SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 26, 2026 — Supermicro, Inc. is announcing the launch of the industry’s first and highest-density blade server platform powered by the latest AMD EPYC 4005 series processors. Designed with a flexible, density-optimized blade architecture, Supermicro’s new MicroBlade platform is designed for longevity and versatility. By including the latest AMD EPYC 4005 series processors, along with previous versions, the system provides seamless scalability and long-term investment protection, allowing organizations to expand and upgrade as compute requirements evolve.
Supermicro MicroBlade platform
“Our flexible blade architecture enables customers to mix different node types with different CPUs within a single enclosure and can incorporate up to 320 server nodes in a standard 48U rack,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “Supermicro continues to lead the industry in delivering advanced, energy-efficient platforms to market that maximize scalability, lower total cost of ownership, and protecting data center investments for the long term.”
The new 6U system supports up to 40 nodes in a single enclosure, delivering unparalleled compute density, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness for scale-out and multi-tenant environments. The platform is optimized for a wide range of efficient and high-density workloads, including:
Each node supports a single AMD EPYC 4005 series processor with two DDR5 ECC UDIMM slots operating at up to 5600 MT/s, along with two PCIe Gen5 E1.S SSDs and one M.2 SSD per node. Integrated networking features dual-port 25GbE via Broadcom BCM57414, with advanced security and manageability including TPM 2.0, signed firmware, hardware root of trust, IPMI 2.0, KVM over IP, and Redfish API support. The new MicroBlade system uniquely enables flexible mix-and-match configurations across single-wide and double-wide nodes further showcasing the versatility of the all-in-one Supermicro blade system. Connectivity further elevates its capabilities, with two integrated 25G Ethernet switches with 100G uplinks in the back of the enclosure, ensuring reliable, high-speed networking while lowering the TCO through cable reduction.
The MicroBlade chassis management module (CMM) provides total remote control of individual server blades, power supplies, cooling fans, and networking switches remotely. System administrators can control the maximum power consumption per server through power capping and manage the power allocation in the MicroBlade CMM for each blade server. Remote power control capabilities to reboot and/or reset the server are available as well as remote access to the BIOS configuration and operating system console information via SOL (Serial over LAN) or embedded KVM capabilities. Because the controller is a separate processor, all monitoring and control functions operate flawlessly regardless of CPU operation or system power-on status.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Debuts High-Density MicroBlade Server Featuring AMD EPYC 4005 appeared first on HPCwire.
 | In a rough financial situation and Onewheel is one of the best ways I can get around my small town. Do you think I can keep riding this for a little while longer until I get some extra cash to replace? Or am I really in danger…? [link] [comments] |
The release of Nancy Guthrie's home in Tucson, Arizona, comes nearly four weeks after she was reported missing on Feb. 1.
Labour has focused its efforts at voters who may be tempted to back the Reform candidate in the by-election
The number of asylum seekers being housed temporarily in hotels has fallen to the lowest level for 18 months, Home Office figures show. Rajeev Syal has the story.
A minister has confirmed that the government is pressing ahead with the deal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
Yes. My colleague the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper has been talking to Marco Rubio, her opposite number in the US, about it. Foreign policy is never easy. We will make progress on the Chagos deal.
Continue reading...A federal judge is weighing whether to dismiss the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia on the grounds the prosecution is vindictive.
Columbia University's president says a student was detained by federal agents Thursday morning at one of its residential buildings.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is meeting with the House Oversight Committee on Thursday in New York.
Feature for supervised accounts rolls out as Meta platforms faces US trials over alleged harms to children
Instagram said Thursday it will start alerting parents if their kids repeatedly search for terms clearly associated with suicide or self-harm. The alerts will only go to parents who are enrolled in Instagram’s parental supervision program.
Instagram says it already blocks such content from showing up in teen accounts’ search results and directs people to helplines instead.
Continue reading...Marcelo Gomes da Silva attended President Trump's speech at the Capitol as the guest of Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton.
Clinton says she does not recall meeting Epstein in deposition taking place behind closed doors
Cindy McCain announced today that she will step down from her role as executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme to focus on her health.
McCain, the widow of the late US senator John McCain, suffered a mild stroke last October and had returned to Italy to resume her work after that, but the demands of the job were affecting her recovery, the organization said. She started the role in April 2023. She will step down in three months.
Continue reading...The Federal Trade Commission, joined by 11 states, claimed that the retail giant deceived its employees about pay and the tips they could earn.
Børge Brende admitted dining with the convicted sex offender on three occasions between 2018 and 2019
The boss of the World Economic Forum (WEF) has quit following criticism of his connections to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Børge Brende said he will step down as president and chief executive after more than eight years leading the body, which is best known for its annual meeting held each January in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos.
Continue reading...New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users "pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value." From a report: While many randomized video game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York suit calls out Valve's system specifically for "enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third-party marketplaces." The vast majority of Valve's in-game loot boxes contain skins that can only be resold for a few cents, the suit notes, while the rarest skins can be worth thousands of dollars through marketplaces on and off of Steam. That fits the statutory definition of gambling as "charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone," according to the suit. The Steam Wallet funds that users get through directly reselling skins "have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash," the suit notes. But if a user wants to convert those Steam funds to real cash, they can do so relatively easily by purchasing a Steam Deck and reselling it to any interested party, as an investigator did while preparing the lawsuit.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Former Labour leader says time for ‘real work’ to begin as his candidates take 14 of 24 available places on executive committee
Jeremy Corbyn is to become the de facto leader of Your Party, after an election in which his rival Zarah Sultana was also voted on to the party’s leadership committee.
The former Labour leader’s allies declared victory immediately after the vote in which Corbyn-backed candidates took 14 of the 24 available places on the party’s central executive committee (CEC). Sultana-backed candidates took seven of the seats and three went to independents.
Continue reading...The price of silver, following a drop from a record high, is on the rise again. Here's where it sits as of February 26.
British Muslim Trust says fund announced last week falls short as it requires mosques to prove they have been targeted
Ministers are being urged to drop the requirement for mosques to prove they have faced a hate crime before they can apply for protective security.
Last week, the Home Office announced up to £40m in funding for security staff, CCTV, fencing, alarms and floodlights for mosques, Muslim schools and community centres through the Protective Security for Mosques Scheme.
Continue reading...BRAUNSCHWEIG, Germany and INNSBRUCK, Austria, Feb. 26, 2026 — QUDORA and ParityQC have announced a strategic partnership to optimize quantum algorithm performance on trapped-ion hardware platforms.
QUDORA develops quantum computing systems based on trapped-ion technology, including the hardware, control systems, and system integration. ParityQC specializes in hardware-aware quantum architecture, resulting in scalable blueprints for quantum hardware and algorithms. Its Parity Twine method has demonstrated record efficiency in implementing quantum algorithms on every known hardware connectivity.
The partnership combines QUDORA’s proprietary Near-Field Quantum Control (NFQC) technology with ParityQC’s architecture framework. ParityQC will work with QUDORA’s engineering teams to tailor and optimize its algorithms for QUDORA’s hardware platform.
“Efficient use of hardware resources is essential for delivering practical quantum computing,” said Dr. Daniel Borcherding, Head of Quantum Software at QUDORA. “ParityQC’s architecture-driven approach allows us to improve algorithm performance on our systems without increasing hardware complexity. This supports faster progress toward customer-relevant quantum applications.”
“We’ve shown that Parity Twine enhances the performance of currently existing quantum hardware and allows to implement corner-stone algorithms in the most efficient way. Combining our approach with QUDORA’s vast experience in building trapped-ion quantum hardware will fast-track the development towards utility scale quantum devices,“ said Wolfgang Lechner and Magdalena Hauser, Co-CEOs ParityQC.
The Optimization Challenge
Quantum computers deliver practical value only when algorithms are aligned with the physical characteristics of the underlying hardware. Without hardware-specific optimization, algorithms typically require more qubits, deeper circuits, and longer coherence times than needed.
ParityQC’s Parity Twine technology addresses this challenge by restructuring algorithms to match the topology and operational constraints of specific quantum processors. Applied to QUDORA’s trapped-ion systems, this approach reduces gate counts and circuit depth, directly improving computational efficiency. Fewer operations mean less accumulated error and better results with existing hardware.
Quantum Computing Made in Europe
The partnership is rooted in a shared European quantum technology ecosystem. QUDORA operates from Germany, while ParityQC is based in Austria with subsidiaries in Germany, France and UK. Both companies are engaged with partners such as the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and NXP Semiconductors, creating a strong foundation for coordinated technical development.
Together, QUDORA and ParityQC aim to enable faster validation of quantum use cases and provide customers with quantum computing solutions that are technically robust, resource-efficient, and ready for real computational environments.
About ParityQC
As quantum architecture company, ParityQC’s focus is on developing blueprints and operating systems for quantum computers. ParityQC solves the challenges in the scalability of quantum devices by a fundamentally new paradigm which allows for fully programmable quantum chips with simplified design and control, as well as integrated error correction. ParityQC collaborates with hardware partners all over the world to jointly build highly scalable quantum computers for applications ranging from solving optimization problems on NISQ devices to general-purpose, error-corrected quantum computing.
About QUDORA
Founded in 2021, QUDORA is a leading full-stack system integrator of trapped-ion quantum computers based in Germany. The company’s proprietary Near-Field Quantum Control (NFQC) technology brings together ultra precise qubit control with very long coherence times significantly improving the performance per qubit. QUDORA’s QC systems are designed for seamless integration with existing industrial infrastructure, including on-premise deployments for HPC centers. With operations in Braunschweig and Hamburg, QUDORA is making quantum computing accessible to a broader range of applications and industries.
Source: ParityQC
The post QUDORA and ParityQC Partner to Optimize Quantum Algorithms for Trapped-Ion Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
Federal agents detained a Columbia University student at university housing early on Thursday morning, according interim Columbia President Claire Shipman.
In an email to the university community that was obtained by The Intercept, Shipman said that agents with the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia residential housing building and detained the student, who has not been publicly identified, at approximately 6:30 a.m. on Thursday.
“Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person,’” Shipman said in her email.
Shipman implored members of the university community to not let unidentified people into campus buildings without a judicial warrant.
“It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including housing,” Shipman wrote. “An administrative warrant is not sufficient.”
The Department of Homeland Security, New York Police Department, City Hall, and Shipman’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The incident took place less than 25 hours after students rallied on campus to demand protections for international students as well as calling for the release of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who has been in federal custody since her arrest by immigration agents nearly a year ago.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
The post Columbia University: Federal Agents “Made Misrepresentations” to Enter Building and Detain Student appeared first on The Intercept.
Ford said a tech glitch can increase the risk of a crash for vehicles towing a trailer. Here's what to look for.
Before signing up for an AI video subscription, read our testing and reviews.
Staff at a for-profit Pennsylvania immigrant prison serially falsified detention records about a man who died in 2023, according to a federal death review obtained exclusively by The Intercept earlier this month.
Despite these findings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to punish the facility’s politically connected operator, GEO Group. Instead, records show the agency gave GEO even more money to run the facility after the man died: $4 million in additional funds, just three months after the death review was completed. After an April 2024 visit at the facility, ICE’s acting director called GEO a “valued partner.”
Frankline Okpu died in solitary confinement at GEO Group’s Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center in Clearfield County on December 6, 2023. According to the detainee death report, two days before his death, staff sent the 37-year-old Cameroonian father of three to solitary confinement following an altercation with a guard in which he allegedly swallowed an unknown substance they believed to contain “k2,” a synthetic form of cannabis, “mixed with a tranquilizer.”
A physician who treated Okpu upon his placement in segregation instructed facility staff to take him to the emergency department. According to GEO, Okpu refused informed consent for this course of treatment; the doctor ordered GEO to house him in the facility’s infirmary for observation. GEO staff claim Okpu refused this course of treatment, too. The provider ordered prison staff to conduct 15-minute visual checks to ensure his safety.
But records show that did not always happen before Okpu died, according to ICE’s death review.
Surveillance footage revealed 94 of 219 required visual inspections (42 percent) did not occur as ordered. In 23 instances, GEO staff recorded checks that never occurred at all. In another 33, staff logged visual inspections without looking in the cell window to personally observe Okpu. And in 38 logged events, the checks staff claimed to perform every 15 minutes occurred outside that required timeframe.
Federal prosecutors have previously indicted GEO staff for falsifying visual inspection logs during the period preceding an incarcerated person’s death in custody.
The Intercept sought comment and posed a series of detailed questions to ICE and GEO. An ICE spokesperson said the agency was unable to provide a response by deadline, citing “the blizzard in the Northeast.” GEO Group did not respond.
ICE’s reviewers found discrepancies between the chain of events on the morning Okpu died and GEO’s documentation. According to the death report, Okpu was due to have a routine dental appointment, but when a resident adviser went to bring him in shortly after 7 a.m., Okpu did not respond. The resident adviser reported to a dental assistant that Okpu had refused his appointment, and the dental assistant completed and signed a refusal form, however, she “acknowledged she did not witness Okpu’s refusal, visit Okpu to explain the risks associated with refusing the appointment, nor attempt to obtain Okpu’s signature on the form.” ICE concluded GEO “failed to comply” with the medical care standard requiring providers to obtain a signed refusal form after counseling patients.
The dental assistant also told ICE “it is common practice to have another staff member sign as a witness on refusal forms when patients refuse appointments, then deliver the completed form later.”
The death review also found facility medical staff violated ICE standards by failing to conduct a face-to-face encounter with Okpu less than an hour before he was found unresponsive, despite documenting that they had done so. Video revealed that when three nurses conducted their rounds shortly after 10:30 a.m., they “knocked on Okpu’s cell and then all three briefly looked in the window of Okpu’s cell, then walked away without conducting a face-to-face encounter.”
And although GEO staff documented that Okpu ate both breakfast and lunch on the day he died, ICE investigators found prison staff did not confirm he ate the breakfast staff slid inside his door, and he was found unresponsive as lunch was being distributed. By 11:15 a.m., a nurse arrived at Okpu’s cell and found him lying on his side, with a “clear frothy liquid coming from his mouth.” Nurses administered Narcan and CPR and summoned EMS. Okpu was declared dead at 12:02 p.m.
In all, ICE investigators found GEO staff failed to comply with four of the agency’s detention standards, committed two additional facility policy violations, and noted one area of concern. “These deficiencies,” the report notes ICE notes, “are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as contributory to the detainee’s death.”
ICE’s findings that GEO failed to follow informed consent protocols in Okpu’s case mirrors a pattern observed in March 2024 by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight, or ODO. In its compliance review of operations at Moshannon, ICE inspectors found medical staff violated ICE standards by failing to explain the need for treatment to detained immigrants, allowing non-medical resident advisers to carry out refusals and sign as witnesses — thus preventing detained people from asking follow-up medical questions, and failing to ensure medical staff obtained signed refusal forms. ODO deemed these failures “a priority component.”
The ODO inspection report also found GEO staff failed at least six times to perform required 15-minute safety checks in one of 13 files reviewed involving detained immigrants on suicide watch, suggesting the serial failures to conduct safety checks in Okpu’s case were not an isolated occurrence.
Since Okpu’s death in 2023, at least two more men have died in custody at Moshannon. Chinese national Chaofeng Ge, 32, died by hanging himself in a shower room at the facility on August 5, 2025. His hands and feet were bound behind his back, according to Ge’s autopsy and first reported by Scripps News.
Then, on December 14, 2025, 46-year-old Sheikh Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, a beloved imam in Ohio who was originally from Eritrea, died at Moshannon from unspecified causes. A one-page Detainee Death Report ICE released last week claims he “declined recommended admission to the medical housing unit for monitoring,” following an abnormal EKG reading “in early December,” after he’d reported chest pain, numbness, and tingling. The detainee death report does not explain why Abdulkadir was not rushed to the Emergency Department following the abnormal EKG.
