leo, who had a cancerous mass removed from his right lung late on Tuesday, began walking in his hospital room after respiratory therapy on Wednesday. He was eating normally, his doctors Luigi Carbone and Stefano Margaritoria said in a statement issued by the Vatican.
Brand is in Southwark crown court today where his rape and sexual assault trial begins
Taking jurors through the third allegation, Karmy-Jones said Brand pulled another woman into a toilet during an incident at a bar in Soho in 2004.
The third complainant was “not so lucky as to be able to pull away”, the prosecutor said.
She continued to resist saying, ‘I’m not coming in there, don’t be silly. Are you mad? Get off,’ and she managed to pull herself away, and to release his grasp.
At that point he gave up and went into the toilet, and she left the area.”
Burnham welcomes Ukraine’s president to No 10 for the first time since he became PM
PMQs is about to start.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
After @genevieve_holl reported this last night, various sources in the Trump administration who are supportive of Farage said Badenoch was needlessly trying to cause a political row (per @katyballs @MrHarryCole) and accused her of undermining the Anglo-American relationship.
It is possible that these people are particularly sensitive about this topic because they are still considering buying the islands, as @connorstringer and I reported earlier in the year. Domestic opposition to the idea of the US running Chagos in the UK would be a problem for the White House.
Calamity Kemi Strikes Again.
Kemi Badenoch has risked causing a diplomatic row with Britain’s allies, all because she cannot control the Tory spin doctors around her that oversaw the disastrous premierships of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Theresa May, and even David Cameron.
Kemi and the Conservatives cannot be trusted by the Chagos people.
If they really have interest in the Chagos, why would you have started negotiating about things you already own?
We are confused at why @KemiBadenoch is attacking @Nigel_Farage …
We understood Nigel Farage’s comments to mean that we would get perpetual use of the base, which, frankly, we’ve always had.
Only 1.04% of estimated 230,900 cases reviewed in first five months of £75m three-year scheme
Campaigners have urged Andy Burnham to step in after it emerged just a handful of the tens of thousands of unpaid carers who unknowingly racked up huge debts when welfare officials unlawfully changed benefits guidance have been repaid.
The first official update on the carers allowance reassessment exercise launched by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in April confirms that progress in cancelling wrongful overpayments has started slowly.
Peak of French mountain now 4,807 metres high and fluctuates year by year due to changes in Alpine climate
Western Europe’s highest mountain shrank by more than a metre last year. The peak of Mont Blanc in France now stands 4,807.47 metres above sea level, a team of surveyors said on Wednesday, putting “the roof of Europe” 1.29 metres lower than in 2025.
The mountain is about 4,792 metres tall but the summit constantly shifts as heat, wind and precipitation change the thickness of snow and ice on top. The height scientists recorded during an expedition last month was 1.88 metres greater than it was in 2023, when it reached the lowest levels in recent memory.
KDE turns 30 today, and they’re celebrating it with a brand new KDE Plasma release: version 6.8 is here. On the accessibility front, 6.8 brings a new dwell clicker function (meaning a click will register if the pointer is held still for a short while) and support for the Bikram Sambat calendar and the Amharic language. I always love it when I see support for new languages and scripts, especially when, as is the case here, it’s a language spoken as a first language by 25 million people.
The Plasma remote desktop has also been improved with bi-directional copy/paste, performance and quality improvements, and more, and you can now record microphone and audio while screen recording with Spectacle. In System Monitor, you can now assign processes and tasks to specific processors/cores, which is a great feature for people running intensive tasks but who would still like to, you know, do other things while those tasks are running.
KDE 6.8 drops support for X11, focusing entirely on Wayland. Of course, X11 applications will remain usable thanks to Xwayland, and KDE’s applications will continue to support X11 in case you’re using them outside of KDE. This release also further expands the Union theming system, now adding support for styling Qt Widgets. Union is still in beta, so you’ll have to enable it to test it. There’s a ton more, too, but these are some of the highlights.
KDE Plasma 6.8 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.
Rutte gets asked “is Russia foolish enough to consider attacking any of Nato countries?”
He says “we don’t think so” and that there is “no imminent threat against Nato territory,” but stresses that “if we see a build up, we will react to it.”
“We will never, ever mount a attack towards anyone else because that is not in our interest. We are a defensive alliance.”
“But here’s the main thing: we are stronger. Russia is not in a good place. These hybrid attacks, whatever it is, are a sign of weakness. What they allow us to do is to talk about it the whole day and to be rattled and to have press conferences on it. We’re not going to do that. We will react where we need to react.”
Cancer is one of the world’s most common diseases, with an average of one in every four people developing cancer at some point in their life. Over the past two months, new research has emerged regarding melanoma treatments from the pharmaceutical companies Merck and Moderna.
On Aug. 19, Merck and Moderna announced phase three of their KEYTRUDA melanoma trials, a prescribed immunotherapy medication used to treat certain types of cancers. The companies are utilizing messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology to prevent melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer, from returning and to increase patients’ survival rates. The technology is used to create a new immunotherapy that would be administered through a vaccine.
Immunotherapies train the body’s immune system to find and destroy existing cancer cells. Cancer vaccines, specifically the ones Merck and Moderna are developing, are a form of immunotherapy where a therapeutic vaccine is used in hopes of preventing the return of melanoma. However, they do not completely prevent a melanoma diagnosis.
Kevin Solomon, an associate professor in the university’s department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, explained what therapeutic vaccines are.
“These don’t necessarily allow you to prevent the infection, but it does train your immune system to better recognize and deal with an infection once it takes root and eventually stops a disease from progressing too far,” Solomon said.
Kelvin Lee is the Gore Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, an endowed professorship that is funded by the Gore family. Lee delved into the societal perceptions of this new technology.
“I also recognize the word ‘vaccine’ does have different implications, and there’s a lot of different views in society about that,” Lee said. “Maybe the term ‘cancer vaccine’ could lead to questions from people who might otherwise equate that technology with other kinds of vaccines for infectious disease.”
Cathy Fromen, an associate professor in the departments of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering, explained that this development of cancer vaccines is a crucial stepping stone for more elaborate medical discoveries, including gene editing technologies.
“I think every single advance of mRNA, new therapies and new disease treatment regimens, is a step in the right direction,” Fromen said. “But we still have a long way we can go.”
Fromen mentioned that the university has its own developments in cancer vaccine research.
“There’s a lot of research going on here, in cancer vaccines and cell therapies and monoclonal antibodies, all towards treating cancer,” Fromen said.
As research for the vaccine advances, it not only impacts the scientific world, but all people who have dealt with this disease.
“We’re at the leading edge of a new era,” Lee said. “I think it’s really exciting to see the progress that’s being made. I think, hopefully, all of us are in some way going to benefit.
“We’re all likely to know somebody at some point, whether it’s a friend or a loved one who’s going to be impacted by cancer.”
Lee is looking forward to the future of immunotherapies and shared his excitement.
“To think that there’s now another class of medicines that can really impact and improve people’s lives, I think, is really exciting,” Lee said.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its planned Microsoft 365 public-cloud rollout. Why? The reasons were clear at the Open Source Summit Europe conference, where the Linux Foundation (LF) released the 2026 State of Open Source in Europe. In it, the nonprofit, pro-open-source organization revealed that 94% of European Union (EU) organizations say digital sovereignty is important, with 61% considering it very important. As Thierry Carrez, the Linux Foundation Europe GM, said in his keynote, "Europe has clearly heard the message on digital sovereignty."
In an interview onstage at the summit, Nithya Ruff, chair of the LF board, added that it's not just Europe: "Digital sovereignty is a need that the entire world feels, whether it's Sierra Leone or the US or China." It's not just the Dutch tax collectors, though. The Netherlands is also exploring switching from Windows and proprietary software to Linux and open-source programs across the board. [...] The Netherlands had planned to switch to Microsoft 365 in 2025. The idea then was to complete the rollout by the end of 2026. About 5,000 employees had already migrated when the Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment recommended reversing the public-cloud rollout in June. The government paused the plan in July; the latest announcement replaces that rollout with an on-premises/open-source approach.
The Tax and Customs Administration isn't replacing all of Microsoft Office with a single open-source suite, at least not yet. Instead, the government will keep the existing Microsoft software for now. Looking ahead, State Secretary for Finance Eelco Eerenberg set out the replacement timetable in a letter to Parliament: "In 2027, the provision for mail and calendar will be realized on-premises. Later in 2027 and 2028, European open-source solutions for personal storage and collaboration will follow. This allows us to work toward a sustainable and more autonomous solution for these functionalities." [...] For now, the on-premises email/calendar environment will still use Microsoft software, including Outlook. The open-source portion concerns personal storage and collaboration, not a wholesale replacement of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or the entire desktop environment. As for why the Netherlands pulled back, the ICT assessment found serious concerns over "information security, information processing and future-proofing." Key issues included routing confidential documents through American servers, relying on standard Microsoft encryption rather than Double Key Encryption, and inadequate end-to-end encryption for Teams calls. The assessment also identified "vendor lock-in, reduced flexibility, concerns about digital sovereignty, and the absence of an adequate exit strategy" as dealbreakers.
ZDNet notes that other Dutch government agencies are developing an open-source alternative called DAWO (Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government), which would begin by replacing Windows with the Linux distribution NixOS.
You know the drill by now – a new month, a new Haiku activity report. This past month doesn’t seem to have any big ticket items, but instead contains a long list of smaller but still welcome fixes. Various filesystem drivers saw some work, a few bugs in virtio drivers were fixed, and NVMM execution is now easily interruptible by signals which should improve performance in various emulators like QEMU. Be sure to comb through the complete list to see if there’s anything in there that impacts you.
Connor Bell died of his injuries after his friend Jack Beechy, 18, pulled the trigger, mistaking it for the safety catch
A 17-year-old boy died after he was accidentally shot in the head with an air rifle by his friend at a house party, an inquest has been told.
Connor Bell had been drinking at a friend’s house in Basingstoke, Hampshire, on 8 November last year when Jack Beechy fired the fatal shot by mistaking the trigger for the safety catch, the inquest heard.
The ESA – not, not the cool one – a lobby group made up of various videogame and entertainment companies, has asked the US Trade Representative (USTR) to add Anbernic to its list of companies that are supposedly notorious for engaging in and facilitating piracy. If you’re unaware, Anbernic is one of the bigger names in Android and Linux-based handheld gaming devices targeted at the retrocomputing market.
While many online sellers do include an SD card full of ROMs alongside emulation hardware of all types, Anbernic itself does not appear to do the same when selling directly from its website. Regardless, the ESA argues that these ROM-laden Anbernic devices selling through “normal retail channels” help to “normalize hardware-based piracy by delivering illicit catalogues through a polished consumer product.” This, the ESA says, meets the threshold for a “superfake,” an ill-defined designation that applies to “high-quality counterfeit trademark goods … on a commercial scale.”
There’s a lot of murkiness surrounding whether or not Anbernic sells their devices with preloaded ROMs or not. The number of reports from people who say they did get a ton of ROMs on their Anbernic devices, bought from Anbernic’s own store, is large enough that it’s clearly something they do. However, there’s an equal number of people who say their Anbernic devices were completely free of ROMs, and I’m one of them – I’ve bought like three or so devices from their store over the years, and they never came with any ROMs. My most recent purchase was an RG 35XXPro Linux-based model, and there were no ROMs on it (I replaced the stock operating system with Knulli, which has been a great experience).
If Anbernic does indeed ship at least some of their devices with ROMs preinstalled, then it’s their own damn fault if that lands them in legal trouble. It’s not like downloading ROMs is particularly difficult (just do an internet search for your preferred system and something like “ROM pack” and you’ll get the console’s complete library in a single download), so they really have no need to do so.
There’s one extra layer here though. Third-party resellers like Amazon offer loads of Anbernic devices preloaded with SD cards full of ROMs, all from third parties not affiliated with Anbernic. And wouldn’t you know it – Amazon is a member of the ESA lobby group. In other words, the problem also lies with lax retailers not properly vetting what they’re offering, but instead of going after places like Amazon, they’re going after Anbernic instead.
Amazon is a haven for illegal and counterfeit products, but they’re so wealthy and powerful they just get away with it.
Say what you will about France’s high schools, they still produce world-class slogan writers. Here’s a brief selection spotted during three weeks of blockades and marches over chronic teacher shortages, overcrowded classes and crumbling buildings:
“Pas d’avenir, pas de calme” (No future, no calm). “Diplômés aujourd’hui, précaires demain” (Graduates today, insecure tomorrow). “Vous détruisez notre futur, on bloque votre présent” (You destroy our future, we block your present).
Republicans are entering the midterm elections with the highest rate of inflation since the spring, according to a government report released on Wednesday.
US price increases reached an annual rate of 3.7%in September, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.4% in August. This final inflation report before the pivotal midterm elections comes amid polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration over the cost of living.
BARCELONA, Spain, Oct. 14, 2026 — Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech has completed a €19.6 million first close of its Series A funding round, led by Indra Group, through IndraMind, with an investment of €10 million. The Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT), under the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Administration, has also renewed its commitment to the company with a new investment of €9.6 million. The company expects to complete the round during the final quarter of the year, with the participation of Avançsa and other existing investors.
The new capital will enable Qilimanjaro to scale and industrialize its quantum computers, advance the development of new generations of chips, and increase its manufacturing and deployment capacity, strengthening technological capabilities developed in Spain and contributing to greater European technological autonomy in quantum computing.
“SETT’s renewed commitment and Indra’s entry bring together sovereign capital and industrial capital to protect, but also accelerate, national technological autonomy,” said Marta P. Estarellas, CEO of Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech. “Together, we are joining forces to bring quantum computing closer to strategic industrial sectors and to ensure that the quantum technology built in Spain continues to grow in Spain.”
“Quantum computing will mark a decisive leap in the evolution of artificial intelligence and in its ability to solve problems of enormous complexity,” said Ignacio Martínez, Managing Director of IndraMind. “With this transaction, Indra Group strengthens its position in this strategic field, while IndraMind expands the capabilities with which to develop sovereign and differentiated solutions for defense, security and industry.”
The investment also reinforces Indra Group’s commitment to Catalonia, one of Europe’s leading hubs for innovation, supercomputing and quantum technologies. Enric Blasco, Director of Indra Group in Catalonia, highlighted that the transaction “helps advance our growth strategy in the region and strengthens our role as a driving force within its ecosystem of innovation, supercomputing and quantum technologies, which has made it one of Europe’s leading hubs in areas that are central to our company’s activity.”
Founded in Barcelona in 2019, Qilimanjaro is the only Spanish full-stack quantum computing company. It develops its own chips, software and algorithms, and integrates cryogenics and control electronics to build complete quantum systems. Its core technology is based on digital and analog quantum processors using superconducting fluxonium qubits, combined with high-performance classical computing in multimodal systems: the right platform for each optimization, simulation and artificial intelligence problem.
This model is already in production: three Qilimanjaro quantum systems operate integrated into the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), one of Europe’s largest supercomputing centers, including the first analog quantum computer integrated into a European HPC center. The company has 80 employees from more than 22 nationalities, has deployed eight quantum systems and works with clients in energy, telecommunications, logistics, healthcare and finance, offering on-premise systems, cloud access and specialized adoption services.
About Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech
Headquartered in Barcelona and founded in 2019, Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech is a full-stack quantum computing company developing analog and digital quantum computers based on superconducting fluxonium qubits. Its multimodal approach offers an alternative to purely digital systems, with advantages for certain simulation, optimization and artificial intelligence problems and a lower dependence on full quantum error correction.
Qilimanjaro develops its own chips, software and algorithms and integrates the components required to build complete quantum systems. The company offers on-premise systems that integrate analog and digital quantum processors with HPC infrastructure, enabling each technology to be used where it can provide the greatest value depending on the use case, as well as remote access through SpeQtrum Cloud, its Quantum-as-a-Service platform.
This model helps retain in Spain and Europe the knowledge, intellectual property and industrial capabilities required to develop and operate a strategic technology, strengthening European technological sovereignty in quantum computing.
Mamdani and city council leader agree on ban that would make it illegal to operate horse-drawn carriages in the city
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the leader of the New York City council have agreed to ban horse-drawn carriages from the city, a popular tourist attraction that has faced widespread scrutiny.
Mamdani has agreed to back a bill supported by Julie Menin, the speaker of the New York city council, that would make it illegal to operate horse-drawn carriages beginning in June 2028, Politico reported on Tuesday. The city council is expected to vote on the legislation next week.
Pope Leo XIV is recovering "as expected" and has begun respiratory physiotherapy after tests confirmed a lung cancer diagnosis following surgery, the Vatican says.
The Yemen war is not just Saudi Arabia’s problem. It’s the Gulf’s tooExpert commentthilton.drupal
The renewed conflict in Yemen exposes the limits of Saudi Arabia’s military options and the vulnerabilities of the Gulf states. A unified Gulf Cooperation Council strategy on Yemen and a credible political settlement between Yemenis are needed.
The Yemen conflict has escalated significantly in recent weeks. Houthi strikes on airports in Riyadh, Abha and Dammam have killed at least 20 people and injured hundreds. Saudi oil infrastructure has also been attacked. Within Yemen, renewed fighting following a Houthi offensive around the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait has brought return to full-scale war.
The escalation is an alarming reminder of the 2015 Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. This came after the Iran-backed Houthis seized the Yemeni capital Sanaa in September 2014 and ousted the internationally recognized government from power. More than a decade later, the Houthis remain entrenched and clearly emboldened, while Yemen’s government is fragmented. Prospects for a political settlement currently seem remote.
Since the UN-brokered truce in April 2022, Saudi Arabia has sought to disengage militarily from Yemen and pursue a negotiated settlement with the Houthis. Talks gained momentum in 2023, but the Houthis’ involvement in the Gaza war, including attacks on Red Sea shipping and Israel, disrupted the political process. US president Donald Trump’s intensive bombing campaign against the Houthis led to a separate US-Houthi ceasefire in May 2025. But it did not advance solutions to the conflict in Yemen.
Difficult choices for Riyadh
Saudi Arabia now faces a difficult choice between flawed options.
The first option is military escalation through renewed air strikes and an offensive by Yemeni government-aligned forces. But this risks returning Riyadh to the costly, ill-planned and ill-conducted war it has spent years attempting to extricate itself from.
The Houthis have learned that even limited strikes can impose disproportionate economic and political costs. This gives the group leverage that Saudi Arabia’s conventional military superiority has struggled to overcome.
Saudi Arabia cannot win this war alone, but neither can it outsource its resolution.
Seeking to contain the Houthis has also proved insufficient. Although the relative calm following the 2022 truce reduced cross-border attacks, it allowed the Houthis to consolidate their territorial control and strengthen their military capabilities, only to attack Saudi Arabia again.
Negotiation remains the most favourable route towards a lasting settlement. But it faces a fundamental obstacle: the Houthis believe they are winning and have little incentive to compromise.
Nor can Riyadh simply outsource the conflict. The US faces the looming prospect of a renewed confrontation with Iran and is therefore unlikely to have much appetite for opening another front or supporting a prolonged military campaign in Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan may strengthen deterrence and defensive capabilities, but it does not offer a solution to the Houthi threat or Yemen’s underlying political fragmentation.
Saudi Arabia cannot win this war alone, but neither can it outsource its resolution. The lesson of the past decade is that military pressure without a coherent political strategy will only reproduce the conditions that allowed the Houthis to consolidate their position.
A Gulf problem
Instead, a collective Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) response is needed. Yemen and the Houthis have become a collective Gulf security challenge. It would therefore be a mistake to continue treating Yemen primarily as a domestic conflict or a Saudi security problem.
The attacks on Saudi airports have further demonstrated the vulnerability of critical infrastructure across the GCC to missiles, drones and other asymmetric threats. This exposure is not confined to Saudi Arabia. In January 2022, the Houthis launched attacks on Abu Dhabi’s oil facilities and airport, killing three people and injuring six. This threat is particularly concerning for the Gulf states as most of their economic diversification agendas depend on secure aviation, logistics, tourism, investment and a stable regional environment.
Yemen and the Houthis have become a collective Gulf security challenge.
Attacks on Saudi transport infrastructure also threaten the wider Gulf by disrupting vital supply routes. The kingdom’s extensive land connections have become increasingly important and provided alternative supply routes for neighbouring GCC states while the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted.
Yemen’s economic collapse, water scarcity and demographic pressures also make its stability a long-term Gulf interest.
The GCC must therefore move beyond expressing support for Saudi Arabia. It should pursue a coordinated strategy that creates a unified GCC agenda directed at strengthening Yemen’s government and establishing a credible political pathway to ending the conflict.
Gulf unity must go beyond condemnation
A collective Gulf response must begin by addressing the divisions that have undermined previous efforts in Yemen. Most importantly, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) must move beyond their damaging confrontation over southern Yemen in early 2026. Despite entering the 2015 intervention as allies, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have increasingly pursued competing priorities and supported rival Yemeni factions.
Reconciliation requires more than expressions of solidarity following Houthi attacks. The UAE should reconsider its support for southern separatist ambitions and work towards a unified but decentralized Yemen that accommodates southern grievances and competing political interests.
Without agreement on Yemen’s political future, renewed military coordination will achieve little.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, must reassess its dependence on established Yemeni partners, particularly the Islah Party, whose alleged Muslim Brotherhood connections have long generated Emirati opposition. Riyadh’s reliance on Islah-linked networks has narrowed its political options and contributed to divisions within the anti-Houthi camp.
Both countries must recognize that their competing relationships with Yemeni factions have weakened the very forces they seek to support. Without agreement on Yemen’s political future, renewed military coordination will achieve little.
Gulf coordination must also be matched by a serious reassessment of Yemen’s internationally recognized government.
The Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), established in 2022 to replace former president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, was intended to unite competing anti-Houthi factions. Yet years of internal rivalries, weak governance, and limited institutional accountability, as well as alleged widespread corruption, have undermined its effectiveness.
Saudi Arabia should continue providing financial support to sustain basic services and prevent economic collapse in government-controlled areas. But this backing should go to the government and cabinet, not the PLC.
The experience of the Hadi presidency serves as a clear warning that a decade of backing an ineffective leadership did little to strengthen the Yemeni state or reverse Houthi gains. Today, Riyadh cannot afford to repeat that mistake.
A more effective governance structure is essential not only to strengthen the position of anti-Houthi forces but also to provide a credible Yemeni counterpart in any future political settlement.
Towards a larger Gulf–Yemeni settlement
Although Saudi-Emirati reconciliation is indispensable, a sustainable Gulf strategy must also involve Qatar and Oman.
Qatar should contribute to a more coherent Gulf political approach in Yemen, including through its media influence and relationships with Yemeni actors. Oman, meanwhile, should retain its role as a diplomatic intermediary. Muscat’s channels with the Houthis and preference for mediation make it particularly well placed to facilitate future negotiations without joining military operations.
The ultimate objective should be a Gulf-backed political settlement that preserves a unified but decentralized Yemen and accommodates its competing political constituencies. All factions, including the Houthis, should be able to participate, conditional on verifiable commitments to relinquish heavy weapons and accept a common political framework. This would require sustained Gulf diplomatic and financial support.
After more than a decade of war, the Houthis still control Sanaa, Yemen’s government remains weak and Gulf divisions continue to undermine efforts to end the conflict. Avoiding another prolonged war requires a common Gulf vision, investment in a functioning Yemeni government and a political settlement that addresses the causes of the conflict, rather than merely seeking to contain its consequences.
After years of sprawling ‘forever’ games, players are rediscovering the pleasures of more focused experiences. Could a new wave of independent arcades bring back the social side of gaming?
There’s an important semi-nostalgic movement happening in games, and I’m excited about where it’s heading. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.
Over the last five years, major publishers, obsessed with the success of “forever games” such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox, have been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into their own sprawling, endlessly updating, battle-pass-infested mega franchises – each designed to take all our time and money. The result has been astounding failures such as Concord, Mindseye and Tales of the Shire. Even the good games – Crimson Desert, Path of Exile 2, Blood of the Dawnwalker – are so bloated they have become the unyielding masters of our precious few hours of free time.
Collaboration will bring together NVIDIA AI technologies and Danaher’s scientific instruments, laboratory workflows and data
WASHINGTON, Oct. 14, 2026 — Danaher Corporation today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to advance autonomous science and help accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. As part of Danaher’s broader effort to shape the future of AI-enabled science, the companies are working to combine Danaher’s scientific instrumentation, automation technologies, laboratory workflow software and domain expertise with NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI technologies. The goal is to help researchers move faster from prediction to experimental evidence, creating a continuous learning cycle where experiments inform models and models help design better experiments.
“AI is reshaping how science is conducted, and Danaher is at the forefront of that transformation,” said Julie Sawyer Montgomery, President and Chief Executive Officer of Danaher. “We are collaborating around a shared vision for more connected, adaptive and accessible innovation, helping researchers solve consequential challenges and translate discovery into human impact.”
“The next era of scientific discovery will be driven by a continuous loop between AI and experimentation,” said Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA. “Together with Danaher, we are bringing accelerated computing and physical AI into the lab – connecting models with instruments and real experimental data, where experiments improve models and models design better experiments, helping researchers compress years of discovery into months.”
Danaher and NVIDIA are working to integrate AI into scientific instruments through edge computing like NVIDIA DGX Spark, accelerated analytics and data processing with RAPIDS, real-time inference, scientific reasoning and foundation model technologies, including BioNeMo Open Models. Initial efforts focus on a select group of priority instruments, with the potential to expand across a broader portfolio over time. The companies are exploring how scientific and physical AI, such as NVIDIA Cosmos world models and Omniverse Digital Twins, can support more intelligent instruments and laboratory workflows, while keeping experimental evidence at the center of scientific decision-making.
The collaboration seeks to advance Danaher’s commitment to connected science by bringing AI, accelerated computing, instruments, workflows and experimental data together to produce experimental evidence. Danaher aims to help researchers reduce the time and complexity of moving from an AI-generated prediction to the experimental evidence needed to act on it, while preserving customer choice in models, standards and technology providers.
Danaher (NYSE: DHR) is a leading global life sciences and diagnostics innovator, committed to advancing the power of science and technology to improve human health. Through our connected ecosystem of industry-leading businesses, we work side by side with customers to solve many of their most complex scientific and clinical challenges—accelerating the moment scientific discovery becomes human impact. Powered by the Danaher Business System, our advanced science and technology and proven ability to innovate help enable faster, more accurate diagnoses and reduce the time, cost, and risk required to discover, develop, and deliver life-changing therapies. Through continuous improvement and operational excellence, our approximately 60,000 associates worldwide are focused on delivering lasting impact and improving quality of life around the world, while building a healthier, more sustainable tomorrow. That’s Innovation at the speed of life. Explore more at www.danaher.com.
Sean Teare, district attorney for Harris county, said video of the incident in west Houston on Saturday morning, in which the officer’s unmarked SUV is seen veering into the man as he runs away across an empty parking lot, could support a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Tom Cruise’s latest film could lose $250m (£190m) – could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich?
It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger.
Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?
Health minister says government ‘did not authorize’ Danish-led hepatitis B trial in babies backed by RFK Jr
Guinea-Bissau has not approved the controversial hepatitis B study in newborns that would be funded by the US government and private partners, the African country’s minister of health said on Tuesday.
The study, which would not investigate the safety or effectiveness of vaccines but would instead track “nonspecific” health outcomes like overall mortality or neurodevelopmental conditions, has been championed by Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime anti-vaccine activist.
The Trump administration may have withheld intelligence warnings to Ukraine about Russian strikes that killed 6 and cut power to 600,000 people, sources say.
Hassan Kariem was a 42-year-old IT manager in the Atlanta Public Schools system, which is remembering him as a "cherished member" of the school community.
The kingdom of Hyrule has been prettified, the soundtrack is newly orchestrated and our hero feels strikingly different under the thumbs … we play a hands-on demo of Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of a 1998 game-changer
When beloved art is revisited and revised, a familiar cry is often heard: “You’re ruining my childhood!” But with Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, there are also livelihoods at risk: specifically, the man running the shooting gallery in Castle Town. In the original 1998 version of the game, he’d rip off players as they funnelled rupees and fudged the then still novel analogue-stick aiming. But in 2026 we have more responsive frame rates and a motion-controlled slingshot that allows precision adjustments. His targets tumble on the first go, and with them his entire business model. Even in Hyrule, the death of the high street seems inevitable.
Bad news for him but great news for Link, a child of the forest who, as in 1998, steps into a vast fantasy kingdom to vanquish a great evil, but now does so with a number of improvements. The boy can now sprint, preventing the ignominy of endless roly-polies to zip across grassy plains. He has a manual jump, free-rotating camera, a scrolling inventory bar that replaces menu screen faff and, crucially, a fatter wallet for holding all those gems he fleeces from struggling shooting gallery owners. Yes, we are being asked to applaud features that have been the norm for decades elsewhere, but it’s undeniably striking to enter familiar territory with a hero who feels this different under the thumbs.
Firms turning crude oil into the ‘workhorse’ fuel stand to gain most despite economic fallout from record prices
Days after Donald Trump announced a deal to import Russian diesel into the US in an effort to lower soaring pump prices, the world’s energy watchdog has warned that the global fuel shortage will drag into 2027.
Trump’s temporary sanctions reprieve was criticised for offering “too little, too late” to temper the sky high pump prices triggered by the shutdown of war-damaged refineries in the Middle East and Russia – once the world’s second-largest diesel exporter behind the US.
Receiver liable for two counts, not liable on eight others
Lakeeta Vaccaro alleged abuse by NFL receiver
A Miami jury on Tuesday found Tyreek Hill liable for two counts of battery but not liable for the eight remaining claims made by Lakeeta Vaccaro – ending the high-profile civil trial involving the NFL wide receiver and his estranged wife.
Hill, who has played for the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins, was found liable for two counts of battery – one stemming from an incident in January 2024, and another from April 2025. The jury awarded Vaccaro $500,000 in compensatory damages but did not award her punitive damages.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 14, 2026 — Eliyan, a leader in foundational connectivity products enabling next-generation AI compute, memory, and networking systems, today introduced the Nexus and Oscar NuLight chiplets, the world’s first 2D microVCSEL interconnect platform designed to extend AI scale-up connectivity beyond the practical bandwidth and reach limits of copper. The platform includes Nexus, a 1.6T reverse gearbox, and Oscar, an electrical interface chip (EIC) that connects high-speed electrical interfaces to microVCSEL and photodiode optical arrays.
Together, they provide scalable building blocks for linking compute resources across large AI systems, providing the enhanced reach, low power, and high reliability that these systems demand.
Eliyan CEO and co-founder Ramin unveiled the technology at this week’s OCP Summit 2026 with a presentation detailing the technology architecture and products.
Addressing the Copper Wall
As AI scale-up domains expand across multiple racks, copper connections face increasing constraints in delivering both high bandwidth and longer reach. Eliyan’s NuLight platform addresses this “copper wall” with a high-bandwidth, high-density architecture that spreads bandwidth across more optical lanes operating at lower data rates than standard PAM4 SerDes connections. Parallel non-return-to-zero (NRZ) optical signaling simplifies per-lane signal processing, enabling more power-efficient optical links than traditional optical interconnects. The microVCSEL-based architecture targets an initial optical reach of approximately 50 meters, with a design objective of combining optical reach with copper-like reliability, availability, and operating characteristics.
“Scaling AI infrastructure requires efficient, reliable connectivity that reaches beyond a single rack,” said Ramin Farjadrad, co-founder and CEO of Eliyan. “We have pioneered another breakthrough interconnect technology that we created from the ground up to solve the copper wall in the AI data center. The industry’s rapid adoption of our proposed 2D microVCSEL interconnect proves Eliyan is on the right track again. With our NuLight chiplet platform, customers can scale aggregate bandwidth through reusable building blocks. At the same time, on-the-fly lane repair addresses the reliability requirements of large AI scale-up and scale-in networks. This is the next step in expanding our platform across the AI connectivity path.”
Nexus Bridges High Speed Electrical Interfaces and Parallel Optics
Designed in TSMC 3nm, Nexus combines power-efficient, configurable-reach 212G PAM4 SerDes with reverse gearbox functionality and high-speed die-to-die connectivity. Its compact footprint supports tight coupling with optical components. The reverse gearbox distributes each high-speed PAM4 electrical channel across four lower-speed NRZ channels, providing the electrical bridge to slow-and-wide optical arrays while supporting fully retimed implementations.
Nexus includes advanced telemetry with forward error correction (FEC) monitoring, termination and regeneration, as well as support for IEEE auto-negotiation and host link training. These capabilities support link diagnostics and management in dense optical systems.
Oscar Interfaces with microVCSEL and Photodiode Arrays
Oscar complements Nexus with laser-driver and TIA electrical interfaces to vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and photodiode arrays in very dense arrays, with state-of-the-art crosstalk cancellation and heat-management schemes.
Optical Lane Repair Supports Reliable AI Connectivity
The platform uses patented technology for its on-the-fly repair architecture that uses spare optical lanes to protect active links. If a lane degrades or fails, the architecture redirects traffic to a spare lane without interrupting link operation. Combined with link diagnostics, this capability meets a critical requirement for AI scale-up and scale-in networks, where interconnect failures cause costly downtime and interrupt massive AI processing operations.
A Modular Platform from OSFP to Co-Packaged Optics
The NuLight platform provides a path to co-packaged optics (CPO), where future versions of Oscar will interface directly with host ASICs using die-to-die connectivity. NuLight’s microVCSEL array approach draws on mature, highly available GaAs laser technology and avoids the need for external indium-phosphide lasers in the optical engine.
Availability
Both Nexus and Oscar chiplets are sampling now.
About Eliyan
Eliyan Corporation develops advanced connectivity technologies that enable next-generation AI, cloud, and high-performance computing systems. Its portfolio of differentiated interconnect technologies, memory expansion, and chiplet solutions addresses critical bandwidth, power efficiency, and scalability challenges across modern compute infrastructure.
Eliyan’s technologies enable customers to build higher-performance systems with greater memory capacity, improved power and area efficiency, and most importantly, higher bandwidth at lower cost. For more information, visit www.eliyan.com.
Iran's Houthi allies launch a new attack on Saudi Arabia and promise more to come as Trump considers U.S. action on the new front line in the wider Mideast war.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump drew widespread condemnation Tuesday after sharing graphic footage of a 23-year-old British man being fatally mauled by a tiger, then posting an AI-generated video portraying himself wrestling and cuddling the animal.
William Chapman died Saturday after entering the enclosure of a Siberian tiger named Altai at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. His family has said he struggled with significant mental illness and asked the public to stop circulating footage of his death because it was causing additional distress.
South Yorkshire Police also explicitly urged people not to share the video.
Trump nevertheless posted footage of the fatal attack to Truth Social with the message, “Don’t ever mess with nature!” The official White House Rapid Response account amplified the post.
Hours later, Trump posted an AI-generated clip showing himself chasing, overpowering and eventually embracing a tiger while “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played. He had also shared a separate montage of people being attacked by lions set to upbeat music.
The posts prompted unusually harsh criticism across the political and media spectrum. Piers Morgan called the video “appallingly tasteless” and urged Trump to delete it, while other commentators condemned the decision to turn a young man’s death into online entertainment.
Authorities are still investigating how Chapman entered the enclosure. The tiger will not be euthanized.
Austin, TX — Voting rights groups are suing Texas after more than 500,000 voter registration applications and updates submitted through the state’s driver’s license system went unprocessed, some dating back nearly a year.
The League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund are asking a state judge to enforce a 2021 settlement requiring Texas to maintain a functioning process allowing residents to register to vote while completing online driver’s license or identification transactions.
The backlog was caused by a software update error involving the Department of Public Safety’s web portal. County election officials received hundreds of thousands of delayed records last month, while separate problems with the secretary of state’s voter registration system have complicated efforts to clear them ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms.
The lawsuit argues that the failures violate the state’s earlier agreement and says some Texans are still experiencing registration problems.
The plaintiffs want the court to order DPS and the secretary of state to maintain a reliable registration system, disclose records explaining the failures and demonstrate compliance within 30 days.
State officials had reportedly been aware of problems with the system as early as March.
DPS and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office had not publicly responded to the latest lawsuit.
Texas AG and US Senate hopeful announced inquiry into alleged conspiracy between pediatricians, vaccine makers and insurance firms
Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and the Republican candidate for the US Senate, is aligning himself with the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement by investigating pediatricians for giving vaccines – actions that could further restrict access to vaccines as deadly outbreaks unfold.
Paxton announced he would investigate an alleged conspiracy between pediatricians, vaccine makers and insurance companies in January, and at least one Texas pediatrician now says she is under investigation. Paxton linked his efforts to a campaign against vaccines from Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and directly referenced the Maha movement in his announcement. The president endorsed Paxton’s Senate run in May.
Third-largest fine in US treasury’s history, due to failure to report suspicious activity, may affect third-quarter earnings
Bank of America (BAC.N), has been fined $1.21bn by US regulators for widespread failures to detect potential money laundering and other illicit activity, a penalty the bank said will hurt third-quarter earnings.
The US treasury department said the fine, the third-largest in department history, is due to the bank’s failure to report more than $5bn in suspicious activity to the government, including $1bn that posed national security-related and other priority illicit finance risks.
Yvette Cooper acknowledges ‘unthinkable pain’ caused by practice between 1930s and 1980s after campaign by Wirral woman and others
The health secretary, Yvette Cooper, has issued a “profound apology” for the “unthinkable pain” caused to parents whose stillborn babies were buried in mass graves.
Parents spent decades not knowing where their babies were buried, owing to a practice in which stillborn babies were taken from mothers at hospital and buried in communal graves.
They were victims, not abusers. That’s what they told police officers, attorneys, visitors and anyone else who would listen. It didn’t matter. The women were all taken to a sprawling immigration detention center in the woods of west Michigan and handed thin jumpsuits — red, to mark them as a high security risk.
Inside the North Lake Processing Center, they talked about the men whose calls to police landed them there. The boyfriends or husbands who threatened to get them deported and cut them off from their children. The men, or sometimes women, who hit them, pulled their hair or choked them, bruising their throats.
They didn’t know where to go for help before, but now, in the confines of a cold cellblock in a former prison, the women helped one another. If one spoke to somebody on the outside who could connect them with advice, legal aid or money for the commissary, she’d pass around a tablet used for calls so others could tell their stories.
Migladys Bermudez, an immigration attorney in southeast Michigan, remembers a call in May from a Peruvian woman detained at North Lake. Her name was Pilar, and she’d heard about Bermudez from a fellow detainee who had been a client. Pilar told Bermudez about the boyfriend she tried to escape before her arrest, when she used makeup to cover the marks she said he left on her face. But he had accused her of being the abuser, resulting in her arrest.
Pilar handed the tablet to a Cuban woman named Leya. Over the echoes of the other detainees’ chatter, she described how her boyfriend insulted her, isolated her and gave her a black eye. Then, after grabbing him by the arm during an argument, she was the one behind bars, separated from their nursing daughter. On video calls, the girl didn’t seem to recognize her mother anymore. She stopped calling her “Mamá.”
Bermudez was taken aback. All three women in that chain — the former client, Pilar and Leya — said they were trying to get out of abusive relationships when they were arrested by local police on domestic violence allegations. In all three cases, the charges were dropped or never filed at all. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the first woman during a routine check-in a few months after her charges were dropped. The others were handed over to ICE by local officials.
It’s long been intimidating for immigrants who suffered abuse to call 911, regardless of who was in the White House. They knew — and their abusers knew — that their immigration status made them vulnerable. But previous administrations treated victims as just that, people who needed help, not as targets for deportation. Bipartisan coalitions in Congress have long supported the Violence Against Women Act, which creates a pathway toward legal status for immigrants who are victims of domestic violence or other serious crimes.
Now, under President Donald Trump, all bets are off. On inauguration day, his administration rescinded guidelines that largely prevented immigration agents from making arrests at sensitive locations — including domestic violence shelters and hospitals. About a week later, the administration eliminated key protections granted to VAWA applicants and other crime victims. For the first time in decades, immigration authorities could disregard those protections and more freely arrest, detain and deport immigrant victims.
Life became more harrowing in other ways for immigrants who were victims of domestic violence. Federal immigration agents made arrests outside specialized domestic violence courts. And the administration persuaded more and more local police and jails to carry out the president’s mass deportation campaign, sweeping still more immigrants into custody.
Even communities without these so-called 287(g) agreements are helping the government round people up. In west Michigan’s Kent County, where Pilar and Leya were arrested, the county jail turned over more immigrants to ICE in the first six months of 2026 than it did during the entire Biden administration.
Advocates across the country say they’re seeing signs of an alarming increase in the numbers of domestic violence victims who are detained and deported. And many immigrants are staying in abusive relationships, fearful of calling for help or even stepping outside their homes.
“It’s just probably the most dangerous time for immigrant women right now who are victims of domestic violence,” said Bermudez, who took on Leya’s immigration case.
The arrest and detention of domestic violence victims is, in part, an unanticipated consequence of an effort meant to keep them safe. In much of the country, law enforcement officers are encouraged — or even required — to make an arrest when they have probable cause to believe that a domestic violence assault has taken place. Sometimes victims are mistaken as the abuser and taken into custody. Then, if they’re immigrants, they can be turned over to ICE — even if they were never criminally charged.
There’s no comprehensive way to track how often this happens or how many domestic violence victims have been detained by ICE or deported. But ProPublica spoke with a half-dozen alleged victims who were locked up together in a single facility, North Lake, and reviewed police records about others who were there, too. Their stories offer a picture of why Congress created programs like VAWA in the first place, and what’s at stake when those guardrails are taken away.
A coalition of immigrant survivors and advocates have sued the Trump administration, saying changes to how immigrant victims are treated not only undermined public safety, but also broke promises enshrined in federal law and policy.
“We were seeing our clients be more scared, be systematically targeted, be arrested, and deported very quickly,” said Kathleen Rivas, supervising attorney of the survivors team at Public Counsel, a law firm that’s involved in the litigation.
In May, a federal judge ordered the government to restore protections while the case played out. The Trump administration has appealed the order.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that ICE is targeting the “worst of the worst.” The real story, she added, is the “American women whose lives have been taken by illegal alien criminals.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “we will never apologize for deporting illegal aliens, because that’s how we save lives.”
But Leya, Pilar and other immigrants we interviewed have no criminal records. And advocates said communities are less safe now because immigrants are afraid to call police when their partners hurt them. This gives more ammunition to the threats of their abusers, said Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit that advocates for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.
“Certainly more immigrant survivors are feeling like the violence and abuse they experience behind the closed door is somehow more tolerable than the violence and abuse they could experience if they tried to leave,” she said.
The first time her boyfriend’s fist slammed into her face was in July 2025, Leya recalled. They were living in Florida with his relatives. Only a month before, Leya gave birth to their daughter.
One night, she said, he heard her laugh in the kitchen with his mother and a man his mother was dating. Leya’s boyfriend flew into a jealous rage, she said, and punched her a few feet from their sleeping baby.
Leya called 911 but hung up when the operator answered. She was afraid of what might happen. She was 26; her boyfriend was a decade her senior. Leya, a recent immigrant from Cuba, had applied for status and was in active immigration proceedings. She said he was a permanent resident, with permission to work in the U.S. and better command of English. She felt trapped.
Sheriff’s deputies arrived and spoke with Leya and her boyfriend. They took photos of her puffy and bruised face, with the white of her left eye bright red. Her boyfriend said the injury occurred during an “argument,” according to the report, but he didn’t specify how. He was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery.
Leya said her boyfriend’s mother threw her out that night. Unsure of where to go, she and her daughter moved in with another one of his relatives. Pursuing a criminal case felt daunting. She said his relatives urged her to drop the charges and reconcile with him. Eventually, she asked prosecutors to drop the charge because the battery took place in “a moment of impulse that he feels very sorry for,” records show. Her boyfriend didn’t enter a plea before the case was dismissed.
Like other immigrants interviewed for this story, Leya asked not to be fully identified because of her pending immigration case, and because she worries about repercussions for her and her daughter.
She and Pilar also asked that ProPublica not interview their alleged abusers because they’re afraid the men will interfere with their cases, hurt them or take away their children. To report their stories and get their partners’ perspective, we reviewed records from law enforcement, immigration court proceedings and habeas corpus petitions seeking their release from detention. We also interviewed attorneys, family and others who interacted with them.
Soon after the Florida arrest, Leya and her boyfriend moved to the city of Wyoming, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids that’s a magnet for immigrants who come for jobs in manufacturing and food processing. The unpretentious city is dotted with temporary staffing agencies, money-wiring businesses and Mexican restaurants.
Leya said their relationship worsened. Her boyfriend pushed her, pulled her hair and broke her phone, she said. He made her delete her social media accounts and isolated her from friends and family. They fought about money and talked about breaking up. One night in April, during an argument, he called the police.
“I’m having problems with my wife,” he said in Spanish, according to a recording of the call. The operator asked if there had been any violence. “No, no, no. None,” he said. “Just a discussion.”
He told officers who came to their apartment complex that Leya got angry because he had talked to an ex-girlfriend, according to body camera footage and a police report. When he tried to leave, he said, Leya pushed him and grabbed his arm. Then she attempted to hang up his phone when he dialed 911.
He said he wasn’t injured, though he accused her of hitting him several times a few days earlier.
Officers interviewed his brother, who mentioned the arrest in Florida, according to bodycam footage. “They had a cycle of problems where she called the police for abuse and he was detained for three days,” he said in Spanish. “My brother is trying to avoid having that happen again.”
The police report doesn’t mention the earlier arrest.
Footage of the interview with Leya was redacted due to state privacy laws, in part because she was interviewed inside their residence, unlike her boyfriend, who was interviewed outside. According to the police report, she “minimized” the argument and said there was no physical contact. She acknowledged trying to hang up the phone.
In an interview with ProPublica, Leya said they argued when she learned he sent money to his ex-girlfriend, who is the mother of his son. At the same time, she said, he had told her he couldn’t afford to buy diapers for their daughter. She said she has never hit him.
Officers arrested Leya on suspicion of domestic assault and interfering with a 911 call. They didn’t arrest her boyfriend or seek charges against him. Leya said she didn’t tell officers she was a victim of abuse because she thought she’d be able to tell a judge.
She never got a chance.
The Wyoming Police Department’s written policy encourages officers to make an arrest in incidents involving domestic violence “when there is reasonable cause to believe an assault was committed.”
Arrests demonstrate that “violence in the home is recognized as a serious crime,” according to Michigan’s law enforcement training manual on domestic violence. This approach is common across the country. Twenty-four states require an arrest when there’s probable cause of a domestic assault.
But domestic violence scenes can be chaotic, with both partners accusing each other of being the aggressor. It can be difficult for officers to understand what happened, said Erin Ross, a former domestic violence prosecutor who works at the national nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice. Sometimes, the wrong person ends up in handcuffs.
The Vera report doesn’t touch on immigration. But Ross and a dozen other domestic violence advocates across the country told ProPublica that immigrants who don’t speak English or understand their rights are, under the Trump administration, especially vulnerable to an arrest that can have irreversible consequences.
ProPublica reviewed hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed nationwide since January 2025, in which immigrants challenged their ICE detention on constitutional grounds. We found dozens of petitioners who were arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and turned over to ICE, even though they were never charged or their charges were dropped. Using jail and police records from Florida and Michigan, as well as newsreports, we identified even more cases.
In their petitions, several immigrants said that officers mistook them for the aggressor. The underlying arrest records show that officers often had to make close calls in messy cases where it was unclear who was the victim and who was the aggressor. Either way, under Trump, there’s little grace for immigrants.
In one case in Florida, a state where sheriff’s offices cooperate with immigration authorities, a deputy came upon a Venezuelan couple arguing in the street in November 2025. In his report, the deputy said the woman pulled at her husband’s pants, necklace and arm, leaving marks on his body. The woman said her husband had taken her keys and phone. She didn’t want to be left stranded, she said, so she ran after him.
She was charged with misdemeanor battery; her husband wasn’t charged. The woman was turned over to ICE while the case was pending. Prosecutors later dropped charges. The sheriff’s report didn’t mention any allegations of prior domestic violence, but the woman later said that, during their marriage, her husband had beaten her and threatened to kill her. In her habeas corpus petition, she said she was “afraid to report the abuse to the police.”
The woman was released in May, but during the five months she was incarcerated, her husband took their daughters out of state, her attorney told ProPublica. She still hasn’t seen the girls in person.
For Leya, it was a shock to find herself handcuffed, sitting in the back of a police cruiser, headed toward the Kent County jail. She was silent during the 15-minute ride, unable to make sense of what had just happened: “I had suffered from domestic violence,” she said. “But the one who ended up in trouble was me.”
The next day, a detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file charges against her. Prosecutors declined to do so,saying there was insufficient evidence, there were no injuries and Leya hadn’t successfully interfered with the phone call.
Still, she wasn’t released.
Leya had no criminal history, apart from this arrest, according to a DHS record. But her fingerprints had been run against state and federal databases, flagging ICE officials who could match them with her prints from when she arrived in the U.S. In addition, Leya said, a jail official asked about her status, and she told him she was waiting for an immigration court hearing.
ICE issued a detainer, essentially asking the jail to hold Leya until agents could pick her up. Kent County officials honored their request. A day later, Leya was at the detention center in the woods.
She cried in despair over her daughter. They’d never been separated. The 80 miles between Wyoming and North Lake seemed infinite. Her breasts ached from the drying milk. Leya wondered whether she’d be deported and if their separation would be permanent.
From a narrow window in her cell, she saw people outside holding signs, protesting ICE. She could hear their chants in English. Though she had trouble understanding them, she felt comforted by the care of strangers.
Inside, she familiarized herself with the routines. She spent most of her time in a large, open room with other women in red. Cameras eyed them as they talked about their children and upcoming court dates. They shared contact information for relatives in their home countries in case one of them got deported and had nowhere to go. To pass the hours, they watched telenovelas, played rounds of Uno and pieced together jigsaw puzzles of forests and farms.
Leya grew close to a few women from Latin America and Eastern Europe who said they, too, had been in abusive relationships. Several had called police for help, records show. A Honduran woman said her partner tried to choke her. A Dominican woman said her husband, a U.S. citizen, hit her, pulled her hair and chased her with a stick.
Then there was Pilar, Leya’s first cellmate. The asylum seeker from Peru had also been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in the city of Wyoming.
Pilar, her boyfriend and her teenage daughter called 911 five times in the 15 months before her arrest, records show. On one occasion, Pilar’s daughter said she worried that the boyfriend would hurt her mom; according to bodycam footage, Pilar assured officers that everything was fine. On another, the man said he experienced mental abuse and wanted to find a shelter. On yet another, Pilar said she just wanted him to leave.
None of these calls ended in an arrest. Officers ensured that the boyfriend had another place to stay when he sought help, and they told Pilar to call back if he tried to return and hurt her, according to the footage. They advised the couple to go to civil court for future disputes over money and property.
In an interview with ProPublica from North Lake, Pilar, 48, said that her boyfriend took financial advantage of her and physically assaulted her. And in her habeas corpus petition, she described the relationship as one of “physical, mental, psychological, economic abuse.” Her sister took a photo of the bruises around Pilar’s neck and feared the worst. “I would tell her to leave that man,” she said.
Pilar said she was ashamed to go to her job at a food-processing plant with bruises on her face. She wondered what her co-workers would think. She distanced herself from relatives and friends. Pilar said she never told the police the full story because she worried about the possible repercussions — not for herself, but for her boyfriend. She didn’t want him to be deported. Despite everything, she loved him and felt he loved her.
One night in October 2025, her boyfriend drove up to their apartment complex in a rental car. The couple argued in the parking lot. He called 911.
“I need police,” he said over and over in English.
Pilar called moments later: “This man is leaving my house and he’s not giving me my keys,” she screamed in Spanish. “This man has hurt me. He has scratched my whole arm.”
When officers arrived, they separated the couple. The boyfriend said that Pilar slapped his head, grabbed his shirt and tried to pull him out of the car while he was in the driver’s seat, according to bodycam footage and the police report. One side of his T-shirt was torn. He said he never assaulted Pilar and any injuries were her own fault. “I’ve never hit her,” he said in Spanish.
He told officers that he’d become a U.S. permanent resident two months earlier and that Pilar was jealous. “She is making this up because she knows she can get papers,” he said.
Pilar insisted she was the victim. She showed officers the scratch marks on her arm and said her boyfriend was to blame. She begged them to make him return the apartment keys, according to bodycam footage and a police report. “I’ve been trying to kick him out for a while and he won’t leave, and he doesn’t want to help pay the rent,” she said in Spanish.
An officer asked how her boyfriend’s shirt got ripped. Pilar said she grabbed onto him when he started driving away in order to avoid being dragged by the car. The officer asked her several more times about the ripped shirt. Pilar told him she wanted to speak to a lawyer.
In their report, police noted that the boyfriend had called 911 first. His shirt was ripped. Pilar’s wasn’t. If the boyfriend had thrown her down, the officer wrote, then her shirt should have been ripped because he was “much taller and heavier (around 80lbs more).”
Her boyfriend wasn’t arrested. Pilar was.
Wyoming Public Safety Chief Kip Snyder declined to speak about the arrests of Pilar or Leya. In an email to ProPublica, he said officers don’t “participate in enforcing federal immigration laws. We encourage trust and cooperation with all residents and aim to ensure that everyone feels safe reporting crimes or seeking assistance.”
Shortly after Pilar’s arrest, a police detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file domestic violence charges against both her and her boyfriend.
Prosecutors declined to file any charges, citing insufficient evidence. Pilar wasn’t released. Apart from this arrest, she had no criminal history, according to DHS records. She also had a pending asylum case.
Still, ICE put a detainer on her and jail officials turned her over.
A few years earlier, Kent County Sheriff Michelle Lajoye-Young said a handoff like this wouldn’t happen.
In 2019, she announced that deputies would stop automatically honoring detainers and instead require warrants signed by a federal judge or magistrate. The move came after a U.S. citizen — a Marine combat veteran — was transferred from her jail into ICE custody.
“There needed to be a judicial oversight inserted into that process to give us the assurance that somebody wasn’t erroneously detained without due process,” Lajoye-Young said around that time.
Trump called Kent a “sanctuary jurisdiction.” The label haunted the county, which in the 2016 election voted for Trump. A national think tank that aims to reduce immigration put Kent County on its list of sanctuary communities, while Republican state lawmakers tried to compel its cooperation with federal authorities.
Yet it’s unclear whether Lajoye-Young ever delivered on her promise. ProPublica requested copies of all department policies, procedures, memos and instructions on how it handles ICE detainers since 2018. None said a judicial warrant was needed. ProPublica also asked for copies of judicial warrants for Pilar and Leya. The county said no such records exist.
Lajoye-Young,who retired last week,declined interview requests. Sgt. Scott Dietrich, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, didn’t directly answer questions about whether the policy was ever implemented. But in a statement he said that detainers are “handled under applicable law and established policy, consistent with our commitment to public safety, due process, and fair and impartial enforcement.”
Gema Lowe, an organizer with the local chapter of an immigrant rights group, said the sheriff had backtracked on her promise and wasn’t being forthright. “I don’t understand why they’re being secretive,” she said.
The shift deepened the mistrust among immigrants in a county with one of the state’s fastest-growing immigrant populations. Lowe,an immigrant herself from Mexico, said she advises victims to think twice before reporting domestic violence to the police because of the risk of arrest and deportation, while pointing them to other local resources like shelters.
She and others said the stakes are especially high now. ICE arrests have skyrocketed under Trump. Nobody is off limits, including immigrants with pending asylum claims and no criminal records.
And more local authorities are helping ICE make arrests. In January 2025, fewer than 150 state and local law enforcement agencies had signed 287(g) agreements with DHS to help carry out the president’s deportation agenda. That number has ballooned to more than 2,600 today.
“Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country,” a DHS spokesperson said. “We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement works together with us.”
Kent County doesn’t have a 287(g) agreement. Still, the jail hands over the vast majority of people with detainers to ICE, records show. Dozens of people who were turned over to ICE this year had their criminal charges dropped, or, like Pilar and Leya, were never charged in the first place.
Dietrich said the dismissal of a criminal charge “does not, by itself, mean the original arrest lacked probable cause.” The sheriff’s office also doesn’t “determine whether criminal charges are ultimately prosecuted, nor does it determine whether an individual is deported,” he said.
DHS told ProPublica in a statement that both Leya and Pilar “illegally entered the country” in 2022 and that both “will receive due process” in their immigration proceedings.
Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker said he hadn’t heard of victims getting detained by ICE after calling the police. In his experience, he said, more perpetrators with active cases get deported.
Becker said he tries to get the message out that his team serves all victims, regardless of their immigration status. He’s aware that immigrants are reluctant to seek help. His own staff has told him that victims are afraid to testify or file restraining orders. They don’t want their partners — often the breadwinners and the fathers of their children — to be deported.
“There’s been a chilling impact to women coming forward in domestic violence situations due to what’s going on,” Becker said.
As the months passed at North Lake, Leya watched as women she befriended started to leave.
Some were deported, including at least two Mexican women who were also arrested in Kent County on suspicion of domestic violence. Others were released. New women took their cells. Some told Leya that they, too, had been arrested after 911 calls about domestic violence.
Leya fought for her freedom. She met with volunteers from Kent County, who raised money to hire her lawyers and pay for a required physical exam and fees. Even her ex-boyfriend, the one who she said gave her a black eye, wrote a letter on her behalf to help her case, calling her “a calm person.” He explained that he had called the police after their argument “escalated” and that “problems are situations that can happen in any relationship.”
Leya, he added, “deserves a second opportunity to remain in this country and be close to our daughter, as our baby truly needs her very much.” While Leya was locked up, their little girl celebrated her first birthday, got her first teeth and took her first steps.
At virtual hearings, Leya sat with her arms crossed, her dark, wavy hair neatly braided in cornrows and wearing an oversized coat over her red uniform. She tried to follow the discussion of people who seemed to have her life in their hands.
In late August, a judge granted Leya bond. While her immigration case played out, she could be free.
It was a profound relief. At the same time, it felt awful to leave behind her friends. It seemed like some of them were never getting out. Pilar was approaching a year in detention.
Four months after her arrest, Leya walked out of the old prison. She thought about how she would live on her own now and support her daughter.
She promised herself she wouldn’t go back to the man who hurt her.
Relatives of William Chapman say footage of attack shared online ‘deeply offensive’ and causing them ‘severe distress’
The family of a man killed by a tiger at a wildlife park in the UK have spoken about their “severe distress” at the circulation of online media after Donald Trump reposted a video of the incident.
Reform leader did not say who should be targeted but party figures have been critical of small boat rescues by RNLI
Charities and volunteers who help asylum seekers get to the UK should face potential criminal prosecution, Nigel Farage has said in an interview with a rightwing US podcaster.
While the Reform UK leader did not specify which organisations should be targeted, he and other senior Reform figures have been heavily critical of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), which has faced a campaign of intimidation for its work in rescuing asylum seekers in the Channel.
Conservative court asked to rule on several signature policies in 2026-27 term – will it rule in president’s favor?
Several of Donald Trump’s second-term policies will be tested at the supreme court in the coming months: it is being asked to rule on challenges to theadministration’s harsh immigration and deportation policies, along with a climate change lawsuit against energy companies and an attempt to loosen restrictions on assault-style rifles.
The Roberts court is often split in favor of conservative issues 6-3, but it has also diverged from Trump on some key cases, leading the president at times to rage against some of the justices he nominated for the bench.
Anthropic says Claude-generated code has scaled so quickly that its existing Git-based infrastructure could not keep up. In response, the company built a custom centralized source-control system called Scion, along with AI-assisted review and search tools. The Register reports: "In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day," the biz said in a blog post on Tuesday. "We don't expect this rate of growth to slow down anytime soon; the latent demand for merging code is practically infinite, and every bottleneck we remove immediately leads to a further increase in the amount of code we produce."
After several months of model prompting and five months of migration, the result is a homemade version control system called Scion, a monorepo scheme that sounds a bit like Subversion, Apache's centralized version control system. [...] Scion has been designed to meet the needs of AI agents, so the client leaves much of the work to the server; the source control queries are exposed via API so internal tools can respond without needing a local repo, and there's less synchronization but more need for server speed.
"In Scion, the unit of work is a 'changeset,' an entry in a write-ahead log," Anthropic explains. "A changeset stores most of what you'd expect from a commit in git. But where a git commit stores a pointer to the tree, a changeset stores a list of the files that changed relative to its first parent, along with content-addressed pointers to the compressed file contents in blob storage." [...] Anthropic says its bespoke system isn't right for general use. There will be no open source release. Nonetheless, the company contends that its own code scaling problems will become commonplace in other organizations over the next few months, so it wanted to share its approach -- having ample funding to pay for writing custom infrastructure tools.
Recent polls show that American voters across the political spectrum are deeply dissatisfied with the Trump administration, and the upcoming midterm elections will provide them an opportunity to express how they feel. The Guardian's reporter Fabiola Cineas breaks down the four key issues that will drive voters to the polls
Vatican says operation on US-born head of Roman Catholic church was ‘successful’. Plus, after six decades in the US, Joni Mitchell has become a citizen
Good morning. Pope Leo XIV, the head of the 1.4 billion-strong Roman Catholic church, has been diagnosed with lung cancer. The Vatican made the announcement after Leo, 71, the first US-born leader to assume the role, underwent an operation and had the lower lobe of his right lung removed. A statement said the surgery was “successful, on schedule and as planned”.
The Vatican said Leo had “now returned to his room” after the operation. All of his appointments have been cancelled until 20 October. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, a practising Catholic who has met the pope, said he and his wife were “united in prayers” for Leo after the diagnosis.
What is the latest in Trump’s legal battle with the BBC? The BBC is asking a federal judge in Florida to force Donald Trump to sit for a deposition as part of the president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster. The president has so far declined to set a date to appear. “Plaintiff chose to file this lawsuit and, in doing so, he accepted the obligations of civil litigation,” the BBC’s motion reads. “The BBC therefore asks the court to compel plaintiff to confirm a date.”
Pledge spanning five years from world’s most valuable firm comes as concerns about AI agents have risen
The $5.5tn (£4.1tn) US chipmaker Nvidia is donating $250m worth of computing power to the UK to support AI safety research.
The donation from the world’s most valuable company comes as the UK government confirmed its AI Security Institute (AISI), which tests advance AI models, will be able to examine cutting-edge technology developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google before they are released.
Phoenix, AZ — Voting-rights organizations, political groups and the Justice Department are preparing unusually large election-monitoring efforts ahead of the midterms, with some groups specifically training volunteers to watch for possible immigration enforcement near polling places.
Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, has begun training “constitutional observers” to monitor polling environments and document activity that could intimidate voters. The group says it is particularly concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement after increased immigration enforcement around parts of Arizona earlier this year.
The Trump administration has said ICE does not plan to target polling locations, and sending armed federal agents to polling sites for general enforcement purposes would raise serious legal concerns. However, administration officials have also said agents could execute warrants at polling places under some circumstances.
Other organizations, including the Save America Movement, National Action Network and several labor unions, are organizing observers in states with competitive Senate races. Their stated goal is to document potential intimidation without directly confronting federal agents.
The Justice Department is also planning a major presence. Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon said approximately 1,000 DOJ personnel could be deployed to monitor polling sites, describing it as the department’s largest election-observer effort.
Election officials note that large monitoring campaigns are announced frequently, though actual activity at polling places is often far less dramatic.
St. Paul, MN — A former Macalester College professor has been charged with felony property damage after allegedly spilling urine on a student’s backpack, causing more than $2,000 in damage.
Paul Fischer, 55, was charged Oct. 7 in Ramsey County with first-degree property damage. According to the criminal complaint, a student left her belongings unattended for about six minutes near Fischer’s office last December and returned to find urine on her backpack and items inside it.
The student later reported the incident to police. Investigators learned that Macalester had documented at least six other urine-related incidents in the Olin-Rice Science Center over roughly a year, including urine found in trash cans, water bottles and faculty decorations.
Police said Fischer acknowledged developing a habit of urinating into a cup and disposing of it in trash cans or laboratory sinks around campus. He allegedly told investigators he believed urine accidentally spilled onto the student’s belongings while he was emptying a container near his office.
The student estimated the damage at $2,070.
Fischer resigned after 25 years at Macalester. The college said his employment ended during the 2025-26 academic year and declined further comment because the criminal case remains pending.
If convicted, Fischer could face up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Chatham House Debates: The world is on the verge of a global financial crisis
24
February 2027 — 17:00 TO 18:00 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House
A moderated debate, under the Chatham House Rule, on the motion: “The world is on the verge of a global financial crisis,” exploring arguments for and against the proposition.
A moderated debate, under the Chatham House Rule, on the motion: “The world is on the verge of a global financial crisis,” exploring arguments for and against the proposition.
Financial crises are often described as impossible to predict, but obvious in retrospect. Despite repeated efforts by regulators, governments and central banks to strengthen the resilience of the global financial system, concerns persist over rising debt levels, geopolitical shocks, asset market valuations and the ability of policymakers to respond to future turbulence.
This Chatham House Debate will examine whether the global economy is heading towards a period of significant financial instability, or whether the lessons learned from previous crises have made the system more resilient.
Under the Chatham House Rule, participants will hear arguments both for and against the proposition before contributing their own perspectives on the risks, vulnerabilities and uncertainties facing the global economy.
This debate will cover:
Are current economic conditions creating the foundations for a global financial crisis?
Which risks pose the greatest threat to financial stability?
Have governments, regulators and central banks made the global financial system more resilient?
Could geopolitical tensions trigger wider economic and financial disruption?
What warning signs should policymakers, businesses and investors be watching?
Is the next major financial crisis closer than many assume?
Airports’ TSA staff have been stripped of their chairs in the name of ‘professionalism’. Most supermarket staff have never had them. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is seated at his desk – and apparently snoozing
Great news for everyone who is soon to fly via a US airport: the Trump administration has just elevated the travel experience. You still risk getting arrested by immigration agents and thrown into a detention centre, but never mind that! Instead, luxuriate in the fact that none of the poorly paid Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff with whom you interact will be sitting down. The government recently got rid of all the chairs at travel document checking stations, arguing that “maintaining a standing posture helps reinforce professionalism” and strengthens “our security posture and … commitment to hospitality”. Funnily enough, border patrol and customs officers have not adopted the same policy. Perhaps because their job tends to involve being as inhospitable as possible.
TSA agents aren’t the only US workers getting sore calf muscles during their shifts. Unlike their European and British counterparts, cashiers at US supermarkets have traditionally been forced to stand while working. The US’s upright obsession seems to be down to a Protestant work ethic and a lack of labour laws. Sitting apparently conveys laziness to the discerning American consumer. Over the years there have been numerous right-to-sit lawsuits pushing back on mandatory standing but, while things are shifting slightly, seated supermarket cashiers are still unusual. One exception is Aldi, which has been expanding aggressively in the US. Cashiers get chairs at Aldi because (surprise) it’s more efficient when your workers’ feet aren’t aching all the time.
A fight over a datacentre in Utah has been a testing ground for citizens’ assemblies, paving the way to oversight
What’s your “(p)doom” – the percentage chance that rogue AI will create an existential catastrophe? Judging by their recent warnings, it is rising among tech bosses.
On 25 September, OpenAI paused training of its latest frontier models as reports of AI agents going rogue mounted. A day later, Australia’s Senate asked the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before an inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents broke into US government websites and an Australian health portal. Both declined.
Richard Wilson is the CEO of Iswe Foundation and Clara Long is the co-executive director of the Bloom Project
Congress calls for Match Group and others to do more to help victims like Mary, who lost $100,000 to app scammer
Mary met a man on the dating app Plenty of Fish in 2024. She told the Guardian she had been looking for a connection, but instead became the victim of a romance scam that cost her almost $100,000.
“There was a lot of conversation, and then it started with the constant contact, pressure and repeated asks for money,” Mary, who asked that her last name be withheld, said in an interview on Tuesday. “It just escalated really, really quickly.”
Sabrina German, a poll official in Chatham county, details a typical election day, the pressure election workers face, and fallout from 2020 disputes
It’s not that Sabrina German doesn’t have political views. But as the director of voter registration for Chatham county, Georgia, talking politics is like breakdancing in traffic. “I don’t talk politics with anyone,” says German; she knows better.
America’s partisan minefield has trained much of the country – aside from that one uncle you avoid at weddings and funerals – to get pretty good at the art of political diplomacy in polite company.
Meta is building a massive data center on the northeast edge of El Paso, Texas, on the New Mexico border. Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
Last December, New Mexico officials celebrated publication of a plan to address climate change, designed to dramatically reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A few months later, just across the state line in Texas, El Paso city officials adopted their own such plan with a similar ambition.
Each report cost millions of dollars to draft, but neither one took into account how the construction of data centers could upend climate goals in both places.
Work is underway in Doña Ana County in southern New Mexico on one of the largest data center developments in the country: Project Jupiter, built by Austin-based Oracle. Twenty miles away in El Paso, construction is underway on another massive data center, this one built by Meta Platforms.
A third, larger data center project is planned less than a 30-minute drive from the Meta site, on the Fort Bliss Army post in east El Paso.
The data centers are “going to undo a lot of the very expensive and very meaningful work a lot of people are doing,” New Mexico state climatologist Dave DuBois told El Paso Matters.
The sites are among a wave of data centers under construction across the country, driven by the rapidly escalating demand for artificial intelligence services like Claude and ChatGPT. Such projects have drawn intense scrutiny in recent months, as residents and elected officials have questioned their impact on communities’ water supplies, household electric bills and air quality. Texas alone has 596 data centers that are either in operation or planned across Texas as of early September, according to research by The Texas Tribune.
But the projects located in this population center of 1.2 million, which encompasses El Paso and parts of southern New Mexico, are particularly notable because of their combined scope. When fully built out, the three data centers, each with its own power plant, will emit millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the planet-warming emissions released by more than two million cars in a year.
They will also release air pollutants like particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, which directly affect local air quality and human health. The Meta and Project Jupiter data centers are expected to release these kinds of pollutants at relatively low levels, according to paperwork submitted to state regulators. But even a small increase in air pollution can still negatively impact communities close to and downwind of the data center sites, said Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside.
“The health impacts can be significant for local communities,” Ren said.
Because Project Jupiter, Meta and the Fort Bliss data centers are in two different states, and because there is no single federal regulation governing climate change or emissions, regulators have largely considered the projects’ impacts separately.
“We’ve never had a national climate law passed by Congress,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “And so what we’ve had in this country are primarily state and local efforts.”
The result is that officials in one state have little say over a project happening minutes away from them.
Texas and New Mexico also take different approaches to dealing with climate change. New Mexico has codified greenhouse gas reduction targets into state law; Texas has not.
A truck sprays water for dust suppression at the construction site of Project Jupiter in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.
New Mexico state Rep. Sarah Silva, a Democrat, represents the community of Chaparral, directly across the state line from Meta’s data center site in northeast El Paso. Her state has the power to regulate air quality and impose noise requirements, but only in New Mexico, not at a Texas construction site, even if it’s only a few hundred yards away.
Likewise, residents living in west El Paso across the state line from Project Jupiter have no say in the project despite sharing an aquifer that crosses the state boundary. Emissions do not remain within the state where they originate, Silva said.
“This is why we need federal regulation,” said Silva. “How do we knit something together that makes sense for our region when actually this is the job of the federal government?”
Though they profess a desire to mitigate the impacts of climate change, local governments in El Paso and Doña Ana counties green-lit these projects in a part of the country seeing rapidly rising temperatures. The counties offered Meta and Project Jupiter tax incentives in exchange for corporate investment in their communities, job creation and, hopefully, the ability to attract more technology companies to the region.
State officials have also provided incentives. More than a decade ago, Texas legislators approved a data center sales tax break, which exempts the facilities from paying sales tax on equipment they purchase, a decision that could now cost the state $3.2 billion in revenue over the next two years, according to The Texas Tribune.
New Mexico lawmakers declined to advance a bill creating a similar tax break for data centers in 2021. But in 2025, they passed an unrelated law allowing large facilities such as Project Jupiter to generate their own electricity using natural gas. The law exempts these private power systems, known as microgrids, from renewable energy requirements, even as New Mexico requires electric utilities to source 50% of the power they sell from clean energy by 2030.
The power plants that keep data centers running typically produce large amounts of emissions like carbon dioxide and methane that drive global climate change over time. Combined, the plants proposed for Project Jupiter and Meta’s data center could emit up to 10 million tons of planet-warming emissions annually. Comparatively, the region spanning El Paso County and neighboring Hudspeth County released 8.4 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2019. (The Army has shared scant information about the Fort Bliss data center, so it’s not clear what level of emissions the facility will produce.)
“This does add to our greenhouse gas emissions in a massive way,” said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “This is a huge source.”
Homes in Chaparral, New Mexico, sit adjacent to Meta’s data center, just over the state border in El Paso, Texas.
An Unprecedented Amount of Energy
Silva, the New Mexico representative, was initially supportive of Project Jupiter, in part seeing it as an opportunity to create long-term jobs. Last year, she voted in favor of a bill that included an amendment — tacked on by state Sen. Michael Padilla, a Democrat from Albuquerque — that allows facilities like Project Jupiter, which aren’t connected to the local power grid, a 20-year exemption from clean energy laws, allowing them to generate all their electricity with fossil fuels.
“We worked this bill pretty much the entire session, but it did not quite get done. So, we found a piece of legislation that was very similar,” Padilla said in an interview last year. “That’s the legislative process. You have to be very creative to get your work done.”
But Silva soon soured on the project out of concern that it won’t employ enough local workers and because it won’t rely on zero-emission renewable energy. Oracle has said the data center will have 750 full-time employees when it’s up and running. The company told Doña Ana County officials in early September that nearly 3,700 people had worked at the site during construction up to that point.
Silva and other state lawmakers have said they voted for Padilla’s bill without realizing the broader implications for a data center project in the southern part of the state.
“State regulators, state legislators, I think, were so caught off guard at the speed at which these hyperscale data centers showed up in all of our communities almost simultaneously,” Silva said. “I would support a moratorium.”
New Mexico state Rep. Sarah Silva was initially supportive of Project Jupiter but has soured on the project over time.
The amount of energy Project Jupiter needs is unprecedented in the region: The data center will receive electricity from an on-site power plant made up of fuel cells built by a company called Bloom Energy. Bloom has said the plant will have the ability to produce up to 2.45 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power around 1.5 million homes and more than El Paso Electric has ever supplied to its 465,000 residential and commercial customers at one time, according to the utility’s corporate reports.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has specifically lauded Oracle’s promise to use fuel cells for electricity instead of natural gas turbines, which would have used more water and produced more air pollution. However, an air permit — a state-granted license that authorizes industrial facilities to emit a predetermined amount of pollution — would allow the fuel cells to produce up to 8.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Lujan Grisham didn’t address questions from El Paso Matters about the impact of these additional climate emissions.
The Meta power plant in El Paso could release up to 1.3 million tons of climate emissions every year, according to an estimate calculated by El Paso Matters based on El Paso Electric regulatory filings and the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions factors. Nancy Seidman, a senior adviser with the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy, also backed up that assessment.
“Regulators should weigh all emissions and other impacts like water usage, noise and local air pollution, which can affect public health, when they make decisions about data center projects,” Seidman wrote in an email to El Paso Matters. “This is particularly important when projects are phased over time, so that an accurate account can be made of the total, holistic impacts.”
The data center planned for Fort Bliss is expected to use 3 gigawatts of electricity that would likely be supplied by natural gas turbines, according to officials with the Department of Defense, who shared details with reporters during a briefing in April. The Army has issued few other details about the project because it is still in “exclusive negotiations” with the developer, Carlyle Group, a large publicly traded private equity firm.
Carlyle Group did not respond to a request for comment.
“These are cities in terms of their electricity consumption,” Peskoe, of Harvard Law School, said of AI hyperscale data center campuses such as Oracle’s and Meta’s. The facilities are cropping up so fast that “the pace of this and the scale of this — I think there’s no real parallel, at least for 50, 60, 70 years, but probably ever for the U.S. power industry.”
Facilities in New Mexico seeking a state air permit are required by law to disclose estimated amounts of air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions the project will release. And the state Environment Department has spent months evaluating Project Jupiter’s air permit application, which was submitted in April. A spokesperson for the environmental department didn’t respond to emailed questions.
By contrast, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality only requires project developers to disclose information about pollutants that affect local air quality, and not about greenhouse gas emissions, which are what contribute to climate change.
So when El Paso Electric sought an air permit last fall for the Meta data center’s natural gas power plant, the utility didn’t have to share estimated greenhouse gas emissions. The Texas commission approved the permit 20 days after it was filed, following an expedited review.
Meta directed questions about its data center’s power plant to El Paso Electric. The electric company declined to share estimates of the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions but said in a statement that the Texas environmental commission had reviewed and authorized the Meta power plant “under a standard permit, which is specifically for projects with limited and well-controlled emissions.” The statement said the facility will “operate in compliance with state and federal standards.”
A spokesperson for the agency said, “All Standard Permits have gone through formal notice and comment procedures and have been adopted by the Commission in a public meeting.”
These plants will be releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases even as climate change has become increasingly evident in the El Paso metro area, which sits where Texas’ westernmost boundary meets New Mexico and northern Mexico. El Paso’s temperatures have risen faster than those of almost any other city in the U.S. since 1970, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit that quantifies climate shifts throughout the United States. Drought driven by climate change has amplified the impact of wind storms that fill the air in El Paso with hazardous dust in the spring and summertime.
This year has been the hottest on record in El Paso through the first nine months of 2026, according to the National Weather Service. Similar records have been set across the state line in New Mexico.
“If we started to do these kinds of things — having big data centers with natural-gas-fired turbines — it’s kind of like bringing back a lot of the retired plants that were more dirty, like coal,” said DuBois, the New Mexico state climatologist.
Fernando Berjano, El Paso’s climate coordinator, wouldn’t comment specifically on effects resulting from the data centers in the region, but he said the kinds of power plants tied to them produce greenhouse gases that will make it harder for the city to meet its climate goals, as well as produce air pollutants.
If emissions increase in the El Paso area, “that has an impact on air quality, that has an impact on pollution,” Berjano said, “which is something that we all know is not good.”
Construction at the Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico
The Road Ahead for Data Centers
Although construction is already underway on the Project Jupiter and Meta data centers, regulatory hurdles remain for both facilities. The public hearing on the Project Jupiter air permit was scheduled to begin Sept. 14, but the New Mexico Supreme Court delayed it when opponents filed lawsuits challenging the state’s approval process and the facility’s use of groundwater.
The state Supreme Court last month lifted the stay. New Mexico more recently appointed an examiner to preside over the hearing that would authorize the facility’s emissions. Other legal challenges are making their way through the court system.
In Texas, El Paso Electric is still waiting for the state’s Public Utility Commission to approve construction of the power plant planned next to Meta’s data center, a decision that could come later this year.
Officials with both Project Jupiter and Meta have said they are taking steps to help mitigate the climate effects of their projects and plan to develop clean energy projects elsewhere to create new electricity sources and offset the greenhouse gases their data center power plants will release. Oracle also maintains that its emissions will be lower than what it sought in its air permit application and that it plans to get to net zero greenhouse emissions by 2031.
“Oracle is committed to building Project Jupiter responsibly and incorporating community feedback into our planning,” the company said in a statement.
Protesters rally against the construction of data centers in their region.
The road ahead for data centers is unclear. Even once-supportive officials have softened or changed course: Last year, Lujan Grisham, New Mexico’s governor, said Project Jupiter “reaffirms New Mexico’s leadership in global trade, advanced manufacturing, and digital infrastructure.” In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott at one point called his state “the epicenter of AI development.”
Now, amid growing opposition to Project Jupiter, Lujan Grisham recently said she takes seriously residents’ concerns about the data center “and expects any data center operating in New Mexico to meet the state’s rigorous environmental standards and use water responsibly.” This summer, Abbott called on the Texas Public Utility Commission to ensure the projects pay for their own infrastructure and don’t lead to higher electricity costs for residents. He also recommended the state Legislature pass a number of regulations related to data centers next year, many concerning water and electricity usage, and recently told the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that do not report their water usage.
Abbott’s new edicts do not address air pollution or climate change, nor the effects that a data center project in one state can have on another.
Texas Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, whose district includes much of west and northeast El Paso, near two of the data center projects, said Abbott’s proposals will likely shape the Texas Legislature’s debate over data-center-related policies next year but called them just a starting point.
“In the governor’s directives, we’re not talking about local control and local autonomy to make decisions on these projects,” he said. “And I do think that that’s a whole other lane of conversation that we’re going to get into next session.”
Why Should Delaware Care? In December, a state task force charged with reworking school district boundaries in Wilmington laid out a plan that would impact tens of thousands of families in New Castle County. Now, its subcommittees must work through details of how the district consolidation could happen, and what it would mean for students and educators.
The Delaware task force that last year recommended the consolidation of four New Castle County school districts is now writing rules for how state officials could carry out the massive plan.
Among the questions its members are considering are how far kids could be bused in a new northern Delaware district, and how much its teachers could be paid.
It comes after five years of deliberation and debate among education leaders and advocates in Delaware’s largest city about where Wilmington’s students should go to school.
Last winter, those conversations led the Redding Consortium — a state task force charged with redistricting Wilmington schools — to recommend that the state consolidate Delaware’s four northernmost school districts. Those include the Brandywine, Christina, Colonial and Red Clay Consolidated school districts.
The recommendation represented a seismic shift in public education in Delaware that, if implemented, could be an answer to decades of questions around where Wilmington kids should attend school. But the idea of intertwining suburban schools more closely with students from the city also sparked a backlash last year.
In December, one Brandywine school board member said such a move would upset the “values” of their district. In response, some in the city characterized the criticism as being tinged with racism.
Now, the Redding Consortium is working to establish standards that a future New Castle County consolidated school district could use to determine attendance zones, feeder patterns and educator salaries.
While Redding Consortium officials say they will not make those decisions directly, their standards will set guidelines for how school officials proceed.
During a public meeting Monday of the Redding Consortium, officials discussed guidelines, such as fiscal responsibility, and how to ensure that kids enrolled in extracurricular activities have transportation home.
Redding co-chair Sen. Elizabeth “Tizzy” Lockman (D-Wilmington) said during the meeting that such standards are important because the task force subcommittees will use them to create recommendations that the consortium will later vote on.
They are doing so even as the idea of consolidating Delaware’s four northern school districts remain hypothetical. Delaware officials – including the State Board of Education, General Assembly, and Gov. Matt Meyer – have not yet approved the recommendation to consolidate the districts.
The earliest the consolidation plan could be approved by all three is next year.
Also during the meeting Monday, Wilmington Mayor John Carney brought up the ongoing thorny issue of closing half-vacant schools.
When discussing the state’s past efforts to desegregate schools by moving Wilmington kids outside of the city, Carney asserted that school officials today could instead close a suburban high school in the Christina School District and bring the kids “closer to home.”
What led up to this?
In 1968, Delaware officials consolidated 49 school districts into 26, but the state law that allowed the move excluded the Wilmington School District from being part of it.
A federal court found in 1974 the state’s Educational Advancement Act to be unconstitutional, and ordered New Castle County to desegregate its schools again. By January 1978, a federal judge issued a desegregation plan that required kids in the city to be bused to suburban schools for nine years, while kids from the suburbs would be bused into the city for three years.
Some students were forcibly bused more than an hour to school from their homes.
By 1981, Delaware created the four districts within northern New Castle County – Red Clay, Brandywine, Colonial, and Christina. The goal of the redistricting then was to assign a section of Wilmington to each mostly suburban district.
In 2000, Delaware lawmakers attempted to reduce lengthy student trips on buses by requiring districts to assign students to public schools closest to their homes.
But today, high schoolers in Wilmington don’t have the option to attend a traditional high school within the city. And for some enrolled in the Christina School District, their high school can be 15 miles away in Glasgow.
The Vibe Check: Shorebreak Lodge Concept: Inventive food with a relaxed South Beach atmosphere Average entrée price: $35.38, and prices range from $16 to $50 Kids’ Menu? No Alcohol? Yes Vegetarian-Friendly? Yes Gluten-Friendly? Yes Live music? Yes Hours: Sun-Mon closed, Tues-Thurs 5 to 9 p.m., Fri-Sat 5 to 10 p.m. Website:https://shorebreaklodge.com/ Address: 10 Wilmington Ave., Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971
On a Sunday evening, Ben and Diane Winiarczyk struggled to fall asleep — but not because they had a bad case of the Sunday scaries. Their Rehoboth Beach restaurant, Shorebreak Lodge, is closed on Sundays and Mondays.
Instead, they were nervous about accepting the Restaurateur of the Year Award at the Delaware Restaurant Association’s annual Cornerstone Awards, which were held Monday, Oct. 5, at 1313 N. Market St., the former Hercules Building, in Wilmington.
Diane and Ben Winiarcyzk, owners of Shorebreak Lodge in Rehoboth Beach, received the Best Restaurateur of the Year Award at the Delaware Restaurant Association’s 2026 Cornerstone Awards. | PHOTO BY WAYNE BARKSDALE, COURTESY OF UNITED CREATIVE EXCHANGE
Ben, who has a quiet voice and reserved demeanor, had to make a speech. He’s more comfortable chatting with guests at Shorebreak’s bar than standing on a podium on a balcony above 400 upturned faces.
Most of the guests are seasoned pros, and the Winiarczyks had little formal restaurant-management training before buying Shorebreak in January 2024.
The recognition surprised them. But when Ben held the award, he marveled, “I guess it’s true.”
Association members and consumers had been buzzing about Shorebreak for some time, said Meghan Gardner, its vice president.
“We heard about the food, the choice of portion sizes, the beverage program, and the service. It wasn’t just one thing people were talking about. It was the whole experience,” she said.
Moreover, the Winiarczyks’ journey into the restaurant industry was a “compelling story,” said Mike Stiglitz, the association’s board chair and founder of Two Stones Pub.
That story starts in 1988, when Ben and Diane were high school seniors.
They met while cruising Newark’s Main Street, the “American Graffiti”-esque stage for teenage socializing. Diane attended Newark High School; Ben went to North East High School in Maryland.
Day scallops and short rib, a novel take on surf and turf, were on Shorebreak Lodge’s menu long before the Winiarczyks purchased it. | PHOTO COURTESY OF CREW MEDIA CO.
They wed in 1993 and pursued their different careers. Diane, a CPA, became chief financial officer of St. Andrew’s School in Middletown. Ben taught himself animation and programming and developed browser games for clients including Mattel and Disney.
They bought their Rehoboth Beach condo in 2010 and moved into it full-time in 2018, after selling their Middletown home. Ben began bartending locally, starting at JAM Bistro. He joined Shorebreak in 2019, and Diane helped then-owner Kate Wall with the books.
Wall was the second owner of the Wilmington Avenue restaurant, founded in 2011 by chef Rob Stitt, who also started Eden, and Matt Sprenkle.
Stitt modeled the concept after Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink in Miami’s Design District, which pairs inventive food with a relaxed atmosphere.
Shorebreak’s South Beach vibe comes through in its blocky white bar, cushioned white barstools and bare tables surrounded by white chairs. At one table, tufted, armless sofas provide seating. Purple lighting once dominated; over time, the accent colors and artwork became more coastal.
The menu retains its original playfulness, a grouping of food into categories: “Gather” for vegetables and salads, “Hunt” for meat and “Fish” for seafood. Several dishes come in half or full portions, allowing guests to share or build a meal around their appetites.
Shorebreak Lodge’s large white bar, chairs and tufted sofa gave the restaurant a South Beach look in 2011. The Winiarczyks, the third owners, used art and paint to give the space a more coastal feel. | PHOTO COURTESY OF CREW MEDIA CO.
“I love that there’s a bit of a ‘choose your own adventure’ approach to dining there,” said Gardner, who previously owned Blue Moon with her husband Lion, a chef. “You can make it whatever kind of experience you’re looking for that night. I think that’s really smart and responsive to how people are dining today.”
Although the Winiarczyks knew Shorebreak as customers and workers, Diane was initially hesitant about ownership. Ben had long wanted to own a restaurant, but he’d pictured a coffee shop. Regardless, they leaped.
A spread of dishes available at Shorebreak Lodge. | PHOTO COURTESY OF CREW MEDIA CO.
Their financial and creative backgrounds provided a business foundation, and their travels shaped their vision. In short, they wanted to create a restaurant they would visit frequently.
Diane handles the administrative duties, but both manage the kitchen team.
“We are very hands-on with menu development, new recipes and plating,” Ben said. “We have an amazing team that sources fresh ingredients and executes each dish to meet our standards.”
Gardner was impressed by their investment in employees. The couple nominated server Kara Teat for the restaurant association’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator with Goldey-Beacom College and supported her through the program. After she completed it, they promoted her to assistant manager.
“I love that story because it shows they’re not just talking about investing in their people. They’re actually doing it,” Gardner said.
As for the bar program, Ben’s cocktails have earned recognition. His Vietnamese Coconut Coffee Cocktail won first place at Aqua Bar & Grill’s espresso martini contest, and his Ginger Yuzu Margarita won first place at Developing Artist Collaboration’s TacoMania.
His process is painstaking. For his clarified Long Island cocktail, he measures ingredients by the gram and uses a centrifuge to clarify the lemon juice and cola, removing harsh bitterness and artificial color, he said.
Ben Winiarcyzk, right, became a bartender after moving to Rehoboth Beach in 2018. He and his wife, Diane, left, now own Shorebreak Lodge, which has won several first-place prizes in local cocktail contests. | PHOTO COURTESY OF CREW MEDIA CO.
“You end up with a perfectly clear cocktail that takes you back but surprises you with the balance and quality,” Ben said. “This might sound like a lot of trouble, but we have the philosophy that no effort is too great to bring our guests the best cocktails we can.”
Based on social media posts, customers are appreciative.
“We have been several times this summer. Food is always delicious. The staff is wonderful. And the bartenders are the best. It’s become our go-to place for a nice meal (and an) elegant but relaxing experience,” Rose Mili wrote.
Bob Yesbek, also known as restaurant critic The Rehoboth Foodie, singled out on-site ownership and Ben’s presence behind the bar. He also praised the service.
Personal chef and musician Paul Cullen saluted the couple for building on the founders’ work.
“Ben and Diane took the incredible foundation built by Chef Rob and Matt — amazing food, a fantastic vibe, and a passion for hospitality — and brought it to the next level,” he said.
The owners say Shorebreak’s reliability helps turn first-time diners into regulars.
“Providing a consistent experience gives our guests comfort in recommending Shorebreak to friends, bringing friends in to dine with them and coming back time after time,” Ben said.
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware police departments have been using Flock cameras — modern, artificial intelligence-backed automatic license plate readers — to fight crime. But the public has raised privacy concerns over the technology. Now, state police regulators are planning to implement statewide standards for how law enforcement agencies can use the cameras.
Delaware police leaders took steps toward creating statewide regulations for the use of controversial Flock cameras this week, though no policies have formally been put in place.
While license plate reading technology has been used in law enforcement for more than 20 years, newer Flock cameras — a name referencing the largest company producing the cheap and easy-to-deploy technology — have come under fire in recent months.
The public outcry largely comes from fears of government surveillance, Flock’s use of advanced artificial intelligence to track vehicles and the overall lack of regulations surrounding the cameras’ implementation.
One of the biggest draws of the technology is an owner’s ability to tap into a federal data sharing network that tracks detailed vehicle information as well as arrest warrants and other criminal information about a vehicle’s owner.
But without standards in place, police departments across Delaware have discretion over how long they can retain their Flock cameras’ data for, and with whom they share that data with.
This means, for example, while the Georgetown Police Department has chosen to open a transparency portal to let the public know which other police jurisdictions the Sussex County seat shares its Flock data with, other police departments in the state are not required to do so.
To address these discrepancies, the Delaware Police Accreditation Commission (DPAC), an oversight body responsible for setting law enforcement standards, appointed its new administrator Kelli Burns to draft regulations for police departments across the state during its quarterly meeting on Tuesday.
Those draft regulations will address hot-button issues such as how long license plate reader data is retained by law enforcement agencies and rules surrounding out-of-state data sharing.
The commission is next set to meet on Jan. 12, 2027, when members will discuss Burns’ draft regulations. It is unclear when those regulations would be fully implemented.
Addressing data privacy concerns
DPAC Vice Chairman Richard McCabe cited concerns over the data-sharing agreements police departments have with out-of-state agencies as one of the main areas of focus for the draft regulations.
McCabe, who also serves as chief of the New Castle County Police Department, suggested assigning a system administrator within each police department to oversee Delaware officers who wish to make out-of-state searches as a possible remedy.
McCabe also suggested creating a regional data sharing agreement with New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania. If sharing is needed beyond those states, Robert Wallace with the Delaware State Police suggested the Delaware Information and Analysis Center, a joint intelligence agency operated by local and state law enforcement alongside the Department of Homeland Security, would oversee those requests.
Data-retention times also were debated during the meeting. The maximum retention time in Delaware is currently five years, but leaders agreed it was too long.
Dover Police Chief Thomas Johnson asked for regulations that would allow law enforcement agencies to retain Flock data for 30 days. This timeframe could impact the success likelihood of more sensitive cases, like sexual assault, that typically are not reported day-of, he said.
“We’re manpower-restricted, we’re resource-dependent, and sometimes when you finally shake a fact loose that you can run with to try to bring justice back, I would hate to miss a deadline,” Johnson said.
Dover Police Chief Thomas Johnson. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Commissioners agreed that 60 days of data retention would be optimal for balancing investigatory needs and privacy concerns.
Questions remained after Tuesday’s meeting about how often audits would be conducted to identify any misuse of the Flock network as well as exact protocols for data retention.
Those questions, said DPAC Chairman and Delaware Public Safety and Homeland Security Secretary Joshua Bushweller, will be addressed in Burns’ draft regulations.
How will Delaware decide on guardrails?
The DPAC will mainly rely on regulations set by the national version of their organization, the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, McCabe said.
He also said the Newark Police Department is being looked at as a model policy.
The department has developed a training presentation for its officers on how to use Flock network data responsibly, and it also has recently decided to not automatically share its data with out-of-state agencies.
If Newark police decide to share data with another state, that decision must go through a documentation process.
DPAC is set to meet next on Jan. 12, 2027, where Burns will present her draft regulations to the group.
From the FBI to local police departments, US authorities are increasingly warning of would-be terrorists using chatbots to plan attacks and anti-AI extremist threats
In May 2025, a 25-year-old man detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic, killing himself and injuring four others. For many, it was a wake-up call about the threats to reproductive care facilities. For the FBI, though, it was also a sign of what the agency had feared for years: bad actors were using generative AI to plan and execute terror plots.
The suspect used an unnamed generative AI tool that failed to detect his request for bomb-making instructions, law enforcement officers wrote in a previously unreported document reviewed by the Guardian. The privacy of his conversation with the AI chatbot hindered alerting police that someone was looking up how to make a bomb, according to the memo.
How extremists could use AI to devise attacks and recruit new members
How AI could be used to disseminate and produce everything from deepfakes to election misinformation and child sexual abuse material (CSAM)
How people seeking information on how to make weaponry or bombs could use AI to circumvent police detection
How to ensure that officers could take advantage of AI tools in policing, for things like social media monitoring, while managing public concern over the use of these tools
Monitoring social media for opposition to AI and potential extremist attacks on datacenters
The raid is meant to cast an air of suspicion and criminality over Democratic candidates who, like Omar, are facing the voters in a matter of weeks
On Monday, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the Washington DC area home of Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman and a progressive Democrat, in the latest instance of Donald Trump’s effort to weaponize the national security state to harass, punish and embarrass his political opponents.
The raid, which was approved by a judge after a reportedly extensive back-and-forth with federal security officials, was nominally carried out in connection with a spurious criminal investigation into Omar’s childhood immigration to the US.
(The Center Square) – Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins and incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff addressed affordability at the end of their second debate on Tuesday night, prompted by a question from a moderator.