The fact pattern is similar to what happened after the death of 57-year-old Jaspal Singh, who died of a heart attack on April 16, 2024, at GEO’s Folkston ICE Processing Center in south Georgia. An ICE Health Service Corps mortality review found that GEO’s care in Singh’s case “deviated beyond safe limits and directly contributed to his death,” according to records obtained by The Intercept through Freedom of Information Act litigation. But, as it did with Moshannon following Okpu’s death, ICE subsequently awarded GEO millions more in federal funding — a $50 million expansion deal of Folkston was finalized in 2025, when ICE received an influx of money from Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — after Singh died under circumstances where ICE reviewers found violations.
The post Private Prison Falsified Records in Detainee’s Death in ICE Custody appeared first on The Intercept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness." Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as "welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you." Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. "This is all meant to be a coaching tool," Roux says, adding that the company is "iterating" on capturing the tone of conversations as well.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google says the second-generation model uses the precision of the pro model with the speed of the original.
The founder of a Kenyan recruitment agency stands accused of deceiving and then trafficking young Kenyans to fight in Russia's war on Ukraine.
‘Dynasty: The Murdochs’ will debut on the streamer on 13 March
The real-world drama that is said to have inspired the hit HBO show Succession is set for its own four-part series when Netflix debuts Dynasty: The Murdochs on 13 March.
The docuseries, based on thousands of pages of documents, emails and text messages, presents an exhaustive history of Rupert Murdoch’s rise while homing in on the tensions that have built for decades between him, his chosen heir Lachlan, and Rupert’s three other adult children: James Murdoch, Elisabeth Murdoch and Prudence MacLeod.
Continue reading...I ordered an tfl enduro for my pint x that will be here tomorrow and I’m curious about a few things
What are silly mistakes you guys have made during tire changes so I can try to avoid.
I think I’m going to put 2-4 oz of stans tire sealant rather than the float life sealant. Has anyone done this, how well does it work?
An estimated 4,793 people slept rough in tents, doorways or parks on single night in autumn – up 3% year on year
Record numbers of people slept rough on the streets of England last year, according to the latest official statistics.
An estimated 4,793 people spent the night in tents, doorways and parks on a single night in autumn 2025, up 3% year on year, and overtaking the previous peak of 4,751 in 2017, though charities believe these figures underestimate the scale of the nation’s homelessness crisis.
Continue reading...The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to end temporary deportation protections for thousands of Syrian immigrants living in the U.S.
Alan Milburn says people feel ‘social contract is being broken’ as number of Neets climbs to 957,000
The number of young people in the UK not working or in education has risen closer to a million, figures show, as a government adviser warned that for the first time in a century parents do not think their children will have a better life than them.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the number of people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training (Neet) rose to 957,000 in the final three months of last year, equating to 12.8% of this age group.
Continue reading...A mayor and a federal lawmaker called for an investigation into the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind blind refugee who went missing after being released by Border Patrol.
Feb. 26, 2026 — A team led by University College London (UCL) will receive £19.5 million over five years to provide a powerful, high-speed computing resource for researchers across the UK in areas ranging from medicine to engineering to history.
The computing resource, called Charger, will consist of more than 37,000 central processing unit (CPU) cores. The system will power a wide range of academic and industrial applications, from climate modeling to engineering calculations to the design of new materials at an atomic scale.
Charger is one of four new “digital engines,” known as National Compute Resources (NCRs), funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Compute is the digital horsepower required to process data and run complex simulations. These new computing resources are a major step in delivering the UK Compute Roadmap, the national plan launched by the Government in July 2025 to make the UK a global leader in high-tech research.
While supercomputing was once reserved for niche technical fields, these resources are designed for everyone in the research community – whether a scientist is mapping the human genome, an engineer is designing greener planes, or a historian is analyzing massive digital archives.
Dr Owain Kenway (UCL Advanced Research Computing), who is part of the UCL-led team that has received the funding, said: “Charger boosts the UK’s capability to do real computational research across a wide variety of fields (including but not limited to the physical sciences, biosciences, social sciences and humanities) and puts compute power in the hands of researchers who might otherwise be denied access to larger resources because of the way their problems are structured (many small tasks rather than one large one).
“As part of this service, we are also committed to putting part of the system into the hands of undergraduate students on courses around the country. This will give them invaluable experience learning how to use real, national scale high performance computer systems and preparing them for a world where research increasingly relies on computers for large scale simulation and data analysis.”
Professor James Hetherington, Director of UCL Advanced Research Computing, said: “UCL Advanced Research Computing is delighted to have been selected as a host of the National Compute Resource. We’re a hybrid of a professional information technology service and a research centre, and we look forward both to delivering reliably for the UK and to discovering and sharing new things about how we best use computers to do science.”
UCL Advanced Research Computing is responsible for centrally provided research IT services (data, compute, AI) at UCL. Its new Charger system builds on the success of the Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub, a high-performance UCL-led computing hub that served researchers modelling materials and molecules over 10 years.
The Charger system itself will run on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) technology, including cutting-edge HPE Slingshot networking and HPE Cray storage. The system will be hosted with DataVita, which provides market-leading capability to support high-density, liquid-cooled high-performance computing and AI infrastructure, including next-generation GPU and CPU platforms. DataVita’s Scottish facilities are engineered to accommodate ultra-high-density environments while maximizing efficiency through year-round free air cooling enabled by Scotland’s cooler climate.
By hosting this system with DataVita in Scotland instead of London, this will deliver a carbon saving of approximately 465 tonnes of CO₂e per year due to Scotland having the least carbon intensive electricity supply of anywhere in the UK.
Danny Quinn, Managing Director of DataVita, said: “We want to thank UCL for choosing to partner with DataVita and by combining the research excellence and innovation leadership of leading London institutions with the environmental and cost advantages of hosting in Scotland, this approach brings together world-class compute capability with measurable sustainability benefits. Our recent designation as an AI Growth Zone further demonstrates our infrastructure readiness, market credibility and strategic importance within the UK’s sovereign AI and HPC landscape, reinforcing why Scotland and DataVita represent the most efficient and future-proof location for high-performance AI and supercomputing workloads.”
Richard Gunn, Digital Research Infrastructure Programme Director, UKRI said: “With the £19.4 million award to UCL, UKRI is significantly expanding the capacity of our national network to handle a huge range of research tasks. This system is designed to be a versatile and reliable resource for a vast array of use cases, from life sciences, humanities, to engineering.
“Our goal in funding this facility is to ensure that the UK’s research community has the ‘digital horsepower’ required to solve complex challenges and maintain our global edge in innovation.”
The other NCRs are led by the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham and Cambridge. By investing in these four distinct compute resources, UKRI is ensuring that researchers have access to:
These new resources will work alongside the UK’s existing flagship AI and supercomputing services.
Charger is expected to be fully up and running for researchers later this year.
Source: UCL
The post University College London to Host £19.5M Supercomputing Facility appeared first on HPCwire.
University of Padua employee fractured ankle when getting up to fetch documents during video meeting
An Italian woman who fell and broke her ankle while working from home has obtained compensation in an unprecedented court ruling hailed a victory for workers’ rights.
In April 2022, the woman, an employee in the University of Padua’s law department, fractured her ankle in two places. The injury, which happened during a Zoom meeting where she fell after she got up from her desk to fetch documents, required surgery and treatment lasting more than four months.
Continue reading...Exclusive: DHS chose firm with ties to Corey Lewandowski after demanding partisan loyalty, in departure from federal procurement guidelines
The US Department of Homeland Security has awarded a $250,000 public relations contract to a Republican political consulting firm led by former Trump campaign officials with connections to Corey Lewandowski, a senior adviser to DHS secretary Kristi Noem, according to federal records reviewed by the Guardian.
On 26 September 2025, DHS posted an opportunity for “public affairs consulting services”, specifying that the successful applicant would provide “strategic counsel” to top officials at the department including Noem. The work would also include ensuring that media outlets in “alignment with DHS priorities” were present at appearances with Noem, as well as drafting position papers and devising negotiation strategies “tailored to DHS’s priorities in border security, immigration enforcement, and cyber defense”.
Continue reading...Photograph shows conservative activist handing slip to Darin McCann and Marlene Brady holding a similar paper
Controversy has engulfed Wyoming’s state legislature after a conservative activist was photographed handing checks to Republican lawmakers on the state house floor, in an incident that has highlighted intra-conservative divisions and the role of money in the Cowboy state’s politics.
The political storm started on 9 February, when Karlee Provenza, a Democratic lawmaker, took a photo showing Rebecca Bextel, a conservative activist and committeewoman for the Teton county Republican party, handing a check to Darin McCann, a Republican representative, on the legislative floor. Marlene Brady, another Republican representative, stands in the photo’s background, a similar piece of paper pinched between her fingers.
Continue reading...HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report: The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testing for months to determine who may or may not be a "legitimate user," as CEO and President for Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette described the plan. On Thursday during the company's fourth quarter earnings call for 2025, WBD revealed that the streaming limitations would be expanding. This news came as part of an answer about which levers the company plans to pull to grow HBO Max. Password crackdowns have proven to be a lucrative way to both boost revenue and subscriptions. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024. The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Four arrests over Camorra’s alleged infiltration of San Giovanni Bosco to carry out lucrative criminal activity
Italian police on Wednesday arrested four people over an alleged Camorra plot to infiltrate a Naples hospital, stage fake crashes for insurance payouts and spirit corpses away on oxygen-masked stretchers to profit from private ambulance transfers.
The investigation, prompted by the testimony of a state witness, uncovered a web of lucrative criminal activity allegedly carried out by members of the Contini clan of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, inside San Giovanni Bosco hospital. Prosecutors said the “operations were made possible by the organisation’s capacity for intimidation, a force that bent public officials and private citizens alike to its will”.
Continue reading...Family learned of change while abroad, and fear dual-national children will have to stay with relatives while they return to apply for passports
A British man and a Danish woman fear they will be separated from their young children in Copenhagen airport because of new border control rules on British dual nationals.
James Scrivens and his wife, Sara, who live in Wales, were visiting relatives in Norway and Denmark during the school holidays, and learned about the new Home Office rules only while they were abroad.
Continue reading...Internal email outlines how to handle misconduct claims as expansion raises concerns about background checks
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling to keep pace with vetting new hires during its historic recruitment push and is laying out a process to deal with allegations of past misconduct among recruits, the agency said in an internal email this week, underscoring concerns about ICE’s rapid expansion.
The email, sent to supervisors with ICE’s enforcement and removal operations (ERO) division and seen by Reuters, said the “high volume of new hires” and stalled background checks could create uncertainty for field offices when allegations arise related to actions before joining the federal agency, and that allegations should be referred to the internal integrity investigations unit (IIU).
Continue reading...Edit: not trying to rage bait. I've been looking everywhere for someone to also dislike their onewheel. But guess that's not gonna happen. Not going to go faster or try anything crazy but I'll keep it for longer. And maybe it will click. I just feel a crash coming soon. And I'm not excited. Just gotta get some protective gear ig. Sorry for shitting on the community.
I don't understand why there isn't more hate for the onewheel. I got a used xr 5 days ago. I can now ride it at 7-8 miles an hour and turn pretty well. Can't do switch. Anyway. I feel like after going past 8 mph. There is nothing protecting me from massive damages. I don't want to wear a bunch of protective gear to ride it and still end up probably getting hurt. The fact that it's hard enough already. And people say there are malfunctions apart from the pushback and voltage overload. That cause it to turn off. And send you to the ICU. Is that really worth going like another 7-8 miles per hour? The carving is pretty cool. But idk for a 1k+ device id expect to be able to relax on it and chill. Ride around or choose to go hit some trails and side hits. But no it's constant risk for minimal reward. I can't find a single person saying they dislike their onewheel outright why is that? Am I missing something? What is the minimal protective gear I need to be able to chill on it? In my mind it's already on fb marketplace. But I'm looking for some validation before selling it. And getting a safer vehicle to take on trails and explore. Like a MTN bike or e bike.
A few essential tools are required to brew professional-grade coffee at home. An expert clued me in on the most important one.
Michael Ortega Casanova is one of four people who were killed after people aboard a U.S.-registered speedboat allegedly opened fire on Cuba's border patrol.
The UK will phase out traditional home phones by 2027, but the switchover has been stressful for some. How do you feel about the change?
UK telecoms companies are retiring traditional landline services and replacing them with internet-based home phone connections.
The industry has set a deadline of January 2027 to complete this switch with roughly 3.2 million homes still to move over. While the digital switchover has been straightforward for most households, for some vulnerable customers, such as those with telecare devices, it has been very stressful.
Continue reading...Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic until Friday at 5 p.m. to grant the military unresticted use of its AI technology.
HAMBURG, Germany, Feb. 26, 2026 — ISC High Performance is excited to announce a comprehensive tutorial program featuring 23 in-depth sessions this year. Many of them will include hands-on learning focused on essential high performance computing technologies, AI methods, intelligent systems in scientific computing, and hybrid quantum-classical workflows.
The ISC tutorials take place on June 22 and complement the conference program by emphasizing practical skills, performance optimization, emerging software models, reproducibility, and the integration of AI and quantum technologies into scientific workflows.
As HPC evolves at the intersection of simulation, data, and intelligent systems, the 2026 tutorials provide attendees with the opportunity to deepen their technical expertise and reflect on the growing convergence of HPC, AI, and quantum technologies shaping next-generation research infrastructures.
The complete list of tutorials offered is now available on the ISC website. Detailed descriptions will be published on March 25 when registration opens.
Reduced Pricing to Support the Next Generation
To broaden participation and support the next generation of researchers and technology leaders, tutorial pricing is being reduced across all registration categories.
New tutorial rates are:
“By lowering financial barriers, ISC aims to make advanced technical training more accessible and to support the development of the next generation of HPC, AI, and quantum computing experts. We hope that students, doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career professionals will take advantage of the opportunity,” said Tanja Gruenter, Head of ISC Program Team.
ISC 2026 looks forward to welcoming participants from around the world to engage, learn, and advance their expertise at the forefront of scientific computing.
Join ISC High Performance 2026 in #ConnectingTheDots
ISC 2026 returns to the Congress Center Hamburg from June 22 – 26 for its 41st edition. Since its inception in 1986, it has been recognized as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most attended event for the HPC community, and increasingly for AI and quantum professionals interested in performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
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Source: ISC High Perfrmance
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SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 26, 2026 — At VAST Forward 2026, VAST Data announced a unified, global partner program within VAST’s Cosmos Community that brings together VAST’s partner ecosystem of resellers, service providers, systems integrators and advisory partners, technology alliance partners, distributors, cloud service providers and hyperscalers – all under one consistent framework.
VAST Cosmos is a global community of developers, builders and experts in innovative AI solutions. Within Cosmos, this program is designed to make it simple for partners to engage VAST in the way that best fits their business and their customers – while providing a clear, transparent path to grow with VAST.
As enterprises race to operationalize AI, partner ecosystems have become the fastest way to deliver validated architectures, production-ready integrations, and repeatable services. The VAST Cosmos Partner Program now formalizes how partners can participate in one or more routes to market while aligning around common training, enablement, governance, and go-to-market resources through a centralized partner portal.
“Cosmos was created to transform how organizations build and advance AI by bringing AI practitioners together in a comprehensive, supportive community that nurtures innovation, collaboration, and growth,” said John Mao, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “Now, with the addition of the Cosmos Partner Program, we’re expanding that mission by giving technology, cloud, and channel partners a unified framework to build and validate solutions, differentiate service offerings, and bring the VAST AI Operating System to customers – across the data center, cloud, and at the edge.”