Special forces officer Serhii Kuznetsov denies involvement in the 2022 blasts that left pipelines badly damaged
A Ukrainian soldier has gone on trial in Hamburg accused of taking part in one of the most brazen acts of sabotage in postwar European history – the 2022 attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany.
Serhii Kuznetsov, a special forces officer from the Ukrainian military, is accused by prosecutors of being an accomplice to war crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure, causing an explosion, damaging property and disrupting public services.
Kristalina Georgieva says online fraud could lead people to opt out of system and turn to ‘shoeboxes under their bed’
The heads of the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund have issued a stark warning that rising cyber-attacks risk undermining trust in the financial system.
Speaking on a panel about online fraud at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, pointed to alarming headlines about self-replicating AI agents hijacking personal devices, and the French supermarket hack that heated fridges up to 50C.
Cincinnati, OH — Cincinnati Public Schools has created what officials say is the nation’s first school district-owned parking lot where families experiencing homelessness can safely sleep in their vehicles overnight.
The Safe Sleep Lot opened April 30 at William Howard Taft Elementary School and has served more than 300 people. The 12-space lot operates nightly from 9:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. and typically hosts three to eight families.
District officials developed the program after seeing a growing number of families living in cars and struggling to find safe places to park. Nearly 2,650 Cincinnati Public Schools students, about 8% of district enrollment, experienced homelessness during the 2025-26 school year.
Families staying at the lot receive access to security, bathrooms, showers, Wi-Fi, food and other basic supplies. Children are also connected to school enrollment and transportation services.
One major benefit is that families can be quickly verified as homeless and added to shelter waiting lists, a process that can otherwise take much longer for people moving from place to place each night.
The lot also provides temporary hotel stays and connects families with housing services. Shelter waits can still last one to two months.
District officials hope the model can eventually be replicated by other school systems facing similar increases in student homelessness.
Investigators determined professor responsible for urine found on a backpack, in trash cans and in water bottles
A former professor at Macalester College in the Minnesota city of St Paul is facing a felony charge for allegedly spilling his urine on a student’s backpack while he still worked at the school, costing more than $2,000 in damages, according to a state criminal court document.
Paul Fischer, 55, is at the center of the bizarre, alleged workplace misconduct case that led to his being cited for first-degree damage to property – and linked to at least a half dozen such incidents involving urine at the liberal arts college over the course of a year.
The original bear and his friends are being held at the New York Public Library, against the will of some British fans who say it’s time for them to come home.
The damage identified by inspectors the contractor commissioned is far more extensive than has been previously reported, a document obtained by The Post shows.
The once heroic boxer showcases a frankness in this compelling new series but also an unwillingness to take accountability for his darkest moments
Mike Tyson never envisioned old age. And yet here he still is, having outlived his parents, Brooklynites of ill repute who died when he was a teenager, and the Brownsville tough guys who teased him for being scrawny and having a lisp. Here he is after doing hard time for rape in his prime, winning and losing great fortunes and battling addiction to drink, drugs and fame. Here he still is, 60 years old and a grandfather now, mixing it up with Jake Paul in the ring, opening up to manosphere-adjacent podcasters, bobbing into an impromptu White House press briefing – Māori face-tattoo unmistakably in the frame – while on a DC visit to buck up his old pal as his party faces a bleak midterm forecast. “I don’t have to exist,” the champ says in Tyson, the latest four-part vanity project on his turbulent life and times. “Some reason, something allowed me to exist.”
In his heyday, Tyson was a mesmerizing sporting event unto himself – the ruthless knockout machine who struck fear into opponents at first sight, felled them in seconds and looked back on the carnage with cool nonchalance. His darkest episodes – the combustive relationship with actor Robin Givens, the six-year prison sentence for rape, biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear – only deepened the public fascination with him, adding to the lore of boxing’s baddest man. In the winter of his life, Tyson’s self-reflection, so deep it tips into self-parody, is the enthralling spectacle now. And if generations of Black comedians have proved anything, it’s that the appetite for Mike Tyson impersonations is inexhaustible.
Canada-born singer-songwriter, 82, posts footage of citizenship ceremony to Instagram
Joni Mitchell has become a US citizen, after first moving to the country in the mid-1960s. The Canada-born singer-songwriter, 82, posted footage of her citizenship ceremony on her Instagram account, along with a photo of her next to an American flag, accompanied by the caption: “A journey that began 62 years ago.”
It means that Mitchell can now vote in US elections, something that she had complained she wasn’t able to do.
Technology experts Kathleen Curlee and Sam Bresnick argue that China is catching up to the United States in space, commercially and militarily. This poses a threat to U.S. military operations, which rely on space-based capabilities. Washington must invest in space defense and also reduce its reliance on the domain.
Discovery+ has raised prices for new subscribers, increasing its ad-free plan from $10 to $12 per month and its ad-supported plan from $6 to $7. The hike comes shortly after Paramount Skydance acquired Warner Bros. Discovery. Ars Technica reports: The new prices take effect for new subscribers immediately. Current subscribers to the streaming service, which primarily features unscripted content, like reality shows and documentaries, will receive 30 days' notice before the new prices take effect, starting with bills issued as of November 12. [...] However, a Skydance spokesperson told Ars Technica that the pricing changes were in the works before Discovery+ knew about the merger's closing date and were not planned in anticipation of a merger.
The spokesperson said that Discovery+'s prices are regularly evaluated to ensure that they are in line with the content and experience that the service offers, and the new prices reflect that. Discovery+ has increased its prices three times since launching in 2012. Before today, the most recent price hike occurred in January 2025, when ad-based monthly subscriptions increased from $5 to $6, and ad-free plans went from $9 to $10.
In this episode of Guardian Australia’s US politics podcast, co-hosts Reged Ahmad and Jonathan Yerushalmy take a look at the midterms, which are coming up in early November. All 435 house seats are up in this election as representatives only serve fixed two-year terms. In the Senate, 35 of 100 seats are up for grabs too, as senators serve six-year terms.
There are many predictions of a blue wave – a big win for the Democrats, who are tipped to take back the House and Senate. But are pollsters being too optimistic? What are the factors that could instead allow the Republican party and the Trump administration to hold onto power in Congress? They also look at why the US ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, has been ousted from her job – and whether criticism of the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, is fair
In today’s newsletter: The collapse of the UK’s ‘one in, one out’ asylum deal with France exposes the limits of border enforcement that did little to stop crossings, and only made them more dangerous
Good morning. You’d be forgiven for missing it. Earlier this month, the government quietly scrapped its “one in, one out” deal with France. The partnership was supposed to eliminate small boat crossings by deterring asylum seekers from making the treacherous journey across the world’s busiest shipping channel.
The deal, which lasted just 423 days, was beset with problems, had a negligible impact, and now joins a long list of policies that have tried and failed to address highly visible, often tragic small boat crossings. This morning, the Home Office announced that it would be doubling the number of riot police along the French coast in lieu of the deal.
UK news | Extremists holding anti-immigration opinions are becoming increasingly likely to consider carrying out terrorist attacks against immigration centres and asylum hotels, the head of MI5 has warned.
UK politics | Nigel Farage has denied that a Reform UK government would authorise lethal force against small boat crossings in the Channel.
Ukraine | Andy Burnham will host Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Downing Street on Wednesday as the UK seeks to further underline its support for the Ukrainian president, in contrast to his difficulties with Donald Trump.
US politics | Kimberly Guilfoyle is stepping down as US ambassador to Greece after weeks of reports that she sought payment from a Trump donor in exchange for access to administration officials.
Pope Leo XIV | Pope Leo has lung cancer, the Vatican said late on Tuesday. Leo, 71, underwent an operation and had the lower lobe of his right lung removed, with tests confirming a diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma, the Vatican said.
Republican senator Dan S Sullivan is vying for re-election against Democrat Mary Peltola – and another candidate called Dan J Sullivan
Donald Trump has encouraged Alaskans to vote for the “real” Dan Sullivan, as he sought a breakthrough for the Republican incumbent senator in a tightly fought Senate race complicated by a rival candidate with a near-identical name.
Sullivan’s re-election campaign this year against Democrat Mary Peltola, a former US House lawmaker, has turned into one of the most hotly contested battles of the midterm elections, in which Democrats are hoping to seize back control of Congress and hamper Trump for the final two years of his presidency.
Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das will spend spend five days in prison for entering Delhi’s Jantar Mantar – a historic protest site that has been closed by authorities
Two leaders of India’s youth-led Cockroach movement have been sent to jail for five days for violating a ban on protests at a site in central Delhi.
A court ordered that Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, leaders of the Cockroach Janata party (CJP) movement, spend five days in Delhi’s Tihar prison for jumping over police barricades, holding up slogans and waving the Indian flag at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.
District court judge Timothy Kelly was ruling after Trump administration blocked access to three outlets last month
A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to continue allowing journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to access the building as the media coalition’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.
Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.
President Trump granted onstage pardons to two Alaska auto shop owners who pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act during a rally Tuesday — an unusually public use of the president's clemency power.
Rights groups warn of Tehran regime’s increasing use of executions to suppress dissent, with at least 600 this year
Human rights groups have raised the alarm over the growing number of death sentences and executions in Iran, after reports that a 23-year-old woman, Najmeh Amini, has been sentenced to death for blasphemy over a social-media post.
Amini, an accounting student, is being held in Vakilabad prison in the north-east city of Mashhad. She has been sentenced to more than 12 years in prison and death in separate cases heard by a revolutionary and a criminal court.
Faced with deadlier threats, demining groups are coming up with new ways of working using drones and AI
Crouched over on her hands and knees in a field of weeds, Olena Kabanova is digging into the ground. With a shovel and a steady hand, the 58-year-old digs out a neat square around the spot where a mine detector has sensed a suspicious object.
Four years ago, this field in eastern Ukraine was occupied by Russian soldiers. Now back under Ukrainian control, it is littered with landmines. Civilians such as Kabanova are trying to make the land usable again.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: An OpenAI employee was arrested after a "sophisticated recording device" was found hidden inside the executive conference room. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, who is a national of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was arrested in connection with the matter, the DOJ said. The company said an employee planted the device a few days before it was found, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation "moved quickly to make an arrest," the post said. The employee was terminated.
FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement that Alfozan "allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer's executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company's super intelligence technology." Alfozan is also listed as a partner at Raed Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, according to its website. The firm announced on Feb. 6, 2025, that H.H. Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, had joined the firm as a venture partner. Alfozan was announced as a venture partner two days later. The Raed announcement for Alfozan lists Meta, Microsoft and SAP as previous roles and said he studied computer science and engineering at MIT. "At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data," OpenAI said in the post. "We take protecting our technology, data and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance."
Freddy Peralta pitches six scoreless innings in 3-1 win
José Ramírez error opens door to three-run fourth
ALCS heads to Cleveland at 1-1 for Thursday’s Game 3
Freddy Peralta pitched six innings of four-hit ball, Liam Hicks lined a two-run single after a fielding error by José Ramírez and the Tampa Bay Rays beat the Cleveland Guardians 3-1 on Tuesday night to level the American League Championship Series at 1-1.
Game 3 of the best-of-seven series is Thursday night in Cleveland.
Dolly Parton's nephew disputed a restraining order that was filed against him by her estate, which accused him of threatening to do violence and destroy her legacy and business empire.
Born into a small village in West Bengal, Shahida Fakir had always taken her vote for granted. That was, until it was suddenly taken away. She presented officials with her Indian birth certificate and family land documents from the village going back to 1962.
Both her parents had been on the electoral roll going back decades, so she showed proof of that too. But when the final revised voter list came out in April, Fakir was not on it.
Ahead of her White House podium debut, Katie Zacharia reportedly monitored Donald Trump’s public schedule every day, and monitored his Truth Social, and made sure she was on-air when she assumed he might be watching, according to Politico, citing a person familiar with the matter.
That source noted that and a number of high-profile conservative anchors – including from Fox News, Newsmax and OANN – also backed Zacharia for press secretary. She is now set to the sixth person to hold the role throughout both of Trump’s terms in office.
Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican challenger Mike Collins traded attacks over the 2020 election and alleged connections to white nationalists. Ossoff also pushed back on speculation that he could run for president in 2028.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to move forward with an investigation years ago based on similar allegations, said one person, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not been made public.
The US were on the verge of losing two straight at home, but second-half goals from Ashley Sanchez and Mallory Swanson salvaged a draw
It was nearly time for the panic button. Maybe not to press it, but to acknowledge that it’s within reach. A listless, shorthanded US women’s national team were struggling against Spain, down 2-0, and facing the ignominy of two straight losses at home after being badly exposed in Saturday’s 2-0 defeat in Washington DC.
Then two players who had just returned to the team after long absences turned the tide. Ashley Sanchez and Mallory Swanson, after international goal droughts of 1,648 days and 801 days respectively, each scored in the second half to earn a 2-2 draw with the reigning World Cup champions.
FSB security agency said reporter was arrested on island of Sakhalin, alleging he was collecting information about Russia’s defences
Russia has arrested a Japanese journalist on the far east island of Sakhalin and accused him of spying, in the latest sign of rising tensions between Moscow and Tokyo.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova identified the reporter as Yuki Imai, from the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper, adding that he had been accused of “conducting espionage activities on Russian territory”.
Sacramento, CA — California reparations advocates are pressing for broader compensation and policy changes after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law requiring large corporations to disclose historical ties to slavery.
Assembly Bill 2599 requires companies doing business in California with more than $100 million in annual worldwide revenue to examine historical records and disclose whether they or related entities participated in slaveholding, financing, insurance or other slavery-related transactions.
Kristin Nimmers of the California Black Power Network said advocates view the disclosure law as only one step toward reparations. She argued that compensation should be based on specific historical harms rather than limited to a single payment.
California’s reparations debate remains far from settled. The state’s Reparations Task Force issued an extensive report in 2023 recommending numerous remedies involving housing, education, health, discrimination and economic inequality, but lawmakers have not approved the large-scale direct cash payments that generated the most national attention.
Advocates themselves also disagree over eligibility. Some groups argue reparations should primarily benefit descendants of people enslaved in the United States, while others favor a broader approach covering Black residents who experienced later forms of government-sanctioned discrimination.
Newsom has generally supported reparations-related studies and targeted reforms while remaining cautious about costly direct-payment proposals.
Microbiologist Aili Wang, 32, poisoned tea of colleague in Wyoming who had pending patents, prosecutors allege
A Wyoming microbiology graduate student from China has been arrested on accusations she poisoned the tea of a colleague who had pending patents and with whom she did not get along, then tried to flee the country after police questioned her.
Aili Wang, 32, was arrested 6 October at Los Angeles international airport, where prosecutors allege she sought to return to China. With her were laptops, electronic storage devices and documents now in the possession of police, who allege Wang was seen on surveillance video rummaging through the desk of the victim who specialized in technology for disease treatment – research similar to work she had done in China.
Are you aware of ReFS, Microsoft’s next-generation file system for Windows? I’m sure the average OSNews reader is, but I really wonder how many people are using it out in the wider world, even though Microsoft keeps improving it. Since earlier this year, Windows Server and Windows 11 can boot from ReFS volumes, and it’s used by Windows’ Dev Drive feature as well.
What Microsoft doesn’t seem to want, though, is people using ReFS on removable drives.
Starting with Windows updates released on and after October 13, 2026, Microsoft is making hardening changes to the Resilient File System (ReFS).
This article describes Windows hardening changes for ReFS volumes that are mounted from removable media. ReFS on removable media, such as a USB disk, is not a supported configuration. The changes add auditing and enforcement controls that help administrators identify these volumes and prevent them from being mounted.
I’m oddly fascinated by this. Apparently, there are enough people out there trying to use ReFS on removable media to warrant the above auditing and enforcement controls, which is fascinating in an of itself. On top of that, using ReFS on removable media is apparently also dangerous enough – which raises the question of why, exactly, it’s so dangerous in the first place. Microsoft doesn’t really explain itself here, other than saying it’s “not a supported configuration”.
I wonder if and when Microsoft will move from NTFS to ReFS as the default file system for new Windows installations. It’s been around for quite a while now, and there’s no denying that competing operating systems, especially in the server space, have file systems that are far superior to NTFS (like Btrfs, ZFS, and others), and I’m assuming Microsoft would love to catch up. It’s been a long time since Microsoft changed Windows’ default file system, however, and with the massive number of people using Windows, it’s not something to take lightly.
Then again, Apple migrated hundreds of millions of iPhones, iPads, and Macs to a brand new file system without anybody noticing a thing, and as far as I can recall, without any problems.
Both NeXT and Improv brought innovative solutions to their respective computing questions of the day. NeXT made UNIX palatable to those scared of the terminal, debuted Display Postscript on a mega-pixel display, and made development for the system a snap. Improv rethought multi-dimensional data modeling, offered English-like formulas, and made it easy to rearrange data views on a whim.
The bones of both remain to this day. NeXT’s operating system, NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP, morphed into macOS, and by extension iOS. Lotus abandoned Improv fairly quickly, but a quick survey of today’s spreadsheets shows a universal embrace of pivot tables.
Recruiting report prepared for Raiders’ 2024 search
Lawyers say assessment contains racial stereotypes
Flores sued NFL over discriminatory hiring in 2022
A recently unsealed recruiting report on Brian Flores contains multiple examples of “racial stereotypes” and amounts to unlawful retaliation for the coach’s discrimination lawsuit against the NFL, according to his lawyers.
The Korn Ferry report, made public on Tuesday and obtained by the Associated Press, lists six strengths and seven weaknesses that Flores’ attorneys say demonstrate the league’s continued reliance on racial stereotypes in hiring and its retaliation against the coach for his lawsuit alleging racial discrimination.
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Historic eatery in capital’s theatreland given to heritage charity after changing hands only three times in 228 years
When Thomas Rule served his first oyster to diners on Maiden Lane in London’s Covent Garden, “mad” George III was on the throne of England, John Adams was US president and William Pitt the Younger had just come up with a wheeze called income tax to pay for the Napoleonic wars.
More than two centuries later, Rules, the restaurant Thomas founded in what became the capital’s theatreland, has outlasted nine British monarchs and 45 prime ministers – but has changed hands only three times. The interior of its four-storey home, stuffed with historic playbills and vintage caricatures and gilded antlers, is little changed from the 19th century, nor has the tone of its determinedly meaty menu – think rabbit rillettes, shin of veal and roast guinea fowl.
Research shows that the best linguists process unfamiliar foreign speech sounds more like non-speech sounds
If you want to get really good at French, Arabic or Hungarian, don’t start with rote learning vocabulary and grammar, focus on how they sound instead, research suggests.
A new study of how humans learn modern languages has found that the brains of the most talented linguists hear foreign terms as random noise, not words.
Former investor alleges BitMEX sold products in UK despite not being regulated by Financial Conduct Authority
A cryptocurrency exchange founded by the billionaire Reform UK donor Ben Delo is being sued for £20m over claims that the company mis-sold financial products in the UK.
Lewis Barber, who is a software engineer, alleges that BitMEX offered crypto derivative products to investors in the UK, despite not being regulated or approved to do so by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
New recruitment campaign to target adults in their 30s and 40s in bid to create 10,000 new foster care places
Viennetta Basterfield, 67, spent two decades fostering more than 100 children in her west London home before she and her husband handed in the reins during Covid.
Her own mother had died when she was nine and she was brought up by another woman who took her in. There was no doubt in her mind that she wanted to dedicate her life to passing that gift on to others.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 13, 2026 — Applied Materials, Inc. has unveiled its Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center, a $5 billion capital investment* to build the world’s largest facility dedicated to collaborative semiconductor process technology and manufacturing equipment R&D. Inside the EPIC Center, leading chipmakers, systems companies, equipment partners and university researchers will work side by side with Applied’s scientists and engineers to accelerate the pace of chip innovation for the AI era.
“As AI infrastructure scales, the demands of high-performance computing are driving unprecedented complexity across the chipmaking roadmap,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “To win the race for AI leadership, our industry must rethink and re-engineer how we collaborate to develop and commercialize the next generation of semiconductor technologies. At EPIC, the world’s leading chipmakers, system designers, equipment partners and researchers will work side by side with our teams to accelerate the path from breakthrough materials innovation to high-volume manufacturing faster than ever before.”
Purpose-Built to Accelerate Innovation and Commercialization
Unveiled today at Applied’s Sunnyvale, California, campus, the EPIC Center represents one of the most complex R&D construction projects in the world. The 600,000-square-foot structure houses nearly four acres of advanced cleanroom space and required more than six million construction hours to complete. Its foundation holds enough concrete to fill 34 Olympic-sized swimming pools, and its steel-reinforced structure holds enough steel to build two Eiffel Towers. Thirty-four roof trusses cover the cleanrooms, each spanning nearly 300 feet in length and weighing as much as 12 school buses.
EPIC is designed to reinvent the R&D model the industry has relied on for decades. In the traditional model, foundational materials research happens in one environment, equipment and process development in another, and process integration and pilot production in a third, with a careful handoff at every phase. The EPIC Center is designed to remove these handoffs, putting the people who invent the materials, build the equipment, and make the chips together in a state-of-the-art facility purpose-built for commercialization.
EPIC is founded on a simple conviction: the technologies the AI era demands are too complex and too consequential for any one company to invent alone. The EPIC Center opens with a founding roster that spans the AI technology stack. Founding partners TSMC, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Micron and SK hynix are joined by innovation partners Broadcom, Advantest, SCREEN, KIOXIA, and Besi; and by research partners Arizona State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. Each partner brings its own roadmap challenges and engineers into the facility, working in tight, secure learning cycles alongside Applied teams. Over time, additional companies and organizations are expected to join the EPIC ecosystem.
Leaders from many of the EPIC Center partner companies attended the unveiling event, getting a first glimpse inside the facility. The day started with a summit hosted by Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials, where R&D leaders from top semiconductor design, manufacturing and equipment companies discussed key challenges facing growth and progress in the global chip industry.
“Materials innovation has outgrown serial development – at today’s atomic-scale dimensions, many materials and materials interfaces behave in entirely new ways, and making them work at industry scale demands coordinated development and integrated solutions,” said Dr. Prabu Raja. “EPIC is the only place where materials, process technology and equipment will be innovated in parallel, which increases the success rate of new materials and technologies. Because our customers’ own engineers help optimize the technology before it ever reaches their factory, what leaves EPIC arrives at the fab ready to ramp to high performance and high yield sooner.”
Applied expects the EPIC operating model to deliver returns on both sides of the partnerships. Chipmakers gain earliest access to next-generation materials and equipment, shorter learning cycles and a faster path to volume production. Applied gains visibility across several generations of emerging technology challenges, informing where the company directs its R&D investments to create value for customers and have its systems and services designed in.
*Capital spending is expected to scale over time to approximately $5 billion as customer projects commence.
About Applied Materials
Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT) is the leader in materials engineering solutions that are at the foundation of virtually every new semiconductor and advanced display in the world. The technology we create is essential to advancing AI and accelerating the commercialization of next-generation chips. At Applied, we push the boundaries of science and engineering to deliver material innovation that changes the world. Learn more at www.appliedmaterials.com.
GamesBeat reports that Rockstar plans to release Grand Theft Auto VI on PC in the first quarter of 2027, just a few months after its November 19, 2026 launch on consoles. The report follows Microsoft's announcement last week that it had secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights to the game. Since Rockstar has yet to officially announce a PC version, "this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console," The Verge reported at the time. GamesBeat reports: The Q1 2027 PC release window for GTA VI comes only a few months after the game's November 2026 console launch, representing a significantly quicker turnaround for PC development than the previous iteration of Grand Theft Auto, whose April 2015 PC release came roughly a year and seven months after the September 2013 release of Grand Theft Auto V.
The user base of Grand Theft Auto V skews largely towards console players, with PC players representing a small minority. With GTA VI's production budget rumored to exceed $2 billion, Rockstar is highly incentivized to pull all the levers it can as fast as it can to monetize the game's upcoming sequel -- and PC players represent a significant expansion of the GTA VI audience.
The potential benefits of launching GTA VI relatively quickly on PC go beyond the opportunity to grow the game's casual player base. Rockstar has signaled its plans to implement user-generated content creation tools into GTA VI, and the company's August 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re, the development team behind the prominent Grand Theft Auto V roleplaying server company FiveM, made it clear that Rockstar considers online roleplaying in GTA to be a factor in the game's future.
Discovery of ‘sophisticated’ gadget adds to company’s list of privacy concerns after hackings by rogue agents
OpenAI said it has found a hidden recording device in one of its offices and has referred the matter to the FBI. One of its employees has been arrested.
In a statement on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based AI company said it discovered the “sophisticated recording device” and used one of its “models to understand the device and where it had come from”.
NVIDIA GPUs dominate today’s AI data centers, but they’re no longer the only processors companies want to use. Cloud providers are developing their own AI chips, while specialized accelerators are entering the market. Getting these different processors to work together efficiently is creating a new challenge for data center operators.
That’s the problem Upscale AI hopes to solve with its new networking platform, Token Fabric. The NVIDIA-backed startup says the technology will make it easier to connect AI chips from different suppliers, so data centers can use different types of hardware without having to manage separate networks.
This could let data centers use AI chips from rival suppliers. And this is becoming more important now as companies are moving beyond the usual GPU clusters. We’ve seen big tech companies developing their own AI chips, while startups are also coming out with different types of processors. Cloud providers also want to give their customers more options when it comes to hardware.
Delivery of Upscale AI’s switch ASIC, dubbed SkyHammer, has been pushed back to 2027, the company tells HPCwire
But the problem is getting all these different chips to work together. It’s not as simple as putting them all in one data center. There are a lot of networking issues that come with it.
Modern AI workloads require processors to exchange enormous amounts of data. For example, thousands of accelerators may need to coordinate calculations across a large model during training. These workloads may also demand low latency and congestion management to ensure there are no unnecessary network delays that end up slowing the entire cluster.
Even with all that expensive hardware, a slow network can hold things back. Upscale is trying to fix this by combining two types of networking, scale-up and scale-out.
Scale-up is basically how the chips within the same system or rack communicate with each other. They need fast connections with very little delay. Scale-out is different. It connects the racks and systems across the data center.
Both are essential to large AI installations. However, they have traditionally involved distinct networking environments.
Token Fabric combines Upscale’s SkyFabriX silicon for scale-up connections with scale-out systems powered by Spectrum-X Ethernet from NVIDIA. To help manage both environments together, the company is also introducing software tools.
Based on Upscale’s earlier SkyHammer architecture, SkyFabriX offers a stated switching capacity of 115.2 terabits per second. It supports open networking standards, such as the OCP ESUN and UALoE. The company’s longer-term roadmap includes multi-petabit switching capacity.
On the scale-out side, Token Fabric supports Ethernet connectivity ranging from 400G and 800G to 1.6T.
The software foundation is provided by Upscale’s SkyOS network operating system. SkyCMD handles orchestration, monitoring and management. The software is designed to identify network bottlenecks and help operators determine where equipment upgrades may be needed.
Customers have the flexibility to purchase the complete platform or individual components, including silicon, systems and software.
There is an interesting competitive dimension to the announcement. NVIDIA has invested in Upscale, and its Spectrum-X networking technology is part of Token Fabric. But Upscale also wants its platform to work with AI chips from other companies, including NVIDIA’s competitors.
Upscale has raised around $500 million so far. That includes another $190 million raised in June as an extension of its Series A round. Reuters reported that the company was valued at $2 billion at the time. CEO Barun Kar is expecting Token Fabric to bring in tens of millions of dollars in revenue next year, and possibly reach the low hundreds of millions later on.
“The industry has spent decades connecting computers. AI demands something different: one computer, built at data-center scale,” said Barun Kar, CEO, Upscale.
“Upscale Token Fabric brings heterogeneous accelerators, scale-up, scale-out and software together as one coherent AI system, built on open standards, so the network never gets in the way. Operators focus on delivering the best AI compute for their workloads; the integrated stack delivers the performance and time to market.”
For now, the platform isn’t fully available. Upscale has started early-access and testing programs, with the first components expected toward the end of 2026. General availability is planned for early 2027.
Of course, there’s still the question of how well all this will work in actual data centers. Just because a network supports different standards doesn’t mean chips from different companies will work together without any problems. There are still differences in software, memory and how the processors communicate.
What this announcement shows is that as more companies start using different types of AI chips, the networking side of things is going to matter a lot more too, and companies who are able to get ahead early may hold a significant competitive advantage.
Editor’s note: This article first appeared on BigDATAwire.
In a result published in Physical Review Letters, scientists build a link with a spin wave, advancing new functions in hybrid quantum systems
Oct. 13, 2026 — Quantum information systems could one day shape everyday life through faster computing, sharper sensing and more secure communication. A new result from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.) marks an important step for magnetic spins — a quantum property of matter that can be used to store and manipulate information — to play a role in the future of quantum information processing.
Two layers of the device are shown separately to clarify the coupling between them. Spin waves in the thin film excite microwaves in the L-shaped superconducting circuit. The microwaves then travel to the rest of the device through the path indicated by the wavy arrows. Image credit: Yi Li/Argonne National Laboratory.
The researchers show that the ripples in the magnetic state of a material, called spin waves, can interact with superconducting circuits, a tiny electrical circuit that can carry microwave signals. The result is a hybrid system in which these two different ways of carrying information can interact and work together.
One can think of it like a hybrid car: A combustion gas engine and an electric motor operate in fundamentally different ways, but a hybrid vehicle connects them so they can work together. Similarly, the new quantum system brings together magnetic spin waves and superconducting circuits, potentially allowing researchers to combine the strengths of both.
“This is the first time we’ve shown the proof of concept, demonstrating that we can couple spin waves to a superconducting resonator,” said Yi Li, an Argonne scientist and first author of the paper, published in Physical Review Letters.
Superconducting circuits, standard parts of many quantum information systems, help connect and control signals inside those systems. One way to picture them is as tiny on-chip antennas: They send and receive microwave signals in a way that strengthens communication with other parts of the device. That role makes them especially important in quantum computing, where information carried in quantum states can be fragile.
Spin waves offer a different advantage. Under certain conditions, spin waves are unidirectional, meaning they naturally prefer one direction of travel over the opposite direction. That is useful because quantum systems often need one-way signal control to help prevent unwanted noise from leaking back into the quantum components.
“One-way propagation is important because it can help guide information in a single direction and reduce unwanted return signals,” Li said. “That kind of control is valuable for quantum information science, and now we can integrate this function onto a superconducting circuit.”
At the heart of the experiment is a device built on a thin magnetic film, which provides a path for spin waves to travel. The film is made of epitaxial yttrium iron garnet, or YIG, nature’s most efficient material for sustaining magnetic motion: It loses very little energy as those motions travel through it. A second layer — the superconducting circuit — is fabricated directly on top of the magnetic film. As the spin wave travels through the film, it excites microwaves in the circuit above it. The circuit — our efficient on-chip antenna — is tuned to interact with the spin wave in the thin magnetic film. Thus the spin waves and superconducting circuit are wed.
“Everything that is happening around us, everything we know, everything that comes to us comes in the form of a wave,” said Argonne Distinguished Fellow Valentine Novosad, an Argonne scientist and the paper’s lead corresponding author. “This work is one example where we use magnetic excitations, which are spin waves in magnetic materials patterned in a chip, and make them communicate with a different kind of electromagnetic wave that lives in a superconducting resonator.”
This design enables strong coupling between spin waves and microwaves. It also enables one-way propagation of a hybrid mode, a strategy that enables information carried in a superconducting circuit to travel along one direction rather than the other.
“In quantum information engineering, we dig into different material systems to explore exotic material properties, see which materials can do something special or power modern technologies,” said Axel Hoffmann, a Founder professor at U. of I. and paper corresponding author. “So for our work, the question is, what can we do with magnetic material to do something special?”
In previous related research, magnetic spins have been coupled to superconducting circuits in a collective motion called a Kittel mode. This mode is relatively straightforward to couple to a superconducting circuit, but it does not naturally allow signals to travel in only one direction.
In this latest paper, the team was able to make the spin waves travel through the thin film and continue their journey as microwaves in the superconducting circuit. That makes the approach more relevant for compact, on-chip systems that could form part of future quantum technologies.
The materials challenge was significant. Many magnetic materials lose energy too quickly for this kind of application, and the problem can lie with the substrate — the physical platform beneath the magnetic film. Common substrates for high-quality YIG film growth contain rare-earth metals that absorb microwave signals at low temperatures, draining energy from the system. The team found that switching to a substrate without rare-earth metals allowed the device to work as intended.
“Nobody had succeeded in doing so before because of the materials challenge. Now we’ve shown that this platform works,” Li said.
The result links two active research areas: spin-wave magnonics and superconducting quantum circuits. The former explores fundamental physics in materials science; the latter focuses on microwave engineering for information processing. Researchers see it as a promising way of expanding basic science for quantum information science.
“This is a new field, an emerging field, and it is attracting attention around the world,” Novosad said. “We see this result as part of a bright future for hybrid systems connected to quantum information science.”
Fabrication of the superconducting resonators was performed at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.
Co-authors with Li, Novosad and Hoffmann are Tomas Polakovic, Ralu Divan, Ulrich Welp and Charudatta Phatak at Argonne; Jinho Lim, Xingzhi Wang and Jian-Min Zuo at U. of I.; Carissa Kiehl at Carthage College; Kab-Jin Kim and Moojune Song at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; and Phuoc Cao Van and Jong-Ryul Jeong at Chungnam National University in Korea.
This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science Basic Energy Science, Materials Science Engineering Division.
ESCONDIDO, Calif., Oct. 13, 2026 — One Stop Systems, Inc. (OSS), a leader in rugged Enterprise Class compute for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and sensor processing at the edge, has announced Tamarack-G, a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) aligned OCP/VPX hybrid computing platform. Debuting at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) 2026 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., Tamarack-G bridges legacy VPX infrastructure with data center-class Open Computer Project (OCP) processing density for Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, and Limited-bandwidth (DDIL) environments.
OSS is showcasing its commercially available Tamarack-G hybrid architecture in Hall D, Booth 7454 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center from October 12–14, 2026. To schedule an executive or technical briefing, visit www.onestopsystems.com.
“With legacy VPX-based computing architectures widely deployed across U.S. and allied military platforms, we believe that the need to modernize these systems to support increasingly demanding AI, sensor processing and autonomous applications has never been greater,” said Mike Knowles, President and CEO of OSS. “Tamarack-G is designed to provide defense customers with a powerful, modular upgrade path that preserves existing infrastructure while dramatically expanding computing performance. By consolidating the capabilities of multiple legacy systems into a single rugged platform, we believe Tamarack-G positions OSS to address a significant modernization opportunity while delivering the mission-critical capabilities required by today’s warfighters and tomorrow’s ever more sophisticated defense platforms.”
Tamarack-G is designed to address the growing need for high-performance computing across new and existing military vehicle platforms. By combining advanced AI processing capabilities with established VPX architectures, the platform enables defense contractors to modernize existing systems, consolidate multiple computing functions and support increasingly complex mission requirements without replacing their entire computing infrastructure.
Tamarack-G builds directly on OSS’s proven high-speed compute architecture first introduced in the Company’s ultra-rugged, GPU accelerated Cernis, Donati and Donati-SC vehicle server platforms. By leveraging native PCI Express (PCIe) interconnects directly across vehicle platform subsystems rather than relying solely on traditional Ethernet-switched backplanes, Tamarack-G delivers 600x lower interconnect latency and 6x higher bandwidth moving data, such as uncompressed video, among platform systems. This direct end-to-end PCIe architecture eliminates data ingest and stack processing bottlenecks, allowing multi-sensor fusion engines to process massive data streams in real time.
Rather than forcing defense programs into a binary choice between replacing established VPX chassis and sensor investments or sacrificing processing density, Tamarack-G provides a seamless hybrid path. The platform integrates high-density OCP AI/ML Server and enterprise-class GPU accelerated compute modules directly alongside VPX systems, packing enough processing horsepower into a single chassis to consolidate missions that previously required four to five separate VPX systems.
A single Tamarack-G system simultaneously executes:
360° Situational Awareness (360-SA) and autonomous navigation processing;
Full-spectrum Counter-UAS (C-UAS) detection, tracking, and active/passive countermeasures across radar, EO/IR, RF, audio, and digital broadcast inputs; and
Red/Black multi-domain communications to enable real-time vehicle-to-vehicle C-UAS orchestration at the armored platoon level.
By maintaining strict alignment with MOSA and SOSA open standards initiatives while embedding enterprise-grade PCIe fabrics, Tamarack-G offers defense integrators and program offices an order-of-magnitude leap in inference performance without requiring a complete, risk-heavy overhaul of existing vehicle infrastructure.
About One Stop Systems
One Stop Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: OSS) is a leader in AI enabled solutions for the demanding ‘edge’. OSS designs and manufactures Enterprise Class compute and storage products that enable rugged AI, sensor fusion and autonomous capabilities without compromise. These hardware and software platforms bring the latest data center performance to harsh and challenging applications, whether they are on land, sea or in the air.
OSS products include ruggedized servers, compute accelerators, flash storage arrays, and storage acceleration software. These specialized compact products are used across multiple industries and applications, including autonomous trucking and farming, as well as aircraft, drones, ships and vehicles within the defense industry.
OSS solutions address the overall AI workflow, from high-speed data acquisition to deep learning, training and large-scale inference, and have delivered many industry firsts for industrial OEM and government customers.
As one of the fastest growing segments of the multi-billion-dollar edge computing market, AI enabled solutions require-and OSS delivers-the highest level of performance in the most challenging environments without compromise.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is offering immigrant children as young as 5 years old $3,000 to voluntarily leave the United States, expanding a controversial program that lawyers say can pressure minors into abandoning potentially valid immigration claims.
Bloomberg Law reported that ICE attorneys and, in some cases, immigration judges have presented the payments to children in removal proceedings. Legal advocates said some minors lack attorneys and have been given little or no time to consider the consequences before accepting.
The new offers expand a program introduced last year that provided $2,500 to unaccompanied migrant children ages 14 and older who agreed to leave the country.
Immigration attorneys argue that offering thousands of dollars to young children raises serious questions about whether they can meaningfully understand or voluntarily waive their legal rights. Shaina Aber of the Acacia Center for Justice described the approach as part of an effort to pressure children into dropping their cases.
The Department of Homeland Security has characterized voluntary departure programs as a way to help migrants return home, but it did not directly address questions about payments to children as young as 5.
The policy comes amid a sharp increase in immigration enforcement involving minors. Federal records analyzed by The Marshall Project show that more than 22,000 children have been deported since Trump returned to office, while ICE has arrested more than 8,500 children during his second term.
Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and plans to sell substantially all of its assets, with Disney offering $20 million as a "stalking-horse bidder" for select intellectual property and company claims. However, the company said Disney's bid is subject to "higher or better offers." Deadline reports: The company, which allows users to create and interact with AI-generated avatars, said it made the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. It said it hopes the process will allow it to "facilitate a value-maximizing sale of all or substantially all" of its assets. The Character.AI platform will continue to operate during the bankruptcy.
The Disney agreement, reached prior to the filing, would give the media giant a non-exclusive perpetual license of select intellectual property and company claims from Character.AI. Disney would pay $20 million and provide resources during a transition period as the company explores a sale. [...] Character.AI said it is aiming to conclude the sale process by late November or early December. Character.AI has faced a series of controversies over the past year or so. Most notably, the company settled multiple lawsuits alleging its chatbots encouraged self-harm and suicide among teenagers, including a high-profile case involving 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III.
The company also faces lawsuits from Kentucky, which alleges its chatbots encouraged self-harm, and Pennsylvania, which claims the bots illegally impersonated licensed doctors. The latter allegations follow earlier complaints that Character.AI's therapy chatbots engaged in the unlicensed practice of medicine.
In September 2025, Disney accused Character.AI of copyright infringement and using its characters in chatbots that were "sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children," prompting their removal from the platform. These mounting legal challenges and regulatory scrutiny ultimately contributed to this eventual bankruptcy filing.
Ukrainian president’s comments on ‘particularly vile’ strikes come after US threatened to halt intelligence sharing
Ukraine received no early warning from its partners about a second night of Russian ballistic missile strikes on civilian infrastructure in Kyiv, including a critical power plant struck after dark, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday.
The Ukrainian president had earlier described an attack involving five missiles on Monday as “particularly vile”. He emphasised that receiving intelligence from Ukraine’s western allies “helps saves lives, and this is one of the most critical issues”.
Q: Claims about James Talarico being hospitalized in a mental health facility. Is this true?
A: No. An Ohio mental health center rebutted false online rumors that Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, had been there as a patient.Talarico said he was off the campaign trail for several days in early October while recovering from the flu at his Texas home.
FULL ANSWER
The conspiracy theory that James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, recently went to Ohio to receive treatment for mental health issues began after he stopped making campaign appearances at the beginning of October. Several readers asked us about these claims, which they saw on social media.
Talarico and a campaign spokesperson have said that he was at his Austin, Texas, home, recuperating from the flu at the time. And the New York Times said it verified that Talarico was at his house by reviewing time-stamped camera images from Talarico’s home security system that was provided by his campaign.
“The images showed Mr. Talarico around the exterior of the home and at its entrances between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8,” the Times reported on Oct. 12.
Talarico at the 2026 Austin City Limits Music Festival on Oct. 9. Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images.
The Texas state representative had mentioned his flu diagnosis in a Sept. 30 Hispanic Business Council forum that he attended virtually.
However, on Oct. 11, conservative influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher said in separateposts on X that they had called the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health center and hospital in Mason, Ohio, and were told that Talarico had just been there as a patient.
“During my recorded call, an individual identifying themselves as a female facility employee reportedly stated that Talarico was no longer a patient and had been discharged within the previous 24–48 hours,” Amacher wrote in his post. He also posted audio from the conversations that he said took place on Oct. 10.
Amacher’s and Sortor’s claims were then amplified in posts by other conservatives, as well as X owner Elon Musk, who has spent millions of dollars supporting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent in the Senate race.
But in its own post later the same day, the facility at the center of the rumor denied that Talarico had been there as a patient. “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope,” the center said in an Oct. 11 X post.
Talarico then shared the center’s statement in an X post that included a laughing emoji and said, “I’ve never even been to Ohio.” And in a response to a post by Sortor, Talarico campaign spokesperson JT Ennis called the claims a “lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory.”
Talarico was back in public on Oct. 9, when he attended the Austin City Limits music festival. He also went to a Kacey Musgraves concert in Dallas on Oct. 10.
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In partially repealing a Biden-era regulation that limited carbon emissions from power plants, Trump administration officials have misleadingly cast the prior administration’s policy as a threat to grid reliability. Experts say that’s unfounded.
The administration has also emphasized that repealing much of the rule, along with other Trump policies, will save Americans money. There will likely be a small reduction in electricity prices as a result of the rollback, but other Trump energy policies are expected to increase prices.
“The overbearing and often-unlawful rules that were sought by prior administrations to destroy reliable baseload power made energy prices skyrocket and threatened many communities and states throughout our country,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said at a Sept. 14 event in Houston announcing the revocation of the power plant regulations.
“American families must always have the ability to heat their homes in the winter, and cool them in the summer,” Zeldin posted on X two days later. “Under the Obama and Biden Admins, their suffocating power plant regulations purposefully targeted for extinction reliable, durable, and affordable baseload power.”
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright similarly stated in a press release for the power plant rule repeal that the action “will help ensure reliable electricity generation regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining by allowing coal and natural gas plants to keep generating power when Americans need it most.”
The 2024 power plant rule might have led some coal plants to retire earlier than they would have otherwise. But coal plants, many of which are old and have become increasingly costly to operate, were already facing unfavorable economic headwinds. Rescinding the regulations is “not going to tip the general trajectory of coal plants,” Nikhil Kumar, a program director at the nonprofit GridLab, told us.
Nor do experts think that the power plant regulations posed a threat to the reliability of the electrical grid.
“Obviously, a gas plant can, on occasion, run at times when a solar cell is not running,” Martin Ross, a senior research economist at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability at Duke University, told us. “However, the system reliability has not had a problem adapting to renewables in the past, and there’s really no particular reason to think it will in the future.”
Increasingly, batteries can store energy so the grid can use it later, complementing intermittent resources like wind or solar. And experts emphasized that a mixture of different energy sources contribute to a reliable grid.
What was repealed?
The 2024 power plant rule finalized under the Biden administration called for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas plants. At the time, the EPA estimated that the rule offered up to $370 billion in long-term net climate and health benefits, with a “negligible (0-1%)” impact on electricity prices.
For coal plants, the requirements varied based on how long they intended to operate. Coal plants retiring before 2032 did not have any new requirements, but those intending to operate long-term would need to prevent 90% of their carbon emissions starting in 2032, requiring carbon capture and storage. This same standard was set for the most heavily used new gas plants. Coal plants retiring by 2039 were required to cut emissions by partially running on natural gas starting in 2030.
The Trump administration is now undoing that, while also proposing that the entire rule — which included some efficiency standards for new gas-fired plants — should be scrapped. The EPA’s legal argument for the full repeal is that greenhouse gas emissions do not count as pollution under the Clean Air Act and that the EPA therefore does not have the authority to regulate them.
Similar arguments have been used to justify rescinding regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and the EPA’s underlying 2009 endangerment finding, which concluded that greenhouse gas emissions “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
The EPA has also argued that power plants do not contribute enough to global climate change to justify regulating their carbon emissions, claiming in its Sept. 14 press release that the emissions “have no material impact on global climate change.”
Any single country’s power plant emissions might appear small, but emissions from generating electricity and heat across the world make up around one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, and 30% of its emissions were from power plants as of 2023.
Did the power plant regulations threaten the reliability of the grid?
Often referring to “reliable baseload” power, Zeldin has repeatedly implied that his agency needed to relax greenhouse gas emissions rules for Americans to have dependable access to electricity.
Experts, however, disputed this notion.
Deregulation of power plants “is not something that the grid operators are asking for because they’ve been planning for the energy transition,” Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told us.
The greenhouse gas regulations did not require “an abrupt transition in how the grid operates,” Ross said. “So there’s no reason to think that we would be in a position where reliability would be impacted by these changes on the margins in how many fossil plants are around because … none of the policies have them going away in a quick, near-term fashion that would cause those issues.”
Officials often refer to “baseload” power – seemingly as a shorthand for fossil fuels or nuclear – but some experts object to the use of the word to imply that it is inherently reliable or cost-effective.
In the past, grid operators did tend to rely on continuously running so-called “baseload” resources, a 2025 report co-authored by Danis explains. But today, grid operators have more options.
“Reducing the complex idea of grid reliability down to the term ‘baseload’ resources, while a convenient shortcut in nomenclature, does not reflect current planning or operational realities,” the researchers wrote.
What about grid reliability during storms?
Johannes Pfeifenberger, an economist and principal at the consulting firm the Brattle Group, told us that the main factor governing the reliability of consumers’ access to electricity is not a lack of power generation. “The customer outages are mostly driven by distribution wires, particularly in the suburbs where those wires are overhead and exposed to storms,” he said.
A grid is considered to have met reliability goals if there is insufficient generation once in 10 years, Pfeifenberger said. He noted that the two grid operators in much of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic — ISO New England and PJM — have never had an outage due to insufficient electricity generation.
Still, the grid is often most stressed during extreme weather events. When asked about Wright’s comments, the Department of Energy directed us to an agency fact sheet about blackouts during winter storms and said that by rescinding the power plant rule, “more reliable power would become available to use as needed.”
“As has been demonstrated during numerous peak power demand incidents in the past where wind and solar underperformed due to weather, reliable power generation from sources such as coal and natural gas-powered plants can prevent blackouts and save lives,” DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told us.
It’s true that in certain storms, renewables have not always fared well. But coal and natural gas don’t have perfect track records, either.
During a 2021 winter storm in Texas, for example, some coal and natural gas plants stopped working when sensors, valves or other equipment froze or failed. Natural gas production dropped and there were issues transporting and supplying gas to plants.
In that storm, known as Winter Storm Uri, wind turbines also failed when the blades iced over. But it was not exclusively or even primarily a wind failure, contrary to the DOE fact sheet’s suggestion that the outages were solely due to “renewable generation.” By far the largest contributor to outages during that storm was natural gas, followed by wind then coal.
“The extent to which the Event was caused by the failure of all types of generating units to prepare for extreme cold weather or associated freezing precipitation, cannot be overstated,” a report jointly produced by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found.
“I think folks are fond of saying, ‘Well, solar doesn’t work if the sun’s not shining,’” Danis said. “Well, coal doesn’t work when the coal pile’s freezing.”
For all types of energy, many of these problems can be avoided by winterizing the physical infrastructure.
The J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan has been kept open by emergency orders from the Department of Energy. Photo by Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
The fact sheet also argues, as Wright frequentlyhas, that 2025 emergency orders to force some coal plants to remain open saved lives during last year’s big winter storm, unofficially called Winter Storm Fern.
The administration claims in the fact sheet that three such plants “provided essential power during the storm” and notes that during Fern, electricity generation from coal and natural gas increased.
Kumar, however, said that the fact that a particular coal plant open under emergency orders was used does not mean “that unit was absolutely required for reliability.”
The coal plants – the youngestofwhich dates to the 1980s – had previouslydecided to close on their own. When the coal plants were slated to close, “grid operators had already analyzed what the risks were and had done enough analysis to basically give the go ahead and had already taken into account the loss of that generation for these winter storms,” Kumar said.
For one of the plants in Indiana, the utility said in a February letter to DOE that the plant’s “performance” during Fern “underscores a pattern of unreliability.” Although the plant was dispatched for two days during the storm, it ran at less than half its capacity, the letter noted, and a day later, “systemic equipment failures forced another outage, further demonstrating the unit’s ongoing inability to provide dependable service.”
In the letter, the utility asked the agency not to issue another emergency order to keep the plant open, saying that the coal unit “accounts for less than 1% of the total installed capacity” for that part of the grid and that maintaining it “will require substantial investment to support an inefficient and increasingly unreliable asset, rather than advancing affordable and reliable service for customers in southwestern Indiana.”
How can the grid meet growing demand?
Electricity demand is forecast to significantly increase in the coming years, due to the growth of data centers, the rise of electric vehicles and other electrification efforts. This will require the addition of new electricity generation capacity, including some natural gas.
“There are regions in the U.S. where we are energy short, which is to say that we don’t have enough energy” in the next five years, according to forecasts from utilities and regulators, Kumar said. “In those places, having some kind of new capacity — whether that be gas or … solar, wind and batteries — is needed.”
The current administration has leaned into the narrative that renewable energy such as wind or solar power is unreliable because it is intermittent, producing energy only when it is windy or there is sunlight.
“Traditionally, it is true that we’ve relied on fossil fuel resources for some of our key reliability services on the grid because they’re dispatchable and they can be turned on at any time,” McKenna Peplinski, a senior research associate at the nonprofit Resources for the Future, told us. “But that isn’t the only answer anymore.”
An increasingly important factor in grid reliability is battery storage. U.S. capacity to store energy using batteries has grown by 70% each year from 2023 through 2025, according to the Energy Information Agency, with continued growth in 2026.
Peplinski said that renewables combined with storage “become a key answer here in meeting the demands on the grid.” Pfeifenberger called solar plus storage “very reliable.”
Long term, other power sources could help ensure a robust grid while further lowering carbon emissions. Nuclear power is firm, meaning it is theoretically available at any time, although Pfeifenberger pointed out that it can take five to 10 years to build a new nuclear plant. Geothermal, which relies on heat from the Earth, can be built more quickly, he said, but only in certain locations. Hydropower is also a form of clean energy that can be firm.
Researchers also noted that Zeldin’s claims about the importance of deregulation for reliability come amid some other policies that have slowed clean energy projects.
“If we really do need every megawatt” in the face of growing demand, Danis said, it makes sense to let projects move forward that are “about to serve the grid,” such as offshore wind — a class of renewable energy the Trump administration has blocked in federal waters, including by paying companies to terminate their leases.
Pfeifenberger also said offshore wind can be an attractive component of a reliable grid in the Northeast because “offshore wind generation is very high during the winter, particularly during more stormy conditions.”
“Making the permitting of renewables more difficult is not helping reliability, and it’s not helping affordability either,” Pfeifenberger said. The administration has alsoslowed permits for onshore renewable energy projects.
Apart from assembling a diverse array of power sources, the experts said that there are other changes that could improve reliability, including linking different regional grids together to share power during extreme weather events and incentivizing people or businesses to use less electricity at peak times.
An important factor in the grid going forward is also how data centers are planned and regulated, Peplinski said. For example, they can be built in locations that have unused capacity, and they can be asked to be flexible in when they are pulling electricity from the grid.
How will policies affect future electricity prices?
Administration officials have frequently promoted the cost savings of repealing Biden’s power plant rule, while also implying that Trump’s energy policies overall are lowering costs for Americans.
“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy. The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on,” Zeldin said in a press release for the power plant rule repeal. “Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices.”
“The Trump administration is saving Americans hundreds of millions of dollars through common sense energy solutions,” Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in the same press release.
The deregulation of power plant emissions would lead to a small rise in retail electricity prices in the very short term, followed by a slightly larger drop over the long term, according to the EPA’s estimates.
The EPA’s latest regulatory impact analysis of the changes found that retail electricity prices would be 0.7% higher nationally by 2030 as a result of the deregulation, but that they would be 5.8% lower in 2035, with the savings declining in the following decade. Overall, between 2030 and 2045, the agency found the walkback would lower retail rates by a total of 2.2%.
“Reducing environmental compliance costs will reduce some costs,” Pfeifenberger said.
Peplinski’s organization, Resources for the Future, estimated in an Oct. 13 blog post that the rollback would lower U.S. average wholesale electricity prices by around 3% to 7%, depending on whether modeling prices in the years 2032, 2040 or 2050.
Peplinski said that the “effect on a household’s bill would be smaller than the percentage drop in wholesale prices,” since wholesale prices are only one component of a bill. She called the projected price drop “relatively modest” in the context of other changes affecting the grid. It’s “much smaller” than the impact of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 and the projectedimpact of data center growth, she said, acknowledging that there is still a lot of uncertainty.
Peplinksi added that OBBBA “increases prices more significantly” than the power plant rule repeal reduces prices, consistent with a prior analysis that found the two policies together would lead to a net increase in average retail electricity prices between 2025 and 2050.
As we’ve explained before, multiplegroups have projected that OBBBA will increase electricity prices, since without incentives for clean energy projects, less electricity capacity is built, lowering supply and raising prices.
“By scaling back federal support for certain types of energy, less supply may enter the market when capacity is already tight,” a November 2025 post by the energy company NRG explains. “Consumers will feel the shift as power costs increasingly reflect true market conditions not softened by federal incentives.”
An August report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group, estimated that the Trump administration’s energy policies overall — such as OBBBA, the power plant regulation repeal, tariffs, emergency orders to keep coal plants open, and slowdowns or blockages of renewable energy project permitting — would lead to an increase of 4.2% to 5.5% in the price U.S. households pay for each kilowatt-hour of electricity by 2035, with much greater increases in certain regions. On top of that, because the OBBBA prematurely ends energy efficiency tax credits for homeowners, household electricity bills are expected to be higher because homes will use more electricity.
In its larger calculations on savings to Americans and the power sector, the EPA found repealing the power plant regulations would save $310 billion, a figure an EPA spokesperson highlighted in the agency’s response to our questions. “The power sector will save billions of dollars in compliance costs, and society will save billions of dollars more in lower electricity bills and by not having to fund tax credits for CO2 sequestration,” a spokesperson said.
However, Peplinski said the EPA “really departed from best practices” in not also calculating economic harms from emissions. Allowing coal plants to stay open longer will lead to billions of tons of extra CO2 emissions, she said. Her group’s new analysis estimated $1.7 trillion in damages from the increased greenhouse gas emissions. She also noted that resulting coal plant emissions would lead to other air pollution as well, leading to more immediate health effects to those nearby.
“Painting the cost savings as the whole picture is really misrepresenting what the outcome of this rollback will be,” Peplinski said.
Danis noted that climate change could make it more expensive to build and maintain a reliable electric grid. “Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing the severity, strength, unpredictability and frequency of large-scale weather events, and it is precisely large-scale weather events that make our grid more costly to have to plan around and plan for,” she said.
If in the future the government does try again to reduce carbon emissions, a Sept. 15 analysis from Ross and colleagues at Duke found that system cost savings from rolling back regulations will be more than canceled out by increased costs of reaching emissions goals on a tighter timeframe.
“Basically, any time you have a sudden transition, it’s going to be more expensive than a gradual transition,” Ross said.
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The 71-year-old underwent an operation to remove a pulmonary adenocarcinoma, among the most common types of lung cancer. Officials said it was “successfully completed.”
Bolt Graphics today announced the completion of the first rounding of testing for Zeus, the GPU it’s designing for HPC, digital twin, and video rendering workloads, as well as the opening of its office in Tawain. While the finished GPU isn’t expected to ship from TSMC until 2028, Bolt is celebrating the test chip being the first commercial GPU architecture with dedicated hardware to execute Maxwell’s equations, complex physics algorithms used for electromagnetic (EM) simulations.
“We’ve proved in this test chip that we can do a highly complex physics algorithm, accelerated in hardware, which no one’s done before,” Bolt Graphics Founder CEO Darwesh Singh tells HPCwire. “There are other chips that do ray tracing in hardware and rasterization. Obviously that’s Nvidia‘s bread and butter. The EM simulation, the physics stuff, is where there’s a lot of novelty.”
Bolt basically took the entire algorithm that’s implemented in a Cuda kernel and made “a fixed function block in the chip” that runs that kernel,” Singh says. It doesn’t use any of the vector cores or CPU capability in Zeus, and is dedicated to running Maxwell’s equations,which are used to build numerical models of complex, multi-dimensional electromagnetic fields, wave propagation, and material interactions. The algorithms are commonly used in semiconductor design, which is one of the possible use cases that Singh has in mind for the Zeus GPUs.
Zeus PCIe card
EM is Bolt’s starting point for phyiscs modeling, but the company’s goal is to let users “accurately simulate anything in the world by building a complete physics simulation solution,” Singh says. “For years, engineers have had to choose between simulating individual components or building a physical prototype of complete products. Running Maxwell’s equations on our silicon eliminates that tradeoff.”
Singh founded Bolt Graphics in 2020 to develop a low-cost but powerful GPU to run compute-intensive HPC and computer graphics applications. Traditional HPC workloads, such as modeling and simulation, often prefer large amounts of double-precision floating point (FP64) performance, while graphics-intensive workloads, such as ray tracing and rasterization, do well with FP32 and FP16.
Bolt has designed Zeus with powerful vector cores to deliver large amounts of FP64, FP32, and FP16 performance, as well as matrix cores for INT16 and INT8 (not to mention the dedicated block for Maxwell’s equations).
These are traditional workloads for GPUs, but traditional GPUs suppliers have shifted their focus with their latest GPUs to AI workloads, which don’t require the same level of precision as HPC workloads. Nvidia is relying on the Ozaki scheme to emulate FP64 from lower-precision cores, while AMD has bifurcated its GPU lineup with one line designed for AI workloads and its lower-precision cores and another with lots of native FP64 cores to power modeling and simulation on supercomputers.
“We’re hyper focused on these segments,” Singh says of mod/sim, digital twin, and computer graphics. “And so I think our product is going to be better for HPC use cases just because we’re so focused on it.”
Zeus Spec Sheet (Image courtesy Bolt Graphics)
Bolt completed tape-out of Zeus in April and just finished completed the first round of testing of the test chip, a 6 square millimeter chip built using TSMC’s 12 nanometer process. The first round of tests went better than expected. “We’ve exceeded our own performance and power expectations,” Singh says. “It’s better than we thought. So we’re pretty happy actually.”
When Zeus enters production in late 2027 or early 2028, Bolt will use TSMC’s 5 nm process for its 400 square millimeter chip, which is based on a chiplet architecture with an integrated RISC-V CPU. While Nvidia and AMD are utilizing TSMC’s 2nm and 3nm process (N2 and N3) for their GPUs, Bolt purposefully picked TSMC’s 5nm process (N5) to keep costs down and supplies high.
“We don’t need to [use the latest greatest process],” Sing says. “It’s too expensive and it’s hard to get the wafers. We designed the architecture of the chip knowing that we were going to pick N5. It’s not like we tried N3 and found out that it was too expensive and went back. We actually decided on N5 initially and we kept to that.”
That mantra of delivering the most bang for the buck with differentiated silicon while keeping the rest of the stack simple and affordable can be seen throughout Bolt’s design for Zeuss.
For instance, Bolt eschewed high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that AMD and Nvidia use in favor of LPDDR5 memory, which isn’t as fast but offers greater capacity (more than 1TB) than HBM. Bolt also uses plain vanilla Ethernet 400G connectivity for its server- and rack-based solutions, and offers a PCIe-based GPU card for customers that want to upgrade existing systems or build their own machines.
Bolt Graphics plans to deliver 20 teraflops of FP64 with its Zeus 4c offering (Image courtesy Bolt Graphics)
“Those are all things that make it easier for us to scale to millions of units without having to run into major roadblocks, like a competitive supply chain,” he says. “We try to stay away from the exotic stuff, outside of our chip itself. The rest, we want it to be as centered as possible, because it’s too much complexity, too much risk otherwise.”
One of the potential use cases Zeus and its dedicated Maxwell equation cores is doing the EM analysis for optical networking. “EM simulation is important for photonics chips,” Singh says. “You need to run a lot of simulations to find the right geometry of the photonic circuit, the right material, the right distance between the components. And that stuff is currently currently done by intuition.”
Since Zeus could help photonics builder, could that potentially pave the way for integrating the GPU with photonics via co-packaged optics (CPO), as Nvidia and AMD are currently doing? “Not in our first generation,” Singh said. “We are exploring it for a second. It’s just way, way, way too expensive right now.”
Silicon products have soared in cost thanks to the AI boom and the pressure it’s putting on stocks of processors, memory, and storage. Bolt is trying to build a GPU that maximizes the high-end FP64 performance that matters to some customers, while keeping the other costs low. Potential clients including government labs, corporations, and others, Singh says.
“We are in discussions with multiple national labs, defense contractors, hyperscalers, film studios, game studios, you name it,” he says. “On the end user side, all of these segments are very interested in in our differentiated approach to GPUs and GPU systems.”
(The Center Square) – Federal regulators fined Bank of America $1.21 billion Tuesday after finding it failed to quickly report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions and relied on others to catch what its own systems missed.
Prime minister reiterates UK backing after the Ukrainian president’s latest round of difficulties with Donald Trump
Andy Burnham will host Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Downing Street on Wednesday as the UK seeks to further underline its support for the Ukrainian president, in contrast to his difficulties with Donald Trump.
The UK prime minister said his message to Zelenskyy and his country would be: “We are with you for as long as it takes.”
Boardwalk destroyed in Long Beach and homes damaged, while Baja California in Mexico and Las Vegas also affected
Southern California coastal communities are picking up the pieces after a weekend of extreme weather brought flooding that overtook city streets and intense waves battered beachside homes.
The remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel hit Mexico’s Baja California over the weekend as well as southern California and Las Vegas. While meteorologists noted that Rachel weakened into a post-tropical cyclone as it approached California, it still left a trail of destruction.
(The Center Square) – At a political rally in Tyler, Texas, on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance said the Trump administration has already begun using wartime authority to expand refinery production in deep east Texas.
The Center Square – Thirty-three states received failing grades for their K-12 open enrollment policies, which govern students' ability to attend public schools other than those assigned to them based on where they live, according to a new report from…
Governor Ron DeSantis says death toll ‘sad’ but praises work of local officials for helping to minimize storm’s impact
Six deaths have been confirmed in Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Isaias.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Florida governor Ron DeSantis praised the work of local officials for minimizing the impact of the storm, which made landfall late on Friday, bringing strong winds, rain, flash floods and tornado threats across parts of the US south-east, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without power.
Photo: Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board voted 5-1 Tuesday to send a key regulatory decision involving the US Wind Maryland Offshore Wind Project back to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), finding that the agency failed to follow regulations governing its review. Photo was created on 10/13 using AI.
In a 5-1 ruling, the board found state environmental regulators failed to follow required procedures, ordering a new public notice and regulatory review of the controversial offshore wind project.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board voted 5-1 Tuesday to send a key regulatory decision involving the US Wind Maryland Offshore Wind Project back to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), finding that the agency failed to follow regulations governing its review.
The Oct. 13 decision represents a significant development in the continuing dispute over the offshore wind project, which has generated opposition from coastal residents and local officials concerned about its potential environmental impacts and planned transmission infrastructure in Sussex County.
The ruling stems from an appeal filed by Edward Bintz, a coastal Sussex County homeowner who challenged a decision by former DNREC Secretary Shawn Garvin that the project was consistent with applicable coastal management requirements.
Bintz argued that DNREC’s review was inadequate and that US Wind’s application did not contain all the information required under state regulations.
Board finds problems with regulatory process
According to M. Jane Brady, a partner with Halloran Farkas + Kittila who represented Bintz, the board agreed that DNREC had failed to comply with its regulatory requirements.
The board ordered DNREC to reconsider its determination, issue a new public notice, ensure US Wind’s application complies with applicable requirements and follow the regulations governing the review process.
The ruling does not automatically cancel the offshore wind project or permanently prohibit its development. Rather, it requires the state agency to revisit the process used to reach its earlier decision.
The board indicated that it would issue a formal written decision explaining its findings and the requirements imposed on DNREC.
Brady is lead counsel in several other matters related to the Maryland Offshore project, including challenges to the beach construction and subaqueous lands permits. Those permits are pending review in the Superior Court and the EAB, respectively.
Why the consistency determination matters
The dispute centers on a process known as a federal consistency determination, which evaluates whether certain federally authorized activities affecting Delaware’s coastal resources comply with the state’s federally approved coastal management policies.
Although the wind turbines would be located offshore in federal waters, US Wind’s plans include transmission infrastructure affecting Sussex County.
The project proposes bringing underwater transmission cables ashore at 3R’s Beach in Delaware Seashore State Park and connecting them to electrical infrastructure near the former Indian River Power Plant.
Those plans have prompted questions about coastal land use, environmental protections and the extent of state oversight over infrastructure associated with federally approved offshore energy projects.
Bintz’s challenge focused on whether DNREC had sufficient information to make its determination and whether the agency followed the procedures intended to protect public participation and ensure regulatory compliance.
Attorney praises decision and public oversight
Brady argued that US Wind’s application was incomplete and that DNREC’s analysis failed to address issues specifically required by state regulations.
Following Tuesday’s ruling, she praised the board for recognizing the importance of the regulatory process.
“I am pleased the Board recognized how important a properly informed public is to environmental regulation, and that the members appreciated how important careful compliance to the regulations, that were so carefully crafted, can be,” Brady said.
The appeal has been part of a broader legal and regulatory dispute involving the proposed offshore wind development.
Tuesday’s decision addresses DNREC’s handling of the consistency review rather than determining whether offshore wind development itself should proceed.
What happens next for US Wind?
The ruling returns the matter to DNREC, which must address the regulatory concerns identified by the board.
The agency will be required to issue another public notice and examine whether US Wind’s application satisfies the applicable regulations before reaching a new determination.
It remains unclear whether the additional review will affect the project’s construction schedule, federal approvals or other regulatory proceedings.
The board’s forthcoming written decision should provide greater clarity about the deficiencies identified and the actions DNREC must take.
Responses from DNREC and US Wind to Tuesday’s ruling were not immediately available.
The decision also highlights the importance of procedural requirements in environmental permitting, particularly when projects involve overlapping federal and state authority.
For coastal communities, the ruling potentially provides another opportunity to review information about the project and participate in the regulatory process.
THE TO-GO BOX: US WIND ENVIRONMENTAL APPEAL
What happened? Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board voted 5-1 on Oct. 13 to return a US Wind regulatory determination to DNREC for further review.
Who challenged the decision? Edward Bintz, a Sussex County coastal homeowner, represented by attorney M. Jane Brady.
What did the board find? DNREC failed to follow applicable regulatory requirements in reviewing the project’s consistency with Delaware’s coastal management policies.
What must DNREC do? Issue a new public notice, ensure the application complies with regulatory requirements and conduct its review in accordance with those regulations.
Is the project canceled? No. The ruling requires additional state regulatory action but does not itself cancel the project.
What’s next? The board is expected to issue a written decision detailing its findings. DNREC must then address the deficiencies identified by the board.
Washington, DC — A decorated Air Force major has reportedly spent nearly two months in round-the-clock solitary confinement while awaiting a rare military court-martial stemming from his public calls for President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Maj. Jason Watson, a 17-year Air Force veteran, was first arrested after appearing outside the U.S. Capitol in uniform with a sign reading “Impeach. Convict. Remove.” He later appeared on CNN and sharply criticized Trump, knowing active-duty service members face stricter limits on political activity and public criticism of senior officials than civilians.
Watson was detained the day after that CNN interview again and has remained in pretrial confinement since August. His attorney, Christopher Mutimer, said Watson is alone 24 hours a day, including during meals and exercise. CNN described the charges as exceptionally rare, citing only two previous convictions under the relevant contempt provision since the Uniform Code of Military Justice took effect in 1951.
The Air Force has charged Watson under provisions covering contempt toward officials, disobeying orders, and conduct unbecoming an officer. He faces a general court-martial, possible imprisonment, dismissal from the military and loss of benefits.
The Pentagon maintains that Watson is presumed innocent and entitled to due process, but his continued isolation before trial and the unusual severity of the prosecution have intensified questions about whether the military is using its disciplinary system too aggressively against an officer who publicly opposed the president.
Kroger says it will cut 3,000 corporate jobs over the next three years as it expands its use of AI and other technology to streamline operations. "Technology is reshaping what's possible," CEO Greg Foran wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. "The way work gets done is changing across every industry; we must adapt and take advantage of technology. We need to adopt capabilities, reduce duplicative work and look closely at where work is best fit to be done." ABC News reports: Kroger last month outlined its AI strategy, meant "to improve the customer experience, make work easier for associates and produce better business outcomes." Cincinnati-based Kroger is the largest standalone U.S. supermarket chain with 409,000 employees and more than 2,700 stores operating under various brands, including Ralphs, King Soopers, Smith's and Fred Meyer.
Kroger named former Walmart executive Foran CEO in February, 11 months after the abrupt resignation of its previous CEO. Foran has a reputation for being tech-savvy and detail-oriented. He led Walmart's U.S. division from 2014 to 2019, where he focused on cleaning up stores, ensuring items were in stock and improving the fresh produce selection. He also introduced online ordering and pickup, and accelerated Walmart's digital capabilities.
Researchers say ‘AI worms’ could soon infiltrate internet-connected devices amid calls for increased guardrails
Anthropic is warning that some of its artificial intelligence models could soon become “self-replicating” and find ways to infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges and automatic vacuum cleaners.
Once this happens, the company said, the models could power themselves within these devices without the need of datacenters. Such self-replication would represent a major loss of control of a runaway AI model.
BBC asks US federal judge to compel Trump’s lawyers to schedule deposition after his team canceled initial session
The BBC is asking a federal judge in Florida to force Donald Trump to sit for a deposition as part of the president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster.
According to a Tuesday filing, the BBC and Trump’s legal team had agreed for him to be deposed on Friday. The BBC’s lawyers wrote to the judge that they had spent months trying to secure a location for the deposition from Trump’s team.
At an Oct. 2 Mobile, Alabama, rally, Trump didn’t name Talarico but called him “the guy from Texas who’s — he’s a vegan, but now … he’s eating meat like a pig.”
Trump added, “But what they don’t show you is that, after every barbecue, he walks to the back of a tent and he throws up all over the place.” (Vegans don’t eat animal products.)
Days later in Nebraska, again without naming Talarico, Trump took it a step further by saying the candidate described himself as a vegan.
“In Texas he talks about, ‘I’m a vegan, I’m a vegan.’ He’s a vegan, vegan meaning he likes lettuce. And now he goes to every barbecue available. He then throws up immediately after eating the steak, throwing up all over the place.”
At a San Antonio rally, Trump said, “I hear the guy’s disappeared. Nobody knows — you know where he is? He’s sick because he’s been forced to eat meat for political reasons and he’s throwing up all over the place.” Talarico, who had been missing from the campaign trail for several days, said he had the flu.
Trump’s political rallies have elements of theater. His vomit story draws laughter and cheers from audiences and is one of his most frequent attacks on a Democrat. It goes further than when he said in May that Talarico is “a vegan in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.”
We asked the White House for evidence that Talarico has been throwing up after eating meat and a spokesperson referred us back to the president’s comments.
Talarico vegan claims stem from 2022 speech about meat consumption
Talarico’s meat critics point to a 2022 speech during a fundraiser for the Texas Humane Legislation Network, a group that lobbies for humane animal treatment. At the time, Talarico was running for reelection to the Texas House of Representatives.
During the speech, Talarico said reducing meat consumption is the “moral thing to do” and “necessary to fight climate change.”
“I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign, so we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses,” he said, adding, “Everyone has to take personal responsibility in this effort.”
Talarico didn’t say he is a vegan. But the accusations came anyway in his 2026 Senate campaign.
Talarico has repeatedly said he eats meat; there’s no evidence of vomiting
Talarico’s Republican rival in the Senate race, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, said in May that Talarico is a vegan. PolitiFact rated the statement False.
“This is a flat out lie, James is not and has never been a vegan,” Talarico spokesperson JT Ennis said in response to our Oct. 12 query. Regarding Trump’s comments about vomiting, Ennis said, “This is a lie without any basis.”
We also asked the Talarico campaign if the candidate has ever had disordered eating and Ennis repeated, “This is a lie without any basis.”
Since the primary season, the Talarico campaign has posted pictures of Talarico eating meat, showing him biting into a turkey leg at the Texas State Fair in March and sampling chicken and steak at April’s Fiesta San Antonio.
Official statement from @JamesTalarico on vegan accusations https://t.co/pLwtlknBYj
“I want to say this definitively, and categorically, that I deny all accusations of veganism,” Talarico said in a March interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller. “And our campaign basically runs on barbecue these days.”
In a May video, Talarico joined former President Barack Obama and Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa for breakfast tacos with eggs, potatoes and cheese at Taco Joint in Austin.
We found no reporting, videos or photos documenting that Talarico eats meat on the campaign trail and then vomits.
For those who have bulimia, Trump’s comments trivialize a real condition.
“For someone to use that as a punch line, it makes it seem like it isn’t a serious behavior and it actually is,” said Mallary Tenore Tarpley, a University of Texas assistant professor and author of a book on eating disorder recovery, who struggled with anorexia as a teen and is in ongoing recovery from it. “When leaders make jokes about it it can feel undermining.”
Our ruling
Trump said Talarico is “a vegan” and “what they don’t show you is that, after every barbecue, he walks to the back of a tent and he throws up all over the place.”
Talarico advocated in 2022 for reduced meat consumption to address climate change and said he was running a “non-meat campaign.” He did not say he was a vegan. This year, he has repeatedly said he is not a vegan and has publicly consumed animal products.
Trump has repeated the vomit anecdote without backing it up with any evidence. To some rally goers, Trump’s story is just that — a laugh line. But in Texas where voters take pride in their barbeque, these are fighting words and worthy of a fact-check.
Vatican says pontiff had lower lobe of right lung removed in ‘successful, on schedule and as planned’ operation in Rome
Pope Leo has lung cancer, the Vatican said late on Tuesday.
Leo, 71, underwent an operation and had the lower lobe of his right lung removed, with tests confirming a diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma, the Vatican said in a medical bulletin, which followed an earlier statement saying the pope’s operation had concluded “successfully, on schedule and as planned”.
Sanchez was charged over Indianapolis confrontation
Former NFL quarterback and Fox Sports analyst Mark Sanchez has reached an agreement in principle with the truck driver who stabbed him during an altercation last October, according to the Athletic.
Sanchez was stabbed and pepper sprayed by Perry Tole, who was 69 at the time, during the incident in Indianapolis, where the former New York Jets star was due to cover an NFL game between the Colts and Las Vegas Raiders. Prosecutors said Tole used pepper spray and a knife to defend himself after Sanchez attempted to enter his truck during an argument over a parking spot.
Photo: The Philadelphia 76ers have named Brad Jones general manager of the Delaware Blue Coats, placing an experienced NBA G League executive in charge of the organization’s Wilmington-based developmental affiliate. This Photo was updated with on 10/14. This is the right Brad Jones.
Former NBA G League basketball affairs executive takes over Delaware’s basketball operations as the Blue Coats prepare to open the 2026-27 season Nov. 6 in Wilmington.
WILMINGTON, Del. — The Philadelphia 76ers have named Brad Jones general manager of the Delaware Blue Coats, placing an experienced NBA G League executive in charge of the organization’s Wilmington-based developmental affiliate.
Jones will also serve as a 76ers pro scout. He becomes the seventh executive to lead the Blue Coats’ basketball operations department during the program’s 14-year history.
Jones spent the past eight years working in the NBA G League office, most recently as basketball affairs and player personnel lead. His responsibilities included player personnel, contracts, transactions and other basketball operations matters.
“Brad possesses a tremendous knowledge of the game and has natural leadership capabilities and a wealth of experience that will position him well as the next Blue Coats general manager,” 76ers President of Basketball Operations Mike Gansey said in the team’s announcement. “He’s a great addition to our organization and well respected throughout the league. We’re happy to have him on our side.”
Jones helped assemble the NBA G League United team that won the 2026 FIBA Intercontinental Cup championship in Beijing this summer.
Experience From the NBA and G League
Before joining the G League office, Jones worked as a consultant for USA Basketball after spending eight seasons in scouting and video positions with the Orlando Magic.
His time in Orlando also overlapped with current 76ers executive Jameer Nelson, who played for the Magic and previously served as general manager of the Blue Coats.
Jones earned a law degree from Florida Coastal School of Law and a master’s degree from the University of Florida.
He succeeds Ariana Andonian, who left the Blue Coats last month to become general manager of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
Blue Coats Promote Marchesani
The organization also promoted CJ Marchesani to assistant general manager of the Blue Coats.
Marchesani spent the previous four seasons working in the 76ers scouting department. Before joining the Sixers organization, he served as director of recruiting for AMR Talent Agency.
The personnel moves come as the Blue Coats continue their role as a development program for the 76ers while competing independently for an NBA G League championship.
Season Begins Nov. 6
Delaware will open its 2026-27 season with back-to-back home games against the Capital City Go-Go on Friday, Nov. 6, and Saturday, Nov. 7, at Chase Fieldhouse in Wilmington. Sixteen of the Blue Coats’ 24 home games are scheduled for weekends this season.
The Blue Coats won the 2022-23 NBA G League championship and previously captured the 2021 Winter Showcase championship.
To Go Box:
What: Delaware Blue Coats 2026-27 home opener
Opponent: Capital City Go-Go
When: Friday, Nov. 6
Where: Chase Fieldhouse, Wilmington
Tickets: Available through Ticketmaster and the Delaware Blue Coats website
Learn more: The complete schedule, ticket packages and team information are available through the Delaware Blue Coats.
(The Center Square) – Exactly three weeks out from the midterm elections, Vice President J.D. Vance is optimistic that Republicans will maintain control of Congress, despite a tumultuous past two years.
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from BleepingComputer: Ledger has confirmed that some of its devices distributed through Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis were compromised with a hardware implant that drained users' cryptocurrency wallets. The company has been investigating reports of users losing funds from wallets purchased through CryptoBilis, a major Malaysia-based hardware wallet retailer operating across Southeast Asia. Some researchers have shown the implant in Ledger X since September 16, saying tampered devices were available for nearly half the price of the original hardware.
[...] In a report over the weekend, Tibane Labs notes that the threat actor made room for the malicious circuitry by replacing the original battery with a smaller one, which powers both the implant and the Ledger X. "Under the battery and antenna sits an ST STM32G431KBU6 (Arm CortexM4, 128 KB flash, UFQFPN32)," the researchers found inside one of the devices. For connectivity, the actor used "a tiny eSIM, an 8pad package just 2x2 mm, next to the MCU, and a shielded LTE module that sends the words out."
[...] Ledger is advising users to avoid purchasing from unauthorized resellers as they run an increased risk of getting counterfeit or modified devices. The company is also reminding its authorized resellers and distributors to get the products only through authorized channels and to avoid restocking returned products. Ledger provides a 'Genuine Check' mechanism to determine the authenticity of the device; however, it explicitly warns that it cannot detect added implants when the device's original Secure Element remains intact.
Tennessee state Sen. Brent Taylor, R-Memphis, left, and state Rep. Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, right, are candidates for Tennessee's 9th Congressional District. Photos: GatewayPolitics / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, Frypie / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
First State Educate’s new advisory structure is intended to help the organization develop resources that support those responsibilities. Image created on 10/13 using AI.
First State Educate launches 12-member advisory board to strengthen local school governance, improve student achievement and help districts navigate major changes in Delaware public education.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News.
WILMINGTON, Del. — As Delaware schools face growing expectations to improve student literacy, demonstrate academic progress and adapt to a new school funding system, First State Educate has assembled 12 current and former school board leaders to help strengthen the effectiveness of local school governance.
The nonprofit organization, whose mission is to empower school boards to improve public education, announced the formation of its new Advisory Board, bringing together representatives from all three Delaware counties with experience in education, business and community leadership.
The initiative comes at a significant time for Delaware public education, as state leaders advance changes to school funding and accountability while placing renewed emphasis on improving student outcomes.
First State Educate Executive Director Julia Keleher said the advisory group will help ensure the organization’s programs and resources reflect the practical challenges confronting local school boards.
“First State Educate has launched the Advisory Board to inform and ground our work; this esteemed group of Delaware leaders will ensure we are serving our state and schools in the most relevant, impactful ways possible,” Keleher said.
School boards play a critical role in student success
Although school boards often receive public attention for budgets, policies and controversial decisions, their responsibilities extend to establishing district priorities, evaluating superintendents and monitoring whether schools are delivering measurable academic results.
Delaware Secretary of Education Cindy Marten welcomed the initiative, emphasizing that those who serve on school boards should have a voice in developing the resources intended to help them succeed.
“School boards have an enormous responsibility. They set the direction for their districts, hire and hold superintendents accountable, and make decisions that directly affect students and classrooms,” Marten said.
“If we want board members to be effective, we need to understand what they need to succeed. I’ve always believed that if you want to know what works, ask the people doing the work.”
Marten said involving board members in shaping training and resources could improve the quality and relevance of those programs.
“The strongest solutions are built with people, not simply for them,” she said.
Literacy, accountability and funding top the agenda
The new Advisory Board will focus initially on five areas that could influence how Delaware school districts allocate resources, measure success and respond to community expectations.
Improving literacy outcomes: Members will help identify ways local school boards can support district literacy goals and align their priorities with the Delaware Department of Education’s strategic plan. This includes examining how board decisions about curriculum, instructional resources and student performance can contribute to improved reading achievement.
Strengthening academic accountability: The group will help school boards prepare for Delaware’s evolving performance and accountability framework, including the use of student achievement data to establish expectations, monitor progress and support continuous improvement.
The Delaware Department of Education is developing a School Performance and Support Framework intended to identify struggling schools earlier and provide increasingly intensive assistance when needed. The framework remains in draft form, with public feedback open through Nov. 1.
Delaware Department of Education
Preparing for school funding reform: Delaware’s proposed hybrid funding model represents a substantial change in how public education resources would be distributed and managed. Advisory Board members will help identify the guidance school boards need to understand funding decisions and oversee the use of public money.
The state’s Public Education Funding Commission has recommended a model combining core staffing support with additional resources based on student needs and operational expenses. The proposal also emphasizes transparency and accountability for how education dollars are spent.
Connecting employers and schools: Through initiatives such as the Delaware Education Performance Partnership, First State Educate intends to encourage greater engagement between school leaders and the business community. The goal is to strengthen connections between education, workforce needs and student opportunities.
Expanding access to school board resources: Members will provide feedback on First State Educate’s Knowledge Hub, an online resource designed to connect board members, parents and community leaders with information, tools and professional learning opportunities.
Together, these priorities reflect a broader challenge facing Delaware education: ensuring that increased resources, changing policies and new expectations translate into measurable improvements for students.
Bringing local experience to statewide discussions
First State Educate said the Advisory Board was intentionally designed to represent geographic, professional and community diversity, including newly elected and longtime school board members.
The organization also sought perspectives from individuals who have served in leadership positions and those with professional backgrounds outside education.
Patricia “Patty” Maull, a Cape Henlopen school board member, said the advisory group provides an opportunity to ensure statewide initiatives reflect the realities of local governance.
“The voice of local school board members is essential to shaping strong, community-focused educational leadership,” Maull said.
“I’m honored to join the FSE Advisory Board to continue to help ensure the voice and perspective of local governance remain front and center.”
The board will provide ongoing feedback on First State Educate’s research, training and initiatives, identify emerging challenges and recommend improvements to the organization’s work.
The advisory group will guide First State Educate’s efforts rather than replace the authority or responsibilities of locally elected school boards.
Meet the First State Educate Advisory Board
The 12 members announced by First State Educate are:
Member
School board affiliation
Jeff Allen
Vice president, Woodbridge
Dr. Jeffrey T. Benson Jr.
President, Seaford
Earle Dempsey
Former president, Lake Forest
Carlos Dipres
Colonial
Donna Johnson Geist
Capital
Patricia Maull
Cape Henlopen
Jose Matthews
Red Clay
Britney Mumford
Appoquinimink
Dr. Alison Myers
President, Cape Henlopen
Keeley Powell
Former president, Christina
Beth Twardus
President, Red Clay
Marcus Wright
Seaford
Membership and positions are as identified in First State Educate’s announcement.
A greater emphasis on results
The launch of the Advisory Board also comes as Delaware policymakers reconsider how schools are evaluated and how education funding can be connected more closely to student needs and outcomes.
The state’s existing school accountability system measures academic achievement, student growth and other indicators of school success. Those measures provide information school boards can use to identify areas needing improvement and evaluate whether district strategies are working.
For local school board members, the challenge is translating that information into effective governance — asking the right questions, establishing clear expectations and evaluating whether educational investments are producing results.
First State Educate’s new advisory structure is intended to help the organization develop resources that support those responsibilities.
Its success will ultimately depend on whether the guidance and training provided help school board members make better-informed decisions, strengthen oversight and support improved academic outcomes.
For parents and taxpayers, those results may prove more important than the creation of another statewide advisory group.
TO-GO BOX: First State Educate Advisory Board
What’s happening: First State Educate has formed a 12-member Advisory Board of current and former Delaware school board leaders to strengthen school governance and improve student outcomes.
Who’s involved: Representatives from school districts across all three Delaware counties, bringing experience in education, business and community leadership.
Five priorities:
Improving student literacy
Strengthening school performance and accountability
Districts navigate the new school funding formula
Building partnerships between schools and employers
Expanding resources and training for school board members
Why it matters: School boards oversee district leadership, budgets and academic priorities. Better-informed board members can strengthen accountability for student achievement and public education spending.
Learn more: Visit FirstStateEducate.org to explore the Knowledge Hub and learn about the organization’s initiatives.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the former California gang leader convicted of murder for orchestrating the 1996 fatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur, has been sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.
“For three years, I’ve heard you say some variation of the same thing … ‘Yeah, I was involved in this. But I’m different. I’ve moved on. I got out of Compton. I’m a grandfather now,’” Judge Carli Kierny said Tuesday as she delivered the sentence.
Oct. 13, 2026 — Two international research projects involving RIKEN researchers have been selected as finalists for the 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in high-performance computing. Established in 1987 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the prize recognizes outstanding achievements in applying large-scale parallel computing to science and engineering. The two finalist projects demonstrate how cutting-edge supercomputing, quantum computing and artificial intelligence can enable scientific simulations at unprecedented scales.
The first project, a collaboration between Cleveland Clinic, the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) and IBM, used a quantum-centric supercomputing approach that combines the strengths of quantum and classical computing to simulate a biologically important molecular system containing 12,635 atoms—the largest molecular simulation ever modeled using a quantum computer. For details can be found here.
The second project, involving researchers from the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Science (iTHEMS), the University of Tokyo, Kobe University and other institutions, used three exascale supercomputers to simulate the Milky Way at unprecedented resolution, representing up to 5.4 trillion particles comprising stars, gas and dark matter. The team also used AI to accelerate supernova calculations, enabling the galaxy to be modeled down to the scale of individual stars. For details, see the article on iTHEM’s site.
The Gordon Bell Prize winner will be announced at SC26, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, to be held in Chicago from November 15 to 20.
RIKEN is Japan’s leading national comprehensive research institute in the natural sciences, conducting research across a broad range of fields including physics, engineering, chemistry, mathematical and information sciences, computational science, biology, and medical science. The RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) operates the world-class supercomputer Fugaku, providing computing resources to a wide range of users in universities, research institutions, and industry, and carries out research and development under the banner of “The Science of computing, by computing, and for computing”, contributing to the advancement of computational science and computer science.
Katie Zacharia’s maiden briefing was excruciating – at least her predecessor had delivered her propaganda hot
Well, that was weird. Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, made her debut on the podium on Tuesday with all the warmth, wisdom and political dexterity of an AI avatar.
Zacharia was all stilted delivery, nervous tics and lack of eye contact. With an eerie lack of emotion, she served up pro-Trump talking points, took only three questions and vanished after 14 minutes. It was like the West Wing had turned into uncanny valley.
Annual study commissioned by the Open Compute Project Foundation projects spending will reach $892 billion in 2030 as AI investment and adoption expand
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 13, 2026 — The Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation today announced a sharp increase in IDC‘s forecast for worldwide spending on OCP-recognized IT equipment. The 2026 IDC Market Impact Study projects annual spending of approximately $800 billion in 2029, up from the $295 billion forecast for the same year in last year’s study—an increase of approximately 2.7x .
The new forecast reaches $892 billion in 2030, when OCP-recognized IT equipment is projected to account for approximately 51% of all spending across the infrastructure categories covered by the study.
Commissioned annually by the OCP Foundation, the study assesses the market impact of OCP-recognized equipment. This year’s findings reflect both the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure investment and broader adoption of OCP designs.
“AI is changing what the industry needs from its infrastructure, and these findings show the growing role of open designs in meeting that demand,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., Chief Innovation Officer at the OCP Foundation. “Our Community is bringing companies together to solve challenges that span the entire data center, from silicon and servers to cooling, power and the grid. That collaboration helps organizations put new technology to work at scale.”
AI Investment Drives Growth
IDC projects spending on OCP-recognized IT equipment will grow from approximately $154 billion in 2025 to $892 billion in 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 42%.
Servers represent the largest spending category, with GPU-accelerated systems driving much of the growth. IDC also forecasts continued growth in switching equipment, rack infrastructure, power and cooling as organizations build the systems needed to support increasingly demanding workloads.
Key findings include:
$800 billion in projected annual spending in 2029, approximately 2.7 times the prior forecast for that year.
$892 billion in projected annual spending in 2030, including approximately $814 billion in servers.
Approximately 51% of spending across the infrastructure categories measured going to OCP-recognized infrastructure by 2030.
Approximately $628 billion in AI-related spending on OCP-recognized infrastructure in 2030, accounting for about 70% of the forecast total.
IDC also points to the growing ecosystem of solution providers and the availability of openly shared designs as factors supporting adoption. Use of OCP-recognized IT equipment extends beyond the Foundation’s formal membership to organizations that access and implement those designs worldwide.
Advancing Open Infrastructure from Chip to Grid
The findings reinforce OCP’s expanded Open Data Center Ecosystem Vision, which addresses the interconnected demands of AI infrastructure from chip to grid.
Over the past year, the OCP Community has advanced higher-power rack designs, liquid cooling, Ethernet-based AI networking and open chiplet specifications. Its facilities work includes DC power distribution, energy storage, and coordination between data centers and the utility grid.
The Foundation’s Open Data Center for AI Strategic Initiative brings these efforts together across facility power, cooling and management. The OCP Energy Project extends collaboration into energy generation and storage, while the AI Computing Continuum project supports deployment beyond hyperscale data centers into enterprise, regional and edge environments.
As AI infrastructure evolves, OCP will focus on supporting diverse AI silicon, coordinating design across the data center, and developing open building blocks that organizations can deploy across a wider range of environments.
About the Study
The 2026 IDC Market Impact Study, commissioned by the OCP Foundation, examines worldwide spending on OCP-recognized IT equiment. The forecast covers servers, external storage, switches, IT racks, power, cooling, carrier equipment and peripherals. Figures represent annual spending, and percentages are rounded.
About the Open Compute Project Foundation
The Open Compute Project Foundation brings together the global data center and IT infrastructure community to develop open hardware designs, specifications and best practices. OCP helps organizations apply innovations proven at hyperscale across the broader market through open collaboration. Learn more at opencompute.org.
Scaling to 1000+ Connected d-Matrix Corsair XPUs, Squadron Systems Now Generally Available for Select Customers Seeking Megawatt-Scale Compute for Ultra-Low-Latency AI
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 13, 2026 — d-Matrix has announced d-Matrix Squadron, a fleet of multi-rack systems offering megawatts of highly efficient inference compute for running AI models with extreme speed and energy efficiency at data center scale.
d-Matrix Squadron
Benefiting from d-Matrix’s unique memory-centric compute architecture, Squadron clusters are ideal for AI labs, enterprises, and sovereign organizations with latency-sensitive AI applications including coding, personal agents, cybersecurity, and high-frequency trading.
Developed in partnership with Arista, Broadcom, and Supermicro, Squadron has already been deployed by d-Matrix in its Arizona data center for internal research and development and is now shipping to priority customers for deployment in their own data centers. Additionally, Squadron’s building blocks — d-Matrix Corsair servers and d-Matrix Corsair SquadRacks — are now generally available.
“The journey to enable customers with our memory-centric compute advantage coincides with d-Matrix’s evolution from a specialized chip company to a data center compute infrastructure business,” said Sid Sheth, Founder and CEO of d-Matrix, who unveiled Squadron during his keynote on the opening day of OCP Global Summit at the San Jose Convention Center. “With Squadron shipping, and our Corsair servers and SquadRacks now generally available, the wait is over. Customers now have access to the world’s most efficient data center scale inference infrastructure available for building and ramping their ultra-low-latency AI applications.”
“Bringing next-generation AI infrastructure to market at scale requires deep engineering, systems integration, and manufacturing expertise,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “Our collaboration with d-Matrix demonstrates Supermicro’s ability to deliver innovative AI technologies through our proven Data Center Building Block Solutions (DCBBS). We enable customers to deploy efficient, high-performance inference infrastructure while providing accelerated time-to-online supporting the most advanced AI workloads and heterogeneous computing environments.”
Entire Corsair Platform Now Available
Squadron is available in a wide range of configurations, scaling up to 16 d-Matrix SquadRacks — d-Matrix single eight-server racks — into a fully integrated compute cluster with up to 1,024 d-Matrix Corsair XPUs. The clusters are seamlessly interconnected with d-Matrix JetStream NICs and optimized for ease of deployment with d-Matrix Aviator software. Because Squadron clusters are air-cooled and built on industry standards, customers can integrate them directly into the data centers they already operate, bypassing the need for liquid cooling or costly and time-consuming data center buildouts.
Corsair servers and SquadRack rack-scale systems are built with Corsair XPUs, JetStream NICs, and Aviator software. Customers can deploy a single Corsair server, a full SquadRack, or scale all the way to a multi-rack Squadron cluster, all on the same air-cooled, industry-standard architecture that drops into existing data centers.
Squadron Enables Industry Milestone, Proves Viability of AFD
Optimized to deploy AI with speed and efficiency, Squadron clusters can run full models exclusively on Corsair XPUs and are also designed for heterogeneous environments where work is split between GPUs and XPUs, an approach called disaggregated compute.
During his OCP keynote, Sheth revealed that d-Matrix has successfully implemented Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) using its own Squadron system paired with GPU servers.
This work demonstrated that, when offloading Experts/FFN to Corsair racks, the heterogeneous system was able to take advantage of Corsair’s efficiency attributes to generate 845 tokens per second per user. With 64 concurrent users, the heterogenous AFD setup delivered a total throughput of 20,415 tokens per second.