“Partners want clarity and consistency in how they engage with VAST Data, from selling motions and technical validation, to enablement and delivery,” said John Cedillo, Vice President, Global Partner Organization, VAST Data. “Now Cosmos brings that to life with a single program that supports a clear set of pathways to take VAST to market, and the assets that drive execution – structured onboarding, tiered benefits, and a partner portal that connects training, deal registration, and joint go-to-market into one repeatable motion.”
Cosmos brings together disparate partner tracks under one cohesive ecosystem story and engagement model. Together, these tracks provide a single, unified way for partners to build, validate, deliver, and scale customer solutions on the VAST AI Operating System:
“Agency amplifies returns on intelligence and H2O.ai goes where the data is,” said Sri Ambati, Founder & CEO, H2O.ai. “By partnering with VAST Data through Cosmos, we’re embedding H2O AI Super Agent into modern AI infrastructure with the VAST AI Operating System to automate data prep, model surveillance, and continuous model building at scale. Enterprises are demanding intelligent workflows that operate natively within their data platforms – not bolted on top. We’re seeing strong pull for an AI user experience that transforms massive infrastructure into actionable intelligence.”
“As organizations scale AI, they’re looking for partners who can guide them from design, to deployment to ongoing optimization – and they require proven architectures that they can deploy quickly, without stitching together fragmented systems,” said Mike Trojecki, AVP, AI Practice, Global Solutions & Architecture, WWT. “By joining VAST Constellation, we can deliver validated solutions on the VAST AI Operating System that shorten deployment timelines, simplify operations, and help customers move AI workloads into production faster.”
More from HPCwire
About VAST Data
VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.
Source: VAST Data
The post VAST Data Expands Cosmos Community to Unify Global Partner Ecosystem appeared first on HPCwire.
The Even Realities G2 glasses have a spectacular design. I just wish they actually felt useful.
Falling volcanic ash has for years been viewed as a nuisance. But a Sicilian project has discovered its agricultural potential and wants to spread the word
In the Sicilian town of Giarre overlooking Mount Etna, Andrea Passanisi, a tropical and citrus fruits producer, uses an unusual fertiliser on his 100-hectare (247-acre) stretch of land: volcano ash.
Like hundreds of farmers and citizens of rural towns perched on the slopes of Europe’s highest and most active volcano, the 41-year-old’s family has had to deal with the nuisance of falling volcanic ash for generations. But it is only in recent years that the quantity of ash has become so excessive that it required an alternative approach.
Continue reading...Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases
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ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.
OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPTto limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.
Continue reading...For decades, the Valero refinery shaped Benicia’s economy, politics and health. Now the city has become a reluctant test case of whether an oil town can reinvent itself
Less than 40 miles north of San Francisco, the city of Benicia has the quaint ambience of an American small town, where a white gazebo and sign for a community crab bake mark the approach to a vibrant downtown stretch of restaurants, cafes and antique shops.
From many vantage points, it’s easy to forget the city is home to a massive 900-acre oil refinery, its imposing sprawl of stacks, holding tanks and billowing steam hidden from view. But for nearly 60 years, the refinery has loomed over every aspect of life in Benicia, exerting outsized influence on its economy and politics, while posing serious risks to public health.
Continue reading...Feb. 26, 2026 — In a new workshop report published by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), Grand Challenges for the Convergence of Computational and Citizen Science Research, experts across disciplines examine the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) and citizen science can mutually enrich each other, fostering increased opportunity for advancement in numerous scientific fields.
The report presents a roadmap for maximizing the potential of citizen science through the contributions of AI — and vice versa — while also demonstrating the broader applications of this union for challenges across ecological, infrastructural, clinical, and other domains. “We are entering a brave new world where we are renegotiating the relationship between humans and machines,” says Lucy Fortson (University of Minnesota), one of the report’s lead authors. “Investing in human-machine teaming research for citizen science is investing in … accelerating scientific output.”
The report, also co-led by authors Tanya Berger-Wolf (The Ohio State University), Kevin Crowston (Syracuse University), Haley Griffin (Computing Research Association), Corey Jackson (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Saiph Savage (Northeastern University), and Lea Shanley (International Computer Science Institute and GNIES, University of Wisconsin-Madison), is the culmination of extensive visioning. The findings are most notably informed by discussions at the CCC Grand Challenges for the Convergence of Computational and Citizen Science Research workshop on April 8-9, 2026 in Washington, D.C., as well as two virtual roundtables on the topic. In total, 46 experts across computing research, NGOs, philanthropy, industry, and federal agencies came together to envision “how humans and machines may team up to solve some of the world’s most pressing scientific problems,” articulating specific next steps for making that future a reality.
Key Priorities and Opportunities for Growth
This report centers the immense opportunity that arises when human talent is at the core of emerging technologies. Volunteer citizen scientists are capable of data labeling, analysis, and creativity that machines are simply currently incapable of or may not have the resources to perform. Scaling these citizen science efforts would help close the gap between the sheer volume of data that computational technologies are able to produce and the data-based interpretations scientists can then apply to solving complex questions.
Five strategic priorities are identified for increasing this convergence of computational technology and citizen science:
Future Recommendations
These strategic priorities guide detailed recommendations for the future research directions and other actions that support the goal of large-scale convergence. They call on researchers, federal agencies, and industry professionals:
Read the Full Report
The Grand Challenges for the Convergence of Computational and Citizen Science Research report is available now on the CCC website. It provides a detailed roadmap of not only the full benefits of convergence and human-centered computing, but clear, actionable steps for making it possible.
We encourage all members of the computing community to read the full report here.
Source: Computing Community Consortium (CCC)
The post CCC Report Examines How AI and Citizen Science Can Advance Research Together appeared first on HPCwire.
The Galaxy S26's AI-powered Circle to Search tool just leveled up to full-outfit detection, and my bank account may never recover.
Don't know what to watch? Dig through these Netflix movie picks that span every genre.
Space heaters can keep you warm, but only when they're not allowed to burn your entire home down.
EBay is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities. From a report: "We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce," the San Jose, California-based company said early Thursday in a statement. "We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect." EBay will continue to hire in key areas. The cuts come a week after the company said it would acquire secondhand fashion marketplace Depop for about $1.2 billion in an effort to draw younger shoppers and after it reported robust quarterly results. Revenue increased 15% to $3 billion in the fourth quarter, surpassing analyst estimates.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fear, fights and feverish fanservice collide in this celebration of Resident Evil’s recent and retro legacy
PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2; Capcom
There’s often an undercurrent of existential fatigue in games that look back at their legacy. Dark Souls III’s dying kingdom, Metal Gear Solid 4’s decrepit Snake. So when Capcom showed us an ageing Leon Kennedy entering the ruins of the police station that marked the start of his journey from rookie cop to hardened veteran, it felt tinged with ennui as much as nostalgia. That self-reflective swansong for this 30-year series may still happen one day, but Requiem isn’t it. Even at its dourest and most pensive, this is less a song for the dead, more a knees-up in honour of the rocket launchers and typewriters that came before. Leon may be getting on a bit, but this is Capcom as energised, devious and goofy as ever.
Leon’s old scars will have to wait, anyway. Requiem’s new blood is FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft. Equal parts tenacious and nervous, she’s a fitting lens on the horror portion of Requiem’s split focus between disempowered terror and cathartic action. The story opens with Grace – more acquainted with desk work than field ops – tasked to go over a crime scene at a gutted hotel. She knows the place well, since it holds some horrific memories for her. Still, she heads off with little more than a flashlight and a pistol you’ll never find quite enough ammunition for to feel safe.
Continue reading...“I think he is alive today because of Amy and Ryan stepping up to the plate and taking him in,” said Jason Cole, True’s cardiologist.
The Oman-mediated discussions take place amid a massive buildup of US warships and aircraft in the Middle East
The nuclear talks today are the third between the US and Iran since June 2025, when the US joined Israel’s war against Iran and bombed its nuclear and military sites. It effectively ended the US-Iran talks that were held in the weeks prior to the conflict aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement.
As before, the negotiations are being mediated by Oman, which has maintained a policy of neutrality and assumed the role of mediator both within the Arabian peninsula and more broadly across the Middle East. The country lies in the centre of tensions between the US and Iran and is directly vulnerable to maritime instability and regional escalation.
If the talks fail, there is uncertainty over what the US may do regarding a possible military attack against Iran, and when it might act. Questions remain over what this could mean for the wider region, with Iran warning it would retaliate and even attack Israel.
The state-run Oman News Agency has posted photos on social media showing the Omani foreign minister Badr Albusaidi sat with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Geneva.
Continue reading...‘It will soon be spring – and the Danes will soon be going to the polls,’ Danish PM tells the parliament in a special statement
Nordic correspondent
Frederiksen is speaking now.
Continue reading...Rare clash off island’s coast took place amid US oil embargo and heightened tensions between two countries
Cuban forces killed four exiles and wounded six others who sailed into its waters onboard a Florida-registered speedboat and opened fire on a Cuban patrol, the country’s government said, at a time of heightened tensions with the US.
Cuba’s interior ministry said the group comprised anti-government Cubans, some of whom were previously wanted for plotting attacks. They came from the US dressed in camouflage and armed with assault rifles, handguns, homemade explosives, ballistic vests and telescopic sights, it said.
Continue reading...Trump says he won't let Iran to build a nuclear weapon, and Iran says it doesn't intend to, but as talks resume, experts see war as more likely than a deal.
Tehran is expected to deliver a new proposal on nuclear enrichment in Geneva as the United States continues to amass military forces in the Middle East.
The crew of the Florida-registered vessel opened fire on border agents, Cuba’s Interior Ministry said. Cuban forces returned fire, killing four.
The Roli Piano Learning System promises to make learning the piano at home easier than ever before. But just how easy can it be to pick up and play a new instrument?
NIK ANNA
Photographer
HANNAH PALIATH
Photographer
Photographers Nik Anna and Hannah Paliath capture Delaware’s game against Navy
MLS coaches’ reputation abroad won’t get any better after two disastrous appointments by desperate clubs
The shipment of Eric Ramsay’s possessions must have hardly made it to the West Midlands in time. After leaving Minnesota United this MLS offseason, his era in charge of West Bromwich Albion lasted just 44 days, during which time the Baggies played nine games, and won none. The club couldn’t afford to be patient; not while perched just one point above the drop zone in the Championship. Ramsay was sacked on Tuesday.
In one sense, this is business as usual in the English system’s second tier. Ramsay is the 11th coach to be sacked, to resign, or part by mutual consent since the 2025-26 season commenced, and the league’s 12th mid-season change when counting Rob Edwards’ move to Wolves. One level below, League One has seen nine such changes; League Two has undergone seven. As Ramsay himself said a year ago: “getting managers sacked is a bit of a national sport.”
Continue reading...While some who have lived their entire lives under democracy seem willing to forsake it, many who have experienced life under autocracy want out
There is plenty to worry about in the global contest between democracy and autocracy. Iran’s violent repression of antigovernment protests in January crushed the latest effort to challenge a ruthless regime. In many European countries, including Britain, Germany and France, far-right parties seem ascendant. And Donald Trump is doing what he can to undermine democracy in the United States.
Yet a closer analysis shows that autocrats are often running scared of their people. And surprisingly, democracy these days seems sometimes to be held in higher esteem in the global south than in the democratic heartland of the west.
Continue reading...It took Ellen Baum about 16 hours to finish clearing one section of hair ties, condoms and tissues woven into the fencing
On a blisteringly cold day earlier this month, Ellen Baum was not in the best mood as she walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to meet some friends in Manhattan.
“I had read particularly horrible news that morning about, you know, the general state of the world,” said Baum, who is 37 and works in tech. And then there was the garbage. Baum stared at the dirty tissues, hair ties, trash bags, and socks affixed to the suspension bridge’s frame – sometimes she even sees condoms and tampons woven into the fencing – and had a thought. “I can’t do anything about some of these big problems that the world and the city are facing. But I can do one modicum of something nice.”
Continue reading...Before arrest at US House chamber Tuesday, Aliya Rahman had only a month earlier been dragged from her car by ICE
When Aliya Rahman accepted Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar’s invitation to attend the State of the Union address, she said she had no intention of disrupting Donald Trump’s high-profile speech.
“It is a locus of people gathering and an opportunity to talk to legislators and to be in DC and try to understand – for someone like me, that doesn’t work in politics, who is not involved in policy work and organizing – what is the texture of this stuff here?” Rahman told the Guardian.
Continue reading...A new survey shows that our gadgets make us feel in control, but our expert calls that concerning.
Firm, which has announced record profits and £9bn share buyback, has £3bn project for smaller commercial planes
The chief executive of Rolls-Royce has pressed ministers for taxpayer support for a new jet engine, on a day the company also announced record profits and promised to give up to £9bn back to shareholders.
The £3bn engine project, designed to power smaller commercial planes, would allow Rolls-Royce to re-enter the lucrative short-haul flights market.
Continue reading...Man in 20s arrested on Thursday after man in 40s reportedly carrying weapons apprehended at scene on Tuesday
A second suspect has been arrested after a man allegedly entered Manchester Central Mosque with an axe and a knife on Tuesday.
Greater Manchester police announced on Thursday that a man in his 20s had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a section 18 assault in relation to the incident.
Continue reading...Tehran insists deal is possible if Trump abides by preconditions agreed with Witkoff. Plus, will Andrew bring down the British monarchy?
Good morning.
Iran enters critical talks on its nuclear program with the US in Geneva today, insisting a deal is possible as long as Washington sticks by three preconditions: to concede Iran’s symbolic right to enrich uranium, allow Tehran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and not impose controls on Iran’s ballistic missile programme.
What do we know about Trump’s position? In his State of the Union speech, Trump veered sharply away from the negotiating path adopted by Witkoff when he warned about Iran’s ballistic missiles reaching Europe, accused Iran of being the number one sponsor of terrorism and again claimed Iran had not promised to forgo nuclear weapons. He also claimed 32,000 demonstrators had been killed by the Iranian authorities in recent protests.
This is a developing story. Follow our live coverage here.
How have Democrats responded? “This has nothing to do with fraud,” Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, said on X. “The agents Trump allegedly sent to investigate fraud are shooting protesters and arresting children. His DoJ is gutting the US Attorney’s Office and crippling their ability to prosecute fraud. And every week Trump pardons another fraudster.”
Continue reading...The club’s chief executive, Paul Lakin, explains how they reached the top so quickly and what it will take to stay there
When Hull Kingston Rovers play Leeds Rhinos in Las Vegas on Saturday night, they will do so as domestic treble winners and world club champions. The club’s chief executive, Paul Lakin, explains how they made it this far and what they want to achieve next.
Leeds say they will struggle to break even on Vegas as the Super League teams have to pay all their own costs. So how difficult a decision was it to give up a home game to go? “It was a big decision and one that we didn’t take lightly. Part of our strategy is to constantly raise our profile and when you looked at the results from a marketing and audience perspective for Wigan v Warrington in Vegas last year, the eyeballs on that were incredible. You don’t get given a pot of money: you have to generate your own money through ticket sales. But like Leeds, we felt that we have a big enough fanbase to financially support our ability to go out there. It’s an incredibly tough schedule but to put ourselves on that stage was too big an opportunity to turn down. A year ago we said: ‘What if we won the Grand Final? It’ll be the World Club Challenge and straight into Vegas.’ We just decided to worry about it when it happens. And now it’s happened!”
Continue reading...An exit from Soldier Field could lead the Bears across state lines. But it could help revive a once thriving area and the team would still be in most fans’ orbit
You think you’re locked out of the housing market? The Chicago Bears have been renting since Warren G Harding was president.