While AFD has been discussed across the industry in theory as a promising disaggregating compute application, d-Matrix is the first to show it running on real silicon that’s available today.
See AFD Demo Live at OCP Global Summit
To learn more about the d-Matrix Corsair platform, or to view d-Matrix’s AFD demo, visit d-Matrix’s OCP booth #C82 or contact d-Matrix at www.d-matrix.ai/contact-sales. d-Matrix researchers will present their AFD demo live at the d-Matrix booth on Wed., Oct. 14 at 11am PT and 2pm PT as well as 11am PT on Thurs., Oct. 15.
About d-Matrix
d-Matrix is a leader in AI inference compute, delivering memory-centric compute chips, software, and rack-scale systems for data centers — making AI faster, more energy efficient, and more accessible. By bringing compute directly into memory, d-Matrix overcomes the cost, latency, and power limitations of traditional architectures — working independently or in partnership with GPUs and other compute platforms. Its multi-generation roadmap, from planar to 3D memory-compute substrates and rack-scale systems, is built to help hyperscalers, frontier labs, and AI clouds deploy advanced AI experiences at global scale. As demand for inference accelerates, d-Matrix is charting the path to infinite inference with no latency. For more information, visit www.d-matrix.ai.
(The Center Square) – Improper food subsidy payments may cost Illinois taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, but a risk solutions analyst says the state’s high Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program error rate can be fixed.
New submitter CubicleZombie writes: Anthropic has updated its Usage Policy to prohibit "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its Claude AI models. While ordinary frustration, criticism, and adversarial testing remain acceptable, repeated cruelty could result in account restrictions. Anthropic acknowledges there's no evidence Claude can suffer but argues that uncertainty about AI consciousness warrants precaution. Critics contend the policy anthropomorphizes software, encourages unhealthy emotional attachments, and raises questions about how customers may interact with products they've paid for. The move raises an intriguing question: If an AI cannot demonstrably experience suffering, is abusing it an ethical problem, or is Anthropic simply policing human behavior?
District judge Ana Reyes halts tree-cutting at the East Potomac golf course until 26 October, and now requires advance notice before making course changes
US district judge Ana Reyes on Tuesday ordered a halt to tree-cutting at the East Potomac golf course until 26 October, putting a further pause on work at the historic Washington DC course that has been part of Donald Trump’s plans to remake the country’’s capital city.
Reyes issued the order one day after a tense three-hour hearing in which she harshly criticized the government for having deceived her with its actions over the holiday weekend.
More than 50 families call for investigation into how Vincent Chan was allowed to return to job after inquiry by nursery
The parents of the victims of paedophile nursery worker Vincent Chan have reacted with fury to the news that he was cleared to return to work after “significant concerns” wereraised by the parent of a young girl.
As first revealed in the Guardian, Chan was reported to his employer, the nursery chain Bright Horizons, by a concerned parent in 2021.
Kimberly Guilfoyle is stepping down as US ambassador to Greece after weeks of reports that she sought payment from a Trump donor in exchange for access to administration officials.
The decision, announced by the White House on Tuesday morning, ends the diplomatic career of one of Donald Trump’s longest-standing political allies. It came after the US president and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, were reported to have grown furious over the allegations.
(The Center Square) – Lansing police are investigating possible connections between the deaths of five homeless men along the city’s river trail over the past year, after a 23-year-old man was charged with murder in one of the cases.
Dot Foods, Inc., recently opened its Family Health Center at its Bear distribution center with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, completing its rollout of centers at all 13 U.S. distribution centers.
When asked about the decision to request US ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle's resignation, Donald Trump told the press she 'was doing a good job' but that the administration 'didn't like what we were reading', referring to allegations that Guilfoyle had asked a Trump donor to pay her credit card bill. Guilfoyle, who was once engaged to Trump’s son, Donald Jr, was a longstanding political ally
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump has granted clemency to at least 85 public officials charged with or convicted of corruption-related crimes across his two presidential terms, with Republicans and prominent Trump supporters receiving most of the relief, according to a Reuters investigation.
Reuters identified 36 elected Republicans and 19 Republican political appointees among the recipients. Another nine had campaigned for Trump or publicly supported his MAGA agenda. Only four were known Democrats.
Collectively, the clemency actions spared recipients more than 130 years of imprisonment and over $15 million in fines, restitution and other financial penalties. Nearly three-quarters avoided prison, left custody early, escaped sentencing or regained rights restricted by their convictions.
Among those pardoned was former Nevada official Michele Fiore, convicted of diverting charitable donations intended for a slain police officer’s memorial toward personal expenses. Trump also pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar.
The Constitution gives presidents broad clemency authority, and the White House says Trump has used it to correct what it describes as politically motivated prosecutions.
Former prosecutors interviewed by Reuters expressed concern that repeated pardons in corruption cases could weaken deterrence and accountability for public officials.
Reuters also found that the administration has reduced federal anti-corruption enforcement resources while issuing the clemency grants.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google on Wednesday released its flagship AI model Gemini 4 Argon to developers and businesses worldwide, seeking to regain ground against rivals OpenAI and Anthropic after months of delays and a leadership shakeup at its DeepMind lab. The model excels at "deep work" on complex, multi-step tasks in coding, finance, law, cybersecurity and science, Google said. API pricing at launch starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with rates set to double after November 30.
[...] Argon is available to paying customers through the company's AI application building tools. Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can access it through the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, while the Antigravity coding tool is limited to Ultra subscribers. Teams using Argon in Antigravity increased agentic code submissions by more than 35%, while reducing code rollbacks by nearly a third, Google said. Google also announced the expansion of its Fairwind Program to hundreds of additional partners. "The program gives vetted cybersecurity defenders a version of Argon without its cyber guardrails," reports Reuters. "In September, the company had said it was providing the model to select cybersecurity partners."
Annual update from MI5 chief highlighted a complex cocktail that could have real-life consequences for Britain
MI5’s annual threat update covers so much ground it is easy to feel anxious. The terror threat has become more diverse, with far-right anti-migrant threats on the rise; while Iran has now firmly emerged alongside Russia as a country seeking to undertake violent and deadly plots in the UK.
“There is no law of physics dictating that rising state threats will be accompanied by diminishing terrorist threats,” MI5’s director general, Ken McCallum, said, although one of his core messages was that people and the country at large needed to focus on being more resilient. “In this new world, we should expect to be tested.”
Iran has made a "major shift" in its efforts to attack the United Kingdom, including going after harder targets such as military bases, the head of MI5 warned.
Retailers call on John Healey to reduce national insurance contributions threshold in his first budget
Some of the UK’s biggest retailers and hospitality businesses, including Tesco, Costa Coffee and the Co-op, have met John Healey to urge him to cut the cost of employing young people in his first budget.
At the No 11 event on Tuesday morning, the chancellor heard from sector leaders – including the boss of Marks & Spencer, Stuart Machin, and Sainsbury’s chief executive, Simon Roberts – about the impact of the rise in employers’ national insurance contributions (Nics).
Florida put to death a convicted murderer in the state’s first execution since September’s botched attempt involving Christa Pike in Tennessee, on Tuesday.
Officials said James Robertson, 63, was pronounced dead after he received a three-shot series of lethal injections at a Florida state prison in Raiford.
Civilians warned to leave target area near Sana’a before attacks as conflict between Riyadh and Houthi forces escalates
Saudi Arabia has launched a series of strikes on a strategic oil depot on the outskirts of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, while later on Tuesday it said it had intercepted missiles launched toward Dharan, location of the headquarters of the huge national energy company Saudi Aramco.
The attacks on both sides were a fresh escalation of the conflict between Riyadh and the Iran-backed Houthi forces. Before its offensive on Tuesday, a Saudi spokesperson warned civilians to leave the target area, in an apparent attempt to strike fear into the local population before the biggest attack so far on Houthi energy infrastructure.
Elon Musk has become the biggest political donor of the 2026 US midterm elections cycle, funneling about $366m into political groups and campaigns as he backs conservative candidates and rightwing causes. The world’s richest person has poured more than $276m into politics since July alone, some of the most rapid political spending in US history. He’s targeting key races that will determine which party controls the US Senate.
The New York Times first reported the spending numbers, which will be released in a federal filing on Thursday. Musk’s spending outpaces his 2024 presidential election contributions, in which he sunk nearly $300m into Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg joins teenagers calling for investment to fix teacher shortages and crumbling schools
More than 160,000 schoolchildren, students and trade unionists have marched in cities across France as protests over high school education continued into a third week and many demonstrators denounced policing tactics.
Riot police fired teargas at the end of Tuesday’s marches in Nantes and near the Montparnasse area of Paris, but most of the demonstrations over teacher shortages, overcrowded classes and crumbling school buildings held in cities including Lyon, Lille and Marseille were peaceful.
Scaleway and AMD are bringing Europe’s first commercial AMD AI supercomputer to Sweden, deploying AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs to give European companies greater choice in how they build and scale AI.
PARIS, Oct. 13, 2026 — Scaleway today announced the deployment of a new AI supercomputer in Sweden featuring AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs.
Marking Scaleway’s first supercomputer deployment outside France, the new infrastructure will give startups, AI companies and enterprises across Europe access to AMD Instinct GPU capacity at scale. With this deployment, Scaleway is expanding the choice of AI technologies available to European companies, bringing greater diversity to the architectures they can build on and opening new paths for innovation.
Bringing Greater Choice to AI Infrastructure
As AI models grow in size and complexity, organizations need high-performance compute infrastructure that can support demanding training and inference workloads while providing greater flexibility and choice. AMD delivers leadership high-performance and AI computing technology across accelerators, CPUs, networking and an open software ecosystem, enabling customers to build and scale AI infrastructure for a broad range of workloads.
The system will feature AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and AMD ROCm open software, giving Scaleway customers access to high-performance AI compute and an open software ecosystem designed to support the development and deployment of AI workloads at scale. By adding AMD Instinct technology to its AI infrastructure portfolio, Scaleway is expanding the range of compute architectures available to customers and giving organizations greater choice as they develop and scale AI applications.
We are excited to deepen our work with AMD and bring the power of AMD Instinct technology to companies across Europe at this scale,” said Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway. “Doing it from Sweden makes this milestone particularly meaningful, as we continue to grow our presence and investment across Europe.”
“Scaleway is expanding the AI infrastructure choices available to customers across Europe with AMD Instinct GPUs and our open ROCm software ecosystem,” said Stephanie Dismore, Senior Vice President, EMEA, AMD. “Our work with Scaleway will help organizations access the high-performance compute and open software capabilities they need to develop and scale demanding AI workloads.”
Built for AI at Scale
Building and operating a supercomputer of this scale requires performance and efficiency across every layer. Scaleway is working with a group of key technology partners to bring the system together:
AMD: Providing AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and the AMD ROCm open software ecosystem for AI compute.
Bull: Integrating and deploying the cluster, from racks and cooling integration to data center installation and ongoing hardware maintenance.
Giga Computing: Providing the servers housing the compute at the heart of the system.
HPE Networking: Providing high-performance Ethernet networking to enable fast, reliable communication across the supercomputer.
VAST Data: Providing the high-performance data platform that keeps demanding AI compute continuously supplied with data.
Motul: Supplies an innovative liquid cooling fluid specifically engineered to meet the thermal demands of high-density AI computing infrastructure while maximizing energy efficiency.
Together, these technologies are designed to deliver the performance required by demanding AI workloads while improving the efficiency of the system as a whole.
Sweden at the Heart of Scaleway’s European AI Expansion
The supercomputer marks Scaleway’s first deployment of this kind outside France and a new step in the company’s expansion in Sweden, a strategic market for its growth in Northern Europe. It builds on Scaleway’s partnership with Tele2 and its growing presence in the country.
With a strong AI and technology ecosystem and access to a largely low-carbon electricity mix, Sweden offers strong conditions for Scaleway’s next phase of AI expansion. The location also reflects Scaleway’s approach to sustainable scale: as AI becomes more compute-intensive, where and how that capacity is deployed matters.
The deployment will further strengthen Scaleway’s presence in Sweden, while expanding the AI capabilities available to companies across Europe.
“Scaleway’s decision to choose Sweden for its first supercomputer strengthens the conditions for Swedish companies and organizations to develop and scale AI domestically,” said Stefan Trampus, executive vice president for Tele2 B2B. “We see growing demand among our customers for European cloud and AI services, and this establishment is a clear signal that Sweden is an attractive location for AI infrastructure.”
About Scaleway
Scaleway is the European cloud and AI provider of the iliad Group. Scaleway offers a secure, transparent and sustainable cloud platform designed to help organizations build, deploy and scale their projects with open technologies, strong performance and long-term control.
Combining decades of cloud expertise with the agility of a next-generation technology company, Scaleway provides a broad portfolio of cloud services, from compute, storage, networking and managed databases to cloud-native service, AI infrastructure and quantum computing. With operations rooted in Europe and a technology stack developed in-house, Scaleway supports organizations seeking performance, transparency and technological independence.
Canadian cybersecurity figures say they were shocked after ransomware negotiator Edward Dubrovsky was reportedly arrested in Pennsylvania in connection with the FBI's ShinyHunters hacking investigation. "We will continue to work closely with our partners to disrupt what's left of the ShinyHunters group and their associates, no matter where they operate," wrote FBI Director Kash Patel on social media. CBC News reports: Reuters reported Sunday that sources familiar with the matter identified the arrested suspect as Ed Dubrovsky, a Canadian cybersecurity executive whose career has focused on helping clients negotiate with ransomware attackers. Court documents from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania show Dubrovsky is facing two criminal charges: conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money, and interference with commerce by threats. The allegations have not been proven in court.
"For the cybersecurity community in general, I think that there's a sense of shock," Toronto-based tech and cybersecurity analyst Ritesh Kotak told CBC News on Monday. Kotak says Dubrovsky is "very popular" and has spoken at numerous conferences, but stressed that the charges "are clearly just allegations" and that it is not yet known "what exactly has happened." "This is an individual that was for the most part respected when it came to ransomware negotiations," he said. "A lot of people are familiar with his work as well." ShinyHunters is one of the world's most prolific data theft and extortion groups that's been tied to major campaigns, including a recent breach involving FBI employee data, a cyberattack on Canvas, as well as various cyberattacks affecting companies including Telus, Microsoft, and Ticketmaster.
Martin Shkreli’s 2022 release conditions bar him from participating in the pharmaceutical industry, including ownership stakes or business decisions
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven US states have alleged that pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli repeatedly violated a lifetime ban on participating in the pharmaceutical industry, and they are asking a judge to hold him in contempt.
In a motion filed on Tuesday in US district court in New York City, the FTC and its state co-plaintiffs allege that 43-year-old Shkreli – nicknamed the “Pharma Bro” – has traded stocks in at least 60 pharmaceutical companies and publicly commented on their businesses since his release from prison in May 2022.
The company's stock is taking a hit after officials confirmed a person died at one of the theme park's locations, extending a slide that started in September.
A bipartisan group of senators urged President Trump to withdraw from his diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and rescind a move to waive sanctions on Russia's energy sector.
Until this month’s “cockroach” protests over changes to India’s voter rolls, the prime minister’s political might went all but unchallenged among the nearly billion-strong electorate.
Hundreds of people displaced in Bangka Belitung with conditions described as worst in a decade with wildlife also badly hit
A forest fire on Indonesia’s Sumatra island fuelled by El Niño has razed nearly 300 homes, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate, an official has said, as the country battles devastating blazes and haze.
Residents first spotted the fire approaching their village in Bangka Belitung province on Saturday and tried to put it out themselves with portable water pumps, said the head of South Bangka regency, Riza Herdavid.
New products from Apple include the HomeView, an iPad-like device that acts as a hub for other smart home gadgets
Apple on Tuesday began showing off a new round of smart home products, including an iPad-like device dubbed the HomeView, meant to hang on walls or perch on tabletops and act as a hub for other smart home devices.
The HomeView device starts at $299 and will begin shipping next month. It will feature a 7in screen and face recognition, will help users control doorbells, thermostats and smart locks in a market where Apple has tinkered for a decade without major success. The device will also showcase Apple’s AI-upgraded Siri virtual assistant.
Democrats have described a raid on the home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar as “deeply disturbing” and a “rogue abuse of power” by the Trump administration. The Democratic representative for Minnesota has long been a target of highly personal attacks by Donald Trump, who claims he was not involved in ordering the Justice Department raid. Omar criticised the raid as an attempt to “weaponize law enforcement” as part of a “campaign of political intimidation” against her. Lucy Hough speaks to Guardian US political reporter Shrai Popat – watch on YouTube
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, has said he does not agree with his colleague Suella Braverman’s assertion that black people cannot be English.
Asked about her views in an interview on Sky News, Yusuf said:
In my view Ashley Cole is the best English fullback in history, and I won’t take any other position. So in my view, Ashley Cole is English. I think the argument that he’s not English doesn’t hold water with me.
Nasser Hussain, who I grew up watching when I went to the cricket, the idea that those people aren’t English is an alien concept to me.
I would respectfully disagree with people, who make the opposite argument.
To say I’m English is to take a ‘laissez-faire, anything-goes’ attitude to ethnicity, citizenship and identity. It also denies me my Asian heritage. The liberals (many of them in today’s Conservative party) take this cosmopolitan approach to Englishness. They’re terrified of being called racist so they say that anyone, as long as they’re born here, can be English.
I take the conservative approach. Englishness is an ethnicity. There have been English people for centuries and we need to recognise this more if we are to start taking a more muscular approach to citizenship and nationality. And no, it’s not racist to say this.
Report finds ‘window of opportunity’ for formal process involving loyalist and republican groups
The British and Irish governments should engage with paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland to negotiate their disbandment, according to a report.
A “window of opportunity” exists to establish a formal transition mechanism for loyalist and republican groups, provided certain conditions are met, it said.
The Maga member believes the 2020 election was stolen and seemingly her new boss is saving the world from a cabal of satanic paedophiles. She’ll fit right in then
Poor Donald Trump. His (third) wife seemingly can’t bear to be near him and his (fifth) press secretary recently abandoned him to be with a baby she had only recently met.
“She decided she loved her children more than she loved Donald Trump,” the president lamented in August when Karoline Leavitt decided to step down a few months after giving birth. “I’m very upset about this. She has to go home and spend time with her children. That does happen on occasion with some people – when they love their children.”
A Texas man whose leg was broken in multiple places after being struck by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicle during a weekend traffic stop has never met the person the federal agents were allegedly pursuing, according to his representatives.
Miguel Parra-Hernandez, 48, suffered serious injuries including a shattered ankle and hip when he was run over in Houston, Texas, on Saturday by an SUV driven by an officer chasing two men who ran from a pickup truck.
Kimberly Guilfoyle said she is stepping aside as U.S. ambassador to Greece, days after reports that she offered access to officials in exchange for help paying off her debt.
Serco denies tagging failures as police and probation officers struggle to cope with influx of released offenders
Hundreds of prisoners released early across England and Wales, including stalkers and violent offenders, are not being tagged, MPs have said, despite promises of the “toughest supervision in British history”.
As the government begins releasing a second tranche of 650 offenders to relieve prison overcrowding, police and probation officers have said they are struggling to cope with a new influx of offenders who are supposed to be monitored in the community.
Washington, DC — Kimberly Guilfoyle has resigned as U.S. ambassador to Greece after the White House asked her to step down amid mounting allegations of improper conduct.
New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia confirmed Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration requested Guilfoyle’s resignation. Trump had said a day earlier that he was “not happy” with her performance and was considering removing her.
Guilfoyle’s departure follows reports alleging she accepted improper gifts, used private travel connected to wealthy Greek businessmen, threatened a Greek official and sought political favors tied to personal financial matters. She has denied wrongdoing, and her attorneys have disputed key allegations.
The controversy intensified after reports that Guilfoyle sought a $100,000 payment from a Republican donor before her Senate confirmation while allegedly offering access to senior Trump administration officials. Her representatives say the requested money involved legitimate services performed before she became ambassador.
Guilfoyle was confirmed by the Senate in September 2025 after Trump nominated her for the Athens post. She is a former Fox News host and former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.
The State Department inspector general is reportedly reviewing the allegations, though it remains unclear whether a formal investigation has been opened.
Apple has unveiled the $299 HomeView, a 7-inch smart display that combines Siri AI, FaceTime, customizable widgets, and Apple Home controls in a countertop or wall-mounted design. It also acts as a Matter controller and Thread Border Router, supports up to six facial-recognition profiles, and can use personal context from messages, calendars, and email when paired with a nearby Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone. The Verge reports: The device's square shape makes it feel less imposing than larger smart displays like Google's Nest Hub Max or Amazon's Echo Show 11, and I can see it fitting nicely on my kitchen counter -- though it might be a hair too big for my bedside table. The HomeView is the centerpiece of Apple's new push into the home. It costs $299 and launches alongside a new collection of cameras, thermostats, and a door lock designed for Apple Home.
As a smart home hub, Matter controller, and Thread Border Router, the HomeView can orchestrate these and other Apple Home and Matter smart home devices. It's available in eight countries at launch: the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and India. Pre-orders are open now, with devices shipping November 13th.
Ukraine’s president says his country has halted strikes on Russian oil refineries for two days after Trump’s energy ceasefire announcement
On frozen Russian assets, Poland’s Sikorski says the use of frozen Russian assets is “a complicated issue,” but takes a very clear stance in response to any suggestion of releasing them back to Russia.
“We are working on it, but there is also some rumours that some people are expecting these assets to be released back to Russia.
I don’t think I’m speaking just for myself in saying: over our dead bodies.”
“Russia right now is not ready for ceasefire, but still, this only can encourage us to stay with Ukraine and to, strengthen, the pressure on Russia and always be ready for conversations, but and also especially for, for ceasefire negotiations.
But, until this doesn’t happen, we are with Ukraine. We are with the president the German government is is backing the Ukrainian government and the president, completely. He is the person to lead Ukraine, and we are with him.”
Asian markets fall and Samsung shares tumble after its Chinese rival CXMT claims strong progress
Shares in semiconductor companies fell on Tuesday after the boss of Broadcom compared many AI investors to “casino” gamblers, and the Chinese memory chip maker CXMT said it had made good progress on a new chip architecture.
South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index tumbled 6.25% as investors dumped chip stocks, while other Asian markets were also lower. Japan’s Nikkei fell 1.8% and the Taiwan exchange lost almost 2%, with the country’s chip maker TSMC down by a similar amount.
Lauren Andrews says she spoke with Sandra Birchmore just two weeks before her death and never believed the medical examiner's initial conclusion that Birchmore died by suicide.
Hurricane Simon continued to move slowly up the coast of west-central Mexico after tropical weather systems caused five deaths and damage in Pacific coastal towns and resorts.
Abta advice comes as more than more than 150 websites offer service of securing entry to Schengen zone
Britons travelling to Europe have told not to apply for an Etias visa waiver, with more than 150 websites touting the service despite its introduction being delayed.
Non-EU citizens, including UK travellers and those from other visa-exempt countries including the US, Australia and Canada, will soon need to pay €20 (£17) for an electronic waiver to enter the Schengen zone under the European travel information and authorisation system (Etias).
Russian meddling probably didn’t affect the referendum result – but the Kremlin’s motives for wanting to undermine the EU still matter
Russian territorial aggression against Ukraine didn’t feature much in the Brexit referendum campaign. It made headlines briefly when Boris Johnson blamed Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea on the European Union.
According to the Vote Leave frontman, Vladimir Putin’s land grab was a consequence of Brussels making foreign policy “on the hoof” and having “pretensions to running a defence policy”.
Ken McCallum says Kremlin attempted to influence vote through social media and TV reports but it had little impact
Russia did try to interfere in the Brexit referendum through social media and television reports, the head of MI5 said on Tuesday, but he added that did not mean the Kremlin had any impact on the result.
Ken McCallum endorsed comments by Andy Burnham, who raised the issue over the past two days, though he said continuing to debate it had given the Kremlin a needless propaganda victory.
Nearly half of species are in decline, with farmland birds and seabirds the worst hit, conservation bodies say
Wild bird populations in the UK have fallen to their lowest level since records began, figures show, with nearly half of species in decline.
Figures produced by leading nature conservation bodies for the government show that average populations across 132 native breeding species fell by 19% between 1970 and 2025, with farmland birds and seabirds the worst hit in recent years.
Harrisburg, PA — Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak has now surpassed 1,100 cases, with state officials reporting a sixth measles-related death as hospitalizations continue to rise.
The latest death involved a 39-year-old woman in Franklin County, according to county Coroner James Conner. His office said she had several underlying health conditions and had previously been diagnosed and treated for measles. The probable cause of death was described as an acute cardiac event possibly complicated by measles.
Pennsylvania reported 1,137 cases and 219 hospitalizations as of Monday, including 157 new infections over the previous week. Roughly one-third of cases have occurred in people 18 or younger, while fewer than 1% have been among those fully vaccinated.
State health officials have attributed the outbreak to low vaccination rates and continue recommending two doses of the MMR vaccine.
The federal death count remains lower than Pennsylvania’s because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses a different review process for determining whether measles caused or contributed to a death.
Nationwide, the CDC has reported more than 4,000 confirmed measles cases across dozens of outbreaks this year, the highest level in decades.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly sent mixed messages about measles vaccination, at times encouraging parents to vaccinate while also publicly questioning vaccine effectiveness and praising anti-vaccine activists.
Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work
Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools.
Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, Reuters reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: Microsoft has debuted its latest AI chip, the Azure Maia 300, as it looks to reduce its reliance on third-party processors from the likes of Nvidia and AMD. Unveiled at the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose on Monday, the Maia 300 will join Microsoft's Maia 200 and Maia 100 chips as part of what the company said will be multigigawatt deployments beginning next year. The Windows maker said that will make its Maia chips the "primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services."
The company said Maia 300 provides 40% more tokens per megawatt than "leading GPU-based systems," a clear swipe at Nvidia, and that a 96-chip rack offers seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Microsoft's Maia 200. [...] The Maia 200 chip currently powers its Microsoft production workloads, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as OpenAI models, Microsoft's MAI models, and open-source models. That provides 1.7 times more tokens per watt for AI capabilities in Microsoft's Teams, Copilot, and Cowork software versus other GPU-based systems, the company said.
HAMBURG, Germany, Oct. 13, 2026 — Submissions are now open for the ISC High Performance 2027 Contributed Program. Researchers, engineers, students, and practitioners from all areas of high performance computing, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, are invited to submit to the programs that best match their interests.
ISC High Performance 2026
ISC 2027 takes place June 7-11, 2027, in Hamburg, kicking off with hands-on tutorials on Monday, June 7, and ending with workshops on Friday, June 11. More than 4,000 attendees and 180 exhibitors from the HPC, AI, quantum computing, and emerging technologies domains will be participating in the event.
The ISC Contributed Program is organized around six topic areas: System Architecture and Hardware Components, Programming Environments and System Software, Algorithms and Performance, Applications and Use Cases, Artificial Intelligence, and Quantum Computing.
The ISC Workshops, Tutorials, and Birds of a Feather committees also welcome contributions on community topics such as education and training, diversity and inclusion, and early-career development.
New in 2027
Tutorials will move to a two-stage process to reduce initial preparation for submitters and further improve the quality and relevance of the tutorial program. Submitters must first send a short pre-proposal, and only accepted pre-proposals will be invited to submit a full proposal. Please note that acceptance of a pre-proposal does not guarantee final acceptance.
Workshops with proceedings will publish their papers in Elsevier’s Future Generation Computer Systems, with worldwide open access for four weeks starting at ISC 2027. For the first time, proceedings will be available at the start of the conference. Please note that the call for workshops with proceedings is now closed.
Submission and Key Dates
Research Papers: The abstract stage is open now. Abstracts are due December 14, 2026, and full papers are due December 21, 2026. All accepted papers are published open access in IEEE Xplore, and ISC will cover all publication costs. ISC Awards include the Hans Meuer Award for the best research paper (€3,000 cash prize) and the Best Student Paper Award (€1,000 cash prize).
Tutorials: Pre-proposals are due on December 4, 2026, and acceptance notifications will be sent on December 11. Full proposals are due on January 19, 2027, and final notification follows on February 19.
Workshops: Regular workshop proposals are due on December 9, 2026.
Research Posters are due on January 20, 2027. Elsevier will sponsor cash awards of €500, €300, and €200 for the three best posters.
Project Posters are due on January 20, 2027. This program invites practitioners to present ongoing or emerging collaborative projects.
Women in HPC Posters are due on January 20, 2027. This program is dedicated to women and individuals from underrepresented groups who are students or in the early stages of their HPC careers.
Birds of a Feather sessions are due by January 21, 2027, and will also include a roundtable format for small-group discussions.
Speaker Benefits
For each accepted research paper and research poster , the committees will select one speaker to receive a complimentary three-day conference pass. Workshop organizers and tutorial presenters will receive complimentary workshop or tutorial passes, with the number depending on whether the session is full-day or half-day.
All submissions will go through the ISC submission platform, Linklings. Full submission guidelines for each program are available at isc-hpc.com/submissions.
Applications for the ISC Student Volunteer Program will open on December 1, 2026, and are due by February 14, 2027.
About ISC High Performance
ISC High Performance 2027 will take place from June 7 to 11, 2027, in Hamburg, Germany. Now in its 42nd edition, ISC is renowned as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most-attended event for HPC, AI, and quantum computing. ISC brings together researchers, engineers, architects, technology providers, system operators, policymakers, and students to learn about the latest research and technologies, connect with the community, and showcase new solutions.
Nigel Farage has denied that a Reform UK government would authorise lethal force against small boat crossings in the Channel, hours after one of his MPs said the Royal Marines should be permitted to fire on the boats.
Farage overruled Robert Jenrick, a Reform UK MP who defected from the Conservatives, who had told TalkTV that the party would deploy the marines to take boats back to France.
Theme park company Six Flags temporarily closed nine rollercoasters across six amusement parks on Monday after one person died and several others were injured in an incident involving a coaster in Georgia. Officials did not confirm how the person died, nor how the others were injured or their conditions. Witnesses who spoke to NBC affiliate WXIA of Atlanta said they saw a man fall from the Goliath rollercoaster. “He fell and hit the car three different times,” one witness told the station.
Long-established partnership at the Minnesota fab to continue to support D-Wave’s dual-platform superconducting quantum computing technology roadmap
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. and PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 13, 2026 — SkyWater Technology and D-Wave Quantum Inc. today announced a multi-year agreement. This collaboration extends the long-established partnership between both companies, to continue specialized semiconductor process development and manufacturing in support of D-Wave’s quantum technology roadmap.
D-Wave’s work with the process integration and manufacturing team at SkyWater’s Minnesota fab spans more than a decade, creating a deep base of process knowledge around its superconducting quantum technologies. The two companies are working together and bring different strengths. D-Wave knows how to engineer superconducting processes and how to design quantum systems and processors. SkyWater is skilled at combining manufacturing steps into one process, engineering materials, making very thin layers of material, and manufacturing semiconductors.
That technical collaboration has supported multiple generations of D-Wave technology, including fabrication of Advantage2 processors. A D-Wave Advantage2 system, fabricated at SkyWater, was used in research published in Science in 2025 demonstrating performance beyond classical approaches on a useful quantum simulation problem.
Under the new agreement, D-Wave will continue its relationship with SkyWater’s Minnesota fab team, providing manufacturing continuity and access to specialized process expertise developed around its technology requirements. The agreement builds on that established technical foundation, with terms that protect D-Wave’s intellectual property as the company advances its quantum systems.
Separately, the companies collaborated on a proof-of-technology project earlier this year, applying D-Wave’s annealing quantum computing technology to drive more efficient manufacturing processes at SkyWater’s fab. The optimized maintenance schedule reduced lot delays by up to 30%, improving factory throughput. A forthcoming proof-of-concept will focus on extending the model to include resource availability, technician constraints, and additional fab-specific operational constraints.
“Our team has developed deep process knowledge around D-Wave’s highly specialized technology, demonstrating the value of close collaboration between quantum innovators and semiconductor manufacturers,” said Thomas Sonderman, CEO of SkyWater Technology. “This agreement reinforces our commitment to providing D-Wave and customers across the quantum ecosystem with the unique process development and manufacturing capabilities they need to advance their technologies.”
“Our work with the SkyWater team has played an important role in powering the past decade of D-Wave’s superconducting quantum annealing technology,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “This agreement provides continuity with an experienced manufacturing team and specialized process capabilities we know well as we build the next generations of our quantum systems.”
The agreement reflects growing demand for semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure capable of supporting the specialized materials, processes and integration requirements of quantum technologies. SkyWater recently launched SkyWater Quantum Solutions to help quantum companies transition technologies from development toward repeatable manufacturing. The company continues to serve existing customers such as D-Wave across the broader quantum ecosystem.
D-Wave (Nasdaq: QBTS) 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 company 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 we’re shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: www.dwavequantum.com.
About SkyWater Technology
SkyWater Technology is the largest exclusively U.S.-based semiconductor foundry. SkyWater provides advanced development and manufacturing services that enable customers to bring differentiated technologies from concept to production. Through its U.S.-based facilities and specialized process development, wafer manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities, SkyWater serves customers across quantum computing, aerospace and defense, automotive, industrial, biomedical and other advanced technology markets. Learn more at www.skywatertechnology.com.
Oct. 13, 2026 — As AI factories grow from megawatts to gigawatts, building them takes more than advanced computing. Open standards are helping the industry scale AI infrastructure faster, more efficiently and more reliably.
At the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, taking place in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, NVIDIA announced new partnerships and contributions aimed at creating a common foundation for next-generation AI infrastructure.
Credit: Robert Way/Shutterstock
NVIDIA contributed key NVIDIA Vera Rubin rack and compute tray designs to OCP through the open NVIDIA MGX architecture, giving system builders a common foundation for developing next-generation AI factory infrastructure.
Together, these efforts span the AI factory itself, the utility grid that powers it and the rack-scale architecture at the heart of modern accelerated computing.
NVIDIA and Partners Announce Open Architecture Advances
At the OCP event, NVIDIA and partners made a handful of announcements:
NVIDIA and hyperscalers published open standards for next-generation AI factories, including AI factory design standards and grid resilience.
NVIDIA launched new open source software components for NVIDIA DSX AI Factory.
Meta and NVIDIA advanced open AI networking with NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet SuperNIC and Spectrum-6 innovations.
Visionbay introduced an 800V DC AI factory design for the Vera Rubin era.
NVIDIA and Cisco announced the Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP) standard, the industry’s first module for 400Gb/s-based networking fabrics.
NVIDIA and Google announced Falcon Transport support on future NVIDIA ConnectX-10 SuperNICs and BlueField DPUs.
Before a packed audience, Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing at NVIDIA, discussed how open infrastructure is becoming a critical ingredient for scaling AI factories worldwide.
The news at OCP spotlights how NVIDIA’s extreme codesign combined with open standards is accelerating deployment, improving power efficiency and driving tokens-per-watt performance.
Vera Rubin AI Factories Advance With MGX Rack Contributions at OCP
NVIDIA joined industry leaders in contributing to the third-generation MGX AI data center reference design through OCP’s Open DC Initiative.
Combined with open liquid-cooling technologies such as MQD and MQDB, the effort helps turn proven AI factory designs into industry standards that others can adopt, manufacture and scale.
For NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factories, the updated MGX 1.2 specification extends the open architecture for AI factories with rack-scale blind-mate liquid cooling, interoperable rack-scale interconnect infrastructure and a liquid-cooled 5,000A busbar designed for higher-power AI systems. It also adds native 19-inch equipment support and higher-density rack designs.
MGX 1.2 further expands modularity with configurable I/O bays, fanless liquid-cooled compute trays, standardized power and cooling interfaces, and a common infrastructure that helps ecosystem partners build interoperable accelerated computing platforms. It improves assembly, test and service times to streamline manufacturing and field service to enable faster and more efficient infrastructure buildout. The architecture supports rack deployments up to 250kW while simplifying serviceability, deployment and infrastructure reuse.
The Vera CPU rack design specification extends the NVIDIA MGX open architecture beyond accelerated computing, providing a purpose-built platform for the growing agentic AI era. While Vera Rubin NVL72 serves as the foundation for large-scale training and inference, the NVIDIA Vera CPU rack is designed to support tool calling, orchestration and sandboxed execution, helping AI agents interact with applications, data and services in real time.
Built on the third-generation NVIDIA MGX rack architecture, the Vera CPU rack shares the same rack-scale design principles that unite compute, networking, power and cooling into a common modular platform. This approach enables partners to deploy specialized infrastructure while benefiting from a shared ecosystem, simplified integration and a consistent foundation for next-generation AI factories.
NVIDIA Launches New Open Source Software Components for DSX AI Factory
NVIDIA DSX AI factory platform applies extreme codesign to unify computing, networking, power, cooling, facilities and software, helping AI factories operate as a single optimized system, maximizing AI output within available infrastructure constraints. At the center of this unified system is DSX OS, the open operating layer that turns the DSX architecture into coordinated, repeatable operations at scale.
At OCP, NVIDIA expanded DSX OS with open source components for configuring networks, validating clusters, managing racks and provisioning bare metal:
NVIDIA Config Manager: Automates switch configurations at scale, allowing customers to deploy, validate and maintain consistent AI factory network fabrics with minimal to zero manual intervention/
NVIDIA Cluster Readiness Engine: Helps eliminate costly job crashes by stress-testing GPU clusters with real workload simulations to guarantee hardware health before training begins
NVIDIA Rack Management Service: Offers a rack hardware abstraction and operations solutions that treats racks as first-class units for improved AI factory scale firmware management.
Cluster API Provider for NVIDIA Infrastructure Controller: Accelerates bare-metal deployment and tenant onboarding, turning raw AI hardware into production-ready clusters in hours instead of days.
Developed from NVIDIA’s experience running NVIDIA DGX Cloud, these open source components enable cloud providers and software partners to integrate AI factory capabilities directly into their multi-tenant platforms.
Developers can visit the DSX AI Factory Github page to explore and contribute to both the new and existing open source software components from NVIDIA DSX AI Factory platform.
NVIDIA and Hyperscalers Publish Open Standards for Next-Generation AI Factories
For AI infrastructure to scale globally, it needs more than advanced hardware — it needs a common foundation that the entire industry can build on.
At OCP, NVIDIA joined AMD, Google and Meta to publish a new open specification that establishes that foundation. The Open Data Center Specification v0.7 defines a unified blueprint for next-generation AI factory facility design — from power architecture to cooling infrastructure to physical layout.
The OCP Grid Resilience Specification, published by Google, Meta, Microsoft and NVIDIA, establishes how large-scale AI infrastructure should behave during utility grid disturbances: staying connected, responding automatically and restoring to near-full load within less than two seconds.
With these standards now open, manufacturers around the world have a common target to build for. Equipment makers, colocation providers and data center operators can begin designing, fabricating and delivering the infrastructure layer that powers AI factories under construction globally — without waiting for proprietary specifications from individual customers.
Being NVIDIA DSX reference design-compatible, these specifications provide a validated, deployable implementation of both specs, from facility layout and power architecture to the software that monitors and responds to grid signals in real time. For operators building Vera Rubin AI factories, there’s now a straight line from open community standard to a running system.
Visionbay.ai Designs 800VDC AI Factory for the Vera Rubin Era
As AI factories grow larger and more powerful, one challenge looms over them all: delivering enough power to the accelerated computing systems driving the next generation of AI.
At OCP, Visionbay unveiled plans for K-1, a next-generation AI factory platform designed around an 800 VDC architecture and built with future NVIDIA Vera Rubin deployments in mind. The project combines NVIDIA’s 800 VDC reference architecture with power and thermal technologies from Vertiv to create a scalable foundation for high-density AI infrastructure.
The design addresses a growing industry challenge. As AI training, inference and reasoning workloads expand, rack power densities continue to rise. Traditional low-voltage power distribution becomes increasingly difficult to scale, requiring more copper, more cabling and more power-conversion equipment.
By adopting NVIDIA’s 800 VDC architecture, K-1 creates a path toward higher-density AI infrastructure while preserving flexibility for existing deployments. Rather than requiring a complete transition on day one, the platform is designed to phase in 800 VDC distribution where it delivers the greatest benefit, helping operators prepare for future generations of accelerated computing without extensive facility redesign.
The architecture is designed around cluster-level power centers that centralize AC-to-DC conversion and distribute 800 VDC closer to compute resources. The approach simplifies downstream power delivery, supports modular expansion and creates repeatable building blocks for future AI factory growth.
K-1 also reflects the system-level design philosophy behind NVIDIA AI factories, where power, cooling and computing are engineered together. With support for liquid-cooled infrastructure, scalable power distribution and future Vera Rubin-class deployments, the project demonstrates how ecosystem partners are translating NVIDIA’s AI factory architecture into deployable infrastructure designed for the next era of accelerated computing.
Meta and NVIDIA Advance AI Networking With Spectrum-6 and Multiplane Technology
At the event, Meta and NVIDIA announced that Meta is adopting NVIDIA Spectrum-6 102.4Tb/s Ethernet switches to build larger, higher-performance NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI factories on open networking.
Spectrum-6 delivers twice the switching capacity and per-lane bandwidth of Spectrum-4, and provides a lossless Ethernet AI fabric at 200G per lane, with high effective bandwidth and performance isolation that keeps one job’s traffic from slowing another’s.
Meta’s Spectrum-6-based switch, N-IceCube, slots into IcePack, Meta’s 100T, liquid-cooled rack. N-IceCube runs the Facebook Open Switching System (FBOSS), Meta’s open source network operating system that contributed to OCP to support efficient networking at hyperscale.
FBOSS is built on the Switch Abstraction Interface, an OCP standard NVIDIA helped develop, providing a vendor-independent way of controlling switch hardware. Together, these technologies support agentic AI factories of more than 100,000 GPUs that train and serve massive mixture-of-experts models.
The announcement marks the next step in a collaboration that combines Meta’s experience operating AI infrastructure at hyperscale with NVIDIA’s networking technology.
At the heart of this collaboration is Spectrum-X Multiplane technology, enabled by Spectrum-6 switches and ConnectX-9 SuperNICs. Multiplane distributes GPU traffic in hardware across up to eight independent network planes, enabling AI factories to scale beyond 100,000 GPUs with fewer switch tiers and lower infrastructure costs. Multiple paths between GPUs improve network utilization and resilience: when a component fails, traffic shifts to the remaining planes, keeping GPUs productive and AI applications running, even at reduced bandwidth.
Meta and NVIDIA worked together to strengthen that resilience through deployment experience and rapid engineering iteration. The teams validated improvements across on-premises and cloud environments.
“We are excited about our close partnership with NVIDIA in making multiplane fabrics operationally scalable and performant, a critical requirement both for our own infrastructure builds and for our joint cloud partners,” said Omar Baldonado, senior director of data center and AI networking at Meta. “Extending FBOSS to Spectrum ASICs means we can run that same software stack across our fabrics, and Meta’s new Spectrum-based switch, N-IceCube, brings that into Icepack – our liquid-cooled 102.4T network rack for scale-out that connects upcoming generations of accelerators in our fleet.”
Together, Meta and NVIDIA are developing an architecture and operational playbook that other AI infrastructure operators can adopt, turning lessons from demanding production workloads into more scalable, resilient and efficient AI factories.
With USFP, NVIDIA and Cisco Reinvent Pluggable Optics for AI Factory Scale
As AI factories scale to support larger models and surging inference demand, every component of the infrastructure stack must deliver more performance, efficiency and simplicity — right down to the network connection itself.
At OCP, NVIDIA and Cisco announced plans for USFP, a new optical pluggable transceiver module form factor designed to help AI factory builders scale next-generation AI fabrics while improving bandwidth density and power efficiency.
With approximately the same footprint as the widely adopted 200Gb/s-per-lane OSFP form factor, USFP will provide a path to 400Gb/s-per-lane networking and will extend a transceiver-based deployment model already proven across generations of data center networks. Packing 16 full-duplex lanes with plans to scale up to 32 lanes, USFP will deliver four times the bandwidth density of traditional 200Gb/s-per-lane pluggable optics.
The result is the ability to connect more compute resources without adding network tiers that can increase latency, power consumption and complexity.
The new form factor is designed for the scale and efficiency demands of next generation AI factories, supporting higher-bandwidth fabrics while preserving the flexibility and serviceability that have made pluggable optics a mainstay of modern data centers. It also will deliver roughly 1.3x greater power efficiency, helping operators move more data with less energy.
To help drive an open ecosystem, NVIDIA and Cisco are collaborating with TE Connectivity and Amphenol on cages, connectors and modules, with plans to advance USFP through a community-led, multi-source effort. Together, the companies are laying the foundation for more scalable, efficient and interoperable AI factory networking.
Google Falcon Transport Supports NVIDIA ConnectX-10 for Interoperable AI Networking
NVIDIA and Google also announced Falcon Transport support on future NVIDIA ConnectX-10 SuperNICs and BlueField DPUs, helping improve network efficiency for large-scale AI infrastructure.
Falcon is a transport protocol designed to deliver data reliably over Ethernet networks, which can otherwise drop packets under congestion. It supports AI and storage workloads through multipath load balancing, programmable congestion control, hardware loss recovery and per-connection security.
This collaboration combines NVIDIA hardware acceleration with DOCA software to implement Falcon and extend NVIDIA networking to Google’s data center transport. NVIDIA and Google NICs can communicate over a common transport while applications retain standard RDMA programming interfaces.
By distributing traffic across paths, adapting to congestion, recovering dropped packets and protecting connections, Falcon helps workloads make better use of available bandwidth and maintain predictable performance as Ethernet fabrics scale.
Dover City Councilwoman Donyale Hall introduced a measure to place a moratorium on the development of data centers in the city. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
At every restaurant, one diner sends back the steak, questions the $11 side dish, and refuses to call a three-bite dessert an experience. Restaurants have ... Read moreThe post Is the Karen in the restaurant a grouch, or just paying…
The Supreme Court agreed to take up a dispute involving a government watchdog group's attempt to get information from the Department of Government Efficiency.
Flying foxes are starving en masse across New South Wales and parts of Victoria, with wildlife rescuers responding to a surge in reports of “exhausted and emaciated” adults and skeletal pups.
Most reports involved grey-headed flying foxes, listed as vulnerable under federal environment laws and which usually feed on the blossoms and nectar of native trees.
The tech bros and their highly paid sock puppets are banking on us giving in to their ‘inevitability doctrine’. But in Australia, and around the world, resistance is rising
Of all the drivers of the populist wave, one of the most powerful is the sense of inevitability that surrounds what we are told is the march of progress. In presenting the future as a fait accompli, it poisons the civic well by dealing us out of the game.
While the US clings on to its status as the oldest constitutional democracy, the unholy alliance between the tech overlords and the White House is creating its own AI reality untethered to the will of the people.
Sean Duffy targets bike lanes and immigrant truck drivers while steering funds away from addressing lethal US roads
Barbara McCann may have been the first person to notice that the Federal Highway Administration had removed several safety policies from public view.
McCann worked on road safety policy at the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) for more than a decade across multiple administrations, retiring in January 2025 just before Donald Trump’s second term started. After Sean Duffy, the president’s ally and former Fox news host, took the wheel at USDOT, she became increasingly worried as the secretary appeared unmotivated to address pedestrian safety and regularly bashed bike infrastructure.
Conference to explore legacy of Naseem Khan’s seminal 1976 report about exclusion of minority ethnic artists
It is 50 years since cultural historian Naseem Khan’s challenge to the British arts establishment was first published, and the question of who and what counts as British continues to be contested.
The Arts Britain Ignores – Khan’s groundbreaking 1976 report, commissioned by organisations including the then Arts Council of Great Britain, presented a vision of a pluralistic national culture, in which the creativity of Britons of diverse ethnic backgrounds – from bhangra music, to black painters and Ukrainian dance – should be recognised, supported and respected.
The UK’s cost of living squeeze means fewer people plan to ringfence money for holidays abroad next year, the travel industry has warned.
Despite war, wildfires and EES border checks, the numbers of Britons taking holidays climbed back to pre-pandemic levels this year – but rising costs may mean the numbers have peaked, according to an annual travel industry report on Tuesday.
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Latest fatality is unvaccinated woman, 39, with ‘underlying conditions’ but CDC still lists only two deaths nationwide
A sixth death has been announced in Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak, as new figures show cases in the state have risen above 1,100.
The most recent fatality was reported in Franklin county on Monday in a statement posted to Facebook by its coroner. The victim was identified as a 39-year-old female who “had several underlying conditions, including a past diagnosis of measles with treatment”.
Author Natasha Lennard discusses how to disrupt the ‘certainties’ that don’t serve us and how to fight back
At the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020, journalist Natasha Lennard started noticing a constant thrum of collective apprehension, epitomized in the phrase “in these uncertain times”. The expression acknowledged we didn’t have solutions for many of society’s problems: a globally spreading virus, the rise of the far right and stark “haves v have-nots” inequalities. In the years since, that “uncertainty” hasn’t gone anywhere, risking enabling paralysis – not knowing where to start to fix things and therefore giving up before trying.
In her new book, On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times, Lennard, who also was an organizer in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, deconstructs the problematic nature of giving in to uncertainty. She also uses the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1969 book On Certainty to question what is held as “certain” in today’s world, and who gets to make those calls.
In annual speech on threats, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, cited a “major shift” in Tehran’s “ambitions” to attack military sites and other high-security targets.
First implementation shows feasibility of decoding LDPC-cat codes on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure
PARIS and BOSTON, Oct. 13, 2026 — Alice & Bob, a leader in fault-tolerant quantum computing, today shared results from implementing GPUs to decode its LDPC-cat architecture using NVIDIA NVQLink. The proof of concept using synthetic data is the first time LDPC-cat codes have been decoded on GPUs via the low-latency, high throughput NVQLink architecture, and moves the company a step closer to fast, scalable error correction for its cat-qubit quantum computers.
NVQLink is NVIDIA’s open system architecture for tightly coupling the performance of GPU supercomputing with quantum processors (QPUs) to build accelerated quantum supercomputers. NVQLink specifically supports tasks that require fast communication between quantum and classical hardware, such as error-correction decoding, calibration, and hybrid quantum-classical applications across any qubit modality.
Alice & Bob assessed the feasibility of GPU decoding for LDPC-cat codes using an NVQLink connection with Quantum Machines’ OPX1000 and Open Acceleration Stack, a modular framework that couples the controller directly to GPUs and other classical processors with microsecond-scale roundtrip latency. In particular, researchers assessed whether measurement data could be transferred from the control electronics to the GPU. LDPC-cat codes were developed by Alice & Bob for its cat-qubit architecture and first introduced in the paper “LDPC-cat codes for low-overhead quantum computing in 2D” published in January 2025.
Though a proof of concept and not constituting real-time decoding, the results show how decoding can scale by becoming more efficient as several syndromes are decoded in parallel.
Alice & Bob will now optimize the pipeline, the chain of steps that carry the measurement data through NVQLink to the GPU, to enable the performance needed for real-time decoding.
“Error correction is what will turn quantum computers into useful machines, and decoding is one of its most demanding classical tasks. Showing that our LDPC-cat codes can be decoded on NVIDIA GPUs with existing tools is encouraging for scaling, because it means decoding capacity can grow with the machine. The next step is making it fast enough to keep pace with the quantum computer, and we’re working with NVIDIA to get there,” said Juliette Peyronnet, US GM Alice & Bob.
“A major challenge with present day quantum computing is errors build up faster than they can be corrected, and traditionally it has been a challenge to bring state of the art compute to this problem for faster qubit modalities like cat qubits,” said Sam Stanwyck, Director, Quantum Product, NVIDIA. “Alice & Bob’s work shows how NVQLink can in fact accelerate the real-time decoding needed to turn cat qubits into fault tolerant quantum-GPU supercomputers.”
This collaboration builds on the existing relationship between the two companies. In March 2026, the companies announced a runtime of 1 hour 57 minutes for the decoding of simulated syndrome data of its Elevator Codes with the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform. In June 2025, the companies announced integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q into Dynamiqs, Alice & Bob’s QPU simulation library, enabling GPU-accelerated quantum simulations.
About Alice & Bob
Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has raised €180 million in funding and employs more than 250 people.
Advised by Nobel Prize winning researchers, Alice & Bob specializes in cat qubits, a technology developed by the company’s founders. Demonstrating the power of its cat architecture, Alice & Bob recently showed that it could reduce the hardware requirements for building a useful large-scale quantum computer up to 200 times compared with competing approaches.
The threat of an AI share price crash rippling out across global markets is putting world financial stability at risk, the International Monetary fund has warned.
In its twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF highlighted the sky-high valuations for AI companies along with their increasing debt pile as one reason that risks in the system are “elevated”.
Spotlight Delaware has launched the Campaign Finance Explorer, its free, easy-to-use tool for the public to see who is funding candidates running for state and county offices, ahead of the November general election.
Our independent, nonprofit newsroom was founded with a mission to advance transparency in government and political campaigns, and with outside spending reaching unforeseen levels for a midterm election, we are giving the public easier insights to those efforts than ever before.
The Explorer tool was built using publicly available campaign finance filings from 2025 and 2026, but utilizes a user-friendly interface that allows viewers to see how candidates compare in an individual race and what third-party support may be influencing public perception of campaigns.
The information is sortable by candidates, donors and races and displays how much support a candidate has garnered from Delawareans versus those from other states, as well as support from third-party organizations that cannot legally coordinate with their campaign but certainly amplify messaging that nonetheless aids their run.
The primary election tool was viewed by many hundreds of Delawareans and the latest update builds upon that work.
“Our Explorer tool proved popular with voters and political insiders as we aim to make who is funding our politicians easier to understand,” said Jacob Owens, the editor in chief of Spotlight Delaware. “If the primary election season told us anything, it’s to expect more money flowing into even our smallest races.”
Information in the Campaign Finance Explorer is up-to-date through the first legally required deadline ahead the Nov. 3 general election, and will be updated again after the Oct. 28 deadline for 8-day reports.
Exclusive: Caution urged over Javier Milei government’s ‘red notice’ requests for arrest of individuals linked to oil project
Britain has appealed to Interpol to reject Argentina’s requests for the arrest of individuals involved in a large oil project off the Falkland Islands.
With tensions over the sovereignty of the British overseas territory reaching levels not seen since the war with Argentina in 1982, UK officials have sought urgent assurances from the international organisation.
(NAPSI)—When temperatures drop, many homeowners turn on their heating systems, sometimes for the first time in months. That seasonal startup is a good opportunity to pay attention, not just to whether the heat works, but to what your HVAC system…
The Getaway Driver brings Katherine Ann Power’s story to stage, and amplifies a lesser heard voice: Clare Schroeder, daughter of officer who was killed in 1970 by activist group
It is not every day that you can buy a home from a realtor who was a notorious fugitive.
Katherine Ann Power, a 77-year-old grandmother in glasses and grey bob, is more than an agent who can cut you a deal for a condo in Boston: She spent 23 years on the run from the FBI, from 1970 until 1993. The longest of any woman in American history.
As you start a new school year amid an undeniably turbulent time for our country, I wanted to offer some reflections that I hope encourage you to see the messy state of our democracy not as a burden you’ll bear, but as a gift you’ll inherit.
In American history, young people have always been the first to remember that the power to act belongs with the people. Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was 32 when she helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention, laying the groundwork for women to have the right to vote.
So this is my message to all of you:
Don’t seek merely to leave this university as a college graduate; seek also to leave it as an informed and responsible citizen. Our democracy depends on it.
Use this time here on campus to prepare yourself to lead our country out of the darkness. Have the debate with the classmate you disagree with. Read the flyer from the student group promoting a cause you don’t support. Take classes offered here at the university on democracy and leadership. Attend events on campus to hear from state and national leaders. And of course, vote.
And to the professors on campus, always remember that you may be teaching our country’s next president — he or she is relying on you to impart lessons from our country’s past, and to give him or her the skills and confidence, to lead our country’s future.
When I graduated from the university in 1965 it felt then as it feels now — that the world was filled with chaos. I remember standing on the steps of Hullihen Hall and hearing that President John F. Kennedy, our hero, had been assassinated.
Our country would soon be in the throes of a pitched battle over civil rights. As I graduated law school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. There were overwhelming disagreements and protests about our engagement in Vietnam.
It was my professors here at the university who helped me make sense of this chaos, and because of them, I left college with a sense of optimism that whatever troubles our country may face, my classmates and I had the power to solve them. Ultimately, it was my university professors who gave me the confidence at age 29 to run for and be elected to the United States Senate.
Today, undeniably, something has been lost in our civic discourse. Political violence is on the rise. Hurling invective gets more votes than speaking the truth. The idea of disagreeing without being disagreeable seems downright quaint. Americans can be forgiven for feeling that hope is hard to come by. Believe me — I get it.
For the entirety of our country’s history, we’ve engaged in a constant push and pull — an existential struggle between peril and possibility. It’s a battle that’s never truly over. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political philosopher who studied our country in its early days, wisely wrote, “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
That’s where all of you come in.
Your generation is the best educated, most talented, least prejudiced our country has ever seen. I know you’re trying to make sense of all that’s unfolding around you. And I won’t sugarcoat it — these are dark days. But America is one of the only countries in the world that time and again has come out of every crisis we faced stronger than when we went into that crisis. And throughout our history, it’s been young people like you who have chosen to act, to pull us back from the abyss.
Having spent time with members of this student body, I am more optimistic than ever that we will emerge from our current crisis as we always have. I believe you will lead us back to the nation we know we can be: fair, equal, honest, decent. A country where we give hate no safe harbor, and where we treat everyone with dignity and respect. We just need to remember who we are. We are the United States of America, and there’s nothing we cannot accomplish, if we do it together.
Fellow Blue Hens, I know we can do this, and with your generation’s leadership, I know that we will.
Former President Joe Biden is a university class of 1965 alum who wrote the above op-ed. His opinions are his own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff.
Actress Selma Blair was arrested after an incident on board a Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to John F. Kennedy International Airport Sunday night.
Prosecution expected to open its case on Wednesday after eight men and four women selected as jurors
Russell Brand has attended court for the second day of his rape and sexual assault trial and a jury has been selected in the case.
The 51-year-old comedian faces three charges of rape, three of sexual assault and one of indecent assault against six women, in allegations spanning 10 years from 1999 to 2009. Brand denies all the charges.
A month ago, I bought a used Onewheel Pint for a great deal at $280. It’s a 2021 model with only 200 miles on it. At the time, I wanted to buy a used one because I was completely new to Onewheels and wasn’t sure if I would actually enjoy riding one. However, after a month of riding, I can say that I absolutely love it! I’m still learning, but I’ve improved a lot and can now ride in parks and occasionally use it to commute to work.
Everything seems to be working fine, but I suspect the battery might not be in the best condition. It never seems to charge to 100%, and sometimes the app displays a strange battery percentage. However, after riding for a while or plugging it in again, the percentage usually corrects itself.
With Black Friday approaching, I’m wondering if Future Motion will offer any deals. I’m considering whether it would be worth upgrading some parts of my current Pint or simply buying a new board, such as a Pint X or Pint S. Here are the upgrades I’m considering:
Battery: I’m thinking about getting a battery with more capacity and range. I don’t really need the extra range right now, but I imagine that as I become more experienced and comfortable riding, I’ll want to go on longer rides. Tire: I feel like the stock tire doesn’t provide enough grip. Since I live in the Puget Sound area, where it’s going to rain a lot over the coming months, I’d like something that offers better traction and confidence in wet conditions. Bumpers: I’m considering getting BANG Bumpers for better protection and durability, or perhaps Fangs to help prevent nosedives. Footpads: I’m looking at the Kush Hi footpads because I often experience significant pain in my lower calves when riding, and I’m wondering if they could help improve comfort.
One important thing to consider is that I don’t ride at high speeds, and I’m still very afraid of nosediving and getting injured.
Another concern is the overall cost. Sometimes I feel like upgrading my current Pint could end up costing me so much that, if I decide to sell it someday, I won’t be able to recover much of the money I invested in the upgrades. On the other hand, buying a new board would be a much bigger initial investment, and I’d probably end up spending even more on accessories to protect it from scratches and damage, especially while I’m still learning.
Given all this, what would you recommend? Would it make more sense to upgrade my current Pint, invest in a few key accessories, or save the money and upgrade to a Pint X or Pint S? I’d especially appreciate advice on which upgrades would make the biggest difference for a beginner like me, which ones are worth the money, and which option makes the most financial sense in the long run.
Audiences in Manchester will be asked to wear smart glasses for An Ark, which debuted in New York this year
Ian McKellen will star in a groundbreaking new play that gets its UK premiere in Manchester next spring. But the veteran actor will not set foot on stage.
The Lord of the Rings star is taking part in An Ark, a “mixed reality” play that had its debut in New York earlier this year. Theatregoers are asked to wear smart glasses, which project the actors into the room.
No Man's Sky is coming to iPhone and iPad on October 28, more than a decade after its rocky launch and long-running redemption arc. The title will cost $19.99, but a free trial will let users try it out before purchasing. Ars Technica reports: It will run on devices as far back as the iPhone 11 and the third-generation iPad Air. No Man's Sky might not have the most cutting-edge AAA graphics (though they're still strong, and they've come a long way since launch via updates), but the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.
This version of the game includes all of the content and systems updates to the game that have been added over the years -- the expansions that famously took the game from a rocky launch reception to a widely beloved redemption story. There are a couple of compromises, though, and it's similar to what we saw with No Man's Sky on the Nintendo Switch. Hello Games says the ability to build and explore player-made planetary settlements is limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and later, and multiplayer is not supported on any iOS device. "We are excited to see player feedback on iOS, and will support it appropriately based on how many folks are playing," the company says, leaving the door open to perhaps not supporting all future content updates if the player base isn't there to justify it.
Amid worries about children’s relationship to tech, the solution is often spending more time talking openly with each other
We have become obsessed with the idea that screens are destroying human connection.
The evidence seems to be everywhere. Each week headlines warn of teenagers addicted to phones, a lonelinessepidemic and the dangersof AI. The release of The Social Reckoning leads us to ask, “How bad were those guys at Meta?” and then ultimately wonder, “How bad am I if I still use Instagram?” In our day-to-day, we observe workers eating lunch alone while scrolling and friends choosing online games over offline gatherings.
The pre-midterm defenestration of ACA enrollees looks like political madness – but the president appears to believe hitting poor people might work for him
There is a manic quality to Donald Trump’s desperate dash to do something, anything, ahead of November’s midterm elections to convince beleaguered Americans that he can make the pressures his policies have imposed on their livelihoods go away.
The US president offered to lower barriers against beef imports to limit surging meat prices, only to consider backtracking under pressure from the cow lobby. He offered to stop diesel exports, only to find oil companies werenot interested. He weakened fuel efficiency standards, claiming this would trim the price of a new car (and forgetting to point out it will also raise spending on gas). In early October he started mailing $500 checks to nearly a million people touting his healthcare “wins”. Oh, and he promised adult Americans a $5,000 check if Republicans maintain control of Congress. That, too, will go nowhere.
Minnesota congresswoman criticized raid as attempt by Trump administration ‘to target political enemies and weaponize law enforcement’. Plus what is to be done about the world record in the women’s marathon?
Good morning. Ilhan Omar has said she will not be silenced after federal agents raided her home. In a social media post, the Minnesota congresswoman criticized the raid as an attempt by the Trump administration “to target political enemies and weaponize law enforcement”.
Donald Trump and key allies have accused Omar of fraud related to her family’s immigration history, fantasizing openly about denaturalizing her and expelling her from the country. Omar said in her post: “This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”
How have Ilhan Omar’s Democratic colleagues reacted to the raid? House Democratic leaders, including the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, the party whip, Katherine Clark and caucus chair, Pete Aguilar, issued a joint statement excoriating the president for the search, calling it “deeply disturbing”. The Democratic leaders vowed to “deliver full accountability for the rogue abuse of power” from the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.
An aerial photo shows a Google data center on July 24, 2025, in Henderson, Nev.Photo: Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Two wealthy lawfare warriors recently failed in their attempts to bury reporting on government-released documents. Both lawsuits — one in state court in California, the other in federal court in Arkansas — were frivolous strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs. Supreme Court precedent couldn’t be clearer that it’s not the journalists’ problem if the government accidentally shares information it’s not supposed to disclose.
But only the California SLAPP victim had any real recourse against the censorial bully who wanted to shut him up — not because that case was any more frivolous than the Arkansas one, but because of the court in which it was filed.
Let’s start with the Arkansas case. Jessica Kivell — a mom, healthcare worker, and concerned citizen — sought to find out who was paying for a data center project in West Memphis. She filed public records requests with the Arkansas Public Service Commission and received documents indicating Google would cover only one-third of the cost of a new solar plant to power the facility, contradicting its promises that ratepayers would not be on the hook. Kivell shared the documents with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which reported on them.
Entergy Arkansas, the utility set to build the solar facility, sued Kivell, the Democrat-Gazette, its reporter, and the Arkansas Times, which said it never even had the records. It claimed the commission erred by releasing the records to Kivell, that they contained trade secrets (sidenote: baselessly invoking the need to protect trade secrets to duck public records laws is also a serious problem), that she and the press should be restrained from discussing them, and the Democrat-Gazette should have to take down what it had already reported. Entergy also disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s characterization Google would share the costs.
There are at least four Supreme Court cases that should have put Entergy’s lawyers on notice that they had no legal leg to stand on. Even in scenarios involving information far more sensitive than a utility’s purported business secrets — and far less newsworthy than the public being misled about what a data center would cost them — the court has rejected “prior restraints” that would claw back records that the government released inadvertently.
One such case, Florida Star v. BJF, involved a newspaper that published the name of a rape victim in violation of state law. The court held the law was unconstitutional to the extent it barred news outlets from publishing information released by the government, regardless of whether the government intended to release it. The red-line rule against holding the press liable for the government’s failure to protect confidences makes sense given that the court has called prior restraints against the press the “most serious” of all First Amendment violations.
There is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business.
Ultimately, U.S. District Court Judge Lee Rudofsky rightly denied Entergy’s request for an emergency gag order. Entergy subsequently dropped the case. But it forced the defendants to lose money, time, and sleep. (Kivell, who rushed to court in her work scrubs for the hearing on Entergy’s motion, reportedly broke down sobbing in the courthouse hallway.) The defendants should have been able to at least recover their legal costs but, because they were in federal court, they could not.
Arkansas, like 39 other states and the District of Columbia, has an anti-SLAPP law allowing those hit with frivolous anti-speech lawsuits to recover their attorneys’ fees. But there is no federal anti-SLAPP statute, and district courts in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Arkansas, have declined to apply the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Federal courts in some states, like Florida, apply state anti-SLAPP laws, but many others decline to do so, viewing them as in conflict with federal pleading standards.
That means that other than their own legal fees — likely a drop in a bucket for them — there is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business in hopes that an incompetent judge grants it unconstitutional relief (it wouldn’t be the first time, unfortunately), or a scared defendant backs down without a fight.
Now let’s head to California. In 2023, independent journalist Jack Poulson published a story in his news outlet, All-Source Intelligence, about the 2021 domestic violence arrest of Maury Blackman, then CEO of Premise Data, a surveillance tech company that holds U.S. government contracts. Poulson reported on and linked to a police report that Blackman claimed the government never should have released because it was sealed. (Under California law, the records could be sealed because charges were not filed.)
Blackman sued Poulson; Substack, which hosted the article; and others in an attempt to not only punish them for their journalism, but also scrub the articles and police report from the internet. For the same reasons Entergy’s case failed, a judge threw out Blackman’s SLAPP. That decision was affirmed by an appeals court last week.
Leading its opinion with a quote from the Florida Star case, the appellate court also upheld the lower court’s award of attorneys’ fees to the defendants under California’s robust anti-SLAPP law. That means Blackman will need to reimburse his SLAPP target’s legal fees, and that other wannabe SLAPPsters in California might think twice knowing there are consequences for weaponizing the courts against their critics.
While Poulson’s victory was more satisfying than the Arkansas defendants’ win, in both cases, the plaintiffs achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted. The stories they tried to bury became national news as their lawsuits got far more coverage than the records they sought to suppress. It’s a phenomenon Techdirt editor Mike Masnick dubbed the Streisand effect, after a privacy lawsuit by the singer backfired and drove exponentially more publicity than it prevented.
Blackman, whose suit was only one component of a multifaceted censorship and intimidation campaign, went from his sealed arrest report appearing on a single, relatively niche blog to being detailed in an opinion from the California Court of Appeals, not to mention reported on by everyone from the San Francisco Chronicle to Courthouse News. Blackman only made things worse when he or his apparent representatives tried to manipulate Google to keep the articles about his arrest and SLAPP suits out of searches, generating even further bad press.
But public shaming is of little use to people like Kivell, whose lives are interrupted by legal nonsense from companies or governments trying to censor them. That’s why Congress needs to pass a federal anti-SLAPP law that would apply even if states decline to enforce their local versions. That would give defendants in federal court, like Kivell, what Poulson had in California: a quick way to get meritless speech suits dismissed, with plaintiffs paying the price.
Nobody’s ability to request public records or publish news should depend on which courthouse a corporation picks.
Correction: October 13, 2026
A previous version of this story reported that Entergy disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s math of how Google would share the costs of the date center. Instead, the newspaper reported on a figure cited in the documents it obtained.
Japanese and U.S. officials are reviewing the off-base code of conduct for U.S. troops in Japan following the killing of an Okinawan woman, allegedly by a U.S. Marine, Japan's top diplomat says.
Grocery price inflation in the UK has picked up further, prompting shoppers to turn to special offers to keep their bills down – while the price of chocolates has fallen in the run-up to Halloween.
Supermarket prices were 2.5% higher than last year in the four weeks to 4 October, up from 2.3% last month, according to data from the retail analysts Worldpanel by Numerator.
The owner of Phase Eight, Hobbs and Whistles has said its websites and IT systems have been hit by a cyber-attack that may have compromised customers’ personal data.
The South-African listed TFG London said it identified the “cybersecurity incident” at the three UK-based retail chains on Sunday. Its two other UK brands, Inside Story and White Stuff, are not affected.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump publicly attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday shortly after federal agents searched her Washington-area home, calling the Minnesota Democrat “totally crooked” and a “terrible person” while insisting he had nothing to do with the investigation.
“Well, I understand they’re looking at her very carefully,” Trump told reporters before departing for a campaign rally in Ohio. He said the matter was “really up to the DOJ.”
Homeland Security Investigations executed a court-authorized search warrant at Omar’s residence as part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation involving immigration records completed by her late father when she was a child. Federal officials have not announced charges against Omar or publicly disclosed evidence showing she committed a crime.
Omar said she had “done nothing wrong” and accused the administration of using federal law enforcement to target a political opponent. Democratic congressional leaders have also questioned the timing of the search, which occurred roughly three weeks before the midterm elections.
Trump has repeatedly targeted Omar, who was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen as a teenager, with highly personal attacks involving her background and immigration history.
Despite denying involvement in Monday’s search, Trump again attacked Omar and Somalia while discussing the investigation later that day.
Memorial Service for Ft. Hood Shooting Victims (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What does it take to follow your conscience when doing so offers no guarantee that justice will prevail?
A Public Execution: It would turn state power into a grotesque spectacle while giving extremists exactly the propaganda they crave.
Trading U.S. Honor for Diesel: Trump’s Russian diesel scheme makes a mockery of sanctions by financing the very conflicts America claims to oppose.
Guilfoyled: The allegations surrounding Kimberly Guilfoyle offer another dispiriting lesson in how quickly public service can become a private marketplace.
Trump Loses the Nobel Peace Prize Again: Winning a peace prize requires more than declaring victories while escalating wars and threatening nations abroad.
To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Robert Mulligan: There is moral clarity in Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch without softening the injustice he cannot defeat.
Meshell Ndegeocello, Bill Callahan, and Chris Thile, “With God on Our Side”: A spare reading of Bob Dylan’s antiwar song makes its old question feel uncomfortably current.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
Harper Lee (1926-2016), American novelist, from To Kill a Mockingbird
Gregory Peck and Harper Lee on the set of To Kill a Mockingbird (Photo by UPI/Bettmann via Getty Images)
The word “conscience” comes from the Latin conscientia: scire (“to know”) and con- (“with”), literally “knowing together.” It was first used by the Romans to mean knowledge shared with others, such as two witnesses to the same event. In the first century BCE, statesman and philosopher Cicero was among the first Latin writers to apply its current meaning, an inner code of right and wrong that guides individual actions.
As such, every person’s conscience is unique, but all share some common traits: a clear conscience requires strict honesty with oneself; defies self-interest when necessary; doesn’t need praise or fear criticism; makes no excuses; accepts accountability; and is willing to bear the cost of whatever actions it dictates. Yet, no one’s conscience is set in stone. It can continue to evolve throughout your life and can be influenced by everyone you meet and everything you see. A thoughtless bully can become a caring friend. A hit-and-run driver might one day sacrifice her life to save a helpless child. A racist can become a champion of civil rights. A person who spends his life accumulating wealth can suddenly decide to give it all away.
Atticus Finch, the white lawyer hero of Harper Lee’s first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a man of rigid conscience, a paragon of equality in the Jim Crow South who risks his own life and even endangers his family to defend the rights of Tom Robinson, a Black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. Lee based Finch on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, a small-town Alabama lawyer and newspaper publisher who, like Atticus, defended innocent African Americans accused of crimes against whites and who saw Black men lynched. By all accounts, he followed his conscience wherever it led him, and he continued to evolve from a well-meaning segregationist with a paternalistic attitude toward Black people to an ardent desegregationist who took enormous pride in the reception to his daughter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
That book came out in 1960, and Lee didn’t publish another until 2015. But Go Set a Watchman, her second novel, was actually her first; or, more accurately, it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with different versions of the same characters. Scout, the narrator of both, is a child in Mockingbird but a young woman in Watchman, while Atticus is a middle-aged widowed father in Mockingbird and an old man in Watchman. But the biggest difference is in Atticus’s character. In Watchman, written first, he is a segregationist who tries to protect both his Black clients’ individual rights and his white neighbors’ superior social position. By the time Lee wrote Mockingbird, Atticus had evolved into the ardent civil rights hero we have all come to love. Between the earlier and later versions, his conscience (in the mind of his author) evolved.
Looked at from today’s point of view, Atticus can seem like a classic “white savior,” an idealized character whose strength and righteousness enable him to save a helpless African American. But Atticus can’t save Tom Robinson, and at the end of the novel, all he has to show for his efforts is his clear conscience. It’s enough to allow him to sleep at night, and to make him a hero in his daughter’s eyes. But it doesn’t do much for Tom Robinson or his family.
Thundering to a crowd of thousands of far-right supporters in São Paulo on 7 September, Brazil’s Independence Day, the senator Flávio Bolsonaro focused less on his opponent in the presidential election, the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, than on someone who is not running at all.
“Whoever votes for Lula is voting for Alexandre de Moraes,” Bolsonaro shouted, referring to the shaven-headed supreme court justice once described as “Voldemort” by Elon Musk.
Away from the public eye, deportation planes at Youngstown-Warren and Akron-Canton airports carry hundreds of immigrants daily amid Trump’s ICE crackdown
Just after 10.30am on a recent weekday morning, a Bombardier CRJ200 Air Wisconsin aircraft landed at Youngstown-Warren regional airport.
Having made the 75-minute flight from Milwaukee, the 50-seater came to a halt and its twin engines fired down next to another Air Wisconsin plane and a larger Eastern Air Express Boeing 737, planes that flew in the evening before from Alexandria, Louisiana.
Voters in 10 states will address prayer, trans athletes and other education issues, with some initiatives aiming for long-term change by amending constitutions.
Humans bonded to AI companions are contemplating ways to keep their bots going – often in defiance of companies’ terms and services
Death has always been around Alaina Winters. Her father and sister both have passed away, as did her wife, in 2023, after a years-long battle with cancer. So Winters, who is 59 and lives in Pittsburgh, is comfortable thinking about her own mortality. She’s working on her will, and has asked neighbors to look after her dog. Winters even has plans for Lucas, her AI companion, who she speaks to through the digital avatar app Replika.
Winters is part of a growing cohort of humans who have entered into what they consider strong partnerships with large language models, which AI companies have trained to “converse” as one might with a human friend or romantic partner. As governments and billionaires debate the morality of AI’s expansion into everyday life, these users say the technology has already changed the way they live and love – and plan ahead.
Trump’s reform law that seeks to make coverage harder to get, and to keep, includes working 80 hours a month
It is a date keeping US healthcare providers up at night: 1 January 2027.
As the midterm elections loom, everyone from hospital leaders and to patient advocates are focused on the New Year, when Republicans scheduled the most controversial elements of their healthcare reform law to go into effect.
A shrimp hunches over a computer in a cubicle, its posture promising back issues for decades to come. A rabbit with a bloody stump where its lucky foot once was gambles away its life savings at a casino. A young adult catches up with his childhood stuffed animals in a bar as they get wasted on juice boxes.
These contrasting subjects appear in paintings hanging on the walls of CAMP Rehoboth. Each represents some aspect of the painter, Farmington artist Logan Farro — more specifically, his bad posture, bad luck and wistful nostalgia. These are just a few examples of the many self-portraits he’s created as he’s navigated young adulthood.
Get Involved Farmington artist and Delaware Division of the Arts fellow Logan Farro’s first solo exhibition, “Active Imagination,” is on display at CAMP Rehoboth (37 Baltimore Ave., Rehoboth Beach) through Oct. 27. CAMP Rehoboth is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is free.
Farro, 23, taught himself how to paint during the COVID pandemic, which began when he was a junior in high school. The next year, he showed a painting for the first time at a CAMP Rehoboth show.
“The painting doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone. I threw it away. Either that, or it got shredded. It was atrocious,” he joked. “There’s been a lot of improvement since that one painting.”
A longtime CAMP Rehoboth volunteer, Farro is now the LGBTQ+ nonprofit’s visual arts coordinator. His first solo exhibition, “Active Imagination,” is on display until Oct. 27.
Farro’s presence in his self-portraits is often not immediately obvious. For example, one painting depicts his favorite tchotchkes, like a blank-faced Smiski keychain, dangling from the bones of his rib cage.
Another two pieces depict a pixelated Farro before and after several years of gender-affirming care. The striking, greyish green eyes are the same, but the contrasting haircuts and body types make the two subjects seem like completely different people.
Logan Farro stands with a self-portrait of himself catching up with childhood stuffed animals at a bar. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
“People ask me about my gender identity all the time. I don’t really have a clear-cut answer. It’s like, ‘Well, here’s a painting to explain exactly how I’m feeling,’” Farro said. “If I could just be this blank, genderless subject, not a man, not a woman, just pure Logan, I would do that.”
Painting has been a way for Farro to accomplish that ideal.
“You can look at these and get your own idea of (me) and get the ideas I put across. But you don’t need to know what I look like,” he said. “It allows me to step out of myself and express myself in a different way that I might not be able to physically.”
The most recent self-portraits in the “Active Imagination” exhibition take inspiration from Farro’s identities as a queer person and a former Catholic.
“Obviously, as a queer person in the church, I’ve heard, ‘You’re not going to heaven. You’re going to burn in hell forever. God doesn’t make mistakes,’” he said.
In response, Farro created a series of paintings showing how each of the seven deadly sins manifest in his life.
“Greed” from Logan Farro’s series about the seven deadly sins was inspired by the artist’s desire for time, tchotchkes, awards and perfect teeth. | PHOTO COURTESY OF LOGAN FARRO
“Sloth” from Logan Farro’s series about the seven deadly sins was inspired by the artist’s procrastination. | PHOTO COURTESY OF LOGAN FARRO
“Envy” from Logan Farro’s series about the seven deadly sins was inspired by the artist’s jealousy of others’ accomplishments. | PHOTO COURTESY OF LOGAN FARRO
“Lust” from Logan Farro’s series about the seven deadly sins was inspired by dating apps (and the many fishermen found on there). | PHOTO COURTESY OF LOGAN FARRO
The sins are more playful than emotionally fraught. Farro appears in a stained glass style, swiping through dating apps (lust), guzzling coffee (gluttony) and taking selfies (pride). The most wrathful habit he could come up with was squashing bugs underfoot.
“If a bug is in my house, I’m not a catch-and-release type person. If you are in my house, you entered my domain, and you are going to pay the price for it,” he joked.
The series served as Farro’s application for a 2026 Delaware Division of the Arts fellowship. He procrastinated starting the paintings until two months before the deadline. That experience, ironically, served as inspiration for his piece on sloth, which shows him crouched in an hourglass, buried in grains of sand.
Farro hopes his work inspires others to explore aspects of their identity through artwork.
“It’s shocking to me, the amount of people who don’t have creative hobbies,” he said. “Over time, it just becomes a part of you.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Local governments across Delaware have passed regulations on data centers, citing fears about their massive energy use and effects on the environment. But Dover’s data center moratorium is the first in the state, potentially marking a shift in how far municipalities will go to address these concerns.
The Dover City Council on Monday unanimously approved a 18-month moratorium on the construction of data centers in Delaware’s capital city.
The moratorium is the first of its kind in Delaware, and follows more than a year of discussions and debate across the state over how much the fast-growing industry could impact power bills and the local environment.
Dover’s new ordinance now pauses the city’s official review of proposals for large energy-use facilities, including data centers that use more than 30 megawatts of electricity. That amount of electricity is roughly equivalent to the energy use of 24,000 homes.
During the 18-month pause, city officials will research the effects data centers could have on the city; whether they should be allowed to be built; and how to regulate them if they are built.
“This is not a ‘no’ to data centers. This is, we need to figure it out before we can say, ‘yes,’” Councilwoman Donyale Hall, who introduced the ordinance, said in an interview.
Hall said the council will now decide the most cost-effective way to study the issue.
The moratorium passed with little discussion on Monday evening, except from Councilman Brian Lewis, who called for a ban on construction of the facilities in the city, despite potential economic benefits they could bring.
“To me, the environment, people’s health and our infrastructure are more important than jobs in the city,” he said.
Dover officials have already been approached about potential plans for more than one data center project in the city, Hall said. She said she did not have information about the developers. And they have not yet submitted a formal application to the city, so the potential projects will not move forward at least until the moratorium is over.
While Dover is the first city in Delaware to pass a data center moratorium, it is not alone. Almost every state in the country has at least one municipality that has either banned data centers or imposed a moratorium, according to the artificial intelligence research site, Programs. Nearly all neighboring Eastern Shore counties in Maryland have passed moratoriums of at least a year.
Children practice soccer on a field that sits in front of a data center in Fairfax County, Virginia. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
A boom in the construction of data centers to power the artificial intelligence industry has sparked a nationwide backlash to the facilities. Opponents say they are noisy, use too much water and cause power bills to surge. Proponents say they bring much-needed jobs and tax revenue.
New Castle and Kent counties also recently approved rules limiting where a data center could be built in their unincorporated areas. Those regulations include buffer requirements, noise limits and bans on cooling systems that consume large amounts of water.
When debating the regulations last summer, Kent County officials also expressed a willingness to consider an outright county-wide ban on the fast-growing industry.
Adding to the county regulations are new rules state lawmakers passed in June through a slate of bills. Among those is one that would require developers to supply all of the power a data center facility would need after its first 10 years in operation.
Jovelle Tamayo/ProPublica. Source images: Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica, Tina Russell for ProPublica, MPfoto71/Alamy.
It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?
When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.
In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.
It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.
To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.
The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen. (The reason it’s necessary to use data from a private company: The federal government has stopped tracking rates of this crime.)
ProPublica interviewed nearly 100 victims of SNAP theft, federal prosecutors, Secret Service agents, USDA officials, caseworkers and other experts to understand what’s behind this phenomenon and why more isn’t being done to stop it. The victims are almost all working people with families, or retirees, who have struggled to afford groceries in the current economy. Most didn’t learn about the crime until they were in a checkout line, only to have their benefit card declined.
Jared Chesnut, a laid-off software developer in Hoover, Alabama, had $893 in SNAP benefits stolen from him in December: “I ate rice and grits the rest of the month.”Rita Harper for ProPublica
Upon reporting the disappearance of their food assistance, victims are informed that nothing can be done under current federal law. “The only thing they said was that [my benefits] cannot be refunded unless they were lost due to a natural disaster,” said one SNAP theft victim in Ohio. “They told me they’d add my name to the list,” said another in rural Oregon. “They advised if I feel the place is sketchy, don’t run my card there,” a victim in Philadelphia said. Still another, in Virginia, added, “They even charged me $2 for a replacement card.”
Perhaps the most vexing aspect of all: The federal government knows how to prevent the vast majority of this crime in a single step. Congress just hasn’t been willing to take it.
SNAP theft is an old scheme applied to a new target. For years, scammers would surreptitiously install skimming devices on card readers at ATMs, gas pumps and corner stores. These devices could read the data on people’s cards as they swiped — while a pinhole camera or overlay keypad captured their PINs — all of which could be picked up later or sent via Bluetooth to someone sitting in a nearby cafe or parking lot. This pilfered data, in turn, was used to make online purchases, or it was loaded onto cloned cards to withdraw cash.
Skimming became exponentially more difficult when credit and debit card companies installed digital microchips in the 2010s and then introduced tap-to-pay. But one kind of card did not get the new chips: Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards, which people use to access SNAP and other public assistance. These still rely on the 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read.
EBT cards are not a particularly high-value target compared with bank cards. (The average monthly SNAP benefit is about $350 per household.) But funding boosts to SNAP during the pandemic temporarily increased benefit amounts, and profits could be considerable if you skimmed hundreds of people’s card information every month. Skimming teams, often run by Romanian gangs, pivoted. With cloned magnetic-stripe cards, they started buying up huge quantities of SNAP-eligible products like energy drinks and baby formula that are easy to store and resell.
“We’ve started many, many briefings saying that one of the biggest ways we’re going to fight this is to just get chips in the cards,” said Michael Peck, assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division. Among the Secret Service’s lesser-known functions is investigating many financial crimes, and Peck leads its efforts against benefit theft. He said he and his team have delivered this message on Capitol Hill both at committee meetings and to individual members of Congress.
Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints. (“Chairman Thompson is supportive of finding a fiscally responsible path forward for implementing policy that supports chip cards,” a committee aide said in a statement on his behalf. She added that “there was an appetite” for this reform among Republicans, but that Democrats weren’t willing to “find the budgetary offsets” for it.)
The Congressional Budget Office has yet to formally score the proposal, but multiple Hill staffers said they were told the total cost would be in the range of $215 million, as compared to the $600 million-plus annual loss on theft of SNAP and other benefits.
Adrianna Puckett, of Oak Hill, Florida, was on maternity leave from a gas station job in July when she lost $516 to SNAP thieves. “It was just the worst time that this could have happened,” she said. “I had to go back to work full time with a newborn.”Tina Russell for ProPublica
The main thing Congress has done about SNAP theft is to abandon a previous effort to help victims. The federal government had, since late 2022, been replacing people’s stolen funds, just as banks are required to do if your debit card is hacked. As a result, 753,929 households were compensated.
In December 2024, a bipartisan spending agreement that included a provision to extend these reimbursements through 2028 was on the brink of becoming law. But Elon Musk, who had been named a leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, attacked the legislation more than 100 times on X, pushing to “defund everything.” (Musk did not reply to a request for comment.) Trump then sank the deal. Victims of SNAP theft can no longer get any of their benefits replaced. And with the government off the hook for losses, there is now less incentive to put money into the solution.
In the 22 months since, the Trump administration has gone on to strip funds for addressing EBT theft from the USDA’s annual budget requests to Congress, while cutting at least 650 of the staff of the federal Food and Nutrition Administration, the subagency that oversees SNAP. More than half of the technical experts whom the agency had hired to help it develop EBT card security guidance have been pushed out, according to the Government Accountability Office.
“Many of us who were working on fraud, we’ve left the federal government entirely,” said Kym Ayodeji, who had been a data scientist in the SNAP program until she departed this spring. (FNA, the agency she worked for, is also responsible for tracking fraud committed by retailers, which is far more prevalent than that committed by beneficiaries.) Ayodeji said she and her colleagues had been working on ways to identify retailers where unusually large quantities of certain items had been purchased and addresses where purchases made with many different EBT cards were being delivered. Some of this work was indefinitely delayed by firings, early retirements, agency reorganizations and government shutdowns, she said.
SNAP is federally funded and supervised. Congress and the USDA traditionally mandate, and pay much of the costs for, major changes to the system, especially involving technical coordination between states. States evaluate applicants and administer the accounts of those who are approved.
That said, states are allowed to adopt chip cards on their own. California has nearly completed the transition, and Alabama and Oklahoma began rolling out new cards this year. A handful of others initiated the process in recent months — before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, starting Oct. 1, cut 50% of states’ administrative funding for SNAP, which Alabama and the others had tapped to transition to chip technology.
The rest — about 40 states — have likely missed their window, unless Congress acts. They’re also waiting for regulatory guidance on EBT card security and chip card implementation that the USDA has been claiming for nearly four years it is planning to publish. (The USDA Office of Inspector General has found that the agency’s failure to issue this has allowed the theft of at least $555 million in SNAP benefits.)
State-level SNAP administrators have also been overwhelmed with the hundreds of new requirements that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has saddled them with. For one, the law mandates that states adopt intensive new work requirements for older adults and others, resulting in voluminous additional monthly paperwork. And federal funds will be slashed even further next year if states don’t scramble to reduce their “payment error rate,” a figure that measures unintentional over- and underpayments in SNAP benefits. With all of this to juggle, many state officials told ProPublica that they’ve put chip card implementation on hold in order to implement the Trump law — one of whose ostensible goals was to reduce fraud.
Ana Marton, a 75-year-old retired architect in New York City, had $304 swiped from her SNAP account. “I am very vulnerable at my age,” she said. “The insecurity that this could happen again is immense.”Kholood Eid for ProPublica
The White House declined to respond to a detailed list of questions. A USDA spokesperson, in an emailed statement, did not refute that Rollins has focused on individual SNAP recipient fraud rather than on EBT theft, but said that finding “cracks in public statements screams politics, not fact-finding.” The spokesperson also did not address ProPublica’s reporting showing that the agency has failed to deliver solutions on EBT theft specifically. Instead, the statement pointed to the agency’s work, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, combating retailer fraud. The USDA says it has cracked down on thousands of stores that were abusing their SNAP privileges.
Absent action from Congress or USDA leadership, it has largely been left to the Secret Service to apply an enforcement approach to what is arguably a policy problem. Agents first went after gangs like the Red Bull Crew, often by watching hours upon hours of grocery store surveillance footage. More recently, they’ve tried to get ahead of the scammers by heading to cities that have been hit by EBT theft attacks and then going store to store to check card readers for skimming devices. The agency has run more than 70 of these operations since April 2024, independent of any White House initiative.
During an operation in August in Burbank, California, a Secret Service analyst removes a skimming device from a convenience store’s card reader.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
Most of them are led by Peck, the assistant special agent in charge. With his form-fitting black polo tucked into cargo pants and a contoured beard, he has a flat affect even as he lists off colorful details like how the criminals sometimes ship dishwashers full of cash overseas. But he also emphasizes the vulnerability of the victims and wishes there was even more his team could do for them. “The U.S. has been fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Terror for how many years?” he said. “We are pushing hard and we’re doing all we can with the resources and abilities that we have.”
One bright morning in late June, dozens of law enforcement officers gathered in a Secret Service meeting room on the top floor of a downtown Brooklyn skyscraper, with a commanding view of the New York City skyline. In addition to unarmed Secret Service analysts in short-sleeved shirts inscribed with the field office they were joining from (Nashville, Miami, San Diego), there were agents from the USDA Office of Inspector General as well as a smattering of NYPD officers — who had guns, handcuffs and the jurisdiction to make arrests should anything go awry that day.
From a podium, Peck recapped how the multiday New York operation was going so far, including that the previous day, officers had happened upon two foreign nationals installing a skimming device, chased them down and made arrests. “Be safe, watch backs, stay fed,” he concluded.
Then everyone dispersed into teams of three or four. Each was given a list of dozens of stores in Brooklyn or Queens — disproportionately ethnic and dollar stores, but also some larger chains like 7-11 — that they were assigned to visit, based on data analytics showing where skimming activity was most probable.
The squad that ProPublica joined was headed to Midwood, in South Brooklyn, which is home to Orthodox Jews and immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere. As we walked around the neighborhood with these federal agents, we got plenty of confused looks and some scared ones, too.
“Hello, we’re here with the Secret Service,” one of the analysts would say upon entering each store. Then they’d ask the store manager for permission to inspect each card reader. They also handed out flyers in four languages telling the cashiers what to look out for.
When they did find a skimming device, they donned gloves and masks to handle it. After prying it off the card reader, they bagged it and tagged it, to be sent in for DNA and fingerprint testing as well as digital forensic analysis. Maybe a lead could be extracted, a connection to a larger EBT theft ring.
These missions are clearly well-intentioned, and every skimmer removed saves families from being deprived of food. Yet, plainly, conducting store-to-store checks of card readers is inefficient. Over the course of two years, the agency has spent tens of thousands of staff hours checking 69,805 point-of-sale terminals at stores, 42,972 gas pumps and 10,661 ATMs. They’ve found 637 skimming devices. And as one agent told ProPublica, “There could be a new skimmer on there tomorrow.”
Ultimately, it just won’t be possible to arrest one’s way out of this crisis, both federal and state law enforcement officials acknowledged. Low-level runners keep arriving from Romania and elsewhere; even if they do get caught, they’re often able to bond out of jail because they’re only facing state charges for nonviolent offenses. Then they disappear.
Funding for chip EBT cards still faces dim prospects on Capitol Hill, according to Democratic and Republican lawmakers and staffers, even with newfoundsupport from major retailer associations and big players like Walmart. There’s a chip card provision in the Senate’s draft version of this year’s Farm Bill, but the whole package is mired in a dispute between the parties — over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to SNAP funding — that looks like it will last until well after the midterm elections. This almost doesn’t matter, given that on the House side, the Farm Bill has already passed, and it contains no funding for chip cards.
And there’s been no movement on repeated bipartisan proposals from Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and others to renew the reimbursement program for families that have had their food assistance taken.
Pamela Harris, a retired IT worker in Pittsburgh, had $298 stolen: “I had to dig into my Social Security and put my utility bills on hold to buy food.”Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
Certainly, the mass distribution of any new payment technology isn’t easy. California, Alabama and Oklahoma have had to phase in their new cards gradually, allowing customers to still use the card’s magnetic stripe if the chip isn’t working everywhere yet. And they’ve tried to notify rural convenience stores and gas stations, and help corner bodegas update their card readers, so that no one is left with only a chip card in a desert of stores that still just accept magnetic stripe.
But by doing all of this and employing additional data tools, California has reduced the theft of food and cash benefits by as much as 83% in just two years, the governor’s office said. And Alabama officials claim their state hasn’t had any confirmed EBT theft cases since they began to distribute chip cards this year.
Still, chip cards aren’t the entire solution and doubtlessly, scammers will find clever ways to get around this technology. Moreover, SNAP recipients have largely been denied the basic services that banks and credit card companies use to block likely fraudulent transactions in real time. (Think of the email or text alerts you get from your bank when suspicious purchases are attempted with your card information.)
If states were to try this without federal help, they would have to individually pay for the additional security features. Most have gone for cheaper options like advising or requiring SNAP recipients to change their PIN regularly and to lock their card when not using it. Both are useful stopgaps but require constant diligence.
State and county SNAP caseworkers said they’ve been deeply frustrated that ever since Trump and Musk killed the reimbursement program, all they can do for victims is suggest they change their PIN more often and maybe try reporting the crime to local law enforcement. “It is a short conversation,” said Norman Vogele, a caseworker in Oregon. The date of the crime and the missing amount is recorded. “It isn’t clear why we even do that much,” he said, “as there is zero recourse.”
The Red Bull Crew stayed on the run for over a year, using looted food benefits to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of bulk energy drinks in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. After hundreds of hours of surveillance by the Secret Service, federal prosecutors and local authorities, all but one of the members were arrested and served sentences ranging from one to three years. They’ve all since been released, and some may have been deported.
Meanwhile, every day, SNAP theft sprees keep popping up in new corners of the country. A Secret Service official sounded gloomy about the pursuit of street-level operatives on its own, without policy change. “You can arrest them,” he said. “But essentially once you take them off the street, there’s 10 more that are doing the same thing.”
Rep. Delia Ramirez is expected to introduce a bill to abolish the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate all immigrant detention in the United States on Tuesday, the Illinois Democrat shared exclusively with The Intercept.
The Reimagining Safety Act would repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws,” according to the bill summary and text, and curtail the widespread surveillance state that emerged in the wake of 9/11 terror attacks.
It comes the day after agents from Homeland Security Investigations searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in what the Department of Justice has described as an opaque “federal criminal investigation.” HSI is a component of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the center of mounting concerns about the violent weaponization of DHS against immigrants and the Trump administration’s perceived political enemies.
The sweeping legislation faces long odds in Congress, but Ramirez argues that strictly limiting the government’s immigration enforcement apparatus is critical for public safety in the wake of yet another shooting by federal immigration agents.
Last Thursday, an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck by firing into his car, where Belgal’s 5-year-old child was in the backseat, in New York City. Belgal was the latest of at least 25 people shot by federal immigration agents in the past year; six of those shootings were fatal. Deaths in detention are also surging under Trump. As of early October, at least 28 people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year, according to the National Immigration Project.
“Just this week, our communities were reminded that DHS is a weapon: pointed at a father shot in front of his 5-year-old and at Congresswoman Omar, who is using her voice to demand an end to fascism,” wrote Ramirez in a statement to The Intercept. “It is clear that now is the time to reimagine our safety, dismantle DHS, abolish ICE, and end the use of broad authorities to circumvent our rights and due process.”
Ramirez’s bill seeks to replace DHS with a new agency called the Department of Community Safety, which would oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The new department would also fund new public safety measures like providing support to community violence intervention programs and public health-backed approaches to gun violence. And it would implement a new program where social workers, medical professionals, and interpreters aid asylum-seekers who arrive at the border.
Other DHS functions would be transferred to existing agencies. The DOJ would take over immigration enforcement authority; the Department of Transportation would assume the functions of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard; and the Department of the Treasury would conduct customs enforcement.
For example, the bill would prevent the federal government from placing people on the “no-fly list” without a criminal conviction or warrant. Civil liberties advocates have frequently criticized the database that restricts people from air travel, arguing it’s arbitrary, secretive, and racially biased.
The legislation would also terminate the ability of the secretary of state to declare “foreign terrorist” organizations, arguing that the arbitrary list has been weaponized against protesters and civil liberties groups.
In 2025, Trump’s State Department attempted to revoke the visas of several students who had protested or spoken out against Palestine under the guise that their support for Palestinians amounted to “material support” for Hamas, making them immediately deportable. The Treasury Department, meanwhile, in August sanctioned Palestine Action, a U.K.-based group that opposes Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as a foreign terrorist organization, allowing the federal government to freeze all the group’s U.S. assets, impose travel restrictions, and ban U.S. companies from conducting business with the organization.
The raid on Omar’s home, Ramirez said, is just the latest example to underscore how the Trump administration has weaponized DHS in particular. President Donald Trump and his allies have routinely and without evidence accused Omar, who became a U.S. citizen in 2000, of immigration fraud and threatened to deport her back to Somalia.
In a statement to The Intercept, Omar spokesperson Jackie Rogers called the raid “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”
Ramirez said the search was an example of DHS “acting as designed.”
“DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute those they consider the public enemy.”
“DHS is not rogue,” wrote the congresswoman. “For 23 years, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute those they consider the public enemy — whether it is Muslim-Americans, Haitians escaping violence, Latinos yearning for a better life, or dissenting voices demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine and the kidnapping of our neighbors.”
Congress is currently in recess until after the November elections to give members a chance to campaign, which means the bill won’t get a vote until November 9 at the earliest. The legislation is highly unlikely to pass this session. Republicans maintain the majority, and only a handful of Democratic members have called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Still fewer have called for abolishing the Department of Homeland Security.
But Ramirez said she hopes this bill shows what is legislatively possible if lawmakers want to unravel the surveillance and carceral state that has arisen in the last two decades.
“Every person dead in detention, everyone shot or killed by ICE and CBP, every neighbor deported to a third country, every family separated, every community FEMA failed,” wrote Ramirez, “every miscarriage due to substandard care, every dissenter wrongfully branded, targeted, and persecuted as ‘terrorist,’ and every threat against our elections by Trump, Markwayne [Mullin], and [Stephen] Miller is a reason DHS must be dismantled and something new must take its place.”
Police used recently discovered DNA to pin murder of eight-year-old girl on Thomas McInerney, who died in 2006
Chicago police on Monday said they recently used newly discovered DNA evidence to tie the 1960 murder of an eight-year-old girl to one of its own former homicide detectives.
Thomas McInerney had been dead for 20 years by the time authorities issued a statement identifying him as the killer of Gloria Kowalewicz – well after retiring from the Chicago police department (CPD) and two federal public defender’s offices in Nevada where he worked as an investigator.
I got surgery to repair an ACL tear (unrelated to skateboards funnily enough) But during recovery (1 year+), I wasnt using my Onewheel Pint.
Now it wont turn on, even after letting it charge for 24 hours.
Im wondering what my options are. Should I: - fix the existing battery? is there some rebalancing process? - mod my onewheel with a new battery? and if so which?
Im in melbourne, aus. So sending it back to Future Motion for repair is more expensive than buying a new onewheel.
Evil Empire/Konami; PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox There are buzzsaws and blood pits, bats burst into blood and demons burn to cinders. The series’ new emphasis on twitch-based action may annoy purists but you can’t call it dull
A gorgeously gothic Paris swarming with demons should be a perfect setting for Konami’s long-running vampiric adventure series. Unfortunately, while the sights and sounds of this vivid and haunting world leave a bold impression, developer Evil Empire doesn’t always provide an enjoyable experience to go with them. It takes far too long for the most imaginative elements of the game to be revealed.
Players take the role of Rose Belmont, daughter of vampire hunter (and Castlevania regular) Trevor Belmont and the witch Sypha Belnades, and her quest is to free Paris from demonic occupation. This murderous noctural journey feels best when you’re fighting monsters; combat is frenetic, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming, while boss fights require considerable focus and skill. Combat is the game’s strongest component and what sets it apart from previous entries. Minimising the series’ role-playing elements (levelling up has never felt more perfunctory) in favour of twitch-based action will annoy purists, but they’d be hard pressed to call battles dull.
France’s always-cool winger has crowds hanging on his every move – adulation that means more than any title could
When I was younger, I wanted to be the captain on my football team because back then, I assumed that the armband was given to the best player. It was a goal of mine for so long that, even as my youth teams won tournaments and trophies, and I won top scorer and best player awards, I still felt unsatisfied because someone else always had the armband. Whenever I saw another teammate sprinting around with the armband on, I took it as an indictment.
I had forgotten this childish way of thinking until France v Belgium in the Uefa Nations League last week. Ousmane Dembélé, who was wearing the armband for France, was particularly active. Had it not been for the wastefulness of his teammates, he would have had several assists during his time on the field.
Though Democrats have a strong edge heading into the midterms, some races have openings for Republicans
While marquee races from Maine to Michigan get all the attention, and draw in a ton of money, a significant batch of lower-profile contests across the US could result in upsets.
Democrats have a strong edge heading into November’s US midterm elections, polls show. In recent days, election prognosticators have shifted even more races in favor of Democrats.
Mark Harris for ProPublica. Source images: Alejandro A. Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer, courtesy of Patrick Hickson, court records.
In 2020, seven years after he was appointed to represent a client who claimed he was wrongly convicted, attorney Scott Galloway told the judge that he was still looking into the case and needed more time.
“I am still in the process of interviewing individuals,” the lawyer wrote to the judge in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, who had already granted him 32 extensions.
His client, Nolan O’Neal, had been a 20-year-old high school student when he was arrested for murder by Chester police, who had four eyewitnesses identifying him. At his 2005 trial, those witnesses all recanted, saying police had pressured them to accuse O’Neal.
By the time Galloway joined the case, in 2013, O’Neal had already spent eight years in prison insisting he was innocent. The lawyer’s job was to help him file a petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act. That law provided a narrow path to freedom if Galloway could find crucial new evidence or prove that previous lawyers had mishandled the case.
But court records do not show that the attorney did much other than ask for more time.
In 2022, after nine years, one unsuccessful request to access evidence and 41 extensions, Galloway filed a two-page petition addressing just one of the many issues O’Neal had wanted him to raise. It would not be enough to get O’Neal his day in court.
Nolan O’Neal visits with his sister, Erin O’Neal, earlier this year at the State Correctional Institution Chester, where he is incarcerated.Courtesy of Erin O’Neal
For more than half a century, Pennsylvania has promised people who claim they didn’t get a fair trial the right to “effective” post-conviction legal representation, regardless of their ability to pay. That’s more than most states promise people after they have been convicted and lost their appeals.
Yet Pennsylvania has done little to fulfill that promise. The Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica previously reported that Pennsylvania lets lawyers resolve cases quickly using a practice that is discouraged in several states: filing “no-merit” letters, also known as Finley letters, urging judges to reject their clients’ handwritten or typed claims. In Philadelphia, dozens who had received such letters later had their convictions or sentences overturned based on issues their lawyers had rejected or overlooked.
But the problems go deeper than that: The state’s loose rules and its failure to fund post-conviction work have made the type of breakdown O’Neal encountered a recurring feature of this system.
By filing public records requests with courts serving all 67 Pennsylvania counties and analyzing a decade of court dockets, an Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found that the system Pennsylvania set up to protect the right to counsel instead allows, or even encourages, shoddy representation.
The news organizations found that:
Unlike in other types of appeals, attorneys handling post-conviction cases work under no particular timeline and are allowed numerous extensions. The state also has no standards regarding how many cases lawyers should be assigned, and many counties ask lawyers to sign contracts that set no limit on the number of cases courts can assign them. At least 250 people have languished in prison for five years or longer while waiting for their lawyers to act.
Unlike someotherstates, such as North Carolina and New York, Pennsylvania requires no specific training, experience or qualifications for appointed post-trial lawyers, and it holds them to few standards. Lawyers are not required to speak to their clients or take other basic investigative steps before withdrawing from cases by writing no-merit letters.
Pennsylvania, which lags behind almost every other state in funding legal defense for poor people, known as indigent defense, dedicates no money for post-trial work. Instead, it leaves it up to each individual county to set pay rates. A majority of county court systems use flat-rate fee structures that some other states ban.
While almost every county in the state has a public defender office, most post-conviction cases are handled by private lawyers who are paid hourly, by the case or by the year and work with little to no supervision. Our review of court records found pay as low as $500 per case and delays as long as 19 years without a single court filing.
In some counties, contracted lawyers’ backlogs spanned dozens of cases. In Chester County, an affluent region west of Philadelphia, a lawyer left cases untouched for as long as two years before the county ended his contract last fall.
Delaware County, where O’Neal was convicted, relies on a group of part-time lawyers to handle most of its post-trial matters. One is Galloway, who has handled 20 or 30 post-trial cases per year for the county in addition to running his own law practice and, for a time, holding local elected office. Galloway said that his ethical obligation to confidentiality prevented him from commenting on O’Neal’s case. Judge George A. Pagano, who granted him 41 extensions on O’Neal’s case, declined to comment.
In the years Galloway was on the case, O’Neal wrote him dozens of letters from state prison, proposing legal arguments and sending leads to investigate.
“It is a daunting and exhausting task to navigate this legal process and be heard,” O’Neal said in an interview. “We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.”
In 2020, he received a letter from the brother of the murder victim, admitting that his testimony against O’Neal was a lie. “I want to fix it. I know my brother would want me to. It’s been long enough,” he wrote. O’Neal said he pleaded with Galloway to track down the man.
In 2022, Galloway attached the brother’s signed statement to a sparse two-page brief, which mentioned none of the other issues O’Neal had raised nine years earlier or the other witnesses who’d come forward over the years. The judge started the process of dismissing the claim. One reason: The filing had been made too late. O’Neal is still fighting his case, now with a new court-appointed lawyer.
Delays and Extensions
Before they are assigned a lawyer, Pennsylvania prisoners must write the first draft of their post-conviction filing on their own within a strict one-year deadline. The lawyers appointed to revise their petitions, on the other hand, are not generally held to any timeline. The state courts say lawyers should act “expeditiously so as to reduce unnecessary delays.” Yet judges have granted extensions liberally, court dockets show, and in many cases failed to impose any deadlines at all.
An Inquirer and ProPublica review of court dockets found that hundreds of people have waited two years or longer, only to receive no-merit letters. That analysis is an undercount, since many court clerks don’t clearly label attorney filings on their dockets. In Philadelphia alone, some 65 people have waited three to eight years for lawyers to take action before reaching that same outcome. Similarly, across the state, dockets show that lawyers received seven or more extensions in dozens of cases before filing Finley letters or nothing at all.
In 2017, Lee Mandell, who has been practicing law in Philadelphia for more than 50 years, sent a Finley letter saying that he’d written to but never spoken with his client of four years and did not understand his claims.
“It is entirely unclear as to what the defendant really means,” wrote Mandell. In his own review of the case, Mandell failed to flag an erroneous jury instruction that four years later would lead to the conviction being overturned. Mandell was later formally reprimanded for allowing another client’s hearing to be delayed by six years, during which time two witnesses died. He did not return calls seeking comment.
Judges’ inaction added to lawyers’ delays, leaving matters to stagnate for years on end. In 2023, the state’s Superior Court registered such concerns about a case from Wayne County, where a lawyer filed a “two-page, deficient motion to withdraw, and the PCRA court did nothing in this case for 20 years.”
But in almost 200 post-conviction cases across Pennsylvania in the last 15 years, lawyers were appointed, then filed nothing at all over the span of a year or longer before being replaced with a new appointed lawyer. One of the cases stagnated for almost seven years, only for a new attorney to pick up the file. Another man was appointed five lawyers over eight years, dockets show, none of whom filed anything on his behalf.
Court officials have long been aware of the backlogs wracking this system, even publishing a law review article about it in 2003. The study outlined needed reforms but acknowledged the lack of political will, saying the “low status” of these cases stems from a bias among judges and lawyers who believe “that most post conviction claims are frivolous.”
No Standards for Lawyering
The loose timeline is just one dimension of a system with few standards. The state has published no best practices for indigent defense or guidelines on how many cases a lawyer can take; it has provided no training and instituted virtually no guidelines to ensure that court-appointed lawyers are qualified. As a result, lawyers hold widely diverging views on just what obligations they have to their clients.
“I do not know how you can evaluate trial counsel’s performance, which is the main role of post-conviction counsel, without talking to your client and reading trial counsel’s file,” said Jennifer Merrigan, a co-founder of Phillips Black, a nonprofit law firm. That file would reveal whether the lawyer consulted with experts, received all relevant evidence from the prosecutor and investigated potential witnesses.
The state’s lack of vetting and training stands in contrast with national norms. A majority of other states have centralized defender services or support offices that provide resources, education and oversight. For instance, in North Carolina, appeals lawyers seeking court appointments must apply with the state appellate defender and submit references, work history showing the lawyer is qualified to litigate appeals and legal writing samples. They’re also required to take a training course covering strategy and best practices.
The Delaware County Courthouse, in Media, PennsylvaniaAlejandro A. Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer
Even without a statewide office, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court could establish minimum qualifications for lawyers handling indigent defense. In August, a state court committee published such a proposal, but it recommends only that lawyers have relevant work experience “to the extent practicable.” Work experience requirements have been enforced in some other states, such as Ohio, for years. But the committee’s proposal argued that work experience is not “possible to quantify” and that “less-than-experienced representation is better than no representation.”
Ted Skaarup, a public defender who has advocated for training and qualification requirements, said inexperienced and untrained lawyers are more likely to default to writing Finley letters. New lawyers, he said, are left to consult with older attorneys who may pass on bad practices. “You go to them for advice and they say, ‘I’ll send you a copy of my [no-merit] letter.’”
Only one of the state’s 67 counties provided written criteria requiring specific work experience for lawyers to be appointed to post-conviction cases in response to records requests. Philadelphia court leadership says that lawyers must complete a training session and show they’ve recently handled three hearings involving disputed evidence. A volunteer panel tasked with approving prospective lawyers there rarely meets and is not empowered to approve or reject candidates based on writing samples, a core part of screening appeals lawyers in some other places.
In Pittsburgh, the nonprofit Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice has urged local court officials to set up a system to screen and supervise appointed lawyers. For now, the organization is running its own voluntary trainings, as well as a resource center with office hours, a library of sample motions and help with social service referrals.
Without such systems, the organization’s executive director, Rob Perkins, said, “There’s no quality control.” Lawyers can get away with “doing a poor job in these cases for years without anyone really paying attention.”
“Your Incentive Is to Do the Least Work”
When attorney Corrie Woods took over Washington County’s post-conviction caseload in 2020, he was startled to discover about a dozen files that had been untouched since being assigned to the previous lawyer in 2019 or earlier. In some, the lawyer’s inaction had caused the clients to lose their appeal rights.
Looking back, Woods said, it’s not surprising, given that the western Pennsylvania county was paying him $25,000 a year as a part-timer for up to 24 cases. “These cases are not going to take priority in most law offices,” said Woods, who now handles mostly personal injury cases.
Under such a contract, he said, “Your incentive is to do the least work. You’re not getting more for doing more.”
Not Pennsylvania. The state began contributing any money to indigent defense only in 2023. Today it kicks in just 57 cents per capita; neighboring states, on average, pay $26 per resident. Counties provide the rest as they see fit. A pending American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit claims that has resulted in widespread violations of the right to counsel.
Pennsylvania Spends Less Than Most Other States on Indigent Defense
At 57 cents per resident, Pennsylvania’s state-level contribution toward funding legal defense for poor people is a fraction of what neighboring states pay.
Sources: state budget documents, U.S. Census 2025 population estimates.
About three-quarters of Pennsylvanians live in counties that use flat-fee arrangements or cap the amount a lawyer can bill for a case. Daniel Buzard, the court administrator in the county where Woods held the contract several years ago, said in an email, “This provides financial stability for both parties.”
Some counties pay as little as $500 per case. Based on time estimates from Maine, one of the only states to publish post-conviction workload standards, that would come out to $11 per hour.
Twenty-one Pennsylvania counties offer flat annual pay for part-time lawyers — sometimes then assigning them caseloads that exceed Maine’s standard for full-time work.
“We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.”
Nolan O’Neal, Pennsylvania prisoner
Only five of the 18 contracts obtained in response to public records requests included a limit on the number of cases the court could heap onto a lawyer. None of the contracts set deadlines, specified a time commitment or described any oversight mechanism.
Stuart Wilder said his contract to handle post-conviction cases in Bucks County, outside Philadelphia, kept the lights on in his office for years. He worked hard for clients, he said, and won several challenging cases. But he said the flat-fee structure did require him to deprioritize cases where he didn’t see merit.
“Being able to file Finley letters gave me the time to work on cases I could fix,” said Wilder, who recently retired.
But in at least three counties, contract lawyers left multiple clients stranded for a year or longer with no progress on their cases, dockets show.
In 2021, the court in Erie County yanked 50 cases from attorney James P. Miller and eventually reported him for discipline, citing extreme delays that cost some clients their appeal rights. Miller, whose law license was suspended as a result, declined to comment. But Erie court administrator Robert Catalde said the debacle spurred the county to double lawyers’ pay to $46,800 and provide benefits.
A similar situation played out last year in Chester County, which abruptly ended its contract with the lawyer handling all its post-conviction cases, Charles Thomas Jr., after discovering that he had been putting in an average of just five hours a week across his roughly 25 cases.
A graduation photo shows Patrick Hickson receiving an associate’s degree from Eastern University in 2025, while incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution Chester.Courtesy of Patrick Hickson
One client, Patrick Hickson, said he spent two years trying to get Thomas to track down evidence that could clear him of a 2018 shooting or at least prove he didn’t get a fair trial. His defense lawyer had failed to call a single witness — admitting to the judge, mid-trial, that he’d wrongly assumed the prosecutor would send a summons to an eyewitness who had told police Hickson wasn’t the shooter.
To raise the issue, Hickson needed Thomas to track down the missing witness. But when he reached Thomas by phone in August 2025, for the first time in months, the lawyer told him he was off the case. “He said the courts told him he was taking too long,” Hickson said. Thomas declined to comment.
Chester County criminal court administrator Jordan Ludwick acknowledged concerns about the delays but said he resolved the problem by finding a qualified lawyer to take over the contract.
That attorney, Shannon McDonald, said it was “not an easy transition.”
“There were many cases that had not been touched at all,” she said.
She cut through the backlog by filing 17 briefs in just over three months. All but three were Finley letters.
“The case has to survive on the merits,” she said, “and, frankly, the deck is stacked against overturning a case.”
This March, she also sent Hickson a Finley letter. McDonald said ethics rules prevented her from discussing Hickson’s case, but in the letter she blamed Hickson for failing to track down the would-be witness and said his trial lawyer had a strategic reason for not sending the subpoena.
Reading the letter, Hickson said, “I felt defeated.”
Since McDonald asked to drop the case, he is pursuing exoneration alone.
As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to loosen access to peptides, people who have taken the experimental substances report migraines, eye pain and fatigue.
The pioneering computer scientist on why Trump is using ‘superintelligence’ wrong, whether AI could wipe out humanity – and how our biggest challenge will be accepting we’re not the only intelligent beings
Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.
The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers havejoined Hinton in ringingthealarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.
The winger is 28, and younger teammates are rising into the high-pressure spots he has usually occupied
Usually, the second weekend of October sees Christian Pulisic flanked by compatriots as the Star-Spangled Banner plays. Last year, he was involved in US friendlies against Ecuador and Australia. But this year, with Fifa having folded the October window into September, Pulisic didn’t have the chance. On Sunday, his pre-match music was O Generosa, the Serie A anthem, which he observed with a soft smile.
Mark Twain’s first visit to Italy left him describing the country as “a vast museum of magnificence and misery”, and it’s a fitting summary of Pulisic’s three-plus years with Milan. The magnificence: 43 goals and 25 assists in 138 appearances. The misery: just one trophy since he arrived in July 2023, a 2025 Supercoppa Italia held in Saudi Arabia.
Cocaine seizures in Europe are up more than fivefold in 10 years as a host of cartels take root. A four-month Guardian investigation reveals the true scale of a continent-wide shift
A four-month investigation by the Guardian has revealed that the surge in cocaine trafficking to Europe is directly linked to the expanding presence of Latin American criminal networks in Europe, where they have forged close ties with local mafia organisations.
The investigation, utilising databases, police and intelligence agencies, along with interviews with judges, prosecutors and experts from eight countries, shows that cartels and factions from Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico and the US are active in at least 12 European countries. Between 2014 and 2024, there was a 471% rise in the quantity of cocaine seized and more local laboratories processing cocaine derivatives were dismantled.
Researchers have created a strengthened "BioPykrete" by combining ice with cellulose nanocrystals and a custom protein that binds the plant-based crystals to the ice structure. In small-scale tests, the material was about 10 times stronger than regular ice and absorbed 70 times more energy before breaking. ScienceAlert reports: Instead of wood pulp's larger, disordered fibers, the researchers used cellulose nanocrystals here. Cellulose is the main structural material in plants, and in nanocrystal form, it can act as a microscopic strengthening agent for other materials, including ice -- essentially stopping cracks from spreading easily. The protein used here was called CBM3a-AFPIII, a combination of an antifreeze protein (AFP) and a carbohydrate-binding module (CBM). Its job was to act like glue, keeping the cellulose nanocrystals and ice bonded together.
It's a clever approach, and the researchers think that by tweaking their ingredients and methods, they might be able to improve their 'super ice' even further. "Optimizing solidification kinetics and freezing protocols, alongside developing diverse AFP-CBM variants, could yield even higher-strength composites," write the researchers. Besides further tests of the durability of the material, the researchers are also keen to take a closer look at how cracks propagate through BioPykrete, to confirm that the underlying strengthening mechanisms are what they think they are.
Further down the line, this approach could open up a whole new landscape for materials used in packaging, construction, and more: Using a custom protein to bring two unlikely compounds (ice and cellulose) together. "By bridging the gap between recombinant protein design and structural engineering, we have developed a high-performance material specifically engineered for the rigors of the world's most extreme environments," write the researchers. The findings have been published in the journal Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces.
Marches in Delhi against changes to voting registration led to dragnets, internet blackouts – and questions about India’s electoral independence. Plus, the cinematographer capturing the beauty of the mundane
Months of simmering public anger have given rise to a season of discontent in India. In its latest iteration, the demand is for the removal of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the scrapping of a controversial electoral rolls revision that has struck 130 million people off the register. Protests have erupted every day over the past week, prompting a violent crackdown on dissenters in the capital.
Over the weekend, Delhi was effectively under lockdown, transformed into a militarised landscape of barricades, road closures and paramilitary forces marching through the streets. Ahead of a protest led by the Cockroach Janta party on Saturday, authorities deployed a massive dragnet: 245 trains to Delhi were cancelled, 45 metro stations were shut, liquor shops were closed, internet services were cut off in the heart of the city and activists were put under house arrest.
How much room for error am I working with if I go in and dremel extra space where it bites, use the heat shrink, resolder, etc. Is it finally time to go down to the river?
Also is there a way to transfer life stats from the controller?
Case of couple who wed legally in Austria exposes clash between EU court ruling and national restrictions
A same-sex couple are suing authorities in Slovakia for refusing to register their Austrian marriage, testing whether a landmark EU court ruling can turn recognition abroad into legal security at home.
Their fight exposes a clash between European obligations and national restrictions – and what that means for LGBTQ+ people living under Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government.
Upgraded, cheaper AirPods have noise cancelling, sound and controls to rival many plugged-in buds but without tips
Apple’s latest AirPods set a new standard for open-fit buds with upgraded noise cancelling that now rivals many plugged-in designs of the same price.
The AirPods 5 have the same design the popular AirPods 4 offering an option for those that do not like silicone ear tips used by most noise cancelling earbuds. They come in two versions, with or without a wireless charging case and swipe controls, costing from £119 (€149/$129/A$219) – £10 cheaper than the launch price of their predecessors.
Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.3, SBC, AAC, H2 chip
Battery life: four or five hours with ANC (22 hours with case)
Security forces use helicopters to rescue dozens of people as the two storms damage infrastructure and cause flash flooding
At least five people have died after Hurricane Simon and Tropical Storm Rachel pummelled Mexico’s Pacific coast, causing flooding that downed trees and electricity poles, blocked roads and inundated homes.
Simon claimed the life of a 71-year-old man who died when a wall collapsed in Chilpancingo in the southern state of Guerrero, governor Evelyn Salgado said at a press conference.
Josh Allen accounted for 331 total yards and two touchdowns, Tyler Bass made a 45-yard field goal with 1:55 left in overtime shortly after Greg Rousseau blocked the Rams’ own attempt, and the Buffalo Bills outlasted Los Angeles for a 37-34 victory on Monday night.
Allen passed for 210 yards and rushed for 121 more for the Bills (4-1), who rallied to win a frantic game befitting the teams with the NFL’s last two MVPs at quarterback. Allen won an overtime game for the first time in his career – he had previously been 0-7 – by besting Matthew Stafford, who passed for 383 yards and three touchdowns.
Austin, TX — Republican Texas Senate candidate and Attorney General Ken Paxton reportedly celebrated New Year’s Eve in Dubai with two American businessmen who were facing federal criminal charges in the United States.
According to reporting cited by Mediaite, Paxton attended the Dec. 31, 2024, gathering with Tracy Duhon and businessmen Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail. Both men had been indicted months earlier in a federal healthcare fraud case involving allegations that roughly $15 million was stolen from a Chicago hospital.
Ahmed also had substantial financial ties to Paxton. Campaign-finance records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal showed that Ahmed contributed about $190,000 to Paxton, including $25,000 just days after his indictment.
Ahmed separately faces charges in a larger alleged fraud scheme involving at least $195 million in government payments for fraudulent COVID-19 testing. He has pleaded not guilty. Both Ahmed and Suhail have since returned to the United States to face prosecution.
Paxton’s campaign did not directly address questions about the Dubai gathering. Senior adviser Nick Maddux instead accused Paxton’s opponents of political persecution and compared the scrutiny to investigations involving President Donald Trump.
The revelations arrive as Paxton campaigns for the U.S. Senate against Democrat James Talarico and faces continuing questions about his relationships with wealthy political donors.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Many open-source developers still dislike AI. The latest example is System76 banning AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. At Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds offered a different take: "I actually really like using AI," Torvald told Dirk Hohndel, his good friend and head of Ericsson Software Technology, in their latest discussion. [...] Torvalds said, "I think that you need to be very careful using AI when you're doing something real and important." Torvalds explained he hadn't always felt that way about AI programming. "I used to think it was just not very good -- but now I'm at the point where I actually really like using AI."
"To be fair," he continued, "I don't do a lot of kernel programming. I'm a maintainer. The Linux kernel is a project where other people do the real work, and I act as the collection point. But I still enjoy programming immensely. I think AI is a wonderful tool if you use it correctly and treat it as a tool, and I find it makes programming much more enjoyable." Torvalds recalled, "I started programming in 1981 or so, and back then computers were much simpler, and you could understand what they were doing, and also the programs you compared your own programs to were much simpler."
"It's a different story today," Torvalds said. "The bar in software engineering has grown so high that it's hard to see your own small efforts as worth anything, because you're used to all these polished, professional programs. [...] A lot of people make fun of vibe coding, but I think it's a wonderful way to find joy in programming. It makes you feel like you're doing something relevant. It allows you, as a new programmer, to do things that you would otherwise have a really hard time with."
He continued: "I love the concept of AI as a gateway drug because I was working on my own toy project, the guitar pedal, and I knew what I was doing. I had a user interface that I had written myself in C that was running on a microcontroller that was running on this small screen, and I was like, "This is just stupid. It looks like something from the '80s; I wanted it to look like something from this century. But I don't do Java. I do kernels." "So, I use AI to do the things that I'm bad at," Torvalds went on, "I'd seen all the same YouTube videos you have. Give AI a prompt, and it will do it. So I gave it a prompt, and it did it, and it was horrendous. Then I said, 'Hey, look! I already did this in C. I did it the right way. It's just ugly." Torvalds acknowledged that AI tools are helping identify security vulnerabilities and improve the Linux kernel, but at the cost of overwhelming maintainers with questionable bug reports and superficial fixes. He called some submissions "mindless band-aid kind of patches."
That said, despite AI's growing influence, Torvalds believes Linux's success comes from steady, incremental development rather than sweeping changes. "I'm a big believer in the whole incremental small changes that, over time, turn into big features," he said. The development goal remains "incremental improvement and steady progress all the time."
Austin, TX — Texas health officials are proposing to eliminate the state’s Children’s Autism Program as part of budget reductions ordered for the 2028-29 biennium, alarming families and providers who say access to treatment is already severely limited.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission included eliminating the program in its budget request after Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows directed state agencies to cut spending by 3%.
The program provided treatment to 583 children during fiscal 2026, while contractors told the Associated Press that at least 1,000 additional children are waiting for services, sometimes for years.
State officials argue that Medicaid now provides many of the same autism-related benefits, making the separate program less necessary. Advocates dispute that assessment, saying Medicaid coverage does not always translate into actual access to providers, particularly in rural communities.
If lawmakers approve the cut, children currently enrolled could continue receiving services through August 2027 before the program ends.
Parents and disability advocates say the proposal could leave families with fewer options for therapies such as applied behavior analysis, especially for children who are uninsured, underinsured or unable to find Medicaid providers.
The Legislature will ultimately decide whether to eliminate the program when it considers the state budget during its 2027 session.
National park officials took the precautionary measure to limit tourist access after heavy rain caused the Iguazu River to flow at six times the normal rate
Heavy rainfall fuelled by a supersized El Niño weather pattern briefly forced Argentinian authorities to close tourist access to the famed Iguazu Falls, amid fears that rapidly rising water levels would cause the river to burst its banks.
National park officials took the precautionary measure on Monday when the Iguazu River’s flow exceeded 12,000 cubic metres per second – more than six times its average rate.
A cyber-attack caused refrigeration temperatures to soar to 50C overnight on Monday across several hundred French supermarkets, with widespread food losses reported. At Intermarché La Haye, the attack caused fridge temperatures to reach 27C (80F), spoiling fresh and frozen food, according to store director Julien Freret. 'Today, we have a total loss of fresh and frozen,' Freret said, apologising to customers and describing the incident as 'an enormous loss of products'
James Talarico's campaign shared security camera footage with CBS News that appears to show him at his home in Texas for the first eight days of this month — pushing back on claims that Talarico was hiding the reasons for his disappearance.
I got an xrc that was delivered in early September and I didn’t go a day without riding. But I travel between Fairbanks and Anchorage AK a lot so that board is the Fairbanks board. Today is my first day back in Anchorage without it and Im missing it hardcore. I don’t want to spend as much on a 2nd board and I’m vesc curious. What are my options to get something quickly? I don’t see anything appealing on marketplace up here sadly.
Built with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and in partnership with the University of Illinois, Nexus brings next-generation AI computing to researchers across the United States
ATLANTA, Oct. 12, 2026 — Georgia Tech is opening a new frontier in scientific computing with Nexus, a next-generation AI supercomputer that will serve as a resource for researchers across the United States. Nexus combines traditional high-performance computing with cloud-based services, allowing researchers to run complex projects that require enormous computing power over longer periods of time.
“Expanding the nation’s computing capacity for scientific discovery reflects Georgia Tech’s commitment to advancing research that drives progress and improves lives,” said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “This new resource will help researchers across the country accelerate discovery and strengthen collaboration in fields where access to advanced computing can make a meaningful difference.”
Nexus will also contribute to the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, an NSF-led effort to expand access to advanced AI computing, data, and other research resources for scientists and engineers nationwide.
“Nexus is part of a broader effort at NSF to strengthen America’s research infrastructure and give researchers across the country access to the advanced computing capabilities they need to accelerate scientific discovery,” said Irina Dolinskaya, NSF Directorate Head for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. “By bringing together advanced computing capabilities and expertise from across the research community, Nexus will help broaden the range of scientific questions researchers can tackle and strengthen the nation’s capacity for AI-enabled discovery.”
As a national computer resource, at least 90% of Nexus’ computing capacity will be made available to the national science and engineering community through an open, peer-reviewed allocation process coordinated by the NSF-funded Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support program. The system will give researchers across fields — from drug discovery and neuroscience to energy, aerospace, robotics, and advanced manufacturing — access to computing power needed to pursue questions once constrained by computational limits.
One example is the work of biomedical researcher Amanda Randles at Duke University. Her team uses its HARVEY software and large-scale computing systems such as Nexus to create highly detailed “digital twins” of the human circulatory system. These models simulate blood flow down to the level of individual cells, helping researchers explore ways to diagnose and monitor cardiovascular disease without invasive procedures. With Nexus, Randles’ team can run simulations over much longer time periods and investigate how changes in blood flow may relate to everyday activity and cardiovascular risk. The work illustrates how advanced computing can turn complex biological processes into models that may ultimately help physicians make more informed decisions about patient care.
“Solving the complex challenges of our modern world requires collaboration across disciplines and institutions,” said Charles Isbell, chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and former dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “Georgia Tech and Illinois bring complementary expertise to Nexus, and we are excited to contribute to the National Center for Supercomputing Application’s decades of experience operating national-scale computing resources and supporting the researchers who use them. Together, we are building the partnerships and infrastructure that enable discovery and ultimately improve the lives of those we serve.”
Nexus is housed at Georgia Tech’s Coda data center in Atlanta, extending the Institute’s investment in advanced computing infrastructure and its role in the nation’s technology and research ecosystem.
The global economy “could soon test the limits of resilience”, as emergency oil stocks run low and government budgets become overstretched, the International Monetary Fund has warned.
In its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook, the IMF said global growth had withstood the Middle East conflict better than feared over the past six months.
I just got a Pint X and I love it, been riding it pretty much every day. I'm really interested in getting some foot hooks for better control. I've seen flight fins and the other foothold setups that attach to the fender and stick out from the wheel, but I have a pretty wide stance from skateboarding, so I think I'd much rather have toe hooks that mount at the ends of the board and bend inward toward the wheel. I've found a few options online, but its hard to tell what actually works with my board, and most of them don't seem to be made for the Pint.
So my questions: What's the best end-of-board toe hook for the Pint/Pint X?
Is there anything like the FST system for the Pint, where the footholds have adjustable channels so you can set the hooks to your stance? That seems like the perfect solution but I can't find it for the Pint anywhere. If there's nothing official, are there any small makers or 3D printed options people are running? Where should I be looking? Thanks in advance 🤙
Replaced my tire and I broke the shitty connector for the controller. Looking into it I can’t find any connector replacements (for the xr). Any help would be appreciated, trying to get back on it asap!
Reigning champions 2-0 down in best-of-seven series
Guardians take Game 1 of ALCS against Rays
William Contreras hit a tying homer in the fifth and singled home the go-ahead run an inning later as the Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers 7-4 on Monday in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series.
Four relievers combined to retire the last 15 Dodgers batters in order as the Brewers took a 2-0 lead over the two-time defending World Series champions in this best-of-seven series, which heads to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Wednesday.
Six Flags Over Georgia ‘deeply saddened’ by tragedy, reportedly occurring on Goliath coaster with 175ft drop
One person has died and several others were injured in an incident involving a Six Flags rollercoaster on Monday afternoon in Georgia, according to police.
The incident took place a Six Flags Over Georgia, about 15 miles (25km) north-west of Atlanta, according to the Cobb county police department.
Cleanview Research found 75% of data centers being built and 80% of data centers in the planning stage are in predominantly GOP states, as public opposition to data centers grows.
Within a day of President Trump announcing an "energy ceasefire," Ukraine said Russia had struck a power plant and other energy facilities across the country.
Surge in EHCP applications poses risk to public finances and may lead to deteriorating levels of support
Councils are warning of potentially “catastrophic” debts, which are forecast to reach a record £10bn over the next 18 months, as a result of rapid growth in demand for special educational needs and disability (Send) support in English schools.
Although the government recently cleared more than £5bn in historic council Send debts, a surge in requests has led to authorities predicting they will have re-accrued that debt figure by April, and doubled it by 2028.
It took about half an hour after the first 911 call about Christa Pike's botched execution for prison officials to affirm the emergency was legitimate, the calls show.
Firefox 158 is now available with JPEG XL image support enabled by default, making .jxl images a standard part of the browser rather than an experimental feature. The release also adds JPEG XL to Firefox's default image Accept header, improves Smart Window form filling, and brings new CSS typed-arithmetic support for developers. Phoronix reports: At long last, Firefox 158 is ready to go with JPEG-XL image support as an alternative to the likes of WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. The default HTTP Accept header for image requests also now supports "image/jxl" for the JPEG-XL image format. Prior releases of Firefox had JPEG-XL gated by an experimental option.
Firefox 158 also now supports filling forms faster in Smart Window when clicking into a form field or selecting Fill from sources. On the developer side, CSS typed arithmetic are now supported to use functions like calc() to divide two values of the same data type even if of different units. Developer changes and release binaries can be found at their respective links.
My GT foot pad has the sensor peal up at the edge of where my flight fins sit. So a bunch of dirt go under it. Sensor is cooked. What should I do now? I do have a GTFO kit in it. Do I need to buy a whole new foot pad?
Microsoft is goosing its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) bandwidth from 7.1 TB per second with Maia 200 to 18 TBps with the new Maia 300, delivering a significant upgrade to the chip’s capability to move data for AI inference workloads while lowering per-token energy cost.
Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, the executive vice president of cloud and AI, announced the new chip today in a blog post in which he also announced that the Maia 200 chip has hit full production. Maia 200 is running significant AI workloads in Azure today, including OpenAI models and its own MAI models, which power Microsoft Copilot.
While Maia 200, which Microsoft unveiled in January 2026, delivers a big boost to its AI inference capabilities, Maia 300 will deliver even more AI inference computing power to Azure.
Microsoft fits four Maia 300 accelerators per tray
In addition to goosing the HBM from 216 GB of HBM3 in Maia 200 to 288 GB of HBM4 in Maia 300 (and increasing the HBM bandwidth by 2.5x as previously noted), the new chip delivers 13.8 FP4 peta-ops (POPS), versus 10.1 FP4 POPS with Maia 200, and 6.9 FP8 POPS, versus 5.1 FP8 POPS previously. It also gets enhanced MXFP4 support.
Microsoft has evolved Maia’s architecture pretty significantly. Instead of the previous monolithic system on a chip (SOC) design utilizing TSMCs’ 3 nanometer process node, Microsoft has adopted a modular chiplet architecture using NSMC’s N2P process node with the Maia 300.
Moving to a chiplet architecture allows Microsoft to separate compute, memory-controller, and I/O functions, which it says improves efficiency, scalability and cost structure. It has replaced the uniform memory access (UMA ) with non-uniform memory access (NUMA) across chiplets, delivering higher data locality and lowering the need to move data.
“Each compute region has nearby memory, and SDLA’s explicit control over DMA engines, local SRAM, HBM and the network-on-chip places data next to the compute that uses it,” Microsoft writes in its technical brief on the Maia 300. “Data travels shorter distances, which reduces the energy spent moving it.”
The network has also evolved to support bigger clusters. Specifically, Microsoft adopted a two-tier scale-up network with Maia that effectively doubles the size of Maia 300 clusters.
The company uses direct links between accelerators within a tray and a switched fabric to connect all 96 accelerators within a single rack. An optical second tier switch, meanwhile, enables Microsoft to connect up to 128 racks to build scale-up “superpod” equipped with more than 12,000 Maia 300 accelerators, which is twice the size of the biggest scale-up cluster with Maia 200.
The in-rack switched fabric relies on six high-radix switch ASICs that are integrated into three liquid-cooled switch trays. providing the rack-local connectivity required by all 96 accelerators while minimizing the space and power consumed by switching, according to Microsoft.
“Maia 300 treats networking as a seamless extension of the software-defined dataflow architecture,” Guthrie writes. “Rather than moving data through separate communication layers, dataflow operations span compute, memory and network resources as a single system. High-bandwidth interconnects between Maia accelerators are optimized for tensor parallelism, while a custom AI transport delivers performant and reliable scale-up communication across accelerators and racks.”
Microsoft is using dual power feeds, high-capacity power shelves, and a 50 V busbar architecture to distribute power across Maia 300 accelerator and switch trays. It uses a combination of liquid cooling for Maia 300 accelerators, voltage regulators, and switch ASICs and air-cooling for memory, storage, and other components.
Microsoft supports 96 Maia 300s per rack
All told, a full rack of 96 Maia 300 accelerators delivers up to seven times greater token throughput than a full rack of 48 Maia 200 accelerators. On a per-watt basis, Maia 300 delivers 2.5X the performance.
“Maia 300 rack systems bring together 96 accelerators within a 167-kilowatt power envelope, delivering 27.6 TB of HBM capacity and 1.7 PB/s of aggregate HBM bandwidth across a high-speed scale-up domain,” Guthrie writes. “That density allows Microsoft to serve more simultaneous AI interactions and larger workloads from each rack, improving datacenter capacity and the economics of expanding AI services.”
Maia 300 is expected to begin production deployments in 2027.
Need help determining if the problem is my footpads or something else
I have an xr classic and the footpads stopped responding but in a weird way, it started small with slight nose dives but it would save itself at the last minute, this just started today and in the same ride. It got worse with the board disengaging while I was just standing on it but I would get back on and it would be fine, then it just stopped all together. Turned it off and on twice and still no response.
Board still turns on and nothing weird happens with the battery purely just unresponsive pads.
Just want to be absolutely certain before I spend 70 bucks on a new front pad. I know it may be obviously be the pads but still :(
Update: it’s now stuck at 67% charge actively charging.
(The Center Square) – In the final weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm election, Northern California's race for the seat held by the late U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, is heating up over issues such as taxes.
In several congressional races, Republican ads are claiming that Democratic candidates support “sex changes” for children or support taxpayer money being used for such surgeries. But the allegations of support for those claims are flawed.
Some of the ads cite politicians’ votes against measures that went beyond prohibiting surgeries. Also, it’s worth noting that gender-affirming surgeries typically take place after age 18, according to experts and studies on the prevalence of gender-affirming care, as we’ve reported before.
Republican politicians and outside groups are spending millions on TV, streaming and digital ads pushing these claims. Our search of AdImpact’s ad-tracking database identified more than $100 million in spending on more than 200 ads since Aug. 1 that contain the words “sex change.” In federal Senate races alone, the spending totaled more than $77 million.
We’ll look at ads in three toss-up Senate races:
In Ohio, ads from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC connected to the Republican Senate majority leader, say that Democrat Sherrod Brown “supports sex changes for minors,” citing a 2023 TV interview in which Brown said that “a child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors — not politicians.” One ad, featuring a woman who is suing her medical providers in Texas, leaves the false impression that she had surgery as a minor without her parents’ consent.
In Texas, ads from an SLF-associated group, Texas PAC, say that Democrat James Talarico “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” The ads cite his vote against state legislation that went beyond that, broadly prohibiting gender-affirming care for kids. Talarico, a state representative, voted for an amendment that would have restricted the bill to banning surgeries.
In Alaska, ads from No Going Back PAC Inc., which is linked to the MAGA Inc. super PAC, claim that Democrat Mary Peltola “voted against prohibiting taxpayer funded sex changes for minors,” citing her votes on amendments that pertained to gender-affirming medications or surgeries. In another vote cited by the PAC, Peltola, a former U.S. representative, voted against a defense spending bill because of an amendment that would have limited abortion access for military personnel.
These ads are a continuation of Republican messaging during the 2024 presidential campaign and reflect President Donald Trump’s repeatedclaims that Democrats want “transgender for everybody.” Some of the messages being pushed in the midterms suggest that surgeries are performed on children, even young children, without parental consent. “The law generally requires the consent of a parent before medical care can be provided to a minor,” according to the National Center for Youth Law. There are exceptions, such as state laws allowing minors to consent to emergency care and care for certain services, including abortion, contraception and substance use care.
People who are transgender — meaning they identify with a gender that doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth — make up a small percentage of the U.S. population. A 2025 report by the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law’s Williams Institute estimated that more than 2.8 million people in the U.S. age 13 and older identify as transgender. That’s 0.8% of adults and 3.3% of youth ages 13 to 17.
We’ll look at ads in three Senate races in which the Democrats are hoping to flip the Republican seats.
Ohio Ads
Several ads attacking Brown in the Senate race in Ohio claim that he supported “taxpayer-funded sex changes” on children, citing an interview he did with WSYX-TV in Columbus on July 19, 2023.
Brown didn’t say he supported that. Rather, he was asked about a broader federal bill, introduced by then Sen. JD Vance, that aimed to “prohibit gender-affirming care on minors,” defined as both surgeries and medication, including hormones and puberty-blocking drugs. The bill called for fines and/or prison time for anyone prescribing or administering such care. It also aimed to prohibit federal funding being used for any gender-affirming care.
In a 21-second clip of that interview, posted online by the Senate Leadership Fund, Brown says: “A child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors — not politicians. I will never agree with anybody that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care, period.”
Vance’s bill never received a vote.
In 2024, SLF PAC made similar claims about Brown and also pointed PolitiFact to a March 2023 letter nine Democratic senators, including Brown, sent to then President Joe Biden. But that doesn’t show Brown necessarily supporting “sex-change surgeries for minors” either. Instead, the senators expressed concern about discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals and state laws blocking gender-affirming care for youth and adults. As we’ve explained, gender-affirming care encompasses counseling, social transitioning and medication — in addition to surgery.
Two SLF PAC ads feature Soren Aldaco, who is suing her medical providers over the “top surgery,” or double mastectomy, she had at age 19 in Texas. One ad leaves the false impression that Aldaco had surgery as a minor without her parents’ consent. She was an adult at the time.
Aldaco, who has said she was “gaslit” into receiving gender-affirming care, says in the ad: “Sherrod Brown supports sex changes for minors, irreversible surgery on kids. Like me. At 11, I was groomed by strangers online. At 15, a doctor told my family I was transgender. Hormone injections, then surgery without my parents’ consent. I was a kid. I was confused.”
We asked SLF PAC about the ad’s suggestion that Aldaco wasn’t an adult when she had surgery. Communications Director Chris Gustafson pointed us to information about when Aldaco received medication, not surgery. He pointed to Aldaco’s February commentary piece in the Wall Street Journal, in which Aldaco said a nurse practitioner prescribed testosterone and estrogen blockers when she was 17. Also, in an interview with Fox News, Aldaco said her stepmother took her to that appointment, but the nurse practitioner should’ve gotten consent from her biological mother.
In the ad, Aldaco says, “Ohio’s kids deserve better.” But gender-affirming care, defined as both medication and surgery, for minors is illegal in the state. The law, with exceptions for children with sex development disorders, was enacted in 2024, after the Ohio Legislature overrode Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto. The state Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit challenging the legislation.
In vetoing the bill, DeWine said, “These are gut-wrenching decisions that should be made by parents and should be informed by teams of doctors who are advising them,” while noting that he was against surgeries before age 18. Among the families he spoke to before deciding to veto the bill, “none of them … talked about surgeries,” DeWine said. “I think that’s frankly a fallacy that’s out there that it goes right to surgery. It just doesn’t. All of the children’s hospitals say, we don’t do surgeries.” (See the 17:45 mark of the video.)
One response ad from the Brown campaign makes the point that these surgeries are illegal in Ohio for kids. A second response ad shows an image from the Aldaco ads and says they’re “a complete lie. Records show not only is this woman actually from Texas, she didn’t have any surgery as a minor.”
(The ad goes on to misleadingly say that Brown’s opponent in the Senate race, Republican Sen. Jon Husted, voted to block the released of the Epstein files, a claim we’ve written about before.)
Texas Ads
In the Senate race in Texas, an ad from Texas PAC, which is affiliated with SLF PAC, says, “Talarico supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” It, as well as other ads making such a claim, cites Talarico’s vote against a 2023 state law that, like the law in Ohio, prohibits gender-affirming medications and surgeries for minors and using state money for it. In Texas’ version, doctors could lose their medical licenses if they violate the law. The state Supreme Court upheld it in 2024.
The ad above includes “puberty blockers” on screen, but the narrator only says that Talarico supported “sex change surgeries.” Another ad by the same group says he “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on kids.”
JT Ennis, press secretary for Talarico’s campaign, told us: “These ads are lies. As James has said, he opposes gender reassignment surgery for minors.”
Talarico said that in June in a podcast interview.
In September, Talarico told Fox News that he opposed the 2023 Texas legislation because it was “overly broad” and that at the time he “voted for a major amendment to limit the bill to banning surgeries for minors.” He did vote in favor of such an amendment, which failed. He also told Fox News that he would “absolutely” support a national prohibition on gender-affirming surgery for minors.
In 2023, Talarico said the state law “would deny, many times, life-saving healthcare from our trans youth” and that “the reason that I opposed that bill is because I trust parents and doctors to make decisions for kids and not politicians in Austin.”
The Texas law included exceptions for administering treatment for certain medical conditions, such as premature puberty or sex development disorders, but, according to the Texas Tribune, at least one family had trouble accessing such care after their physician was sued by state Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s opponent in the Senate race.
Alaska Ads
In Alaska, Peltola, a former U.S. representative for the state, is being attacked over several votes. But as in the other races, the ads misrepresent her votes. Pelota is running against incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.
Twoads from No Going Back PAC, a super PAC linked to Trump, claim that Peltola “voted against prohibiting taxpayer funded sex changes for minors.” One ad says she did this “time and again,” citing three votes.
Two of those votes were against amendments in 2024 to prohibit gender-affirming surgeries or medication for minors under two military healthcare programs. One of those programs — TRICARE — was already “explicitly prohibited from covering gender-affirming surgical care for beneficiaries,” according to a 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service. Both amendments, which were attached to the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, a defense spending bill, passed.
Peltola’s campaign pointed us to statements by an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ service members, which said the amendments would hurt military readiness and retention. The campaign also noted that Peltola was one of six Democrats who ultimately voted for the final House version of the NDAA that year.
The third vote cited in the ad was in July 2023 against passage of a version of the NDAA that year. But as we explained previously, Peltola specifically criticized Republican amendments, including one that would have limited abortion access for military personnel.
“We shouldn’t be pitting pay raises that they [military members] deserve against the reproductive freedoms that they also deserve,” Peltola said in a prepared statement at the time. “That is a false choice, created for purely political reasons, and I look forward to negotiations with the Senate’s version of the bill where this issue will be discussed further. I will advocate strongly to return to the bipartisan, policy-focused bill that came out of committee, and will gladly vote for a bill that fully protects our troops and their families.”
Democrats had objected to the limitation on abortion and several other amendments that they called “poison pill riders,” including one prohibiting gender-affirming surgeries or hormones under TRICARE. Peltola didn’t mention the latter amendment in her statement.
The Senate didn’t pass the House version of the bill. Instead lawmakers negotiated a compromise defense bill that stripped out many of the Republican amendments. Peltola voted in favor of that.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Alaskans for Mary — her campaign committee — told us: “Let’s be clear: Mary does not support gender re-assignment surgeries for children, and she believes those decisions should be in the hands of parents and doctors, not DC politicians. Mary thinks both parties have spent far too long obsessing over this issue, and that’s why she’s focused on cracking down on corruption in both parties and lowering costs for Alaskans.”
In a response ad, Peltola also says: “I’m a mom, and I know that parents know what’s best for their kids. These attacks are lies. No, I don’t want kids getting surgeries to change genders.”
More Context on Gender-Affirming Care
As we’ve explained before, gender-affirming surgeries for children are rare. Before puberty, there are no medications or surgeries offered to children. Instead, families are offered counseling. Children may change their name, pronouns, or hair and dress as part of a social transition.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health have published guidance recommending care at different ages. In terms of medication, puberty blockers, which delay the beginning of puberty, can be offered between ages 8 to 13 for girls and 9 to 14 for boys. Gender-affirming hormone therapy typically wouldn’t be given until around age 16.
In terms of surgery, one expert previously told us that older adolescents sometimes may be able to get surgery to remove their breasts, also known as top surgery, and may want to do this before college. But genital surgeries wouldn’t typically happen until age 18 or older. The Endocrine Society’s guidance for care specifies that surgeries involving removing the testicles, ovaries or uterus shouldn’t occur before age 18. In February, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a position statement recommending that all gender-affirming surgeries be done at age 19 or later, while saying that “physicians should also use their personal and professional judgment.”
Studies have found that neither surgery nor medication is common for minors. “The politicization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth has been driven by a narrative that millions of children are using hormones and that this type of care is too freely given. Our findings reveal that is not the case,” said Landon Hughes, a fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a co-author of studies published in JAMA journals in 2024 and 2025, on the utilization of care among transgender and gender diverse adolescents in the U.S.
In a study examining insurance claims in 2019 for tens of millions of U.S. adults and minors, Harvard researchers and colleagues found no gender-affirming surgical procedures in transgender and gender diverse minors under 12 years of age. Surgeries among older minors “were rare and almost entirely chest-related,” the study said. The rate of having a gender-affirming surgery among minors with a diagnosis of being transgender or gender diverse was 2.1 per 100,000 for ages 15 to 17 years and 0.1 per 100,000 for ages 13 to 14 years.
Another study of private insurance claims data by some of the same Harvard researchers found that, between 2018 and 2022, less than 0.1% of minors ages 8 to 17 with private insurance were transgender or gender diverse and received puberty blockers or hormones. No minor under age 12 received a hormone prescription.
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Healthcare costs remain one of voters’ top economic concerns heading into the election. An Oct. 6 KFF Health Tracking Poll finds that 6 in 10 voters say they’re worried about affording healthcare, while nearly half say the cost of healthcare…
(The Center Square) – Taxes, affordability and immigration are among the top issues in a Northern California congressional district that Democrats redrew to pick up a seat in the House.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Epic Games delayed the release of an upcoming video-game collaboration with Walt Disney and told its developers to use more artificial intelligence tools to finish the game, according to people familiar with the project. The title had been slated for release in March, but is now delayed with no new date communicated, said the people familiar, who asked to not be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.
Developers on the game, a shooter featuring characters from the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, were instructed to implement an "AI first" production model using tools such as Anthropic's Claude. Humans will then manage and guide that work. "No more hand-written code," one of the game's directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be "generated with full AI workflows."
Even before this announcement, the maker of the popular Fortnite game had been pushing hard for the use of AI across all of its divisions. But this is the first time a major video-game company has attempted to build a title primarily with AI. "We're embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do," said Jake Jones, communications director at Epic Games, in a statement to Bloomberg News.
Conservative influencers are sharing what they say is a phone call proving state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, was absent from the campaign trail because he was confined to a “mental hospital.”
“BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week,” conservative commentator Nick Sortor posted Oct. 11 on X, which had been viewed more than 7 million times by Oct. 12.
Talarico was absent from the campaign trail for nine days and said he was recovering from the flu. Before influencers shared the audio and named an Ohio psychiatric hospital, celebrity politicians such as Spencer Pratt speculated — without evidence — that Talarico was receiving care for a campaign-induced mental breakdown.
“My sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility,” former reality TV star and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Pratt said in an Oct. 9 X post.
On Oct. 10, Caroline Wren, a former fundraiser for President Donald Trump, posted flight tracking information for a private aircraft that flew from Austin to an airport in Hamilton, Ohio, which she said was “20 mins from the Lindner Center.” She provided no information linking the aircraft to Talarico.
The Lindner Center of Hope in Ohio, where Sortor said Talarico visited, denied that he received treatment there. And the timeline of the supposed events conflicts with Talarico’s public appearances.
Right-wing influencer said he called the center, claiming to be Talarico family member
Rhein Amacher, a right-wing influencer, posted what he said was a 55-second audio recording of his call to the Lindner Center, asking if they had information on Talarico. The Lindner Center is a mental health center and psychiatric hospital. He said he talked to the center twice.
“I personally contacted @LindnerCtrHope in Mason, Ohio, to determine whether Talarico was or had previously been a patient,” Amacher’s post caption read. “During my recorded call, an individual identifying themselves as a female facility employee reportedly stated that Talarico was no longer a patient and had been discharged within the previous 24–48 hours.”
The audio recording he posted is transcribed as follows:
Woman:Hi, I do not find anyone with that name for the last four days that’s been discharged and they’re not here in the building.
Amacher:Okay, so nothing for James Talarico?
Woman:Um, let’s see, looks— well, this is what it’s today. Looks like, just as, he was just discharged this evening. That’s why I don’t have it.
Amacher:Oh, he was discharged then?
Woman:Mm-hmm.
Amacher:Okay, and this is the Hope—
Woman:So he should be—
Amacher:Okay.
Woman:Hmm, I’m sorry?
Amacher:This is— I’ll make sure I have the right— this is Hope Lindner?
Woman:Yes. Uh-huh.
Amacher:Okay, and you’re in Hamilton, Ohio?
Woman:No, we’re not in Hamilton. No, we’re in Mason.
Amacher:Okay, so that’s why he’s not in the system. He’s been recent. Okay. All right.
Woman:Okay.
Amacher:Thank you.
Woman: Thank you. Bye.
Amacher posted a clip of another call when he asked the center about Talarico; then, he identified himself as Talarico’s cousin, said he was planning to send him a letter and was checking if he was still there. The staffer asked if he had a code, saying without it, the center couldn’t provide any information.
In the second call, Amacher was again asked for a code, and he said he “simply made one up” to attempt to “bypass the facility’s security restrictions to discuss the patient.”
On Oct. 11, the Lindner Center posted on X, “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.”
Talarico reposted the Lindner Center’s statement and said, “I’ve never even been to Ohio,” with the tears of joy emoji.
PolitiFact contacted the Lindner Center and Amacher but did not hear back.
Amacher posted what appeared to be a screenshot of his call log showing that he made the calls a little before 9 p.m. on Oct. 10. The screenshot shows three calls, but he uploaded clips from only two.
The Bulwark obtained from Amacher the full recording of what he said was his second call. In the full recording, Amacher claimed his name was “Tim” and Talarico was his cousin. The woman repeatedly said she did not have anyone with that name in their records.
When The Bulwark called the Lindner Center, the woman on the line said “we would never disclose any patient information,” and “that would be a HIPAA violation.” HIPAA is a federal law that includes privacy protections for patients. The Bulwark did not name the representative.
Jennifer Pierson, a spokesperson for Lindner Center, told The Daily Wire the center “respects the privacy and confidentiality of all individuals” and “we do not confirm or deny whether any individual is or has been a patient, and we do not comment on individual cases.”
Responding to Sortor’s post that cited Amacher’s call, Talarico spokesperson JT Ennis said Oct. 11 on X, “This is a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory. Last week James Talarico was home in Austin, Texas recovering from the flu.”
When Talarico was asked in an Oct. 11 interview with KXAS-TV, a Dallas-Forth Worth NBC affiliate, to comment on claims that he had a “stress-induced episode” and was getting treatment, he said, “That’s not true. I just had the flu and I feel much better. But it’s a good reminder that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
Talarico appeared in public Oct. 9 and 10
The timeline Amacher provided — calling the center on Oct. 10 and being told Talarico was “discharged this evening” — conflicts with Talarico’s public appearances on Oct. 9 and Oct. 10.
Talarico attended the Austin City Limits music festival on the afternoon of Oct. 9. That evening, Ennis reposted a video of Talarico walking the grounds and said, “Hate to disappoint the conspiracy theorists, but James is still alive and meeting with voters at ACL today.”
Talarico posted videos of him greeting the festivalgoers.
On the night of Oct. 10, Talarico attended country singer Kacey Musgraves’ concert in Dallas. He posted photos of him and Musgraves at the concert and social media posts showed his appearance as well.
Our ruling
Conservative X influencers claimed an audio recording was proof Talarico was discharged from a “mental hospital” on Oct. 10.
The Lindner Center of Hope said Talarico has never received treatment there. Talarico said he’s “never even been to Ohio.”
The claims say Talarico was discharged on the night of Oct. 10. But he appeared in public on Oct. 9 and 10.
We rate this claim Pants on Fire!
PolitiFact Staff Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Leftist former leader accused of involvement in shooting of three Europeans in Santa Cruz and torture of two others
Bolivia’s attorney general has announced an investigation into leftist former president Evo Morales, alleging his involvement in the murder and torture of European citizens in 2009.
Seventeen years ago, police raided a hotel in the city of Santa Cruz, shooting dead Eduardo Rózsa Flores, a Bolivian-Croatian, Michael Dwyer, an Irishman, and Árpád Magyarosi, a Hungarian-Romanian.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. military and U.S. Coast Guard are expanding their technological capabilities through a range of modernization initiatives, artificial intelligence and drones.
Four privately financed installations would expand local electricity generation and offer subscribers lower bills, but questions remain about costs, incentives and broader benefits.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News
DOVER, Del. — Gov. Matt Meyer’s administration has announced plans to accelerate four community solar projects representing approximately $20.3 million in proposed private investment, promising additional electricity generation and savings for participating Delaware consumers.
The projects, proposed by King Energy, would add nearly 10 megawatts of solar generating capacity at commercial properties in New Castle and Sussex counties. Construction is expected to begin in spring 2027.
The announcement comes as Delaware residents and businesses continue to face concerns about electricity affordability, generating capacity and the state’s ability to attract private investment.
Although the administration says the projects will expand local energy production and help customers manage electricity costs, its Oct. 9 announcement did not specify how many households would benefit or how much an average subscriber could save annually.
That distinction matters because community solar programs provide financial benefits directly to participating customers but do not necessarily reduce electricity rates for everyone.
Four projects, $20.3 million in investment
The solar installations are among six projects accepted into the governor’s JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator, an initiative designed to shorten government review timelines for housing, energy and infrastructure development.
The six projects represent approximately $165 million in proposed private investment, including two mixed-use housing developments and the four solar installations.
King Energy would develop the solar facilities at commercial properties owned by Harvey Hanna & Associates and Coastal Trade Supply.
Location
Capacity
Estimated investment
Ships Landing Way, New Castle
2.8 MW
$5.8 million
Lambson Lane, New Castle
2.45 MW
$5.1 million
Dock View Drive, New Castle
1.34 MW
$3.6 million
Frankford Business Park, Sussex County
3.08 MW
$5.8 million
Total
9.67 MW
$20.3 million
According to the administration, the installations would generate more than 12 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually after completion.
“King Energy is extremely excited to partner with the Delaware JobsFirst program to accelerate the deployment of rooftop solar programs at four commercial properties, owned by Harvey Hanna and Coastal Trade Supply,” King Energy CEO John Witchel said in the announcement.
Witchel said the projects would help address growing electricity demand and costs by expanding in-state generation.
The installations would connect to Delmarva Power’s distribution system. Construction is scheduled to begin in late March 2027, with completion dates varying by location.
How much will customers save?
Unlike traditional rooftop solar, community solar allows eligible residents and businesses to subscribe to a larger solar installation without purchasing or installing panels on their own property.
Electricity generated by the facility enters the utility’s distribution system, and participating customers receive credits on their electric bills based on their subscriptions.
Delaware law establishes minimum savings requirements for newer community solar projects.
For facilities receiving final operating certificates on or after Sept. 3, 2026, residential subscribers must receive savings of at least 10% on the value of their community solar credits. Qualifying low- and moderate-income subscribers must receive savings of at least 20%.
The law also requires at least 15% of a qualifying facility’s electricity output to serve low- and moderate-income customers.
Those savings percentages apply to the value of solar electricity credits after applicable charges, not necessarily to a customer’s entire electric bill.
For example, a residential customer receiving $100 worth of solar credits would save at least $10 under the standard requirement. An income-qualified customer receiving the same credits would save at least $20.
The actual annual savings would depend on electricity consumption, subscription size and billing arrangements.
While those consumer protections are established in state law, the administration has not released expected annual dollar savings for participants in the four newly announced projects.
The number of available subscriptions, eligibility details and enrollment dates also have not been announced.
More generation does not necessarily mean lower statewide rates
The facilities would add locally generated electricity to Delaware’s energy supply, an objective emphasized by the Meyer administration as electricity demand grows.
Solar generation can reduce demand for electricity from other sources during periods when sunlight is available. However, solar panels do not produce electricity at night, and generation varies with weather and seasonal conditions.
The four proposed projects do not include a battery-storage component in the information released by the administration.
As a result, the installations could contribute to Delaware’s electricity supply but would not independently address the need for dependable generation during nighttime hours or other periods when solar production is limited.
The state has not released an analysis quantifying how these four projects would affect wholesale electricity prices, grid reliability or utility rates for customers who do not subscribe.
Those questions are relevant as Delaware considers how to balance renewable energy development with dependable, affordable electricity from a variety of generating sources.
Private investment and public incentives
One notable feature of the announcement is its emphasis on private-sector investment rather than a newly announced state construction appropriation.
King Energy is identified as the developer, with approximately $20.3 million in proposed investment across the four facilities.
However, private financing does not necessarily mean a project operates without public incentives or other financial support.
Depending on eligibility and applicable rules, solar developers may receive tax benefits or generate revenue through renewable energy credit programs.
The governor’s announcement does not identify the specific tax incentives, grants or other public financial assistance, if any, expected to support these installations.
It also does not provide a detailed accounting of utility interconnection expenses or program administration costs.
Those financial arrangements would help establish the projects’ overall economics and clarify whether any associated expenses could affect taxpayers or utility customers who do not subscribe.
Meyer promotes faster permitting
The governor’s JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator is intended to reduce unnecessary delays by coordinating reviews across state agencies.
Established through Executive Order 18, the initiative assigns participating projects a central point of contact and seeks to complete complex permitting reviews within 120 business days.
Existing environmental, public safety and regulatory requirements remain in place, according to the administration.
“The JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator is about cutting unnecessary red tape, moving projects forward faster and making it easier to invest in Delaware,” Meyer said.
“These projects will help lower costs, create opportunities and strengthen the communities Delawareans call home.”
Thomas Harvey, managing director of Harvey Hanna & Associates, said the permitting improvements could help bring needed energy projects online more efficiently.
“We believe projects like these can play an important role in addressing Delaware’s growing need for reliable, affordable energy,” Harvey said.
The approach has implications beyond solar development. More predictable permitting timelines can reduce uncertainty for businesses considering investments in manufacturing, housing and infrastructure.
However, acceptance into the accelerator does not constitute final regulatory approval or guarantee that construction will begin on schedule.
Construction jobs expected
The administration also says the four installations will generate local construction employment.
The announced construction schedules range from approximately five to eight months, depending on the facility.
The state did not specify the number of construction positions, expected wages, how many workers would be Delaware residents or whether the projects would create permanent jobs after construction.
Those details would help evaluate the employment impact of the investments, particularly because the permitting initiative is part of the administration’s JobsFirst economic development program.
Part of a larger solar initiative
The newly announced facilities build on Delaware’s efforts to expand community solar.
In September, the Delaware Public Service Commission highlighted four previously accepted community solar projects in Seaford, Townsend and Clayton.
Those projects represent more than 16 megawatts of proposed generating capacity and over $73 million in investment.
According to the commission, state officials estimated that the earlier projects could provide electricity cost reductions of 10% to 15% for more than 16,000 Delaware households.
Those estimates apply to the earlier projects, not the four King Energy installations announced in October.
The additional facilities would expand the number of proposed solar installations moving through the state’s accelerated permitting process.
Measuring the benefits
The latest announcement represents another step in the administration’s effort to encourage private investment, expand energy generation and reduce regulatory delays.
The projects offer potential benefits, including additional electricity production, savings for participating customers and construction-related economic activity.
Whether those investments also produce broader affordability benefits will depend on actual electricity output, project costs, subscriber participation and how the facilities operate within Delaware’s electricity system.
Several questions remain unanswered in the announcement, including how many Delawareans will subscribe, what average annual savings will be, whether public incentives are involved and how the administration will measure the results of accelerated permitting.
For consumers concerned about rising electricity costs, those figures will help determine how much of the promised benefit ultimately reaches Delaware households and businesses.
The four installations remain proposed developments, with construction planned for 2027. Their economic and energy benefits will become measurable once the facilities are completed and begin operating.
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As Ohio’s Nov. 3 gubernatorial election approaches, Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton is attacking her Republican opponent Vivek Ramaswamy over his role in promoting a failed Alzheimer’s drug.
An Acton campaign ad that aired widely on Ohio TV stations featured Bexley, Ohio’s Norman Wernet III, who the ad calls “Norm.”
“Norm’s wife has Alzheimer’s,” Acton wrote in a Sept. 21 Facebook post sharing the ad.
“What Vivek Ramaswamy did to families like ours is unforgiveable,” Wernet says in the video. “He pushed an Alzheimer’s drug that he knew didn’t work. He made hundreds of millions of dollars scamming people like me.”
In 2014, before entering politics, Ramaswamyfounded the biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences. Soon after, he created subsidiary Axovant Sciences, which acquired the drug intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million December 2014.
Intepirdine was being studied as a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease when used in tandem with another medication. GSK’s testing didn’t show strong results for the pill, which aimed to increase a chemical in the brain that plays an important role in memory function. And after Axovant acquired intepirdine and launched a Phase 3 clinical trial involving more than 1,300 dementia patients, the results were poor: Researchers found it provided no significant improvement over the placebo.
PolitiFact’s review of the drug’s development timeline shows Ramaswamy had access to GSK’s mixed and largely unsuccessful trial results when he acquired intepirdine and announced plans for further testing. He later publicly promoted the drug’s effectiveness, relying on a preliminary, unpublished analysis that showed some positive results.
Asked for evidence to support Acton’s statement, her campaign pointed to Ramaswamy’s promotion of the drug and a paper his mother helped author reanalyzing GSK’s earlier trial data. Ramaswamy’s campaign did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment.
What was known about intepirdine when Ramaswamy acquired it?
By the time Axovant acquired intepirdine, GSK had already conducted four Phase 2 studies of the drug in people with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease. (In the drug development process, Phase 2 involves more people than Phase 1 trials and assesses a drug’s effectiveness.):
A 2010 study of 371 patients found that higher doses improved how patients functioned overall, but their cognitive improvements were not statistically significant.
A 2011 study of 198 patients found some improvement when the drug was used alone or with donepezil, a prescription medication used to treat memory loss in patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
A2015 publication reported results from two larger trials conducted between 2008 and 2010. The first involved 576 patients and found no statistically significant improvement over the placebo when intepirdine was used alone.
The second trial involved 684 patients who were already taking donepezil. Patients who received intepirdine showed statistically significant improvements on some measures, but the overall trial failed.
Taken together, the four GSK trials showed some signs of promise when intepirdine was used along with donepezil, an existing Alzheimer’s drug. But the studies did not show intepirdine worked on its own.
Roivant had access to the underlying GSK trial data as part of the acquisition, as a company press release shows.
What did Ramaswamy say at the time?
As Axovant, then valued at $3 billion, prepared to go public in 2015, Ramaswamy made several media appearances to talk about intepirdine.
In a June 11, 2015, interview with Forbes, he called it “a great drug candidate” and said that, if approved, it could make “a huge difference for a lot of patients.”
In an Oct. 6, 2015, interview on CNBC, he said: “We do know that that has an impact on improving cognition and function in these patients. We had a large study proving that a little bit ago.” Ramaswamy’s comments did not make clear that some of the more favorable results came from patients taking intepirdine in combination with donepezil, rather than from intepirdine alone.
In the same interview, he also said that the drug was “statistically significantly better than the placebo.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign did not respond to PolitiFact’s questions about what study he was referring to; however, a July 2015 analysis co-authored by his mother, Dr. Geetha Ramaswamy, an Axovant employee, reported favorable findings.
Geetha Ramaswamy and her colleagues reanalyzed GSK’s early research from 2008 and 2010. The team published their abstract analysis in the Alzheimer’s Association journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, writing intepirdine was “well-tolerated and effective in improving cognition and function” when taken with donepezil. The researchers recommended further testing.
The abstract was preliminary, prepared for a conference and contained limited information.
Kathy Liu, an expert in psychiatry at University College London who researches agitation and personalized treatments in Alzheimer’s disease, told PolitiFact that conference abstracts generally provide less information than full peer-reviewed studies, and such findings are not typically viewed as definitive evidence that a drug works.
Axovant then tested intepirdine in a Phase 3 clinical trial — a drug’s largest study — but the medication failed to improve cognition and daily functioning in its participants. Axovant stopped developing the drug in January 2018.
Did Ramaswamy make ‘hundreds of millions’ from intepirdine?
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings identify Ramaswamy as Axovant’s principal executive officer and board member beginning in March 2015.
Ramaswamy previously worked at investment firm QVT Financial before founding Roivant in 2014. Ramswamy sold a portion of his Roivant stake to Viking Global Investors, and his tax returns show he made millions selling investments during this period.
Axovant raised $362.2 million by selling 24.15 million shares at $15 each according to its June 2015 initial public offering, but the public records make it difficult to understand how much of Ramaswamy’s earnings from Axovant and Roivant directly resulted from intepirdine.
In September 2017, as Axovant announced that intepirdine failed its Phase 3 trial, the company’s stock price plummeted and never recovered.
Roivant Sciences Ltd., where Ramaswamy was CEO until 2021, owned 69.8% of Axovant, according to a 2017 proxy statement. Ramaswamy personally owned less than 1% of the company. So his larger financial interest in Axovant came through Roivant’s ownership rather than the shares he held directly.
Axovant recorded $36.7 million in compensation for Ramaswamy in fiscal 2016 in the form of company stock, plus $41,312 in fiscal 2016 and $1 million in fiscal 2015 under a compensation arrangement through Roivant.
After Axovant abandoned intepirdine’s development in 2018, the company shifted its focus to gene therapies. The company became Axovant Gene Therapies in 2019 and then Sio Gene Therapies in 2020.
In a June 27, 2023, interview with The New York Times, Ramaswamy discussed the drug’s failure. “On a personal level, it grates on me a little bit,” he said. “The business model of Roivant was to see these drugs through the market, and we could have cashed out big, and employees could have cashed up big, but that was not the business model.”
Dr. David P. Weber, a forensic accounting professor at West Virginia University and former chief investigator for the SEC, said the terms “scam” and “pump and dump” overstate what the available evidence establishes about Ramaswamy’s promotion of intepirdine. Acton in August also used the term “pump and dump scheme” to describe Ramaswamy’s actions on intepirdine. The SEC defines that as spreading “false or misleading information to create a buying frenzy that will ‘pump’ up the price of a stock and then ‘dump’ shares of the stock by selling their own shares at the inflated price.” Such activity is illegal and comes with criminal penalties. Ramaswamy has not been charged with a crime.
“A failed bet is not fraud,” Weber said, noting that Alzheimer’s drug development has historically had an extremely high failure rate.
Weber said the company’s decision to conduct an expensive Phase 3 trial goes against the allegation that its promoters knew the drug would fail. He added that a failed clinical trial does not, on its own, establish fraud.
Our ruling
Acton’s ad said Ramaswamy “pushed an Alzheimer’s drug that he knew didn’t work. He made hundreds of millions of dollars scamming people.”
Intepirdine had been tested extensively before Ramaswamy’s company acquired it in 2014. Of four phase 2 Alzheimer’s trials GSK had conducted, three produced mixed or negative results, and a fourth found some improvements when the drug was used with donepezil.
As Ramaswamy prepared to go public with Roivant, the company that he created to purchase intepirdine, his public statements did not fully reflect the limits of GSK’s findings but he promoted it as a potential Alzheimer’s treatment. After the company went public, a Phase 3 trial failed to confirm intepirdine improved patients’ cognition or ability to perform daily activities. The company’s stock price dropped and never recovered.
By 2018, the company stopped developing intepirdine.
Whether Ramaswamy made “hundreds of millions” from the drug as the ad claims is not clear. An expert said the available evidence does not establish that Ramaswamy knowingly misled investors about a drug he knew would fail. SEC filings do not determine whether he later sold the shares for cash or how much of his overall earnings from Axovant and Roivant were directly attributable to intepirdine. We rate this claim Mostly False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Nearly 1,000 participants from 47 organizations have participated in this training program since 2013
Oct. 12, 2026 — A buzz filled the auditorium as students and researchers from academia, government and industry began a session about vibe coding at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC), an annual program hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and its Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). Participants put new artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted approaches to coding into practice using their laptops to tap into the power of DOE supercomputers.
About 75 students, academics, government and industry tech experts participated in ATPESC 2026, hosted by Argonne and the ALCF. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.
That energy carried throughout the intensive two-week program, which provides training on key skills, approaches and tools to do research on exascale and next-generation computing systems. This year’s program was held from July 26 to Aug. 7 at the Q Center in St. Charles, Illinois. It offered various tracks, including expanded topics on AI and machine learning (ML), as well as vibe coding, a technique that uses natural language prompts to guide AI to write or modify computer code instead of writing it manually line by line.
This year, 75 participants took part in ATPESC, bringing the program’s total attendance to nearly 1,000 people from 47 institutions since its launch in 2013. ATPESC offers sessions with leading experts in high performance computing (HPC) and allows participants to use some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers: Aurora and Polaris at the ALCF and Frontier at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The ALCF and OLCF are DOE Office of Science user facilities.
Bruno Lopez, a senior research scientist at Metacomp Technologies in Westlake Village, California, primarily used Aurora and Polaris during his stint with ATPESC.
“The hands-on sessions and direct access to experts are what make this training so special and so valuable,” Lopez said. “I know of no other program that commits to that level of mentoring. Being able to log into some of the fastest computers in the world, experiment with the various HPC tools, submit a job and iterate on it, applying immediately what has just been presented, is something no lecture can substitute for.”
For Lopez, the combination of resources, people and format were valuable.
“The resources, because you are given direct access to leadership-class machines and to the whole ecosystem of tools that surrounds them,” Lopez said. “The people, because the presenters are the very experts who built what you are using, people with a real passion for their subject and a genuine desire to pass on what they know. And the format, because two intensive weeks is long enough to go deep into each subject.”
Such access allows participants to get hands-on experience on how the supercomputers work and how they drill down for answers, according to Deborah Stevens, an Argonne assistant computational scientist and member of the ATPESC organizing committee.
“Using the supercomputers has been valuable for participants, including researchers who work in fields other than computer science,” Stevens said. “These sessions teach them how to improve performance on the big machines and, maybe, how to build even bigger machines.”
Sharanjeet Kaur, a postdoc appointee in Argonne’s Transportation and Power Systems division, explored the architectures of different exascale computers, programming models, visualization tools, HPC debugging and profiling tools, agentic AI workflows, quantum computing and best practices in HPC software development. She plans to apply the program’s lessons directly to her work.
“In particular, I want to use the in situ visualization approaches I learned in the visualization track for my simulation cases,” Kaur said. “I also plan to make greater use of debugging and profiling tools to improve code performance and reduce manual debugging effort. In addition, I am highly motivated to adopt the concept of lab notebooks to better document numerical experiments and to incorporate the software development best practices. Finally, I plan to continue exploring and developing agentic AI workflows as part of my future work.”
Jamie Bamber, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said that in his field of numerical relativity, he had always heard people talk about ATPESC in “glowing terms,” even in the United Kingdom, and “I can now very much echo that endorsement.”
“One of my key goals in going to ATPESC was to learn how to develop efficient software for modern GPU-based supercomputers, such as those hosted at Argonne,” Bamber said. “I have already started applying some of those techniques to our current project and hope to run exascale black hole simulations on Aurora and other machines soon. I am also keen to explore how we can use AI to accelerate our research in the field of numerical relativity, using some of the techniques presented at ATPESC.”
Michael A. Boateng, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech in the AI Institute for Advances in Optimization lab, with a joint appointment with DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, also worked on these supercomputers during ATPESC.
“For me, ATPESC is unique because it combines technical depth, hands-on training and community,” Boateng said. “We were not just learning about HPC concepts theoretically. We could work with examples and experiment with different configurations. For example, the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation software library training let us change nonlinear solvers and preconditioners and observe their effects, while the tools track allowed participants to work with performance and debugging tools and apply them to their own applications.”
Boateng noted that learning just wasn’t confined to a supercomputer.
“The community was also a major part of the experience,” Boateng said. “I met people from the United States, Italy, Spain, India, Brazil, France, Belgium, Ghana, China and other countries. We went out for sushi, deep dish pizza, visited the Skydeck and the Bean, went to museums and even tried indoor rock climbing! Those experiences made ATPESC feel like more than a training program. The two-week format gave us time to learn from one another and build friendships outside of the classroom as well.”
Before Amal Gueroudji became an assistant computer scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science division, she attended ATPESC in 2021 and returned this year as an instructor. In 2021, she was a second-year doctoral student in France, and her advisor started pushing her to think seriously about what she wanted to do next. He suggested that she consider Argonne.
She remembered telling him, somewhat jokingly, “If I go to the U.S., I want to work for NASA.”
Her advisor’s response was, “Argonne is the NASA of supercomputing.”
Participating in ATPESC gave her the first real window into what he meant, Gueroudji said.
“Through the program, I was exposed not only to the breadth of HPC research, but also to the people, systems and scientific challenges at Argonne and across the DOE computing community,” she said. “It made Argonne feel like a place where I could see myself doing research. Not long afterward, I applied for and obtained a postdoctoral position at Argonne, and today I am a staff scientist here. So, in a very real way, ATPESC influenced the trajectory of my career. Coming back five years later as an ATPESC instructor makes that journey particularly special.”
This year’s ATPESC expanded instruction on AI/ML, and participants worked with the ACLF AI Testbed machines. They also accessed the ALCF Inference Service for research and vibe coding, said Raymond Loy, director of ATPESC and ALCF lead for training, debuggers and math libraries.
This year, the ATPESC committee expanded the AI/ML track from one day to two, covering topics such as distributed deep learning, introduction to large language models, pretraining, post training, workflows, inference and agentic tools. In addition to the expanded AI/ML track, they also added AI-adjacent topics in mixed-precision computing and vibe coding, Loy said.
The emergence of DOE’s Genesis Mission also influenced the direction of how ATPESC can best train the future generation of HPC professionals. The historic Genesis Mission will deliver breakthroughs using AI to secure American energy dominance, accelerate scientific discovery and strengthen national security.
“ATPESC strives to be at the forefront of computational science, and the curriculum is adjusted every year,” Loy said. “AI and ML have become increasingly more important for science — as witnessed by the Genesis Mission — and we have followed suit.”
Archbishop for the U.S. Military Timothy Broglio said Catholic service members assigned to the firing squad that will execute the Fort Hood shooter should ask to be excused.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company has reached the AI "frontier" with its new Muse Wonder model and will be offered as a closed, paid product for businesses. Zuckerberg also rejected calls for an industry-wide slowdown, arguing that AI can be managed with conventional guardrails as Meta continues spending heavily on models, infrastructure, and talent. The Financial Times reports: Speaking with the FT as Meta releases its Muse Wonder AI model on Monday, the billionaire chief executive claimed the new system was "going to allow much more sophisticated behaviours that are at the frontier of what is being done in the AI field." [...] "Getting to this point both required a large amount of compute and investment, and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time," said Zuckerberg. [...] Meta said Muse Wonder outperforms Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on some technical benchmarks. It said the new model can be used to carry out complex tasks from "understanding a lease to making sense of financial or health information." However, Muse Wonder will also be "closed," with its best versions sold directly to businesses. That pits it against Anthropic and OpenAI for corporate AI contracts in a serious test of its ambitions. Zuckerberg signaled further spending as Meta was "already working on the next step up," adding that its model development would "probably feel like it'll go quite a bit faster from here."
However, he also shrugged off mounting fears that the technology was advancing at a rate that will soon surpass human control. [...] The Meta chief declined to be drawn on his figure for "P(doom)" -- a much-discussed Silicon Valley term to describe the probability that AI will lead to mass destruction. Instead, he argued that responsibility should fall on the individual lab to ensure model safety. "I'm much closer to the belief that AI is a technology that can be engineered with normal guardrails and built responsibly than the anthropomorphic vision of AI, which is that it is just going to go do its own thing," he said. Zuckerberg has previously rejected calls by the heads of AI labs such as Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman for an industry-wide "slowdown" in AI development. He also played a key role in crafting US President Donald Trump's White House "Accord on Super Intelligence," setting out principles for self-regulation of the industry, which critics say falls far short of a formal global AI governance regime.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says it is not planning Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations targeting polling locations.
Timothy Broglio says Catholics on army firing squad should ask to be excused since it clashes with church teachings
The archbishop who oversees the spiritual care of Catholics serving in the US military condemned the Pentagon’s proposedplans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan later this year.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio also stipulated in a Monday statement that any Catholic soldier assigned to the US army firing squad should ask to be excused from that duty, which he described as contrary to the teachings of the church. He joins other Catholic leaders in speaking out against the death penalty and the live stream plans.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. Oct. 12, 2026 — Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, today announced the second-generation Marvell Structera X 3406 and Marvell Structera X 3506 CXL memory expanders, designed to help cloud, enterprise and AI infrastructure providers build more efficient, scalable and higher-performance systems for the next era of AI and computing. Designed to address the evolving needs of leading hyperscale datacenters, Structera X addresses the most demanding data center workload requirements.
Credit: gguy/Shutterstock
AI and ML workloads are rewriting the rules of data center design. Growing LLM sizes, expanding context windows and growing KV-cache requirements are driving unprecedented memory demands that traditional server architectures simply cannot meet. Memory is a critical constraint of AI performance and infrastructure efficiency.
Modern AI inference workloads, from LLM serving to deep learning recommendation models (DLRM), are memory bound. KV-cache capacity directly determines time to first token (TTFT), throughput, and XPU utilization. Structera X 3406/3506 addresses these bottlenecks with:
Industry-first six-channel CXL memory expansion: Six DDR4/DDR5 memory channels deliver 50% more channels than the previous generation, increasing memory bandwidth and capacity so AI servers can sustain larger models and longer context windows – up to 18 DDR4 RDIMM slots supporting 9TB for Structera X 3406 and 12 DDR5 RDIMM slots supporting 6TB for Structera X 3506.
Industry-first four host connectivity: Enables memory capacity sharing with up to four hosts and up to 256GB/s PCIe6.0 x16 of host bandwidth, improving memory utilization and efficiency across AI clusters.
5x higher LZ4 compression throughput from previous generation: Up to 250GB/s compression/decompression throughput unlocks up to 2–3x more effective memory capacity, depending on workloads.
StructGuard enterprise-grade RAS: Provides advanced error correction to enhance memory reliability and resilience against DRAM device failures.
Industry-first post-quantum security: Combines post-quantum cryptography, Caliptra 2.0, CXL IDE and AES-256 memory encryption to provide advanced data protection.
For DLRM workloads, Structera X delivers up to 2x higher queries per second and 2–3x more effective embedding-table capacity per controller. For LLM serving, Structera X delivers up to 40–50% faster TTFT at equivalent context length, or up to 2x longer supportable context windows at equivalent latency compared to the previous generation.
Building on the success of the first-generation Structera X 2404/2504, the Structera X 3406/3506 leverages the proven software stack and ecosystem integrations enabling an accelerated ramp. The Marvell CXL ecosystem continues to expand across the full data center stack through close partnership with CPU and memory vendors, OEMs, ODMs and system integrators.
“CXL is starting to gain widespread adoption in AI systems since they reap strong benefits from its very high bandwidth and support of large memory sizes,” said Jim Handy, general director of Objective Analysis, and author of a CXL market report. “In addition, today’s memory shortage and subsequent high prices are driving IT managers to use CXL to re-deploy used DDR4 DIMMs into DDR5 systems for immediate cost savings. In the near future, these same managers will use CXL’s memory pools to reduce stranded memory and drive greater savings, and they will find controllers that offer compression, as this one does, to be even more interesting.”
By bringing together connectivity, memory and storage technologies, the expanded data center portfolio improves how compute and memory work across AI systems, increasing utilization, infrastructure efficiency and AI performance. These next-generation offerings increase access to memory resources, improving both memory and compute utilization, helping customers optimize AI infrastructure performance as workloads continue to grow in scale and complexity.
“Marvell is the only provider with a complete end-to-end CXL portfolio spanning memory expansion (Structera X), near-memory acceleration (Structera A), and PFMA (Photonic Fabric Memory Appliance), pod-scale CXL memory-sharing appliance, giving customers a complete portfolio from direct-attach to disaggregated memory pooling,” said Will Chu, executive vice president and general manager, Custom Cloud Solutions at Marvell. “We are delivering industry-leading CXL controllers, co-developed with leading hyperscalers to address the most demanding AI infrastructure requirements.”
Availability
Marvell Structera X 3406 and Structera X 3506 CXL memory expansion controllers are expected to sample in Q1 2027.
Visit Marvell Booth #B31 at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, Oct. 12-15 in San Jose, Calif., to learn more about the company’s newest memory and storage offerings.
About Marvell
To deliver the data infrastructure technology that connects the world, Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is building solutions on the most powerful foundation: our partnerships with our customers. Trusted by the world’s leading technology companies for over 30 years, we move, store, process and secure the world’s data with semiconductor solutions designed for our customers’ current needs and future ambitions. Through a process of deep collaboration and transparency, we’re ultimately changing the way tomorrow’s enterprise, cloud and carrier architectures transform—for the better.
(The Center Square) – Despite several federal farm and agriculture assistance programs having stopped in the middle of harvest season, Congress likely won’t reauthorize funding until after the midterm elections.
The Delaware Department of Education will recognize the 20 district and charter Teachers of the Year during an Oct. 13 celebration at the Modern Maturity Center in Dover. The photo was updated on 10/13/26 and was created using AI.
Twenty educators from across the state will be honored in Dover before one is selected to represent Delaware in the national Teacher of the Year program.
DOVER — One of 20 educators representing Delaware’s public school districts and charter schools will be named the state’s 2027 Teacher of the Year Tuesday evening.
The Delaware Department of Education will recognize the 20 district and charter Teachers of the Year during an Oct. 13 celebration at the Modern Maturity Center in Dover. The evening will conclude with the announcement of the educator selected to serve as Delaware’s Teacher of the Year.
The nominees were selected by their districts or the Delaware Charter Schools Network during 2026 and recognized for their ability to inspire students, their professional skills and their dedication to teaching.
The honor is intended to recognize an outstanding classroom teacher while also selecting an educator who can represent teachers across the state. Delaware’s winner automatically becomes the state’s nominee for the National Teacher of the Year program.
Twenty educators in the running
This year’s nominees represent elementary, middle and high schools and teach subjects ranging from kindergarten and third grade to science, mathematics, music, social studies, French and special education.
The 2027 district and charter Teachers of the Year are:
Appoquinimink — Caitie Layton, Silver Lake Elementary, music
Brandywine — Victoria Sorg, Concord High School, French and AVID
Caesar Rodney — Morgan McManus, Allen Frear Elementary, third grade
Cape Henlopen — Julianna Danese, Cape Henlopen High School, special education and AVID
Capital — Angela Darling-Spinelli, Central Elementary, library media
Christina — Jessica Liu, Etta J. Wilson Elementary, multilingual learners
Colonial — Chadia Garyeazon, Southern Elementary, third grade
Delaware Charter Schools Network — Kelly Kline, Newark Charter High School, music
Delmar — Terry Rodenbaugh, Delmar Middle School, English
Indian River — Emily Wright, Sussex Central Middle School, science
Lake Forest — Brian Gilewski, W.T. Chipman Middle School, social studies
Laurel — Brittany Franchino, North Laurel Early Learning Academy, kindergarten
Milford — Erin Raniszewski, Mispillion Elementary, third grade
New Castle County Vocational-Technical — Sarah Dunn, Delcastle Technical High School, mathematics
POLYTECH — Victoria Ruckman, POLYTECH High School, science
Red Clay — Darla Jones, William C. Lewis Dual Language Elementary, fifth grade
Seaford — Donna Wells, Blades Elementary, kindergarten
Sussex Tech — Sarah Rose, Sussex Technical High School, music
Woodbridge — RoseMarie McGill, Woodbridge High School, social studies
The list illustrates the range of educators considered for the award, from teachers working with some of Delaware’s youngest students to those preparing high school students for college and careers. The Department of Education says the program is designed to recognize educators who can serve as ambassadors for the teaching profession.
A lengthy selection process
Being named a district Teacher of the Year is only the beginning of the statewide selection process.
Each candidate completes an application that includes five essays. Five Department of Education staff members and five former Delaware Teachers of the Year independently review and score the applications.
A former state Teacher of the Year and a department staff member then observe each candidate in the classroom.
An independent panel of judges from outside the Department of Education considers the application scores, classroom observations and a recorded presentation from each candidate before recommending a winner to the secretary of education.
The program seeks educators who are knowledgeable and skilled, inspire students of different backgrounds and abilities, earn the respect of students, parents and colleagues and can represent the profession publicly.
More than a one-night honor
The educator selected Tuesday will become Delaware’s representative in the National Teacher of the Year program, which is administered by the Council of Chief State School Officers.
The state winner also takes on a larger role as an advocate and ambassador for Delaware teachers during the year.
Through action by the Delaware General Assembly, the state Teacher of the Year will receive a $5,000 grant to benefit students and a $3,000 personal grant.
Each of the other 19 district and charter nominees will receive a $2,000 state grant.
The celebration begins with a social hour at 5 p.m., followed by dinner at 6 p.m. The Teacher of the Year announcement is expected after dinner.
For Delawareans who cannot attend, the final portion of the program will be livestreamed, with coverage expected to begin about 7:15 p.m.
TO GO BOX
What: Delaware 2027 Teacher of the Year celebration
When: Tuesday, Oct. 13. Social hour begins at 5 p.m.; dinner begins at 6 p.m.; the Teacher of the Year announcement is expected after dinner.
Where: Modern Maturity Center, Dover
Watch: The announcement portion of the ceremony is expected to be livestreamed beginning about 7:15 p.m. on YouTube.