They started out in the NFL as tenants at Wrigley Field, sharing the baseball cathedral with the Cubs for 50 seasons before the league insisted all teams play in a stadium with a capacity of at least 50,000. So in 1971, the Bears decamped to Soldier Field, where they’ve been ever since – save for a season-long “road trip” in 2002 to the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium during renovations. Soldier Field is prime football real estate: neoclassical, on the downtown lakefront, with sweeping views of one of America’s most sumptuous skylines. But the lease terms are crazy, the city park district (which owns the stadium) is a borderline slumlord, and the Bears – star-crossed to play in the league’s oldest and smallest stadium while representing its third-largest market – have outgrown the place.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader shares a report: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn't definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus -- negative net migration -- as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America's own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe. Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn't collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas. The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there. In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language -- not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin's trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification. More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care. [...] The U.S. experienced net negative migration -- an estimated loss of some 150,000 people -- in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S. data doesn't yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7 million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023. The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million "self-deportations" last year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial 2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them -- a number likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Peacock's got the goods, from Oscar contenders to big-budget blockbusters.
Did you miss the reveal of the Galaxy S26? There were more than phones at Samsung's Unpacked event.
Air fryers have taken over kitchens like few appliances in history. I took a deep dive into who's using these speedy countertop ovens, and the numbers are staggering.
Thinktank proposes councils stop using private contractors in attempt to improve quality and spending
Councils should train up their own workers to install insulation in England’s draughty houses, and offer home upgrades street by street, beginning in the most deprived areas, according to proposals for cutting energy bills.
Setting up “home improvement corporations” would allow greater control by councils over low-carbon retrofits for housing, and would be a more efficient way of spending limited public funds for insulation, according to the Common Wealth thinktank, sets out the proposals in a report this week.
Continue reading...Bills aim to make ICE employees ineligible for jobs in law enforcement, public education and state civil service
Supercharged by billions in dollars from Congress, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has hired thousands of new officers to carry out Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign in an effort it has likened to “wartime recruitment”. In several states, Democratic lawmakers want applicants to think twice about taking part.
Bills introduced in recent weeks in the legislatures of at least four Democratic-led states would impose long-term consequences on new ICE employees by rendering them ineligible for jobs in law enforcement, public education, and, in their most expansive form, the entire state civil service.
Continue reading...The Tennessee socialist and labor organizer creates art that reflects and inspires organizers and workers
The crowd lining up to get into Tabitha Arnold’s exhibition in New York City last fall wasn’t full of the older, moneyed types one might expect to find at a Chelsea gallery opening. Instead, the small space was packed with twenty- and thirtysomethings wearing Zohran Mamdani pins, Democratic Socialists of America hats and SEIU T-shirts.
If the crowd might have seemed unusual in the context of the city’s fancy gallery district, they looked right at home next to the art that had drawn them there. The exhibition on display, called Gospel of the Working Class, featured monumental handmade tapestries highlighting working-class struggles from both recent and distant history. In one, textile workers carry bolts of fabric and wield scissors, while people dodge bullets from strike-breakers outside the factory. In another, angels walk behind autoworkers carrying picket signs above a row of hands holding drills and other tools.
Continue reading...Daniel Siad, facing allegation of rape in France, appears in more than 1,000 documents in latest declassified files
“In This busyness I feel like fisherman some time I cache quick, some time no fish,” Daniel Siad, a model scout, wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in July 2014, explaining the frustrations of his work scouring the world for future models.
In this exchange, released in the latest batch of US Department of Justice documents, Siad was annoyed with Epstein, who had failed to turn up for a planned meeting.
Continue reading...Starting next week, parents will get an alert if their teen repeatedly searches for certain terms related to self-harm or suicide in a short time span.
The Hedgehog Go was designed to be the world’s first dual-purpose dryer for hair and winter gear. I tested it for several weeks.
Assembly members voted on Wednesday in favour of the bill, which will need royal assent before it becomes law
Jersey’s parliament has given final approval to a bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults who live on the island.
Members of the States Assembly voted by 32 to 16 on Thursday in favour of the bill, which will now need royal assent before it becomes law.
Continue reading...The toucan has been living in Las Vegas since November, much to the concern of bird experts who were worried about the exotic bird's health and ability to survive.
Offering “peaceful coexistence or eternal confrontation,” North Korea’s leader said he would only restart talks if the U.S. ends “hostile” policies and accepts Pyongyang’s nuclear status.
Where does the UK sit in the global race for AI leadership? 5 March 2026 — 6:00PM TO 7:00PM Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
Following the AI Summit in India, Kanishka Narayan MP, Minister for AI and Online Safety, will speak at Chatham House on the UK’s position in race for AI development, deployment and governance.
Following the AI Summit in India, Kanishka Narayan MP, Minister for AI and Online Safety, will speak at Chatham House on the UK’s position in race for AI development, deployment and governance.
The world is facing twin revolutions: in geopolitics and in emerging technology. This is a pivotal moment for the UK as it navigates both.
The AI race is between laboratories as they race to the frontier, between countries as they race to diffuse the technology across their economies, and between the two technology superpowers, the US and China, whose rivalry shapes the trajectory both of the technology and its use by the rest of the world. The UK faces a pivotal moment in carving out a strategic position, shaping emerging governance norms and maintaining influence over the systems underpinning tomorrow’s economies and security environments.
At this Chatham House event, Kanishka Narayan MP, UK Minister for AI and Online Safety, will reflect on the global AI summit in Delhi last month, assess the viable paths forward for countries like the UK in navigating the technology transition, and outline the diplomatic balancing act required to navigate competing spheres of technological influence.
Former Air Force fighter pilot Gerald Brown, who allegedly trained Chinese military personnel without authorization, has been arrested, the Justice Department says.
Will US intelligence learn its lessons from the Iraq war, and just how badly their legitimacy has been undermined?
Four years ago, on 24 February 2022, the Russian military began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, having already occupied Crimea since 2014. Tensions between Ukraine’s government and western leaders on one side and the Kremlin on the other had been escalating for years, but war did not seem like a foregone conclusion, at least not to key European politicians and even to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president.
Zelenskyy hadn’t even packed an emergency suitcase, though talk of war was everywhere. All that changed at 4.50am that Thursday morning. Russian missiles rained down on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and Russian troops invaded the eastern flank of the country on three different fronts. Zelenskyy and his family fled to an undisclosed location amid threats of Russian assassination squads. What has become the largest war on European soil since the second world war, what Putin has blandly called a “special military operation”, had begun.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Continue reading...Hillary Clinton to testify Thursday from their home in Chappaqua, while Bill Clinton will speak to panel friday
Hillary Clinton will testify before congressional lawmakers investigating the ties of Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday in the first of two closed-door hearings that will also include her husband, Bill Clinton.
Both have complained that they are being singled out unfairly to distract public attention from Donald Trump, who had a long friendship with Epstein before breaking with him. They also claim the testimony should occur in public.
Continue reading...The US has lost factory jobs amid promises of a tariff-led renaissance
Workers at Whirlpool, the US’s largest appliance manufacturer and a champion of Donald Trump’s tariff policies, are criticizing the company for cutting jobs at an Iowa plant while bolstering production in Mexico.
The job cuts at Whirlpool come as the company has continued to support the Trump administration’s trade policies and claimed they will help bolster US manufacturing. Trump’s trade policies appear to have done little for US manufacturing so far. The US has lost 83,000 factory jobs since Trump took office in January 2025.
Continue reading...After the star made a fresh denunciation of the US president at an alternative State of the Union event, Trump returned fire at length on Truth Social, calling De Niro ‘sick and demented’
Donald Trump has responded to a recent podcast appearance by Robert De Niro, in which he called the president “an idiot”.
Speaking on Monday’s episode of The Best People with Nicole Wallace, De Niro, who has long criticised the politics, morals and competence of Trump, said: “He’s an idiot. We gotta get rid of him. He’s gonna ruin the country.”
Continue reading...Under a bill gaining traction in its state legislature, Florida could soon have its own spy squad.
The spooks operating in the shadows of the Sunshine State would track and “neutralize” people “whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat” to Florida.
The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Danny Alvarez, a Republican from the Tampa area, would create a state-level counterintelligence and counterterrorism unit inside the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Alvarez says the unit is needed to defend against the likes of China and Cuba. Critics, however, see a civil liberties nightmare in the making that could be used to target Muslims and alleged subversives based solely on their views or opinions, much like the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program.
During a Tuesday committee hearing, Alvarez said he was preparing to introduce an amendment to address civil liberties concerns and gave a fiery defense of his bill.
“People are looking for boogeymen here. There’s no boogeyman. I’m going to strip everything that makes you question it. You just have to trust me to get to the next committee,” he said. “But while you look for boogeymen, I need to be looking for terrorists. I need to prevent the next bomb.”
Alvarez’s promise of a rewrite did not persuade state Rep. Michele Rayner, the committee Democrat who raised the specter of COINTELPRO, which targeted 1960s radicals using illegal methods. She said that as a black woman working in the civil rights field, she herself had been tracked by law enforcement.
“I don’t know if there’s any iteration of this bill that I could support, because quite frankly that means any of us in this room could be a target,” she said.
The legislation has already passed votes in three Florida House committees, and a companion bill is pending in the state Senate, giving it a stronger chance than most of making it into law.
The proposed unit is already drawing interest from the spy industry. The Israeli spyware company Cellebrite is tracking the bill’s progress through a registered lobbyist, according to state disclosures, which do not list the company’s position. (The lobbyist, Alan Suskey, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Alvarez argues that Florida needs to step up to protect itself, especially in light of two intelligence failures in the past three decades: the September 11 attacks and the more recent New Year’s truck-ramming attack in New Orleans. He said he envisions the unit as a complement to federal law enforcement.
In a statement, Alvarez denied that the new unit would be allowed to open investigations based solely on people’s views.
“It does not authorize investigations based solely on speech,” he told The Intercept. “Any action must be tied to demonstrable conduct and constitutional standards. The First Amendment remains fully intact, and the unit operates under strong statutory safeguards and oversight.”
At a minimum, the current language of the bill leaves the spy squad’s targeting process open to debate. The bill says state intelligence officers are supposed to detect so-called “adversary intelligence entities” and “neutralize” them.
According to the bill, those entities include but are not limited to “any national, foreign, multinational, friendly, competitor, opponent, adversary, or recognized enemy government or nongovernmental organization, company, business, corporation, consortium, group, agency, cell, terrorist, insurgent, guerrilla entity, or person whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”
The unit will also deploy “tradecraft” against Florida’s enemies, among other language in the bill drawn from the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage that raised questions at the Tuesday hearing.
There’s no specific language in the bill protecting U.S. citizens from being targeted. In a press release last month, Alvarez said he wants it to tackle “both foreign and domestic threats.”
Bobby Block, executive director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, said the bill’s sweeping language leaves open the possibility that the new unit could target people simply based on their views, citing the language about actors who hold views deemed “inimical” to Florida.
“What does that mean? If I’m not a white Christian nationalist, does that mean my views are inimical to the values? It begs a lot of questions,” Black said.
The lack of explicit civil liberties protections in the bill worried Black, who pointed out that Congress passed a host of such legislation in the 1970s after the famed Church Committee investigated intelligence community abuses, including COINTELPRO.
With ongoing attacks in Florida against Muslim groups, CAIR-Florida officials think they know who will wind up being a target of the new counterterrorism unit.
In the past few months, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in deeming the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a designation the Muslim advocacy group is challenging in court.
“It’s going to be one particular group that is going to be surveilled.”
“If it’s anything like what we’ve seen, which we’re pretty sure it is, it’s going to be one particular group that is going to be surveilled,” Omar Saleh, a civil rights lawyer for CAIR-Florida, told The Intercept. “They are not going to go into churches or synagogues or any other places of worship — they’re going to focus on mosques.”
Saleh said he believes that Alvarez’s legislation is one of several pending attempts to “codify” DeSantis’s executive order if it is struck down by a judge.
Alvarez didn’t respond directly to a question about whether Muslims would be targeted, but he dismissed the idea that the bill would lead to civil liberties violations.
“Anyone pretending that safety equals tyranny is guilty of performance art,” he said. “Some people act as if safety and liberty can’t coexist. In Florida, we believe they can, and they do.”
The post Florida Might Make Its Own Spy Squad. Muslims Think They Have a Pretty Good Idea Who’ll Be Targeted. appeared first on The Intercept.
When guards appeared earlier this month outside the room Christian Hinojosa shared with her son and other women and children at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, she guessed what they might be after. She quickly donned her puffy winter jacket, then slipped a manila envelope inside it. “Thank God the weather was cool,” she said — the jacket didn’t raise suspicions.
Then, she said, she was instructed to leave the room while eight to 10 guards lifted up mattresses, opened drawers and rifled through papers. In the envelope were kids’ writings and artwork about life in America’s only detention facility for immigrant families, a collection of trailers and dormitories in the brush country south of San Antonio. She planned to share their letters with the outside world.
Guards have taken away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper during recent room searches at Dilley, according to Hinojosa and three other former detainees, along with lawyers and advocates in contact with the families inside.
Guards have taken artwork, too, they said — even one child’s drawing of Bratz fashion dolls.
They said detainees have lost access to Gmail and other Google services in the Dilley library amid stepped up searches, seizures and restrictions on communications, making it more difficult for them to contact lawyers and advocates.
They and family members said guards sometimes hover within earshot during detainees’ video calls to relatives and reporters.
The detainees and others interviewed for this story said these measures increased after the Jan. 22 arrival of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat, sparked protests and congressional visits. They said the clampdown intensified as children and parents at Dilley wrote letters to share with the public and reporters and relatives recorded video calls with the detainees, including those published by ProPublica this month. The children’s stories, many told in their own words, fueled an outcry over the scope of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which the president had promised would focus on criminals.
The detainees said the more they tried to make their voices heard, the more difficult it became.
One mother, who asked to remain anonymous because her immigration case is still pending, told ProPublica that she and her three kids watched through a window as guards swept through their room in late January, removing drawings from the walls and placing colored pencils and crayons in plastic bags before taking them away.
With little schooling available at Dilley and weather too chilly for kids to want to play outdoors, drawing had been the children’s main diversion, the former detainee said. “What were they going to do now?” she said. “They were so bored.”
After the room inspection, the woman said, the children just “cried and cried and cried.”
CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs the Dilley facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a written statement that routine inspections of living facilities are a common practice and that detainees are informed of what items they are allowed to have in their rooms.
“We vehemently deny any claims that our staff have confiscated or destroyed children’s personal artwork or their related supplies,” the statement reads, adding that there are examples of kids’ artwork “proudly displayed” throughout the facility.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that “ICE is not destroying children’s letters,” but the agency acknowledged that in one case “all the written items in the cell were seized” as part of an investigation of a mother who DHS said refused to comply with a search and pushed a detention center employee. CoreCivic referred questions to DHS when asked about this incident. ProPublica was unable to reach the mother for comment.
This week, DHS issued press releases that it said were “correcting the record” about Dilley, saying “adults with children are housed in facilities that provide for their safety, security, and medical needs.” DHS’ and CoreCivic’s statements to ProPublica did not answer questions about Google services being blocked or whether guards listen in on Dilley detainees’ calls.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, visited Dilley after Liam and his father, both originally from Ecuador, were picked up in Minnesota and transferred in January. He went again last week and was asked at a Friday news conference about reports of children’s letters and drawings being suppressed.
“I believe those stories, because I’ve heard similar stories myself,” Castro said.
He said he’d been told repeatedly that guards had warned detainees not to talk to him. “Yes, I think there’s a lot of secrecy there,” Castro said.