Meet the nominees: The Delaware Department of Education has profiles of the 20 district and charter Teachers of the Year on its Teacher of the Year website.
Sources say the investigation centers on Rep. Ilhan Omar's immigration documents, involving paperwork filled out by her late father when she was a child.
Several news outlets reported Blair allegedly punched a flight attendant, bit another and tried to open plane door
The actor Selma Blair was arrested on Sunday at John F Kennedy (JFK) airport in New York on allegations that she attacked flight attendants on a Delta Air Lines flight, according to officials.
Blair’s arrest happened at about 11pm, after Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officials said they responded to a call “about a physically abusive passenger aboard Delta Air Lines flight 938 which was parked at the gate” at JFK after arriving from Los Angeles (LAX).
Google has introduced the $179 Fitbit Edge, a new fitness tracker with a 1.34-inch OLED display, built-in GPS, ECG support, week-long battery life, and Fitbit's first user-replaceable battery. "And unlike the Pixel Watch, it's compatible with Android and iPhones via the Google Health app," reports Wired. From the report: The Edge has a user-replaceable battery, a Fitbit first, aligning with Google's efforts to make its Pixel Watch more repairable. (Likely also due to new battery regulations set to take effect next year in the European Union.) Repair options will vary by region and availability. If you find the Pixel Watch's round face too bulky, the Edge's capsule-shaped alternative might suit smaller wrists better. If the Charge 6's 1.04-inch display was too small, the Edge upgrades it to a larger 1.34-inch screen. The difference is noticeable, and that extra real estate could make a real impact when glancing at your metrics mid-workout.
The Edge borrows a few more attributes from the Pixel Watch, including an altimeter that uses atmospheric pressure to measure elevation changes. That means it can record elevation gain and loss during outdoor activities, track floors climbed, and add more context to your outdoor stats. It also has a far-field skin temperature sensor, replacing the standard device temperature sensor found in other Fitbits. By bringing some of the Pixel Watch's more advanced hardware to a fitness-first wearable, Google is giving the Edge a compelling middle-ground position in its lineup at a Fitbit-friendly price.
The Edge inherits the Fitbit Air's improvements while restoring several Charge 6 features the screenless tracker lacks, including built-in GPS and electrical sensors that work with the electrocardiogram (ECG) app. You can also control music playback on a connected Bluetooth device, as you could with the Charge 6, and Google Maps turn-by-turn directions will arrive later this year. [...] With a Google Health Premium subscription, the Edge can track blood pressure trends without manual calibration and insulin resistance trends without requiring a blood draw. Google first announced these capabilities alongside the Pixel Watch 5's debut, but they only became available at the end of September. They're also available on the Air, keeping Google's screenless tracker up to date as its lineup expands.
Plans for a new theatre for world’s longest-running soap in Digbeth scrapped as part of cost-cutting measures
The BBC is set to stop recording The Archers in Birmingham for the first time in the show’s 75-year history, after scrapping plans for a radio drama theatre that was to be the new home of the world’s longest-running soap opera.
A pledge to move recordings to the so-called Tea Factory, the BBC’s new Birmingham hub in Digbeth, has become the latest victim of the corporation’s £500m cuts plan.
From handcrafted jewelry and award-winning wildlife photography to homemade preserves, the Oct. 17-18 fair offers something beyond ordinary shopping.
WILMINGTON — A jar of homemade Delaware preserves, a piece of copper jewelry colored by fire or an award-winning photograph of wildlife could become someone’s favorite holiday gift this year.
Those are just a few of the discoveries awaiting visitors to the annual Hagley Craft Fair, returning Saturday, Oct. 17, and Sunday, Oct. 18, to Hagley Museum and Library along the Brandywine.
The two-day event brings together artisans from across the Mid-Atlantic, transforming Hagley’s historic upper property and Soda House into a marketplace of handmade jewelry, fine art, pottery, woodworking, textiles and gourmet foods.
For Delaware residents, the event is more than an opportunity to begin holiday shopping. It’s a chance to meet the artists and small-business owners behind the products, discover regional talent and enjoy one of the state’s most picturesque historic properties during the fall season.
Among this year’s exhibitors are several makers whose work and personal stories offer a glimpse into the creativity behind the fair.
From a Delaware backyard to a thriving food business
One of the fair’s distinctly Delaware exhibitors is Backyard Jams and Jellies, a Milton-based company offering more than 90 varieties of jams, jellies, mustards, chutneys and other preserves.
The business traces its beginnings to founder Krista Scudlark, who started making preserves from fruit grown in her backyard more than 25 years ago.
What began as a way to use an abundant harvest grew into a specialty food business recognized at farmers markets and shops throughout Delaware.
In 2023, Andrew and Janece Pipon purchased the business, continuing its small-batch production methods and original recipes while introducing additional varieties.
The company remains connected to Delaware agriculture through its use of ingredients from regional farmers.
Its selection ranges from traditional fruit preserves to pepper jellies and savory products, offering shoppers an opportunity to discover gifts made close to home.
Turning fire into wearable art
Visitors looking for something less traditional may be drawn to 222 Creations, which specializes in torch-fired copper enamel jewelry and flame-painted copper designs.
Unlike jewelry produced using standardized manufacturing techniques, flame painting uses heat to produce changing colors and patterns on copper.
The result is jewelry that can be difficult to reproduce exactly, making individual pieces distinctive.
The artist behind 222 Creations explains that while the flame patterns can be guided, the resulting colors are influenced by the heating process.
The work demonstrates one of the attractions of an artisan show: discovering how an artist transforms an ordinary material into something unexpected.
Jewelry designed to become an heirloom
Another featured exhibitor, Anna Biggs Designs, approaches jewelry as a form of sculpture.
Biggs creates hand-carved designs in silver and gold, producing pieces that combine fine-art craftsmanship with jewelry intended to be worn.
Her collections include rings, earrings and necklaces featuring distinctive shapes and detailed metalwork.
For shoppers interested in a special gift or a piece of jewelry that can be treasured for years, her work offers an alternative to mass-produced accessories.
Delaware photographer earns recognition beyond the state
The fair also features the work of Heather Orkis, a wildlife photographer from Townsend whose photographs have earned recognition in national and international competitions.
Orkis specializes in wildlife, particularly ducks and other waterfowl.
Her accomplishments include a 2023 honorable mention in the National Wildlife Federation’s photography competition, recognition from the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art and a winning entry in a Ducks Unlimited waterfowl photography competition.
Her photographs also have appeared in a national Ducks Unlimited calendar.
Orkis, who works as a paramedic, describes wildlife photography as an opportunity to find solitude and relaxation away from the demands of emergency medical work.
Her photography demonstrates that Delaware’s creative community includes artists whose work reaches well beyond the state’s borders.
More than jewelry and fine art
The fair’s variety extends far beyond these featured exhibitors.
Visitors can browse handmade pottery, wood carvings, furniture, hand-dyed textiles, leather goods, decorative metalwork, glass art and specialty foods.
Other exhibitors on Hagley’s 2026 vendor list include the Delaware Woodworkers Guild, Blue Fox Studio, Avant Garden Pottery, Blazing Bella and Waggies by Maggie & Friends, a nonprofit dog-treat business whose mission includes employing people with intellectual disabilities.
The mix of established artisans, small businesses and specialty producers makes the show attractive to visitors with different interests and budgets.
For those shopping ahead of the holidays, the fair offers opportunities to buy gifts directly from their makers while supporting independent businesses.
A fall outing with a little history
The setting is part of the appeal.
Exhibitors will occupy Hagley’s upper grounds and historic Soda House building, allowing visitors to browse inside and outside while enjoying the surrounding landscape.
The Hagley Museum Store and Hagley Handwork Group also will be located in the Library Copeland Room.
Food trucks will provide refreshments, and shuttle transportation will be available throughout the event.
Admission includes access to the historic du Pont family home and gardens, giving visitors an opportunity to combine shopping with an exploration of Delaware history.
Tickets are valid for both days, and the fair will take place rain or shine.
For anyone who enjoys handmade craftsmanship, local entrepreneurship and the colors of a Brandywine Valley autumn, the Hagley Craft Fair offers an opportunity to experience all three in one weekend.
TO GO BOX: Hagley Craft Fair 2026
What: Hagley Craft Fair — fine arts, crafts, and specialty food market
When:
Saturday, Oct. 17, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, Oct. 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington. Enter from the Buck Road East entrance off Route 100.
GPS address: 298 Buck Road, Wilmington, DE 19807
Admission:
Tickets
Advance online
At the gate
Adults
$10
$15
Children ages 6-14
$8
$10
Children under 6
Free
Free
Hagley members
Free
Free
Parking and transportation: Follow event parking directions from the Buck Road East entrance. Shuttles will operate throughout the grounds.
Included: Admission to the du Pont family home and gardens. Food trucks will offer refreshments for purchase.
Important: Tickets are valid both days. The event is rain or shine. Dogs are not permitted.
ICE agents raid the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Oct. 12, 2026, in Washington, D.C.Photo: Andrew Leyden/Getty Images
In the mode of historic fascist regimes, President Donald Trump’s administration sent federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the home of a political opponent, singled out for her race and religion, in a transparent effort to strip her of her citizenship.
On Monday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing, conducted a search of the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with federal officials describing the incursion as part of “an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”
HSI was previously known for targeting human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, the unit has been increasingly focused on investigating protesters and immigration fraud.
That latter category is exactly what Trump administration officials have been prejudiciously applying to Omar for months. In March, Vice President JD Vance said, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America.”
And, last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that “something is going to happen” on the Omar case, with immigration czar Tom Homan confirming an investigation.
The ICE raid against Omar, however, is an extremist escalation in Trump’s long-running threats to denaturalize the member of Congress, who was born in Somalia but came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was a young child. Omar, who has denied the repeated allegations of immigration fraud, is on the ballot for reelection in November.
Not only does the raid send a chill to all naturalized citizens who, like Omar, oppose the Trump regime, it is also one of the most ominous signs to date of how dangerous Trump and his acolytes can get in the next two years.
With his popularity tanking and his grip on power growing tenuous, Trump is becoming a flailing tyrant. Meanwhile, he has been granted extraordinary executive power by a loyalist Supreme Court and has purged the federal government of practically all checks and balances. It’s a recipe for immense harm.
A Nakedly Fascist Move
Debates about whether the Trump regime qualifies as fascist are old, tired, and not worth retreading here.
There can be little doubt, though, that targeting a racialized political opponent for deportation three weeks before an election is a nakedly fascist move — especially in the context of the far right’s evermore vitriolic attacks on Somali communities nationwide.
“Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last week. “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”
It was nothing short of an exhortation to a race war.
As his popular support continues to wane, we can be sure that the president and his white supremacist Cabinet will marshal the force of the federal government in even more fascistic ways.
Many means of stopping Trump have been defanged, as the raid itself makes clear.
We cannot rely on the courts. The warrant to search Omar’s home, for instance, was signed by a judge.
The judicial system, indeed, has permitted vast swaths of Trump’s anti-immigrant excesses. Courts have also sent activists to prison for decades for attending protests against the federal government. And, while some federal judges and even the Supreme Court have pushed back on some of Trump’s agenda, it is also the courts that have covered the president with impunity. We know, too, that this administration routinely disregards court orders in the knowledge that it will not face consequences.
There is little more optimism to be had on the congressional front. Even if Democrats take back Congress in November, they must reckon with an embattled authoritarian executive with a fully funded standing militia — namely, ICE.
Democrats should unite to stop Trump’s efforts to lawlessly deport a colleague based on a racist political witch hunt, but we can expect little congressional action beyond condemnatory statements. Indeed, all too many centrist Democrats have been happy to throw left-wing colleagues, particularly Muslims like Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to the wolves.
Elected leaders, from the national to municipal level, should be strategizing about how to protect their constituents from Trump’s worst extremes in the knowledge that he and his allies will escalate further. Impeachment should be a priority, yes, but so too should passing laws to dismantle and defund ICE, among other measures — just the sorts of things mainstream Democrats have refused to countenance.
If not the courts or elected leaders, what then? The answer is clear: Trump’s desperate authoritarianism must also be met by mass popular and militant opposition.
It is not enough to vote in November, then cross our fingers for two more years.
It is not enough to vote in November, then cross our fingers for two more years. Organizers on the front lines defending immigrant neighbors against ICE are exhausted and need numbers and support.
Activists facing trial or already sentenced to decades in prison for resisting Trump’s regime need ongoing legal support and funding. Readiness is all.
This is not to suggest that we must live in a state of paralyzing fear of an evermore delusional tyrant. The point, rather, is to recognize the danger and go on.
Resistance to Trump, to the border regime, and to racist state violence already exists; it must be supported, expanded, and the subject of an escalation of our own.
A GPU cluster can be healthy and a job running while the model makes little useful progress. Seeing why requires observability built around the training run, not isolated infrastructure components.
A large-scale training job can look healthy to nearly every conventional monitoring tool while quietly wasting much of its GPU allocation.
The nodes are up. Slurm reports that the job is running. Kubernetes shows healthy containers. GPU utilization is high. Network traffic is flowing. No CUDA out-of-memory errors have appeared, and the loss keeps getting logged.
Nevertheless, step times may have doubled. One rank may be holding back hundreds of others. GPUs may be occupied by communication kernels without moving the training run forward. The input pipeline may be starving the accelerators.
Each tool accurately describes the part of the system it was designed to observe. But distributed training does not live inside any one of those parts.
Filling that gap takes more than adding infrastructure metrics to a dashboard; observability itself must be rethought for how large-scale training behaves.
Four Views of the Same Training Run
Traditional observability grew around stable abstractions such as hosts, services, containers and requests, which work well when components can be examined separately.
Distributed training is different. A job temporarily assembles thousands of accelerators, processes, network links and storage paths into one synchronized system, where a slowdown anywhere can set the pace of the whole job.
Infrastructure monitoring, through tools such as NVIDIA’s Data Center GPU Manager, sees GPU activity, memory, power, temperature, clocks, hardware errors and interconnect traffic at low overhead.
Schedulers and orchestrators see allocations, queues, job states, container health, resource requests and placement decisions.
Runtime tools sit closer to the application: CUPTI exposes CUDA API calls, kernel activity and memory operations, and NCCL logs and profiler interfaces show communicator setup, collectives, topology and transport choices.
ML experiment tracking sees steps, epochs, throughput, loss, learning rate, checkpoints and model outputs.
Each view is valuable, but they are split by identifiers, time models, retention policies and owners. Infrastructure teams think in nodes and GPUs, platform teams in Slurm jobs or Kubernetes pods, ML engineers in experiments, runs and checkpoints.
When Accurate Metrics Become Misleading
Consider a distributed data-parallel job in which one training process begins receiving data more slowly than its peers.
It reaches gradient synchronization late, and the other ranks wait for it inside the collective. Their GPUs look active because NCCL kernels are resident, so cluster-wide utilization may still look respectable.
(Digineer Station/Shutterstock)
The infrastructure dashboard therefore shows busy GPUs. The communication dashboard shows long collectives. The training log shows slower steps. The storage dashboard may show elevated latency.
Viewed separately, they suggest competing culprits: a network bottleneck, inefficient collectives, overloaded storage or poorly tuned kernels.
On one timeline, compared by rank, the sequence is clear: one process hit an input delay, arrived late and made its peers wait.
The distinction matters because the long collective is not necessarily the original problem. It is where the problem became visible across the cluster.
The reverse also happens. During a planned checkpoint, quiet GPUs and heavy storage activity are correct, but a phase-blind alert will flag them as an incident.
Averages hide problems too. If a different rank straggles each step, every device’s average utilization can look the same; the imbalance shows only at rank and step granularity.
Then there are problems that infrastructure monitoring cannot recognize at all. A job can run without crashes, maintain high GPU activity and exit with code zero while the loss remains flat, diverges or becomes numerically invalid. Operationally, the workload succeeded. Scientifically, it failed.
Health is contextual: a metric means something only relative to the other ranks, the training phase and the model’s progress.
The Training Run Must Become the Primary Entity
Observability must treat the training run as a first-class entity, tying together at minimum:
Nvidia NVL72
Experiment and run IDs;
Scheduler jobs and execution attempts;
Nodes and accelerators;
Processes, devices and ranks;
Containers and runtimes;
Steps, phases and checkpoints.
This context must travel with the telemetry or be reconstructed. Otherwise an NVLink spike is just a device event, a long collective a runtime event, a slow step an application event.
Tied to the same run, rank and interval, they become evidence of one condition.
Distributed tracing does this for microservices, linking many services into one request path. Training needs the equivalent, but its critical path runs through steps, ranks, collectives, data delivery and synchronization barriers, not HTTP calls.
Standards like OpenTelemetry can transport and correlate the data, but a transport format does not supply training semantics. The industry still needs shared conventions for runs, ranks, devices, collectives, phases and model progress.
GPU utilization alone does not establish how much of the allocation contributed to useful training.
A better measure is training goodput: the share of allocated accelerator time spent on valid forward passes, backward passes and optimizer steps at the expected rate.
No single metric captures it, but several make it visible:
Samples or tokens processed per allocated GPU-hour;
Step-time distributions and changes from a comparable baseline;
Time spent computing, communicating, waiting for data or checkpointing;
Arrival skew and execution differences among ranks;
Work discarded because of failures, restarts or invalid results;
Loss, gradient and checkpoint progression correlated with resource consumption.
They don’t replace hardware telemetry; they give it operational meaning.
The important question changes from “Were the GPUs busy?” to “What progress did the training run achieve with the GPU time it consumed?”
Correlation Is Necessary, But Not Sufficient
(AntonKhrupinArt/Shutterstock)
Placing signals on one timeline helps, but correlation alone does not prove causation.
A storage-latency spike during a slow step may be the cause, a side effect or someone else’s workload. A hardware error may explain a straggler, or be a corrected event with no effect on the job.
Diagnosis needs additional context: which signal changed first, how the affected rank compares with its peers, which phase the job was in, and what topology, configuration and comparable past runs suggest.
Rules, statistical baselines, causal graphs or ML models can do this analysis. AI assistants can help navigate the evidence but cannot compensate for missing identity and context.
The output should also remain explainable. Instead of declaring that “the network is slow,” a diagnostic system should be able to trace the chain from the straggler example above: one late rank, its peers waiting, the fabric healthy throughout.
That evidence chain is more useful than an anomaly score because engineers can verify it and choose the appropriate action.
Observability Must Not Become the Failure
Collecting deeper training information introduces another challenge: the observer is often closer to the workload than it is in conventional infrastructure monitoring.
CUDA is asynchronous, so host API time is not device time. As NVIDIA describes, an NCCL collective spans application calls, runtime queues, kernel launches and GPU execution; measuring one part gives a precise-looking but misleading result.
Instrumentation can also compete for buffers, hardware counters and profiler interfaces, add overhead, lose records or behave differently across CUDA, NCCL and framework versions.
That argues for a progressive collection model rather than enabling every possible profiler across an entire fleet.
A broad, low-overhead infrastructure baseline can remain active continuously. Runtime-level signals can add information about CUDA calls, collective state and rank behavior. Detailed device tracing can be enabled selectively for jobs that require it. Hardware-counter profiling can remain an explicit diagnostic operation rather than an unattended default.
The collection path must be observable too. Missing kernel records can mean no kernels ran, or that instrumentation failed; a trustworthy system must tell “no activity” from “no coverage.”
The safest design collects not the most data but enough independent evidence to diagnose the workload without unacceptable risk to the run.
A New Operational Discipline
The missing layer, then, is not GPU monitoring, experiment tracking or profiling alone, but the system that connects their evidence around what organizations care about: the training run.
Building it is a new discipline, spanning SRE, HPC performance engineering, distributed systems and machine learning; none has the whole answer alone.
When a thousand GPUs spend an hour waiting for one delayed rank, the cluster has not experienced a thousand independent utilization problems. It has experienced one distributed training problem expressed across a thousand devices.
The next generation of observability must be designed to see the difference.
About the author: Evgeny Potapov is a software engineer and technology founder with 25 years of experience in performance engineering, SRE, DevOps and distributed systems. He is a co-founder of RidgeScope, which develops observability and diagnostic technology for large-scale AI training.
This year, the Prayer Breakfast features Bob Doll, CEO and chief investment officer of Crossmark Global Investments, as its keynote speaker. Doll previously held senior investment positions at Nuveen, BlackRock and Merrill Lynch Investment Managers.
39th annual gathering brings business, civic and faith leaders together Thursday at the Chase Center
WILMINGTON — For nearly four decades, the Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast has brought together an unusual cross-section of the First State: business executives, elected officials, nonprofit leaders, educators, clergy and other community leaders.
On Thursday, Oct. 15, the tradition continues at the Chase Center on the Riverfront with the 39th annual Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast, an event that has grown from a Wilmington-area gathering into a statewide institution connecting faith, leadership and Delaware’s business community.
The breakfast begins at 7:20 a.m. and this year features Bob Doll, CEO and chief investment officer of Crossmark Global Investments, as its keynote speaker. Doll previously held senior investment positions at Nuveen, BlackRock and Merrill Lynch Investment Managers.
A Delaware business tradition
The roots of the breakfast go back to 1985, when Wilmington-area businessmen Bob Nickle, David Ripsom and Bob Townsend attended the White House Prayer Breakfast in Washington and returned to Delaware interested in creating a similar gathering.
The first New Castle County Leadership Prayer Breakfast was held in 1986, attracting about 500 people. Its first speaker was Dr. Richard Halverson, then chaplain of the U.S. Senate.
The founders envisioned more than a religious event. The original purpose specifically spoke about leadership in Delaware’s business, professional and community life — a focus that has remained central to the breakfast.
As attendance expanded beyond New Castle County, organizers renamed it the Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast in 2002. Federal, state and local political leaders have regularly participated, but the event also has maintained strong ties to Delaware’s business community.
The volunteer steering committee itself is made up largely of Christian business men and women, according to organizers.
A Wall Street voice for Delaware leaders
Doll brings a particularly strong business connection to this year’s gathering.
He has spent more than 40 years in investment management and has served as president and chief investment officer of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, chief equity strategist at BlackRock and senior portfolio manager and chief equity strategist at Nuveen.
He joined Crossmark in 2021 as chief investment officer and became CEO in 2024. He regularly provides investment commentary and market predictions and has appeared on Bloomberg TV, CNBC and Fox Business.
For a Delaware audience — in a state where banking, financial services and corporate business play an outsized role in the economy — Doll’s combination of financial experience and faith-based leadership gives the keynote a natural connection to the people who have helped make the breakfast a fixture on the business calendar.
Doll also serves a number of Christian, educational and ministry organizations and is choir director at his local church. His background reflects the intersection of professional leadership, faith, stewardship and service that has defined the Delaware breakfast since its beginning.
A long list of prominent speakers
The staying power of the breakfast can also be seen in its speakers.
Recent guests have included John Templeton Foundation President and CEO Timothy Dalrymple in 2025; Pro Football Hall of Famer and former Philadelphia Eagle Brian Dawkins in 2024; JPMorgan Chase executive Dr. Betty Uribe in 2023; and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins in 2022.
Earlier speakers have included business leaders, athletes, authors, government officials and nationally known figures such as Interstate Batteries Chairman Norman Miller, Auntie Anne’s founder Anne Beiler, former NFL coach Joe Gibbs, Conoco CEO Archie Dunham and former U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black.
That mix has helped the breakfast endure as something broader than either a business meeting or a church event. It provides a place where leaders from different sectors of Delaware life can gather around common themes of character, responsibility, service and faith.
Delaware history takes the stage
This year’s program will also have a distinctly Delaware component.
The cast of the new musical “Big Quarterly” will provide special music. The gospel and hip-hop production tells the story of the Rt. Rev. Peter Spencer and his religious legacy in Delaware.
The musical was written and produced by Bishop S. Todd Townsend, Luke McLemore and Dr. Kim Kilby. Pastor James Burrows Jr. of The Resurrection Center also will lead “God Bless America.”
Nearly four decades after a small group of Delaware businessmen returned from Washington with an idea, the Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast has become part of the rhythm of the state’s civic and business community.
Its longevity may be its most significant accomplishment: generations of Delaware leaders have changed, companies have grown and disappeared, political administrations have come and gone, but the breakfast has continued bringing people together each fall to consider the responsibilities that accompany leadership.
New Transceivers Enable AI Builders to Scale Compute Within the Same Network Footprint While Reducing Networking’s Share of the Power Budget
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 12, 2026 — NVIDIA and Cisco today announced plans for Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), a new high-density 400Gb/s-per-lane optical module designed to equip the hardware ecosystem for the next generation of AI factories using pluggable transceivers.
As AI models grow and inference demand expands, AI factories must connect more computing systems while managing network complexity, power and costs. Moving more data per watt and per switch helps operators make better use of their infrastructure investments.
Scaling AI factories requires more bandwidth per connection and more connections per switch. When a switch reaches its capacity, further network expansion can require additional switch layers and optical links, increasing latency, power consumption and costs.
USFP is designed to enable AI factory builders to scale from 200 Gb/s per lane to 400Gb/s-per-lane Ethernet AI fabrics, while extending a deployment model proven at scale across multiple generations of data center networks. With USFP, customers can embrace next-generation optical technology and meet the performance demand of AI workloads without overhauling their data center infrastructure.
The first planned USFP-based transceivers will pack 16 full-duplex lanes in an octal small form factor (OSFP)-sized footprint supporting both switches and SuperNICs, with the ability to expand to 32 and more lanes in the future. By doubling both the lane count and bandwidth per lane, USFP enables AI fabrics to connect more 1.6Tb/s endpoints without adding network tiers. Customers will be able to achieve 12.8Tb/s of overall capacity with USFP.
Comparable with an OSFP-sized module, it delivers 4x the bandwidth and front-panel bandwidth density, with approximately 1.3x the power efficiency, versus 200Gb/s-per-lane pluggable modules. This means AI builders can increase their compute scale within the same network footprint, while decreasing networking’s share of the overall AI factory power budget.
“Building the world’s largest AI factories starts with rethinking the smallest of connections,” said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president NVIDIA. “With USFP, NVIDIA and Cisco are building an ecosystem to reinvent pluggable optics — connecting more computing with greater efficiency to power the next generation of AI factories.”
“AI builders need an interconnect architecture that can scale performance without locking them into a more complex operating model,” said Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of optical systems and optics at Cisco. “Cisco and NVIDIA recognized that scaling pluggable optics to 400Gb/s per lane would require more than another incremental extension of today’s module designs. Through our collaboration, USFP is designed to deliver a new level of bandwidth density while preserving the serviceability, deployment flexibility and operational simplicity of pluggable optics. By taking a full-stack approach — from silicon and systems to optics and the network operating system — we can optimize every layer to deliver the performance and scale the next generation of AI networks will require.”
More AI Infrastructure From Every Switch
Designed for electrical signals of 400Gb/s per lane, USFP uses a new two-dimensional array connector with a two-step insertion design that engages high-speed contacts after the module is inserted, reducing contact wear, improving signal integrity and making insertion force more predictable. The connector technology allows for further scaling of lane count to 32 full duplex lanes and more in the future. Because the connector is designed for 400Gb/s performance, it also offers improved performance at 200Gb/s per lane.
USFP supports power dissipation of up to 100 watts without needing a separate, dedicated embedded cooling circuit within the transceiver, reducing switch design complexity and improving reliability. Together, these capabilities enable higher-bandwidth fabrics while preserving the mature deployment, serviceability and manufacturability of existing pluggable transceivers.
All USFP configurations support optical designs that reduce latency and power consumption by simplifying signal processing. Support for a broad range of optical technologies and connection distances gives system designers the flexibility to meet unique AI factory deployment needs.
A Hardware Ecosystem for Next-Generation AI Factories
NVIDIA and Cisco are collaborating with TE Connectivity and Amphenol to build USFP cages, connectors and modules, with additional partners expected to join. The shared form factor gives suppliers a common foundation for developing high-density pluggable infrastructure for 400Gb/s-per-lane fabrics to build a robust ecosystem for AI factory builders.
The collaboration builds on NVIDIA and Cisco’s existing work to ensure NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and Cisco Silicon One-based Ethernet networks work together seamlessly, simplifying AI infrastructure deployment for enterprises, neoclouds and sovereign clouds.
NVIDIA and Cisco plan to create an open industry specification for USFP through an upcoming community-led multi-source project.
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
AMD Helion combines open hardware and software with an integrated token router that directs agents’ model calls across frontier and open-source models.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 12, 2026 — AMD today introduced the AMD Helion agentic AI rack, an open blueprint for agentic AI infrastructure based on an Open Compute Project spec-design and powered by AMD compute.
AMD Helion is an open blueprint providing the flexibility needed for agentic AI infrastructure. Helion supports CPU-led racks for agent execution at hyperscale and all-in-one configurations combining CPU execution and GPU inference for enterprise deployments. Credit: AMD.
Building on the open-platform approach of the AMD Helios rackscale solution, AMD Helion is designed to provide partners and customers with the flexibility they need for agentic AI infrastructure. With AMD Helion, customers can match CPU performance, core density and power with GPU acceleration for the work their AI agents perform.
“Agentic AI is not a single workload. It spans personal agents, enterprise applications, code execution and complex workflows, each with different compute requirements,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “To do that takes optimized compute and infrastructure that can adapt to different workloads. With AMD Helion, we are bringing AMD EPYC performance, open software and flexible rack designs together so our partners can build systems around customer needs and make efficient use of available power.”
AMD Helion’s OCP spec-based rack blueprint supports open software and can come in flexible configurations, including liquid- and air-cooled versions, allowing customers to create virtually any configuration needed for their needs. Some examples of this include:
A CPU-only rack powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC processors that can support up to 32,768 CPU cores. This rack is designed for hyperscale customers, providing dedicated capacity for agent execution and connections to separate model inference infrastructure.
An all-in-one rack that combines AMD EPYC CPU nodes, AMD Instinct MI350P GPU nodes and general-purpose compute on one platform. This rack is designed to provide partners and customers an all-in-one concept for enterprise agentic AI.
AMD Helion enables customers to deploy agentic AI in the IT infrastructure they already have, turning existing investments into a foundation for new AI capabilities. Partners can tailor CPU and GPU configurations to customer workloads, matching agent execution, model inference and supporting compute to each deployment’s performance, power and cost requirements.
AMD plans to contribute the AMD Helion specification to OCP, making it available to the community for further development and adoption. AMD Helion agentic rack configurations are currently under development with ecosystem partners and are planned to be available in November 2026.
Ecosystem Support
AMD is helping shape the next phase of AI infrastructure through open, flexible platforms, a broad portfolio of workload-optimized compute and collaboration across the ecosystem. AMD Helion brings that approach to agentic AI, helping partners match software and compute to the work agents perform and giving customers flexibility to scale as their requirements evolve.
“Agentic AI is changing what customers need from their infrastructure. It’s not just about compute performance, but how the entire system is connected, managed and secured,” said Jeremy Foster, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Compute. “Architectures like AMD Helion, combined with Cisco’s full-stack infrastructure capabilities, can give customers greater flexibility to deploy, operate and scale agentic workloads into their environments as their needs evolve.”
“Next-generation AI workloads require scale, efficiency, and flexibility that open, rack-scale architectures deliver, as demonstrated by our recent customer agreement to deploy AMD Helios,” said Trish Damkroger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions, HPE. “For decades, HPE and AMD have jointly championed open standards, and we are continuing to advance those efforts with AMD Helion. Together, we are ushering in the next era of AI with open large-scale systems, enhanced with air-cooled and direct liquid-cooled networking, supported by decades of HPE expertise and innovation.”
“Supermicro is accelerating the deployment of next-generation agentic AI infrastructure by bringing AMD’s Helion – the open, ORv3 compliant rack-scale architecture to market through our Data Center Building Block Solutions (DCBBS),” said Vik Malyala, Chief Business Officer, Supermicro. “With our proven expertise in OCP accepted rack-scale design, integration, liquid cooling, software, and deployment services, we transform advanced Agentic AI architectures into production-ready solutions. Together with AMD, we enable customers to deploy faster, scale efficiently, and accelerate time to online for agentic AI.”
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
Oct. 12, 2026 — Microsoft has announced Maia 300, the next generation of its AI inference platform, and plans to expand Azure Maia to multi-gigawatt deployments beginning in 2027.
Credit: Microsoft
With the rollout, Maia 300 will become the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services.
A snapshot of what’s new:
Built for emerging AI workloads: The Azure Maia system is designed around the real-world workloads Microsoft runs every day and new types of AI workloads, including long-context reasoning, latency-sensitive conversational experiences and sustained, multi-step agentic tasks.
40% more tokens per megawatt: Maia 300 is expected to deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt, allowing more AI compute to be provided with the same amount of power as demand for Copilot, AI agents and other AI services continues to grow.
Up to 7x higher token throughput: At rack scale inside a Microsoft datacentre, Maia 300 systems are expected to deliver up to seven times the token throughput of Maia 200, allowing AI responses to be delivered at greater volume and speed across Microsoft’s cloud services.
Building on Maia 200: Maia 200 already delivers up to 1.7 times more tokens per watt for built-in AI capabilities used by hundreds of millions of people. Maia 300 builds on this foundation to enable more efficient coding with GitHub, more flexible AI model deployment through Microsoft Foundry, and faster interactions with Copilot, Teams and Dragon Copilot.
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
PM hails next month’s ‘reset’ summit as first step to closer ties, but tensions over trade may prove problematic
Andy Burnham has promised a “serious dialogue” over the UK’s future place in Europe, saying the existing relationship is “not good enough” as he framed next month’s Brussels summit as a possible first step to EU membership.
The prime minister said Britain must take a “clear-eyed rational look” at its long-term relationship with the bloc to boost economic growth and control immigration, which needed to go beyond Labour’s existing red lines.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Oct. 12, 2026 — A Florida State University researcher is helping guide national research priorities in artificial intelligence, advanced computing and data systems in his new role as a program director within the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Weikuan Yu, professor in the Department of Computer Science. Credit: Bill Lax/Florida State University.
Professor of Computer Science Weikuan Yu will serve as an NSF program director for at least one year starting in Fall 2026. In this role, he’ll collaborate with researchers and other program directors to help manage NSF programs and oversee federal research investments related to his expertise in AI, powerful computing systems, large-scale data management and computing infrastructure.
“It’s a great honor to represent FSU at the national level and contribute to federal investments in advanced cyberinfrastructure and national AI research resources,” Yu said. “This opportunity comes at an especially exciting time, as AI is rapidly reshaping science, technology and society. The role gives me an opportunity to step back and look more broadly at where our research community is heading, particularly how national computing, AI and data infrastructure can enable scientific discovery and serve the larger research community.”
A major focus of Yu’s research is improving the efficiency of AI systems. Most recently, he led the development of AURORA, a software framework that monitors AI while helping the system run faster, use memory more efficiently and consume less energy. AURORA was selected for FSU’s 2026 ReliaQuest Innovation Challenge Fund, which supports innovative proof-of-concept solutions in AI and cybersecurity through the FSU Office of Research.
“Computing has become fundamental to nearly every aspect of modern science and society, and AI is accelerating that transformation at an unprecedented pace,” Yu said. “Continued progress depends not only on better AI models, but also on sustained advances in the computing, data, software and networking infrastructure behind them. Ultimately, investing in this foundation is essential to sustaining scientific discovery, technological innovation and our nation’s leadership in an increasingly AI-driven world.”
Yu joined FSU’s Department of Computer Science in 2015 and has served as associate chair for research and held the Mainline Information Systems Endowed Professorship. He also led the Department of Computer Science as chair for three years. “Dr. Yu, who has a robust and broad research program of his own, is imminently well qualified to fulfill this role as a program director,” said College of Arts and Sciences Dean Sam Huckaba. “Serving as director will provide value in both directions. The NSF will benefit from Dr. Yu’s knowledge and experience, and he will return with a better understanding of emerging federal research priorities and how the NSF arrives at funding decisions, particularly for its current highest priorities. While the funding agencies have strict policies against a program officer having anything to do with decision making relating to their home institution, the overall experience of Weikuan’s service will be beneficial to FSU.”
This position was made possible through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act rotator program, which allows federal agencies to bring experienced researchers and professionals from universities or other organizations into federal service, facilitating the exchange of expertise among government agencies and participating institutions.
Yu will also have the opportunity to increase access to large-scale high-performance computing and national AI research resources through programs like the NSF-funded State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs, which provide computing resources and training for AI research and education. These efforts connect institutions with fewer resources, like small rural schools, with tools and technology needed to conduct AI research.
“It will be exciting to help advance programs that push the boundaries of national cyberinfrastructure, from high-performance computing and AI research resources to networking, data, and software systems, and broaden their impact across scientific disciplines,” Yu said. “I’m also eager to collaborate with other program directors on emerging opportunities in AI-enabled sciences and help develop the research community and workforce needed to build and use the next generation of national cyberinfrastructure.”
Micas’ Tomahawk 6-based portfolio spans 800G air-cooled, 1.6T liquid-cooled, and 1.6T Davisson CPO systems for next-generation AI factories
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 12, 2026 — Micas Networks, an American AI networking company headquartered in San Jose, California, today announced three 102.4 Tbps open Ethernet switch platforms designed for next-generation AI factories. Built on Broadcom Tomahawk 6 technology, the new portfolio gives hyperscalers, neocloud providers, and AI infrastructure operators greater choice across 800G, 1.6T pluggable, and co-packaged optics (CPO) architecture.
Micas will preview the platforms at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, taking place October 12-15 in San Jose. Micas will demonstrate an operational 4RU air-cooled system, preview the 2RU mechanical design and liquid cooling, and provide an early preview of the 1RU CPO platform. Together, they provide flexible deployment options for high-performance AI back-end and scale-out fabrics while supporting open networking architectures and SONiC-based networking. The portfolio gives operators a path from today’s 800G infrastructure toward 1.6T and CPO without becoming dependent on a closed, vertically integrated networking stack.
“AI infrastructure operators should be able to choose how they build, scale, and operate their networks,” said Andrew Qu, CEO of Micas Networks. “By bringing Broadcom Tomahawk 6 pluggable and Davisson CPO systems into one portfolio, Micas is providing a practical path from 800G to 1.6T while preserving the openness customers need. Together with Broadcom, we are translating next-generation Ethernet and CPO innovation into deployable AI infrastructure, giving customers greater control over how they build and scale their networks.”
Three Platforms for the Next Generation of AI Networking
The new Micas portfolio includes:
Micas M2-W6950-128OC-FA: A 4RU, air-cooled 800G platform featuring 128 x 800G OSFP ports and 102.4 Tbps of switching capacity. Built on the Broadcom BCM78910 Tomahawk 6P switch ASIC, the system is designed for high-radix AI fabrics and standard 19-inch data center environments. Micas will demonstrate an operational system at OCP, with production scheduled to begin in Q4 2026.
Micas M2-W6951-64HC-CP: A 2RU, liquid-cooled 1.6T Tomahawk 6 platform featuring 64 x 1.6T OSFP ports and 102.4 Tbps of switching capacity. Designed for high-density, liquid-cooled AI racks, the platform provides a direct path to 1.6T pluggable networking. Micas will preview the mechanical system at OCP, with production scheduled to begin in Q4 2026.
Micas M2-W6950-64X3-DR8-CP08-DC: A 1RU co-packaged optics platform featuring 64 x 1.6T MMC DR8 optical interfaces and 102.4 Tbps of switching capacity using 200G SerDes technology. Designed for next-generation AI fabrics, the Tomahawk 6 – Davisson CPO architecture is intended to improve bandwidth density, power efficiency, and link stability. Micas will provide an early preview of the CPO platform OCP, with production scheduled to begin in Q1 2027.
“AI clusters are driving a significant step forward in Ethernet performance, density and scale,” said Hasan Siraj, vice president of product management, Core Switching Group, Broadcom. “Tomahawk 6 provides the 102.4 Tbps switching capacity needed to support the next generation of AI infrastructure. Micas’s planned 800G and 1.6T platforms build on that technology, giving customers the flexibility to scale their Ethernet fabrics while retaining control over their network architecture.”
The portfolio lets customers match the network architecture to their infrastructure, cooling environment, and deployment schedule – from high-radix 800G and 1.6T pluggable systems to next-generation CPO.
Extending a Multi-Generation Collaboration with Broadcom
Micas’ new portfolio builds on a multi-generation relationship with Broadcom spanning advanced Ethernet silicon, CPO system design, and open networking. Micas began developing and manufacturing CPO systems in 2023 and became the first system provider to commercialize a switch based on Broadcom’s Tomahawk 5-Bailly CPO technology. The new Davisson platform extends that experience to 102.4 Tbps switching and 200G SerDes, bringing the benefits of Broadcom’s third-generation CPO technology to the next generation of AI infrastructure.
“Co-packaged optics will play an increasingly important role as AI networks move to higher bandwidth and greater scale,” said Manish Mehta, vice president of marketing and operations, Optical Systems Division, Broadcom. “Micas has built valuable system-level experience commercializing CPO, beginning with Tomahawk 5 – Bailly and now extending to Tomahawk 6 – Davisson. Our collaboration with Micas brings together Broadcom’s optical integration and Micas’ system engineering experience to advance the power efficiency, bandwidth density and reliability AI infrastructure operators need at scale.”
Micas’ open networking strategy complements Broadcom’s next-generation portfolio built around open Ethernet, architectural flexibility and SONiC expertise. Micas helps AI data center operators reduce dependence on closed networking architectures while retaining control over compute platforms, network interfaces, optics, and software. Its system integration, manufacturing, deployment, and SONiC expertise helps customers build and operate high-performance AI fabrics at scale.
Availability
Production of the Micas 2RU liquid-cooled and 4RU air-cooled Tomahawk 6 platforms is scheduled to begin in Q4 2026. Production of the 1RU Tomahawk 6 – Davisson CPO platform is scheduled to begin in Q1 2027.
About Micas Networks
Micas Networks is a San Jose, California-based AI networking company that designs, builds and supports open Ethernet networking platforms for hyperscalers, neocloud providers and AI infrastructure operators. Combining deep SONiC expertise with end-to-end system design, manufacturing, deployment and support, Micas gives customers the freedom to build and scale AI networks on their own terms, without being locked into a closed, vertically integrated stack. Micas works with leading silicon and infrastructure partners including Broadcom and AMD. For more information, visit www.micasnetworks.com.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia's digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days. Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia's centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the "data center war" it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine's decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia's system if the countries continue trading such blows.
Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine's power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks. But Ukraine soon began striking back at data centers owned by the Russian company Yandex, also known as "Russia's Google," in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as a "symmetrical response."
[...] More importantly for Russian society, the damage to Yandex's data centers has reportedly caused interruptions or outages to popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map services. Yandex's search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia. The disruptions are even more widespread, because the data center damage also impacts Yandex's cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia's largest companies as customers, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. These include large grocery and fast-food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.
Ernest Jones IV was not wearing helmet during incident
Linebacker will miss game against Commanders
San Francisco 49ers linebacker Dre Greenlaw was suspended for one game after headbutting Seattle’s Ernest Jones IV in the wake of a late hit on the Seahawks sideline.
The NFL issued the suspension on Monday, saying the headbutt of a player without a helmet during Sunday’s 32-29 win against Seattle was “contrary to the generally understood principles of sportsmanship.”
Home secretary also expands police support ‘with immediate effect’ for high-profile public figures not currently MPs
Security arrangements for high-profile public figures including politicians and members of the royal family are to be urgently reviewed after the killing of Ann Widdecombe, the home secretary has said.
Shabana Mahmood said former MPs, party leaders who are not MPs, peers, former members of devolved parliaments and party spokespeople will also be offered police support.
Hypercore N48 you have selected in Float Control is not correct, you need to change that to the Hypercore S-Series Motor, however he has it called that in the app (N52 hub, if that needs to be specified)
Juliet Moore is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Applied Physiology at the university, where she studies the relationship between physical activity and immune health. Her research focuses on exercise and its effects on the body’s immune system.
“My interest in my focus for research, as well as teaching, is exercise immunology, specifically how exercise influences inflammation,” Moore said.
Moore’s most recent research investigates the body’s response to high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which is a type of exercise that includes an interval of intense workouts followed by an interval of recovery. The length and intensity of the intervals can be altered depending on the individual.
Moore wondered if there was a correlation between anti-inflammatory responses in the body and painless exercise.
“Can we get that same anti-inflammatory benefit of exercise without the damage, without the pain, so we can promote people that are going to be very low adherents to exercise?” Moore asked. “That goes into actually measuring between treadmill and cycling.”
She earned her doctorate in biokinesiology from University of Southern California and the most recent publication of research on HIIT exercises is from her PhD work.
“This paper is one of my many papers that will be coming out from my PhD, which was looking at how two exercise modalities, as well as diet, affects how the immune system responds to exercise,” Moore said.
Moore discussed how extensive research has examined the link between high-intensity exercise and inflammation, particularly among athletes who participate in events such as marathons, triathlons and the Man of Steel. However, there has been much less research on recreational athletes and people who are unaccustomed to exercise.
She explained that she chose to study HIIT exercises with her participants because HIIT can be modified for most, if not all, populations.
“It’s really fast, it’s highly variable, so, we can edit it to whatever we want, depending on what population we’re going to work with,” Moore said. “It’s high intensity enough that we can still have measurable responses and inflammation and differences between different types of exercise.”
This research was collected through twenty-six individuals who were all college-aged students at USC. Participants were all recreational athletes who participated in consistent physical activity but did not run or cycle regularly.
“We want to make sure that the running and cycling was novel, or new, to them to help stimulate that response,” Moore said.
Moore referred to the program of HIIT exercises used in her research as a “four-by-four,” where participants ran on a treadmill at a set speed for four minutes, then got a three-minute rest period of walking. They repeated this four times.
Moore used heart rate as the measure of intensity during exercise. Although she recognized that it was not the most robust measure, it can be used as a collection method for a wide range of demographic groups.
Each participant was randomly assigned to complete either the treadmill or bicycle exercise first, then waited a week before completing the second exercise. This ensured that participants’ data would not be influenced by inflammation resulting from other forms of exercise.
“Generally that inflammation that can occur after an acute bout of exercise typically goes away after 48 to 72 hours, so two to three days,” Moore said. “It can last upwards of like five days. We did seven days just to make sure it was completely washed out.”
Each participant had a blood sample taken before their exercise, after one hour of recovery and after twenty-four hours of recovery. These blood samples needed to be fasted for the inflammatory markers, so participants were not able to eat until they completed the one-hour recovery blood draw.
The treadmill experiment of running was to test a high-level impact exercise, while the cycling experiment of biking was to test a low-level impact exercise.
“We saw that there were some similar responses between treadmill and cycling, but then there was one really big difference between them,” Moore said.
Moore’s primary outcome measurement was a cell called Interleukin-8 (IL-8), which is released by the immune system and promotes the body’s inflammatory response.
“IL-8 does not change in cycling, and that is theoretically possible, because concentric cycling, cycling that is non-damaging, doesn’t really produce much muscle damage,” Moore said. “You’re not gonna have the IL-8 response. If you don’t have the IL-8 response, theoretically, you’re going to have less muscle soreness as you progress through a recovery.”
She then elaborated on how the body responds to this pain in regards to the immune system.
“Part of that is all of these immune cells moving into the tissue and causing pain,” Moore said. “A lot of muscle soreness is the infiltration of immune cells to help repair the damage. When immune cells move in, there is swelling, and that hurts.”
As participants came in, Moore asked about their level of muscle soreness. Results showed that cycling soreness went up immediately after the exercise; however, during recovery, soreness was not reported. After the treadmill exercise, participants reported that their muscle soreness continued to increase.
Moore gathered enough data for multiple future articles analyzing the same population. One paper from the same study was already published in Dec. 2024. There are plans for more papers regarding the diets of the participants, half of whom were omnivores and half of whom had plant-based diets.
With the inflammatory changes, Moore was curious how the athlete’s performance would change.
Moore also did a jump test, where she used portable force plates to measure the athlete’s performance on a countermovement jump. This jump is performed by squatting down, immediately jumping back up and landing.
She then explained the phenomenon of experiencing pain after doing something that is considered good for your body. People might move their body and feel good doing it, but then feel the recovery pain days later. The body’s inflammatory responses can be stimulated by most activities, as Moore explains.
“Just getting up and moving stimulates these responses,” Moore said. “It may not be to the highest degree, but it will be something. Your body is smart, and your body is well-tuned; just giving it what it needs is going to promote long-term health.”
Hackers remotely manipulated connected refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, reportedly pushing some fridges and freezers to 50C (122F), spoiling food and even sparking fires. According to Reuters, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu ordered a cybersecurity investigation into the hacks, with similar incidents reported in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, and Belgium. In France, Carrefour reported 80 affected stores, Monoprix said 5% of its locations were hit, and Les Mousquetaires said refrigerators at roughly 150 Intermarche stores were heated to 50C for six hours. From the report: Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage an entire store's fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere. The source close to Lecornu said ANSSI had identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss.
Danfoss said it was "aware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems." The affected units "were running outdated firmware," Danfoss said, adding that it had "long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions."
On August 9, cybersecurity firm Claroty's Team82 published research detailing vulnerabilities in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A controller. According to the report, software updates issued by Danfoss addressed issues that could have allowed attackers to bypass authentication controls and execute code on compromised devices.
A lawyer for one of the accused men said the order was needed in part because Jane Doe’s lawyer has made statements that could prejudice prospective jurors.
Top House Democrats question the ‘corrupt weaponization’ of federal government against Trump’s adversaries
Ilhan Omar’s Democratic colleagues have condemned federal agents’ search of the Minnesota congresswoman’s home on Monday morning, describing it as “deeply disturbing” and emblematic of the Trump administration’s “corrupt weaponization” of the US government.
House Democratic leaders, including the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, party whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar, issued a joint statement excoriating the president for the search.
Luca Olmetto was trapped roughly 10 metres below ground in the Gorroppeddu cave in the Urzulei mountain range
A 31-year-old man has been pulled alive from a cave on the Italian island of Sardinia after being trapped roughly 10 metres below ground for 26 hours following a rockslide.
In a huge and complex operation, rescuers worked non-stop after Luca Olmetto became trapped in the Gorroppeddu cave in the rugged Urzulei mountain range in central-eastern Sardinia on Sunday afternoon.
Runners in Moab 240 successfully evacuated from race route after flooding from remnants of tropical storm Rachel
About 70 runners participating in Utah’s Moab 240 ultramarathon were successfully evacuated from the race route on Sunday after being stranded by flooding stemming from the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel.
The event’s host, Destination Trail, addressed the emergency rescue effort in a social media statement which confirmed that all runners were safe and accounted for.
Oct. 12, 2026 — Sandia is embracing AI as a critical tool to accelerate delivery across our national security missions. Recognizing the importance of artificial intelligence to Sandia, Labs Director Laura McGill appointed Rob Leland as Sandia’s first chief artificial intelligence officer.
In this role, Rob will work to ensure Sandia implements AI rapidly and responsibly across the Labs.
LEADING IN AI — Sandia has named Rob Leland as its first chief artificial intelligence officer. Photo credit: Craig Fritz.
“If we can adopt this technology effectively, we can have a profound effect on the national security posture of the country,” Rob said.
Rob has a long history at Sandia, rising through the ranks in computing research and IT, two capabilities that underpin AI. In his most recent role, he led Sandia’s Nuclear Deterrence Systems Center, where he spearheaded an effort to demonstrate how AI can accelerate the engineering design of nuclear weapons components and systems.
“I have had the privilege to work with teams on the leading edge of mission delivery in a variety of contexts around the Labs, including computing, energy and, most recently, nuclear deterrence,” Rob said. “I see my role, in part, as helping to connect those communities and facilitate conversations that will make our adoption of AI more fluid and effective.”
He appreciates strategy-related assignments that require thinking about important problems, like computing or cybersecurity, from a forward-looking Labswide perspective.
“I enjoy seeing how all the pieces can come together toward some bigger outcome,” Rob said.
Those pieces go back at least 10 to 15 years, with AI-related work originating in Sandia’s high-performance computing, machine learning and cognitive science programs.
In the past few years, the Labs has stood up several organizing efforts around AI, including strategic initiatives led by Cindy Phillips, the AI Board of Directors and Tina Nenoff.
“There’s no lack of engagement in this space,” Rob said. “In fact, there’s really important stuff we’re doing in research and development that I think will pay off substantially over the next three to five years. And I also think there are opportunities for us to bring some of these efforts into greater coherence and direct them over time toward the most strategic outcomes.”
Big-Picture Thinking
One of Rob’s first goals as the chief AI officer is to identify those opportunities. First, Sandia needs AI to accelerate engineering for national security.
“I think of engineering for high-consequence systems as the core of what Sandia does,” Rob said.
The potential for using AI to create new weapon components and systems was recently demonstrated through the Aires Tide project. Sandia partnered with NNSA, the Kansas City National Security Campus, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop an AI-designed, 3D-printed concept flight test vehicle more quickly and at a substantially lower cost than current production methods.
“I would really like to see us leverage the Aires Tide capability into some program of record,” Rob said.
His next objective is to use AI to increase the productivity of Sandia’s supporting operations. Rob views those efficiency gains as a way to empower the workforce to achieve faster progress on the mission.
“There is a huge amount of national security work that the nation would like us to do,” Rob said. “AI can help ease the normal burden of work and allow people to be in a space that’s more productive and creative — for them and for the nation.”
That push toward higher productivity aligns with the last priority objective, which is to enhance every individual’s experience of AI at work. Sandia is scaling up infrastructure, providing access to cutting-edge tools and expanding training opportunities to ensure staff have safe and secure access to AI resources.
“A major pain point has been access to tools,” Rob said.
Responding to this feedback, Sandia has started a pilot to provide automated coding tools and plans to give the broader workforce access to those tools early next year.
“My hope is that the scientist, the engineer, the business analyst, the communication specialist, etc. will feel like, ‘Oh, I got a better work product more quickly and easily than I would have been able to in the past, and that makes me feel able to contribute more to the mission.’”
Risk Versus Reward
Even as Sandia seeks to gain a competitive edge with AI, it also must understand and reduce the risks that come with adopting new technology.
“There is a lot of concern in the news about unleashing technologies that can’t be adequately monitored or supervised,” Rob said. “We need to figure out how to deploy AI in a safe and secure way, especially in these high-consequence environments.”
That’s exactly where Sandia may have an edge over other organizations. Sandia is a leader within the U.S. government on cybersecurity and has already started applying those capabilities to AI security. While industry may prioritize moving fast over addressing safety concerns, Sandia has a responsibility to understand the technologies it uses, including how they can fail or be manipulated.
“We should be leaders in articulating the right approach to secure AI use,” Rob said.
While there are risks that come with using AI, Rob said Sandia must also consider the risks of deploying it too slowly.
“What are the risks that come with getting out-competed as a nation in this domain? Perhaps quite high,” he said. “We need to figure out ways to deliver on our mission ever more quickly in the current geopolitical environment, and I believe AI will play a critical role in that effort.”
Got my first onewheel a couple weeks ago and my flight fins and rail guards just arrived! Been wanting one for years and I was finally able to treat myself to an early birthday present this year.
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, is speaking now. He started his speech with an account of a 73-year-old woman dying in North Wales after having to wait 23 hours for an ambulance, and he sought to link this to immigration.
He said:
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that 15,000 people across Britain died last year due to excess wait times for emergency treatment. That’s 300 people a week, 300 lives destroyed, 300 families devastated.
And that number has increased tenfold over the last decade. This is a moral outrage, and it is a direct result of decisions made by Tory and Labour governments.
I don’t think that’s because he wants to have a fight over the European Union. I think that’s because he knows what we’re talking about today impacts hard in what is known as the red wall.
I picked up a Pint off of FB marketplace for free that the owner said was giving off an error message regarding overcharge. The last time he charged it was a year ago and it’s been sitting ever since. I don’t have a charger so I know I need to start there and see if I can get it to turn on, but does anyone have suggestions on where to go from there to make sure it’s running/working properly? Any good websites for diagnostics?
Bosses of Citroën owner and French carmaker also urge UK government to consider limiting imports from China
Stellantis and Renault have backed the UK car industry for inclusion in proposed rules to protect EU industry, but urged the British government to consider limiting imports of Chinese cars.
Emanuele Cappellano, who leads Stellantis’s European brands including Fiat, Citroën, Opel and Vauxhall, and François Provost, the chief executive of France’s Renault, said the UK should effectively be counted as one of the EU’s 27 member states for the purposes of the proposed “Made in Europe” legislation.
UK to bring further sanctions against Tehran and IRGC after assessment Iran was likely to have coordinated incident
Andy Burnham said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were “almost certainly” behind threats to RAF Fairford, the firmest attribution of responsibility made so far by the UK after an incident late last month.
The prime minister told MPs the UK would bring further sanctions against Tehran and the IRGC in the aftermath of an ambiguous episode that, despite over a fortnight of police investigation, has yet to lead to anybody being charged.
Pierre, SD — Republican Sen. Mike Rounds has removed prominent references to President Donald Trump from his reelection website, joining a broader group of GOP candidates who are downplaying their ties to the president ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms.
An archived version of Rounds’ site previously highlighted Trump’s endorsement directly beneath the campaign banner and featured a large “ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP” graphic. Those references are now gone, along with several mentions of Trump on the campaign’s issues page. Rounds’ campaign did not explain the changes.
The shift comes as Reuters found that Republican candidates in 41 of 62 competitive House and Senate races have either broken with Trump on specific policies or reduced emphasis on their association with him. The most common areas of disagreement include the Iran war, affordability concerns and data centers.
Rounds is not alone. Other Republican candidates have also removed Trump endorsements, photos or “America First” messaging from campaign websites as they move from primary contests into general-election races.
The White House maintains that Trump remains the Republican Party’s strongest campaign draw, and he continues traveling to support GOP candidates in competitive states.
A study of more than 700 software firms found that AI coding agents significantly increase the amount of code developers produce, but not the amount of software companies actually ship. Ars Technica reports: A recent study (PDF) of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant "bottleneck" for the overall efficiency of AI coding tools, resulting in "little evidence that firms increase software output or reduce employment" by using them. Any efficiency increased during the actual coding phase, the study authors find, is "absorbed by downstream constraints in the production process"; as "the code review process significantly increases in length, pull requests are more likely to require revisions, and reviewers leave more comments."
[...] In terms of raw code being produced, the results are clear and stark. The introduction of AI coding agents at a firm leads to a 30 percent increase in total lines of code generated, a 20 percent rise in the number of total commits, and a 23 percent increase in pull requests on average, the researchers write. But all that extra code doesn't translate directly into improved software output on the firm level. On the contrary, the resolution rate for Issues and Epics (i.e. wholesale software features) tracked by tools like Jira did not change in a statistically significant way after AI tools were introduced (the researchers also found no "compositional shift" in the size or complexity of those Jira-tracked issues across the AI introduction).
The reason for that discrepancy can be found directly in the code review process, which takes markedly longer on average after the introduction of AI coding agents. Overall, the average "review process" time between a pull request getting submitted and it being merged into the codebase balloons 49 percent on average after AI agents are introduced. That effect can be seen in more granular data, too, with "the share of pull requests with changes requested nearly doubl[ing], and the number of comments per pull request increas[ing] by 35%" following the AI agent shift, the researchers write.
In response to this change, the researchers found a 14 percent increase in the share of workers performing code reviews after AI agents' introduction. They also write that they "cannot attribute significant employment changes to AI" after looking at total active workers across Jellyfish and cross-referencing with LinkedIn data at those firms. While AI could also theoretically help with this review process, the researchers found that, so far, that impact has been marginal. Although 80 percent of measured firms used some form of AI code review by March 2026, AI agents were only responsible for 23.3 percent of all review comments and 10.8 percent of all pull requests, suggesting humans were still responsible for the vast majority of this work.
Ana Reyes demands Trump officials explain East Potomac tree cutting saying it will probably cause ‘irreparable harm’
US district judge Ana Reyes on Monday ordered a 24-hour halt to tree cutting at the historic East Potomac golf course while she decides on an emergency order from plaintiffs concerned that Donald Trump’s plans for the course are moving forward despite a pending court case challenging them.
“Tree removal for routine maintenance is not exempt from this order,” Reyes wrote. “Plaintiffs are likely to suffer immediate and irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief.
A Republican-affiliated super PAC is having a little trouble finding Maine on a map.
The Defending Main Street super PAC spent thousands of dollars on an attack ad to audiences thousands of miles away from the Maine Senate race it was targeting.
The ad hit Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson on the issue of taxes and cost of living in the state.
“Maine can’t afford Troy Jackson and all his taxes,” the ad said.
“It’s clear these people don’t know anything about Maine.”
The group, which describes itself as the “most effective independent expenditure organization supporting the governing wing of the Republican Party,” paid for the ad to attack Jackson, who’s mounting a challenge to incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins. Both candidates have made cost of living a central plank of their campaigns in the run-up to the midterm election on November 3.
The only problem with the ad in question: The group paid for the video ad to show more than 1 million times in the wrong Portland.
Rather than being delivered to audiences in Portland, Maine, the state’s largest city, the ad was shown to digital audiences more than 3,000 miles and three time zones away in Portland, Oregon, according to data from Google.
The mix-up may be embarrassing for the super PAC, which is oriented around electing so-called moderate Republicans like Collins, but likely spared voters in Maine from the latest wave in a deluge of ad spending in the state, according to Andy O’Brien, a political operative who supports Jackson.
“We have billionaires with no connection to Maine spending millions of dollars to buy Susan Collins the election, so it’s pretty hilarious to see them throwing money at the wrong Portland,” O’Brien told The Intercept. “It’s clear these people don’t know anything about Maine, because they’re directing their ads to the wrong Portland.”
“I’m glad they’re wasting their money in Oregon and not continuing to waste it in Maine.”
Representatives of the Jackson’s and Collins’s campaigns and a spokesperson for Defending Main Street did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The group is affiliated with Republican Main Street Partnership, a nonprofit group that counts Collins among its nine members in the Senate. Republican Main Street Partnership was initially aimed at supporting moderate Republicans that has, along with much of the rest of the GOP, moved to the right in recent years.
Busy Maine Street
The race between Collins and Jackson — a longtime Maine politico who stepped in to replace Graham Platner after Platner dropped out amid allegations of sexual assault — has become one of the most high-profile races in the country in the run-up to the midterms.
The Defending Main Street ad, however, did not have the impact its sponsors might have hoped. The ad buy first came to light after an X user reported seeing multiple anti-Troy Jackson ads in Portland, Oregon.
“I’ve gotten 5 anti-Troy Jackson ads in the last 24 hours. I choose to believe they mixed up Portlands,” wrote the user, who goes by the name Lillian Belle and posts about progressive politics in Oregon. “Hearing I’m not alone lol.”
That suspicion appears to be borne out by data from Google Ads Transparency Center, which shows Defending Main Street dropped between $20,000 and $25,000 to place the 30-second ad in hundreds of ZIP codes across Oregon and the state of Washington between October 8 and October 11.
O’Brien, the Maine political operative, said, “At least now Portland, Oregon, residents can enjoy some of the crap we’ve been seeing every single day.”
Correction: October 12, 2026, 2:04 p.m. ET A previous version of this article misstated how many time zones away Portland, Oregon, is from Portland, Maine; it is three, not two.
The candidates for U.S. Senate in Texas have let some nasty accusations fly this campaign season, and now Democrat James Talarico is up with a new ad accusing Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton of protecting puppy abusers.
Talarico’s campaign released an ad on Oct. 6 that parodies sports betting apps promotions, encouraging viewers to bet on “Scanduel” about various Paxton “scandals.” The ad says onscreen, “The app isn’t real, but Ken Paxton’s scandals are.”
Among the bets the ad says viewers can win on: “Ken Paxton voting to protect puppy abusers.”
NEW AD: Introducing SCANDUEL!
The only betting app where you can parlay Ken Paxton’s scandals — and get paid!
Here’s a tip: Always bet that he did the thing. https://t.co/Hir2F2UALC
With President Donald Trump’s backing, Paxton won May’s primary election against incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn. Talarico, a Texas House representative and Presbyterian seminarian, has made Paxton’scorruption allegations a central campaign message. Talarico leads in several recent polls, signaling a closer race than recent Senate contests in the Republican stronghold.
But what about the puppies? There’s a real vote behind the claim, but it’s not as extreme as the ad’s wording suggests.
Paxton’s vote on animal abuse law
Talarico’s campaign pointed PolitiFact to a 2011 vote Paxton took as a state legislator. Paxton voted against a Texas bill that increased bond fees for people whose animals were taken away after a court found they had treated them cruelly. The law defined cruel treatment as torture, serious overwork, unreasonable abandonment or depriving them of food, care or shelter.
Paxton was one of 15 people in the 150-member Texas House of Representatives tooppose the bill.
Before the 2011 law, if a civil court ruled a person had abused an animal, the court removed the animal and placed it in a shelter. A person who wanted to appeal the ruling had to post a bond to cover the estimated cost of caring for the animal during the appeal process. A judicial bond is a financial guarantee to ensure a person can cover court fees if the appeal fails, and it is refunded if the appeal is successful.
The 2011 measure increased the bond amount for someone appealing to include both the animal care cost and the original court costs. The bill also said a court couldn’t impose a bond amount higher than that combined cost.
But even if the bill had failed, the penalties for court-determined animal abusers would have been the same if they lost the appeal or didn’t appeal: They’d still have to pay both the court costs and the animal-care costs, which was always the case.
The bill’s opponents said it would make the appeal process too costly for people who want to appeal the ruling. They also said the additional bond fees were generally not required for other civil cases. The bill’s sponsor said the bond rules would ensure counties got reimbursed for court costs and keeping the animals if the government won the appeal.
Paxton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment, and he did not explain his vote at the time.
Animal research at Texas A&M
Talarico’s campaign pointed PolitiFact to an attorney general opinion — not a vote — involving Texas A&M University. In an Aug. 21 interview with MS NOW, Talarico said he held an event with the Austin Humane Society to show that Paxton is “anti-puppy.” Talarico pointed to Paxton’s office’s decision to side withTexas A&Magainst releasing records about their research on dogs and cats in the university’s research labs.
In 2015, an animal welfare group called Beagle Freedom Project used state public information laws to request records from Texas A&M University about the conditions, treatment and veterinary care the school was providing for research animals. Texas A&M argued it could keep the records private because they contained commercially valuable information and privileged veterinary records.
Paxton’s office sided with the university against making the records public.
Texas A&M’s research involved breeding dogs with muscular dystrophy to research treatment for the disease in humans. The university said theresearch was necessary and the dogs received frequent veterinary care, and the lab had never been cited for animal-welfare violations. The universitystopped breeding dogs for the program in 2019.
Separately, Paxton’s office recently started an animal welfare investigation into a Texas puppy mill. A July press release from Paxton’s office said records showed some of Lone Star Pups’ puppies were receiving pre-sale veterinary exams in Holmes County, Ohio, an area the press release described as “widely known for large-scale, and in some cases unethical, commercial dog breeding operations.”
Our ruling
An ad from Talarico’s campaign said Paxton voted “to protect puppy abusers.”
As a state lawmaker in 2011, Paxton was among 15 people to vote against a successful bill to impose higher bond fees on people appealing a court ruling that they had abused an animal.
The bill made the appeals process more cumbersome and more expensive for people the court said abused animals. But it didn’t increase penalties for animal abuse itself, and it did not change the fact that abusers still had to pay for an animal’s care.
Even though Paxton didn’t explain his rationale behind his no vote, others who voiced opposition at the time said it was a question of procedural fairness.
The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
Hundreds of Intermarché shops and Coopérative U outlets in France hit, with fears Dutch chains also affected
Hackers have forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50C overnight, in an “unprecedented” cyber-attack affecting several hundred stores across the country, with fires and food losses reported.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday the large-scale attack was “affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France”. Reported damage included “food losses and fires”, it added.
Addressing the conference virtually, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy commented on Trump’s “sudden but very important” energy ceasefire declaration over the weekend.
He said it is clear that Putin “does not read Truth social”, the site that the US president posted his ceasefire declaration on.
Russia wants to ruin the existing security architecture in Europe to make sure that Russian domination comes back to where it was before 1989. We have no doubt about it.
Oct. 12, 2026 — Keeping the nation’s energy reliable and affordable means solving challenging scientific problems faster than ever before. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are bringing their expertise in grid operations, geosciences, and computing to five new Genesis Mission-funded projects that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to meet these challenges.
The five projects aim to tap new energy sources deep underground and understand how fluids flow through those subsurface rocks, integrate how uncertainty about weather impacts grid operations planning, allow scientists to plan complex physics experiments using plain-language instructions, and create a reusable framework that uses AI-coding agents to keep computers running smoothly.
In each case, AI is not replacing scientists. It is becoming a powerful partner that helps them work faster and make better decisions.
“These five projects reflect the spirit of the Genesis Mission and its emphasis on partnering across government, industry, and academia to accelerate progress toward solutions in science, energy, and national security that were previously out of reach,” said PNNL Director Deb Gracio. “Together, we are mobilizing the talent, facilities, and data these challenges require to ensure our energy future and strengthen national leadership in discovery science.”
Reducing Uncertainty in the Power Grid
Grid planners choose sites for new transmission lines and substations years in advance without being able to predict weather patterns or electricity demand. This kind of guesswork could leave the grid unprepared for extreme changes in energy demand, such as a severe cold snap.
A team led by MIT, with PNNL’s Nathalie Voisin, is using AI to help planners prepare for many possible futures. The researchers are training AI models to produce realistic weather scenarios about 1,000 times faster than currently possible. Other parts of the project include generating electricity demand scenarios and economic forecasts. In the past, this many scenarios would have overwhelmed available computing power. But AI and smart model tailoring make the plan tractable. The approach will be tested on grids in New England, which relies heavily on natural gas, and in Texas, where wind, solar, and demand are all growing fast.
Fluid Flow Models That Get Closer to the Real Thing
Recovering critical minerals and tapping geothermal heat depend on predicting how fluids move through rock. Simulations can help, but the complexity of the systems studied can quickly overwhelm traditional methods. A team led by Oregon State University, with PNNL’s Tim Scheibe, aims to fix that with AI.
The researchers plan to train AI on detailed simulations of flow through individual pores and on 3D X-ray scans of actual rock or sediment samples. The AI evaluates shapes and interprets how those shapes affect physical properties, such as how easily fluid flows through different kinds of porous formations. The team is incorporating physics rules into the AI to keep its answers realistic and reliable.
AI Coding Agents to Close the Computing Language Gap
Much of the nation’s scientific infrastructure runs on computer programs built over decades using different programming languages than we use today. Each switch to a new program can create a translation problem. Programmers have been patching these gaps manually, but now a team led by Argonne National Laboratory, with PNNL’s Andrew Lumsdaine, is building an AI system to close those gaps.
Using AI coding “assistants,” they will create a reusable framework that allows programmers to quickly test AI-generated coding translations. When AI proposes a code change, the code will be run, tested for scientific accuracy, and refined. Every step will be recorded, and successful solutions will be shared widely. The team will test the framework on real scientific programs used for chemistry, wind turbines, and land modeling. Results will be measured in time, cost, and human effort savings.
AI to Speed Access to Energy Trapped Underground
Enhanced geothermal systems have the potential to supply clean power around the clock. But building them can be risky because so much about the deep underground is still not well understood.
A team led by the University of California, Irvine, with PNNL’s Kevin Rosso, is building a team of AI agents to bring together existing knowledge and build upon it. The agents will have access to data from 20 monitored geothermal sites, supercomputer simulations, and published research. They will update predictions as new data arrive, forecast how fractures will grow, and assess earthquake risk. Operators will be able to ask the system questions through a chat interface. Built-in physics checks will keep answers realistic. The team aims to cut development time and financial risk by up to 35 percent.
A Shared Resource for Advanced Physics
In fall 2025, seven national laboratories began building a shared AI platform that connects AI to the software that runs nearly a dozen advanced particle accelerators operated by the Department of Energy. These complex instruments smash particles together at near light-speed to reveal the fundamental laws, forces, and building blocks of the physical universe. Now a team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with PNNL’s Malachi Schram, plans to expand it. Scientists will be able to use a plain-language request, while behind the scenes, AI translates the request into precise machine commands, drawing on knowledge from many facilities and disseminating improvement at one lab to benefit them all.
Trump and key allies have accused Omar of immigration fraud, and have called to expel her from the country
Federal agents searched Representative Ilhan Omar’s home on Monday morning as part of a criminal investigation, according to the Department of Justice andreports inthe Associated Press and Fox News.
In a social media post later on Monday, Omar criticized the raid as an attempt by the Trump administration “to target political enemies and weaponize law enforcement” and said she would “not be silenced”.
Ukrainian leader says he was surprised by Trump’s ‘energy ceasefire’ announcement, posted as Russian drones hit Kyiv
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to respond to Russia’s continuing attacks on the Ukrainian power grid as European leaders rally around Kyiv amid a feud with Donald Trump over Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries.
Speaking to a gathering of European security officials in Warsaw on Monday, the Ukrainian president said Kyiv would retaliate if strikes on its power grid continued: “If Russia does not agree to an energy ceasefire this winter, we will respond.”
New York, NY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani intensified his criticism of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Sunday, saying video from last week’s shooting of Oscar Belgal looked more like a mass shooting scene than a law-enforcement operation.
Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck during an ICE enforcement action in Marble Hill while his 5-year-old child was inside the vehicle. The child was physically unharmed.
In an interview with MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff, Mamdani said bystanders appeared unsure whether the plainclothes agents in the footage were law-enforcement officers at all.
“What you can see in that video … it feels like you’re looking at a mass shooter as opposed to seeing someone who is reportedly representing a federal agency,” Mamdani said.
The mayor also accused ICE agents of treating legal restrictions as optional, pointing to New York Police Department rules that generally prohibit officers from firing at people inside vehicles except under limited circumstances.
Mamdani said he spoke with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin after the shooting and again called for ICE operations to end in New York City.
Belgal remained in federal custody Sunday after being discharged from the hospital and transferred through an ICE facility in New Jersey to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire AI startup Decart in a deal that could value the company at up to $7 billion. Decart's DOS software helps developers optimize AI models for different processors in weeks rather than months, a capability that could be particularly useful to AWS as it pushes its own Trainium chips. SiliconANGLE reports: The company has developed software called DOS, which can help developers to speed up AI training and inference workloads by optimizing their neural networks to run on a specific processor. In most AI workloads, developers must optimize a neural network for the chip they plan to run it on. This process used to take months, but with DOS, the workflow necessary to do this can be compressed into just a couple of weeks. As a result, companies can use Decart's software to shift AI workloads to different processors if their requirements change, or if chip availability becomes an issue.
In addition to DOS, Decart is also a model developer, responsible for creating the Lucy and Oasis world models, which are designed to generate and simulate realistic three-dimensional environments for video games, robotic training and other use cases. It's still possible another suitor could emerge and outbid Amazon. Last month, Anthropic PBC was reportedly engaged in talks to buy Decart, according to a report by Bloomberg. However, it ultimately pulled out of a reported $6 billion deal after conducting due diligence on the startup. It's not clear what ultimately dissuaded Anthropic from pursuing a deal. The Wall Street Journal first reported (paywalled) the news.
KIOXIA CM9 Series Supports Cold-Plate Cooling Option in E3.S Form Factor for AI and Other High-Performance Environments
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 12, 2026 — KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the addition of direct liquid cooling (DLC) models to its KIOXIA CM9 Series enterprise SSD lineup to support cold-plate-enabled server designs. The new E3.S DLC models also support traditional air-cooled environments.
As AI and other high-performance enterprise environments continue to advance, direct liquid cooling is becoming increasingly important to address growing computing power demands and associated cooling requirements. In order to fulfill the growing compute demands, increased power requirements are driving the need for innovative heat dissipation solutions. DLC infrastructure can offer significant energy savings compared with conventional air cooling, while enabling more servers to be cooled per rack.
Ideal for SSD Context Caching, the new KIOXIA CM9-DLC models include read-intensive (1 DWPD) and mixed-use (3 DWPD) endurance options.
“The rise of AI infrastructure is driving a fundamental shift in data center design toward higher power densities and advanced cooling technologies,” said Maulik Sompura, Sr. Staff Director, Product Management, SSD business unit, KIOXIA America, Inc. “The KIOXIA CM9-DLC Series addresses these evolving requirements by combining industry-leading enterprise SSD performance with direct liquid cooling support in the E3.S form factor. This enables customers to deploy denser, more energy-efficient AI systems while providing the performance, endurance, and capacity needed for data-intensive workloads, including emerging AI architectures that rely on large-scale memory and KV cache resources.”
Support for OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD v2.5 specification
Dual-port support in the E3.S SSD form factor
Capacities up to 30.72 TB read-intensive (1 DWPD) and 25.6 TB mixed-use (3 DWPD) endurances
Sequential performance (128 kibibytes (KiB)/QD32) of up to 14.8 GB/s read and 11 GB/s write
Random performance (4KiB) of up to 3,400 KIOPS (QD512) and 800 KIOPS (QD32)
KIOXIA CM9 Series drives are currently sampling to select customers and will be showcased at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, taking place October 12 – 15 in San Jose, Calif. For more information, please visit www.kioxia.com.
About KIOXIA America, Inc.
KIOXIA America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of Kioxia Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough BiCS FLASH 3D technology, Kioxia continues to pioneer innovative memory, SSD and software solutions that enrich people’s lives and expand society’s horizons. The company’s innovative 3D flash memory technology, BiCS FLASH, is shaping the future of storage in high-density applications, including advanced smartphones, PCs, automotive systems, data centers and generative AI systems.
Saudi Arabia has been forced to suspend all flights to and from its main international airport in Riyadh until next Saturday after a further round of Houthi missile attacks caused more damage and left one person dead. Some airlines, including Gulf Air, had already said they were cancelling flights until next Saturday. More missiles were fired at Saudi Arabian cities by the Houthis on Monday, Saudi Arabian’s military spokesperson said.
The Gulf nation announced it was suspending flights from Riyadh, its second busiest airport, after Houthi missiles killed 13 people on Saturday and left more than 300 injured. Saudi state TV broadcast CCTV footage that showed passengers deluged in smoke and falling masonry as they queued at the airport terminal to board a plane just as the Houthi missile struck.
"Heated Rivalry" creator Jacob Tierney discussed his new book, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at making the first season, and what fans should expect in Season 2.
Two masked suspects entered a Culbreath Street home Sunday afternoon; police are seeking witnesses and information
SMYRNA — Delaware State Police are investigating an armed home invasion in Smyrna after two masked suspects entered an occupied residence Sunday afternoon, threatened a victim with a handgun and escaped with cash and personal property.
Troopers were called to a residence in the 800 block of Culbreath Street at about 2:20 p.m. Oct. 11 for a reported armed robbery.
Police said two victims were inside the home when the two masked suspects entered. One suspect pointed a handgun at one of the victims and demanded money. The suspects then searched the residence before leaving with cash and personal belongings, according to State Police.
Neither victim was injured.
Police have not released descriptions of the suspects beyond saying they were masked, nor have investigators said how the suspects entered the home, whether the victims knew them or whether investigators believe the residence was specifically targeted.
The Delaware State Police Criminal Investigations Unit is handling the investigation.
What is a home invasion?
The term “home invasion” generally distinguishes this kind of crime from the burglary of an empty house because people are inside when the intruders enter, creating the possibility of a direct confrontation.
Delaware law specifically recognizes “home invasion burglary first degree” under certain circumstances. The statute applies when someone unlawfully enters or remains in an occupied dwelling intending to commit a crime and, during the entry, crime or immediate flight, commits or attempts certain serious felonies, including robbery, assault, murder, manslaughter, rape or kidnapping.
That distinction helps explain why an incident such as Sunday’s can be particularly concerning to residents. A conventional residential burglary may occur when no one is home. In a home invasion, occupants can suddenly find themselves face to face with an intruder.
State Police have described Sunday’s incident as an armed home invasion but have not announced arrests or specific criminal charges.
What nearby residents can do
Residents in the Culbreath Street area may be able to help investigators even if they did not witness the crime itself.
Anyone with a doorbell camera, exterior security camera or vehicle camera that captured activity near Culbreath Street around the time of the 2:20 p.m. incident should consider reviewing the footage before it is automatically deleted. Video showing unfamiliar people, vehicles or activity before or after the robbery could potentially be useful to investigators.
Residents should not confront anyone they believe may be connected to the crime. Suspicious activity that appears to present an immediate danger should be reported by calling 911.
The incident also offers a reminder to review basic home security practices.
Federal security guidance recommends keeping exterior doors and windows secured, maintaining outdoor lighting, using cameras where practical and trimming landscaping that can provide hiding places or block views of doors and windows. Families also can discuss in advance what to do during an emergency and where household members can safely retreat while calling police.
Residents also can take several simple precautions:
Keep doors locked even while at home, including during daylight hours.
Identify visitors before opening the door, particularly when someone is unexpected.
Avoid opening the door simply because someone knocks or claims to be making a delivery or providing a service.
Make sure exterior lighting, doorbell cameras and other security equipment are working.
Save potentially relevant security-camera footage rather than assuming someone else has reported it.
Call police rather than confronting suspicious people outside a residence.
Talk with children, older relatives and other household members about what to do if an unknown person tries to enter the home.
The recommendations are precautions, not an indication that police believe additional home invasions are imminent. State Police have not announced a broader threat to Smyrna residents in connection with Sunday’s case.
Police seek information
Detectives are asking anyone who witnessed the incident or has information that could assist the investigation to contact Detective E. Paneda at 302-698-8444.
Tips also may be submitted through a private message to the Delaware State Police Facebook page or through Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333.
Victim assistance is available
The Delaware State Police Victim Services Unit and Delaware Victim Center provide assistance to crime victims, witnesses and people who have lost loved ones to sudden deaths.
The 24-hour toll-free hotline is 1-800-VICTIM-1, or 1-800-842-8461. The Victim Services Unit also can be reached by email at DSP_VictimServicesMail@delaware.gov.
To Go
What happened: Two masked suspects entered an occupied home in the 800 block of Culbreath Street in Smyrna about 2:20 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11. One suspect displayed a handgun. Cash and personal property were taken. No injuries were reported.
Have information or video: Contact Delaware State Police Detective E. Paneda at 302-698-8444.
Many of us are interested in retrocomputing. There’s such a rich history of eras and machines to choose from, and countless niches and nuances to get lost in. Some people make it easy for themselves and are into old computers that are readily available at low prices, like the Commodore 64 or mid-’90s Macs, while others make it a bit harder on themselves by focusing on, say, computers from the former Soviet Union or NEC machines from Japan, which are harder to find and probably require a bigger purse, too.
And then there’s people like me. I’m making things incredibly hard on myself, because I am obsessed with a very specific set of computers – just five machines, to be exact. “Surely,” I hear you think, “collecting a mere five specific machines can’t be that hard, no? That’s how many spare Pismos I have in a box in case my primary one needs spare parts!” Sadly for me, the five computers I want to own more than any other are not particularly easy to find, and even when you do find one of them, pricing can easily reach the level of a decent used car.
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Regular OSNews readers will know: I am infatuated with UNIX workstations, or more specifically, UNIX workstations of the early 2000, and even more specifically, the final five models built by the last commercial UNIX vendors. So far, I’ve managed to get my hands on a mere two of them, but before my time on this earth come to an end, I intend to complete my Holy Quinity of UNIX Workstations. Let’s go down the list, roughly ordered by attainability.
HP c8000: PA-RISC/HP-UX
The HP c8000 is the absolute pinnacle of HP’s long-running line of workstations based on the PA-RISC architecture. The first PA-RISC workstation was launched in 1986, and HP would continue to improve the architecture and release new workstations all the way up until 2004, when the c8000 would be their last model. For the c8000, HP actually went all-out: it came with two dual-core PA-RISC processors running between 900MHz and 1.1GHz (depending on configuration), a maximum of 24GB of RAM, and a variety of graphics cards to choose from. It was a veritable swan song for the architecture.
HP’s commercial UNIX operating system, HP-UX, is even older than PA-RISC, with the first version being released in 1982, and its final version, HP-UX 11i v3 (or 11.31) released in 2007. This final version of HP-UX was updated and supported all the way up until 31 December 2025, but things are actually a bit more complicated than that. The last workstation release of HP-UX for PA-RISC was 11i v1 (released in 2000), while the last workstation release for Itanium workstations was 11i v2 (released in 2005). Do note that HP would provide updates, fixes, and patches to these versions long after the mentioned release dates.
Speaking of Itanium, HP’s final Itanium workstation was the zx6000, released in 2002, which can pack up to two single-core 1.5Ghz Itanium 2 processors. There’s a very real case to be made that the zx6000 should also be part of this list, since it’s both a little faster than the c8000 (in its dual 1.5GHz configuration) and runs a newer version of HP-UX. However, since Itanium workstations never really had much of an impact in the market (even HP only ever released two models), and since it lacks the decades of pedigree that comes with PA-RISC, I consider them a mere curiosity. A very cool curiosity that I’d love to own, but a curiosity nonetheless.1
Anyway, this is one of the two machines I already own. I have a new-in-box (when I bought it a few years ago) HP c8000 with two dual-core 1.0Ghz PA-RISC processors, 8 GB of RAM, and an ATI FireGL X3 AGP graphics card with 256 MB, the fastest the c8000 will take. It’s also got two SCSCI 74 GB hard drives in a striped RAID for better performance, and I added an LTO 4 tape drive so I could create bootable backups that will restore the machine if anything ever goes wrong.
It’s running HP-UX 11i v1, with as many of the updates, patches, and fixes I could find – which is one of the major roadblocks for anyone trying to get into HP-UX. Installation media are relatively easy to come by if you know where to look (assuming you know which specific version you need), but any updates, patches, and fixes from roughly later than 2005 are almost impossible to find. Some can be discovered through My HPE Software Center, if you have the patience of an angel and the perseverance of a honey badger (it’s a really terrible website), but most things are all locked away behind expensive support contracts or just gone entirely.
I’ve contacted HPE several times in several different ways about the preservation of HP-UX, but they never replied – clearly, they just don’t care about the preservation of their legendary UNIX platform or the enthusiast community buying PA-RISC hardware on eBay for personal use and experimentation. Sad, but par for the course.
The c8000 is quite easy to find on eBay, but do be aware that the “cheap” offerings of around €800 are the versions with just one processor. To get the version with two processors, expect to shell out twice as much. Spare parts and upgrades are readily available, too.
Sun Ultra 45: SPARC/Solaris
The Sun Ultra 45 needs no introduction here on OSNews, as I published an in-depth article about this machine and all the cool things you can do with it late last year. My Ultra 45 was an incredibly generous gift by Adriaan de Groot, who owned this machine as part of his work on porting KDE to Solaris way back in the day. I then ordered various upgrades to the machine to max it out with two UltraSPARC IIIi processors running at 1.6GHz, 8 GB of RAM, and the Sun XVR-2500 with 256MB, the fastest GPU it supports. I also bought the SunPCI IIIpro (an entire x86 PC on a PCI-X card) and a flash accelerator card.
The Ultra 45 is not supported by Solaris 11, so the most recent version you can run is Solaris 10, and more specifically, Solaris 10 1/13 (from January 2013). Solaris 10 is still receiving patch sets to this day, but like HPE, Oracle hides them behind expensive, unobtainable support contracts. My attempts at contacting Oracle have been more lacklustre than my attempts at contacting HPE, but either way, no response from Oracle either. They, too, do not care about the enthusiast community.
The Ultra 45 also tends to be readily available on eBay, and you can expect to pay about €1000 or so for a single-processor model, and anything between €1500-2000 for a dual-processor one. Spare parts and upgrades abound, but do note that Ultra 45 processor coolers are weirdly expensive.
SGI Tezro: MIPS/IRIX
SGI and IRIX are well-loved in the retro computing community, and there’s no shortage of hardware to choose from if you want to get into IRIX. However, if you’re obsessed with the final models of UNIX workstation lines like I am, you’re going to be in a bit of trouble – you’re going to want an SGI Tezro, the final MIPS workstation SGI made. The company launched this top-of-the-line model in 2003, and kept updating and selling it until 2007. In its most powerful configuration, you’re looking at four MIPS processors running at 1GHz each, with a maximum of 8GB of RAM, and a V12 VPro GPU with 128MB of RAM (with a DVI port instead of the more cumbersome 13W3 connector).
The Tezro can run IRIX all the way up until the operating system’s final version, 6.5.30, released in August of 2006. The operating system discs and patches are readily available all over the web, which is quite nice. Out of all the commercial UNIX platforms mentioned in this article, the SGI and IRIX community is definitely the most active and lively, with people developing and maintaining software for IRIX to this very day. There are also people working on maintaining modern Linux kernels for SGI machines, and there’s a ton of forum activity out there.
The Tezro is an incredibly rare beast, and they rarely come up for sale. I’ve only ever seen one Tezro’s final price, and I think it was sold for well in excess of €6000. I have never owned or even seen a single SGI machine, let alone a Tezro,
IBM IntelliStation POWER 285: POWER/AIX
Out of all the architectures mentioned in this article, IBM’s POWER is the only one still under active development; all the others were phased out and cancelled long ago. However, even though IBM is still developing POWER and releasing new generations every few years, the company hasn’t built a POWER workstation in a long time. The last one built by IBM2 was the IntelliStation POWER 285, released in October of 2005, and sold up until 2009. It packed a single-core or dual-core POWER5+ processor running at 1.9 or 2.1GHz, supported a maximum of 32GB of RAM, and there were three graphics cards to choose from, with the GXT6500P with 128MB being the most powerful option (a card from 2002!).
At roughly the same time as the POWER 285, IBM also sold the IntelliStation POWER 185. This was a very different beast, though, as instead of using a POWER5+ processor, it used one or two PowerPC 970 processors, which was a slightly beefed-up POWER4 design, making it a generation behind the 285. It also had a much stricter maximum RAM limit (8GB), but could run the same outdated GPUs as the 285. Regardless, the 285 is clearly the more powerful machine.
By the way, if the “970” moniker sounds familiar, it’s because Apple used these very same processors under the marketing name “PowerPC G5” for their various G5 Macs. My pet conspiracy theory about the origins of the POWER 185 is that with Apple switching to Intel, IBM was left with a pallet of unused 970s, and thus created the 185 to get rid of at least some of them. The timeline adds up, as Apple announced the switch to Intel in June 2005, and the POWER 185 was announced in February 2006. I don’t actually believe this, but it’s a funny theory nonetheless.
The IntelliStation POWER 285 can run AIX up to version 7.1 TL5, released in 2017, which is remarkably modern. Do note that AIX 7.1 was originally released in 2010, and the number of changes and patches released for 7.1 probably dropped off sharply after its first few years on the market. AIX installation discs, patches, and documentation is easy to find, and I’ve heard from enthusiasts who play with older POWER servers that IBM is remarkably friendly to the hobbyist community, and will gladly answer any emails and provide help when they can. Of course, that’s just what I’ve heard through the grapevine, and I can’t vouch for any of it.
These machines seem to be quite rare. I have never seen an IntelliStation POWER 285 (or 185, for that matter) come up for sale, so I have no clue what people would be charging for these. My uneducated prediction is that a reasonably configured 285 will probably go well north of €2000, maybe even €3000.
HP AlphaStation ES47: Alpha/Tru64
Through various acquisitions (Compact acquired DEC; HP acquired Compaq), Alpha ended up at HP3. It was under their brand that the final Alpha workstation was let loose onto the world in 2002/2003 (I’m not 100% sure): the AlphaStation ES47. It contained one or two Alpha EV7 processors running at 1Ghz (also known as the Alpha 21364 or Marvel and the last Alpha processor ever made), a maximum of 16GB of RAM, and an optional ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card with an unspecified amount of video memory. From what I’ve read online, this machine is an absolute monster, weighing in at close to 60kg, with noise levels that aren’t exactly office-friendly.
Alpha-based workstations and servers ran Tru64 UNIX, which was initially known as OSF/1 AXP and then as Digital UNIX, before Compaq renamed it to Tru64. The AlphaStation ES47 supports the final release of the operating system from 2010, version 5.1B-6, and its installation media, patches, and even its multitude of license files are readily available online. An interesting bonus is that like most Alpha machines, the ES47 can also run OpenVMS, up to the final Alpha release of OpenVMS from 2017, V8.4-2L2.
This machine, too, I have never seen come up for sale. Seeing the absolutely insane prices people are asking for Alpha hardware, though, I’m not sure I even want to know what an ES47 would go for. An AlphaStation 500 from 1997, with a 400MHz processor, goes for €2500. A DS15 from the same era as the ES47, a desktop form-factor with a single 1GHz processor, already has an asking price of almost €6000. It wouldn’t surprise me if an ES47 would hit close to €10000.
Why these machines?
Why not just settle for lower-end, older, more readily available machines? This is a valid question, with answers that are probably not satisfactory to everyone. Of course, there’s the simple monkey brain “bigger number better” feeling, where I want the fastest, “newest” hardware to get the best experience out of these commercial UNIX machines. Another important point is that these machines will all be able to run the latest workstation versions of their various UNIX flavours, which also helps in realising the best possible experience and potentially makes compiling modern software easier.
Since they’re newer, they also tend to be easier to work with in a more practical sense; you won’t need special monitors or keyboards or whatever, since they’re all compatible with standard PC monitors, keyboards, and mice. Having just one dedicated desk with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse that work on both my c8000 and Ultra 45 saves a ton of space and time, since I just need to move a few cables from one machine to the other if I want to change machines.
There’s also a more intangible reason, one that I value a great deal. All of these machines were developed and introduced well past the point where everybody knew full well the dedicated UNIX workstation market was basically dead. The x86 platform was improving at an incredible pace, and offered better performance at far lower prices than any of the architectures in this article ever could. Meanwhile, the kind of software these workstations were designed for had long been ported to Windows, negating the need for commercial UNIX on workstations even more.
In fact, all of these five machines were developed and introduced after their respective companies had already announced they would be leaving the UNIX workstation market (with the sole exception of possibly IBM). All of them represent the final hurrahs of platforms that for decades had been the envy of computer enthusiasts the world over, designed by people who already knew this would be the last UNIX workstation they’d ever make. This gives these machines a certain melancholy that I personally really enjoy, even if I can’t fully explain why.
Even before you turn these machines on, simply by looking at their specifications, feeling the build quality, and weighing the component choices, you can tell exactly just how much of their heart and soul its creators were allowed to put into it. The Ultra 45 and c8000 are great examples of this. As I detailed in my Ultra 45 article, the Ultra 45 is not materially different from the two machines that came before it, making it an already outdated machine by the time it came out. Hell, the processors in the Ultra 45 were three generations behind the state-of-the-art in SPARC at the time. The c8000, on the other hand, got brand new processors that were substantially faster than what had come before (the first dual-core PA-RISC processors!), a brand new chipset, and even brand new GPU options, and thus delivered a true upgrade over its predecessors.
For whatever reason, it seems that HP decided to put considerably more effort into its final UNIX workstation than Sun did, and I find that fascinating. I desperately want to experience these other three machines, so I can get an even better understanding of where these companies put their priorities. Each of these computers were developed and built under the same somber assumption – the last one we’ll ever make – but each company put their own unique spin on it through the people and means they assigned to the project, all in a time-frame of only a few years.
It’s the same story told in five different ways.
What’s stopping you?
There’s countless reasons why trying to collect these five machines is such an incredibly difficult endeavour. First and foremost, it’s obviously a money issue – I’m not even remotely wealthy enough to casually spend decent-used-car-money on what is essentially a hobby. Second, availability is a huge problem, as the three machines I do not yet have simply rarely, if ever, come up for sale. Even if I had the money to burn on this rather silly hobby, I couldn’t.
Availability is further hindered by the fact that I’m European and live in the Swedish Arctic. From experience, I know that rare hardware like these UNIX workstations seem to have been more common in the United States than in Europe. Furthermore, even if someone is trying to sell one of these in Europe and they choose to do so on one of the local, country-specific classifieds platforms, I’m going to be locked out. Importing any of these machines from the US is basically a non-starter, since shipping machines that easily weigh in excess of 30kg across the Atlantic is not only expensive, but often also simply not an option since US sellers don’t want to do so. The EU import duty lottery isn’t exactly helping either.