DHS did not respond when asked to comment on Castro’s assertion about the guards. A CoreCivic spokesperson said, “We are not aware of any staff member warning residents not to speak with Rep. Castro.”
The Dilley Immigration Processing Center first opened during the Obama administration primarily to hold families that had just crossed the border. Then Biden ended the practice of detaining families in 2021. President Donald Trump restarted it even as border crossings in his second term hit record lows. Now ICE is ramping up immigration arrests inside the country, and Dilley holds many families who have been living in the United States for years.
The families spend their days behind a metal fence, sleeping in rooms that hold six bunk beds and a common area with a few small tables and desks. More than 3,500 people have cycled through the detention center since the Trump administration began sending families here last spring.
A ProPublica reporter who had been speaking with families at Dilley since late last year went to the center for an in-person visit in mid-January and asked families whether their children would want to write about their experiences. On Jan. 22, we received a packet of colorful drawings and handwritten letters from a detainee who had been recently released, which we later published.
Then on Jan. 24, dozens of detainees staged a mass protest in the yard, which was photographed from above, where they yelled “libertad” and held up hand-drawn signs. The signs were made using the detention center’s art supplies, former detainees said.
That protest and Liam’s detention triggered widespread media coverage and a visit by Castro, who arrived on Jan 28. Supporters gathered outside Dilley, and some clashed with state troopers. At the beginning of February, Liam and his father were released, and ProPublica published the letters it had received. By that time, it had become clear to detainees that their voices — especially children’s voices — had gotten broad public attention.
They kept writing.
“We were looking for help,” said Hinojosa, who collected letters at ProPublica’s request. “We were looking to be heard.”
Hinojosa, along with her 13-year-old son, Gustavo, both originally from Mexico, were released in early February after four months at Dilley to return home to San Antonio. (Although a 1990s legal settlement holds that children should generally not be detained for more than 20 days, DHS has said the settlement should be terminated because newer regulations have addressed the needs of child detainees.)
“My parents say it’s been 4 months but for me and my little sister,” a 9-year-old wrote in one of the letters Hinojosa gathered. “It feels like a year I just want to go to the United States to be with my grandparents and finally end this nightmare.”
“I’m writing this letter so that you can hear my story,” a 7-year-old wrote in another of the letters. “I need you to help us … I cry a lot. I want to get out of here go back to my school.”
“I see how they treat us like criminals,” wrote Edison, a seventh grader from Chicago who was born in Guatemala, “and we’re not.”
CoreCivic said that Dilley residents are given a written description of property they’re allowed to have in their living areas, and that decorating rooms with personal items is permitted “provided they do not present a health or safety hazard.”
Former detainees told ProPublica they experienced room searches before January but that they typically were carried out by just two employees at a time, not eight or more.
After guards searched Hinojosa’s room following the protest, she said, she and the other residents were unable to locate their colored pencils, which were purchased at the commissary and stored in a little cup atop the writing table where the kids liked to doodle. “Even knowing that we had paid for those ourselves,” she said, “they removed them.”
“There were many, many families whose children had their pencils and paper thrown away,” said a third mother, who also asked to remain anonymous because of her immigration status.
Former detainees and their family members described close attention by guards during calls home, some of which happened via tablet computers in a common area.
Edison, the 13-year-old Chicago seventh grader, cried during a recent video call home that his father shared with ProPublica, saying he felt locked up.
The father, who asked that his son’s last name not be used, recalled the boy saying before the recording began, “Dad, there’s an agent here and he’s watching us.” He said his son sounded panicked.
The mother who said she watched guards sweep her room told ProPublica that after the January protest inside Dilley, a half-dozen guards were posted in a room where calls took place. “Every time someone came in to make a call,” she said, “they practically stood behind you.”
As families held at Dilley continue to try to make themselves heard, Hinojosa and other recently released detainees are determined to help.
Hinojosa carefully protected her fellow residents’ letters and drawings before her release. Every time she left her room, she wore the CoreCivic-issued puffy gray jacket and tucked the drawings and letters inside.
“I carried them around with me all day to prevent anyone from taking them,” she told ProPublica. “I knew they were valuable.”
Many of the pieces she carried were different from the vibrant paper drawings ProPublica received in January. With paper in short supply, Hinojosa said, children drew pictures on the backs of old artworks. With crayons and colored pencils now scarce, some drew in plain pencil.
Hinojosa walked out of Dilley earlier this month with her son Gustavo and with 34 pages of drawings and letters. They capture the names and lives of dozens of people.
Along with long notes from moms who remain inside are simple sketches by the kids detained with them: a teddy bear. A bus going home. A pet cat named Willi. A family of three stick figures trapped behind a wire fence. A family of six stick figures trapped behind a wire fence. A single small stick figure trapped behind a wire fence. Many of the drawings show faces, and most of the faces are frowning.
The post Seized Art, Eavesdropping Guards: Parents Describe a Clampdown at Dilley Detention Center as Kids Shared Their Stories appeared first on ProPublica.
Group aims to be ‘simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business’ and achieve £500m of annual savings by 2028
The beleaguered UK advertising group WPP has announced a radical restructure to counter the threat posed by the growth of artificial intelligence, including plans to sell assets and job cuts.
Aiming to be “a simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business”, the London-based company laid out plans to achieve £500m of annual savings by 2028, at a cost of £400m over two years.
Continue reading...  | Absolute doozy of a project and this is the non electronic side lol. Almost 100% infill ASA printed in two parts along the plane and then acetone welded together(to minimize warping during printing). Custom cut out some Viscous extra coarse grit grip tape with a printed template I made which came out surprisingly clean considering I was hacking at the stuff with a box cutter for 15 minutes. All in all the most expensive part was the grip tape but I got several pieces to make more with now. MUCH cheaper than a store bought pad [link] [comments] |
The ongoing battle over who will own the iconic film studio is set to have a major impact on what we, the viewers, get to watch in the future
It’s not unusual for a corporate merger to take months and months to actually finalize, but even by those standards, the bidding for ownership of Warner Bros Discovery has been drawn out. Netflix made a deal to buy the Warner Bros side of the company – its studio and streaming businesses – late last year, but Paramount Skydance has been undeterred, aggressively pursuing what it claims to be a better offer for the entire WBD operation. After several failed attempts at a hostile takeover, WBD is considering a final Paramount offer, to which Netflix will have the opportunity to counter. What we have is what learned cinema scholars might refer to as an Alien v Predator situation, in honor of Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox: whoever wins, we lose.
That is to say that for cinema devotees, casual viewers and people working in the film industry, the ideal outcome would be for Warner Bros to continue as its own entity: an entertainment company making movies and TV series. But that’s clearly not going to happen – nor are any number of relatively superior options floated last year, like the idea of Apple, who worked with the studio on the global smash and Best Picture nominee F1, buying Warner instead. They’re still a massive corporation, but they’ve shown a willingness to spend on major (and theatrically released!) projects like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and have such a thriving business in other areas that they could afford to run Warner as a real studio, trying to continue the company’s recent hot streak.
Continue reading...Some say the technology is devaluing their work, while others reckon it is not yet – and might never be – good enough to replace them entirely
Workers grappling with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence have said they feel “devalued” by the technology and warned of a downward trajectory in the quality of work.
Recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund found AI would affect about 40% of jobs around the world. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, has said: “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”
Continue reading...A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives
There’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.
We’ve entered into a Faustian pact with these companies: “While it’s brilliant to have access to high-quality products and software, very often for ‘free’, it’s important to remember that there is a trade-off involved – often of our personal data and privacy,” says Lisa Barber, tech editor at Which? We give these companies our attention and our information, which they then turn into big bucks and apparently unassailable monopolies.
Continue reading...Senate leaders are urging the Department of Defense to prioritize the purchase of generic drugs manufactured in the United States, warning that the country’s overreliance on foreign factories poses an “existential risk” to the military.
In a letter last week, Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., asked Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide information about drugs or key ingredients purchased from foreign sources and how long the department’s inventory would last if China restricted exports. They also sought details about whether the Food and Drug Administration had imposed any import bans on the department’s suppliers.
The letter cited ProPublica reporting last year that found the FDA allowed dozens of foreign drugmakers, mostly in India and China, to continue sending generic medication to the U.S. even after the factories were banned because of serious safety and quality-control failures. Since 2013, ProPublica found, the FDA allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients into the United States from banned factories, including antibiotics, anti-seizure drugs and chemotherapy treatments.
The agency has said that the exemptions helped prevent drug shortages and that factories were required to conduct extra quality testing with third-party oversight.
“Exempting these drugs or facilities allows for substandard and potentially unsafe drugs to enter the U.S. market,” the senators wrote in their letter. “These exemptions can pose a threat to drug safety for American consumers.”
Scott and Gillibrand also noted they are worried about instability in global trade and politics, which they said can create “profound ramifications for the availability of medications” and pose public health and national security risks.
Nine in 10 prescriptions in the United States are for generics, many of them made overseas. Last year, the senators, who lead the Senate Special Committee on Aging, released an investigative report demanding changes in the FDA’s oversight of the generic drug industry. Among other things, they asked the FDA to alert hospitals and other group purchasers when troubled foreign drugmakers are given a special pass to continue sending their products to the United States.
This month, Scott and Gillibrand introduced legislation known as the Clear Labels Act to help patients, doctors and pharmacists know more about the drugs they use and prescribe. The proposal calls for prescription labels to disclose the original manufacturer as well as the suppliers of key ingredients. The generic drug lobbying group has said that the labeling requirements would be costly and that drug manufacturers already disclose country of origin information under U.S. Customs and Border Protection rules. The trade group for brand-name drugmakers said the industry would “welcome conversations” about strengthening the supply chain.
ProPublica had to sue the FDA in federal court last year to learn more about where generic drugs were made and whether the agency’s inspectors had ever flagged those factories for safety and quality lapses. ProPublica ultimately created a first-of-its-kind tool that empowers consumers to find the information themselves.
Now, Scott and Gillibrand are turning their attention to the medications used by millions of U.S. servicemembers, veterans and their families. They requested a briefing by the Pentagon to explore whether officials are prioritizing the purchase of American-made drugs.
Drug safety experts said the push could ultimately help shore up a vulnerable supply chain.
“Before you can be deployed, you have to be stable on your medications,” said David Light, president of the independent testing lab Valisure, which is conducting drug-quality testing for the Defense Department. “If you purposely add more variability to your drugs, you could prevent the deployment of thousands of troops without a single shot.”
Last year, ProPublica engaged Valisure to test several widely used generic drugs and found several samples had irregularities that experts say could compromise their effectiveness.
Vic Suarez, a retired Army medical supply-chain commander, said he hopes the effort in the Senate will lead to stronger drug acquisition policies.
“This is a national security issue. It is an economic security issue. And it is a patient safety issue,” he said.
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
The post Senate Leaders Warn Defense Department About Procuring Generic Drugs Overseas appeared first on ProPublica.
You can now have conversations with the Luna Ring about your health and even ask it questions, but there is a catch.
Federal drug enforcement investigators targeted Jeffrey Epstein and 14 others in a yearslong probe first reported by CBS News.
Chaz and Jean Franklin were facing a sevenfold increase in their health premium payments with the expiration of enhanced federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans. Then Jean received a crushing diagnosis.
A bipartisan Senate duo is teaming up on legislation that would ban large investment firms from snapping up single-family homes, a measure they say is aimed at the country's housing affordability crunch.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Smoke shops proliferated in Wilmington in recent years just as THC-infused drinks and edibles quietly entered Delaware’s retail market without state oversight. Now, authorities say some of those shops have broken the rules around how much THC can be in a product, while others have allegedly been illegally selling marijuana.
New smoke shops are now prohibited from opening in Wilmington after Mayor John Carney signed an ordinance Tuesday that placed a moratorium on such businesses.
The Wilmington City Council passed the measure last week. Its sponsor, Councilman Chris Johnson, said the moratorium is in place to give city officials time to conduct an assessment on the health and safety impacts of smoke shops – which typically sell cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and, more recently, hemp-derived THC products.
The moratorium will be in place for one year or until “such time an equity impact assessment is completed by the city’s Department of Land Use and Planning, unless this city council repeals this moratorium,” the ordinance’s text states.
City officials say they are uncertain as to when the assessment will begin, as they are “still working through the logistics,” Carney spokeswoman Caroline Klinger said.
Johnson, who introduced the moratorium proposal last month, said that several smoke shops across the city have been selling illegal products, including unregulated marijuana.
He has also claimed that some are linked to illegal firearm possession.
During a City Council meeting last week, Johnson said one of the goals is to understand how to better regulate the city’s smoke shops.
“They’re not tobacco, they’re not marijuana, they’re not retail. Some are going unlicensed,” Johnson said.
Currently, smoke shops operate under standard retail business licenses issued by the municipalities in which they are located. Many of the products they sell are not produced or tested in Delaware, and the stores themselves are not licensed or regulated by the state government.
The passage of Johnson’s ordinance follows at least two arrests in Wilmington over the previous three months involving the alleged selling of marijuana within smoke shops that were not licensed cannabis retailers.
One occurred in early February at the VIP Smoke Shop, located on Maryland Avenue near Browntown. In a statement, Wilmington Police said its officers arrested the retailer at the shop, after they found a loaded 9mm handgun, and about 4,630 grams of “marijuana and marijuana products.
During last week’s council meeting, Councilwoman Zanthia Oliver expressed frustration over the VIP Smoke Shop remaining open after the police seizure.
“If plenty of marijuana and a gun are not a code violation, I don’t know what it is. What’s the purpose of putting in these regulations if we don’t have enforcement?” she said.
Asked about the situation, Carney’s deputy chief of staff, Daniel Walker, said the city will look into Oliver’s claim.
“Our team will be investigating,” he said.
Also during the meeting, Councilwoman Michelle Harlee questioned how the city will be able to determine which businesses end up selling smoke-related products. She noted that some establishments apply to operate in the city as delis or convenience stores, but later end up selling such products.
“There needs to be some type of monitoring, especially for the businesses that did not get a license to be a smoke shop but they have those types of products in their stores,” Harlee said.
Asked how the city would ensure businesses did not bypass the moratorium, Elijah Simmons, the City Council’s chief of staff, noted that “any enforcement would be a business compliance matter. The city does regular reviews of businesses and will continue to operate in that posture.”
The smoke shop moratorium passed unanimously among councilmembers who were present.
Councilmembers Maria Cabrera, Yolanda McCoy, Alex Hackett, and James Spadola, were absent.
On Tuesday, Spotlight Delaware called nine smokeshops throughout Wilmington seeking those business owners’ opinions about the moratorium and about claims that crime is prevalent within the industry. Four stores declined to comment, five others did not respond.
The post Smoke shop moratorium now in effect in Wilmington appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Immigration Judge John Carle’s face suddenly materialized on the flat-screen television hanging at the center of the mid-sized Philadelphia courtroom – he was presiding virtually.
The tubular cream-colored camera perched atop the television then craned its neck to focus on a man from Venezuela who sat in the immigration courtroom on a recent afternoon.
Carle asked the man why he was just now beginning his court proceedings to seek asylum, if he had already been in the country for nearly three years. The man replied that he was living under Temporary Protected Status, which provides work authorization and protection from deportation for immigrants fleeing war, natural disaster and other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions.
But those protections are now gone.
A year ago, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem decided to terminate TPS for Venezuelans, kicking off a year of legal battles and appeals that threw the program into uncertainty.
In October, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the termination to take effect, pending appeals — effectively leaving hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants without a legal status in the country.
Still, the Venezuelan man appeared in court and looked into the camera. His previous legal status was stripped and now he must find a different path.
“Now I have to get an asylum application or get a lawyer,” the man told Carle.
“You read my mind,” the judge replied.