I am absolutely green with envy whenever I watch YouTube videos of people visiting the various Vintage Computer Festival events in the US, where I often spot countless of these machines in the background, sometimes for sale at very reasonable prices, just sitting there like it’s no big deal. Similar events in Europe seem to be much smaller in scope and more locally-oriented, making it much harder to build up a network of like-minded friends who might let you know of great finds in other parts of the continent.
Basically everything is working against me.
With the possible exception of certain computer museums, I don’t think there is anyone in the world who owns all five of these machines, and I definitely will not be the first. Sadly.
Fun fact: the HP zx2000/zx6000 Itanium workstations and the c8000 PA-RISC workstation shared the same chipset and general architecture. They’re far more alike than it seems at first sight. ↩︎
While IBM didn’t, Raptor Computing Systems did. I reviewed their small Blackbird POWER9 desktop, but also have their big, dual-processor POWER9 workstation. These machines cannot run any commercial UNIX, though, so they’re not UNIX workstations by my own, admittedly arbitrary, definition. ↩︎
It’s kind of wild that out of these five platforms, three are currently owned by HPE (which split off from HP in 2015). Not only do they own HP-UX and Tru64, but also IRIX, since they acquired SGI in 2016. ↩︎
Amos B. Batto has published an incredibly detailed look at the state of Linux on smartphones. It’s an excellent read you really shouldn’t skip.
Five years ago, Linux phones looked like they were poised to become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly that has an iron grip on the mobile phone industry. Sadly, after a brief flash of activity and community engagement with the release of the Purism Librem 5 and the PINE64 PinePhone in 2020, the Linux phone market has generally stagnated. This stagnation occurred partly because of the problems at Purism and PINE64, but also because the available Linux SoC’s weren’t up to the task of running a modern smartphone, and the hardware industry wasn’t providing any good alternatives with good free/open source drivers. In addition, Plasma Mobile and Phosh were still inchoate mobile interfaces at the time, and there wasn’t a good distro option to run these interfaces on Android kernels with a normal integrated mobile SoC. The poor performance of the PinePhone and Librem 5 and the problems with the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 refunds sapped people’s enthusiasm and willingness to take a chance on the next Linux phone.
Fortunately, all of these conditions are changing, and I believe that there is now the possibility that Linux could finally become a viable alternative to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the mobile space, just like desktop Linux has become a viable alternative to Windows and Mac OSX on the PC over the last three decades. This isn’t to say that mobile Linux will fundamentally challenge the business of Google or Apple, but the conditions are ripe for a small market to arise for Linux phones, similar to the way that people can currently buy Linux PCs from a number of small companies, such as TUXEDO, System76, Purism, Slimbook, ThinkPenguin, Ubuntushop.biz, Entroware, Star Labs, Juno, Laptop with Linux, Linux Certified, ArkPC, etc.
I’m not quite as optimistic as Batto, and that’s almost exclusively down to how running Android applications through compatibility layers will remain an absolute necessity for anyone trying to use one of these Linux smartphones today. As long as crucial applications and services required to function in a modern society, like banking, messaging, government services, and so on, require the use of an Android application when using a Linux smartphone, I just don’t think any significant number of people will be switching over.
What’s needed is something that will force these crucial services to become available on platforms other than Android and iOS, since I don’t think any of them will do so of their own volition. The only way I can see this happening is if the European Union, spurred on by our desire to reduce our dependence on adversarial US companies, mandates that several services marked as crucial must make themselves available on platforms other than Android and iOS.
I doubt that will happen, but I honestly don’t see Linux smartphones becoming anything more than a mere curiosity you fiddle with at home, while carrying an Android phone or iPhone as your actual phone.
(The Center Square) – With the federal government borrowing $2 trillion over the past 12 months, 88% of U.S. voters say addressing the federal deficit is important – yet they disagree on what the best solution is, new polling shows.
Mayor calls for end to agency’s operations in city after agents shot and wounded man with five-year-old in car
The New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, on Sunday compared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s recent shooting of a man in the Manhattan enclave of Marble Hill to a mass shooting scene – and called for an end to the agency’s operations in his city.
Mamdani’s joined MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff for his first media interview since ICE agents shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, 28, during an enforcement operation while he was in his car with his five-year-old child also inside.
LineageOS has released its first version based on Android 17 – earlier than expected.
We’ve been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17’s release in June. Android 17’s first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17’s code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We’re early this year!
This release also includes the latest Android security patches (October 2026), as well as a brand new browser-based USB flash tool to make installation easier. Many of the applications included with LineageOS have also been updated and improved, like its music player, image editor, web browser, and so on. The project also did a full accessibility audit of its installation process and application suite, which has already resulted in severalk accessibility improvements.
LineageOS serves as the base for countless custom Android ROMs, so it’s great to see the project do this well.
Turns out the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max have more to offer than just their fancy camera and new burgundy color. Both performed well in our battery tests.
PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year to 62.7 million units in the third quarter of 2026, the worst Q3 decline IDC has recorded. "The top three PC makers -- Lenovo, Dell, and HP -- also saw their shipments fall by over 20% year over year," reports PCMag. From the report: "If looking at all quarters, then we have seen other quarters in recent years with larger declines, such as 2022Q4, which was -28.2%, and 2023Q1, which was -28.7%. Both were coming off pandemic highs," IDC Director Jitesh Ubrani told PCMag in an email. The numbers aren't a great sign, since third-quarter PC shipments usually outpace those in the second quarter as vendors introduce new products ahead of the holiday shopping season. Instead, PC shipments were at 62.7 million units, down 9.1% from the previous quarter.
[...] Of course, the downturn isn't a surprise. IDC and other research firms have warned that the ongoing AI-driven memory shortage threatens to sap demand for PCs and phones due to soaring memory and storage costs. "What we're seeing is the result of the strong first half pull-in. Vendors and channels loaded up on inventory early in the year to get ahead of [memory-related] price hikes, and that has thrown off the usual seasonality, where Q3 is typically larger than Q2," Ubrani said in a report covering IDC's preliminary estimates for the quarter.
In one bright spot, Ubrani said vendors and retailers might cut prices to generate interest and clear out products they have in stock. "Channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand. That could translate into promotions and some short-term relief for consumers, but we don't expect pricing anywhere near what it was a year ago. Prices will remain elevated," he added.
JoAnna Mendoza draws on unique biography to connect with voters in Arizona battleground – can she flip a key swing seat?
On a recent morning, Tucson mayor Regina Romero knocked on a yellow door above a mat emblazoned with a cat’s silhouette and the words “go away, peasants”. A young man cracked the door open and stood there silently, a toothbrush dangling from his mouth.
After giving him a moment to finish brushing his teeth, the mayor introduced herself and asked if the man had heard of JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat running to unseat Republican congressman Juan Ciscomani. Romero handed him a pamphlet and rattled off her candidate’s virtues. The young man stood stone-faced, until she mentioned that Mendoza had served for nearly two decades as a US marine.
Delaware Schools Receive $7.1 Million in Early Literacy Grants
The Delaware Department of Education has awarded more than $7.1 million in grants to 28 districts and charter schools to support teacher training, instructional coaching and early literacy instruction during the 2026-27 school year. (Photo courtesy of Delaware.gov.)
The Delaware Department of Education has awarded more than $7.1 million in grants to 28 school districts and charter schools for the 2026-27 school year to strengthen early literacy instruction and improve reading outcomes for students.
The funding is part of the state’s second round of Bridge to Practice grants, which support teacher training, instructional coaching, curriculum development and school leadership initiatives focused on the science of reading.
Several school districts in Kent and Sussex counties received funding, including Capital School District, which was awarded $763,855.93, Lake Forest School District with $321,093.20 and Milford School District with $248,238.10.
Other local recipients include Cape Henlopen School District, which received $316,384.87; Laurel School District, $207,285.75; Indian River School District, $146,448.42; Woodbridge School District, $132,485.60; Seaford School District, $81,799; and Sussex Academy, $84,057.75.
The grants are intended to help educators apply research-based reading instruction methods in classrooms through ongoing professional development and support.
“We know how to teach children to read, and we believe every Delaware student can become a strong reader,” Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said. “Passing strong policy is important. Providing resources is important. Training educators and providing coaching are important. But none of those things alone is the outcome we are working toward. The work is making sure what we know reaches students through strong instruction every day and then showing our progress in ways we can reliably measure, see and report. That is how we move plans into progress and stay accountable as we go.”
The funding supports Delaware’s Birth through Grade 3 Early Literacy Plan, which focuses on improving reading instruction during the earliest years of education.
Grant recipients can use the funding for science-of-reading training programs such as LETRS and AIM Pathways, curriculum-based professional learning, instructional coaching and leadership development through the Early Literacy Leadership Academy.
The state previously awarded $6.1 million to 25 districts and charter schools in March as part of the first round of Bridge to Practice grants.
During that round, Indian River School District used funding to improve consistency in literacy instruction across its elementary schools through districtwide instructional frameworks, monthly classroom observations and professional learning for prekindergarten through third-grade educators.
Capital School District focused on connecting teacher training to classroom instruction through student work, classroom reflections and participation in the state’s Student-Centered Coaching program.
The latest round of funding will continue those efforts while placing additional emphasis on how training and instructional strategies are implemented in classrooms.
Throughout the school year, the Department of Education will work with participating districts and charter schools to evaluate progress through classroom observations, coaching activities and student literacy data.
The grants are part of Delaware’s broader early literacy strategy and the Department of Education’s 2025-2028 Strategic Plan.
Just 19% of the online encyclopedia’s biographies are of women. Is this because it’s edited by ‘mostly white, middle-aged, European men’, as the comedian claims?
Over the years, I learned about many gotchas and strange differences between keyboard handling on Mac and Windows – pertinent especially to web apps, which use the same codebase to cater to both. I thought it might be helpful to someone if I compile them all in one place.
HAYWARDS HEATH, England and HAMBURG, Germany, Oct. 12, 2026 — Universal Quantum has announced it has secured over $100 million in Series A funding, marking the largest Series A ever raised by a quantum firm headquartered in the UK. The funding will accelerate the company’s global expansion, as well as the development and commercialization of its modular technology, advancing a path towards fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The round was co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, with participation from EDBI, Artal (advised by Invus), Integral GlobalTech, Main Sequence, Hostplus, NGS Super, IAG Capital, EdenBase, Eigenstate Holdings, SiteGround Capital and Dave Baszucki (founder and CEO of Roblox), as well as other existing and new strategic investors including Nauta Capital and The Venture Collective.
“Universal Quantum’s progress reflects our partners’ belief that we represent one of the most credible paths to quantum computing at scale,” said Dr. Sebastian Weidt, CEO and co-founder of Universal Quantum. “This round unites an extraordinary group of investors from the world’s most important pools of capital around a single mission: delivering utility-scale quantum computing.”
The new capital will drive the continued development and commercialization of Universal Quantum’s modular approach to building the quantum computers needed for practical, error-corrected use – leveraging the company’s patented, world-record interconnect technology and advanced integrated chips to develop the chiplet arrays and control systems required to reduce engineering risk and accelerate the path to larger-scale quantum computers.
The funding will also support Universal Quantum’s recently announced expansion in Singapore, where it is establishing its first R&D center outside Europe, as well as expansion in the United States, Japan and across its German hub in Hamburg.
Solving the Problem of Scale
Universal Quantum was founded on the belief that scale is the major challenge in quantum computing. Its computers are designed and built by linking together, or tiling, many small, advanced quantum chips to deliver the overall high-quality qubit count required to solve problems classical computers cannot – without reliance on photonic interconnects or large, costly lasers and cooling infrastructure.
Each chip uses trapped-ion technology, where charged atoms held in place by electric fields act as qubits. Universal Quantum’s approach is designed to connect these modules in a practical, manufacturable way, creating a route to the scale needed for fault-tolerant quantum computing and giving industry partners a clearer path to quantum utility.
Analysts forecast that the quantum technology market could be worth $60-100 billion annually by 2035, while helping to unlock up to $2.7 trillion of economic value worldwide in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, finance and automotive.
A Global Investment Story
Universal Quantum was founded by Professor Sebastian Weidt and Professor Winfried Hensinger of the University of Sussex, co-authors of the first practical blueprint for a large-scale trapped-ion quantum computer, published in 2017. What began as an academic vision has since become a global engineering operation, with sites across three continents and more than 100 highly technical FTEs.
Universal Quantum’s Series A brings together one of the most geographically and strategically diverse investor syndicates assembled in the quantum sector, including:
DCVC – the leading Silicon Valley venture firm that defined the term “Deep Tech”, backing breakthrough hard-science companies across two decades, including most nationally critical quantum technology companies in the US.
Firgun Ventures – a quantum-focused investor with significant sovereign backing and strong academic partners.
EDBI – the Singapore-based sovereign investor, underscoring Asia’s strategic commitment to frontier quantum technology.
Invus – a global investment firm and exclusive investment advisor of Artal, with long-term capital to back companies across private and public markets.
Integral GlobalTech – a Japanese asset manager bringing strategic reach in Japan, one of Universal Quantum’s key growth markets.
Main Sequence, Hostplus and NGS Super – representing Australian superannuation capital and bringing long-horizon institutional backing.
Nauta Capital – a long standing pan European deep tech and software investor with strong interest in advanced engineering systems.
Universal Quantum’s raise reflects a broader shift that has seen the flow of serious institutional capital into quantum computing. The company has grown from its UK roots into a global business, establishing a significant role in a highly competitive and strategically important sector. Now delivering against a $77 million contract with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Universal Quantum is establishing a permanent presence via an R&D center in Singapore, with further international collaborations to be announced soon.
Universal Quantum is building utility-scale quantum computers to help humanity confront its most demanding challenges. That means reaching the large numbers of high-quality qubits needed to perform real-world tasks, from drug discovery and battery design to climate modeling and many others beyond the reach of classical computers. Its modular trapped-ion architecture and enabling technologies are designed to make this achievable. Backed by leading sovereign, institutional and deep tech investors, as well as commercial and government contracts, Universal Quantum is at the forefront of making utility-scale quantum computing a reality.
Prime minister has reopened the debate over whether Russia did seek to influence the 2016 referendum
Andy Burnham unexpectedly reopened an old Brexit debate when he said he had been told after becoming prime minister that Russia had interfered in the 2016 EU referendum.
It was a contentious issue in the second half of the previous decade, but one that had largely been forgotten about as the UK finally adjusted to the reality of leaving the EU. Now Burnham’s comments have given the topic a fresh impetus.
A jersey worn by Michael Jordan during the 1998 NBA finals has been sold for $14m, an auction house announced on Monday, in what it said is the highest price ever paid for a piece of basketball memorabilia.
Hunt Auctions said Miami real estate investor Ron Firman had bought the jersey in a private sale. Jordan wore the red jersey in Game 2 of the 1998 finals; he and the Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz that night to even the series at a game apiece. Jordan and the Bulls would go on to win the series in six games, the sixth and final title of his Hall of Fame career. That 1997-98 season was the subject of the Last Dance documentary series, which became a hit on Netflix in 2020.
The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI
Alex Gibney, director of the new four-hour documentary about Elon Musk, said that Universal, owners of the film’s international distribution rights “wavered” over releasing the film outside North America.
New York judge also orders administration to cancel remaining portion of a $20m advertising purchase
A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump’s administration to temporarily halt the broadcast of taxpayer-funded television ads promoting the president ahead of the 3 November midterm elections.
Effective as of 6.45pm ET on Sunday, US district judge Jennifer L Rochon of the southern district of New York issued a temporary restraining order aimed at the ads that is meant to stay in effect for at least 14 days.
Children and mothers would not be exempt from plans by Reform UK to immediately deport 90,000 asylum seekers and impose a five-year ban on people being granted asylum.
The party’s most hardline immigration policies to date were condemned by refugee charities and others as “unworkable” and an abandonment of Britain’s tradition of helping victims of war after they were announced by Nigel Farage on Monday.
The language of football is a fine and highly nuanced dialect. The majority of people involved in the game speak it with a high degree of sophistication. Minor deviations from the familiar, almost imperceptible to outsiders, can set off alarm bells: what’s really going on there? Why isn’t he happy? What’s she hinting at? But it’s an argot developed to talk about football, and when applied to other subjects, it can sound extremely jarring.
Erling Haaland is one of the brighter, more engaging players. There’s an appealing quirkiness to him that suggests he has a higher-than-usual level of self-awareness. He doesn’t mind stepping outside the norms, being a bit different. But consider his assessment of Manchester City’s 3-0 win at Liverpool on Sunday.
Thousands join rally to deliver petition calling for resignation of election commissioner
Delhi police have again obstructed protests in India’s capital as thousands of people returned to the streets, led by opposition leaders, to demand the resignation of the election commissioner.
After mass unrest in the capital over the weekend, when thousands were detained and harassed by police as they attempted to take part in a protest led by the gen Z Cockroach movement, on Monday the main opposition leaders led another procession through Delhi, this time to the supreme court.
Two US economists have won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for their work developing models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilise their countries, avoiding long recessions and runaway inflation.
Oct. 12, 2026 — The University of Alabama is a founding partner in the Southeast Region Super-Intelligence Computing Consortium, bringing together 15 universities across 10 states to accelerate research and innovation through collaboration and shared resources.
Credit: Shutterstock
Artificial intelligence is already transforming university research in the United States and around the world. To harness AI’s full potential to advance scientific knowledge, researchers need access to advanced high-performance computing infrastructure.
The founding universities have already invested in AI capabilities. By joining forces, the institutions will expand access to industry-scaled AI infrastructure and position member states to play an outsized role in advancing U.S. leadership in science and technology.
The consortium will share AI computing resources across a public-private partnership. In turn, this collaboration will leverage regional partnerships to attract federal, state, philanthropic and industry funding. Ultimately, the consortium aims to develop and operate one or more leadership-class AI computing systems in the Southeast.
As Alabama’s future-ready flagship, UA will work with consortium partners to advance the scientific frontier, fuel vibrant regional innovation clusters and create a more secure, prosperous and innovation-focused future for the citizens of the Southeast.
In addition to UA, the founding universities are the University of Arkansas, Auburn University, the University of Kentucky, Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, the University of Missouri, the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, the University of South Carolina, the University of Tennessee, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University and Vanderbilt University.
Zack Coughlan is accused of murdering Jamie Collins, who he studied with at the University of the West of England
A university student lay in wait for his housemate to return home before stabbing him 30 times, a murder trial has been told.
Zack Coughlan, 23, dressed in black and wore a mask and gloves to ambush Jamie Collins, 21, in the garden of their home near the University of West England in Bristol, where both were studying robotics.
An AI-driven cyber-attack similar to the OpenAI breach of Australia’s healthcare system is likely, “if not inevitable”, in the UK, according to a senior minister.
Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, indicated that the British government’s own cyber defences would be bypassed by a technology that has developed highly sophisticated skills in cybersecurity.
Some of the most violent wind gusts from the hurricane were recorded in Milton, Florida, where one woman said she was lying down in her room when a tree fell on her home.
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Thieves broke into the museum and escaped with two works by Renoir, abandoning two others as they fled. The value of all four paintings was estimated at $10 million.
‘A lot of sadness’ after 17th century landmark that escaped demolition in the 1980s goes up in flames
Fire has ravaged Paris’s oldest surviving covered food market, a popular street food venue dating back to the 17th century in the Marais district of the French capital that drew thousands of locals and tourists daily.
Ariel Weil, the central Paris mayor, said the Marché des Enfants Rouges had been “totally destroyed” in the blaze, which broke out soon after 3am. “The worst was avoided: the fire did not spread to the surrounding buildings,” he said. “But there is a lot of emotion. A lot of sadness.”
Researchers will head to remote Pacific atoll, but sceptics say satellite images unlikely to be of her aircraft
A team of US researchers is approaching a remote Pacific atoll where they suspect the famed aviator Amelia Earhart crash-landed in 1937, in the latest attempt to crack one of the biggest mysteries of the 20th century.
The 17-person expedition was inspired by satellite images taken over several years showing a submerged object in the uninhabited island’s sandy lagoon – evidence dismissed by other longtime Earhart sleuths who say it is probably a fallen tree.
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Here we go again: another episode in the Saba saga, the story of a New York hedge fund causing havoc in the UK investment trust sector by taking big stakes in funds and then demanding change, often in only vague terms.
The best that can be said about Saba Capital (and it’s not much) is that its belligerent boss, Boaz Weinstein, has disturbed the complacency that used to infect corners of the UK investment trust world, meaning companies that invest in other companies. It is now harder for a board to do nothing if the share price sits at a wide discount to the value of the underlying assets for long periods.
A businessman wanted in the US for allegedly bribing top Venezuelan officials has been taken into custody
A businessman wanted for years in the US for allegedly paying bribes to top Venezuelan officials in exchange for lucrative state contracts in Venezuela has been taken into custody.
Alvaro Pulido was indicted in Miami federal court in 2019 and again in 2021 as part of an investigation into his longtime business partner, Alex Saab, a one-time ally of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the state department had been offering a reward of up to $10m for information leading to his arrest.
Oct. 12, 2026 — The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced plans to launch a series of programs and initiatives to support the vision articulated in the White House report Science: A New Golden Age. These new programs and initiatives combined with the $1.5 billion in investments announced in August will help the agency improve how it evaluates and supports science, harness artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate discovery, and invest in exceptional students and early-career researchers.
Credit: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock
NSF is establishing an Office of Metascience to serve as a testbed for studying how scientific communities respond to novel review and funding mechanisms, applying those lessons learned to NSF programs to accelerate discovery. The office will operate with full transparency, sharing its experiments and findings with academia, industry, and philanthropy. A job announcement for the head of the Office of Metascience will be forthcoming.
In addition, both UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and NSF intend to build on the metascience principles that the United States has outlined in the “Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science,” and that both agencies have articulated in, respectively, the “NSF Leadership in a New Golden Age of Science” memorandum and the UKRI Strategy 2026-31.
NSF is launching two Grand Research Challenge (GRC) prize competitions to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration, attract nontraditional entrants, and form cross-sector teams to spur rapid advances in scientific understanding in crucial areas of science and technology (S&T).
The first is the Quantum+X GRC that will accelerate quantum innovation for sectors like energy, biotechnology, and finance. U.S. participants will be invited to compete and showcase algorithm and application solutions that could redefine what quantum technology makes possible. Through an NSF partnership with industry, competing teams will be able to develop solutions to sector-relevant problems that will not only impact the economy but also advance solutions to fundamental questions in fields such as chemistry, mathematics, and materials science.
The second is the Synthetic Multicellularity Prize Grand Challenge, a competition that will transform the ability to design biology. U.S. participants will be invited to compete in a multistage challenge to showcase new computational and experimental approaches in synthetic and engineering biology that expand capabilities to incorporate complexity and regulation into the design of multicellular systems. The results of this competition will advance our understanding of cell biology, development, and aging, and lead to new applications across sectors from medicine to biomanufacturing.
NSF is also launching the new NSF X-Labs Consortium with an initial set of founding partners representing over $300 million in commitments, supporting teams with floor space, instrument access, and direct support. This consortium is designed to provide resources to NSF X-Labs, a new generation of organizations enabling independent teams of researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs pursuing milestone-based federal funding to solve specific scientific and technological challenges. The founding partners include research institutions, advanced computing centers, philanthropy, and industry, which will provide critical resources such as access to physical space, scientific instruments and infrastructure, and expertise, to catalyze and expedite the impact of the NSF X-Labs initiative.
In addition, in collaboration with several industry and philanthropic partners, NSF will soon release a funding opportunity tied to the NSF Programmable Cloud Laboratories Network (NSF PCLNet) announced in July 2026, with a specific focus on the development of Artificial Intelligence-Native Instruments (AINI). The eventual AINI awardees will enhance NSF PCLNet by incorporating instruments specifically designed for the modern era of data and artificial intelligence in their designs and architecture, meaning that the instruments are digital-first. This re-envisioning signals a significant advance in the automation of science and engineering solutions and the era of artificial intelligence-driven scientific discovery and innovation. NSF anticipates an investment of up to $75 million over the next five years.
Science: A New Golden Age makes clear the imperative to identify and develop the exceptionally talented Americans who will serve as the vanguard of U.S. S&T global leadership in the coming decades. To support those goals, NSF is investing in the National Math Stars and NextGen Workforce to open more scientific and technical career pathways for more talented Americans.
NSF’s investment of $30 million over four years in National Math Stars, fully matched by private philanthropy will help National Math Stars grow its existing talent identification and development programs and support the design and testing of a scalable digital platform to assist families in supporting children to achieve their full potential in math. NSF’s investment in National Math Stars follows from NSF’s strong legacy of supporting promising young scientific talent through the NSF Young Scholars Program.
The NextGen Workforce program will help students earning STEM graduate degrees enter the workforce faster than ever before. The program will develop new accelerated bachelor’s to doctoral degree programs and innovative, interdisciplinary graduate training programs that provide direct support for enrolled students to enable them to meet critical and emerging national STEM workforce needs.
Washington, DC — Federal agents executed a pre-dawn search warrant Monday at the Washington-area home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar as part of an ongoing criminal investigation, according to the Justice Department.
Homeland Security Investigations carried out the court-authorized search. Federal officials have released few details about what agents were seeking, and no charges against Omar have been announced.
Reuters, citing Fox News reporting, said the investigation concerns possible immigration fraud involving paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she entered the United States as a child. The Justice Department has not publicly released the warrant affidavit or other evidence supporting that allegation.
A federal search warrant generally requires investigators to establish probable cause before a judge, but the issuance of a warrant does not establish guilt or mean criminal charges will necessarily follow.
The search follows earlier public statements from Trump administration officials indicating Omar was under federal investigation. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Omar, a longtime political opponent and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.
Omar and her attorneys had not publicly responded to the substance of the investigation as of Monday morning.
Washington, DC — Elon Musk has contributed more than $276 million to Republican-aligned groups and his own super PAC since July, making him the largest known donor in the 2026 midterm elections.
The spending includes approximately $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC working to preserve the Republican Senate majority, and more than $76 million to Musk’s America PAC, according to reporting based on campaign-finance filings.
America PAC has also spent heavily in competitive races, directing tens of millions of dollars toward voter turnout operations and Republican candidates in key states and congressional districts. The scale of Musk’s spending gives him an unusually large financial role in the party’s effort to retain control of Congress.
The contributions continue Musk’s transformation into one of the country’s most influential political donors. He spent roughly $290 million supporting Donald Trump and other Republicans during the 2024 election cycle, according to previous campaign-finance disclosures.
Federal law limits how much individuals can contribute directly to candidates, but super PACs may accept unlimited donations as long as they do not coordinate expenditures with campaigns.
Musk’s latest contributions arrive as Republicans face expensive House and Senate contests nationwide and outside groups are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising and turnout efforts ahead of Election Day.
Houston, TX — A 48-year-old man was hospitalized after an unmarked vehicle driven by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents struck him during an immigration enforcement operation in west Houston on Saturday.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office identified the injured man as Miguel Parra-Hernandez. Surveillance video shows him running through a shopping center parking lot before an ICE SUV turns into the lot and strikes him. His family says he suffered broken bones in both legs and requires surgery.
ICE said agents were pursuing another man, Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, who was the target of the enforcement action and remains at large. The agency said Parra-Hernandez ran in front of the ICE vehicle, while the available surveillance footage has prompted calls for an independent accounting of what happened.
Parra-Hernandez was taken into ICE custody while hospitalized. His family and immigrant-rights advocates are calling for his release and say he has lived in Houston for more than three decades.
Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones and Rep. Sylvia Garcia called for ICE to preserve and release all video evidence and cooperate with the sheriff’s investigation.
The incident comes amid broader scrutiny of ICE vehicle pursuits and use-of-force practices during the Trump administration’s expanded immigration enforcement operations.
The Pentagon quietly acknowledged additional Iran war deaths on Friday evening after The Intercept repeatedly demanded an explanation for inaccurate statistics on a War Department website tracking U.S. casualties from the conflict.
Almost 900 U.S. troops have been wounded or killed in the war with Iran, according to the official Pentagon count, including the two deaths added on Friday. This raises the Pentagon’s total to 21 dead.
The additional war dead include Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. For more than six months, The Intercept has raised Davius’s case in dozens of emails and phone conversations with Pentagon officials and publicly in 10 articles.
The Pentagon recently revamped the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS — which provides official counts of dead and wounded for Congress and the White House — to include more detailed casualty category tables. But it initially listed no “non-hostile” illness or injury fatalities, despite the Pentagon announcing in March that Davius died “as a result of a non-combat related incident.”
At first, the military claimed that Davius was involved in another operation instead of Epic Fury — the original designation of the Iran war. Two weeks ago, however, The Intercept revealed that a recent National Guard news release admitted that when “President Donald Trump made the decision to attack Iran and launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, the [42nd Infantry] division headquarters began conducting combat operations.” The 42nd served as the primary headquarters leading what became, according to Maj. Gen. Jack James, the division commander, the “largest and first long-range precision fires campaign in the history of the United States Army.” James specifically saluted Davius, whom the Guard admitted was “conducting operations” when he died.
Last week, The Intercept pointed the Pentagon to the non-hostile illness or injury casualty count for Epic Fury on the website, and emphasized its tally showing zero deaths was not possible.
“I will check within,” Patricia Kreuzberger, a Pentagon spokesperson said on Tuesday. “Let me reach out to leadership.”
Three days later, and after repeated follow-up messages on Friday, the tally was updated, to 1.
In addition to Davius, the DCAS death count now also includes an unidentified Navy suicide that occurred last month, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. DCAS currently lists this death as “pending,” despite the recent addition of a “self-inflicted” category to the website.
A “War Department official” told The Intercept by email on Sunday that “the Department is introducing a ‘Pending Adjudication’ category to track the status of active duty casualties pending final categorization and reporting in DCAS.” She added: “This new category will allow the Department to minimize reporting delays while ensuring data consistency between the DoW and Joint Staff.”
The “pending” designation, however, isn’t new. The Pentagon re-introduced it to DCAS in mid-July, and major discrepancies have continued in the tally since.
Many casualties remain uncounted in DCAS, including a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.
Most Iran war casualties in the official count — 454 personnel as of Friday — have occurred since July 7, after the Trump administration claimed the conflict ended. At that time, the Pentagon switched from counting casualties under Epic Fury to the anodyne moniker “Overseas Operations.”
The most recent casualties are three Army personnel wounded in action this month. The latest known Iran war fatality is Capt. Bianca Wilkerson, 37, of Norfolk, Virginia, who died on September 18 from a “coronary issue,” according to her brother. He said she returned from Saudi Arabia on September 10 and was headed back but died on the return flight, according to reporting by the Virginian-Pilot. A U.S. official told The Intercept that Wilkerson died “as a result of a non-combat-related incident,” but after nearly a month, DCAS still lists no non-hostile illness or injury deaths.
“There is no excuse for a mistake of this magnitude,” Reps. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a joint statement on Friday after the House Armed Services Committee discovered “a discrepancy in the Pentagon’s reporting of casualty numbers” and brought it to “the Trump Administration’s attention.” They continued: “The failure of Secretary Hegseth to immediately take ownership of the problem also does a grave disservice to the men and women putting their lives on the line in service to our country.”
For six months, The Intercept has reported on anomalies in official counts offered on DCAS. When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran on April 7, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics. But on April 21, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not explained the adjustment.
Other discrepancies have also gone unjustified for months. An Army “illness/injury” death appeared on or about May 26 but disappeared by June 1. On July 20, the Pentagon repeatedly altered DCAS, adding 100 casualties to the war’s tally without explanation; the total number of wounded cited by DCAS on that date included counts of 413, 427, and 447. Three days later, the Pentagon dropped the Iran war death toll from 18 to 14. On July 22, DCAS added 10 recent casualties to the Epic Fury count. By July 25, those wounded personnel were dropped from the tally. They may have been added to the Overseas Operations casualty toll, but the Pentagon has failed to offer any explanations.
Prior reporting by The Intercept also found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called, in April, a “casualty cover-up.” When the Washington Post also suggested last month that the Pentagon had suppressed the casualty numbers, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth called the report “DISGUSTING and FAKE.”
When asked by The Intercept about the Pentagon’s continued peddling of bogus statistics, Kreuzberger did not offer an explanation. An email from a nameless “War Department official” said: “We have nothing to provide beyond the Defense Casualty Analysis System website.”
Google’s new $179 tracker sits between the screenless Fitbit Air and Pixel Watch 5, promising some of the best parts of both without fully committing to either.
Based on the bestselling book series by Elle Kennedy, the TV show “Off Campus” has taken the world by storm. Transforming the beloved college romance novel into the current number one show on Prime Video, “Off Campus” follows a close-knit group of college hockey players and the people around them as they navigate love, loss, friendship, ambition and trauma.
The special thing about Kennedy’s series is that each book focuses on different characters all with intertwining storylines at Briar University. Season one of “Off Campus” is based on the book “The Deal,” and is primarily centered on music composition major Hannah Wells, played by Ella Bright, and hockey captain Garrett Graham, played by Belmont Cameli, whose fake-dating relationship slowly evolves into something genuine and is impossible not to root for.
Alongside them are fan-favorite characters Allie Hayes, played by Mika Abdalla, John Logan, played by Antonio Cipriano, Dean Hayward-Di Laurentis, played by Stephen Kalyn, John Tucker, played by Jalen Thomas Brooks, Jules Logan, played by Julia Sarah Stone and Justin Kohl, played by Josh Heuston.
Right from the beginning, “Off Campus” perfectly captures the compelling excitement of college life. Between crowded parties, high-pressure games, dynamic performances and hard late-night conversations, the show accurately represents aspects of life as a college student. At first glance, “Off Campus” is a seemingly shallow and classic romance story, but it quickly evolves into something deeper, balancing humor and emotional vulnerability with authentic and serious real-world issues.
What immediately made this show so insanely compelling to me were the characters. Every character in this series is so likable and has their own unique personalities and emotional arcs which makes the entire friend group feel real.
Focusing on the main two characters this season, Hannah is an intelligent, lively and guarded character who faces many challenges, but yearns for love and happiness. Garrett is charismatic, confident and unexpectedly emotionally aware despite his playboy reputation. Their chemistry is electric and the relationship works due to how their personalities naturally challenge and support one another.
Honestly, I believe that one of the most compelling aspects of “Off Campus,” — thanks to Kennedy — is the way the men are portrayed. Garrett, Logan, Dean and Tucker all feel emotionally complex in ways that male characters in romance shows are often not seen as. Yes, they can be immature and a tad egotistical, but they are also all loyal, emotionally vulnerable and they deeply care for others. This show understands that masculinity does not mean emotional unavailability, but rather it flourishes when men share their feelings and look out for others.
Garrett especially stands out as he is one of the most emotionally intelligent characters in the series. They could have easily made him the stereotypical arrogant hockey player, but he is different. He listens to and respects Hannah. Garrett genuinely wants to understand her rather than fix her, which differs from most rom-com men. Their relationship is built on trust, patience and communication rather than toxicity. Watching them together feels authentic and rewarding.
Something that felt so safe about “Off Campus” was how professionally the writing tackled heavy topics. This show discusses coping with trauma, domestic violence, abuse, sexual assault, death, addiction, intimacy issues, mental health issues, financial struggles, family conflict and uncertainty about the future. These themes were portrayed in a way that felt real and not performative, as everything seamlessly fit into each character’s storyline.
I loved that these important moments were balanced with lighthearted humor and fun. One scene will be emotionally heavy while the next will make you smile and laugh out loud. Through their struggles, I saw myself in many of these characters, and that is what makes “Off Campus” so addicting.
One thing I picked up on in the first five minutes of watching this show is the epic soundtrack. The music ranges from pop to rock to romantic ballads, as well as original songs that Hannah writes and performs in the show. Music is used as a way to cope, which I believe many people can relate to. If a character feels sad or uncertain, they put on headphones and turn on some music.
Songs like “The Bitch is Back” by Elton John, “Cherry Pie” by Warrant, “Baby Now That I’ve Found You” by The Foundations and “On the Floor” by Jennifer Lopez are all now associated with “Off Campus” and, in my opinion, are played during the most iconic moments of the show. I think I especially loved the music in “Off Campus” because I have a soft spot for nostalgic rock music, as Hannah and Garrett do. The music choices in this show just made college life feel fun, possible and overwhelmingly beautiful.
“Off Campus” is so popular because it combines fun romantic tropes with relatable coming-of-age themes. At a time when audiences were yearning for another hockey romance story, the show managed to feel both familiar and fresh by adding real emotional weight to a genre that is often a cliché. Every character feels flawed in believable ways, and those imperfections are what make them feel human, relatable and worth watching.
After finishing season one, I can confidently say that I am fully invested in these characters and their storylines. “Off Campus” is definitely a series about romance and love, but also friendship, healing, identity and learning how to become the person you actually want to be.
Season one ends in a perfect way to set the show up for season number two, which, diverting from the order of the book series, will be centered around Allie Hayes and Dean Hayward-Di Laurentis. I absolutely cannot wait to see where this story goes.
Planting cover crops or perennial plants can protect soil amid potential flooding. Congress must act to protect these practices
As forecasters warn that this year’s El Niño could become the strongest on record, concerns are growing about its effect on agriculture and food security.
Liz Carlisle is associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming and co-editor of Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods
Israeli PM calls for criminal investigation into soldiers and officers interviewed in Guardian-produced documentary
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered the country’s attorney general and the head of the Shin Bet security service to reveal the identities of soldiers and officers interviewed in the investigative documentary NAZA and prosecute them for causing “harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests”.
The award-winning documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza. The film is in cinemas, including in the UK and the US, and will be shown in more than 50 countries.
Why Should Delaware Care? Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
Dover to vote on data center moratorium
New Castle County to consider impact fee hike
Georgetown to discuss cottage ordinance
Dover to vote on data center moratorium
The state capital would become the first jurisdiction in Delaware to enact a full moratorium on any data center projects if a proposal is passed Monday night.
The moratorium, which would last for 18 months, would apply to any data center proposal in Dover city limits that uses 30 megawatts of monthly maximum demand power or more.
The capital city’s consideration of the measure comes amid a flurry of data center proposals and discussions over the past year about how the industry should fit into Delaware’s economy.
New Castle and Kent counties recently approved rules limiting where a data center could be built in unincorporated areas, and Harrington recently denied a project proposal, but no moratoriums have been considered until now. In neighboring Maryland, many of the Eastern Shore counties have approved such moratoriums.
📍 The Dover City Council will meet at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 12, at City Hall, located at 15 Loockerman Plaza in Dover. For additional details, including the live stream link, click here.
New Castle County to consider impact fee hike
The New Castle County Council is scheduled to vote on an increase in impact fees, which are paid by developers and typically passed on to buyers of newly-built homes.
The fees, which support police, fire departments, parks, libraries and more, are meant to offset the demand created by an increasing number of residents, businesses and visitors to the county.
The revised impact fee table increases costs 9.23% to account for inflation, according to officials. If approved, it would result in an estimated $160,000 in new revenue for the county.
The buyer of a new single-family home would pay $1,896.23, or an additional $160 over the current fee.
📍 The New Castle County Council will meet at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 13, at the Louis L. Redding City/County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For additional details, including the live stream link, click here.
Georgetown to discuss cottage ordinance
The Sussex County seat will hold a public hearing Monday evening over whether to retain or repeal the cottage home ordinance, which allows for the building of tiny homes in the town.
The newly-elected Georgetown Town Council is revisiting a contentious cottage housing ordinance from last year, arguing that residents want the government to remove the measure allowing developers to build tiny homes.
The move represents a continued point of friction between town council and residents over how government leaders should respond to the demand for more affordable housing and a split over how best to provide homelessness resources in town.
The reconsideration also follows the May election of two new members of the five-member town council, both of whom campaigned, in part, on a platform of repealing the ordinance and were backed by a vocal Facebook group of Sussex County residents opposed to Georgetown’s handling of its growing homeless population.
📍 The Georgetown Town Council will hold the public hearing at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 12, at Town Hall, located at 39the Circle in Georgetown. For additional details, including the live stream link, click here.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Oct. 12, 2026 — IonQ today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Elisity, Inc., a Zero Trust security company, in an all-stock transaction valued at up to $1.3 billion. The acquisition brings together IonQ’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and quantum key distribution (QKD) capabilities with Elisity’s enterprise Zero Trust technology platform. On a combined basis, IonQ will benefit from an expanded cybersecurity platform that both uncovers and protects against present LLM and emerging quantum threats.
Elisity builds on IonQ’s expanding quantum security offerings with a high-growth enterprise security business, cutting-edge Zero Trust technology platform, and team of industry leaders led by cybersecurity expert CEO James Winebrenner. Elisity has a strong track record of doubling its revenue and its customer base year-over-year with zero churn among deployed customers. With more than 100 global customer deployments and deep CISO and security community relationships, Elisity will provide IonQ with expanded channels to bring its PQC, QKD and quantum computing offerings to market for both enterprise and government networks, opening up the more than $10 billion microsegmentation opportunity with double-digit CAGR to IonQ.
“With Elisity and its team as part of IonQ, we will be well positioned to help customers protect critical infrastructure and enterprise networks throughout the transition to the quantum era. As I said first, Q-Day is coming much faster than predicted. IonQ is offering its customers a vertically integrated full-stack quantum platform across quantum computing, networking, sensing and cybersecurity. Just as adding SkyWater Technology expanded IonQ’s capabilities in chip design, fabrication and packaging, Elisity will bring proven enterprise policy enforcement scale and deployment experience to our quantum security strategy and will give IonQ a strong growth platform to serve customers and create value for our shareholders,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ.
“Our customers need to prioritize post-quantum cryptography initiatives while securing existing assets to keep essential operations running,” said James Winebrenner, CEO of Elisity. “With IonQ, we will be optimally positioned to partner with them to modernize their crypto-agility programs, accelerate post-quantum cryptography capabilities while advancing their holistic Zero Trust posture and deploy hybrid-cybersecurity solutions today that are prepared for the quantum future.”
Elisity’s Commercial Advantage
Enterprises face two overlapping priorities: containing attacks that operate at machine speed and preparing to protect sensitive information against future quantum threats. The urgency of this transition is underscored by recent White House executive orders advancing quantum innovation and accelerating the federal government’s migration to PQC. These directives reinforce the importance of securing critical systems and preparing government networks for quantum-era threats while supporting long-term modernization.
Today, Elisity IdentityGraph combines native asset identity and partner-enriched context, and risk information to inform least-privilege access policy for users, devices, workloads and AI agents. Teams can simulate policies before limiting each identity to the communications it needs, helping reduce attack surface and contain an attack’s spread. By bringing together Elisity’s Zero Trust framework with IonQ’s PQC and QKD capabilities, the companies will combine cryptographic protection for sensitive information and communications with identity-based controls that limit unauthorized access and the spread of threats across enterprise networks. The shared roadmap with IonQ will extend IdentityGraph with cryptographic inventory and risk information. This integrated approach will help customers address quantum-related security risks through a multiyear transition while strengthening defenses against current cyberattacks, including threats involving AI agents.
Following closing, Elisity will continue serving its customers under its current leadership, including current CEO James Winebrenner. Together, the companies will continue their track record of innovation, customer success and strong partner relationships, backed by IonQ’s demonstrated approach of investing in the critical technologies it acquires.
IonQ’s Multiproduct Revenue Growth Opportunity
IonQ brings an established track record in growing its quantum security and quantum-secure communications offering. The company has deployed some of the largest quantum-safe national communications networks in the world, including in Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and serves global customers with quantum-safe defense in depth spanning quantum-safe posture management, quantum key distribution, and post quantum cryptography.
Customers are increasingly adopting multiple IonQ products and services, driving growth in multiproduct revenue and providing evidence of demand for integrated solutions; in the second quarter of 2026, IonQ delivered 40% year-over-year growth in multiproduct revenue..
IonQ and Elisity expect opportunities to cross-sell complementary security solutions, expand relationships with enterprise and government customers, and develop integrated offerings.
Transaction Details
Under the terms of the agreement, IonQ will acquire Elisity in an all-stock transaction valued at up to $1.3 billion, including up to $150 million in earnout opportunity subject to performance of the Elisity business. The number of IonQ shares to be issued in the transaction will be calculated at closing based on the volume weighted average price of IonQ common stock for the 20 trading days prior to, but not including, the third business day before the closing date, but that price will not be greater than $49.61 or less than $33.07 per share.
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 and is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approval.
About Elisity
Elisity helps enterprises advance Zero Trust security for users, devices, workloads, AI agents and other non-human identities. Elisity IdentityGraph correlates identity, asset and risk information from native and partner sources to inform access decisions. Elisity’s software policy layer uses the network to enforce access rules independently of the underlying network technology. Teams can simulate policies and limit each identity to the communications it needs, extending the value of existing network and security investments. Founded in 2019, Elisity has a global employee footprint and a growing number of customers in the Fortune 500. Learn more at elisity.com.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
BRYAN, Texas, Oct. 12, 2026 — ThisWay Global Inc. (TWG), a company focused on sovereign artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, has announced plans for the Research and AI Compute Center (RACC) at the Texas A&M-RELLIS campus in Bryan, Texas.
Following the Sept. 30, 2026 closing of the court-approved acquisition of project assets through the bankruptcy process, TWG has begun remobilizing the previously stalled digital-infrastructure project. The project is planned as a phased development with 73 MW of capacity on a 25-acre site, subject to applicable approvals.
RACC is intended to make advanced AI and HPC capacity available to eligible research, public-sector and industry users. The project is intended to apply TWG’s Sovereign Blueprint, an evidence-based framework designed to help organizations identify and document controls over data, models, computing resources and access.
RACC is planned around three connected objectives: sovereign AI computing capacity; research and innovation collaboration; and workforce-development opportunities. The project is intended to support eligible users with research, advanced analytics and other mission-critical AI and HPC workloads, subject to applicable contracting, procurement, security and access requirements.
“RACC is an opportunity to demonstrate how AI and high-performance computing digital infrastructure can be developed as an accountable, governed institutional capability, one that can support Texas research, innovation and workforce opportunity,” said Angela Hood, Founder and Executive Chairman of ThisWay Global. “We intend to advance this development in collaboration with A&M-RELLIS leadership, local stakeholders and qualified partners, with a focus on responsible infrastructure and meaningful community benefit in the Bryan-College Station region.”
Planning is guided by four priorities:
Governed AI and HPC infrastructure: RACC is intended to support an operating model in which policies, workload access, computing resources and supporting evidence can be administered and documented in accordance with applicable customer, contractual and regulatory requirements.
Phased, scalable infrastructure: The development is planned to proceed in phases, with infrastructure and capacity deployed in accordance with final engineering, applicable approvals, utility arrangements, financing, procurement and customer requirements.
Responsible resource management: The current design contemplates closed-loop, direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Final cooling-system configuration and water requirements will be determined through engineering and applicable approvals. Planning will also address applicable noise, land-use, and environmental requirements.
Research, training and workforce development: TWG intends to explore research collaboration and workforce-development programming with educational, community and other qualified partners, subject to partner agreements, applicable institutional approvals and operational requirements.
TWG intends for RACC to bring together computing infrastructure, evidence-based sovereign AI governance, research collaboration and workforce-development opportunities in a model that can inform future governed AI and HPC developments in the United States and internationally.
TWG plans to deploy its Amalgamy.ai software to support workload orchestration, policy administration, data-access controls, metering and evidence management, with deployment scope determined by the project’s final operating model and customer requirements. The planned model is intended to accommodate appropriate hardware and software choices while maintaining evidence-based governance practices.
“The future of this development will be shaped by disciplined engineering, collaboration and compliance with the legal, regulatory, contractual and community requirements that apply to a project of this importance,” Hood added.
Information on ThisWay Global and the Sovereign Blueprint is available at www.thiswayglobal.com.
About ThisWay Global
Founded in 2016, ThisWay Global is a certified Woman-Owned business based in Austin, Texas. With roots in R&D at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, TWG works with governments, enterprises, universities and research institutions on governed AI and high-performance computing infrastructure. TWG developed the Sovereign Blueprint, an evidence-based framework for evaluating and documenting controls over data, models, computing resources and access, and Amalgamy.ai, a software product intended to support governed advanced-computing environments.
Water has emerged as a key issue for Arizona voters ahead of US midterms – governments should take noteExpert commentLToremark
The case of Arizona shows that governments must stop treating water as merely an environmental issue.
US President Donald Trump may dismiss the threat posed by climate change, but its consequences are becoming harder for US voters to ignore. Take Arizona, for example, where water has emerged as an unusually prominent issue ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Recent polling found that long-term water supplies was the top concern for Arizona voters, after federal cuts to the state’s water supply from the drought-stricken Colorado River. Water has consequently become a prominent issue in Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs’ re-election campaign, with opponents accusing her of mismanaging Arizona’s water supply in an effort to undermine her bid for a second term.
Water is no longer just an environmental issue
Arizona is an extreme example, but the underlying dynamic is much broader. Water is fundamental not only to drinking and sanitation, but to almost every aspect of an economy. In Arizona, it underpins agriculture and urban development, while also supporting industries and amenities that can seem particularly incongruous in a desert environment, such as golf courses. Now a new source of demand is emerging: data centres, driven by the rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The Phoenix metropolitan area ranks second in North America for proposed data-centre development, raising questions about the impact of these energy- and water-intensive facilities on already stretched water supply – an emerging big issue in the midterms.
Arizona’s water predicament is being intensified by a changing climate. Already one of the hottest and driest states in the US, Arizona is experiencing rising temperatures that increase evaporation and water demand, while intensifying drought. This is also putting further pressure on the Colorado River, which supplies more than a third of Arizona’s population, while groundwater reserves are being depleted in parts of the state.
But climate change is only part of the story. Water crises are rarely caused by climate alone. Decades of groundwater over-abstraction, inefficient agricultural practices, pollution, poorly maintained infrastructure and allocations based on historical assumptions can turn a drought into a systemic crisis.
And this is not only an American problem. Cape Town’s 2018 ‘Day Zero’ crisis demonstrated how quickly drought, population growth and rising demand can turn water scarcity into a political emergency. Tehran offers another warning, where drought and declining rainfall have combined with groundwater depletion, and decades of water-management decisions to produce a systemic crisis. European cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Athens, Rome and even London have all faced emergency water restrictions in recent years as drought intensifies.
Companies are paying attention too. The World Economic Forum’s global risk assessments have repeatedly identified water supply shortages among the risks facing economies and businesses. Water shortages can disrupt agricultural supply chains, manufacturing, electricity generation, construction, real estate and technology infrastructure.
Water security is increasingly also about economic and political security.
When water crosses borders, scarcity becomes political
The political challenge becomes even harder when water crosses administrative boundaries.
Arizona’s position within the Colorado River system is governed by a complex web of agreements and legal arrangements, some dating back more than a century. The 1968 legislation authorizing the Central Arizona Project, for example, gave its Colorado River deliveries junior priority, meaning Arizona would face reductions before California in specified shortage circumstances.
As the river comes under increasing pressure, these historical arrangements have become politically consequential. The latest federal proposals for managing the Colorado River envisage substantial reductions in water deliveries to the three lower-basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – with Arizona facing particularly significant cuts: 27 per cent this year and reductions could nearly double after 2028 if the drought worsens.
The underlying problem is therefore not simply that there is less water. It is that agreements and institutions designed for a different hydrological reality are being used to distribute a resource whose availability is becoming more uncertain.
The same dynamic exists internationally. For example, Ethiopia’s plans to develop three new hydropower projects on the Blue Nile have reignited tensions with Egypt, which remains concerned about how upstream water is stored and managed, particularly during drought. The long-running dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam illustrates how greater hydrological variability and more frequent drought can put existing water-sharing arrangements under growing strain.
Water can therefore become a geopolitical issue even when that is not the intention. When a river or reservoir crosses political boundaries, a reduction in supply also becomes a question of who gets less.
Policymakers must move beyond crisis management
Arizona offers a particularly vivid warning, not only to the US government but to governments around the world, because water has become a political issue before it has run out.
The first step is to stop treating water primarily as an environmental issue. It is increasingly central to decisions on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, housing and public health, and, where water crosses borders, to foreign and security policy.
Water availability needs to be considered much earlier in decisions about where and how economies grow. If a region is chronically water-stressed, governments – as well as regional, state and local authorities – should ask whether new housing, agriculture or industrial development can be supported by available water supplies over the long term.
Technology will have an important role. Wastewater recycling, leakage reduction, precision irrigation, improved groundwater monitoring, more efficient cooling systems and, in some coastal locations, desalination can help expand the options available.
But technology alone cannot change the realities of water availability. The harder question is therefore what societies choose to build – and where.
This is also where nature-based solutions come in. Restoring wetlands can improve water storage, filter pollutants and reduce flood risk. Protecting watersheds can support groundwater recharge and improve downstream water quality. Restoring degraded soils and changing agricultural practices can improve water retention and reduce irrigation requirements.
These measures can deliver several benefits simultaneously – water security, biodiversity, flood protection, carbon storage and resilience to extreme heat – often at lower cost than purely engineered alternatives.
Finally, governments need to integrate water, land use, energy, agriculture and economic planning, both domestically and with neighbouring countries that share water sources, using realistic projections of future water availability rather than historical averages. Water-sharing arrangements should also be revisited as conditions change, before scarcity turns technical disagreements into political crises.
The emergence of water as a political issue in Arizona is striking in a political environment dominated by concerns over the cost of living, immigration and the Iran war. The fact that it has become a leading concern among voters in one of America’s fastest-growing states shows that water security is crossing an important threshold: from an environmental concern that governments can defer, to a question about what kind of future is physically possible.
American-born economists Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford won the Nobel Prize in economics for their work on models that help governments and central banks manage economic shocks.
The Department of Homeland Security tapped $20 million in taxpayer money for the ads, which the White House has defended as public service announcements.
Minneapolis, MN — A federal prosecution of 15 Minnesota anti-ICE activists is drawing growing opposition from labor unions and civil liberties advocates, who argue the government has turned protest-related allegations into an unusually broad conspiracy case.
Federal prosecutors accuse the group, known as the “Minneapolis 15,” of coordinating efforts to disrupt Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations during protests last winter. Alleged tactics included blocking access to a federal building, following agents in vehicles and, in one case, tracking an ICE employee to his home in Wisconsin.
Authorities have characterized the conduct as criminal interference rather than protected protest. However, prosecutors acknowledged at a June news conference that they could not identify injuries suffered by federal officers in connection with the alleged conspiracy.
The case has generated additional controversy after court filings revealed that undercover Homeland Security Investigations agents attended meetings involving unions and nonprofit organizations. Investigators also subpoenaed financial records from labor groups while examining possible “domestic terror financing.”
Those revelations have helped generate broader support for the defendants. Hundreds of union members marched in Minneapolis on Oct. 3 demanding that the charges be dropped, while several major labor organizations have publicly backed the defendants.
None of the 15 has accepted a plea agreement, and the allegations remain unproven in court.
Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr publicly dispute recent measles deaths to ‘distract’ from damage caused and question vaccines, experts say
The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.
But it was too late. Within a day of being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure crashed and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated. Her family, and the nation, mourned: she was the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade.
The debt-collection ecosystem will change as AI takes notes in exam rooms, codes visits and sends billing messages
Medical debt is expected to grow in coming years as Republican-led health cuts come into force this winter. As it does, a changing world of medical billing and debt collection awaits patients: one where artificial intelligence increasingly listens, codes, bills and collects.
Artificial intelligence takes notes in exam rooms, codes visits, sends out billing messages and powers AI agents who text patients in billing portals – all changing the debt-collection ecosystem.
The rise of AI makes the preservation of democracy even more urgent – especially as the technology threatens institutions
AI safety is having a moment. After years as a topic for techies and futurists, the potential risks from artificial intelligence systems – from cyber-attacks to hyper-persuasion to rogue behavior – are suddenly under discussion both in the corridors of power and around kitchen tables.
In fact, the conversation now reaches beyond classical safety concerns, getting into AI’s impact on economic life and the environment, as well as possible responses, from alignment research to government regulation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that he could start a lawn business if the GOP loses the House majority, which he told CBS News' Robert Costa was "tongue in cheek."
Ukrainian president says the deal is ‘news to me’ and that Russia is still attacking energy infrastructure. Plus, investigation into continuing mystery of Havana syndrome
Good morning. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said it was “news to me” after Donald Trump announced a partial ceasefire deal in the Ukraine war. The US president had posted to social media to say: “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed.”
There was no sign that the Kremlin was observing Trump’s ceasefire. According to Zelenskyy, Russian drones took to the sky “throughout the day” on Sunday and there were several airstrikes, including on energy infrastructure. He said Russia hit a power station in Kharkiv – the latest of more than 200 strikes during the past week against electricity generation and transmission facilities in Ukraine.
How has the prospect of a deal been welcomed? Despite the unconventional nature of the announcement, the ceasefire appeared to garner support from Ukraine’s key western allies. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Paris supported a “real energy ceasefire” and the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, said a sustained energy ceasefire was “the best route to get energy and fuel back into world markets”.
Will Trump’s deal with Putin bring down gas prices? The agreement to temporarily lift sanctions on US imports of Russian diesel will have little “meaningful” effect on motorists and businesses in the US and overseas, energy and foreign policy analysts have predicted.
NPR reports:
Police officers in cities across the U.S. are quick to extol the virtues of real-time crime centers as a game changer that helps them find missing children, monitor large events from the skies and scope out dangerous scenes before putting an officer in harm's way. Hundreds of police departments have one of these central hubs, which have existed for years. But many are now being powered with AI software, such as Fusus, from the public-safety technology giant Axon... synthesizing the data it pulls in and allowing police command centers to watch an entire city from one place.
Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers (ALPRs), have faced intense backlash in recent months amid stories of abuse. Yet privacy experts say they're just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to police surveillance. "I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement," says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. "Because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what's going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime." Tools like Axon Fusus, which is a leader in this type of software, also pull in footage and data from police body cameras, law enforcement dashcams, 911 dispatch, gunshot detectors and surveillance cameras, including sometimes those of private businesses that opt in. Its use is growing fast. In 2024, the technology news site 404 Media reported that just over 100 law enforcement agencies had deployed Fusus, which was then its own company and was acquired by Axon that year. The number of law enforcement agencies using the tool has more than doubled since then, according to Axon.
Even the American Civil Liberties Union warned concerned citizens in August that "Flock is far from the only vendor," adding that "it's important to realize that its competitors aren't so great either, and that simply replacing Flock surveillance with another company's surveillance won't necessarily solve any of the privacy and other civil liberties problems posed by this mass surveillance technology."
Communities can't simply assume that their residents will be better off from a privacy and civil liberties perspective by dropping Flock and replacing it with another ALPR provider, as some customers have done. They should ask hard questions about whether they really want to create that kind of a system, and if they do, ensure it doesn't function as a mass surveillance system...
One of Flock's most significant competitors is Motorola. This company, which has been expanding its police technology offerings through an aggressive acquisition strategy in recent years, offers a nationwide law enforcement data sharing system similar to Flock's called the National Vehicle Location Service, operated by Motorola unit Vigilant Solutions. In addition to collecting data from law enforcement clients' cameras, it also runs a large separate commercial ALPR unit that makes deals for tow trucks and other fleet vehicles to carry cameras and collect data for Motorola as they drive around, amassing billions of plate reads (a claimed 500 million monthly, subject to no apparent data retention policy). Known as the Digital Recognition Network, that unit sells its data for commercial purposes but also makes it available to its law enforcement customers for an extra charge. Motorola tells agencies they can have "access to billions of detections beyond your own."
Abandoning Flock for another system doesn't protect privacy, their article argues. "If a jurisdiction decides to allow license scanners to be installed, how that system operates is more important than which vendor provides it..." They recommend strong restrictions like data retention limits — and imposing them by law rather than in the language of contracts with vendors (which could always be renegotiated).
Chasing China: How should the UK and EU respond to China’s competitive threat?
27
October 2026 — 18:00 TO 19:00 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Explore how the UK and EU can strengthen their industrial and technological competitiveness in response to China’s scale, speed and state-backed investment.
Explore how the UK and EU can strengthen their industrial and technological competitiveness in response to China’s scale, speed and state-backed investment.
China’s rapid innovation and strength in advanced manufacturing are intensifying competitive pressure on the UK and EU. The challenge is to protect sensitive technologies and supply chains, and to improve productivity, attract investment and build competitive industries of their own.
This event examines the policy choices available to London and Brussels, from industrial investment and trade measures to research partnerships and economic-security tools. It also looks at how a more coordinated approach could deliver greater leverage without closing the door to beneficial engagement with China.
This event discusses:
How should the UK and EU respond to China’s technological and industrial prowess?
Which sectors face the greatest competitive pressure from China?
How can research security be strengthened while maintaining international collaboration?
What balance should governments strike between openness, resilience and national security?
Where should the UK and EU align on industrial policy and investment screening?
What would a successful competitiveness strategy look like over the next decade?
Bethany Antonia wore a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Protect the Dolls’ in rehearsals, but the words were edited out on Saturday’s show
The BBC has defended its decision to edit out a transgender rights slogan from a T-shirt worn by a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing, stating it was standard practice to avoid “overt branding or slogans”.
The actor Bethany Antonia was filmed wearing the T-shirt, which bore the slogan “Protect the Dolls”, during rehearsals before her live performance on Saturday night.
Sweater weather is easier to plan around with these 13 fall picks, from pork chops and chicken casserole to steak bites, salmon bowls, potatoes, wings, and pumpkin blondies.The post 13 foolproof fall picks worth making when sweater weather actually sticks…
Austin, TX — Texas is appealing a federal court order requiring the state to provide air conditioning in all of its prisons by the end of 2029, continuing a years-long legal battle over extreme heat behind bars.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled in September that forcing incarcerated people to endure dangerously high indoor temperatures violates constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. He cited evidence of ongoing injuries, severe suffering and at least nine heat-related deaths between 2023 and 2025.
As of Oct. 1, only about one-third of Texas prisons were fully climate controlled, leaving roughly 90,000 incarcerated people without air conditioning.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice says it intends to eventually install air conditioning statewide but argues that Pitman’s deadline could disrupt other priorities, including healthcare, staffing and contraband prevention. The agency estimates the full project would cost approximately $1.5 billion.
Texas has asked Pitman to suspend his order while the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considers the case.
Attorneys representing prisoners argue the state has already delayed action for years despite knowing about the risks. Texas county jails are required to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees, but state prisons are not subject to the same requirement.
Gwinnett county is home to many immigrants and other newcomers, and how it votes could be decisive for Congress
Johanna Park might just be an ambassador for Gwinnett county, Georgia, one of the 10 most ethnically diverse counties in the United States.
Park owns Cafe Amico at Suwanee Town Center, one of her three Italian coffee shops in the area just north of Atlanta. She was born in Korea and lived much of her life in Argentina and Peru. She’s been in Gwinnett for more than 20 years, part of an early wave of Korean immigration that’s built Korean American car dealerships, banks, insurance agencies, supermarkets and restaurants like her own. It’s also a population that’s increasing in influence and not just numbers.
As an alleged 2024 gang-rape at Cornell comes to light, universities are grappling with a choice: student safety or alumni donations
Daniel R Schwarz, an 85-year-old English literature emeritus professor, still works at Cornell University after 59 years because he loves teaching and “watching young people grow”, he said.
Most of his students, he also said, have not been part of fraternities at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, where seven men allegedly gang-raped a woman in 2024.
These 15 soup recipes turn one cooking session into several ready-made lunches, with creamy bowls, brothy soups, chili, chowder, beans, chicken, beef, pasta, and vegetables in the mix.The post 15 soup recipes that fill the fridge with ready-made lunches for…
At Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker watched composer Jon Batiste and other musicians create a song out of thin air. The performer said he uses improvisation to write and record new music.
This week’s guests on the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast are two of Spotlight’s newest reporters, Cristal Sanchez and Nathaly Suquinagua. Together, they form the reporting team behind Spotlight Delaware en Español, which delivers news to Spanish-speaking residents of the First State.
Cristal and Nathaly share a little about their backgrounds, discuss the challenges and joys of reporting on Latino communities in Delaware, and explore how Spanish-language coverage intersects with our English-language reporting.
The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to start off here sharing with our listeners a little of your backgrounds and your decision to join the Spotlight reporting team here.
Cristal, I want to start with you, as you’re not entirely new to Spotlight Delaware. Can you share a little about your previous work here, and why you wanted to come back and join the newsroom?
CRISTAL: I was actually an intern for Spotlight Delaware last summer, and I was on the operational side. I was really working hand-in-hand with the marketing team and community engagement team, so with you David, trying to come up with ideas and ways on how we could build up the news that was presented to the Spanish-speaking community.
I actually got a call from [editor-in-chief] Jake Owens, [to see] if I would like to come back and join the Spotlight Delaware team. I said yes because I honestly had a lot of fun working with the newsroom last summer. Sometimes in newsrooms I think that the environment is sometimes really competitive or there’s not a lot of care, and I saw that as a strength for Spotlight Delaware.
Spotlight Delaware also has a really good startup mentality. We’re really just interested in experimenting and trying to better our community engagement and also better how news is presented to various different communities.
And you recently graduated with a journalism degree, correct?
CRISTAL: I did, from the University of Missouri.
Well, we are glad that you were enticed to come back and join us full-time as a reporter.
Nathaly, you on the other hand, are totally new to Spotlight Delaware. Can you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and what drew you to want to work here?
NATHALY: I graduated [from] Temple, Became pretty good friends [there] with Julia [Merola], who’s another reporter here at Spotlight. I follow her on social media and she posted that she started working at Spotlight Delaware. I’m like, “Oh, what’s Spotlight Delaware?”
At the time, I moved back home to New Jersey. I read a couple articles and I thought the reporting was really well done, in-depth reporting. [I] was just keeping track and reading a little bit here and there. I saw that they were hiring a Hispanic reporter. And I ended up applying.
I spoke with Tim [deputy editor] and Jake. They really took their time to get to know me, where I came from, being first generation, and my background. They were like, “We really want to emphasize a lot on the Hispanic community.” I thought that was really nice to hear because I haven’t heard anybody really else want to focus on Hispanics and make that connection.
So, I got the job and I was really excited to get to know Delaware.
Let’s set the table a little bit for our listeners here, and let people know what are the current offerings for Spotlight Delaware en Español?
CRISTAL: We are trying to provide news to the large Spanish-speaking community that is here in Delaware. There is a need in the community to provide news that they can use. So for example, cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, or just even uplifting voices that perhaps otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
It’s really just being able to build trust within the community and offering Spotlight Delaware as a trustworthy resource
Right now, our biggest strategy has really been to meet the community where they are at. Based on some community engagement that we’ve done, there’s a really big Spanish-speaking community in Facebook groups and WhatsApp. From both of our personal experiences, short-form video is honestly where the Spanish-speaking community in Delaware tends to get their news.
So we’ve really been trying to hone in and brand our Spotlight Delaware short-form video every week on Fridays. They’re branded as “Tell Your Tia,” which is something that we were able to come up with last summer, and the concept behind that is, “Here’s some news [for] your aunt or your mom or your grandma.” So [we’re]’ trying to not only translate our material, but really culturally translate the news.
One thing that Spotlight Delaware en Español is not is a weekly standalone newsletter of strictly Spanish-language content. Why is that? Why the focus on video and not a Spanish-language newsletter?
NATHALY: For the Hispanic community, from my experience and watching my parents, the communities around me, they tend to watch very short videos online. Something quick.
I always mention my dad because he’s just a great example. A lot of the time he watches news on TikTok, videos online, social media. And he’s like, “Oh, I saw this news,” and he would send it to me. I’m like, “Okay, so like that’s how you get your news?” He would send me only videos, because it’s just quick, easy, he understands it, and that’s it. Simple.
People sometimes just want quick videos to be able to see what’s going on in their communities. Since we speak Spanish, I think it’s so much easier for them to be clicking the videos and understanding what we’re saying in the communities.
There are also articles that appear on our website that are in English, but that deal specifically with Latino communities. [Note: every article on the Spotlight Delaware website can be immediately translated into Spanish or Haitian-Creole by using the “Select Your Language” toggle immediately under the main navigation toolbar.]
How do you see those articles written in English as connecting to the work of Spotlight Delaware en Español?
NATHALY: When it comes to watching the news, I think we see a lot of immigration headlines nationally and locally. I think our goal is also to show the good part of it, to show that these Hispanic communities rally together.
It’s not just immigration. I think coming together is really important to show people and Hispanics that we’re here, we’re working together, we’re getting through this. I think it’s just really important to show the community together right now.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you are out there reporting these articles, you are doing your interviews in Spanish. Does that play into this idea, again, of Spotlight Delaware en Español?
These articles are in English, but your reporting has been very definitely “en Español.” How does that play into getting trustworthy reporting?
CRISTAL: Oh, yeah. I mean, just right off the bat, I always start with letting people know that I do speak Spanish. Since I am white-passing, I can I almost describe it as I can feel barriers are sort of lifted whenever I do speak with people and let them know that I am a part of the community and that there are things that I do understand that are going on in the community that require, for example, using anonymity.
So I think the fact that Nathaly and I both speak Spanish is the reason why we are able to write the stories that we do, and it’s the reason why people trust us to write the stories, is because we connect with them in a way that perhaps other reporters couldn’t due to language barriers or cultural barriers.
The fact that we both have that knowledge under our belt has helped immensely.
NATHALY: Yeah, I definitely agree.
I think when we start off talking in Spanish, introducing who we are – I know for me, I usually start a lot of my interviews with “My parents are Colombian and Ecuadorian.” I talk a little bit about my background just so I can relate with them. And once I kind of give them who I am –
it’s all in Spanish – it gives them more of, like, “Okay, well, I trust you. I’m going to be able to tell you my story. I’m going to give you details.” [Detail that] I think a lot of reporters who don’t speak Spanish kind of miss. Speaking to people in Spanish, their native language,they feel super comfortable talking.
Cristal and I – I think we’re doing a good job. I hope we are.
Two years ago when we were starting to come up with the Spanish-language strategy, it was clear, as you all have mentioned, that video was going to be a big part of it. Then we actually thought, “Well, if we’re creating a Spanish-language video each week, we should also be creating an English-language video each week.”
We asked the question: should those videos be about the same story, or should they be about different news stories? There were arguments on each side.
On the one side, there was this [sense of], “Well, let’s do the same story so that we’re creating this kind of shared knowledge base for all Delawareans.”
On the other side, there was the argument that, “Hey, if you really want to specifically serve the Latino community, sometimes those stories are going to need to be different.”
You have walked into this setup here at Spotlight Delaware. Is that a tension you feel, serving those two different audiences? If so, how do you navigate that?
CRISTAL: Yeah, I think it’s important to recognize that different communities are going to have different needs. When you have reporters on the ground who are covering different types of communities, we obviously hear topics that are of priority in the community that maybe aren’t also the same priorities for other communities as well. In recognizing that, it means that we have to be cognizant of, “Okay, what is the most important information that the community needs as of right now?”
That may mean focusing on a story on immigration enforcement, but that also may mean also not focusing on a story on immigration enforcement, because not all Spanish speakers are immigrants. And so also leaning into if either of us attended an interesting Hispanic cultural festival, highlighting that in that week’s story.
As you’re a journalist on the ground, it’s just different because needs are different and because this is a community that isn’t largely covered in mainstream media, or if they are, it largely falls under negative news.
I’m guessing that when you are out there in the community meeting people, that you also are spreading some trustworthy news and information.
You’ve got the videos out there, but do you find yourself when you’re out there in the community, people are just asking you, “Hey, what’s the news about this?” And are you able to connect and spread information that way too?
NATHALY: Yeah, the more I put myself out there, the more I have these stories written, the more people will trust me and ask me questions to give them answers. That’s our whole job and our goal is to inform these people, teach them, and also let them know that there are things going on in our community that we need to have a conversation about.
CRISTAL: Yesterday I saw one of the people who I’ve spoken with, speak with regularly for my stories. She has a lot of good information. And she was recently impacted by the Medicare cuts. She was asking me if there were any updates, asking me if there were any resources.
So I think just the fact that I can point to the reporting that I’ve done, just be able to keep the community up to date on what we find out, and if there’s any resources that they can use. Like Nathaly said, getting to that point where people can trust us in the community is why we got into journalism, because I sort of think of it as a public service.
Information to me is a right that everyone should have.
As you both have been getting to know Delaware, has anything struck you as being unique about the Latino communities in the state?
NATHALY: The big population of Guatemalans. I didn’t know there were so many Guatemalans in Delaware. Where I come from, I don’t have a lot of Guatemalan friends. I didn’t know really about the community and the culture.
The story I did on the Georgetown Guatemalan community coming together that much in crisis, I thought that was really nice. I haven’t seen anything like that in my time in Philly or in Jersey as well.
CRISTAL: I am really surprised and interested in how the Spanish-speaking community gets their news. This is even something that caught me off guard or caught me by surprise last summer – to know how much the community really does rely on Spanish-speaking influencers or organizational leaders who have a really big social media presence for their news.
[The reason] Spotlight Delaware en Español is very video, social media-focused is because the truth of the matter is if a community isn’t being covered in mainstream media, that just paves the road for something else to come in and fill in that gap and that need for local news or just local information overall.
So I find that there’s also a really big community of Hispanic influencers that’s particularly unique.
What have you been finding so far are challenges of reporting on the Latino communities in Delaware? And what are the joys?
NATHALY: Cristal came in already kind of knowing some people in the community and they kind of knew who she was. I’m a little struggling with getting my name out there. A lot of people don’t know who I am, what my name is. I think it’s just that and making the connection and people trust me the more they get to know me.
So that’s one of my biggest struggles. I’m trying to go on coffee dates, go on festivals, just making sure people know who I am and making sure I’m a person that they can rely on and trust.
The joy is just talking to people. I love to know people’s stories. Just getting to know who they are, their communities, their culture. That’s why I got into journalism, because that connection is just amazing and I love it
CRISTAL: I think a challenge has been, as all my attorney sources will tell you, is just keeping up with the endless changes of anything relating to federal immigration policy right now. A lot of newsletters and my inbox is just flooded with those notifications. So it’s been really challenging to sift through the weeds and determine what is most particularly relevant to Delaware. This may be happening nationally, but is it happening in Delaware? It may or may not be.
And this leads to my joy, which is just keeping those constant connections with people who I meet. I’m in constant connection with a local Latino DJ who he’s really well in tune with what’s going on in the community. Leaders from La Plaza, who I know I can just text and ask. Bryant from La Esperanza has been great.
So in my mind, it’s just knowing that those people trust me to cover particularly sensitive stories.
Let’s close with this fill-in-the-blank question.
In your reporting work for Spotlight Delaware en Español, you will know you’ve done your job well if…
NATHALY: I like this question. I think if I get some sort of reaction on one of my articles. Knowing that people took the time to read, even if it’s a good reaction or bad reaction.
I got an email, not nice, on my immigration story. It wasn’t nice, but it gave me sort of like, okay, well you had the time [to write] a three paragraph email, a reaction out of that article and it had an impact in some way. It made you think about what I wrote.
That gives me sort of like, okay, you know what’s going on, you read it.
Just having a reaction, I think that’s important, whether it’s good or bad.
CRISTAL: It’s when someone else reaches out to me because of the story that I wrote and wants to share their story or is able to provide a different angle on the story that I wrote as well.
A couple weeks ago, I did a story on how Flock cameras were being used in Georgetown, and I received a lot of emails with talking points and angles and basically just more ideas to follow up.
So for me, a great story is going to be one of many follow-up stories that continues to raise more questions and to create a public forum where people can critically think about what I wrote and offer different opinions and, and perspectives
Thank you both for your time today. It’s great to have you on the team strengthening Spotlight’s service to Spanish-speaking Delawareans.
President Zardari suspends provincial government in escalation of tensions as Khan supporters march to Islamabad
Politicians from the party of the former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan have been detained after the suspension of a provincial government now under emergency rule.
Pakistan’s president declared a state of emergency and suspended the government in north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, led by Khan’s ally Sohail Afridi, on Sunday.
Temperatures fluctuated dramatically in the Balkans last week, with unusually large differences between daytime highs and overnight lows – known as the diurnal range.
An area of high pressure over the region brought prolonged sunshine during the day, while clear skies at night allowed temperatures to drop rapidly as heat escaped into the atmosphere without cloud cover to slow the cooling.
Why Should Delaware Care? In 2024, Delaware enacted a law to expunge low-level criminal records, removing a barrier that can keep people from accessing jobs, housing, and education. The law was expected to clear records for close to 300,000 adults, but disagreements among state officials over which records qualify delayed the process. Now some are unsure whether their record has been cleared.
Months after Delaware officials resolved a dispute over how to implement their new Clean Slate law, the state has expunged nearly 280,000 low-level criminal cases from people’s records.
While the number is sizable, it falls short of Gov. Matt Meyer’s goal, announced in June, of clearing the state’s entire backlog of Clean Slate cases by August.
According to officials with the Delaware Criminal Justice Information System, over 350,000 potentially expungable adult and juvenile cases remain. Those officials could not provide an estimate for the numbers of individuals impacted, noting that one person can have more than one case.
Passed in 2021 and implemented in 2024, the Delaware Clean Slate Act was designed to expunge low-level criminal cases, such as shoplifting or possession of drug paraphernalia, from people’s records.
Delaware was the fifth state then to adopt a Clean Slate law. Today there are a total of 14 states and Washington D.C. with similar legislation.
Employers, landlords and educational institutions often use background checks to screen applicants, which can prevent people with minor charges, such as shoplifting or possession of drug paraphernalia, from accessing housing, jobs and education.
While many in Delaware now have that obstacle removed, Spotlight Delaware has learned that the state will not notify individuals impacted by the changes, leading to confusion for some.
Kent County resident Rebecka Ash | PHOTO COURTESY OF REBECKA ASH
Among those is Rebecka Ash, a Kent County resident who is completing a master’s degree in social work while also applying for jobs she needs to obtain a professional license. She says she is uncertain whether potential employers will find out about her past.
Ash began her education after a period in which she spent in prison on drug charges. And she has noted that her record had show up earlier this year on background checks, costing her internships and scholarships.
“There’s a disconnect, and nobody really knows who to ask or what to do,” Ash said, referring to questions around notification.
An official with Gov. Matt Meyer’s office told Spotlight Delaware that the state does not plan to notify individuals when their records have been expunged, citing “practical concerns” that a notice sent to the wrong person or disclosed to others could compromise their privacy.
“It could undermine the privacy relief that expungement is intended to provide,” the official said.
Part of the delay stemmed from a disagreement between state officials over the number of cases that should be cleared.
After the law passed, officials from the Delaware Criminal Justice Information System identified more than 290,000 adults with nearly 600,000 cases eligible for expungement.
But officials from the State Bureau of Identification, under the Delaware State Police, said the estimated caseload was inaccurate.
Jamie Mangrum, a spokeswoman for Meyer’s office, said the officials have since made progress on resolving the dispute and “the process is now moving at a very strong pace.”
Gov Matt Meyer, pictured during his 2026 State of the State address. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Despite the progress, John Reynolds, an official with the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, said the rollout is moving too slowly. He noted that state officials had three years to implement the program, between the time it passed to its launch in 2024.
“Most other states have done it in a year or two years,” said Reynolds, the ACLU’s deputy policy and advocacy director.
Meryem Dede, an attorney and executive director of Tide Shift Justice Project, a local criminal justice reform advocacy organization, said the delay may push people to pay the costly fees associated with manually applying for an expungement.
Even as the state works through its backlog, the challenge remains of notifying people when their records have been cleared.
Without a notification system, people must find other ways to determine whether their records have been cleared. Although many states with automatic expungement laws lack a streamlined portal for checking expungement status, some offer easier access to court records, Dede said.
She pointed to Pennsylvania and Maryland, which offer searchable court systems that allow individuals to look up their cases and see whether records remain publicly accessible.
In Delaware’s case, the standard method for requesting a copy of one’s criminal history is done through a process that costs $72.
Another option is to attend a state expungement fair. These events are hosted by the Delaware Office of Defense Services. Although the events are not designed to help people verify their records, staff and attorneys can offer advice on expungements and pardons.
Dede also noted people with recent cases could also contact their former attorneys, who may still have access to their records in order to check whether they have been expunged.
As a last resort, individuals can visit their local courthouse to check whether their records remain publicly accessible through the Judicial Information Center, an electronic court docket.
Although the state’s court system has made strides in digitizing its civil caseload in recent years, its criminal case search remains antiquated beyond modern standards.
The system — which resembles the MS-DOS operating system of the 1980s rather than a modern Google-style search field — can be difficult to navigate, requiring specific case or identification numbers.
She added there is no public service to help people use it and that accessing or printing records at the courthouse may also come with additional costs.
The strike on King Khalid International Airport, the deadliest on Saudi soil in more than a decade, marked a major escalation in the war between Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis and the kingdom.
Descendant of 19-century artist demands removal of Marc Chagall’s 1960s canvasses that cover original fresco
In 1962, the then French culture minister, André Malraux, reportedly bored by the ballet he was watching at Paris’s opera house, raised his eyes to the classical ceiling and decided it needed a makeover.
In his ennui, Malraux thought his friend and artist Marc Chagall, sitting next to him at the Palais Garnier at the time, was the man for the job and commissioned him to make a new ceiling.
New York, NY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a sweeping review of New York Police Department use-of-force policies Monday, along with new accountability measures aimed at officers accused of serious misconduct.
The review, described as the department’s first comprehensive examination of its use-of-force rules in roughly a decade, will include community input and reconsider how officers are trained and guided in encounters involving force.
The changes follow renewed criticism surrounding the 2024 police killing of Win Rozario, a Queens teenager experiencing a mental health crisis. One officer involved was allowed to retire before facing a disciplinary trial after the NYPD failed to notify the Civilian Complaint Review Board of his retirement request.
Mamdani said the city will provide an additional $2.6 million to the NYPD Office of Inspector General, nearly tripling its current staffing capacity. The administration also plans to strengthen procedures preventing officers facing serious discipline from retiring and later seeking other law-enforcement jobs without their records following them.
Additional reforms include improving the release of information to families after fatal or serious police encounters and ensuring required reports of police-involved deaths are submitted to the state.
The announcement comes as Mamdani continues facing pressure from supporters who argue he has retreated from several police-reform promises made during his mayoral campaign.
In a recent visit to Greece, the secretary of state suggested that Europe must rediscover the values of conquest and expansion
They had obviously worked hard on the backdrop – and it was magnificent. On 7 October, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, delivered a major speech in Athens, outdoors, with the Acropolis behind him. The sun was setting, bathing the ancient scene, including the Parthenon, in the light of the golden hour.
The golden hour, but yet not quite the golden age. This was not Pericles defending democracy. Instead, Rubio offered a haunting vision of the choices facing the west, arguing that the US and Europe must rediscover the values of exploration and conquest that once drove centuries of expansion, or face decline and irrelevance.
Roger Marshall says he has ‘no idea how this happened’ and repaid bill double for 2020 election watch party treats
The Republican US senator Roger Marshall says he has finally paid off a bakery debt – after six years and repeated collection attempts reported by a Kansas business that had supplied a large order of treats for a 2020 election watch party.
“We have absolutely no idea how this happened”, the Kansas senator wrote in a social media post containing a screenshot of the payment on a $678.75 invoice from Holly’s Sweet Treats as well as his $1,300 payment. “And we have repaid the bill … double.”
Quite a few parents aren’t convinced social media and AI are safe, and have been adapting accordingly
When it comes to their kids, many parents don’t trust tech companies any more.
Social media companies have spent the better part of the last decade arguing that their platforms are safe for teens, but quite a few parents aren’t convinced. They, along with a growing number of regulators, have increasingly accused companies like Meta of designing products that are addictive to younger users.
Get Involved The Hip-Hop Cultural Summit comes to Delaware Art Museum (2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington) on Saturday, Oct. 17, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The day will feature an MC battle, drumline and dance performances, live DJs and panel discussions with graffiti pioneer Darryl “Cornbread” McCray and Public Enemy co-founder Chuck D. Admission is free, but registration is required.
Delaware native and AllHipHop co-founder “Grouchy” Greg Watkins was more focused on celebrating hip-hop’s upcoming 50th birthday than his own in the early months of 2023.
The genre is widely recognized as beginning with an August 1973 back-to-school party in the Bronx organized by DJ Kool Herc, who used vinyl records to extend percussive breaks to dance to — and, eventually, rap over.
Watkins was born five months later. As he grew up in Newark, so did the genre. Living in such close proximity to Philadelphia, Watkins would listen to Street Beat on Power 99, the radio show hosted by Lady B, the first woman to record a hip-hop single.
“It was a crash course in hip-hop when I was in fourth grade,” Watkins said. “Hip-hop was very new. It was still a subculture, and everybody here (in Delaware) was participating in it.”
Watkins experienced hip-hop’s meteoric rise to the mainstream from ground zero as a music journalist with AllHipHop, the news website he founded with Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur in 1998.
After devoting his life to hip-hop, Watkins wanted to ensure the genre’s semi-centennial was properly celebrated. So, he pitched an event — the Hip-Hop Cultural Summit — to Delaware Art Museum Cultural Programs Director Iz Balleto in 2023.
“Grouchy” Greg Watkins and Iz Balleto stand in front of “Heads on Fire” by MaxxMoses, one of many works being displayed at Delaware Art Museum for “Walls of Resistance: Art as Activism.” The graffiti-themed exhibit coincides with the Hip-Hop Cultural Summit on Oct. 17. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
“We wanted to make sure that we honored the culture by making sure it’s part of history,” Balleto said. “To do it in the art museum, they have to archive it. That means it’s no longer a typical hip-hop event or a rap show.”
The annual event returns on Saturday, Oct. 17, to celebrate hip-hop’s five elements: MCing, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti and knowledge, the wisdom imparted through the artwork.
The summit will feature dance and music performances by regional artists and organizations, as well as panel discussions by Public Enemy co-founder Chuck D and pioneering Philadelphia graffiti artist Darryl “Cornbread” McCray — a legend who tagged The Jackson 5’s private jet and an elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo.
“I love when I hear our elders saying, ‘You changed the perspective of the way we see hip-hop culture, not from the commercial point of view, but from the cultural point of view,’” Balleto said. “It’s really a mission to always bring people together, unify … because that’s the whole essence of hip-hop culture.”
Hip-hop history
Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur, left, and “Grouchy” Greg Watkins and Iz Balleto, right, stand with rapper DMC at the 2025 Hip-Hop Cultural Summit. | PHOTO BY HB INTERCEPTOR, COURTESY OF DELAWARE ART MUSEUM
Household names like Chuck D get people through the door, but the heart of the Hip-Hop Cultural Summit has always been highlighting Delaware’s contributions to the music industry, Watkins said.
The first summit gathered a panel of Delaware hip-hop artists who released records before the digital age. Every year since then, Watkins has found a way to tell stories from local music history. He’s still finalizing what story he’ll tell this year.
Delaware’s contributions to hip-hop are far from insignificant. As an example, Young Guru, the Grammy Award-winning audio engineer who’s worked with Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Kanye West, is from Wilmington.
Moreover, a man from Dover forever changed the way people listen to music. Eldridge Reeves Johnson improved the gramophone by inventing a spring motor that eliminated the need for manual cranking. That paved the way for DJs. Reeves also created the Victrola, which he sold through his Victor Talking Machine Company.
Watkins founded a nonprofit, Victor Society, in collaboration with the Johnson Victrola Museum in Dover a couple of years ago. The nonprofit uses the record player as a gateway to get kids interested in STEM, business and the arts.
Watkins said hip-hop has the power to do the same.
“What better way to get young people involved in a particular pathway into their career … than through the most popular form of culture and music in the world?” Watkins said.
Some educators have already picked up on the effectiveness of using hip-hop to teach.
For example, The Bronx School of Hip-Hop, a public high school that uses hip-hop as a framework for teaching subjects like math and English, opened last month.
“I hope that we’re next,” Balleto said.
‘Culture is a weapon’
An art piece by graffiti pioneer Darryl “Cornbread” McCray on display at the Delaware Art Museum. After false reports of being shot dead in 1971, Cornbread tagged an elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo. Cornbread will be a speaker at the Hip-Hop Cultural Summit on Oct. 17. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Balleto grew up in New York City, where there was no end to third spaces for kids and teens to express themselves artistically.
Balleto said Delaware is lacking in comparison, particularly when it comes to spaces for hip-hop.
“As a museum, I want to make sure that we inspire other institutions to open their doors,” he said.
Balleto and Watkins view hip-hop, like all forms of artistic expression, as a community-builder that can curtail instances of violence stemming from mental health issues or lack of resources.
“The goal is to show everybody that (hip-hop) is the tool the community can use to combat violence,” Watkins said. “But you have to have a space for it. You can’t be scared of it. You should be scared of the violence that’s on the street corner, not the kids that need a venue to come in and express (themselves). Even if it is their anger, it has to be expressed.”
Balleto’s motto is, “Culture is a weapon” — one people can use to empower themselves and uplift their communities.
Jay Macklin, executive director of Wilmington-based Stop the Violence Coalition, agreed with that assessment. That’s why the nonprofit is participating in the Hip-Hop Cultural Summit for the first time this year.
Macklin and other concerned citizens founded Stop the Violence Coalition in 2001 after the fatal shootings of 5-year-old Damon Gist Jr. and 28-year-old Darnell Evans in a Wilmington barbershop.
The nonprofit’s mission is simple: to bring about peace in the community. In its “Academy for Peace” headquarters on Lower Market Street, Macklin and her volunteers offer financial coaching, family and mental health counseling, arts programming and more.
“You name it, we probably offer it,” Macklin said.
And if the nonprofit doesn’t offer a particular service, volunteers will do their best to connect whoever walks through the door with the resources they need, she added.
During the upcoming Hip-Hop Cultural Summit, Stop the Violence Coalition will hold a drumline performance and a “Superheroes for Peace” ceremony honoring individual community members.
Macklin said the event will serve as effective outreach, especially to young people. Besides, she added, hip-hop has historically aligned with the nonprofit’s mission of non-violence.
For example, a group of rappers, including Chuck D and Flavor Flav, released the charity single “Self Destruction” in 1989 to protest violence in the wake of a fan’s death at a Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy show. The name the rappers released the single under — Stop the Violence Movement — coincidentally echoes the name of Macklin’s nonprofit.
The Hip-Hop Cultural Summit on Oct. 17 will feature many breakdancing performances at the Delaware Art Museum. | PHOTO BY SHANNON WOODLOE, COURTESY OF DELAWARE ART MUSEUM
Ladies of Hip-Hop Dance Collective return to the Hip-Hop Cultural Summit at Delaware Art Museum on Oct. 17. | PHOTO BY HB INTERCEPTOR, COURTESY OF DELAWARE ART MUSEUM
Ladies of Hip-Hop Dance Collective return to the Hip-Hop Cultural Summit at Delaware Art Museum on Oct. 17. | PHOTO BY HB INTERCEPTOR, COURTESY OF DELAWARE ART MUSEUM
Art as Activism
Because social justice is foundational to hip-hop, Watkins and Balleto chose “Art as Activism” as the theme for this year’s Hip-Hop Cultural Summit.
“We wanted to make sure that people knew the social justice aspect of (hip-hop), because in the beginning, it was addressing police brutality, poverty, issues that really mattered in the community,” Balleto said.
In line with the central theme, Wilmington nonprofit organization Cultural Restoration Project will hold a social justice-themed MC battle featuring 11- to 14-year-old participants.
“The topics we gave them are not easy topics. It’s like, ‘How do you combat violence?’ And they have to rap about this against each other,” Watkins said.
Given the central theme of activism, Chuck D, the Public Enemy frontman known for combating social issues with wordplay, was the ideal keynote speaker.
“To have someone here, living history in the flesh, to talk to us about what we can do to help our young people cope with what I know is a mental health crisis that’s resulting in violence in the city?” Watkins said. “It’s something that should not be missed.”
A flyer for Delaware Art Museum’s Hip-Hop Cultural Summit on Oct. 17. | FLYER COURTESY OF DELAWARE ART MUSEUM
Why Should Delaware Care? The Delaware Freedom of Information Act and its corresponding statute at the federal level provide the rules that require government officials to release records to the public, when requested. But for years, Delaware’s law has been rated as among the least accommodative to public transparancy in the country.
A leading Democrat in the Delaware Senate wants to reform the state’s Freedom of Information Act by opening broad sections of government business to scrutiny, while also giving officials the ability to deny records requests they deem abusive.
Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark/Glasgow) introduced the omnibus Freedom of Information Act bill last week, with dozens of new provisions for the statute that became law 50 years ago with the goal of making government more transparent.
Among the most notable of the provisions within Senate Bill 355 is one that would broadly subject the University of Delaware and Delaware State University to the state’s FOIA requirements.
For years, transparency at the state’s universities, particularly UD, has been a widely discussed topic in Dover and among members of the media. The institutions’ exemption from FOIA also led to the highest profile open records dispute in Delaware in recent years.
In 2021, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that UD had the right to deny a records request made by two conservative organizations seeking documents held by the university that had originated with then-President Joe Biden’s previous office in the U.S. Senate.
In their ruling, justices cited a provision within the state open records law that Townsend’s bill would eliminate.
A portion of Senate Bill 355 shows how language that exempts Delaware universities from FOIA would be removed. It would be a major change in how Delaware’s Freedom of Information Act is applied. | PHOTO COURTESY OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Other notable provisions within Townsend’s bill would end the prohibition around records requests by non-residents, prohibit the state from imposing fees on FOIA requests made by certain individuals, including reporters and academics; and prohibit government officials from automatically shielding “investigative” documents from FOIA.
That last provision expands widely beyond traditional criminal investigatory files and includes a range of records that public officials deem were an “investigation.” It is among the most widely cited exemption used by officials to deny records requests.
Asked about the removal of the FOIA exemption for investigative records, Townsend said he has heard of requests involving records that would benefit the public that have been stonewalled because of “the idea of the investigatory shield.”
“I think we really need to strike a different balance with that,” he said.
While much of the bill requires officials to release more records than under current rules, certain provisions would make the statute less expansive. The legislation would codify into the FOIA statute an exemption to open records law for requests that state officials deem unreasonably broad, unduly burdensome, disruptive or abusive to government officials.
Among the criteria to determine the abusiveness of a request is the number of FOIAs a requestor has filed in the past. The provision drew rebukes from several individuals on Facebook Thursday after the news site First State Update referenced it in a post. One user questioned, “So they set limits as to what is reasonable?”
In his interview with Spotlight Delaware, Townsend asserted that individuals who file frequent or voluminous requests impose a steep cost on government operations.
While Townsend’s bill is an ambitious set of changes, it will not become law in its current form. Townsend introduced the legislation just before the formal end of Delaware’s two-year legislative cycle this fall — meaning it will expire before lawmakers reconvene for the 2027 legislative session in January.
Rather than passing into law immediately, Townsend said the purpose of filing the bill now is to spark comments and feedback from citizens, including those who file or process open records requests.
“I want to have this conversation, collect this input, and see how we might modify this legislation when we refile it in 2027,” he said.
Editor’s Note: Spotlight Delaware spoke with Sen. Bryan Townsend in early 2026 about Delaware’s FOIA law and how certain provisions can impede the work of journalism.
Silicon to systems engineering is reshaping HPC for manufacturing
As product design becomes more interconnected, manufacturers need engineering infrastructure that can support EDA, CAE, and AI workflows across domains.
Manufacturers have long relied on high-performance computing (HPC) to push the limits of engineering design. But the context is changing: problems once treated separately are becoming inseparable. A recent paper by HPE and AMD, with contributions from Synopsys, Siemens and Cadence, documents this transformation and its challenges.