In Philadelphia’s Immigration Court, people must navigate a year’s worth of ever-changing policies and dense legal decisions under the Trump administration’s immigration agenda — oftentimes without lawyers. The Trump administration has systematically cut legal pathways available to immigrants while gutting the immigration judge workforce.
In California, the state lost more than a quarter of its immigration judges in 2025, with the San Francisco Immigration Court permanently shutting down as a result — further straining other judges’ workload.
Courthouse arrests of immigrants who have their asylum cases quickly dismissed have become a mainstay of the Trump administration’s enforcement tactics. And, under a new directive, millions of immigrants are now subject to mandatory detention without the opportunity to ask an immigration judge to be released on bond.
The detention policy has “frustrated” Philadelphia federal judges as the city’s federal courthouse has seen a deluge of lawsuits filed by undocumented immigrants who are opposing their mandatory detention, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
These release petitions now comprise more than one sixth of the civil lawsuits filed in the district, according to recent legal opinion written by U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond.
Still, despite the evolving policies, the day-to-day reality of the Philadelphia immigration court, which also oversees Delaware cases, remains mundane and routine. Sometimes, moments of humanity and levity even slip through the bureaucracy.
One morning in December, a man from Richmond, Va., appeared for his hearing before Immigration Judge Joseph Scott in Philadelphia’s immigration courthouse.
Scott offered to move the man’s case to a courthouse closer to his home, but the man refused. When Scott asked why the man would want to keep driving more than five hours for his immigration appointments, the man had a simple response.
“When I come to (Philadelphia), I visit my friends and eat food from my country,” the man told Scott. “So, I have a good time.”
The judge chuckled and turned to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorney to ask if they had a motion to move the case closer to Virginia.
“Why does he want to keep his case in Philadelphia?” the DHS lawyer asked.
“Food, and friends,” Scott replied with a smile.
DHS offered no opposition, and Scott gave the man a list of low-cost immigration lawyers in the Richmond area.
Food, and friends and onto the next case.
A woman called in virtually to the court from Harrisburg, Pa. The person whom she hired to drive her to Philadelphia for her court hearing did not show up that morning, she said.
If she appears virtually again, it would probably be considered a non-appearance, Scott said. That morning, 10 people did not appear for their court hearings.
Scott then turned his attention to the group of people sitting in the courtroom’s wooden pews. Eleven wait to have their cases called. Six need an interpreter in Spanish, four in Haitian-Creole and one in Arabic.
“You are all here in immigration court because the government of the United States believes you are here unlawfully,” Scott said to the group.
The judge, who was appointed to the court in 2020 under the first Trump presidency, encouraged the group to talk to a lawyer to help them with their asylum proceedings.
“Who would like more time to try and find a lawyer?” Scott asked.
The interpreters echoed. Everyone raised their hands. More time was needed.
It has become commonplace for people to appear for their hearings without a lawyer and decide to represent themselves. Unlike other courts, non-citizens are not provided an attorney if they cannot afford one.
No lawyers and an increase in people representing themselves could lead to less fair outcomes and less efficiency in the court system, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan immigration think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Back in Immigration Judge John Carle’s courtroom, the proceedings continued as he remained on the television on a recent afternoon.
An uncle and nephew from Cuba had filed a motion to terminate their case. They had no lawyer and were representing themselves.
The pair had applied for their permanent residency, also known as a green card, with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and were just waiting to receive their final paperwork. They wanted to terminate their bid through the court as they found success through another pathway, the nephew told Carle.
Carle suggested they instead file to adjust their status and set a future hearing date.
“Hopefully, you’ll have good news by then,” Carle said in regard to their green card applications.
Next, a man from Colombia sat in front of the television. He traveled from his home in New Jersey for his preliminary hearing for his asylum application.
At the end of the hearing, Carle said he’d move the man’s case to a court closer to his home.
“Do you have any other questions?” Carle asked.
“I would have liked to stay here with you, but you moved me,” the man joked in response.
Carle laughed. A baby’s cries began to spill out of the courtroom down the hall. The day continued.
The post Immigrants navigate complex federal policies in court amid mundane day-to-day reality appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
An anonymous reader shares a report: A Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94% of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic's Claude, spending about $1,100 on tokens. The purpose of the experimental project was not to show off AI coding, but to address an issue with Next.js, the popular React-based framework sponsored by Vercel. According to Cloudflare engineering director Steve Faulkner, the Next.js tooling is "entirely bespoke... If you want to deploy it to Cloudflare, Netlify, or AWS Lambda, you have to take that build output and reshape it into something the target platform can actually run." The Next.js team is addressing this following numerous complaints that deploying the framework with full features on platforms other than Vercel is too difficult, with a feature in progress called deployment adapters. "Vercel will use the same adapter API as every other partner," the company said when introducing the planned feature last year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Retail technology business to reduce about 5% of global workforce, with two-thirds of job losses affecting UK
Ocado is to cut 1,000 jobs as the retail technology business attempts to £150m in costs though a substantial restructuring programme.
The company confirmed that about 5% of its global workforce will be affected, with roughly two-thirds of the job losses affecting its UK operations.
Continue reading...Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise were taken into custody under laws that have outraged LGBTQ+ community and rights activists
Two women have been arrested and detained in Uganda after allegedly kissing in public, an act of “same-sex activity” which can lead to a life sentence in the east African country..
Wendy Faith, a 22-year-old musician known as Torrero Bae, and Alesi Diana Denise, 21, were taken into custody after police raided their rented room in Uganda’s north-west Arua City last week.
Continue reading...Resembling cigarette packet warnings, the ads highlight dangers and urge people to email MPs
Mumsnet has launched a campaign to introduce a ban on social media for under-16s featuring health warnings in the style of those on cigarette packets.
The deliberately provocative national advertising campaign calls for all social media to be banned for children under the age of 16. The images on billboards and social media make a number of stark statements related to health.
Continue reading...Just over a year ago, a fellow Onewheel rider, Heath Ogle was killed while riding his XR on the night of February 19, 2025. Since then, I have obtained case reports from both the San Diego medical examiner's office and sheriff's department to try to piece together exactly what happened and see if there's any lessons to learn from this tragedy.
Regrettably, there were several decisions Heath made that evening that may have contributed to his vulnerability on the road. While the primary cause of the tragedy was a hit-and-run driver who failed to stop, I have identified some critical safety lessons to share with my fellow riders.
The medical examiner reported Heath was riding without a helmet and the autopsy showed he suffered severe, life-threatening blunt force trauma to the head and neck, including base of the skull fractures and hemorrhaging in the brain. While it's impossible to know if a helmet could have saved Heath, you should be wearing one. It is the most critical piece of safety gear you can wear for surviving head trauma.
The toxicology reports indicate that Heath was riding while intoxicated. His blood alcohol content was 0.141% and he had significant THC in his system. We don't know if this was a contributing factor, but riding a Onewheel requires constant micro-adjustments, balance, and hyper-awareness of your surroundings. Riding while impaired is a bad idea for coordination and avoiding traffic.
The accident occurred at night, with 911 being called around 8:13PM. The medical examiner noted Heath was wearing almost entirely black clothes with dark blue jeans. If you're going to ride at night, maximize your visibility. Wear lights, bright colors, reflective clothing, anything that will make you more visible to speeding or inattentive drivers. Responding officers noted there were no skid or tire marks on the road where Heath was found. It's possible the driver never saw him until it was too late.
Heath was riding on a stretch of road that was known to be dangerous, and the posted limit was 45 MPH. Highway patrol data shows his death was the fourth deadly pedestrian crash in the past four years. Be careful where you ride. Even if there's a bike lane, it's still super risky to ride near vehicles going that fast.
To be perfectly clear, I'm not trying to shame or blame Heath for this accident. It's ultimately the driver who struck him and fled the scene that is responsible. That said, there are some defensive measures we can take to protect ourselves while riding: riding sober, wearing a helmet, increasing nighttime visibility, and avoiding dangerous roads. My heart goes out to Heath and his family, and I hate that he was killed doing something I enjoy so much. Take care, ride safe!
Having Perplexity's AI and models on devices from the world's biggest phone-maker puts the company under a brighter light.
Along with Alberto Carvalho's L.A. home, search warrants were also executed at LAUSD headquarters and a home in South Florida, according to the FBI.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Uber employees have built an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi -- internally dubbed "Dara AI" -- and have been using it to rehearse and fine-tune presentations before delivering them to the actual Khosrowshahi, he revealed on a recent podcast. Khosrowshahi said a team member told him that some teams "make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me," and that the bot helps them adjust their slides and sharpen their delivery. Asked by the podcast host whether employees might eventually show Dara AI to the board, Khosrowshahi laughed but noted that AI models still can't process and act on new information the way executives do. "When the models can learn in real-time, that is the point at which I'm going to think that, yeah, we are all replaceable," he said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Delaware Tourism Office is planning to host two large World Cup watch parties in Newark this summer.
With Moscow pressing its advantage, Kyiv should trade land for peace.
The era of neutral enforcement is over.
Atmospheric machine-gun has fired storm after deadly storm at the region this year, leaving a trail of widespread destruction
For Andrés Sánchez Barea, in Spain, it was the fear that arose when water started to spurt from plug sockets. For Nelson Duarte, in Portugal, it was the helplessness that hit as violent winds smacked down trees and tore tiles from roofs. For Amal Essuide, in Morocco, it was the reality that dawned when a corpse was pulled onboard a boat in the flooded medina.
Each moment of horror is a fragment of the destruction wrought by an atmospheric machine-gun that in recent weeks has fired storm after storm at the western Mediterranean. Scientists do not know if climate breakdown helped pull the trigger, but research suggests it loaded the chamber with bigger bullets.
Continue reading...A third victim has died following the Feb. 16 shooting at a high school hockey game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Cuba's Interior Ministry said Wednesday night that the boat was carrying 10 people armed with assault rifles, handguns and Molotov cocktails.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 26.
Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases -- but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery. Guy Azari, a former security researcher at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, told The Register that only two to three of those 500 vulnerabilities have been fixed and none have received CVE assignments. The National Vulnerability Database already carried a backlog of roughly 30,000 CVE entries awaiting analysis in 2025, and nearly two-thirds of reported open-source vulnerabilities lacked an NVD severity score. The curl project closed its bug bounty program because maintainers could no longer handle the flood of poorly crafted reports from AI tools and humans alike. Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of security firm Socket, said discovery is becoming dramatically cheaper but validating findings, coordinating with maintainers, and developing architecture-aligned patches remains slow, human-intensive work.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The lawyer for Nicolas Maduro says the U.S. is blocking Venezuela's government from paying for the cost of his legal defense against drug trafficking charges.
Dismissals follow revelations that FBI subpoenaed records of Patel and Susie Wiles before Trump returned to office
At least 10 FBI employees connected to an investigation of Donald Trump have reportedly been dismissed following revelations that the agency subpoenaed personal records of the current FBI director, Kash Patel, and White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in the years before Trump returned to office.
The dismissals, reported by CBS News and CNN, were linked to the federal investigation led by former justice department special counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents that were found at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort after his first term.
Continue reading...This blog has closed. Read more here
A newly revealed diplomatic cable calls on US diplomats to work against attempts by foreign nations to regulate how US tech companies handle their citizens’ data, as “data sovereignty initiatives” gather steam in Europe over security concerns.
More from Reuters:
President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies’ handling of foreigners’ data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services.
Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens’ personal information - initiatives often described as “data sovereignty” or “data localization.“
Continue reading...At least 10 FBI employees who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation into President Trump's retention of classified records were fired Wednesday, multiple sources said.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 26, No. 521.
Australia advises dependants of officials in Israel and Lebanon to leave amid vast US military buildup in the region
More countries have told citizens to leave Iran and the surrounding region as airlines scale back flights amid mounting tensions between Washington and Tehran.
As a day of critical talks over Iran’s nuclear programme was set to begin, and as a vast US military buildup continued in the Middle East, the Trump administration warned of drastic consequences if Iranian negotiators failed to make significant concessions.
Continue reading...hey y'all I'm trying to get setup for my 5in superflux coming in. I already have the axle blocks l, so I went to test the axle blocks on my rails. Only to find out that the outer axle bolts are too big. correct length just the bolt head size is too big. So I ordered some what I thought different, but same problem with the head being to big. I ordered some m8 1.25x 25mm. Can anybody point me in the right direction for what might be the correct bolts? please and thank you 🙏 are there any options for like stock XR bolts but extended? appreciate any help 👍
Is the Mini Crossword too easy, but the original one just too time-consuming? Here's your new puzzle.
 | Hey guys, so I was finally able to change my tire but in the process I chipped the left outer plastic to one of the connectors. Is this serious since another piece screws on over it?? Any ideas if I need to put something else to help protect it from moisture?? [link] [comments] |
 | Man, I’ve had my GTS for just over a year and 1,100 miles later, I finally made the switch to the soft lowboy flared footpads. These are a total game changer. The board feel and control is amazing. Living in Baltimore City where the streets are littered with pot holes, these really take the stress off the knees and feet. I also took my tire from 20 psi to about 16 and the combo feels like I’m standing on pillows. Even with the lower psi, I was still hitting the speeds I wanted to. I highly recommend these, they are worth every penny. Keep on floatin on. [link] [comments] |
ADT's acquisition of Origin AI brings presence-sensing technology under the home security company's umbrella.
Since 2019, when Baltimore's murder rate hit an all-time high, something has changed, and data points to the city showing major improvement.
The game developer targets young people, which could lead to serious addiction problems, according to the suit.
Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube's biggest creator as the offender. The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who it says traded around $4,000 on markets tied to the streamer and achieved "near-perfect trading success" on low-odds bets -- a pattern investigators flagged as suspicious. Kalshi froze Kaptur's account before he could withdraw any profits, fined him $20,000, suspended him for two years, and reported the case to the CFTC.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
VAST Data today unveiled CNode-X, a new node type that will allow customers to accelerate data analytics and AI workloads within their data platforms.
While VAST’s software governs the storage that interacts with GPU clusters via systems like GPUDirect and NVMe over Fabric, it has avoided incorporating GPUs directly into its clusters, VAST Co-founder Jeff Denworth said.
That’s starting to change, and now the company sees a need for accelerating the processing of tables and vectors, he said. “Where we’re going now [is] to a point of maturity that it makes sense to start to do these integrations,” Denworth said.
VAST Data Co-Founder Jeff Denworth delivers a keynote address at VAST Forward
VAST clusters are composed of CBoxes and DBoxes, which allow customers to expand the compute and data storage available to their cluster, respectively. The CBoxes and DBoxes, which are housed in EBox enclosures, themselves are composed individual CNodes and DNodes.
The new CNode-X offering will incorporate several external libraries from Nvidia, including cuVS, a library for accelerated vector search and retrieval. Embedding cuVS into VAST cluters via CNode-X will bring GPU acceleration to bear on vector database operations, and also boost performance for vector search and RAG pipelines utilizing VAST’s InsightEngine. VAST will support Nvidia Nemotron models and NIM microservices.
VAST says that CNode-X, which will become available later this year, will also support Nvidia’s Context Memory Storage (CMS) platform. Supporting CMS will allow VAST to support the latest BlueField-4 DPUs and Spectrum-X scale-out network switches, which it says will accelerate access to shared KV cache and lower time-to-first-token for long-context, multi-agent inference.
“This is the first time that we’ve run accelerated services natively within our system,” Denworth said. “Ultimately, what this allows us to do is to take our software and then power it with a bunch of very specific Nvidia libraries that are being built into the system.”
Nvidia and VAST are working together to accelerate AI infrastructure
CNode-X will also leverage Sirius, the open source library that provides GPU-based acceleration for SQL workloads. VAST says Sirius will reduce SQL query times by 44% and query costs by up to 80%.
Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang commented on the launch of CNode-X in a video message played for the VAST Forward audience.
“Three year sago we started working on a problem that nobody had solved: How do you make data infrastructure–all of it, every layer of it–run at GPU speed? Without it, AI infrastructure powered by Nvidia GPUs running lightning fast is bottlenecked because storage can’t keep up. The world’s fastest AI supercomputers are waiting on storage.
So VAST’s engineering team came to Nvidia and we started co-designing, from the ground up, a new architecture for data processing and storage,” Huang continued. “What we bulit together is remarkable: The world’s first fully Nvidia CUDA-accelerated data platform.”
Adding GPU acceleration into the data infrastructure also lengthens the memory of AI agents, Huang said.
“AI agents today have a problem: Every time they start a new task, they need to reload their context,” he said. “It’s like you and I waking up in the morning with no memory. You spend the first hour of the day relearning what you already knew. With VAST integration of Nvidia inference context memory on Bluefield-4, agents have persistent memory across the entire cluster, with microsecond latency.”
VAST is going to add a number of different form factors with its C-nodes, depending on customer demand. But it’s starting with CNode-X, said Sagi Grimberg, Vast VP of architecture said during a VAST Forward session today.
Supermicro and Cisco are the first two computer makers to sell CNode-X, which represents the first time VAST’s stack is being deployed directly atop accelerated compute. The company is also working with HPE and Lenovo to bring new specialized CNodes to market. VAST is planning to add more OEMs in the future.
The post VAST Adds GPUs Into Clusters with CNode-X appeared first on HPCwire.
Whether you're a new fan or a Pokemon master, the famous monster-catcher franchise has a game for everyone. Strap in to catch 'em all, enter a multiplayer online battle arena or solve an engrossing mystery.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 26, No. 1,713.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 26, No. 725.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 26 #991.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the AI company Anthropic an ultimatum about the military's use of its technology, known as Claude.
"I know, like, later on, there'll be a full invite for all Team USA athletes to go to the White House like there has been in the past," decorated U.S. women's hockey veteran Kelly Pannek told CBS News.
Samsung just unveiled the new Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra. All three give you access to a variety of new Galaxy AI features, while the Ultra gets a new built-in privacy display.
The ruling could make it more difficult for the government to send migrants to countries that are not their own.
 | Some how it's still holding air on my btg burris. My guess dry rot got to it as I was out due to injury for half a year. I'm just using the green slime and it's dirt cheap. [link] [comments] |
The death last March of Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island, Texas, was not disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security for nearly a year.
Federal immigration agents arrested 261 DACA recipients during the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, according to statistics shared with Congress.
Here are the differences between all three new Galaxy S26 phones.
Exclusive: Former New Zealand PM ‘based out of Australia’, according to spokesperson, after rumours she was looking for houses in Sydney
The former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is living in Australia with her family, a spokesperson has confirmed.
“The family has been travelling for a few years now,” her office told the Guardian.
Continue reading...A new study reveals that a car's tire pressure monitoring system can be easily accessed by hackers.
Vice-president makes announcement with Mehmet Oz, who says other states will be next after Minnesota
JD Vance announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration would “temporarily halt” more than a quarter-billion dollars in Medicaid reimbursements to the state of Minnesota, escalating Donald Trump’s newly announced “war on fraud”.
Vance said the action was to ensure Minnesota was “a good steward of the American people’s tax money”, part of its crackdown on the state following a fraud scandal linked to residents of the Somali community in Minneapolis, which prompted the administration to send thousands of federal immigration agents into Minneapolis and that resulted in the deaths of two US citizens and widespread protests.
Continue reading...I’ve got a one wheel pint in the closet for about two years now. The battery obviously won’t hold a charge. What are my best options for it at this point. Should I sell it for parts as is or can I repair or replace the battery myself. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated
Damning inquiry into services in England reveals falsification of medical records after ‘negligent’ care
What is the national maternity and neonatal investigation and why was it launched?
Cruel comments, racism and cover-ups: key findings from England’s maternity care report
Hospitals that cause harm and injury to women and babies during childbirth often resort to a “cover-up” of their mistakes, falsify medical records and deny bereaved parents answers, a damning report has found.
“Negligent” care has devastating emotional and psychological consequences for families, disputes between maternity staff have a “disastrous” impact on mothers, and ethnic minority and poorer women have worse outcomes because of racism and discrimination, Lady Amos said.
Banning families from being involved in investigations into the mistakes they encountered.
Conducting inquiries into errors which families think are poor quality and do not properly reflect what occurred.
Driving distressed families to instigate legal action as a way of getting at the truth after they were “denied openness and honesty in the aftermath of harm and bereavement”.
Failing to treat families who have lost a baby with compassion.
Continue reading...Independent commissioner’s report finds websites can act as ‘accelerators’ of exploitation for sex workers using them
The anti-slavery watchdog has called for a complete overhaul of websites advertising sexual services after an investigation revealed they can act as “accelerators” of exploitation for sex workers using them.
While working online can provide enhanced protections for some, a new report from the independent anti-slavery commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, investigated the experiences of women who said they were exploited on the adult services sites, which typically allow users to browse through images and videos of women selling sex in their local area.
Continue reading...Updated guidance from Crown Prosecution Service covers forms of spiritual and immigration abuse for first time
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has published new guidance for its lawyers to help tackle “honour”-based abuse, with spiritual and immigration abuse included for the first time.
The guidance was updated to reflect growing concerns around evolving forms of abuse and to tackle what the CPS described as “emerging harmful practices”.
Continue reading...From racism to staff shortages, the interim report found a host of deep-rooted issues affecting women and babies
NHS maternity units often cover up harmful errors in childbirth, report finds
Cruel comments, racism and cover-ups: key findings from England’s maternity care report
On Thursday, a damning interim report published after a national investigation into England’s maternity services found deep-rooted issues affecting women and their babies, including insensitivity from maternity staff, racism and discrimination, and chronic staff shortages. Below is an exploration of what led to the report and what happens next.
Continue reading...Group says case far from over after being found liable for defamation and other claims brought by energy firm
A North Dakota judge has said he will order Greenpeace to pay damages expected to total $345m in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline from nearly a decade ago, a figure the environmental group contends it cannot pay.
In court papers filed Tuesday, Judge James Gion said he would sign an order requiring several Greenpeace entities to pay the judgment to pipeline company Energy Transfer. He set that amount at $345m last year in a decision that reduced a jury’s damages by about half, but his latest filing did not specify a final amount.
Continue reading...Tehran insists deal is possible if Trump abides by preconditions agreed with Witkoff and Kushner
Iran enters critical talks on its nuclear programme with the US on Thursday, insisting a deal is in reach as long as Washington sticks by its willingness to concede Iran’s symbolic right to enrich uranium, allow Tehran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and not to impose controls on Iran’s ballistic missile programme.
The three preconditions for success are seen as critical by Iranian diplomats, but it remains unclear whether Trump accepts these parameters.
Continue reading...Agitator whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was hosted by senior adviser at US state department
The far-right activist Tommy Robinson has been hosted by the Trump administration for a meeting at the state department in Washington.
Robinson, 43, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was hosted by Joe Rittenhouse, a senior adviser at the state department.
Continue reading...This is the second factory the Swiss brand is banking on to produce its shoes.
Killing of Ruben Ray Martinez on 15 March 2025 in Texas was not disclosed by the department until media reported it
A grand jury on Wednesday rejected indictments over the fatal shooting last year of a US citizen by a federal immigration agent during a traffic encounter in Texas, prosecutors said.
The shooting of Ruben Ray Martinez on 15 March 2025 by a Homeland Security investigations agent wasn’t publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security until the Associated Press and other media outlets reported it last week.
Continue reading...Feb. 25, 2026 — Designing ventilation systems for large vessels is highly demanding due to the complexity of the ventilation network, internal obstacles, and numerous branches that must distribute air evenly throughout the entire system. Conventional engineering calculations often cannot fully predict how air will behave in such complex configurations. The team at NCC Croatia collaborated on precisely this type of challenge with Lürssen Design Centre Kvarner, an engineering company specialized in superyacht design.
As part of the collaboration, NCC Croatia provided a range of services tailored to Lürssen’s needs. The first step involved training the company’s engineers in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the application of high-performance computing (HPC). The objective of the training was to enable the engineering team to independently use CFD tools in combination with HPC infrastructure, thereby opening up opportunities for faster and more detailed analyses in everyday engineering practice.
In addition to the training, a detailed analysis was conducted on a section of the ventilation system of an active vessel, where measured values significantly deviated from the initial air distribution design. The analysis aimed to identify the causes of these discrepancies: where and why unexpected air distribution occurs, which system components most strongly influence the observed issue, and what possible solutions could be implemented. Furthermore, the study sought to determine whether CFD could effectively model this type of problem and whether, already at the design stage and with the support of HPC resources, results consistent with real operating conditions could be obtained within a reasonable timeframe.
OpenFOAM, a leading open-source software package for CFD simulations, was used for the analysis. The process was carried out on the supercomputing infrastructure available through NCC Croatia. In the preliminary configuration, the primary distribution segment with nine outlet branches was modeled. The initial simplified analysis revealed that the geometry of the system itself caused uneven flow distribution as a direct consequence of duct arrangement and internal obstacles.
These observations were confirmed by on-site measurements on the vessel. In the extended configuration, additional downstream duct segments were introduced to simulate the resistance of the actual distribution network, enabling more realistic simulation of real operating conditions. Complex three-dimensional flow patterns were observed, including secondary circulations, preferential air paths, and zones of flow separation and reattachment around internal obstacles. The established workflow enabled simplified models to be computed in approximately one hour, while more detailed analyses, using HPC resources, required less than twelve hours — making this type of analysis a practical tool in everyday engineering practice.
The collaboration resulted in tangible advancements for Lürssen. The company is now equipped with the knowledge and tools to independently conduct similar analyses, enabling faster development iterations, more efficient testing of design modifications, and shorter development cycles for new systems.
The collaboration was carried out within the activities of the NCC Croatia and the EuroCC 2 project.
Source: HPC in Europe Portal
The post NCC Croatia Brings CFD and HPC to Superyacht Engineering Workflows appeared first on HPCwire.
Airline credits better fuel efficiency, customer demand, new routes and more flights to Japan, Bali and New Zealand for strong result
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Qantas has delivered a bumper $1.46bn half-year underlying profit as travellers shrug off cost-of-living pressures to travel within and outside Australia.
Australia’s biggest airline credited robust customer demand, new routes and increased flight frequency to “Japan, Bali and across the Tasman”, and more fuel-efficient new aircraft for the strong result, up 5% from a year ago.
Continue reading...I’ve been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames.
↫ Tony S.
An absolute horror story about Google’s dominance over the web, in places nobody really talks about. Scary.
Proposed settlement would pay users of glyphosate-based weedkiller with non-Hodgkin lymphoma $10,000-$165,000
A group of 14 law firms representing nearly 20,000 plaintiffs is seeking to intervene in Bayer’s proposed class-action settlement of Roundup litigation, citing concerns that the deal will not be fair to cancer sufferers.
The group filed both a motion to intervene and a motion for an extension of time for court preliminary approval of the deal in St Louis city circuit court in Missouri late on 24 February.
This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group
Continue reading...Marshall Yates also served on a "weaponization" working group tasked with carrying out Trump's quest for retribution.
Former Australian Border Force officer Rohan Pike, who has been quoted extensively as an expert, also advises nicotine-industry-linked organisations
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A former Australian Border Force officer who has positioned himself before government inquiries as Australia’s “foremost law enforcement expert” on illicit tobacco also advises nicotine industry-linked organisations – leading public health advocates to argue that more transparency is needed.
Rohan Pike, who spent more than two decades in law enforcement and now runs a consultancy, has become a prominent media commentator on the illicit tobacco trade, promoting policies that align with those supported by the tobacco industry.
Continue reading...Investigation under way after man was dropped off five miles from home but family wasn’t notified, officials say
A nearly blind Burmese refugee who was abandoned by border patrol agents has been found dead in Buffalo, New York, city officials confirmed.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, had been missing since 19 February, when he was dropped off by border patrol following his release from Erie county holding center, according to the Investigative Post.
Continue reading...  | hucka bucked off a small cedar stump [link] [comments] |
Only a few days ago we talked about the concept of client-side decorations, and how more and more desktop environments and operating systems – specifically GNOME and macOS – are putting more and more buttons, menus, and other widgets inside title bars. How about we take this concept a step further?
This hides the AppMenu icon button and draws the menu in the title bar. It also includes a search button to find actions. It works on both X11 and Wayland. On Wayland, GTK apps don’t export the menu in a KDE-friendly way. You need to start them with
↫ material-decoration’s GitHub pageGDK_BACKEND=x11environment variable or you can try the experimental appmenu-gtk-module-wayland (GTK3 only).
So this little tool allows you to add an application’s menu bar (file, edit, view, etc.) to the titlebar of a KDE application. The way it works is that it adds an optional widget to KDE’s System Settings > Colors & Themes > Window Decorations > Configure Titlebar Buttons…, alongside regular staples like close, minimise, maximise, etc. You can then freely add said “menu bar” to the title bar of your applications. There’s some configuration options, too. For instance, you can disable the search button, or turn the entire menu bar into a hamburger menu instead.
It looks weird, and I’m definitely not the target audience for this, but I do find it intriguing. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I doubt many people will like it since it takes up so much space if you don’t opt to use the hamburger menu option. That being said, I’m fairly sure KDE and Kwin allow you to edit the titlebars of specific applications and specific windows, which does open some interesting possibilities for, say, applications or windows which you always have maximised or whatever.
There’s an AUR package for Arch users, but everyone else will have to build it themselves.
Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer reviews for the first time this year, and Meta's new performance review system will do the same -- it can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI assistance. Amazon Web Services managers have dashboards showing individual engineer AI-tool usage and consider adoption when evaluating promotions. About 42% of tech-industry workers said their direct manager expects AI use in daily work as of last October, up from 32% eight months earlier, according to AI consulting firm Section. At software maker Autodesk, CEO Andrew Anagnost acknowledged that some employees had been using initially blocked coding tools like Cursor stealthily -- and warned that AI holdouts "probably won't survive long term."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The generative AI assistant can be brief, chill or sweet, using different responses for each version.
The Cuban government said it returned fire following an attack by passengers on a Florida-based speedboat that had entered its territorial waters on Wednesday. Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior said its border guards killed at least four people aboard the U.S. boat and wounded six others.
A U.S. government official said the firefight did not involve U.S. Navy or Coast Guard vessels but a civilian boat. The speedboat approached within one nautical mile northeast of the El Pino channel north of Corralillo, a town in the central Cuban province of Villa Clara, according to an official statement by the Cuban government.
Cuban border guards on a government vessel approached the speedboat seeking identification when people aboard the American boat opened fire on the Cuban personnel, wounding the Cuban vessel’s commander, the statement said.
“As a result of the confrontation, at the time of this report, four foreign attackers were killed and six were wounded,” according to the Cuban government.
The firefight comes during a pressure campaign by the Trump administration that is causing immense hardship on the island. In the past, the U.S. military drew up secret plans for a false-flag attack in Cuban waters to justify a U.S. military intervention.
The U.S. military has been regularly carrying out attacks on supposed drug boats in the Caribbean, the most recent on Monday, killing three people. There have now been 44 such attacks in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, killing at least 151 people since September.
The Cuban government said on Wednesday that the “injured individuals were evacuated and received medical assistance.” The U.S. government, by contrast, has killed survivors clinging to wreckage or left boat strike victims to drown.