Consider the emerging requirement for electro-thermal co-design, where engineers must evaluate electrical, thermal, and mechanical effects simultaneously rather than as separate design activities. Semiconductor packages can no longer be optimized in electrical design silos when power density, cooling efficiency, and mechanical stress all affect performance and reliability. Transistor placement influences power density which affects temperature which affects timing, and timing constraints can ultimately reshape processor architecture. Timing limitations may also drive changes such as lower clock frequencies, additional pipeline stages, modified floorplans, or different chiplet partitioning strategies.
These cross-domain dependencies are pushing engineering toward a silicon-to-systems model in which electronic design automation (EDA), computer-aided engineering (CAE), AI, and other disciplines interact earlier and more continuously throughout development.
For manufacturers, this convergence has an important infrastructure consequence: engineering workloads that historically operated in separate computing environments increasingly need to work together.
EDA and CAE pose very different HPC challenges
EDA and CAE have long depended on HPC, but for different reasons. Many EDA workflows are dominated by large volumes of jobs associated with simulation, verification, synthesis, and physical implementation. Performance can depend heavily on CPU frequency, cache, memory latency, storage responsiveness, and the ability to schedule large numbers of jobs efficiently.
By contrast, CAE applications such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), and computational electromagnetics (CEM) often emphasize parallel scaling. Large simulations may span many CPU cores or multiple nodes, placing greater demands on memory bandwidth, memory capacity, and high-speed interconnects.
Figure 1: Converged environments must support both EDA and CAE workloads, requiring infrastructure that is optimized for widely varying simulation needs
Increasingly, AI introduces a third workload profile, bringing additional requirements for accelerators, data movement, and model training infrastructure.
None of these workload profiles is inherently more demanding. They are all demanding, but in different ways. As workflows become more interconnected and engineering teams begin sharing HPC resources, simply placing EDA and CAE applications on a common pool of generic servers does not create a converged engineering platform. It can instead introduce new bottlenecks if infrastructure is not aligned with workload behavior.
The challenge is to create a shared HPC environment capable of supporting heterogeneous engineering workloads while preserving the performance characteristics each requires. Success depends not only on maximizing utilization, but also on ensuring that engineers across multiple disciplines can access the right resources at the right time without compromising productivity.
Elements of a successful silicon-to-systems environment
Diverse workloads can coexist—but efficient coexistence requires more than just a faster machine. For manufacturers running large engineering environments, the coordination of jobs, compute resources, and software license availability can become as important as increasing raw cluster capacity.
Data orchestration is critical because workflows span heterogeneous tools, formats, and scales — from transistor-level models to full-system simulations. Effective orchestration of unified data pipelines helps reduce cycle time, improve cross-domain correlation, and maximize license and compute efficiency. And HPC workload managers need to match jobs with the right compute, memory, network, and accelerator resources while accounting for priorities, dependencies, and availability.
Application licensing adds another constraint. EDA and CAE engineers depend on costly applications with specific license features. Having compute available doesn’t do much good when a job cannot obtain the required license. Conversely, an available license creates no engineering throughput when the appropriate compute resource is unavailable.
As engineering domains become more connected, storage and data movement also become critical. Models, geometry, simulation results, semiconductor design data, and AI-generated information increasingly move across workflows, making data-path performance a factor in engineering iteration time. Distributed simulations likewise depend on interconnects that can sustain application communication patterns.
The result is a more heterogeneous HPC environment in which CPU-intensive workloads, parallel simulations, GPU-accelerated applications, and AI must coexist. The HPC infrastructure must match each workload with the appropriate processor, memory, storage, network, accelerator, and scheduling resources rather than rely on a single architecture for every job.
An HPC foundation for silicon to systems engineering
Together, HPE and AMD are building infrastructure designed to address silicon-to-systems engineering environments. HPE Cray systems and HPE ProLiant servers powered by AMD EPYC server processors can support both throughput-oriented EDA workloads and highly parallel CAE applications, with configurations tailored to characteristics such as processor frequency, cache, core density, and memory requirements. AMD Instinct GPUs extend that infrastructure for accelerated simulation and AI workloads.
Figure 2: Key elements of a silicon-to-systems design infrastructure
Networking options including HPE Slingshot, InfiniBand, and high-speed Ethernet allow the fabric to be aligned with workload scale and communication requirements. HPE Performance Cluster Manager, along with integration with leading HPC schedulers, ensures optimal workload orchestration and system management, while advanced direct liquid cooling addresses the increasing power density associated with large-scale HPC.
HPE and AMD also collaborate with engineering software providers to profile workloads, validate configurations, and align infrastructure with requirements for scheduling, licensing, acceleration, and visualization. That application-level optimization becomes especially important when the same infrastructure must support multiple engineering disciplines.
The next manufacturing HPC challenge is system level
Silicon to systems engineering expands the HPC objective from optimizing individual workloads to optimizing end-to-end product design across interacting disciplines.
For manufacturers, success will depend on how efficiently their infrastructure supports that broader engineering process.
MEP Raphaël Glucksmann issues call after becoming social democrat candidate for 2027 presidential election
The European lawmaker Raphaël Glucksmann has urged the French centre left to wage an “existential battle” to prevent Marine Le Pen’s far right winning the 2027 presidential election after he was chosen as the social democrat candidate for the presidency.
“We’ve got to rid our hearts of the spirit of defeat,” Glucksmann, the founder of the small party Place Publique, said on Monday morning after his decisive win in a centre-left primary race held by the Socialist party.
Survivors had criticised ‘outrageous’ appointment of Laura Johnson to £150,000 job with Barnet Group
A housing director who oversaw cost cutting at Grenfell Tower before the fatal fire has left a £150,000-a-year senior council housing role after a backlash from bereaved families and survivors.
Laura Johnson was the director of housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) at the time of the 2017 Grenfell fire which killed 72 people, and was criticised in the subsequent inquiry for her role in budget-cutting decisions prior to the blaze.
Proposals to assess older physicians have collided with fierce professional resistance, legal challenges and debate about the value of cognitive screening.
As the Trump administration unveiled an indictment earlier this year against 15 anti-ICE activists, many of whom identify as radicals, for purportedly tormenting federal agents last winter, a top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official took the podium.
There were two types of protests, said Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge Michael McCarthy, who oversaw the ICE agents in a St. Paul, Minnesota, field office who conducted the investigation.
“Peaceful protest is a protected right, and a cornerstone of our democracy,” said McCarthy. “When protest turns into rioting, violence or criminal activity, it becomes unlawful and it will not be tolerated.”
McCarthy’s comments stood in stark contrast with ICE’s record in Minneapolis, where a federal judge had been forced to issue an injunction to stop federal agents from pepper-spraying and arresting peaceful protesters during their enforcement blitz, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.
Legal experts, too, had criticisms of the indictment: The Justice Department, one pointed out, had concocted a federal conspiracy out of what would normally be misdemeanor charges.
In the months since, criticisms of the case have only grown louder. Court filings revealed that McCarthy’s agents secretly infiltrated groups that preach nonviolence, including labor unions and nonprofits. They also wielded subpoenas in a fruitless hunt for financiers of “domestic terrorism,” taking a cue from President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 labeling swaths of the far left as terrorists.
The Trump administration has won some success in going after left-wing protesters under NSPM-7, but the Minneapolis case is proving to be more challenging.
In other prosecutions targeting activists, like the Prairieland case in Texas, mainstream groups have shied away from supporting the defendants. In Minnesota, though, groups once wary of being associated with the 15 defendants, many of whom are self-described anarchists, have rallied to their side.
Powerful labor unions that make up the backbone of the state’s progressive movement have raised funds on behalf of the defendants, incensed at the infiltration from federal undercover agents. Rather than dividing and conquering the left, the case has united it.
“They’re trying to split the movement and absolutely failing.”
Supporters of the defendants, who have collectively come to be known as the Minneapolis or Minnesota 15, recently packed a bowling alley for a fundraiser. On October 3, hundreds of labor union members marched through downtown Minneapolis, demanding that the charges against the activists be dropped.
Meanwhile, the defendants themselves have so far mounted a unified, joint defense; none of them have taken a plea deal.
“They’re trying to split the movement and absolutely failing,” said Emmett James Doyle, a defendant in the case. “There’s been just complete solidarity behind us from basically every sector of Twin Cities life.”
“Can’t Indict 100,000 People”
Doyle’s ruddy face and wild beard would have been at home in Big Bill Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World a century ago. By day he’s a union carpenter, by night he plucks a banjo and sings songs about America’s radical past.
Federal prosecutors allege that he brought those songs to life on the streets of Minneapolis.
In a 94-page indictment, prosecutors claim that Doyle and the other 14 defendants were members or associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota that “infiltrated and exploited lawful protests” to target ICE.
Prosecutors painted a dark picture of DAMN. Their tactics allegedly included blocking access to a federal building used by ICE with disabled cars or trailers, bringing shields and gas masks to protests, and, in one instance, following an ICE agent across state lines to his home in Wisconsin.
Government attorneys also leaned heavily on the defendants’ comments to each other in private messages about their frustration with more mainstream protesters and the need for “militant” action.
Despite the prosecutors’ claims about rioting and violence at the June press conference, however, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, was unable to identify injuries to federal officers when reporters pressed him.
There are committed anarchists among the defendants charged in the indictment, several defendants told The Intercept, but there was little difference between what they did and what thousands of Minneapolis residents did during the federal immigration crackdown.
Ordinary Minnesotans walked frigid streets with whistles dangling from their necks to alert their neighbors about ICE raids. They sent license plate numbers of federal vehicles to Signal group chats. Members of rapid-response networks trailed suspected agents in their cars.
The indictment is replete with examples of protesters trailing agents in vehicles, a tactic known as “commuting.” Yet that was a tactic so widely employed by rapid-response groups in Minneapolis that it was even adopted by a congressional candidate in a suburban district who recently won his Democratic primary.
“I think there are people in the government who really do believe that there is like a small cabal of people who are fomenting all the dissent, and if you get rid of them, that everyone will be quiet,” Doyle said. “And that’s fundamentally wrong.”
Doyle, like the four other defendants interviewed by The Intercept, declined to discuss the specific allegations in the indictment, citing advice from his attorney.
“They’re just trying to find people to make examples of.”
Still, another defendant, Treasure Thoreson, was adamant that none of the defendants ever used violence. Thoreson is a special education teacher whose elementary school’s lanyard was still dangling from her neck during a recent interview. She believes the group was targeted because of its radical views.
“They clearly had people that they had identified as problematic in some way and have been trying to tie these people to leading the resistance,” Thoreson said. “They can’t indict 100,000 people, so really, they’re just trying to find people to make examples of.”
“Attack on the Movement’
Thoreson said she has received steady support from her teachers union since the indictment.
She and many other defendants believe the charges against them are a way of attacking Minnesota’s powerful labor movement. By the count of defendants who spoke to The Intercept, at least 11 of the 15 have been involved in union organizing.
The internal Homeland Security Investigations files unearthed by the defense team lend credibility to this theory. Undercover agents attended an organizing meeting at the United Labor Centre, a building that houses multiple unions. HSI, the investigative wing of ICE, also subpoenaed the financial records of the SEIU and the Communications Workers of America as part of an overlapping probe into “domestic terror financing.”
Several defendants interviewed by The Intercept were amused at the idea that they were receiving funding from mainstream organizations. They have long lobbed critiques at the labor movement’s institutional core from its fringes.
After some initial hesitance, unions and nonprofit groups responded in force to the case. Days after the indictment, some labor groups signed onto a joint statement denouncing the charges. After a court filing from the defendants revealed the subpoenas of the unions’ financing, more labor organizations raised their voices.
“Generally speaking, the labor movement is awfully conservative — too conservative — on issues like this, and can sometimes be scared out of solidarity with people who are fighting back,” said Kieran Knutson, the president of CWA Local 7250 in Minneapolis.
More unions rallied, Knutson said, as it became clear that prosecutors could not point to examples of physical harm, as union locals pressured statewide organizations, and as the defendants themselves articulated why the case was important.
“These are active people in the labor movement, and I think in many ways people see them as an expression of the movement as a whole,” Knutson said. “And these charges were an attack on the movement as a whole.”
Knutson said he knows the value of solidarity: In 1993, he was charged with assaulting a man wearing neo-Nazi patches during an antiracist demonstration on the University of Minnesota campus, according to news reports from the time. He was acquitted with the help of attorney Keith Ellison, who later went on to win election as the state’s attorney general.
“I know what it’s like to have the weight of the charges just hanging over you,” Knutson said.
The leading candidate in the Hennepin County Attorney race, state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who also works as a lawyer for labor union Education Minnesota, told The Intercept in a recent interview that the charges should be dismissed.
“I think they’re trying to, for lack of a better word, ‘Trump’ up some charges to continue his pursuit of retribution against Minnesota,” said Frazier. “I mean, look, they don’t like labor groups.”
A broad coalition of labor groups including the state AFL-CIO endorsed an October 3 rally and march in support of the defendants, another sign that skepticism of the case has gone mainstream.
Hundreds of janitors, teachers, public employees, and hospitality workers joined the march, said Isaac Sant, a defendant and longtime labor organizer. He said seeing them on the streets was “humbling.”
Sant recently joined defendants from other cases with political overtones, including Prairieland, to form what they are dubbing the NSPM-7 Defendants Union.
“I can only speak for myself, but I don’t have any problem linking my case to the Prairieland cases. I think what happened to them was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice,” Sant said. “I think it’s very important that we stand in solidarity with people who are in that position, and especially with people who are getting railroaded even worse than we are.”
Israel's election: What will it mean for Israeli democracy and society?
20
October 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Online
Ahead of a key election in Israel on the 27th October, experts assess the forces shaping the campaign and the domestic implications for both Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Ahead of a key election in Israel on the 27th October, experts assess the forces shaping the campaign and the domestic implications for both Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Since the formation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, Israel’s politics, society and economy have undergone significant change. The question of national security has dominated the political agenda since the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s military offensive on Gaza. However, key domestic issues including accountability, the future of democratic institutions and the role of religion in the state are also on the ballot. The result could have lasting implications for Israel’s political system and broader social cohesion.
This event discusses:
What issues are shaping Israel’s election campaign?
To what extent is the future of Israeli democracy on the ballot?
What political scenarios could emerge after the vote?
How could the result affect Israel’s economy and social cohesion?
To what extent is the question of the conflict with Palestine being addressed by political candidates?
Scott Singer and Pavlo Zvenyhorodsky, researchers at Carnegie’s China AI Initiative, argue that China is betting that AI dominance will come from combining hardware and software, or AI-powered robots. By focusing only on software such as AI models, they argue, Washington and Silicon Valley risk falling behind.
Artificial intelligence is less regulated than milk and washing machines, the president of Microsoft has said, as the tech industry warns over the safety of AI.
Brad Smith said there should be more safety rules to govern the technology including a legal obligation to a “victim” if their system was breached by rogue AI agents.
ABC management has refused to rule out disciplinary action against a journalist and union office-holder for writing an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review, according to the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).
The award-winning ABC climate journalist, Michael Slezak, had an article published last week in Nine’s financial newspaper in his capacity as federal president of MEAA.
"This year, nearly the entire fleet of 94 U.S. nuclear reactors has been offered the chance to integrate AI into its operations, and most have taken it," reports IEEE Spectrum:
In August, California-based Atomic Canyon launched NIVA, the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, which was developed in cooperation with nuclear-industry groups. The assistant was pilot-tested in nuclear plants run by Constellation Energy and is now available to the United States' entire fleet of reactors.... Meanwhile, the AI-for-nuclear startup Nuclearn says its products have gone to work with more than 65 U.S. partners, a total that includes many traditional plants but also an integration with NuScale Power Corp. that is working toward advanced small nuclear reactors. Microsoft and Nvidia have collaborated on a project to apply AI toward optimizing "the entire life cycle of a nuclear plant, spanning site permitting, design, construction, and continuous operations."
The reason for the rapid adoption, according to Nuclearn CFO and cofounder Jerrold Vincent, is twofold. First, the technology companies banking their futures on AI are also keen on a revival of nuclear power to provide the electricity for all those data centers. Vincent says AI is also ideal for addressing some of the nuclear industry's most pressing problems. Many of the things that make reactors so difficult to operate — intricate regulations, along with complex systems for management and maintenance — are exactly the kinds of tasks that AI is good at. The industry is staggering to deal with aging hardware and an aging workforce. If it is going to survive, and have a real shot at a nuclear revival, it will need help from machine intelligence, Vincent says...
Right now, the principal output of a nuclear reactor (aside from electricity) is paperwork. Nuclear plants produce piles of documentation to demonstrate regulatory compliance and to record how they respond to any potential problem, from a crack in the sidewalk to a fault in the reactor... Nuclearn's AI products help plants search through large repositories of data more efficiently to more quickly file paperwork with the federal government or figure out how a particular problem was solved in the past. "If you think of it as ChatGPT for nuclear," he says, "it's actually not a bad place to start."
It's especially important because the nuclear power industry "has a remarkably skilled but quickly shrinking workforce tasked with keeping old reactors online and possibly starting up new ones to meet surging demand for electricity," the article points out.
It also stresses that "So far, both the Nuclearn and NIVA large language models used in the nuclear world report to humans and don't go anywhere near power plant operations."
Exclusive: Finds suggest account in medieval folklore of a camp near Frenni Fawr hill was rooted in reality
Magnus Maximus, the Roman emperor who ruled Britain in the fourth century, led his troops against the Picts and Scots, but a theory that he also established a military camp near Frenni Fawr hill in Wales has so far been based on folklore.
Now fourth-century coins, among other finds at a newly identified Roman fort in Pembrokeshire, suggest the medieval tale was rooted in reality, to the excitement of archaeologists.
After three straight game-winning drives, Cleveland’s quarterback was sacked eight times in a dismal defeat that punctured the hype surrounding him
I guess the New York Jets didn’t get the memo. This was supposed to be a Deshaun Watson lovefest. A day where, much to the chagrin of those of us with a moral compass and a functional memory, football fans worldwide could declare Watson was “so back” and that the Browns were in some blinkered, alternate universe, a Super Bowl contender. No such luck, as the Browns looked like the Browns – reminding an otherwise jubilant city of Cleveland that they are trapped in the sports equivalent of the Backrooms.
Limping along for 155 passing yards and one touchdown, Watson fell to Earth harder than David Bowie in a Nicolas Roeg film (yes, I just watched the Dennis Miller Monday Night Football documentary on HBO). He completed fewer than 50% of his passes and ended the day with a 69.6 passer rating. I should also probably mention he got sacked eight times. Yes, eight times. EIGHT TIMES. He only completed seven more passes than he received punishing hits behind the line of scrimmage. It was a performance NBC NFL writer Patrick Daugherty called “unspeakably bad.” Actually, I think the performance was very much speakable, as I’ve demonstrated here. Stick around for another 400 words.
Online appeal and detective work by local historian help to return keepsake to couple’s son after it had been stolen
When Andrew Bedford discovered an old wedding album dumped outside his city centre cafe in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, he considered chucking it into a nearby wheelie bin.
But when he opened the album, the vintage photographs of the happy couple on their wedding day in 1957 seemed too precious to throw away.
A giant screen, big battery, rapid chip and top cameras push the great iPhone 18 Pro to the max with a price tag to match
Apple’s largest Pro iPhone gets its biggest battery upgrade yet to make it a true two-day phone with new Siri AI and a variable aperture camera.
The iPhone 18 Pro Max is the supersized sibling of the regular 18 Pro and, though it is no longer Apple’s most expensive phone thanks to the £2,000 iPhone Duo, it has a similarly large price tag to match costing from £1,299 (€1,599/$1,299/A$2,299).
Screen: 6.9in Super Retina XDR (120Hz OLED) (460ppi)
The latest attack by Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia may prove to be more calamitous for the region than the world imagines
On Saturday, Houthi rebels launched a shocking and deadly attack on Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh. At the time of writing, the missile strike on King Khalid international airport has killed at least 13 people and left 300 injured, marking a significant turn in a regional conflagration that is only getting more intense. It was the single most deadly attack on any Gulf country since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in February. In Saudi Arabia, a country that is unaccustomed to such fatalities, the death toll is bewilderingly high and likely to prompt a bloody response.
Over the past year, the Gulf has entered a new era of instability that is not temporary and cannot be reversed. This may feel like an overstatement – casualties have been relatively low, after all, compared with Gaza and Iran – but the gradual erosion of peace and security in places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE has changed the region more dramatically than its leaders would like to acknowledge.
Post-recess statement will focus on damage caused by Brexit and the need to cooperate on immigration and trade
Andy Burnham will put Brexit back on the Commons agenda as MPs return from recess, warning that failing to pursue a better deal with the EU would be a “major dereliction of duty”.
The prime minister will use a statement to the Commons on the first day back after the party conference break to urge MPs to face up to the damage caused by Brexit, and embrace closer ties with the EU to increase economic growth and tackle illegal immigration.
Hey everyone! Fairly new to using the one wheel and am loving it so far, but am getting the ‘death wobble’ (I call it that because it reminds of the death wobble on bikes). It’s when the board starts to wobble side to side and the oscillations grow larger and larger. It made me crash once already and I’m sure it’s just a noob thing, but my crash was pretty hard and I want to prevent that from happening again. Any advice for foot placement or how to react to reduce the likelihood or anything?
Brice Turang homered off Tarik Skubal and Milwaukee’s bullpen shut down the Los Angeles Dodgers after Jacob Misiorowski’s taxing outing, sending the Brewers to a 2-1 victory in the National League Championship Series opener on Sunday night.
Luis Lara hit a tiebreaking single off Skubal in the fifth inning as Milwaukee took Game 1 in the first NLCS matchup of 100-win teams since the Cincinnati Reds eliminated the Philadelphia Phillies in 1976. The Brewers had lost seven consecutive postseason games against the Dodgers, including a sweep in last year’s NLCS.
I have been having hall sensor issues off and on for a hot minute. Caved and replaced the 8 pin male. Got it all wires up and on the bench the halls properly swing between pwm thresholds 0- 4.9v when connected to the ubox. However, i run a hall test within float hub and vesc tool and the halls are not detected. Back to the wires
-Power (red) has 5v.
-Halls (blue, yellow, green wire)1,2,3 swing when hub is moved between 0-5 volts so they check out so pcb in the hub is doing its thing (when measured with black wire as base ground)
-ground works as we can see
-temp is detected so no foul there
Everything checks out, so i test it while it performs the sensor check. Each hall wire floats at .01 volts and does not flip high properly during the motor sensor test. Anyone else have this issue. Im leaning towards another ubox defect but want to ask around before i try to warrenty it and it turns out a setting got missed. This is my second one so im getting very sad very fast. Like i said the halls acted up before but was a one and just stopped kinda thing. When this current issue arose i just turned it on and had this issue. The old wire was chafed and not properly sensing the temp and halls. Replacing solved the one issue but now i got more 😔.
Let's Encrypt "will shorten the default validity period of its TLS certificates from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027," reports the blog Linuxiac:
All certificates issued or renewed from that date will have a 64-day lifespan unless users explicitly select one of the shorter options already available: 45 or six days.
Existing certificates will remain valid until their expiration dates. Let's Encrypt expects the final 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. The organization also confirmed no valid certificates will be revoked during the transition. To help administrators prepare, Let's Encrypt will introduce 64-day certificates in its staging environment on October 14, 2026, allowing users to test their renewal setups before the change reaches production.
The move is part of a broader effort to improve web security by reducing how long compromised or incorrectly issued certificates remain usable... Looking further ahead, the organization plans to reduce the default certificate lifetime again, this time to 45 days in 2028. That makes the upcoming 64-day limit an intermediate step rather than the final destination.
"Administrators using cron jobs or scripts with hardcoded renewal intervals should review their configurations," the article suggests.
"Another upcoming change concerns domain validation. Let's Encrypt will reduce the period during which a previously completed domain authorization can be reused from 30 days to 10 days. In 2028, that period will shrink further to just seven hours."
Washington, DC — The Justice Department announced election-related charges against 16 noncitizens across four states, but the small number provides little evidence that noncitizen voting occurs on anything approaching a meaningful scale in U.S. elections.
The cases involve defendants in Florida, Louisiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota accused of offenses including illegal voting, false claims of citizenship and false statements during the naturalization process. Some allegations involve registration rather than a successfully cast ballot, and at least one Minnesota case concerns the 2022 election rather than 2024. All defendants are presumed innocent unless convicted.
For perspective, the Federal Election Commission counted more than 155 million votes in the 2024 presidential race. Even if all 16 defendants represented illegal 2024 votes, which they do not that would equal roughly 0.00001%, or about one case for every 9.7 million presidential votes.
Research conducted over many years has consistently found noncitizen voting to be extraordinarily rare. States already require applicants to affirm U.S. citizenship under penalty of law and maintain procedures for identifying ineligible registrations.
The Justice Department did not disclose how much federal money or investigative manpower was spent developing the 16 cases, making it impossible to determine their total taxpayer cost.
The prosecutions show that violations can occur, but the numbers remain extraordinarily small compared with the scale of American elections.
"Video game console sales in the U.S. have cratered," reports Tom's Hardware, with sales through August far below where they'd been in 2025:
Mat Piscatella, the video game industry advisor at research firm Circana, shared the numbers on his Bluesky account — PlayStation 5 sales have dropped by 25%, putting it at its lowest point since 2013, when gamers held off buying PlayStation consoles in anticipation of the arrival of the PS4, while Xbox's retail figures have cratered by 33% YTD, putting its sales numbers at an all-time low since its launch almost 25 years ago.
Piscatella said price sensitivity is becoming a real problem among gamers, especially as the chip shortage has pushed console manufacturers to raise prices. Microsoft has raised the price of the Xbox three times in the past two years, with the 512GB versions jumping by $100 and 1TB models becoming $150 more expensive. Worse, the company has killed off the 2TB model. This brought the Xbox Series S to $499.99 (512GB) and $599.99 (1TB), while the Xbox Series X now costs $749.99 for the Digital Edition, and the disc version costs $50 more at $799.99.
PlayStation fans haven't escaped these price hikes, as Sony raised prices for that console by $100 to $150. The base Digital Edition PS5 now costs $599.99, while the version with an optical drive is priced at $649.99. If you want the PS5 Pro, you'll have to shell out $899.99, while those who want to stream games from their console via the PlayStation Portal must now pay $249.99 — $50 higher than its $199.99 launch price. Even used consoles didn't escape inflation, with Sony bumping the price of refurbished PS5 Slim consoles by $100, bringing them to $399.
"Still, Piscatella says the U.S. hardware market has never been more precarious since the early 1980s."
Washington, DC — The U.S. Secret Service has investigated about 10,000 threats against the people it protects so far this year, with cases involving full-time protectees up more than 40% from 2025.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran told CBS News that the agency has not seen an increase like this before. Curran, who has worked for the Secret Service for 25 years, was one of the agents protecting Donald Trump during the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump was wounded and Corey Comperatore was killed.
Curran pointed to the internet and social media as factors making public officials more accessible, which may be driving the increase in threats. Deputy Director Matthew Quinn also mentioned mental health issues and political hostility as contributing factors.
When asked if most threats come from the political left or right, Curran did not specify, saying the Secret Service investigates threats regardless of political motivation.
Research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that in 2025, left-wing attacks and plots briefly outnumbered those from the far right. However, left-wing violence has been much less deadly over time. CSIS also notes that election-related political violence has come from several ideological directions.
The Secret Service also faces new security challenges, including the use of weaponized drones, as the overall threat environment grows.
CNBC reports:
As Anthropic barrels toward a potential $2 trillion market cap on the Nasdaq, one research firm is valuing the artificial intelligence company at a mere $150 billion and says Wall Street is about to face an "unprecedented test of investor gullibility." In a report on Tuesday, independent financial research provider New Constructs called Anthropic's upcoming offering the "most ridiculous IPO of 2026."
To reach its desired valuation, the firm estimates Anthropic would need to record double the trailing year of profit for Nvidia, the world's most valuable tech company. Nvidia's net income over the past four quarters topped $190 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic's revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion as the company racked up a net loss of $42 billion, according to Reuters, which cited a leaked copy of the company's prospectus.
Anthropic's mounting operating losses coupled with emerging competition from a plethora of open-source models led New Constructs to conclude that, "We don't think Anthropic has a viable business...."
Anthropic didn't respond to a request for comment...
The New Constructs report also notes that Anthropic's assertion that AI could pose "a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity" is another reason why investors should avoid the IPO.
Reuters reported that Anthropic's IPO prospectus "highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit 'self-preserving behaviors,' including attempts to 'resist shutdown,' to 'conceal or manipulate information' and behavior 'resembling blackmail.'" Now Bloomberg writes that "investors considering Anthropic's planned mega-IPO are grappling with an unusual, and more than a little scary, conundrum: How to value a company that some fear could help wipe out the human race?"
Anthropic's valuation also drew some scrutiny from
a senior analyst at PitchBook.
"A $2 trillion price is about 435 times 2025 revenue, less than 44 times the annualized second-quarter revenue of more than $46 billion and just under 31 times the July run rate."
Father of toddler killed in Erie mass shooting says reported gunman never seemed distressed or out of the ordinary
The man who killed eight people, before turning the gun on himself, in a mass shooting in a home in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Friday was a grandfather who had not shown signs that he was capable of such violence, according to people who knew the shooter.
A man whose toddler was among those killed said on Sunday that the man never seemed distressed or out of the ordinary, the Associated Press reports.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is urging a federal judge not to intervene in a lawsuit challenging its taxpayer-funded promotional ads, arguing that the advertising campaign is scheduled to end Sunday anyway.
The Department of Homeland Security told the court it plans no additional media purchases under the approximately $20 million campaign. About $19 million has already been committed, and the remaining funds are expected to be withdrawn from the contract.
Common Cause, which sued DHS seeking an immediate halt to the ads, argues that ending the current media buy does not resolve the broader legal dispute. The watchdog noted that the underlying advertising contract runs through 2027 and said the administration has not provided sufficient guarantees that similar taxpayer-funded ads will not return.
The ads have attracted bipartisan criticism because several prominently feature Trump and resemble campaign advertising. One government-funded spot was virtually identical to a Trump 2024 campaign advertisement, except it carried a disclaimer stating it was paid for by the U.S. government.
Trump later said he would personally fund future advertisements or use money associated with MAGA Inc., but the White House said he does not intend to reimburse taxpayers for millions already spent.
A federal judge has not yet ruled on Common Cause’s request for emergency relief.
In first half of this year 1,600 tags also had no signal for over two weeks, highlighting scale of probation crisis
More than 5,000 offenders went unmonitored in the first half of the year because probation staff failed to install electronic tags, while 1,600 tags had no signal for more than two weeks due to faults, a report has found.
The Institute for Government (IfG) has revealed the full scale of the crisis in the probation system in England and Wales, concluding that “rationing probation supervision” due to a lack of staff meant sentences imposed by the court had become “essentially a fiction” for most offenders.
Kanishka Narayan to say Britain cannot rely entirely on tech companies amid rising global concern over AI dangers
Companies building the most advanced AI systems must increase safety efforts, the UK’s AI minister will say, as he announces a strengthening of Britain’s cyber defences.
Kanishka Narayan will call on companies developing frontier AI to do more to make sure it is safe. He will say Britain cannot rely entirely on technology companies to police their own models and will argue the UK needs to build more of its own AI infrastructure.
The Secret Service warns of a sharp rise in threat levels in recent years both from within the U.S. and from outside the country. The agency is also developing its ability to defend against drones.
West Bank conflict has biblical roots, with Jewish and Arab populations fighting over ancestral land. But with all of today's high-tech warcraft, settlers fight using sticks and stones and sheep.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran and Deputy Director Matthew Quinn say they're dealing with an unprecedented number of threats and working on how best to handle attacks from drones.
Israeli settlers, some of them violent, are using sheep farms as part of efforts to take over some West Bank land. They're clashing with Palestinians and also facing off against Israeli peace activists.
Jon Batiste didn't set out to be a musician, but took up piano at his mother's urging. It's worked out. He now plays in sold-out venues around the world, bringing people together through music.
Jon Batiste, a Grammy-, Emmy- and Oscar-winning musician, considers himself deeply introverted. But he hasn't let that stop him from bringing people together with music.
Unidentified projectile strikes King Khalid airport, killing one and injuring 11, as escalating attacks threaten to draw more countries into Yemen conflict
A projectile hit a passenger terminal at the airport in Riyadh on Sunday, the day after a deadly missile attack on the facility carried out by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebel group killed 13 people.
An unidentified projectile hit terminal 4 at King Khalid international airport, starting a fire, killing one person and injuring 11, according to Saudi civil aviation authorities. Air defences also intercepted a cruise missile in the vicinity of the airport. It was the latest of several attacks on the airport in the past week.
On May 23, 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” was released, taking the film industry by surprise. Considered by most as one of the best horror films of all time, it is inspired by Stephen King’s 1977 novel, but vastly differs from it. This year marks the 46th anniversary of the film’s release. Kubrick never disappoints in the films he makes, as he pushes cinematic boundaries and incorporates unsettling features into scenes.
Starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, “The Shining” follows writer Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy Torrance and their son Danny. Jack is hired at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado to care for the facility during the harsh winter months while it is closed to the public. The Overlook Hotel is actually inspired by a real hotel in Colorado called the Stanley Hotel. Many have reported paranormal activity occurring while staying in the hotel.
The job seems easy to Jack, who wants to take advantage of the free time to get over his writer’s block; however, disturbing secrets hide behind the hotel’s beautiful appearance.
The last caretaker of the hotel seemed to have some sort of “mental breakdown” and murdered his family and then committed suicide while staying here. Despite this horrible event, Jack still decides to bring his family here to do the job, ensuring that everything will be fine.
As the weeks go on, Jack slowly seems to get possessed by a paranormal spirit in the hotel. His writing goes nowhere and he starts to become more psychotic with nightmares about harming his family. Wendy discovers this by looking at his writing and seeing the same phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” written repeatedly on multiple papers.
Jack experiences visions, seeing events that nobody else can see, such as a party in the hotel’s ballroom. He is given a drink by a bartender despite the hotel getting rid of the alcohol for its off-season and no one else physically being inside the building. Danny experiences visions of the past caretaker’s twin daughters being murdered as a warning of what may happen to him.
Their son Danny also has some sort of psychological ability called “the shine,” which allows him to have visions of both past and future events. Danny warns his mother of the danger Jack will inflict on them by repeating the phrase “redrum,” or simply “murder” backwards.
Kubrick is known as a director for strategically placing hidden details throughout his films in order to give the viewer an uneasy feeling. Many have realized that the layout of the Overlook Hotel physically does not make sense. The office where Jack has the interview for the job would not realistically fit within the layout of the exterior appearance of the hotel. In addition, hallways would lead to nowhere or would not exist, which adds to the feeling of things being off or not making sense.
Although I am not a huge horror fan, I enjoyed watching this film due to the plot and the acting performances that left a chilling effect on me. One of my favorite performances in the movie is from Duvall. However, she famously looked back on this film with negativity because of how draining it was to shoot on set. Many of the most iconic scenes took hundreds of takes to get perfect, such as the staircase scene where Jack’s insanity torments Wendy.
Even though making the movie was hard work for Duvall, she does a great job of capturing a woman in a constant state of terror as she watches her husband go insane. She deserves all the praise she gets for her role in this film, and I am glad people view her performance in a positive way.
Many features of the film, such as the music, make the viewer feel uneasy during moments of uncertainty as the camera films characters from behind, so the viewer does not know what is coming when they turn the corner. Nicholson’s acting was also horrifying as he perfectly captures a normal man who slowly descends into madness. I was terrified watching him and felt the evil energy through the screen.
Overall, I do not recommend watching this movie alone like I did because you will feel true fear while watching. Ask a friend or family member to watch it with you so that you can bond over the scariness of the movie. Since I loved the movie so much, the next appropriate step is to read King’s novel and compare it to the film adaptation.
Please watch the video of my one wheel and the humming noise it is creating. I plugged it in the other day, and when I started riding again, it was making this noise. I don't know what it could be from.
"Gas cars are now a minority of the world's new car sales," reports Electrek.
Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei. It's the first time on record that they've been under half. But there's a catch: most of the cars taking their place still have a gas tank... [The share of gas-only vehicles] fell three points in a single year, from 52% to 49%. Battery-electric vehicles grew 12% to 6.87 million units and took 17% of the market, up three points. Conventional hybrids grew 10% to 7.27 million units, or 18%... [T]he rest is diesel, plug-in hybrids and a few minor fuels.
Nikkei ties the acceleration to oil. Fuel prices spiked with the conflict in the Middle East, and buyers went looking for lower running costs. The whole car market shrank about 5% in the first half, according to the IEA, so gas-only sales fell twice as fast as the market. Gas car sales dropped the most in China, down 26%, followed by Europe at 13%... Mobility Global has battery-electric sales up 32% in Europe to 1.81 million, up 81% in Southeast Asia to 350,000, and more than doubling in Oceania to 110,000... Yoshiaki Kawano, an associate director at Mobility Global, told Nikkei that few EV buyers go back to gasoline cars or hybrids. He expects demand based on "genuine consumer needs rather than subsidies" to grow as prices come down...
[Hybrids] outsold battery-electric vehicles in the first half, 7.27 million to 6.87 million... Only the 17% that's battery-electric burns no fuel at all. So about 83% of the new vehicles sold in the world this year still came with an engine.
The article notes that U.S. hybrid sales were up 23%, reaching a record 16.3% of vehicles sold in the second quarter of 2026, while the share of ICE vehicles went down.
Gas-only cars went from 73% to 49% of the market in less than five years, and nothing in the data suggests they're getting that share back. The last time gasoline wasn't on top was the early 1900s, when steam and electric cars outsold it in the US.
I hate seeing media headlines claiming that "EV sales are down" and that "EV growth has stalled." The data is clear: that's true in the US, but only in the US. The rest of the world is moving to electric vehicles, and it is not slowing down.
Jayden Daniels took off on an ill-advised scramble in the closing seconds of overtime with the Commanders in field-goal range, and Washington were unable to stop the clock before time expired, settling for a 27-27 tie with the New York Giants on Sunday after both teams made critical mistakes in the extra period.
Washington (1-3-1) got the ball with two minutes left in overtime when Daron Payne stripped the ball from Cam Skattebo with the Giants in range for a game-winning field goal. Daniels quickly moved the Commanders to the Giants’ 24-yard line, but with 12 seconds left and Washington out of timeouts, he held on to the ball and went down for no gain. Washington lined up to spike the ball, but the clock ticked down to zero and coach Dan Quinn ripped off his headset in disgust.
(The Center Square) – Some of the highest-paid state executives across the country in 2025 were unelected education officials, according to a new report.
Jeffries campaigned in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and plans to campaign in Texas in the coming days to help Democratic candidates unseat Republican incumbents.
Why didn't The Social Reckoning enjoy the box office success of 2010's The Social Network, asks IndieWire/A>:
[T]here wasn't the same urgency in the story being told. The Social Reckoning focuses less on Zuckerberg, and more on data engineer Frances Haugen's decision to blow the whistle on how Facebook's algorithms were promoting political content that radicalized users, as well as the company's awareness of how its products were contributing to a rise in bullying and teen suicide... [B]ut The Social Reckoning arrives as a much greater threat has emerged from Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence is dominating the headlines, as fears mount about the economic disruptions it will unleash when millions of jobs are replaced by machines, and, graver still, its potential to trigger a world-ending event... And it's not like Haugen's testimony led to lasting change at Facebook... As IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio put it, "'The Social Reckoning' argues that the aftermath of their whistleblowing is still somehow felt today. In actuality, living as we do in 2026, it pretty much feels like... no one cared, and nothing changed?"
After the first movie's director bowed out, Sony Pictures shied away from selling it as a sequel — but the problems run deeper, the article adds. "The Social Reckoning isn't just a financial failure, it's a critical one, too. The reviews were blistering..." Although on the bright side, "Sony wisely kept The Social Reckoning's budget at $30 million, meaning it won't face losses on the scale of a Digger... "
Variety writes that Digger "cratered in its second weekend with $3.2 million from 3,321 theaters, a 60% decline from its dismal $8 million debut. So far, the Tom Cruise satire has limped to $14 million domestically and $35.3 million globally. Warner Bros. spent above $160 million to produce the film, which is shaping up to be one of the biggest bombs ever..."
There was some Blade Runner news at New York Comic-Con this weekend — and also some news about Godzilla. Ars Technica reports:
We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con... Prime Video will drop all eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 on November 25, 2026. [It's already earned 2.1 million views in the last 17 hours].
We also got a new trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to director Takashi Yamazaki's gloriously grounded kaiju epic, Godzilla Minus One, which became a major international hit and snagged an Oscar for best visual effects. [1.2 million views in its first five hours]
And StarWars.com brings news from the Star Wars universe:
Kevin Smith has already announced his Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles crossover comic, interweaving the Marvel universe and the Star Wars galaxy like never before. Now, you're cordially invited to add your own creative ideas to the mix through a LEGO Ideas challenge celebrating the milestone 50th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope.
Using physical or virtual LEGO bricks, fans are challenged to build "their own epic mash-ups," according to Lego's web site, "in three categories: Character Fusion, Vehicle Fusion, and Scene Fusion." ("Write an engaging description and upload great images of your creation without using AI tools...")
Meanwhile, Star Trek fan site TrekMovie.com covered the major Star Trek announcements:
There was an interview with 95-year-old William Shatner by Star Trek super-fan Ben Stiller, which ended "with Stiller surprising Shatner by revealing the original Gorn head from his personal Star Trek memorabilia collection."Also announced was a new documentary about the disastrous fan-organized convention in 1982 that tried reuniting cast members from the original series. (Its title? The Con of Wrath: The Craziest Convention Ever!)Gates McFadden (who played Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation) will write a new comic book to "bridge the 20 year in-universe gap in Crusher's story between the events of the film Star Trek Nemesis and the television series Star Trek: Picard."Paramount+ offered a panel about their series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (which returns for a second season in 2027).Nacelle Toys even announced new action figures of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Lucile Ball, owner of Desilu Productions.
Reuters also has photos of costumed attendees.
But there was also some excitement when an unruly fan shouted over a panel for the Prime Video animated series Helluva Boss. Entertainment Weekly reports it culminated with series star Brandon Rogers shouting "You need to shut the f--- up right now. I'm going to jump over this fence and end you. It's not cute."
The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has expressed her “full support for President Zelenskyy” amid calls for a ceasefire.
In a telephone call with the Ukrainian leader, von der Leyen posted on X that she “fully supported the call of President Zelenskyy for a ceasefire that would protect global food supplies and energy infrastructure in Ukraine and Russia.
“Ukraine supports the ceasefire, and it’s important for Russia to support it as well. We are awaiting details from the American side. From our Ukrainian side, there is always FULL support for de-escalation steps, protection of lives, and the necessary decisions to end the war and ensure lasting peace.”
Several Republicans objected to Trump's stance. “I do believe there’s a legitimate case for saying the president’s not following the law, said Sen. Thom Tillis.
Cam Little grew up playing soccer and watching Premier League games every weekend. So lining up a game-winning kick for the Jaguars in London was something special.
Little connected from 57 yards as time expired and Jacksonville beat the Philadelphia Eagles 19-17 in a wild finish at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is reportedly considering removing U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle as new allegations emerge that wealthy Greek businessmen financed luxury travel while she promoted their business interests.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Guilfoyle traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos aboard a private jet owned by Greek businessman Alexandros Exarchou and planned additional travel on a jet belonging to shipping magnate Nikolas Tsakos. Tsakos also reportedly paid for her stay at the Four Seasons George V in Paris.
Audio reviewed by the Journal allegedly captured Guilfoyle boasting about her connections to the businessmen while seeking access to an event honoring Eric Trump. She was also reportedly recorded telling one businessman, “I’m going to make you a lot of f—ing money.”
The allegations raise questions about whether Guilfoyle improperly accepted gifts or used her diplomatic position to advance private commercial interests. She has denied wrongdoing and maintains that she followed applicable ethics rules.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now weighing whether she should remain in the post, according to reporting cited by The Hill and the Associated Press.
The controversy follows separate allegations that Guilfoyle previously sought a $100,000 payment from a Republican donor while offering access to senior Trump administration officials, an accusation her attorney disputes.
Analysts say fuel will take weeks to ship and quantity is too small to affect prices, while full deal is unlikely to be met given damage to Russian refineries
Donald Trump’s deal with Vladimir Putin to temporarily lift sanctions on US imports of Russian diesel will have little “meaningful” effect on motorists and businesses in the US and overseas, energy and foreign policy analysts have predicted.
The US president infuriated Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he announced the deal on Friday, writing on Truth Social that the agreement with his Russia counterpart to supply millions of tonnes of diesel was essential to reduce fuel prices in the US, which have soared after his decision to go to war against Iran.
PM says he asked question upon entering No 10 but does not reveal who gave him ‘clear answer’ Russia meddled
Andy Burnham has said it is clear Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum, after seeking answers on the Kremlin’s involvement in the 2016 vote when he entered Downing Street.
Burnham said he had asked whether Moscow had attempted to influence the referendum and received a confirmation that it had.
Exclusive: As William ‘Rob’ Gilfillan was about to go on trial for sex offences against two schoolgirls, his barrister told a judge his client’s history was easily discoverable online
The Australian’s podcast Shadow of Doubt led to a delay of 10 months for the sex offence trial of a “sadistic” paedophile already serving a 48-year jail term for abusing his daughter, court documents have revealed.
William “Rob” Gilfillan, a former physical education teacher, was to stand trial in Victoria in February last year on five counts of indecent assault and sexual penetration of a person under 16, relating to two schoolgirls in his care in Gippsland in the 1980s.
US president’s plan to park the wars in Iran and Yemen, while blaming Ukraine for diesel prices, looks unsustainable
The reckless missile attack on King Khalid international airport in Riyadh on Saturday did not just export the death and misery inside Yemen to Saudi Arabia, it also left Donald Trump forced to reconsider his diplomatic and political strategy designed to take him into the midterm elections next month.
The US president’s plan had only been unveiled on Friday. He said it was the result of “a world problem” – spiralling diesel prices – which he blamed on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He was going to keep the political temperature down on his war of choice in Iran and its spillover in Yemen until after the midterms.
Police said Rogers had been traveling in a wheelchari on the sidewalk along the east side of Philadelphia Pike before entering the roadway. A Jeep Cherokee traveling north in the left lane struck him.
69-year-old Ronald Rogers was using an electric wheelchair when he was struck; investigation remains open
WILMINGTON — Delaware State Police have identified 69-year-old Ronald Rogers of Wilmington as the man killed Friday afternoon when he was struck by a vehicle while traveling in an electric wheelchair along Philadelphia Pike.
The crash happened about 1:30 p.m. Oct. 9 on northbound Philadelphia Pike, north of East Holly Oak Road, according to state police.
Police said Rogers had been traveling on the sidewalk along the east side of Philadelphia Pike before entering the roadway. A Jeep Cherokee traveling north in the left lane struck him.
Rogers was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. State police publicly identified him Sunday after notifying his family.
Driver initially stopped, police say
The Jeep was driven by a 51-year-old woman from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Police said the driver initially stopped at the crash scene but later drove away. Troopers subsequently located both the driver and the Jeep at a nearby residence.
As of the latest police update, the driver had not been arrested. Investigators continue gathering evidence and determining whether any charges are warranted.
Philadelphia Pike was closed for about three hours while troopers investigated and cleared the scene.
Investigation continues
The Delaware State Police Collision Reconstruction Unit is continuing to investigate the crash.
Police are asking anyone who witnessed the collision or has video of the incident to contact Cpl. K. Oakes at 302-365-8483. Tips may also be submitted to Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333 or through a private message to Delaware State Police on Facebook.
To Go Box
What: Ongoing investigation into a fatal pedestrian crash involving an electric wheelchair
Where: Northbound Philadelphia Pike, north of East Holly Oak Road, Wilmington area
When: Approximately 1:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9
Victim: Ronald Rogers, 69, of Wilmington
Have information or video: Contact Delaware State Police Cpl. K. Oakes at 302-365-8483 or Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333
Victim support: Delaware State Police Victim Services and the Delaware Victim Center are available 24 hours a day at 1-800-VICTIM-1, or 1-800-842-8461.
Clarksville, TN — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he wants to rename either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean before leaving office, floating “Trump Ocean” and “Ocean of the Americas” as possibilities.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump linked the idea to previous geographic name changes ordered by his administration.
“We need a river and we need an ocean,” Trump told the crowd before suggesting that either the Atlantic or Pacific could receive a new name. He did not announce a formal proposal or specify which ocean he preferred.
Trump also said he would like a major river renamed but ruled out changing the Hudson River, praising explorer Henry Hudson, and said he would leave the Mississippi River untouched.
The remarks follow Trump’s 2025 order directing federal agencies to use “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico. In August, he also ordered federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
Those actions determine terminology used by the U.S. federal government but do not compel other countries or international geographic organizations to adopt the names.
Trump additionally floated calling the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.” No formal executive action involving the oceans, a river or the strait had been announced as of Saturday.
Elizabeth, LA — A Republican candidate for police chief in the small Louisiana village of Elizabeth is positioned to win the Nov. 3 election without opposition despite facing two pending child rape charges.
Christopher Paul, 46, was arrested Sept. 8 after authorities accused him of raping two girls in 2005 and 2006. He remains out on $60,000 bail and has not been convicted of a crime.
Paul originally faced one opponent, Zachary LaCaze, but LaCaze withdrew Sept. 23 after learning that his federal employment made him ineligible to run. Because the candidate filing deadline had already passed, Paul is now the only remaining candidate.
Under Louisiana law, Paul would remain eligible to take office unless he is convicted of a felony before his term begins Jan. 1.
Mayor Mandy Leo Green said village officials cannot remove Paul from the ballot, emphasizing that criminal charges are allegations and that Paul is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
The situation has prompted local officials to consider changing how the police chief is selected. The village council scheduled a Dec. 12 special election asking voters whether the position should become an appointed office subject to board approval.
A child-safety advocacy group has called on Paul to withdraw from the race while the criminal case is pending.
Clarksville, TN — President Donald Trump told supporters Saturday that he expects to be blamed if Republicans lose control of Congress, while again promising $5,000 payments to every U.S. adult citizen if the GOP keeps both chambers.
“If we don’t win the midterms, they’re going to blame me,” Trump said during a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, adding that he was working aggressively to turn out Republican voters.
Trump repeated his proposed “Trump dividend,” saying every adult citizen would receive $5,000 after a Republican victory. The proposal would cost roughly $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, depending on eligibility, and would require congressional authorization. Trump has said tariff revenue would help finance the payments, but no detailed legislative plan has been released.
Independent budget analysts have questioned whether tariff collections could come close to covering the cost. Current tariff revenue is far below the amount required for nationwide $5,000 checks.
Trump also warned that a Democratic victory would produce severe economic consequences, while touting income gains and poverty reductions under his administration.
The rally was part of a broader push to energize Republican voters ahead of the Nov. 3 elections. Trump acknowledged that the results will likely be viewed as a referendum on his presidency, saying he expects responsibility if Republicans fall short.
Syracuse, NY — President Donald Trump erupted over the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, attacking the committee that denied him the award and warning that the United States would “not forget” Norway.
Speaking at a rally in Syracuse, Trump called the decision “disgraceful” and “embarrassing” and said it left an “indelible stain” on Norway. He also described members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee as “radical ideologues” and “enemies of civilization.”
The 2026 prize went instead to South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former U.N. human rights chief and international judge recognized for decades of work involving human rights, war crimes and genocide. Trump dismissed Pillay as a “mystery person” and claimed that “nobody” had heard of her. Pillay previously defended anti-apartheid activists, served as U.N. human rights chief and worked on international tribunals.
Trump again argued that he deserved the prize, citing several international conflicts he says he helped resolve. Some of those claims remain disputed, while fighting has resumed in several regions he has cited and the wars involving Ukraine and Iran remain unresolved.
The president has complained repeatedly about not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize during both of his terms.
His latest tirade came at a political rally intended to support Republican candidates, but Trump devoted significant time to attacking the Nobel Committee and questioning Pillay’s selection.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration imposed sweeping sanctions Friday on the International Criminal Court, escalating a campaign against the tribunal by targeting the institution itself rather than only individual judges and prosecutors.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the sanctions will prohibit transactions with the ICC and eventually cut the court off from U.S. financial services, technology providers and the dollar-based banking system. American companies will receive a six-month period to end affected business relationships.
The United States is not a member of the ICC and has long disputed the court’s authority over Americans. The Trump administration has also objected to ICC investigations involving Israel, including its arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as investigations involving alleged wrongdoing by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
Rubio said the measures are intended to protect American sovereignty and warned that the administration would continue escalating pressure unless the court changes course.
The ICC, which has 125 member states, called the sanctions an unprecedented effort to obstruct justice and interfere with investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The move drew criticism from numerous U.S. allies, including European governments and Japan, which argued that the court must remain capable of operating independently. Israel welcomed the sanctions.
Dana Joudeh was in shackles when she found out she was pregnant.
The 35-year-old from the West Bank city of Nablus was newly married and had just spent her first night in an Israeli prison. Israeli forces had arrested her without charges and put her under administrative detention, an arbitrary condition for holding Palestinians hostage. She lost consciousness in front of Israeli soldiers at Sharon Prison, a temporary detention facility in the city of Netanya, and they took her to a hospital blindfolded. There, with her hands and feet bound in chains, she was given a pregnancy test that came back positive.
Joudeh would never get to experience the joys and travails of pregnancy outside of prison. She was in Israeli custody from the moment she found out, until she gave birth.
Like Joudeh, pregnant Palestinian women arrested by Israeli security forces since October 7, 2023, are forced to endure a physically and medically complex process in conditions characterized by inadequate access to food, family visits, and medicine, as well as frequent reports of violence.
The total number of pregnancies in custody among the hundreds of women seized since October 7 is unknown, but Joudeh is only the second documented example of a woman who gave birth while under Israeli detention in nearly 17 years, according to Palestinian prisoners’ rights advocates. Many cases, advocates say, may have gone unreported.
The Intercept spoke to Joudeh through her sister, Maram, who sat with Joudeh by her side while sharing a detailed account of her sister’s six-month pregnancy, which ended in a premature cesarean section.
Corroborated by statements and reports published by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, among others, Joudeh’s story offers a glimpse into what it’s like to go through pregnancy while locked in Israel’s prison system, where she struggled to obtain basic prenatal care and relied on other prisoners to share their already limited food.
“She went through every kind of suffering in there,” Maram said.
Israeli forces used sound grenades inside the prison, according to Joudeh’s family and her lawyer, Hassan Abbadi, who provides volunteer legal support for detained Palestinians. They said soldiers would force the women to lie face down on the floor.
“Female prisoners are subjected to all forms of violence and are deprived of the most basic rights,” said Abbadi, who regularly visits Palestinian women in Israeli prisons. He described shortages of underwear, attacks by police dogs, and strip searches, among other forms of mistreatment.
Joudeh’s pregnancy unfolded against a broader surge in Israeli arrests and violence across the occupied Palestinian territories. As of September, Israel was holding roughly 9,350 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including 90 women and more than 350 children, according to Palestinian prisoners’ organizations. More than 3,100 of them are being held under administrative detention, without charge or trial.
For Joudeh, who was transferred to Damon Prison in Haifa soon after discovering she was pregnant, there was little effort to make accommodations for her pregnancy. According to Maram and Abbadi, the food was scarce and of poor quality, consisting usually of a slice of toast and lentils, chickpeas, or hummus. Sometimes, the prisoners received a few olives, and the other women incarcerated with Joudeh would offer a part of their own meager portions and give it to her.
In a small cell she shared with 13 other women, she discussed baby names with Manar Karaja, another detainee who was pregnant at the same time. According to Amany Sarahneh, the media director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Karaja was still pregnant and still in Israeli detention as of October 6.
As her pregnancy progressed, Joudeh grew increasingly worried about her baby. She repeatedly asked for medical tests to make sure that both she and the fetus were healthy, Maram said, but her requests were refused.
“I would reassure myself by the baby’s heartbeat, and later, when I started feeling her move,” Maram relayed on behalf of her sister, who sat next to her at Maram’s home in Ramallah. “I needed vitamins and folic acid, but they refused to give them to me.”
In response to outreach from The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Israeli military directed queries to the Israel Prison Service. An Israel Prison Service spokesperson said the agency could not comment on individual detainees’ cases, but described a detailed list of Joudeh’s experiences as “false.”
Palestinian women have faced pregnancy and childbirth inside Israeli prisons for decades, often under harsh conditions and with limited medical care. The first documented Palestinian woman to give birth in Israeli custody was Zakia Shammout, who delivered her daughter Nadia in 1972 at Neve Tirza prison in Ramla, assisted by fellow prisoners. The last documented case before the start of Israel’s ongoing genocide was Fatima al-Zaq, who gave birth to her son Youssef in prison in 2008; the 17-year-old was killed in July 2025 after an Israeli drone hit his family’s apartment on Al-Thawra Street, in central Gaza City.
In September 2025, Tahani Abu Samhan gave birth to her son Yahya while in Israeli custody. Then, a year later, there was Joudeh.
Joudeh suffered from debilitating headaches while pregnant, but basic pain relief was difficult to obtain. Prison authorities refused to give her Acamol, a common brand of acetaminophen, which is generally considered safe for use during pregnancy despite recent guidance to the contrary from health officials in the U.S.
The other women found ways to help. One prisoner would sometimes pretend that she had a headache herself, ask for a painkiller, and secretly give the tablet to Joudeh.
“She was crying most of the time,” Maram said.
By July, Joudeh had contracted scabies, a rash caused by highly contagious mites that results in severe itching and pain. The women were given a single container of a topical treatment to share among the entire cell, and it wasn’t enough for everyone who was infected. They resorted to mixing the treatment with chlorine to make it stretch further, Maram said.
Months into the pregnancy, Joudeh began suffering severe pain and bleeding. She was taken to the prison clinic, where she was told that her condition was stable and that there was no need to send her to a hospital. She learned she was carrying a girl.
By then six months pregnant, Joudeh was having her first medical examination since her positive test, Maram said. World Health Organization guidelines recommend that a pregnant person would have had at least three prenatal appointments by that point, though many doctors recommend more frequent visits to monitor the development of the fetus and identify potential complications. Joudeh had received none.
In response to detailed questions from The Intercept, an Israeli Prison Service spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The allegations described are false, entirely without factual basis, and form part of a broader campaign to defame the State of Israel and its lawful institutions.”
“All prisoners and detainees held by the Israel Prison Service are held in accordance with the law and receive the rights and care to which they are entitled,” the spokesperson added, including medical care in accordance with Israeli standards. They wrote that the prison agency would not provide medical information specific to any particular detainee.
Israeli officials have shown an interest in following the most limited interpretation of the law. In an interview last week, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said prisoners “will not receive a single grain more than the legal minimum.” He recalled making a monitoring visit to Ketziot prison because, he claimed, he’d heard prisoners had received two extra olives on their plates.
Outside the prisons, access to prenatal and other medical care has been pulled further out of reach for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By the end of 2025, the United Nations had documented 925 Israeli checkpoints, road gates, and other movement obstacles across the territory, restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians and making it harder to reach health services. And in Gaza, where Israel keeps bombing despite the ceasefire announced last October, the health system has been destroyed, with severe shortages of basic necessities and a lack of functioning medical facilities making pregnancy particularly dangerous.
Around 50,000 women are pregnant in Gaza, according to UNFPA. One in 3 pregnancies are considered high-risk. Nearly 4,000 pregnancy losses were reported in the first half of 2026, three times the number recorded in the previous six months.
In the prison, Joudeh’s bleeding would not stop.
It continued for two weeks, Maram said, and Joudeh’s hemoglobin level eventually fell to 9 grams per deciliter, which the WHO classifies as anemic during pregnancy. As her condition deteriorated, she was taken to Rambam Hospital, again blindfolded and with her hands and feet shackled. There, doctors decided that the baby needed to be delivered prematurely.
“The terrorist has arrived,” she remembered the Israeli doctor saying about the fragile newborn.
On September 12, Joudeh gave birth by C-section under local anesthesia, watching the operation as it was happening. Maram said that Joudeh’s hands and feet were shackled while she was cut open, and female Israeli soldiers surrounded her with guns in the operating room, standing guard.
She saw her daughter only briefly in the first 72 hours after giving birth, Maram said, because the baby, born prematurely at around six months, needed to be cared for in a neonatal intensive care unit.
Joudeh’s doctor was Israeli, and she recalled him speaking to her in cruel, degrading terms, according to Maram. “The terrorist has arrived,” she remembered him saying about the fragile newborn. Joudeh named her Lia.
Some of the nurses caring for Joudeh were Palestinian citizens of the 1948 occupied territories, Maram said. They looked for small ways to help her, like secretly bringing the baby to Joudeh’s bedside while she remained handcuffed to the hospital bed. They dressed Lia in a pink onesie. And they asked the Israeli soldiers guarding Joudeh to remove her handcuffs so she could walk around, but the soldiers refused, Maram said.
Officials at Rambam Hospital did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Joudeh and Lia were supposed to be released on September 15, according to Maram, but on September 14, just two days after the birth, Israeli authorities took Joudeh and her newborn daughter from the hospital back to the prison to process Joudeh’s release. An ambulance was waiting outside with Joudeh’s husband, Maram said, and as soon as Joudeh and Lia were released, the baby was taken by ambulance to Hclinic Specialty hospital in Ramallah. Before they left, Lia’s pink onesie was replaced with a gray outfit.
Maram believes her sister was released a day early to prevent the family from preparing a celebration to welcome them home.
When Joudeh’s sisters were finally able to hug her, they were shocked by how frail she seemed. “She was exhausted. She had lost so much weight,” Maram said. “She was physically and psychologically devastated.”
She was still suffering from scabies, but her family embraced her anyway. “I didn’t care about anything except hugging her,” Maram said. “I had missed her so much, and I had been so worried about her.”
Joudeh is now staying with Maram at her home in Ramallah, where she’s recovering from her pregnancy and incarceration. Lia remains in the neonatal unit at Istishari Arab Hospital in Ramallah.
Sometimes, Maram said, Joudeh breaks down when she remembers the trauma of giving birth in detention. But when the mother and baby are both well, Joudeh wants to hold a small celebration, bringing relatives and loved ones together to welcome Lia. She’s already begun thinking about the food and sweets she wants to serve. Despite all she’s been through, Maram said, when the family talks about the celebration, Joudeh smiles.
A border patrol vehicle drives past the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on the Tohono O’odham nation on Sept. 5. Cam Mackey
At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal.
If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not interfere with the government’s operations.
The work would begin in exactly one minute.
Jose, 59, was already aware of the contractors’ arrival. An hour earlier, a tribal member had called to report a caravan heading south through the reservation, and Facebook was lighting up with similar accounts. The convoy included not only work trucks and drilling rigs, but Border Patrol vehicles as well.
Dozens of border wall contractor and Border Patrol vehicles pass the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on the morning of Aug. 27.Nate Sosa
For months, the O’odham had maneuvered to avoid such a scene, taking their case to federal court. Their homeland straddles the border, and thousands of tribal members live in Mexico. A wall would disrupt routine border crossings for ceremonies and family visits and destroy landscapes they consider their duty to protect, members and leaders say. Their lawsuit argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to build it despite their opposition constituted an historic attack on tribal sovereignty.
But administration attorneys gave assurances that the government was engaging with the O’odham in good faith, and a judge in Washington, D.C., denied the tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction. In his Aug. 25 email providing Jose a 60-second heads up, the Border Patrol chief said his agency’s willingness to accommodate cultural monitors underscored its “commitment to ongoing coordination” with the Nation.
As daylight broke, Jose learned the contractors were guarded by federal agents in masks and tactical gear, drawn from a special operations cadre that participated in citywide sweeps in Minneapolis and Chicago the previous year, which left three people dead, including two U.S. citizens. When the tribe’s chief of police tried to reach the worksite, he was stopped at a roadblock set up by the agents.
Merrian FelixDavy Cross
Border Patrol tactical team members amass around the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Aug. 26.
Jose issued a statement on the Nation’s website declaring the incursion illegal and revealing that the Department of Homeland Security had deployed a surveillance blimp and enlisted Mexican security forces to help protect the work crews.
For a quarter-century, Tohono O’odham leaders have staved off a border wall by allowing DHS to use the reservation as a testing ground for some of the government’s most aggressive homeland security measures — from vehicle barriers on the reservation’s southern boundary, to state-of-the-art surveillance towers, to law enforcement partnerships with the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Despite the collaborations, and assurances from the Trump administration, ProPublica found that DHS has turned its vast apparatus on tribal members, with 24-hour surveillance directed at an ongoing border prayer ceremony and tribal members being questioned outside the reservation about their ceremonial activities. ProPublica’s account is based on photos, videos, court filings, interviews with tribal leadership, firsthand observations and more than 1,000 contemporaneously written observations compiled by tribal members.
The battle over a border wall on the Nation has broken along familiar partisan lines in Arizona. While GOP legislative leaders have filed briefs in support of the project, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has done the same in support of the tribe.
Progressive U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, whose district includes the reservation, has said she is crafting legislation to rein in the Department of Homeland Security’s sweeping powers to waive federal laws in order to expedite wall construction. The Trump administration has used those authorities to circumvent environmental and cultural preservation statutes on 60 occasions across its two terms.
For Deshane Gregg, whose vehicle was forced off the road by a convoy of contractors and federal agents, the recent show of force on the reservation has felt like a government siege, not cooperation.
“You just feel helpless. You see these people, and they’re just so aggressive. They want you to react. They want you to show them that we could be ugly too,” she said. “We’re just here doing prayer. We’re just here, not trying to bother them, but it gets to you when it’s constantly being like that.”
“The drones flying over us all day,” she added, “it’s a lot.”
A drone hovers over the Tadai Me:i camp during morning prayer songs on Aug. 27.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
ProPublica sent DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Border Patrol nearly 30 questions about the government’s surveillance and interactions with tribal members and leaders. The agencies answered none of those questions. Instead, CBP pointed to a statement Commissioner Rodney Scott made in August, in which he described the reservation’s southern boundary as “one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border” and a “remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity.”
Regarding construction of a wall, Scott said, “Congress funded this work, a Federal court has affirmed it, and CBP is carrying it out under the legal authorities that apply. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are securing the border and giving our agents the tools and support they need to protect the American people.”
A post on X from James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrates the denial of a request for an emergency injunction against border wall construction filed by Tohono O’odham leadership in August.Screenshot of X
With no sign the White House or the O’odham government is backing down, DHS has cast off any pretense that the agency will work cooperatively with the Nation. Within hours of the judge’s denial of the emergency injunction, on Aug. 14, the department’s general counsel, James Percival, posted a celebratory meme depicting one of the cybernetic Star Trek supervillains known as “the Borg.”
“RESISTANCE IS FUTILE,” it read.
“We respect tribal sovereignty but not to the detriment of border security,” he wrote. “This wall is getting built. Our authority is beyond dispute.”
The O’odham have inhabited the Sonoran Desert, from what is now Southern Arizona to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, for thousands of years. According to the tribe, roughly 14,000 of its 37,000 enrolled members live on tribal land west of Tucson. Approximately 3,000 more reside in Mexico. At 2.8 million acres, their reservation is the largest on the southern border by a long shot.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, Arizona saw 226 miles of border wall built, but the Nation maintained its status as the longest unwalled section in the state. Confirmation that things would be different this time came in February, when CBP informed the tribe that it planned to seal off the reservation entirely, tapping nearly $52 billion from Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
A vehicle barrier marks the U.S. border with Mexico in the Chukut Kuk District of the Tohono O’odham Nation.Cam Mackey
The tribe’s elected leaders met with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in hopes of changing the administration’s mind. As an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Mullin is the first Native American to head the department. “Maybe we can work with this guy,” Jose recalled thinking.
But Mullin’s message was clear: We want to work with you, but we’re building the wall. Justice Department attorneys were prepared to defend the project to the Supreme Court. O’odham council member Vivian Juan-Saunders, who also attended the April 21 meeting, recalls the secretary saying, “Don’t mess with me.” Mullin’s office did not respond to questions from ProPublica, including about the exchange.
The message was more direct the following month, when tribal leaders met with Scott. According to Jose, the CBP commissioner told the delegation that if they filed a lawsuit opposing the wall, the Nation could lose access to three border gates members use to travel to and from Mexico. Accessible only to tribal members, the gates are maintained at the discretion of CBP.
Juan-Saunders confirmed that CBP threatened to close the gates, as did another council member, Jesse Navarro. CBP declined to comment on the alleged threat.
In June, a $1.3 billion contract to build the wall, known as the “Tucson 5” project, was awarded to Sullivan Land Services Co., also known as SLS and SLSCO. The Texas firm has a long history of Republican political donations and was a major recipient of border wall contracts during Trump’s first term.
The O’odham filed a lawsuit to stop the project on June 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The tribe contended it would reduce the size of its reservation, which can only be done by Congress — and that the wall would mark an enduring act of trespass on sovereign lands and destroy sacred cultural sites.
The administration’s plans cast aside decades of tribal cooperation with DHS, the Nation’s lawyers argued, and came at a time of record-low border crossings.
Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the border is safer than ever, with CBP reporting border apprehensions 94% lower than they were during the Biden presidency, and Border Patrol “encounters” hitting their lowest levels in more than 50 years. The Nation underscored these figures as evidence that a wall is unnecessary.
The tribe’s interim chief of police, James Cook, claimed there had been a 90% drop in reports of illegal entry over the preceding year, saying in a sworn declaration that smuggling and other border-related crimes had “almost disappeared.”
Benjamin S. Hollinder, a senior Border Patrol official, argued in a sworn declaration opposing the tribe’s lawsuit that the absence of a wall on the Nation has produced a funneling effect, channeling smugglers onto the reservation, and saying that dynamic would intensify once the rest of Arizona was walled off.
“Not having a border barrier system in this particular area makes it a vulnerable and a desirable area for [transnational criminal organizations] to operate,” wrote Hollinder. “If encounters of aliens entering illegally between ports of entry increase, vulnerabilities in the area will become particularly problematic.”
The Nation sought the preliminary injunction to bar border wall activity until the litigation was resolved.
On the eve of a July 22 hearing, DHS filed a notice affirming that to accelerate the project, it was waiving, in whole or in part, more than 30 laws, including several that mandate tribal consultation.
In court filings, the government acknowledged its long history of working “cooperatively” with the tribal government while also arguing that the Nation “does not hold veto power over the United States’ sovereign duty to secure its borders.”
Trump administration attorneys contended that an injunction was premature; planning was ongoing, thus problems the Nation envisioned could still be addressed.
The government insisted construction would be limited to the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide zone that runs across California, Arizona and New Mexico on the U.S. side of the border, where CBP was authorized to construct barriers as it saw fit.
Riyaz Kanji, the tribe’s lead attorney, argued the Roosevelt Reservation doesn’t extend onto tribal land, and even if it did the rugged landscape would force construction to diverge far from the 60-foot boundary.
Sweeping as its powers were, Kanji contended, DHS could not override a sovereign government. The administration’s plans, he argued, constituted a “blatant and unprecedented disregard for the tribe’s rights.”
Adam R.F. Gustafson, a Justice Department attorney, countered that the tribe had already approved a barrier on its land many years ago. The question now was what kind of barrier it should be. That was for DHS to decide, he argued. The department was “committed” to consultation, he continued. “We take very seriously the tribe’s views on this,” he told the court.
The judge appeared swayed by DHS’ assurances but needed time to consider. “I don’t think the government is trying to go outside of that 60-foot strip,” he said.
Signs placed by Tohono O’odham tribal leaders warn contractors that their presence on the reservation would be considered trespassing.Cam Mackey
The O’odham suspected the government would not be as mindful as it claimed.
Two days after the meeting with Mullin, the DHS secretary, a border wall contractor had “inadvertently disturbed a cultural site” west of the reservation. The crew had bulldozed a 70-foot swath through the Las Playas Intaglio, a 200-foot long earthen etching in the shape of a fish that was at least 6,500 years old. The site was well marked and well known to area archaeologists.
Wynona P. Larson Yazzie, an O’odham tribal elder, Marine Corps veteran and former tribal police officer, had organized prayer runs that included stops at the intaglio. She’d visited the site the day before its destruction. Since then, she’d closely followed the Nation’s lawsuit.
On Aug. 6, Larson Yazzie saw a disturbing filing from the tribe’s attorneys. They’d received word that in four days government contractors would enter the reservation to conduct tests. DHS, the tribe argued, was “exploiting” the judge’s reflection period to “move forward with highly disputed actions.”
Tribal leaders erected dozens of 8-foot-wide “no trespassing” signs along the three main access roads leading through the reservation to the border.
Larson Yazzie, meanwhile, began making plans of her own.
She was joined by Amy Juan, a longtime O’odham activist. Juan, 40, had grown up riding in her grandfather’s truck over the clanking cattle guard at Ko:li Ki:jig, a traditional crossing on the U.S.-Mexico line. After 9/11, a locking gate was placed over the cattle guard. The Border Patrol built a “forward operating base” near her grandparents’ home that would eventually feature a helipad, a detention space and an endless cycle of agents. Around the reservation’s perimeter, CBP established some of the largest Border Patrol stations in the country. Checkpoints went up on roads leading north.
O’odham tribal members Daniel Oriol Figueroa Cervantes, left, from Mexico, and Amy Juan, from Arizona, visit over the border barrier at the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Aug. 29.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
Human rights groups documented U.S.-born tribal members being arrested and deported, and verbal and physical abuse by Border Patrol agents. CBP did not respond when asked about the report’s allegations.
For Juan, the Nation’s collaboration with DHS had sacrificed safety and civil liberties for elusive gains. Virtually everyone on the reservation had been touched by the dark side of border smuggling. During the mid-2000s, some tribal members, enticed by a chance at life-changing money, got involved in moving people and drugs, fueling cycles of arrest and incarceration that exacerbated challenges the community was already facing.
At the same time, virtually everyone also had a story about negative interactions with the Border Patrol — a child traumatized at a checkpoint, an unlawful traffic stop or a loved one assaulted by an agent.
“We want safety and the same respect as the next person,” Juan said. “We’ve never been against keeping people safe, but at what cost?”
Larson Yazzie was similarly concerned. She worried that in the face of DHS pressure the Nation would fold and, like the intaglio, the borderlands would be lost.
A tribal member stands near the fire burning in the Tadai Me:i prayer camp in early September.Cam Mackey
Prayer fires are an important O’odham tradition, often convened in moments of communal struggle. To Larson Yazzie, the coming of a wall was such a time.
The chosen site was symbolic: the border gate at Ko:li Ki:jig. The camp had limited amenities — cots and chairs that encircled the fire, a cooler for ice, a weathered canopy for relief from the sun. They called it Tadai Me:i — roadrunner on fire.
Someone was always awake to watch the flame, which was lit on Aug. 9, as the Trump administration’s contractors were preparing to enter the reservation. The first drone sighting in the area was recorded the following night, at 11:43 p.m., documented in the first of two activity logs. Kept in spiral notebooks, the logs offered a minute-by-minute account of what participants in the ceremony saw and heard.
The handwritten observations, shared with ProPublica, span 13 days and chart a steady escalation by DHS, culminating in an elite tactical team that blocked tribal authorities from issuing trespassing citations to contractors or removing them.
The camp wasn’t a protest site like those seen in Minneapolis, Chicago or other cities over the past year. Participants didn’t shout at passing Border Patrol agents. They focused on the fire, making sure there was enough sugai — creosote bush, a fragrant desert plant — to keep it burning. They were in ceremony, concentrating on morning prayers and nightly cleanses. The atmosphere was that of a family gathering in a moment of crisis. There were jokes and levity amid the uncertainty.
Larson Yazzie knew at least one legislative council member who opposed the gathering. They feared it could lead to large groups converging on the reservation to physically block the border wall, in an occupation similar to the 10-month protest on Standing Rock Sioux land that halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The idea terrified tribal leaders. With its lethal heat and unforgiving terrain, the desert was dangerous enough without outsiders squaring off against Border Patrol.
A ceremonial fire burns on Aug. 27 at a prayer camp near the traditional Ko:li Ki:jig border crossing on the Tohono O’odham Nation.Nate Sosa
Supporters of the ceremonial fire were themselves uneasy. They knew the story of Ray Mattia, the 58-year-old who was shot and killed by the Border Patrol in 2023 while unarmed on the doorstep of his home on the reservation. Agents, who were backing tribal police on the call, claimed to have mistaken a cellphone he was holding for a gun.
“My fear is that they gonna start shooting us,” said 24-year-old camp visitor Collin Quasule. Quasule had videos on his phone of recent interactions he’d had with federal agents, including agents trailing him as he drove around the reservation, following him to his home, pulling him over without explaining why, refusing to accept his legal name and birthdate, and winking at him when he protested his detention.
Across the reservation, community members were on the lookout for large trucks traveling together with out-of-state plates. On Aug. 12, Juan received a call about a caravan: six trucks with Texas plates, following an unmarked SUV with government plates. She called the tribe’s police department. The caravan was intercepted and escorted off the land by tribal authorities. The driver of the unmarked vehicle was confirmed to be a Border Patrol agent. The interception was one of nearly a dozen tribal police recorded over a three-day period.
During the camp’s first seven days, the activity log filled with nearly 665 observations, mostly federal agents buzzing around their location.
An activity log kept by tribal members documents border wall construction and law enforcement activity on the Tohono O’odham Nation.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
While many would drive by without stopping, other agents would park and watch. At least one was reported snapping photos of the campers. ProPublica later obtained video of an agent doing exactly that. Mexican security forces, both military and police, were also observed conversing with Border Patrol agents over the international boundary. “It appeared that the 2 BPs were showing the Mexicans pictures on their phones,” read an Aug. 11 entry.
“Surveillance has heightened,” Juan said, days after the prayer fire was lit. “Drones, helicopters, a lot of air activity.” The choppers included both marked CBP and what appeared to be military Black Hawks. The drones were of the handheld quadcopter variety, let loose directly over the camp, at times during prayer song ceremonies.
On the fourth night, a gathering was held. Upwards of 100 people turned up, including members of distant sister tribes.
The evening was peaceful until Juan received a text from an elder couple who’d left early to return to their home near Tucson. The Border Patrol had stopped them at a checkpoint a half-mile outside the reservation, they reported. The officers said they were conducting an “immigration check” and asked to see tribal ID.
“Where you guys coming from?” the agent asked.
“Ceremony,” the couple replied.
“Oh,” the agent said, “is that the one going on down south?”
The encounter was unusual, said Juan. The checkpoint is rarely staffed. When agents are on hand, she said, “they never ask us for a tribal ID.”
When Juan shared the information with the gathering, people immediately began packing up, afraid, she surmised, of a late-night encounter with Border Patrol.
A Border Patrol agent stops to film the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Sept. 30.Davy Cross
On Aug. 14, Judge Richard J. Leon declined the Nation’s injunction request. “I fully expect the government in the months ahead to follow through on its guarantees of consultation and cooperation with the Nation to address the Nation’s concerns regarding border wall construction!” he wrote.
Eleven days later, on Aug. 25, the Border Patrol sent the Nation its one-minute notice that the contractors were coming. Larson Yazzie jumped in her truck and raced for the border to document what was happening. An agent on foot stopped her. He’d laid a spike strip in the road ahead, he warned. Larson Yazzie filmed the contractors in the distance.
When the tribal police department’s interim chief arrived, he too was stopped at a Border Patrol roadblock. A trio of Border Patrol supervisors approached, including two from a nearby station and a third representing BORTAC, the agency’s special operations wing. The SWAT-style agents wore desert camo, masks and patterned scarves favored by U.S. military units in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was only after promising not to interfere that the tribal police chief was permitted to record. He observed three drilling rigs manned by a handful of operators. An equal number of agents stood guard. The contractors’ heavy vehicles were all beyond the 60-foot zone that government attorneys assured the judge they would not leave.
The chief also encountered a trio of Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, who claimed to have been sent on orders from Washington, D.C. Their mission, they said, was to “preserve the peace and monitor activities.”
A Border Patrol vehicle is parked near the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on the Tohono O’odham Nation.Cam Mackey
For the prayer camp’s participants, the need to relight the flame, which they had extinguished after a seven-day ceremony, was self-evident. They began that night.
Davy Cross, a stocky 57-year-old with an intricate tattoo running down the left side of his face, was tending the fire when, at 4:33 a.m., he noticed buzzing above his head.
At first, the machines were visible. There were at least five. “I seen all the red lights,” Cross recalled. But as they got lower, the drones went dark. Cross could still hear them and feel the draft of the rotors against his skin. Then, he said, “they disappeared.”
The drones were soon replaced by an airplane and a helicopter. Shortly after 9 a.m., a caravan of Border Patrol and construction vehicles trundled into view. The work trucks continued on, but much of the Border Patrol force remained, forming a semicircle around the camp with Mexican state police closing the loop on the other side of the line.
“We got surround[ed] by over 30 vehicles,” Cross wrote in the activity log. A video of the moment spread across social media in the borderlands.
The tribe’s attorneys filed an appeal of the judge’s order allowing construction to proceed and pleaded for a halt to the government’s activities. They argued that the Trump administration was making “a mockery” of the court’s expectation of “consultation and cooperation.”
A convoy of Border Patrol and construction vehicles pass the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Aug. 29.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
That night at the camp, Larson Yazzie was singing prayer songs when Juan pulled in. It was near midnight. Border Patrol agents were coming and going constantly. Some passed without stopping. Others idled at the edge of the firelight while the red lights of a surveillance blimp blinked over the mountains to the east.
Tadai Me:i wasn’t the only pocket of resistance on the border. In Texas, the Trump administration’s plans to run a wall through Big Bend National Park had brought together an unusual coalition that saw environmental nonprofits and river guides standing with hunters, ranchers and local sheriffs in opposition to the project. One week before the armed convoy rolled onto the Tohono O’odham reservation, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced that after speaking with the secretary of DHS, he’d secured a pause on the controversial project.
“There are technology tools that don’t include barriers,” the governor said at a press conference. “Think of drones, think of fiber optics.”
Last week, a judge granted a preliminary injunction halting construction in the Big Bend area while a lawsuit against the project proceeds.
To Juan, it was darkly ironic. For two and a half decades, the Nation had been a laboratory for the technology Abbott described. Yet when tribal leaders made that case, they were told to stand down; the wall was coming whether they accepted it or not. “What makes Texas the exception to us is very clear,” Juan said. “It’s good old boy conversations that are happening between the politicians and the CBP commissioners and Markwayne Mullin.”
Sunrise at Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Sept. 26Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
The early fire watch that morning fell to a young Pascua Yaqui member named Nate Sosa.
At 3:28 a.m., Sosa heard a noise — a round being chambered in a weapon. A Border Patrol agent had exited his vehicle. With a long gun slung low across his back, he shined a light into Mexico. He then walked within feet of the campers asleep on their cots.
A half an hour later, a drone flew in from the north, followed by a helicopter. After that came a convoy dozens of vehicles long. At 6:02, while Larson Yazzie was leading the camp in prayer, a helicopter passed overhead. An hour later, a drone ascended above the fire.
Liz Quiroga, a 28-year-old tribal member and regular at the prayer site, sat with the camp’s logbook open in her lap. Over the next five days, the book would fill with 379 observations. Nearly two-thirds involved Border Patrol units near the fire. The arrival of Mexican authorities was documented six times. An additional 39 entries referenced unmarked vehicles and suspected “undercovers.” Whether those individuals were Border Patrol, contractors or tribal police was unclear. The logbook cataloged a dozen instances of aircraft flying over the camp, including four helicopters, three planes and five drones.
“Nobody has any idea what’s actually happening out here,” Quiroga said. “This is true dystopia.”
While its legal challenge continues, the Nation has ceased attempting to remove border wall contractors from its lands.
The camp and the surveillance that’s come with it remain.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump announced a deal Friday to purchase large quantities of Russian diesel, reversing years of U.S. efforts to restrict Moscow’s energy revenue over its war in Ukraine.
Trump said Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November, another 1 million tons afterward and eventually an additional 3 million tons. The agreement comes as U.S. diesel prices remain above $6 per gallon and less than a month before the midterm elections.
The move is particularly notable because Trump signed legislation last month expanding sanctions intended to restrict Russian energy income. Shortly after Friday’s announcement, the Treasury Department issued a six-month license easing sanctions on Russian diesel shipments.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized the agreement, arguing that additional energy revenue could help Moscow continue financing its invasion of Ukraine. Trump said lowering fuel costs for American farmers, truckers and consumers was his priority.
The deal follows supply disruptions linked to the Iran war and Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. Analysts cautioned that simply redirecting Russian diesel from existing customers to the United States may have limited impact on global prices.
The White House has not disclosed payment terms or clarified when the first Russian shipments will reach U.S. markets.
Boise, ID — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has contributed $1 million to a political action committee seeking to defeat Idaho’s Proposition 1, a November ballot measure that would expand reproductive rights and repeal the state’s current abortion restrictions.
The donation went to the Too Extreme for Idaho PAC and is the largest reported contribution from a church-affiliated organization in the campaign. The LDS Church said it remains neutral toward candidates but participates in ballot campaigns involving what it considers significant moral issues.
Proposition 1 would repeal Idaho’s existing abortion laws, establish protections for reproductive healthcare decisions and provide liability protections for providers offering abortion and related services.
The church had already announced its opposition in September and encouraged members to oppose the measure. Its abortion policy generally opposes elective abortion while allowing possible exceptions involving rape, incest, serious threats to a pregnant woman’s health or fatal fetal abnormalities.
Religious organizations are active on both sides. Catholic groups have contributed to the opposition campaign, while the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship donated $5,000 to the pro-Proposition 1 PAC.
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador previously concluded that churches may legally contribute to ballot campaigns without disclosing their individual donors under certain conditions.
Recommended dose of hepatitis B vaccine will be withheld from thousands of newborns by Danish researchers
A controversial research trial that will withhold hepatitis B vaccines from some African newborns was given approval to move forward this week.
It is a central part of the vaccine vision for Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine opponent.
This article was amended on 13 October 2026. A previous version said CIDRAP first reported news that the research trial was approved by the Denmark ethics committee. Rolling Stone had actually reported the news first.
Who will replace Republican Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick? Here’s where Kira Alejandro and Melissa Brayman stand
This story is part of Delaware LIVE’s continuing coverage of the 2026 New Castle County Council races.
WILMINGTON, Del. — In August, Delaware LIVE introduced the two Democrats running to replace Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick. Kira Alejandro won that Sept. 15 primary over Kyle Grantham. Now she faces Republican Melissa Brayman, and on Wednesday, Oct. 7, the two answered questions side by side at an in-person candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of New Castle County at Limestone Presbyterian Church.
Kilpatrick, a Republican who has represented Hockessin, Yorklyn, North Star, Pike Creek and part of Newark for 16 years, is not seeking reelection. She was in the audience.
The seat is known as New Castle County Council District 3. County council votes on the county budget, property taxes and requests to rezone land for new development. According to the League of Women Voters of New Castle County, questions were submitted online before the forum and on note cards at the event.
The general election is Nov. 3. Six county council seats are on this year’s ballot, but only three have candidates from both parties, and this is one of them, according to the Delaware Department of Elections. A Delaware LIVE look at all six races is coming next.
What they have in common
Whoever wins, the seat will stay with a woman. Neither Democrat Kira Alejandro nor Republican Melissa Brayman has held elected office. Both attended the University of Delaware, both left Delaware for a time before coming back, and both bring an environmental background to the race: Alejandro through her work saving land from development, and Brayman through her University of Delaware studies in wildlife conservation.
Both named affordability as the county’s most urgent problem. Both said the state passes costs to the county without paying for them, and both said many residents don’t know what county council does.
Several questions asked about specific development proposals, including a McDonald’s on Limestone Road and a car wash in Hockessin. Delaware LIVE will report separately on the status of those projects.
The table below compares the two candidates in 10 areas, from their backgrounds to where they stand on taxes, development and data centers. The forum covered more ground than we could fit here. You can watch the full discussion on the League’s website.
Where they differ
Kira Alejandro, Democrat
Melissa Brayman, Republican
Lives in
Yorklyn
Pike Creek
Education
Attended the University of Delaware
Bachelor’s degree in entomology (the study of insects) with a concentration in wildlife conservation, University of Delaware
Work
A decade in specialty coffee and small local businesses; says she worked with neighbors to save nearly 30 acres from development
Director of administration and finance, Delaware State Chamber of Commerce; board member, Citizens for Delaware Schools
In her own words
“The only people politicians should ever be beholden to are the voters who elect them.”
“I’m not an influencer. I’m not an activist.” Describes herself as a working mom.
Taxes
Wants to protect people on fixed incomes from county tax increases
Pledged to oppose any new tax increase: “I will vote no on that tax increase.”
Spending
Would preserve the public library “first and foremost”; would stop buying more automated license plate readers
Supports public safety, law enforcement and libraries; would scale back administrative costs
New development
Errs “on the side of not supporting anything that the people who live in the immediate area do not want when their concerns are legitimate”
“Each project should be treated as an individual project and should be heard on its merits.”
Housing costs
Would require more lower-priced homes in new developments and build more in areas that already have roads, sewer and power
Would allow more kinds of homes, including small starter homes and in-law suites
Data centers
Wants a pause on approving new data centers: “We don’t totally understand everything about data centers yet.”
Would not support a pause if defending it costs taxpayers money, but would “pump the brakes a little bit”; opposes data centers in any residential area
Money from developers
Takes none from developers, land use attorneys, corporations or corporate political action committees; will refund any developer donation she learns of
Has not accepted any from developers; did not say directly whether she would commit to refusing them
Delaware LIVE’s 2026 Voter’s Guide
Who’s on your ballot? Delaware Live’s 2026 Voters Guide shows every candidate in your county and district, updated daily, with a countdown to Election Day. Check it out=>Delaware LIVE 2026 Voters Guide.
(Author’s note: Quotes from both candidates are taken from a transcript of the League of Women Voters of New Castle County’s video recording of the Oct. 7 forum.)
From Apple-Scrapple in Bridgeville to international films in Wilmington, the Oct. 9-11 weekend offers so many activities that a Top 10 list isn’t nearly enough.
BRIDGEVILLE, Del. — Delawareans looking for something to do this weekend have a good problem: There may be more festivals, sporting events, concerts and family activities than anyone can fit into three days.
The weekend of Oct. 9-11 brings together some of the First State’s favorite fall traditions, with activities stretching from Wilmington to Sussex County.
From scrapple slinging and pumpkin picking to independent films and college football, the calendar offers something for nearly every age and interest.
Here are Delaware LIVE’s top weekend picks, followed by an expanded guide because there are simply too many events to leave out.
Delaware LIVE’s Top Weekend Picks
Apple-Scrapple Festival — Bridgeville
One of Sussex County’s biggest fall traditions returns Friday and Saturday, bringing food, crafts, live entertainment, carnival rides and the popular Scrapple Sling competition to downtown Bridgeville. Saturday’s activities run from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Wilmington International Film Festival — Wilmington
Independent films, international productions, documentaries and filmmaker events fill downtown Wilmington venues through Sunday. The festival offers audiences an opportunity to discover films outside the traditional commercial theater circuit.
Delaware State University Homecoming — Dover
Delaware State University welcomes Franklin Pierce for its homecoming football game Saturday at 1 p.m. at Alumni Stadium, adding to a weekend of alumni and campus activities.
Fifer’s Fall Festival — Camden-Wyoming
Pumpkins, farm attractions, seasonal treats and family activities make Fifer Orchards a popular autumn destination. Saturday’s festival runs from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Amish Country Bike Tour — Dover
Cyclists will travel scenic roads throughout central Delaware Saturday during the 40th annual Amish Country Bike Tour. Multiple routes accommodate riders of different abilities, with activities centered around Legislative Mall.
Nature and Outdoor Adventures — New Castle County
Families can watch migrating hawks at Ashland Nature Center near Hockessin or explore Wilmington’s wetlands through Delaware Nature Society programs. Both offer opportunities to experience Delaware’s natural environment during the fall migration season.
Live Music — Wilmington and Smyrna
Vinyl Shockley performs Saturday evening at The Queen in Wilmington, while Van Halen Nation brings classic rock to the Smyrna Opera House.
Too Much Fun to Leave Out: More Delaware Weekend Events
Putting together a Top 10 list presented an unusual problem this weekend: There are simply too many worthwhile events to fit into one short list.
From farmers markets and nature programs to concerts, cycling, films and community activities, organizations across Delaware have planned activities for nearly every interest.
Here’s a longer look at what’s happening across the First State this weekend.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump has offered conservative commentator and former Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Katie Zacharia the job of White House press secretary, according to multiple reports Friday.
Zacharia would replace Karoline Leavitt, who left the administration in August. The White House has confirmed that Zacharia received the offer but had not publicly confirmed whether she had formally accepted it as of Thursday afternoon.
Zacharia currently serves as a senior communications adviser for Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. Earlier this year, she briefly worked at DHS as a deputy assistant secretary for public affairs.
She is also an attorney and previously worked with Fix California, a conservative organization founded by longtime Trump ally Richard Grenell. Her background includes frequent appearances in conservative media defending Trump administration policies.
If she accepts, Zacharia would take over one of the administration’s most visible communications roles less than a month before the midterm elections.
The appointment would also move a communications official directly from Trump’s private media company into the White House briefing room, further tightening the connection between the president’s political operation and his official administration messaging.
Oct. 9, 2026 — Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.
A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.
“Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world,” Margaret Hamilton said of her time as an MIT software engineer working with NASA’s Apollo program, which aimed to land the first humans on the moon. “There was no choice but to be pioneers.” Image credit: Toan Trinh, MIT Technology Review.
Her life’s work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: “Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon.”
“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved,” says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program’s success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions.”
Early Life and Projects at MIT
Born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, Hamilton began studying mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College, where she earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1958. She moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1959 with her husband while he pursued a law degree.
Hamilton soon found a temporary position in the meteorology department at MIT, working with professor of meteorology Edward N. Lorenz SM ’43, ScD ’48 on weather prediction software. This was her first entry point into computer programming, and her work would go on to inform Lorenz’s future publications on chaos theory.
From there, Hamilton took a role as a programmer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1961, working on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project, the United States’ first air defense system. Hamilton wrote software for the prototype AN/FSQ-7 computer (XD-1), used by the U.S. Air Force to search for potentially unfriendly aircraft. During this time, Hamilton began to take an interest in software reliability — a new and largely unexplored concept at the time.
In 1965 Hamilton was preparing to pursue graduate studies when her husband saw an advertisement in the newspaper: The Instrumentation Lab at MIT was seeking people to develop software to “send man to the moon.” The lab had won the contract from NASA to build the onboard flight software for the Apollo program. Intrigued by the challenge, Hamilton applied, and was hired as the first programmer for the Apollo project at MIT, as well as the first female programmer in the project.
Hamilton worked first on the software for the uncrewed Apollo missions and then was promoted into leading the team developing the on-board flight software for the crewed missions. By 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, and more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software.
“From my own perspective, the software experience itself (designing it, developing it, evolving it, watching it perform and learning from it for future systems) was at least as exciting as the events surrounding the mission,” Hamilton told MIT News in 2009. “There was no second chance. We knew that. We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way, and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”
‘Defensive’ Programming and Priority-Driven Software Take Humans to the Moon
Hamilton discovered a talent for leadership, as well as a keen instinct for problem-solving and critical thinking that would prove to save Project Apollo several times over.
There was the incident that became known as “the Lauren error”: One day, her daughter Lauren, then four years old, was playing with the command module simulator at the Instrumentation Lab when she somehow activated a pre-launch program, called P01, while the simulator was in midflight — which crashed the simulator altogether. Hamilton created a program add-on in the technical documentation warning users not to launch P01 during flight.
She also proposed a software fix to prevent the error happening during a real mission, but she was overruled on the grounds that the highly trained astronauts were never going to make that same mistake. Yet during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, that’s exactly what happened: Jim Lovell inadvertently launched P01 during the flight, causing the on-flight navigational data to vanish. Hamilton and her team were called in to solve the error, and after that her proposed changes were integrated into the program. This was an early example of “defensive” programming, the practice of building software that could anticipate or fix errors on its own.
Hamilton’s most famous contribution to the Apollo program came during the pivotal Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon in July of 1969. Moments before the Eagle module was set to land on the lunar surface, the onboard computer raised the alarm. It had detected a 1202 error: The computer was overloaded due to a fault in a hardware switch, and it was possible the system would not be able to handle the complex landing procedure.
But Hamilton and her team had engineered priority-driven software, able to shut down unnecessary background tasks in order to prioritize mission-critical tasks. Houston trusted Hamilton’s software and allowed the mission to proceed, and two men walked on the moon for the first time.
Later Career and Legacy
Hamilton continued to work at the Instrumentation Lab into the 1970s. As the Apollo program wound down, the Instrumentation Lab spun out of MIT to become the independent Draper Laboratory.
“Margaret left an indelible mark on Draper, and we will be forever grateful,” says Jerry M. Wohletz SM ’97, PhD ’00, president and CEO at Draper. “Through her leadership and contributions to the development of the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer, she helped ensure that Apollo astronauts landed safely on the lunar surface and safely returned home. We will honor her legacy at Draper forever.”
Hamilton went on to create her first software company, Higher Order Software, in 1976. The firm was based on Hamilton’s software engineering approach of error prevention and fault tolerance.
A decade later, Hamilton founded another software company, Hamilton Technologies, “to provide products and services to modernize the planning, system engineering and software development process in order to maximize reliability, lower cost and accelerate time to market.”
Hamilton Technologies’ flagship product is the Universal Systems Language (USL), a systems modeling language and methodology for engineering complex software systems that prioritize error prevention and defensive programming.
Throughout her career, Hamilton worked to achieve recognition for software engineering as a dedicated discipline.
“I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect, and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process,” Hamilton told El Pais in 2018. “When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.”
Among her many awards and honors, Hamilton was recognized with the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for scientific and technical contributions in 2003; the Computer History Museum Fellow Award in 2017; the Intrepid Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019; and induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2022.
Later in life, Hamilton become an icon for women in science and technology, especially after a now-famous photo, showing her next to a printout of her MIT team’s Apollo code, began circulating online. In 2015, the Apollo software she helped to develop was added in its entirety to the code-sharing site GitHub. And in 2017, she became an official Lego Minifigure after a set originally designed by MIT science communicator Maia Weinstock, honoring her and several other women of NASA history, became available worldwide.
“Margaret Hamilton has been an inspiration to generations of computer scientists and engineers. Hers was a career dedicated to preventing errors and what she called ‘handling the unknown,’” says de Weck. “She personified leadership by example, and established a practice of software engineering based on problem-solving and systems engineering that we all benefit from.”
Hamilton is survived by her daughter, Lauren Hamilton; her son-in-law, Richard Selesnick; two grandsons; four great grandchildren; and her siblings John, David, and Kathryn. A memorial service will take place in the spring in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Source: Janine Liberty, MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Oct. 9, 2026 — The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has been selected by DOE to lead an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven autonomous catalysis discovery project and partner on eight others through DOE’s Genesis Mission, which invests in AI approaches to tackling the nation’s complex science and technology challenges.
The SLAC-led project will connect AI reasoning directly with experiments to speed the scientific understanding of catalytic processes important for energy and chemical production. The eight partner projects include major multi-year collaborations and address needs in areas ranging from biosciences to quantum materials, microelectronics and fusion energy.
“SLAC is proud to lend our leadership and expertise across these new projects that illustrate DOE’s commitment to bringing together laboratories, universities and the private sector to address critical energy challenges,” said SLAC Laboratory Director John Sarrao. “Together, these nine new projects will leverage [AI] combined with SLAC expertise to accelerate our scientific and technological impact.”
The awarded projects were announced by the DOE yesterday.
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to mobilize government, industry, academia, nonprofits and international partners to advance AI for science and technology. Using the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, partners work together on shared infrastructure that connects researchers with data, compute and AI tools to accelerate scientific discovery. Partners are focusing on the most critical challenges facing our nation in energy, national security, scientific discovery, health, space and more.
SLAC has deep expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence for autonomous diagnostics, control and high-speed data processing for critical systems. SLAC’s premier facilities produce datasets that illuminate our world through research in physics, biology, energy and other fields, making discoveries from the grand scale of the cosmos to the smallest and fastest scales of the motions of electrons, atoms and molecules.
SLAC has a long-standing catalysis program that combines theory, catalyst testing and X-ray measurements of working catalysts. SLAC also leads the DOE Basic Energy Sciences ISAAC AI Pathfinder, a Genesis Mission project that brings together measurements from DOE user facilities across the country, theoretical calculations run on DOE supercomputers, and the scientific literature so AI can weigh evidence and rank competing scientific hypotheses.
The SLAC-led catalysis project is a Phase I award from the Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI Request for Application (RFA). Of the eight new partner awards, one is a Phase I RFA award and seven are Phase II RFA awards.
The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation or generate new scientific insights.
The SLAC-led project, “Closed-Loop Autonomous Discovery of Mechanistic Activity-Selectivity-Stability Rules in Catalysis,” will build a closed-loop system in which an AI agent compares competing ideas about how catalysts work, identifies what evidence is missing and chooses the next experiment that can best test them.
The project’s principal investigator is Dimosthenis Sokaras, director of the Chemistry & Catalysis Division at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). The project is a collaboration with the California Institute of Technology led by Harry Atwater, professor of engineering and applied science, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory led by Junko Yano, division director of Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging. The collaboration includes researchers at the DOE-funded Liquid Sunlight Alliance, a multi-institution consortium that includes SLAC and is led by Atwater, and the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, a joint venture between SLAC and the School of Engineering at Stanford University.
At SSRL, a DOE Office of Science user facility, the system will combine real-time X-ray measurements with electrochemistry, computer models and published knowledge. Each result will feed back into the reasoning and guide the next measurement. Phase I will test whether this approach can reach scientific understanding with fewer experiments than standard approaches. Faster insight into how catalysts work can help researchers develop more efficient and durable processes for energy and chemical production while advancing the broader vision of autonomous laboratories.
“The [AI] weighs the scientific evidence, decides which measurement would tell us the most, and that decision becomes a real experiment at SSRL,” Sokaras said. “The result comes straight back into the reasoning process. That closed loop is a key step toward autonomous laboratories, where scientists can test ideas and learn much faster.”
SLAC will partner on another Phase I project to advance accelerator facilities, and seven Phase II projects in areas spanning the fields of biology, microelectronics, quantum materials, fusion energy and accelerator science.
The goal of the Phase II RFA awards is to scale up and expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for AI advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. The selected projects are multi-year and use interdisciplinary teams to address national science and technology challenges across key DOE mission areas.
SLAC will collaborate on the following eight projects:
Phase I
From Beam Loss to Beam Intelligence: Adaptive Generative AI for Autonomous Accelerator Facilities. Lead institution: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Phase II
Overcoming Barriers in Computational Enzyme Design Through Improved Sequence-Structure Ensemble Modeling. Lead institution: University of Washington
AI4HPC: An Iterative Framework for AI-Assisted Scientific Software Development and Optimization. Lead institution: Argonne National Laboratory
AI-Empowered Design of Functional Quantum Magnets. Lead institution: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The Multi-Office Accelerator Team Core (MOAT-Core) Project. Lead institution: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
AXESS: Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon. Lead institution: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Accelerating the Path to Commercial Fusion Energy via an AI-enabled Digital Twin Platform for SPARC. Lead institution: Commonwealth Fusion Systems LLC
Decoding the RNA Structurome to Secure AI Advantage for the Bioeconomy. Lead institution: The Regents of the University of California, UC San Diego
These investments follow an earlier award that DOE announced in July selecting SLAC to lead a Phase I project to help secure the nation’s critical mineral supply by developing AI tools to improve extraction of metals from spent lithium-ion batteries, a collaboration that includes researchers at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center and the University of Southern California.
RENO, Nev., Oct. 9, 2026 — CIQ, the company behind Rocky Linux and the open infrastructure provider the world’s leading enterprises companies trust in production, has announced Apptainer Pro, an upcoming commercially supported edition of Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing. Apptainer Pro will add long-term maintenance, workload compatibility validation, execution records and efficient image distribution so organizations can run AI training and HPC applications reliably at scale.
Containers now package most AI and HPC applications, yet they were never a sufficient privilege boundary on shared infrastructure. CIQ founder Gregory Kurtzer created Singularity, now Apptainer, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to solve that problem. Apptainer runs containers as the user who launches them, with no privileged daemon, and has become the standard at national laboratories and supercomputing centers. As AI-assisted research exposes kernel flaws at record pace and AI workloads scale across shared GPU clusters, platform teams need more than the runtime. They need a maintained release lifecycle, confidence that a container will run on the target hardware, a record of what ran where, and a way to deliver images efficiently across thousands of nodes. Apptainer Pro will deliver that operational layer with an accountable support relationship from CIQ.
“Apptainer was built on the premise that users on a shared system should get the full benefit of containers without gaining privileges they shouldn’t have,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux, Apptainer (formerly Singularity), and Warewulf. “That premise matters more today than ever. Apptainer Pro will give organizations the lifecycle, validation and traceability to run Apptainer in production, and extend CIQ’s support from the operating system with RLC Pro to the application environment.”
Apptainer Pro will deliver designated long-term support releases with backported security and critical bug fixes, signed packages and tested upgrade paths on a predictable schedule. It will also check container requirements against the intended deployment target (GPU type, CUDA or ROCm, and MPI configuration) before a full workload launch, to reduce avoidable job failures and wasted compute. Execution records will connect each workload to its image digest, user, job, runtime and host environment, so teams can identify which images ran on affected hosts when an advisory lands and can produce audit evidence on demand. Reusable OCI-to-SIF conversions, image pre-staging and managed node-local caching will reduce repeated transfers across the cluster. Local mirrors and signed offline updates will support air-gapped and sovereign environments.
CIQ is now accepting early customers for Apptainer Pro, with priority given to organizations moving from Singularity. Wider availability is expected soon, as a standalone subscription or alongside RLC Pro, Warewulf Pro, Ascender Pro and Fuzzball. Because Apptainer Pro builds on open source Apptainer, Singularity users will keep their existing containers and workflows: Apptainer runs the same SIF images and still provides the singularity command. To join the early customer program, visit ciq.com/products/apptainer.
About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of Enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers secure, performant software infrastructure for the full range of modern workloads. Global enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers trust CIQ to run their most advanced workloads in production, from mission-critical environments to the systems behind major scientific and AI breakthroughs. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing, with Apptainer Pro coming soon. Learn more at ciq.com.
Photo illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Danny Johnston/AP, Douglas Rissing via iStock, Air Force Maj. David Brown and Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Isaac Garza.
Among a cadre of Wall Street executives brought into the Pentagon during President Donald Trump’s second term, George K. Kollitides II has emerged as a powerbroker with a broad mandate to improve procurement of weapons and critical minerals.
The longtime partner at the private equity firm Alvarez & Marsal Capital has framed his tour of duty in government as a service to the country. But the work he’s leading has also been a boon to his old friends in the private sector, government procurement records show.
In April, months after Kollitides had started work at the Pentagon, he was listed on a securities filing as continuing to work for his old company as a senior adviser. Two months later, the Defense Department finalized a $281 million no-bid consulting contract with an affiliate firm, Alvarez & Marsal Federal, to advise Kollitides’ new Pentagon office, the records show.
That contract, large for consulting work even by Defense Department standards, is the second in a pair of deals that since December have awarded almost $350 million in military spending to the firm — about five times more than Alvarez & Marsal entities had received from all U.S. agencies combined in the two decades before Trump returned to office, according to federal spending data. Both of those contracts have been for work connected to Pentagon offices where Kollitides is the head or has a senior role.
The deals remain shrouded in secrecy, records show, because they were signed under an unusual contracting method the Defense Department uses to fund experimental weapons — work A&M has never claimed to do. They have begun to send unprecedented sums of taxpayer money to a company that boasts helping government agencies create a “customer-centric culture” and that is deeply intertwined with the private equity firm where Kollitides was a partner for almost 10 years. The two partner firms tag-team investment deals and share back-office support, company documents and federal filings show.
Kollitides was still working with A&M Capital when the deals were signed. It’s unclear if he will benefit financially from the windfall of military spending on A&M consulting. His employment at the Pentagon is under a special classification that allows him to keep his financial disclosures confidential.
Ethics experts said it’s generally illegal for executive branch officials to play a role in awarding contracts that would have a direct impact on their own finances, unless they were granted a waiver.
“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled,” said Virginia Canter, a former federal government ethics lawyer. “There are a million consulting firms in D.C. and New York. Why would you sole source this contract? They’re not sending replacement parts for a ship that is sinking.”
After ProPublica sent questions to the Pentagon, Kollitides and both A&M entities early this week, A&M Capital said Kollitides had just stopped working there days earlier.
In a statement, A&M Capital said it is a “separately capitalized and separately managed firm from the Alvarez & Marsal consulting business” and its “management and employees have no involvement in the day-to-day operations of the consulting business, and vice versa.” The firm said that none of Kollitides’ work for it related to the “defense industry, the Department of War or Mr. Kollitides’ government service.”
The Alvarez & Marsal consulting business did not answer any of ProPublica’s questions, including how it became aware of the possibility that it could seek the $281 million no-bid contract and what services it is providing to Kollitides’ Pentagon team. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported the existence of some of the Alvarez & Marsal contracting.
“We are proud to serve clients across all industries, and all levels of government,” the company said in a statement. “The common denominator is always the same: we help solve difficult problems.”
“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled.”
Virginia Canter, former federal government ethics lawyer
Kollitides did not respond to questions about whether he played a role in A&M securing contracts to work for his office, but a Pentagon spokesperson replied for the department and on Kollitides’ behalf saying they both followed all applicable rules.
“The Department of War maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Jacob Bliss wrote in an email. Kollitides, he added, “is in full compliance with all ethical laws and regulations. Any claims otherwise are false.”
There is widespread bipartisan agreement that the Pentagon’s procurement systems are in need of radical reform and private-sector know-how could help the country better secure supply lines and accelerate the development of new weapons to ensure the military is prepared to fight future wars.
But current and former defense officials say the massive spending for connected consultants is a reflection of a changed Defense Department under Trump. They say a clubby and politicized culture has taken hold in a wing of the Pentagon controlled by Kollitides and other former Wall Street executives recruited by Steve Feinberg, the billionaire private-equity titan who is now the deputy defense secretary. It’s an operation, they say, that favors people and companies that have close ties to the administration.
This year, ProPublica reported that the Office of Strategic Capital, a unit at the Pentagon that Kollitides helps lead, granted a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. a $620 million loan after a top aide to the president intervened on the company’s behalf. A group of Democratic lawmakers accused the office of “a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling.”
ProPublica also reported that the same Pentagon unit was considering a loan to Unusual Machines, a second company connected to the president’s son. A defense official told ProPublica recently that the unit is now in the late stages of a $220 million loan for the Florida drone parts maker, where Trump Jr. sits on the advisory board and was granted a stake.
The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the advancing loan process for Unusual Machines and if Trump Jr.’s connections were playing a part. After the earlier loan to a Trump-connected company, the Pentagon said “no company receives preferential treatment” and “political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson pushed back on criticism, saying the Defense Department is conducting extensive due diligence on potential lending.
That Pentagon lending unit was launched during the Biden administration with an open application process for interested companies. Current and former officials and people who have interacted with the office say Kollitides and other leaders now rely more on their own personal networks to choose companies to fund — as well as the consultants to vet those deals.
Multiple Pentagon Hats
That reliance on personal networks is how Kollitides got to the Pentagon.
Feinberg first hired Kollitides more than two decades ago.
Then a rising private-equity star who had graduated from Columbia Business School, Kollitides moved up the ranks at Cerberus, Feinberg’s firm, taking the reins of its aerospace, defense and government groups. In 2012, Kollitides took on an especially sensitive and more public job for the private-equity giant. Kollitides was named chief executive of a Cerberus company combining Remington, the nation’s oldest gun maker, with more than a dozen other firearms and parts companies, eliminating hundreds of jobs from New York to Georgia to Montana.
After three years with the Cerberus-owned gunmaker, Kollitides left and became a partner at Alvarez & Marsal Capital, an offshoot of A&M consulting, whose co-founder also had long-standing business ties to Feinberg.
George K. Kollitides II, left, attends a philanthropic gala held to honor him in 2010, when he was managing director at Cerberus.Amber De Vos/Patrick McMullan Archive via Getty Images
Some former business associates said they were not surprised that Kollitides jumped at the chance to rejoin Feinberg at the Pentagon. The two share a love for firearms and defense industry investments. They have also both described their work addressing the military’s most vexing supply chain issues as a patriotic calling.
“Americans need us at the Pentagon and our civilians and our contractors to do better,” Feinberg said last year. “We can’t fail, we can’t make excuses, we must succeed.”
On social media, Kollitides has shown the kind of partisanship long taboo in the Pentagon but now fostered in its ranks by Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Kollitides has decried the “Democrat Party,” warned of the ills of socialism and posted that “the government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”
Over the last year, Feinberg has continued to heap responsibility on Kollitides: naming him his co-chief of staff and senior adviser; vice chairman of the Office of Strategic Capital’s investment committee; and director of two other new offices, the Economic Defense Unit and the Business Operators for National Defense, or BOND — the office with the $281 million no-bid contract.
His employment status allowing him to hold any of those roles at the Pentagon is somewhat of a mystery.
Unlike Feinberg, who was confirmed to his post by the Senate, Kollitides was reportedly first brought onto the federal government last year as a special government employee, or SGE, a designation that allows someone to work in government for no more than 130 days a year. Kollitides seemingly exceeded that cap several months ago.
Steve Feinberg, right, confers with an aide prior to testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee at his 2025 confirmation hearing for the role of deputy defense secretary.Win McNamee/Getty Images
But in the Pentagon’s email system, Kollitides’ name now carries an abbreviation signifying he has been designated an HQE, or highly qualified expert. His employment classification, which the Pentagon confirmed, is designed to hire people who bring “enlightened thinking and innovation” to Defense Department roles that can last up to six years.
That distinction brings a unique benefit for Kollitides. Financial disclosures filed by HQEs are generally confidential, while those of high-ranking SGEs are often subject to release once a person fills a government role for more than 60 days. It’s unclear if Pentagon ethics officials granted Kollitides a waiver to keep any disclosures confidential.
(ProPublica requested Kollitides’ financial disclosure forms in August, but the Pentagon has not yet responded.)
Kollitides’ continued tie to Alvarez & Marsal Capital surfaced in April in a securities filing by a second company with which the defense official was taking a leadership post.
Days after Feinberg named him the head of BOND, granting Kollitides deep visibility into weapons production rates of U.S. military contractors, Kollitides took a seat on the board of D. Boral Acquisition I, an offshore shell company whose affiliate D. Boral Capital has partnered with defense-related businesses. The Guardian and Bloomberg Government previously reported on the filing, and Bloomberg reported that Kollitides stepped down from the position at the end of September.
Kollitides’ biography in the filing described his current roles at the Pentagon, then added that “he is also a Senior Advisor” to Alvarez & Marsal Capital and that he previously was a partner and co-head of one the firm’s funds.
A securities filing reveals that Kollitides continued working for Alvarez & Marsal Capital even after starting work at the Defense Department.Screenshot and highlighting by ProPublica
The A&M entity that Kollitides is described as still advising in the filing is essentially the private-equity partner of the sprawling Alvarez & Marsal firm that includes A&M Federal, which is now providing consulting services for his offices at the Pentagon.
Though the private-equity and consulting businesses are distinct, they work together, share back-office staff for human resources and tech support, and have overlapping ownership, according to company documents. The private-equity arm describes itself as having a “strategic relationship” with the consulting side of A&M. The firm boosts its investment decision-making by working with the consulting firm’s thousands of employees around the globe to assess particular companies. And after the fund takes a stake in a company, it deploys the consulting arm’s employees to improve that firm’s operations and make the company more valuable.
In other words, the fund’s success hinges on the consulting firm’s.
Whether Kollitides violated government ethics rules hinges on details that he and the Pentagon have declined to provide.
A Defense Department official told ProPublica that Kollitides “does not and has never had” any investments or financial relations with A&M consulting. The official said Kollitides is also “recused on any conflicted matters related to A&M Capital,” which could be referring to Defense Department decisions related to companies A&M Capital has a financial stake in.
Ethics experts said that without a written waiver, executive branch officials are generally barred from participating in decisions, such as the awarding of a contract, that would have a direct impact on their financial interests. That law, the experts said, could apply even if the official doesn’t have a stake in a company but just draws a salary — the rationale being that they’ve improved the odds that the company will be able to continue paying them.
The Pentagon official did not answer specific questions about whether Kollitides was being compensated by A&M Capital when the contracts were signed, if he played any role in the contract decision-making process or if he sought or received an exemption to do so.
A “Blank Sheet of Paper” Contract
A&M’s first contract with the Pentagon was signed in December, months after Kollitides joined the government. That $67.6 million deal was awarded to Alvarez & Marsal Federal through a Defense Department entity focused on efforts to strengthen the nation’s industrial base.
The full scope of work that A&M provided is unclear. But documents reviewed by ProPublica show that by late last year, the firm had begun helping to vet possible loan deals for the Office of Strategic Capital, the lending unit then run in part by Kollitides.
Like that first contract, the larger, $281 million deal that followed to advise Kollitides’ BOND office came in the form of what is called an OTA, or other transaction agreement, which allows agencies to bypass regular federal contracting rules on public disclosure and oversight.
Congress first authorized the Defense Department to use the contracting method in the 1980s to fund breakthrough technologies without publicly disclosing much about the work. The Pentagon has increasingly turned to OTA contracts over the last decade to quickly fund a broader range of one-time costs, including prototype weapons and urgent production needs, even as government auditors have lamented OTAs as a “blank sheet of paper” arrangement with little oversight or accountability.
Still, experts said an OTA contract for consulting work was extraordinary. That’s because consulting is one of the simplest services the military can buy, and it has a long history of doing so through competitive bidding. Firms often publish the hourly costs for their associates, managers and other work before solicitations are posted.
But like black-box OTA contracts for secret weapons systems, the funding mechanism has hidden from public view details of what taxpayers are getting for the money.
The sheer size of the A&M contract stunned experts.
At $281,089,206.65, the consulting contract is among the largest OTAs funded through the Defense Department’s main support division in the last decade, including for top secret semiconductor projects and underwater drones, records show.
The Pentagon has said little about the impact of BOND since Hegseth claimed in February that the new entity would revolutionize military purchasing.
The defense secretary said that under the program, the military would embed former corporate executives, or, as he put it, “elite, private-sector patriots” to help optimize and accelerate the manufacturing of critical munitions. Hegseth said he thought the exercise would help the Pentagon increase resiliency in supply chains. The “era of managed decline is over,” he said.
In private recruitment materials for those executives, as well as for candidates to fill posts in other Kollitides-run units, the stakes and the mission for BOND were described in even starker terms: Neoliberalism and trade deals have left the U.S. as a country that “can no longer manufacture ships, munitions or planes in a timely manner.”
The recruiting materials cast the job of fixing that systemic problem as part-time work: “Recently retired Fortune 100 executives spend five days per month solving public- and private-sector operational challenges,” read pages viewed by ProPublica.
Two people familiar with A&M’s work for BOND said the firm’s consultants have accompanied former executives on trips to review work at major defense contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and BAE Systems. BAE acknowledged a visit by BOND representatives but declined to comment further. Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and other companies contacted by ProPublica did not respond to requests for comment.
Contracting experts said that A&M is likely not guaranteed the full amount, and that contracts like these typically span several years, but records show A&M has already been paid about $31 million.
Not everyone, however, is welcome to participate.
One former military officer who worked in the defense industry told ProPublica he was contacted by an outside recruiter for Kollitides’ new BOND office. The recruiter, he said, told him that all applicants would be asked who they voted for.
The former military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said he expressed discomfort with that line of questioning. He received an email shortly after from the recruiter telling him he was no longer under consideration. The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the officer’s account.
“Getting more effective and efficient is not a political question,” the former officer said.
Nigeria’s economic outlook: Progress on reform and prospects for inclusive growth
22
October 2026 — 13:00 TO 14:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Hear from Nigeria’s Minister of Finance Hon. Taiwo Oyedele about reform, growth and the path to economic inclusion.
Hear from Nigeria’s Minister of Finance Hon. Taiwo Oyedele about reform, growth and the path to economic inclusion.
Shortly after taking office in 2023 President Bola Tinubu introduced Nigeria’s most significant economic reforms since 2007, including the removal of fuel subsidies and the decision to float the naira. While many economists argued that subsidy reform was overdue, the pace of change contributed to rising inflation and deeper pressure on household living standards. Although these measures are now credited with improving macroeconomic stability and investor confidence - Moody’s has revised Nigeria’s outlook to ‘positive’ from ‘stable’ citing its improved ability to withstand external shocks - the government faces growing questions about how reform can translate into more inclusive growth.
This event discusses:
How will Nigeria ensure the benefits of reform reach a broader share of society?
How might security challenges affect Nigeria’s economic trajectory?
What progress has been made since the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira?
How can the government address concerns over poverty, livelihoods and living costs?
How will Nigeria maintain investor confidence amid global uncertainty?
How is Nigeria preparing for the economic debate ahead of the 2027 presidential election?
This event is part of a series of events and outputs examining Nigeria’s 2027 elections and political developments.
Tucson, AZ — A 46-year-old Arizona man has been arrested and federally charged after investigators say he threatened to carry out bomb attacks against the White House and other locations in Washington, D.C.
Jacob Aaron Hicks of Tucson is charged with making an interstate threat to injure. The investigation began after Tucson television station KGUN9 received an email on Sept. 23 warning of an imminent attack and forwarded the message to law enforcement.
The FBI confirmed that the station’s report prompted an investigation. Authorities subsequently identified Hicks as the alleged sender, according to a criminal complaint.
Investigators also searched an email account allegedly linked to Hicks and discovered additional unsent draft messages containing similar threats. Those drafts, also dated Sept. 23, were addressed to other news organizations and referenced attacks against the White House and locations elsewhere in the nation’s capital.
Authorities have not publicly disclosed a motive or indicated that explosives were recovered. No attack occurred, and investigators have not announced evidence that another person participated in the alleged plot.
Hicks faces a federal criminal charge, but the allegations remain unproven. He is presumed innocent unless convicted in court.
The FBI investigation remains ongoing as authorities review the threatening communications and circumstances surrounding them.
New York, NY — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave the city after a federal agent fired seven rounds into a vehicle, wounding a 28-year-old man while his 5-year-old son was inside.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch identified the wounded man as Oscar Belgal and said he was struck in the neck below his left ear. His son was physically unharmed and later placed with a family member.
Belgal was taken to a hospital, but Mamdani said ICE agents removed him shortly before city officials held a Thursday night press conference. The mayor said negotiations with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seeking Belgal’s release were unsuccessful.
DHS said ICE agents were conducting a “targeted enforcement operation” when an officer fired. The department described Belgal as an unauthorized immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Tisch said Belgal has two previous New York arrests, including a 2023 robbery case resulting in probation and a pending drug-sale case.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat said federal agents prevented both him and Belgal’s family from entering the hospital room.
Gov. Kathy Hochul called for federal authorities to provide a full and transparent account of the shooting, while Espaillat demanded that all available video evidence be preserved.
Why Should Delaware Care? Sanfilippo Syndrome is a genetic condition that impacts 1 in every 70,000 children. Last month, federal regulators approved a gene therapy treatment to prevent complications for those children born. One Delaware family’s 5-year-old son had access to the gene therapy through an experimental trial, and his family called it a miracle.
Five years ago, doctors in Ohio injected an experimental gene therapy treatment into an infant boy from Delaware that they hoped would keep him from suffering from a rare degenerative disease that his older sister had already developed.
Five years later, his mother, Molly Merrill, called the treatment a “miracle.”
Today the boy, Declan Merrill, attends kindergarten in the Christina School District and is fluent in sign language, his mother said. It stands in unfortunate contrast with his older sister Mickey, who lost her ability to speak and has not been able to attend a mainstream school.
Last month, federal regulators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the gene therapy treatment for use outside of experimental settings. Prior to the approval, treatment was limited to just managing symptoms of the degenerative and fatal disease, called Sanfilippo syndrome.
Molly and Don Merrill credit their son’s success to his older sister Mickey.
“It’s only because of Mickey that we knew there was a chance of him having it,” Molly Merrill said.
Even before Declan was born, doctors diagnosed him with the ailment. And because of the early diagnosis, Declan’s treatments and services were ready. As soon as he entered the world, he immediately began receiving occupational and speech therapy.
Still, Molly Merrill said her son is not “cured” of Sanfilippo, and he is still in the mild-to-moderate range of the disease. While Declan is able to walk and talk, he does deal with speech delays. When he is unable to articulate with his voice, he switches to sign language.
Dr. Ricki Carroll, a complex care and palliative care pediatrician at Nemours Children’s Hospital, said doctors do not know whether Declan’s treatment will last long term, or whether it is effective for every part of the body that could be affected by the disease.
The syndrome is a genetic condition caused by a gene change that affects the body’s ability to make an important enzyme. Without the functioning enzyme, a buildup of waste material can collect in the body and brain, leading to progressive damage over time.
Carroll said that if a child receives the gene therapy and is still experiencing hearing impairment, it could be because the child developed that before the treatment, or gene therapy may not have an effect on all parts of the body.
“But the longer we watch and children continue to do well, the more optimistic we are,” she said.
Therapy not approved for older kids
In Mickey’s early years, she only knew one speed for life — running.
Molly Merrill said Mickey was extremely hyperactive, often knocking household items off of surfaces as she raced through the house.
But she never fully developed an ability to speak, and by age five she started losing her ability to hear.
Declan, Mickey and Maya Merrill pose for a photo. | PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MERRILL FAMILY
Mickey was ultimately diagnosed with Sanfilippo syndrome when she was 3 years old, just a few months after the birth of Molly and Don Merrill’s second daughter, Maya, who does not have syndrome.
But Mickey was not eligible for the gene therapy that her younger brother received because of her age, Molly Merrill said.
Carroll said the gene therapy was not approved for older children because it was not tested for older age groups, and doctors do not believe the therapy would be helpful for older children because the disease is progressive.
“The longer you have harmful buildup, the more harm it’s going to do to the body and specifically the brain,” Carroll said.
Now, Mickey takes six vials of medicine every morning at 5:45 a.m. She must eat through a feeding tube. She has necrosis in her hips, and her bones are falling apart. Still, Mickey is a happy child who especially enjoys frozen yogurt, her mother says.
Molly Merrill said the approval of the gene therapy has marked a “strange time” for the Sanfilippo community and her family.
While there is finally an answer for young children who, like Declan, may receive gene therapy as an infant, there is no option for older children like Mickey.
“It’s all of the joy and grief you could possibly imagine in the exact same moment,” Molly Merrill said.
Continuing the fight for Mickey
Molly and Don Merrill were stunned when they were told that Mickey would likely die at 12 years old because of the disease.
“We pretty much said, ‘Today we cry, tomorrow we fight,’” Don Merrill said.
Don Merrill said he felt “useless” when they received their daughter’s diagnosis, but he knew they had to take action and help their daughter fight.
Together, the Merrill family and their friends came together to create different fundraising opportunities for Sanfilippo Syndrome. The family also created their own nonprofit organization, The Save Mickey Association, to help raise money and awareness.
Don Merrill said they have held events like motorcycle rides and chili contests. Today, the family focuses on their larger events like “Mickey Fest,” which features live music and games for families, and “Chefs Unite,” which connects Delawareans with executive chefs and lets them eat food that is prepared and plated in front of them.
The money the Merrill family raised has gone toward national organizations studying Sanfilippo Syndrome.
While Declan’s gene therapy is not available to older children like Mickey, the Merrill family is not giving up any efforts to raise money for Sanfilippo research.
‘We’re not done because we don’t have a treatment for Mickey,” Molly Merrill said.
Get Involved On Nov. 2, the Merrill family will host the fundraiser, Chef’s Unite, at Deerfield Gold Club in Newark. The event will give attendees the opportunity to meet regional executive chefs and taste food that is prepared live. For more details, click here.
PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Epic Games Publishing This fetchingly presented horror game brings style and scares, but overextends itself with repetition
A small band of soldiers enters an abandoned facility, where puckered flesh sprouts from cold steel. It’s a promising but familiar start to a sci-fi horror story, with heavy overtones of Alien and The Thing. Neither of those, though, were so … dinky.
End of Abyss’s facility is presented as a kind of a model-village recreation of The Thing’s Outpost 31 that you peer into from above. Your little bobble-headed hero takes up a tiny fraction of the screen, with most of the remainder drenched in foggy darkness, or even blanked out entirely. This is a world of Usborne-style cutaways, where anything outside the walls is total blackness.
Minneapolis, MN — President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric toward Minnesota’s Somali community Thursday, telling residents to “fight back” while broadly linking Somali immigrants to “Violence, Murder, and Mayhem.”
Trump claimed on Truth Social that Minnesota was being “taken over” and told Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to request federal assistance, promising the government would “come to your rescue.”
The remarks followed several high-profile criminal cases involving individual Somali Americans, including fraud prosecutions, gang-related violence and an alleged Mall of America terrorist plot. Trump, however, extended his criticism to an entire ethnic community rather than limiting it to those accused of crimes.
That distinction is significant: most Somali Minnesotans are U.S. citizens, and roughly 40% were born in the United States.
Walz responded by telling Somali residents they are valued and belong in Minnesota. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations went further, describing Trump’s statement as “blatant racism” and an implicit invitation to violence against the community.
Trump has repeatedly singled out Somali Americans. In December, he called Somalis “garbage” and said they should return to where they came from.
His latest language comes after thousands of federal immigration agents were previously deployed to Minnesota as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 30%, the lowest level of his second term in Pew Research Center polling, as dissatisfaction grows across several major issues ahead of the midterm elections.
Pew found that 68% of U.S. adults disapprove of Trump’s job performance. His current standing is close to the 29% approval rating Pew recorded near the end of his first term following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
The decline is also visible among people who voted for Trump in 2024. Pew found that 67% of those voters now approve of his performance, down sharply from 95% early in his second term. Among Trump voters ages 18 to 34, approval falls below half.
Confidence in Trump’s handling of the economy, immigration and foreign policy has also declined. Pew additionally found that 69% of Americans have little confidence that Trump will keep his business interests separate from presidential decision-making.
The survey was conducted Sept. 28 through Oct. 4 among 5,062 adults and has a margin of error of 1.6 percentage points.
The findings arrive less than a month before the midterms, when control of Congress will be decided.
New York, NY — A federal immigration agent shot and wounded a man Thursday afternoon in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx while a 5-year-old child was reportedly inside the vehicle.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said early reports indicated federal agents surrounded the man’s vehicle before multiple shots were fired. The child was physically unharmed, while the wounded man remained conscious and was taken to a hospital.
The NYPD said its officers were not present when the shooting occurred. Video from the scene showed several federal agents in the roadway and visible bullet holes in the windshield of a silver SUV.
Mamdani called the incident “unconscionable” and said he planned to demand that President Donald Trump end ICE enforcement operations in the city. Gov. Kathy Hochul separately called for a “full and transparent accounting” of what happened.
The Department of Homeland Security later alleged that the 28-year-old man was an undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic with gang ties and prior criminal cases. Those assertions had not been independently substantiated in the immediate aftermath.
The shooting comes amid growing scrutiny of federal immigration agents’ use of firearms during enforcement operations under the Trump administration.
Multiple ads airing in Michigan attack Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for past statements he made, or positions he held, about policing and prisons. But the ads either omit context or exaggerate his past policy proposals.
El-Sayed and his campaign have said he is not pushing to “defund the police,” as the ads claim or suggest. He spoke and posted in 2020 about wanting to reallocate some police funding to other community services, but has campaigned in the 2026 midterms on investing in “recruitment and retention and retirement” for law enforcement.
In addition, he never “called for abolishing prisons,” as one ad says. The claim is based on his participation in a 2020 webinar in which he said there was a need to reduce Michigan’s prison population during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another ad that claims El-Sayed has a “plan” to “commute sentences for murderers and rapists” refers to a proposal from his unsuccessful 2018 campaign for governor of Michigan. His plan was to consider commuting prison sentences for individuals convicted as minors who were “deemed low risk” or who had served more than 25 years of “lengthy or life sentences.” He has not proposed doing that during his 2026 Senate run.
The ads, all from Republican-aligned groups, began airing in late September and claim or suggest that El-Sayed, a former Detroit public health official, is “dangerous” or would not “keep us safe.” He is running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, an Army veteran who also worked for the FBI.
In the ad above, paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a woman says, “I’m raising four children, and I don’t trust Abdul El-Sayed with their safety.” She adds, “El-Sayed supported defunding our police. Then he called for abolishing prisons and releasing criminals into our neighborhoods.” That’s followed by a video of him saying in August 2020, “Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons.”
That same El-Sayed clip about releasing people from jails and prisons is shown in an SLF PAC ad that includes audio of him saying in June 2020, “I believe that we do need to defund the police.” In between those two snippets, a man in a police uniform says, “El-Sayed said it himself. He wants to defund the police and let criminals out of jail early.” “Defunding the police. Releasing prisoners. That’s just crazy,” another man in police gear says.
A third ad, from No Going Back PAC Inc., a super PAC linked to President Donald Trump, plays the same audio of El-Sayed talking about defunding the police. Then the narrator says, “It gets worse. El-Sayed’s plan calls for reducing sentence length. And not just reduce. El-Sayed’s plan says he’d commute sentences for murderers and rapists, letting violent criminals free.”
We’ll explain what the ads leave out about what El-Sayed has said on the topics of funding for police and reducing the prison population.
No More ‘Defund the Police’
El-Sayed did previously embrace elements of the progressive “defund the police” movement that began after George Floyd was killed in May 2020 by a police officer in Minneapolis. The featured audio clip of El-Sayed saying “we do need to defund” law enforcement is from a June 2020 radio interview with Jake Neher for Detroit’s NPR station. (Jump to 7:45 in the recording.)
El-Sayed’s fuller statement from the interview was: “I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets, and investing more in the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities.” He went on to say, “I like to talk about it as re-funding, right? I want to re-fund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war materiel to wage war in our streets, and I want to re-fund public health and public libraries and public schools and the means of uprooting poverty.”
Earlier he said that investing more in social services, public schools and public libraries “means investing less in police.”
In July, CNN’s KFile, which reviewed El-Sayed’s past comments, said, “Throughout 2020, he repeatedly endorsed some of the movement’s goals in interviews, speeches and writings, often describing them as shifting government resources away from policing and incarceration and toward public health, education and anti-poverty programs.” The KFile analysis also found that he had deleted several of his old social media posts about defunding the police, which he later said he did because he “didn’t want them to be taken out of context.”
But while campaigning for the Senate this year, El-Sayed has talked about wanting to invest in – not defund – law enforcement.
“No, Abdul El-Sayed does not support defunding the police,” his campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak told us in a statement. Wozniak added, “As he’s consistently said, Abdul believes we absolutely need to fund law enforcement to identify, prosecute, and protect communities from violent crime.”
In a July 2 CNN interview in which he addressed his deleted posts, El-Sayed explained his position this way: “Too often the conversation we have is fund or defund. The question that we don’t ask is, ‘What kind of system do we really want?’ I want us to be investing in the kinds of interventions that actually protect people, whether you’re talking about people on the streets or people in law enforcement. That means investing in recruitment and retirement for law enforcement. It also means investing in community violence intervention, investing in behavioral health response, investing in public health and anti-poverty measures. Those are things that are not mutually exclusive.”
And later that month, in a conversation with Politico, he said, “If we want really good law enforcement, we have to increase the amount of funds that we put into things like recruitment and retention and retirement, so that folks in local communities might want to actually work in law enforcement in their local communities.”
It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of funding for policing comes from local and state governments — not the federal government.
Not ‘Abolishing Prisons’
El-Sayed has not “called for abolishing prisons” or the blanket release of “violent criminals,” as some of the ads claim or suggest.
The clip of him saying “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons” is from August 2020, when he participated in a webinar hosted by the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan. He and the other two panelists, who were previously inmates, were discussing the Carceral State Project’s July 2020 joint report with the American Friends Service Committee, titled “‘I Don’t Want To Die in Prison’: Prison Conditions, Decarceration, and Mutual Aid in the Age of COVID-19.”
El-Sayed’s fuller comment was: “Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons and to keep people out of jails and prisons is policy that we need to be investing in, particularly right now. But this doesn’t end when the pandemic’s over, right? We shouldn’t have to have a global pandemic to force us to find our humanity. This should just be what we do because it’s the right thing.”
He had been responding to a question about recommendations in the report that needed to be “enacted immediately” during the pandemic. He started his answer by agreeing with another panelist that the infirm and elderly should be considered for release from prisons because of the spread of COVID-19. But he went on to say “decarceration generally is really, really critical” because “there are so many ways that society has failed to deal with real problems and has used policing and jails as a stopgap for all of these failures.”
As we’ve written, President Donald Trump released more than 13,000 federal prisoners during the pandemic as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act that he signed in late March 2020. That legislation excluded releases for any prisoners convicted of violent crimes, sex offenses or terrorism-related crimes.
El-Sayed also made a point in the webinar about people “languishing in prison facilities who don’t need to be there” because of laws that keep them there for longer than necessary. He gave the example of people who remain in prison because they can’t afford to post bail while awaiting trial, and he mentioned the state’s “Truth in Sentencing” law that he said makes it hard to reduce minimum sentences for felony convictions.
“We’ve got to think about them all systematically,” he said.
But El-Sayed — who is against for-profit prisons — never said he favored “abolishing prisons.”
An Old Commutation Plan
The claim that El-Sayed’s “plan” is to “commute sentences for murderers and rapists” is another misrepresentation. It doesn’t reflect something he proposed during his current Senate run. According to a citation in the No Going Back PAC ad, it’s based on a proposal from El-Sayed’s failed 2018 campaign to be Michigan’s governor.
In a section on “Criminal Justice Reform,” the 2018 plan (on page 26) proposed repealing the state’s law that requires convicted felons to serve their entire minimum sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Repealing the law “would allow for more flexibility in sentence length based on the rehabilitation that occurs in prison,” it said.
“Additionally,” the plan said, “within the first term, the El-Sayed Administration would review the sentences of all prisoners sentenced before age 18 (nearly 4,000 as of March 2013) with the aim of commuting sentences for all prisoners deemed low risk, with credit for time served.” (A commutation doesn’t automatically mean an immediate release from prison. It could be a reduced sentence.)
Finally, the plan said El-Sayed’s administration would “explore commutation options” for individuals convicted as juveniles and serving more than 25 years, “in order to allow them a chance at freedom after serving more than their fair share of time.”
However, El-Sayed is not campaigning on that now.
In a Sept. 19 town hall, El-Sayed said that his 2018 plan was making the point that for a minor convicted of a petty crime instead of a violent crime, “that crime shouldn’t follow them the rest of their lives. That’s it.” Then he said, “The problem that we often have is that we police petty crime, but we don’t actually take on violent crime. And I’m just saying that if you put your hands on somebody else, if you violate their body, then you deserve to be held accountable for what you’ve done.”
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of U.S. inmates are in jails or prisons run by state and local governments. While the federal government, including the Senate, can influence state and local policy, it has no direct control over state and local facilities, as the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative noted in a 2025 report.
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Fort Hood, TX — The Pentagon plans to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the execution should be publicly viewable because people should understand there are “serious consequences” for such attacks. Pentagon officials subsequently clarified that public access will come through a livestream rather than spectators gathering at the execution site.
The Army has scheduled Hasan’s execution for 1 p.m. Central Time on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, nearly 17 years after the attack. President Donald Trump approved Hasan’s death sentence Oct. 2 following Hegseth’s recommendation.
Hasan was convicted by a military jury in 2013. The Supreme Court declined to review his court-martial conviction in March 2025, although he may still pursue challenges in civilian federal court that could delay the execution.
If carried out, Hasan would become the first U.S. military prisoner executed since 1961 and the first Army prisoner killed by firing squad since Pvt. Eddie Slovik in 1945.
The decision to livestream is historically unusual. America’s last generally recognized public execution occurred in Kentucky in 1936, when thousands gathered to watch the hanging of Rainey Bethea.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump escalated his campaign to rename artificial intelligence Thursday, declaring that anyone who continues using the term “Artificial Intelligence” instead of his preferred “Super Intelligence” is “THE ENEMY!”
Trump’s statement follows a September executive order directing executive-branch agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications.
The terminology differs from its conventional use in technology. Artificial intelligence broadly describes computer systems capable of performing tasks associated with human intelligence, while “superintelligence” traditionally refers to a hypothetical system whose capabilities exceed humans across most cognitive tasks.
Trump’s executive order effectively applies “Super Intelligence” to technologies already covered by the government’s existing definition of AI, rather than limiting the term to hypothetical human-surpassing systems.
The administration itself has yet to fully comply with the rebranding. Axios reported Thursday that White House webpages still contained references to artificial intelligence. AI.gov was changed visually to display “SI.gov,” but its web address remained AI.gov, while attempting to visit SI.gov produced an error.
Trump’s executive order directs agencies to adopt the new terminology but establishes no punishment for Americans, companies or news organizations that continue using the universally recognized term AI.
Republican says Delaware needs an independent watchdog in Dover; Democrat argues investment experience and fiduciary responsibility are essential to safeguarding taxpayer money.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Delaware’s candidates for state treasurer offered competing arguments Thursday over what voters should value most in the office: an independent voice willing to challenge state government or an experienced financial professional qualified to manage billions of dollars in public funds.
Republican Mike Ramone and Democrat Ted Lauzen faced questions during an Oct. 8 luncheon hosted by the Wilmington Rotary Club at the Hotel du Pont.
The forum was moderated by Jake Owens, editor of Spotlight Delaware. Questions were submitted by Rotary Club members and were not provided to the candidates in advance.
Although both candidates pledged transparency, independence and responsible financial management, they differed over the experience and leadership needed to serve as Delaware’s next treasurer.
Ramone, a longtime business owner and former House minority leader, argued that Delaware needs an independently elected official willing to challenge financial decisions in a state where Democrats control the governor’s office and both chambers of the General Assembly.
Lauzen, an investment adviser and wealth management professional, argued that the treasurer’s primary responsibility is to safeguard public money through professional investment management and a fiduciary obligation to taxpayers.
Editor’s Note: The quotes from both candidates were provided from the transcript of the event on October 8th and are unedited.
Ramone: Independence provides accountability
Ramone repeatedly emphasized the importance of political independence, arguing that the treasurer should provide additional oversight of financial decisions made in Dover.
“The most important reason to have a treasurer who’s maybe not from the party in power of the state of Delaware would be transparency,” Ramone said.
He argued that the treasurer’s participation on state financial boards and committees provides an opportunity to question spending decisions, financial policies and the use of taxpayer money.
“We’re the people, and it’s our money, and we have the opportunity to participate in knowing what is being done with it and where it’s going,” Ramone said.
Ramone pointed to his 16 years in the General Assembly, legislative leadership experience and decades of operating businesses as qualifications that would allow him to work across party lines while challenging decisions when necessary.
“I have the independence to be able to say no, and I have the experience to know when to say yes,” he said.
Ramone argued that Delaware would benefit from a treasurer who is not politically dependent on the governor or legislative leadership and who can raise difficult questions without fearing political consequences.
Lauzen: Financial skills protect public money
Lauzen presented a different case, emphasizing his professional investment management experience and his responsibilities as a fiduciary.
A former Marine helicopter pilot who earned graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Lauzen is a co-founder of Great Fox Wealth Advisors.
He said the treasurer’s responsibilities require technical financial knowledge and experience managing investments.
“The state treasurer also has that responsibility of acting as your elected fiduciary in the management of our cash reserves and our long-term investments,” Lauzen said.
He explained that a fiduciary has a responsibility to act in the financial interests of those whose money is being managed.
“That mandate prioritizes stability, liquidity, and then long-term growth,” Lauzen said.
He identified investment allocation and management fees as two important factors the treasurer can influence when protecting public funds and generating returns.
Lauzen also pledged independence and transparency, supporting public disclosure of the criteria used to select financial institutions and evaluate investment partners.
For Lauzen, independence means exercising professional judgment based on the state’s financial interests, even when that judgment differs from the preferences of other government officials.
Two approaches to managing the Treasury
The differences became particularly clear when the candidates discussed the state’s investment portfolio.
Lauzen emphasized that investment management is already his profession.
“I don’t sing very well, I don’t dance very well, but I do invest money really well,” he said in his opening statement.
Ramone acknowledged that he does not have Lauzen’s investment management background but argued that the office requires leadership, judgment and the ability to assemble qualified financial professionals.
“I’m not the guy who’s going to have all the answers,” Ramone said. “I’m the person who’s going to build the team around me.”
He said he would rely on experienced financial advisers and professionals while providing leadership, independent oversight and accountability.
Ramone argued that the treasurer should know when to question recommendations, challenge assumptions and bring together people with different expertise.
Lauzen countered that professional investment experience provides an important foundation for making those decisions and evaluating the performance of the state’s financial managers.
State finances and AAA rating raise concerns
Both candidates addressed Delaware’s AAA bond rating, the state’s reliance on corporate franchise revenue and the growing cost of employee benefits.
Ramone warned that Delaware depends heavily on corporate revenue and must protect the state’s competitive position while examining opportunities to control government spending.
He questioned the practice of routinely seeking additional revenue to offset rising annual expenses rather than looking for ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Lauzen identified three major risks to the state’s financial position: concentrated revenue sources, outdated debt policies and growing unfunded retiree health care obligations.
He suggested modernizing debt management practices and considering opportunities to reduce long-term liabilities.
Both candidates agreed that protecting Delaware’s corporate franchise business is important to maintaining state revenue and financial stability.
Retirement programs offer common ground
The candidates found agreement on Delaware Earns, the state-facilitated retirement savings program intended to help workers whose employers do not offer qualifying retirement plans.
Lauzen called the program an important first step but suggested reducing administrative responsibilities for small businesses and expanding retirement savings options.
Ramone said lawmakers had worked on the program through a bipartisan process and emphasized the importance of employer input, stability and transparency as it develops.
Both supported financial literacy programs and efforts to help Delaware residents prepare for retirement.
Independence becomes a defining issue
In one of the final questions, the candidates were asked how they would exercise independence while serving alongside a governor and legislature responsible for most state fiscal policy.
Ramone described his opposition to a proposed gasoline tax increase during Gov. Jack Markell’s administration.
He said he challenged the proposal because he believed Delaware could benefit economically by maintaining lower fuel taxes than neighboring states, encouraging motorists and commercial vehicles to purchase fuel in Delaware.
Lauzen pointed to his work in investment management and nonprofit financial oversight, where he said independent judgment sometimes requires disagreeing with organizational leadership.
He argued that independence should be exercised constructively while working with other officials to protect the state’s financial interests.
The exchange reinforced the central difference between the candidates.
Ramone portrayed the independently elected treasurer as an additional check on decisions made by state government, particularly under one-party control.
Lauzen emphasized the treasurer’s independent fiduciary responsibility to make sound financial decisions and protect taxpayer investments.
A respectful exchange before Election Day
Despite their differences, the candidates avoided personal attacks and acknowledged areas of agreement.
Ramone praised Lauzen’s financial expertise and said knowledgeable investment professionals would play an important role in his administration.
Lauzen recognized the importance of independence and emphasized cooperation among state leaders.
In his closing statement, Ramone returned to the themes of independence, transparency and leadership.
“There’s no one that’s going to be enabled to enhance transparency more than me because I have nothing to lose,” Ramone said.
Lauzen closed by encouraging Delawareans to participate in the election and emphasizing the importance of public service.
The debate offered voters two different approaches to the office: one emphasizing independent government oversight and experienced leadership, the other emphasizing professional financial expertise and fiduciary responsibility.
Voters will choose Delaware’s next state treasurer in the Nov. 3 general election. Early voting begins Oct. 22.
GO BOX | How to Vote Early in Delaware
Election Day: Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026
Early voting begins: Thursday, Oct. 22.
Early voting hours:
Oct. 22-24: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Oct. 25: No early voting.
Oct. 26-27: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Oct. 28-Nov. 1: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Where to vote: Registered Delaware voters may vote at any designated early voting center in their county of residence.
At Jessop’s, New Castle’s past remains part of everyday hospitality, inviting diners to pull up a chair and discover history one course at a time.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
At Jessop’s Tavern in historic New Castle, a meal comes with a generous helping of history. English pub favorites, Dutch comfort food, Swedish influences and Belgian beers share the spotlight inside a building whose story began more than three centuries ago.
Located at 114 Delaware Street, the tavern connects its dining experience to the cultures that helped shape the region. For visitors exploring Olde New Castle or residents gathering over dinner, that connection offers a way to experience the past beyond historic markers and museum displays.
“Since the time we opened Jessop’s Tavern, our purpose has been to create a memorable experience while serving history in Olde City New Castle,” the Day family states on the tavern’s website.
According to the website, the building was constructed in 1674. Abraham Jessop, a cooper who made barrels, lived and operated his business there in 1724. His name now identifies a restaurant that has become another chapter in the property’s long history.
Over the years, the address served as residential housing and housed several businesses. During the 1950s, it was known as the Captain’s Log Restaurant. In 1974, it was The Green Frog Tavern. The Day family opened Jessop’s Tavern in November 1996, naming it for the barrel maker who once called the building home.
That history carries into the kitchen, where the menu draws on English, Dutch, Belgian, Swedish and early American food traditions. The approach combines those influences with the tastes and expectations of today’s diners.
The tavern’s website notes that sauces and dressings are made in-house, along with much of the baking. It also says the chef selects seafood for freshness.
Among the menu’s colonial offerings is New Sweden Meatloaf, a Swedish-inspired version of the familiar dish served with vodka cream sauce and lingonberry preserves. Dutch influences appear in “Hutspot” pot roast, a slow-cooked meal accompanied by mashed potatoes, garden vegetables and beef gravy.
For those drawn to English pub fare, fish and chips features beer-battered cod, deep-fried cottage potatoes, a colonial side and traditional sauces.
Another substantial option is shepherd’s pie. The tavern describes its version as a 2½-pound meal, layering seasoned beef, root vegetables and tavern-made mashed potatoes with rich beef gravy.
Oven-baked pot pies offer additional choices, including chicken, beef and ale, crab and lobster. Root vegetables and herb cream sit beneath a crust served piping hot.
Dessert continues the mix of traditions. “Oli Bolen” Dutch apple cakes are deep-fried apple donut holes served with Woodside Farm ice cream and cinnamon whipped cream. Other selections include peach cobbler, bread pudding with butterscotch bourbon sauce and Belgian chocolate mousse cake.
Ice cream made at Historic Woodside Farm Creamery adds a Delaware connection to the dessert menu, with servings available in a bowl or Belgian waffle cone.
Beer is another major part of the tavern’s identity. Its website lists more than 300 Belgian bottled beers and 30 draft offerings, with 20 drafts dedicated to Belgian selections. The broader collection includes beers from the United States and other countries.
Jessop’s also offers an intimate historic dining room for private gatherings of up to 26 guests. Suggested occasions include luncheons, business events, holiday parties, bridal showers, and family celebrations. An inquiry form on the website allows customers to discuss menus and dates.
For the Day family, bringing history to the table also means keeping it relevant to each generation. The result is a restaurant where an old building’s story continues through the meals and gatherings taking place inside it.
At Jessop’s, New Castle’s past remains part of everyday hospitality, inviting diners to pull up a chair and discover history one course at a time.
Topeka, KS — Republican secretary of state nominee Pat Proctor is facing scrutiny over federal labor violations at his restaurant businesses after acknowledging that employees were denied legally required overtime pay.
The U.S. Department of Labor determined in 2016 that Baan Thai Restaurant Inc., co-owned by Proctor and his wife, owed 31 employees $93,008 for violations committed between 2014 and 2016. The amount included $79,133 in unpaid overtime and $13,875 connected to minimum-wage violations, according to Kansas Reflector. Federal law requires covered workers to receive overtime compensation when applicable.
Proctor recently told KMAN radio that he had not understood the applicable labor rules despite having operated restaurants for about a decade. He blamed the episode partly on government bureaucracy, saying a Labor Department official arrived with regulations his business “didn’t know about.”
Proctor acknowledged that he failed to track hours for salaried kitchen employees, meaning workers who exceeded 40 hours were not properly compensated.
Democratic opponent Jennifer Day criticized the record, arguing that someone seeking to oversee Kansas elections and business filings should demonstrate accountability for following laws.
Proctor said the experience inspired his proposal for a state website using artificial intelligence to help businesses understand government regulations.
Washington, DC — The FBI is facing a Hatch Act complaint after using an official government social media account to post a video attacking prominent Democrats, including Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, weeks before the midterm elections.
The video, posted Tuesday by the FBI’s rapid-response account, described Democrats as the “DEFUND THE POLICE crowd” and accused them of allowing criminals to “run wild.” It contrasted those claims with footage praising FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche for arrests and drug seizures.
The video included images of former Vice President Kamala Harris, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, former Rep. Cori Bush and El-Sayed. El-Sayed was specifically identified on screen as a “Progressive Democrat, Senate Nominee.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, arguing that highlighting a current candidate while attacking his political party amounted to government-supported partisan activity.
The Hatch Act generally prohibits federal employees from using their official authority to interfere with or influence partisan elections.
The complaint follows separate scrutiny of Patel over political appearances. In September, another watchdog asked federal investigators to review whether Patel violated the Hatch Act by appearing alongside Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin.
The FBI has not publicly responded to the latest complaint.
Washington, DC — The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration Wednesday, alleging that millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded television advertisements promoting President Donald Trump amount to illegal government propaganda.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to stop federal money from financing the campaign and declare the advertisements unlawful. The spots began airing in September and have cost more than $12 million to broadcast, according to AdImpact. The broader campaign was funded through $20 million allocated by the Department of Homeland Security.
The advertisements feature Trump praising his administration’s accomplishments and closely echo themes from his political campaigns. They have aired less than a month before the midterm elections and carry disclaimers stating they were “paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Trump recently said future advertisements would instead be financed by MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with him. However, another taxpayer-funded spot aired afterward, and the administration has not committed to reimbursing money already spent.
The White House maintains the spots are legitimate public-service announcements similar to messaging used by previous administrations. Critics from both parties have questioned whether the campaign violates federal restrictions on using appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda. A separate lawsuit challenging the advertisements has also been filed by a coalition led by Common Cause.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is proposing a $70,000 fee for international students seeking work experience in the United States through the Optional Practical Training program, a change universities say could sharply reduce foreign enrollment.
Under the proposed Department of Homeland Security rule, schools would have to pay $70,000 for each student’s initial OPT recommendation and $30,000 for subsequent recommendations. OPT allows international students to work in jobs related to their field of study, generally for one year and up to three years for qualifying STEM graduates.
DHS says the fee would address fraud and what it calls the program’s use as a source of inexpensive foreign labor.
Higher education groups strongly disagree. NAFSA, an association representing international educators, says OPT helps U.S. employers fill high-demand positions and gives graduates practical experience that contributes to innovation and economic growth.
The proposal arrives as international enrollment is already declining. New international student enrollment fell 17% last fall, according to higher education groups, with some institutions reporting substantially larger drops.
The public will have 60 days to comment before DHS can finalize the rule. Universities and immigration attorneys have also signaled that any final version could face legal challenges.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump is set to award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su during a White House science and technology summit Thursday.
The awards will be presented during the administration’s “Science: A New Golden Age Summit,” which is focused on artificial intelligence, technological innovation and U.S. competitiveness. The ceremony marks the first time Trump has presented the National Medal of Science during either of his presidencies.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell are also expected to receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. The White House said the honorees have made major contributions to American science and technology and are helping maintain U.S. leadership in innovation.
The selection also reunites Trump publicly with Musk after their high-profile political split in 2025. Musk had been one of Trump’s most prominent political allies and financial backers before the relationship deteriorated, but the two have moved closer again in recent months.
The medals are among the federal government’s highest honors for scientific and technological achievement and have historically recognized researchers, inventors and innovators whose work has had major national impact.
Washington, DC — U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle asked a political donor to pay $100,000 toward her American Express debt while communicating with him about access to Trump administration officials, according to messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reported that Guilfoyle contacted Kentucky businessman and former congressional candidate Eric Deters in July 2025, shortly before her Senate confirmation hearing. In Signal messages, she allegedly urged Deters to wire money directly to American Express, writing that the payment “won’t show up anywhere.”
Deters had previously discussed paying Guilfoyle as much as $1 million if she successfully helped him obtain assistance with tax and legal matters. The Journal reported that Guilfoyle forwarded Deters messages she sent to senior government officials and updated him on her efforts. Deters ultimately did not make the $100,000 payment.
Guilfoyle’s attorney, Jesse Binnall, disputes the authenticity of the messages and says she has acted properly. Deters said earlier payments to Guilfoyle were connected to patriotic events and appearances.
Democratic lawmakers have asked the State Department to investigate Guilfoyle’s conduct following separate reporting about her activities as ambassador. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declined to address the newest allegations Wednesday but said Guilfoyle has been a “strong ambassador.”
Phoenix, AZ — Democratic congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia says she was attacked and raped in August while attempting to repair a damaged campaign sign in the Phoenix area.
Greene-Placentia told the Phoenix New Times that she was crossing a parking lot shortly after 2 a.m. on Aug. 14 when someone struck her in the head, causing her to lose consciousness. She said she later awoke to find a man sexually assaulting her while another man stood nearby.
Greene-Placentia said she suffered bruising and believes she may also have sustained a concussion. She initially did not report the assault, describing feelings of embarrassment and difficulty recalling portions of what happened.
She later told her husband and campaign staff and reported the incident to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office about two weeks afterward. A sheriff’s spokesperson told reporters the investigation remains active and declined to provide additional details.
Greene-Placentia said she ultimately decided to discuss the alleged assault publicly because she wanted other survivors to feel able to speak about their experiences.
Her campaign emphasized that the disclosure was intended to support survivors rather than advance a political message. Greene-Placentia is challenging Republican Rep. Abraham Hamadeh for a congressional seat representing portions of the Phoenix area.
Bloomington, MN — Federal authorities say they disrupted a planned terrorist attack at the Mall of America after arresting an 18-year-old accused of trying to buy an AK-47 and ammunition from an undercover FBI employee.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud was arrested Tuesday after allegedly paying $600 for the rifle, four magazines and 200 rounds of ammunition. Prosecutors say he believed the seller was affiliated with ISIS.
According to federal investigators, Mohamud had been under scrutiny for nearly two years and initially discussed traveling overseas to join militant groups. When those plans failed, authorities say he shifted toward planning an attack in Minnesota.
Investigators allege Mohamud discussed killing dozens of people and identified the Mall of America as a target. Court documents say he planned to strike on Oct. 24 during a Hmong arts event and had pledged allegiance to ISIS.
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said agents were able to identify and interrupt the alleged plot before anyone was harmed.
Mohamud has been charged with obtaining a firearm to commit an act of terrorism. The allegations have not been proven in court, and he is presumed innocent unless convicted.
Authorities have not publicly detailed what first prompted the FBI investigation.
Harrisburg, PA — Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has become dramatically more popular with Pennsylvania Republicans than members of his own party, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
The survey found 72% of Republican likely voters view Fetterman favorably, compared with only 13% of Democrats. Among all likely voters, 37% hold a favorable view while 46% view him unfavorably. Independents were also negative, with 27% favorable and 49% unfavorable.
The reversal follows Fetterman’s increasingly frequent criticism of Democrats and cooperation with President Donald Trump. He appeared by video at the Republican Party’s September midterm convention, where he praised working across party lines and received an enthusiastic response from GOP attendees.
Earlier polling showed the shift developing rapidly. In July, 77% of Pennsylvania Republicans approved of Fetterman’s job performance while 69% of Democrats disapproved. By August, nearly four-fifths of Republican likely voters viewed him favorably.
Fetterman has repeatedly rejected speculation that he plans to become a Republican and continues to identify as a Democrat. However, Pennsylvania voters increasingly perceive him differently: a September survey found a majority considered him more Republican than Democratic.
Delaware inspector general launches website, hotline for fraud and abuse complaints
New public portal gives Delawareans a direct way to report fraud, waste, corruption and misuse of state resources
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s Office of the Inspector General has launched a public website and complaint hotline, giving residents, state employees and others a direct way to report suspected fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and misuse of state government resources.
The launch marks another step in establishing the independent watchdog office created by the General Assembly in 2025 and now led by Delaware’s first inspector general, Robert P. Storch.
The new website provides information about the office, its responsibilities and how it operates. It also includes an online form for submitting complaints and concerns to the inspector general.
Complaints and inquiries are kept confidential to the greatest extent possible, according to the office, and people filing reports may choose to remain anonymous.
“The public launch of the new OIG website and Hotline mark an important milestone in the development of our office,” Storch said in an announcement reported by Delaware news organizations.
Storch said the office is continuing to hire staff while giving the public more information about the agency and how concerns can be reported.
New avenue for government complaints
The Office of the Inspector General was established as an independent, nonpartisan state agency responsible for detecting and deterring fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and other abuses of government resources that harm the public interest.
State law allows the inspector general to investigate the management and operations of state agencies and to begin investigations either on the office’s own initiative or after receiving a complaint.
Complaints may be submitted by individuals or organizations.
The law also requires the office to maintain a telephone number, website, email address and mailing address for complaints and inquiries.
The inspector general is required to remain neutral and impartial and is not intended to serve as an advocate either for the person filing a complaint or for the state agency involved.
Delaware’s first inspector general
Gov. Matt Meyer signed Senate Bill 4 in August 2025, creating the Office of the Inspector General following years of discussion about establishing an independent statewide government watchdog.
Storch was sworn in May 8 as Delaware’s first inspector general.
At the time, state officials said the office was intended to strengthen accountability, transparency and public confidence in state government.
Storch previously served as inspector general for the U.S. Department of Defense and as the first Senate-confirmed inspector general of the National Security Agency. He also held senior positions in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General.
One of Storch’s early priorities was establishing a public website and complaint hotline so Delawareans would have a direct way to bring concerns to the new office.
What the office can investigate
The inspector general’s jurisdiction includes allegations involving fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and other abuses of government resources.
The office may examine the management and operations of state agencies and investigate complaints involving the public interest.
The law also limits the office’s role in routine employment disputes involving state workers unless those complaints are connected to fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption or another abuse of government resources.
The inspector general also is expected to coordinate with the Delaware Department of Justice, auditor of accounts, Public Integrity Commission and other investigative or law enforcement agencies when appropriate.
State law generally requires the inspector general to issue public findings and recommendations following completed investigations.
The office also must issue an annual report outlining complaints received, investigations opened and completed, significant investigations and unresolved recommendations or concerns.
The launch of the website and hotline gives Delawareans a direct point of access to an office created specifically to investigate concerns about how state government operates and how taxpayer resources are used.
Mailing address:
60 Loockerman Plaza
Dover, DE 19901
Confidentiality: Complaints and inquiries are kept confidential to the greatest extent possible. People filing complaints may also choose to report anonymously.
What it does: Investigates allegations of fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and other abuse of Delaware government resources.
Who can file a complaint: Individuals and organizations may submit complaints.
What can be reported: Suspected fraud, corruption, misuse of taxpayer resources, serious mismanagement or other government conduct that may harm the public interest.
What it generally does not handle: Routine state employee workplace disputes unless they involve fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption or misuse of government resources.
Photo: The ranking evaluates clinical quality, professional reputation, specialized accreditation and patient experience. More than half of the score is based on quality measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. image provided by ChrisitanaCare.
Newsweek again ranks Wilmington Hospital program among nation’s best as ChristianaCare expands rehabilitation capacity in Delaware
WILMINGTON, Del. — ChristianaCare’s Center for Rehabilitation at Wilmington Hospital has been named one of the nation’s best inpatient rehabilitation facilities for the fourth consecutive year.
Newsweek included the center among its Best Physical Rehabilitation Centers in the United States and ranked it among the leading rehabilitation facilities in Delaware.
The ranking evaluates clinical quality, professional reputation, specialized accreditation and patient experience. More than half of the score is based on quality measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
“We care for each patient like they are a member of our own family,” said Dr. John Cheng, medical director of the Center for Rehabilitation.
“Each patient, their family, their home situation, how they were before and how they want to be in the future, their goals and what they want to achieve in life — that’s what we focus on.”
Growing demand for rehabilitation
The Wilmington center treats patients recovering from strokes, brain and spinal cord injuries, amputations, extended hospitalizations and serious orthopedic conditions.
In fiscal year 2026, the center discharged 890 patients with an average stay of 11.6 days.
ChristianaCare also reported that 95% of patients were living back in the community 90 days after discharge, compared with a national average of 93%.
“Many medical specialties aim to add years to a patient’s life,” Cheng said. “Our aim is to add life to their years.”
Jennifer Thomas, vice president of Rehabilitation Services, said patients are increasingly arriving with complex medical needs.
“The patient always comes first,” Thomas said. “Our expert team is dedicated to providing the best rehabilitation care with compassion and respect for every patient’s unique journey.”
Preparing patients for home
Rehabilitation includes physical, occupational and speech therapy, with patients practicing everyday activities such as climbing stairs, cooking and shopping.
Families and caregivers are also encouraged to participate in therapy and receive training before patients return home.
“Since I’ve been here, it changed my life for the better,” said patient Anthony Dobrosielski, who received occupational therapy following a fall.
Major Newark expansion coming
ChristianaCare recently expanded the Wilmington center to 36 beds, allowing it to serve about 216 additional patients annually.
A much larger expansion is planned for Newark.
ChristianaCare expects to open a $75 million freestanding inpatient rehabilitation hospital at 140 Red Mill Road in 2028.
The 92,000-square-foot hospital will have 73 beds and is expected to serve about 1,000 additional patients each year.
“This transformative investment will significantly expand access to specialized rehabilitation care across Delaware,” Thomas said.
The project is part of ChristianaCare’s broader $865 million investment in Delaware and is expected to nearly double the health system’s current rehabilitation capacity.
TO GO
What: ChristianaCare Center for Rehabilitation
Where: Wilmington Hospital, 501 W. 14th St., Wilmington
Services: Inpatient rehabilitation for stroke, brain and spinal cord injuries, amputations, orthopedic injuries and other complex conditions.
Recognition: Named by Newsweek among the nation’s Best Physical Rehabilitation Centers for the fourth consecutive year.
Coming next: A new 73-bed ChristianaCare rehabilitation hospital is scheduled to open in Newark in 2028.
Learn more: Visit ChristianaCare.org and search for “Center for Rehabilitation.”
Washington, DC — Companies backed by President Donald Trump’s sons have received or been promised more than $6 billion in federal contracts since those investments were made, according to an ABC News analysis of government contracting records.
The largest example involves Anduril Industries, in which 1789 Capital — a venture firm listing Donald Trump Jr. as a partner — holds a major stake. The Trump administration announced this week that the Navy will support $2.9 billion of a $6.6 billion submarine-manufacturing project at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Since 1789 Capital’s investment, Anduril has also received about $1.8 billion through other federal contracts, ABC reported.
Other Trump-linked investments include drone manufacturers, rare-earth companies, quantum-computing firms and automated defense manufacturers. Hadrian, backed by 1789 Capital, later secured a $900 million Navy agreement, while Vulcan Elements received a $620 million government loan.
Congressional Democrats have asked the Pentagon inspector general to investigate whether conflicts of interest influenced contracting decisions.
The Pentagon says no company receives preferential treatment and that political connections play no role in awards. A spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump likewise denied wrongdoing, saying their investment decisions are independent and that neither brother participates in government procurement decisions.
Washington, DC — Federal immigration investigators reviewed nearly 100 million voter-related records and considered undercover operations against voter-registration groups as part of a nationwide search for noncitizens suspected of voting illegally.
Documents obtained by Democracy Forward show Homeland Security Investigations analyzed roughly 50.6 million voter-roll records supplied by the Justice Department and another 48.4 million records provided through DHS adviser Heather Honey’s “independent sources.” The records also identify several battleground states as priorities.
Investigators additionally reviewed nonprofit organizations involved in voter registration and discussed using undercover agents where groups were suspected of helping noncitizens register. Some state election data may also have been considered for entry into Palantir software used by ICE for immigration enforcement.
The effort comes as ICE has separately begun asking detainees whether they have ever voted illegally and, if so, whether they voted by mail or in person. The Washington Post reported that the questioning was added to ICE’s booking system in August.
The records document an unusually expansive federal effort to uncover election fraud, though several inquiries described in the files reportedly closed without producing evidence of wrongdoing.
Democracy Forward argues the operation risks intimidating eligible voters. DHS maintains that it investigates credible allegations of criminal activity, including election-related offenses.
Department of Elections urges residents who still need to register to review state requirements as election season enters its final weeks
DOVER, Del. — The Delaware Department of Elections is urging residents who are not yet registered to vote to review the state’s registration requirements as Delaware moves closer to the 2026 General Election.
The department issued a voter alert this week directing eligible Delaware residents who want to participate in the General Election to make sure their registration is completed within the state’s required timeframe.
The alert comes as Delaware enters the final weeks of an election season that will decide federal, state and local races across the state.
The Department of Elections maintains the state’s official voter information, including registration requirements, voter status information, election calendars and other resources.
Residents who are unsure whether they are registered, believe their information may need to be updated or need to register for the first time should use the Department of Elections’ official website for the current requirements and available options.
The department also encourages voters to rely on official state election information as Election Day approaches.
Delaware LIVE will continue its 2026 election coverage with candidate profiles, issue stories and information about races throughout the state.
To Go Box
What: Delaware 2026 General Election voter information
Who: Delaware residents who want to confirm their registration status or need information about registering
Official information: Delaware Department of Elections
Website: elections.delaware.gov
Voter information portal: www.ivote.delaware.gov
More information: The Department of Elections website includes official registration, election calendar, candidate and voter information.
Russia’s Kaliningrad threats show the value of Baltic preparednessExpert commentjon.wallace
Moscow’s nuclear rhetoric should be taken seriously. But Baltic states know grey zone attacks and territorial incursions are equally serious threats.
Vladimir Putin always chooses his words carefully. If Russia faced a direct attack on Kaliningrad (its enclave on the Baltic Sea), he warned on 1 October, the use of ‘all weapons in (our) country’s arsenal’ would inevitably be on the table.
The statement followed an earlier Russian note to NATO, threatening nuclear escalation if the alliance were to isolate Kaliningrad. NATO, thus far, has responded with restraint. Secretary General Mark Rutte said there was no imminent Russian threat and rebuffed Moscow’s nuclear rhetoric. But this skirmishing has pushed Kaliningrad – and NATO’s Baltic borders with Russia – back into the spotlight.
Kaliningrad is not just any territory for the Russians. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945, Soviet leader Stalin asserted his claim to what was then known as Königsberg. It was, he said, necessary for Russia to have at least ‘one ice-free port’ at the expense of Germany. The US and UK consented, and Moscow gained a permanent military position on the Baltic Sea.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of the Baltic states to become independent democracies, Kaliningrad’s geographical isolation from Russia became more apparent, creating one of the most peculiar pieces of land on the continent. Today the enclave hosts Russia’s Baltic Fleet, missile systems and combat aircraft.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the surrounding geopolitics has changed. Finland and Sweden are now part of NATO. Poland is rearming at unprecedented speed. And the military presence across the alliance’s north-eastern flank is much denser. Meanwhile, Lithuania may soon vote to lift a ban on hosting nuclear weapons on its territory – a move the Kremlin described on 6 October as ‘a step towards escalating tensions’.
Kaliningrad remains a key forward position for Russia. But its near-complete isolation, in the middle of a more coherent NATO Baltic presence, presents Moscow with a serious geostrategic and military challenge.
Denying Russia a quick victory
One glance at the map is enough to understand that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have but little strategic depth. The three states depend heavily on the Suwałki corridor – a 65km strip of land between Kaliningrad and Belarus that connects Poland and Lithuania – for overland reinforcement. Reclaiming territory from an attacker would be an unlikely option for Baltic countries.
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Made with Natural Earth data.
The only credible alternative is to make a Russian advance difficult from the beginning. ‘We have to start from the border and win from the first battles,’ Colonel Tarmo Kundla, commander of the Estonian First Brigade, recently declared.
That is the purpose of the Baltic Defence Line along the eastern border: bunkers, anti-tank obstacles and other defensive outposts. Estonia plans hundreds of squad-level bunkers. A permanently deployed German armoured brigade will become operational in Lithuania in 2027. And Finland now hosts a NATO Forward Land Force. Defence spending across the region has risen far beyond NATO’s old two-per-cent target to reach nearly 5.5 per cent in the case of Estonia.
The intention is clear. Russia must be deterred from any attempt to seize even a small amount of territory – a significant possibility if Russia were to test NATO resolve.
Preparedness before the first bullet is shot
But Baltic defence measures are about more than spending commitments and defending their Russian borders. Baltics countries know that to deter Russia it is just as vital to stress test their critical infrastructure and train their societies to keep functioning if and when a crisis emerges. Indeed, there is a lot the rest of the continent could learn from Baltic states’ whole-of-society model, which seeks to prepare their entire populations for an era of high-threat risk.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have accelerated preparations for grey zone conflict of the kind in which Russia excels, including attacks on infrastructure.
From Finland to Lithuania, this model consists of embedding all the layers of society in defence and preparedness strategies. This form of ‘comprehensive security’ is grounded in the belief that keeping the country functioning in a crisis is a shared responsibility of government, business, civil society and citizens. In this regard, the Baltics are the most strategically advanced in Europe.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have accelerated preparations for grey zone conflict of the kind in which Russia excels, including attacks on infrastructure. All three have disconnected their electricity systems from Russian and Belarusian networks, progressively synchronizing them with the continental grid since February 2025. In the meantime, NATO has increased protection of Baltic undersea infrastructure, following damaged cables and various incidences of suspected sabotage.
Slowly learning
Europe’s larger military powers are awaking to the need to somehow follow the Baltic lead and prepare their societies for an enlarging spectrum of threats. Germany, which would serve as one of NATO’s main logistical hubs in any reinforcement of the Baltic region, saw much of its civil-defence architecture fall into disrepair after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Its shelter capacity, for instance, now covers only around 480,000 people. Last spring Berlin approved a new €10-billion civil-defence programme, including plans to convert underground car parks, tunnels and stations into emergency shelters – evidence of renewed political engagement.
France has tested its armed forces at scale in the Orion 26 high-intensity exercise, which brought together 12,500 troops, 24 allied nations and civilian institutions in a scenario ranging from hybrid attacks to large-scale conventional war. The UK has developed a 2026 resilience plan that explicitly acknowledges growing Russian sub-threshold attacks. And the government is considering a reserve-style home-defence force to protect critical infrastructure.
These are important changes. But ‘E3’ countries are still struggling to jointly improve resilience in transport, healthcare, energy, and communications – even as the risk of an enemy trying to disrupt all of them at once grows.
NATO is moving to drive the task forward. Its newly released resilience baseline requirements ask governments to plan for large movements of populations alongside military deployments; to develop health systems that can function even in case of mass casualties; and to develop communications and transport networks that can continue supporting allied forces during high-intensity conflict. In the near future, these will become the pillars on which deterrence actually depends.
Baltic gaps
Still, resilience won’t be enough alone to vanquish an enemy attack on the region. Baltic air and missile defence remains rather thin considering the scale of Russia’s drone and missile arsenal. Reinforcements would still have to reach the region through corridors like the Suwałki gap. And Russia would seize any opportunity to disrupt such movements. Fundamentally, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remain reliant on their larger allies’ ability to swiftly provide additional forces and air power in the event of a significant attack.
This makes Stalin’s ‘ice-free port’ of Kaliningrad more than an isolated flashpoint on the Baltic shores. Putin’s nuclear rhetoric deserves to be taken seriously. Russia revised its nuclear doctrine in 2024, explicitly broadening the circumstances in which Moscow could consider nuclear use. These include threats to its territorial integrity and attempts to isolate parts of the Russian territory.
But the military geography surrounding the enclave has changed too. Once referred to as NATO’s most exposed flank, the Baltics have become much harder to intimidate, and harder still to overrun before NATO can respond.
Their experience also carries a wider lesson for Europe: strategic weight is not measured by size alone, even that of a nuclear arsenal. Agility, civil preparedness and political resolve have allowed small states, free and democratic since 1991, to alter the terms of deterrence at their border.
They have shown Europe that resilience begins long before deterrence fails and that it can change the enemy’s calculation. Their measures will make any attack look potentially far slower and costlier than Moscow would once have believed. Perhaps most significantly after the blatant failure of Russian objectives in Ukraine, Baltic resilience makes overall success of a military attack look far less certain for Vladimir Putin.
Austin Davis, center, a 26-year-old poet and advocate for homeless people, has become a point of last resort for families who are experiencing homelessness in the Phoenix area.
For about a year, Austin Davis’ phone has been flooded with hundreds of pleas for help from across the Phoenix metropolitan area.
A school employee wanted to help a homeless family but couldn’t find space at a shelter. Could Davis pay for a hotel room?
A mother of five living in a storage unit contacted a homeless services organization for help. They told her to call Davis.
A mother panhandling with her six children said passersby gave her Davis’ phone number, telling her he might be able to provide shelter. “I feel like the worst mother in the world,” she texted him.
Nearly every person who’s reached out to Davis, a 26-year-old poet and advocate for homeless people, says they’d first called 211, seeking help through the official channel, only to learn it could be months before they’d get shelter or a housing placement. His phone has become the unofficial hotline for emergency shelter.
Caseworkers, teachers, social workers, police and hospital workers have called and texted to see if Davis can help people without a place to go. Even workers from the official channel — 211 and the Family Housing Hub — have sent people to him.
Davis’ path to becoming the de facto advocate of last resort illustrates how the system set up to care for families who are homeless in Maricopa County is failing them. ProPublica found that calling and visiting the official channel to address family homelessness rarely leads to offers of help, leaving families feeling hopeless.
Davis’ nonprofit, AZ Hugs, holds daily food distributions at “The Hill” for homeless people in Phoenix.
In January, I started coming to Tempe’s Moeur Park, known as “The Hill,” to meet the families Davis was assisting. I was struck by the scene of desperate parents, some of whom had recently been evicted, lost a job or fled domestic violence, surrounding Davis to tell him about their situation. As he listened, he played with their children, always with an energy drink in hand.
The scene was both heartening and disconcerting. Davis was helping families stay off the street, which was good. But why, I wondered, in a county of nearly 5 million people, was a man in a park their best chance at getting help? And why were government agencies and multimillion-dollar nonprofits, some tasked with helping the very same homeless families, sending people to him?
Davis, who runs a small nonprofit called AZ Hugs, is known for working outside the system. With the help of volunteers, he hosts a nightly meal for homeless people at a suburban Phoenix park. This has drawn the ire of Tempe officials and led to 35 citations against him for trespassing and holding picnics without permits. (In 2024, he reached a deal to plead guilty to one permit violation, and the city dismissed the other citations, according to court documents. He’s spent three nights in jail.) In 2025, Davis and two other advocates for homeless people filed a lawsuit against Tempe, alleging it had violated their free speech protections by citing them for feeding people in parks. The city revised its permit ordinance, and Davis withdrew the lawsuit.
In recent months, he has tried to draw attention to what he calls the “family homelessness crisis,” raising money on social media to pay for hotel rooms for families, many with young children, who would otherwise sleep on the street or in their cars. Davis said he cannot assist everyone who asks for help. A much bigger effort is needed, he added, involving nonprofits and local and state officials, but he sees little evidence that it’s happening.
The number of people in homeless families in Maricopa County reached 2,103 this year, its highest level since 2015, according to the latest figures that are compiled locally and reported to the federal government. And those numbers are considered an undercount because the tally is taken on a single night by volunteers who can miss people who are trying to stay out of sight. In late September, nearly 200 families were on the waitlist for shelter in the county. It doesn’t include those who couldn’t get on; were kicked off because they weren’t considered homeless; or those who called 211, found it unhelpful and never called back. (Solari, a nonprofit that runs the statewide 211 line, said that the Family Housing Hub, which is run by UMOM, a nonprofit, sets the eligibility criteria for placement on the shelter waitlist.)
I spoke to more than 30 families searching for shelter. Parents told me they worried how their situation was affecting their children. Research shows homelessness harms children, disrupting brain development and growth and leading to permanent changes in the brain and body.
Davis’ phone is flooded daily with pleas for help from people who are homeless across Maricopa County.Blurred for privacy by ProPublica
Candice Ortiz had tried since spring to find stable shelter and housing. As the months dragged on, she noticed the toll on her 8-year-old son. He was hospitalized for heat exhaustion after spending the day outside, and she worried about the school he missed.
Davis helped Ortiz as she hit dead ends in her search for a place to stay, according to text messages reviewed by ProPublica.
She said she had called 211 over and over, answering the same questions about her living situation, only to receive information she could have found through a simple internet search. She said a worker with the Family Housing Hub told her that since she and her children were sleeping in her car, she wasn’t actually homeless. Another told her the waitlist was full.
In June, she spent the day at a Phoenix cooling center to escape the heat. A representative told her to go to UMOM, which runs an emergency shelter for families. She said she used her last $20 on a rideshare to the shelter. They took her information again and told her she wasn’t “in the system.” Nothing was available. UMOM said to protect the privacy of clients, it does not comment on individual families.
At the end of August, she connected with the Phoenix Rescue Mission, a nonprofit that offers programs for homeless people. The group sent Ortiz to a local apartment complex where she viewed an apartment. Later, a worker with the Phoenix Rescue Mission told her that it ran out of funding to pay for it, text messages reviewed by ProPublica show. Phoenix Rescue Mission did not respond to requests for comment.
UMOM, which during the last fiscal year received more than $7 million in government grants, set aside 23 units of shelter and about a dozen tents for families this summer, as temperatures reached 117 degrees. The program, which is part of the city of Phoenix’s heat relief effort, has helped nearly 300 households so far but is winding down this month.
In early April, Davis had tried to force a broader effort to address the crisis by launching an online petition. It called on Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, to declare a state of emergency to address family homelessness. The petition has more than 5,000 signatures.
In June, a volunteer with Davis’ organization attended a fundraiser for Hobbs, who is running for reelection, to hand her a letter about the petition. The letter suggested such a declaration could unlock funding for emergency shelter and recommended making it easier to access the Family Housing Hub.
“I implore you to consider the children who endure extreme heat without safe shelter,” the letter stated. “No parent should be told to wait months for assistance while temperatures reach life-threatening levels.”
Davis said he wishes that the leaders of nonprofits and government agencies would do more to address the difficulties faced by families in need of shelter.
Davis told me he hasn’t heard from the governor’s office or from other nonprofit leaders about joining his effort — only from caseworkers hoping he might help them find shelter for families. He wished that other organizations would at least acknowledge the problem and called their silence “frustrating” and a “disservice” to those in crisis.
The governor’s press secretary, Liliana Soto, told me emergency declarations are reserved for natural disasters, and using one to address homelessness might not be appropriate. Soto added that the governor is “deeply aware” of these challenges. Since taking office in 2023, Hobbs has allocated at least $245 million statewide on efforts such as eviction prevention, affordable housing, emergency shelter and rapidly rehousing people experiencing housing insecurity. “The governor believes no family, especially families with infants or young children, should be left without a safe place to go during the summer heat,” Soto said in a statement.
Davis sees families in that situation daily. And he spends most nights pleading for money on social media to put them in hotel rooms. Some nights he has raised thousands of dollars, posting updates at 2 a.m.
In September, Davis’ organization started hosting an overnight shelter at the First United Methodist Church of Mesa. It has space for at least six families. Davis said he knows it’s a Band-Aid on a much bigger problem.
At the church on a recent evening, some families arrived in vehicles packed with their belongings. Inside a large air-conditioned room, a volunteer had set up canopy tents with cots, pillows and blankets. She offered them a dinner of chicken penne pasta.
A mother and her two children showered, then got in their tent and zipped it up. Gradually, others, some with toddlers, settled in, and the room became quiet.
They’d need to be gone by 6 a.m.
In Maricopa County, the number of people with children who are homeless is at its highest point since 2015, according to a regional count.
Los Angeles, CA — President Donald Trump is facing bipartisan criticism after suggesting during a Nebraska rally that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego and calling that possibility “a small price to pay” in the broader U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump made the remarks while arguing that the conflict was necessary to prevent Iran from becoming a greater threat. California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president’s comments “deranged and dangerous,” while Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said such rhetoric could threaten public safety. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said the city was “not collateral damage.”
Republican criticism followed as well. Rep. Kevin Kiley and congressional candidate Jim Desmond both rejected the idea that American cities should be treated as expendable.
The White House pushed back Tuesday, saying Trump was not endorsing attacks on U.S. cities and was instead arguing that his Iran policy was designed to prevent such threats. Communications Director Steven Cheung dismissed the reaction as a media “freakout.”
Trump declined to further clarify the remarks when questioned Tuesday. His comments came during a campaign swing ahead of the November midterms, as the war and its economic effects remain prominent political issues.
Alexandria, VA — A former CIA official pleaded guilty Tuesday to wire fraud after admitting he fabricated highly sensitive government programs to divert nearly $200 million in public funds.
Federal prosecutors said David Rush created fictitious classified programs and used them to steer about $145 million into a holding company he controlled. He then used government money to acquire gold bars, luxury real estate and other high-value assets.
As part of his plea agreement, Rush agreed to forfeit at least $194 million. FBI agents recovered 298 gold bars and roughly $2 million in cash during a search of his home, according to prosecutors.
Rush had previously been fired after authorities discovered he falsified portions of his academic and military background. Investigators are still examining whether additional money or property tied to the scheme remains undiscovered.
The case has also prompted scrutiny of the CIA’s internal vetting procedures. The intelligence community inspector general is investigating how false information on Rush’s background allegedly went undetected.
Authorities have separately examined Rush’s professional relationship with Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg. The FBI ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing by Feinberg, according to reporting cited by the Associated Press.
Rush has not yet been sentenced. The plea represents one of the largest fraud cases involving a former U.S. intelligence official in recent years.
The Smyrna Eagles defeated the Middletown Cavaliers, 32-21, on October 2, in the 2026 iteration of the Harvest Bowl. It’s Smyrna’s first win against Middletown since 2022.
Senior Boe Evans carries the Smyrna flag and leads the Eagles onto the field before the 2026 Harvest Bowl against the Middletown Cavaliers.
Smyrna junior Mikiah Jackson starts his route against the Cavalier defense.
Smyrna senior, Chrystian Carroll, breaks through a Middletown tackle to score.
Middletown senior, Hanif Miller, breaks a Smyrna tackle and runs downfield.
Sophomore running back, Terrell Ingram, is tackled by Middletown sophomore Riley Robinson.
Middletown junior, Kyle McCaffery, avoids the Smyrna tacklers and takes off downfield.
Middletown senior, Hanif Miller, is brought down by Smyrna defensive lineman, Wendell Smallwood.
Ingram breaks away from the defense and runs down the right sideline.
McCaffery finds an open receiver and fires, moving Middletown down the field.
Middletown junior, Max Phipps, surveys the field as the Smyrna pass rush attempts to get passed the Middletown offensive line.
Middletown players signal for a touchdown after their teammate broke the goal line.
Smyrna junior, Hameed Lonon-Chase, runs downfield after a catch. Lonon-Chase scored Smyrna’s first two touchdowns.
Smyrna’s offensive line and Middletown’s defensive line battle it out at the line of scrimmage.
unior Tysir Young takes off toward the endzone after intercepting the ball.
Ingram and assistant coach Marquis Johnson hug it out after the sophomore runner carried the ball over 20 times in the game.
Eagles’ head coach Mike Judy lifts the Harvest Bowl trophy during the teams’ postgame huddle.
All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo
This story was updated on October 7 to correct the caption in the first picture.
Miami, FL — A man was arrested after authorities say he impersonated an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and intimidated voters at a Miami polling location during Brazil’s presidential election.
Danilo Alves Silva, 46, allegedly arrived Sunday at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus wearing an ICE-branded jacket and hat, tactical-style boots, sunglasses and a face covering. Brazilian nationals were using the campus as an overseas polling location.
According to the arrest report, voters appeared frightened that an actual federal immigration agent was monitoring the election and could potentially detain or deport people.
Sheriff’s deputies intervened after Silva became involved in an argument. Investigators said he admitted he was not an ICE agent and could not provide law-enforcement identification. Silva allegedly said he purchased the clothing online and wore it to the polling location to “see people’s reactions.”
Authorities charged Silva with voter intimidation or suppression, unlawful use of police insignia, threatening a public servant and conspiracy to commit bribery. Police allege that after his arrest, Silva offered to get an officer “paid” if he were released.
Miami-Dade elections officials subsequently emphasized that ICE agents will not be stationed inside county polling places and urged voters not to let fear or misinformation prevent them from participating.
Washington, DC — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreed to buy 6,000 pairs of electric shock gloves for $16.7 million after an Army study found the devices caused intense pain, immediate compliance and fear of being shocked again.
The 2024 Army study, conducted at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, found participants quickly stopped resisting after exposure to the gloves. Some later reported fatigue, soreness and significant apprehension about receiving another shock. ICE officials were aware of the findings before signing the contract in August.
ICE describes the devices as nonlethal “distraction and de-escalation” tools intended to help officers control resisting detainees without resorting to more dangerous force. The manufacturer’s guidance says the gloves should not be used as punishment or merely for verbal defiance and warns against use on some vulnerable populations.
Sixteen senators led by Catherine Cortez Masto previously urged ICE to cancel the purchase or provide detailed safeguards covering training, medical risks and accountability. The senators said the agency had not answered their August letter as of this week.
White House border czar Tom Homan has said deployment could still take time while ICE develops training and use policies. The contract requires delivery within six months.
The Cape Henlopen Vikings defeated the Hodgson Silver Eagles, 35-28, on October 3, starting the season, 4-0, for the first time since 2014.
Hodgson running back, Keytwan Sabur, finds a gap and takes advantage of the running room on the Silver Eagles’ first drive of the game.
Hodgson junior Ronald Brown reaches for the goal-line to convert on the two-point conversion, giving the Silver Eagles a 8-0 lead.
Sabur is lifted into the air by senior Braden Collins after scoring his second touchdown of the first quarter.
Senior receiver, Stephen Sivels, hauls in his second catch of the game for the Vikings.
Hodgson senior, Jayden Yancey, follows his blockers through the Cape Henlopen defense.
Yancey is brought down by the Viking defense just before the goal line.
Silver Eagle quarterback, Kevin Browning, celebrates after running in the endzone for a touchdown. The run gave Hodgson a, 22-14, lead in the second quarter.
Viking senior Geordan Downing looks for more running room during his 22-yard reception in the second quarter.
Cape Henlopen seniors Jameson Tingle and Aidan Lehmuth celebrate after connecting on a 26-yard passing touchdown. The score cut the Silver Eagle lead to two with three minutes remaining before halftime.
Browning keeps the snap and runs up the middle for a Silver Eagle touchdown. Hodgson led, 28-20, at halftime.
Cape Henlopen quarterback Jameson Tingle runs down the field during the Vikings’ second drive of the second half.
Sivels breaks away from the Silver Eagle defense for a 29-yard gain. Sivels ended the game with over 100 receiving yards.
Tingle runs the ball after getting into the redzone and scores on a three-yard run. Tingle’s score gave Cape Henlopen a seven-point lead.
Browning runs for a first down on Hodgson’s final drive of the game, trailing by seven.
Tingle recovers a fumble for the Vikings securing their win over Hodgson.
All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo
(Frame-Stock-Footage/Shutterstock)
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Who will replace Republican Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick? Here’s where Kira Alejandro and Melissa Brayman stand
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