The Defense Department and the U.S. Coast Guard referred all questions about Wednesday’s attack to the State Department, which did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez called for revenge on Wednesday, despite the fact that all reports indicate that the American boat attacked the Cuban vessel. “The dictatorship in #Cuba has just attacked a boat from Florida & murdered those on board,” he wrote on X. “This regime must be relegated to the dust bin of history!”
The Trump administration has been ratcheting up pressure on Cuba’s Communist government and extreme pain on its people, cutting off foreign oil shipments and other revenue sources that had kept Cuba’s rickety economy afloat. The pain has increased after oil shipments from Venezuela, its main supplier, were halted after the U.S. attacked the South American country, kidnapped its then-president Nicolás Maduro, and began running the country via a puppet regime. Mexico, another major petroleum supplier, also suspended oil shipments under U.S. pressure. This has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe of food, medicine, and fuel shortages, raging inflation, prolonged blackouts, and service cuts at hospitals.
“In the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect its territorial waters,” the Cuban government said in a statement. “Based on the principle that national defense is a fundamental pillar of the Cuban State in safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region.”
Many U.S. presidents have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government. During the Cold War, the CIA launched the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The agency also tried to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro at least eight times. The U.S. also conducted a covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among other acts of sabotage.
In the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Pentagon prepared top-secret plans to excuse an attack on the island. In the spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a top-secret memorandum titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” It described numerous false-flag operations that could be employed to justify a U.S. invasion. These proposals included staging assassinations of Cubans living in the U.S.; developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area … and even in Washington”; a plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)”; faking a Cuban air attack on a civilian jetliner filled with “college students”; and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters — and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.
The post Cuban Border Guards Attacked by Florida Speedboat appeared first on The Intercept.
In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump said his tariffs are "saving our country."
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, delivering the Democratic response, said the opposite.
"Since this president took office last year, his reckless trade policies have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs," Spanberger said Feb. 24.
We’ve fact-checked other Democrats’ estimates about how much Trump’s tariffs are costing American families. Spanberger’s $1,700 figure is roughly in line with multiple estimates by groups that study the tariffs’ effect. These groups, which represent diverse political ideologies, used different metrics to calculate the tariffs’ cost to American households.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that Trump cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy tariffs on his own, as he had been doing. Trump reinstated a global 15% tariff after the decision, using other laws.
When contacted for comment, Spanberger’s office cited a study from the Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, estimating that the average household has paid about $1,745 in tariff costs from February 2025 to January.
Economists say tariff impacts are mostly passed on to consumers, similar to taxes. But because consumers don’t spend as much on imports, tariffs don’t affect all purchases equally.
Other groups provided estimates:
The Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, estimated that, in 2025, Trump tariffs contributed to an average tax increase of $1,000 per household.
The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan policy research center, estimated in November and January an average income loss of about $1,700, based on consumer prices. Using another measure based on spending relative to a household’s income, the group estimated the median cost at $1,400 per household.
The National Taxpayers Union, a center-right advocacy organization, estimated in August 2025 that Trump’s tariffs would cost households an average of $2,048 each year if left in place.
These estimates measured the impact of tariffs that were in place before the Supreme Court struck them down.
Some groups measured how much tariffs would cost families after Trump tweaked his tariffs following the Supreme Court ruling. The Tax Foundation predicted that new tariffs on items such as lumber, steel and cars will increase taxes by $400 per household in 2026. Other tariffs, which are temporary and up to 15% on imported goods, could also add another $200 to $600 in taxes, for a total of $600 to $1,000 in tax increases in 2026.
The Yale Budget Lab made two estimates after the Supreme Court ruling. The first, based on consumer price increases, found that a household would lose $800 on average in the short run if certain tariffs expired, or $1,300 if those temporary tariffs are extended.
The second measured how much families spend in relation to their income. It calculated that average annual household costs from tariffs range from around $400 to $1,800, and would increase to around $700 to $3,000, if some tariffs were extended.
Spanberger said Trump’s tariff policies "have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs."
Spanberger referred to a study that showed households have paid an average of $1,745 in tariff costs from February 2025 to January.
Three other groups came up with four estimates. Three of their estimates came in roughly the same or within $350 of Spanberger’s estimate. The fourth was lower than Spanberger’s figure.
The statement is accurate but needs additional information. We rate it Mostly True.
Chipmaker’s quarterly earnings surpassed Wall Street’s expectations every quarter for multiple years
Nvidia released its quarterly earnings on Wednesday, with the chipmaker revealing higher than expected revenues and extending its years-long streak of surpassing Wall Street’s sky-high expectations.
The company receives the vast majority of its revenue from its datacenter business, which has been buoyed by the tech industry’s immense investment into AI infrastructure. On Wednesday, Nvidia reported 75% year-over-year growth of this vertical to $62.3bn. The world’s most valuable publicly traded company, Nvidia has dominated the chip market as its processing units have become the backbone of the artificial intelligence boom. The company also posted an enormous total profit for the fiscal year: $120bn.
Continue reading...SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 25, 2026 — Today at VAST Forward 2026, VAST Data announced the VAST Data PolicyEngine and VAST Data TuningEngine, two new computing services that will allow the next generation of the VAST AI Operating System to deliver key requirements for organizations looking to scale their mission-critical AI initiatives.
Specifically, PolicyEngine and TuningEngine work in tandem within the VAST DataEngine to create AI systems and interactions that are trusted, explainable, and continuously learning. PolicyEngine governs agentic activity and TuningEngine manages model tuning, working in conjunction to power automatic learning loops that remain aligned with organizational expectations.
“Just as people are always learning, so should tomorrow’s applications,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “With the introduction of PolicyEngine and TuningEngine, the VAST AI Operating System has become a thinking machine that customers can deploy wherever they compute – a machine that safeguards every interaction and learns from every outcome, bringing the power of AI within reach of every organization.”
Introducing the VAST Data PolicyEngine
AI workflows and agents are increasingly accessing organizational data, using it to produce more information in the form of generated responses, agent-to-agent communications, event logs, and more. Without fine-grained controls on what agents can access and how they communicate with other agents, tools, and remote data products, the chance for data spillage and leakage rises greatly. Without strict controls on how data is accessed and how services communicate, and without tools to log every aspect of an agentic workflow, AI cannot be fully trusted.
The VAST PolicyEngine resolves these concerns via an inline policy enforcement engine to safeguard every aspect of agentic interaction and communication. PolicyEngine governs agents’ access to shared memory, external tools, knowledge bases, or other agents by permitting access, actions, and communications according to fine-grained, explicit permissions, as well as AI-derived context. Because enforcement occurs before actions execute, and because the system maintains extensive, tamper-proof traces and logs, the system maintains a zero-trust operating posture to ensure that decisions and actions remain observable, explainable, and auditable.
Introducing the VAST Data TuningEngine
VAST AgentEngine is the agentic runtime of the AI OS. This serverless computing environment is simple to program and coordinates multi-agent workflows, model invocation, and agentic tool usage within the VAST AI OS. While AgentEngine has been suitable for the deployment of static models, the completeness of the AI OS stack allows the platform to also support “learning loops” that use all of the system’s telemetry, as well as agent and model feedback, to support fine tuning and reinforcement learning pipelines.
The VAST TuningEngine captures outcomes from agentic pipelines and utilizes curated feedback to enhance model performance over time. Using popular methods such as LoRA fine tuning, supervised fine tuning, and reinforcement learning, TuningEngine pipelines automatically ingest that data, process it, and suggest new candidate models. Each new candidate can be evaluated and benchmarked within the VAST AI OS, and then manually or automatically deployed into the platform. This will kick off a new learning loop that uses future interactions to improve on the newly deployed, updated model.
A Big Step Toward VAST’s Thinking Machine Vision
These new capabilities represent a massive step toward building systems that automatically evolve as they interact with data from the natural world. VAST Data has been working on building such a system since 2016, and unveiled the full extent of its vision in 2023. With today’s announcement, VAST AI OS finally creates a closed operational computing loop that observes, reasons, acts, evaluates, and improves – all while fortifying security and explainability by unifying and safeguarding all activities in one unified system.
The VAST PolicyEngine and TuningEngine are slated for release by the end of 2026.
More from HPCwire
About VAST Data
VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.
Source: VAST Data
The post VAST Data Unveils Platform for Secure, Trusted, and Self-Learning Agentic AI Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
Captain says controversy overshadows Olympic gold win
Trump quipped about inviting US women to White House
Knight says there is respect and support with men’s team
Hilary Knight, the captain of the US women’s ice hockey team, has responded to comments made by Donald Trump after the Americans won gold at the Winter Olympics, calling the president’s quip a “distasteful joke”.
After the US men’s ice hockey team won gold on Sunday, Trump called into the locker-room celebration and invited the players to be his guests at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
Continue reading...  | Hope yall have riding weather! [link] [comments] |
Record rainfall in famously arid California park has caused a wildflower eruption nearing levels of a superbloom
Death Valley and parts of southern California have erupted in wildflowers thanks to record rain that helped deliver spectacular blooms.
In the famously arid national park, the rare display has covered miles of the landscape in vibrant shades of yellow and purple.
Continue reading...Trump’s tariff strategy is alive and well Expert comment jon.wallace
The State of the Union showed the president’s faith in the efficacy of tariffs is undimmed – despite the adverse Supreme Court ruling.
‘Are you tired of winning?’
President Donald Trump isn’t, he said on Tuesday night in his 2026 State of the Union address, drawing smiles from Vice President JD Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson, seated on the dais behind him.
Despite the setback inflicted by a recent US Supreme Court ruling, Trump left no doubt that he intends to continue using tariffs aggressively – in his words, to win some more.
US trading partners have good reason to feel relief after the Court’s verdict. The Court invalidated the administration’s reliance on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as a basis for sweeping tariff action. This will reduce the speed and discretion of future tariff imposition.
Other observers will be relieved by the Court’s decision as a visible demonstration that America’s institutional checks and balances are functioning as designed. Court judges selected by President Trump were willing to reach judgements that angered the president and undermined his agenda. Some had doubted they would be.
But there is also bad news for tariff skeptics and America’s trade partners. In the State of the Union, Trump made clear that he has no intention of abandoning his broader tariff strategy.
Within the speech, one could discern the familiar strands Trump has long used to justify tariffs.
First, tariffs as revenue.
‘I used these tariffs to generate hundreds of billions of dollars to make great deals for our country,’ he declared, crediting them as ‘one of the primary reasons for our country’s stunning economic turnaround’.
Trump went further, suggesting that ‘As time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax – taking a great financial burden off the people that I love’.
Critics were quick to dismiss this claim. Income taxes account for the largest share of US federal revenue, and even substantial tariff increases would generate only a fraction of what income and payroll taxes provide.
Most economists therefore see tariffs as supplementary revenue tools rather than plausible substitutes for the income tax. Although the maths may not add up, the idea has intense political appeal: it frames tariffs as an external revenue source that could ease the domestic tax burden.
Second, Trump framed tariffs not merely as fiscal instruments but as tools of geopolitical leverage. In criticizing the Supreme Court’s ‘very unfortunate ruling’ – while four black-robed, stone-faced justices faced him from the chamber’s front row – Trump lamented that limiting presidential tariff authority weakens the executive branch’s power in foreign affairs. Tariffs, in this framing, are tools of statecraft – a way to coerce trading partners, extract concessions, and rebalance relationships without resorting to military force.
Indeed, Trump asserted that the threat of tariffs had enabled him to end ‘several wars’. He described tariffs as ‘peace protecting’, stating that ‘many of the wars I settled was because of the threat of tariffs’ and that ‘I wouldn’t have been able to settle them without [tariffs]’. In this telling, tariffs are a central instrument of US foreign policy influence.
US trading partners around the world can take from the State of the Union that tariffs are here to stay – at least for the duration of this administration. While the Supreme Court may have curtailed one legal pathway, it did not eliminate presidential tariff authority. It certainly did nothing to shake Trump’s broader faith in the tariff instrument.
Following the ruling, Trump indicated that his administration would continue using other statutory tools, including Section 301 of the Trade Act (addressing unfair trade practices), Section 232 (national security), and related provisions. In other words, while one instrument has been declared invalid, the broader tariff toolkit remains – as does Trump’s faith in its efficacy.
Microsoft released an optional cumulative update for Windows 11, and for once, it actually includes something many of you might actually like: it adds Sysmon from Sysinternals to Windows natively, so you no longer have to install it manually. Here’s a refresher on what, exactly, Sysmon does.
System Monitor (Sysmon) is a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network. The service runs as a protected process, thus disallowing a wide range of user mode interactions.
↫ Mark Russinovich and Thomas Garnier
After installing the optional cumulative update in question, KB5077241, you can install Sysmon as an optional Windows component. Of course, this is Microsoft we’re talking about, so it’s not quite as straightforward as you’d think. In Windows 11, there’s two places to add optional Windows features, and in the case of Sysmon, you have to go to the old Windows features dialog instead of the new View or edit optional features one. And also, don’t forget to first remove the old Sysmon from Sysinternals in case you have it installed. After installation, run sysmon -i as an administrator to enable the feature.
Department commissioner will be Erin Dalton, who conducted outreach in Pennsylvania among unhoused communities
Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, has hired Erin Dalton as a new commissioner of the city’s department of social services.
The hire comes as the new mayor has faced scrutiny over the city’s handling of its unhoused population following the deaths of at least 20 people who were found outdoors during an especially cold winter.
Continue reading...The revolt inspired fear that Francoist fascism had returned. Mr. Tejero died the same day the Spanish government declassified documents related to the coup.
COVINA, Calif., Feb. 25, 2026 — The Align Foundation, a nonprofit accelerating predictive biology by convening the world’s leading minds to generate and optimize the data that powers AI breakthroughs, has announced a partnership with Google DeepMind to work with the global community to chart a new roadmap for data and evaluations that can help drive AI for AMR research. Building on the calls to action within the AI for AMR report released by Google DeepMind and the Fleming Initiative, the organizations will convene global experts in microbiology, medicine, and AI to define and prioritize data generation. Resulting datasets will enable the development of “dream models”–predictive systems capable of catalyzing field-wide changes in how the world understands, predicts, and ultimately addresses AMR.
“Our vision at Align is to build the research infrastructure needed to make biological data collection and model development frictionless, scalable, and shareable,” said Peter Kelly, Co-founder and Head of Science at The Align Foundation. “We’re excited to collaborate with Google DeepMind on AMR to create a space where researchers can jointly define the data needed and subsequent models that would truly move the needle for drug resistance. This partnership is about centering the community’s most pressing questions and then developing the shared understanding of data, methods, and benchmarks required to answer them.”
As part of the roadmapping effort, Align and Google DeepMind will host two AMR Community Workshops, one in North America and another in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in spring 2026. The invite-only ideation workshops will surface leading regional perspectives from across disciplines to build prioritized, technically defined dataset proposals with concrete use cases, data standards, and evaluation frameworks required to enable predictive modeling of AMR. The workshops are designed to generate funding‑ready project plans for implementable dataset blueprints that can serve as launchpads for multi-year, multi-stakeholder data generation initiatives.
During the open submission window, the partners will solicit diverse input addressing priority datasets for novel research questions that could accelerate the development of robust, clinically relevant AMR models that can positively impact health outcomes. Interested applicants can learn more and submit concepts by visiting the submission portal through March 31, 2026.
“Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most urgent challenges in global health, and we believe AI can help researchers understand and address it in new and highly impactful ways,” said Agata Laydon, Science Lead in the Google DeepMind Impact Accelerator. “Working with The Align Foundation, we’re excited to support a global community of experts in shaping foundational AI for AMR capabilities that are grounded in real‑world needs and can be developed and evaluated in a safe, responsible way.”
AMR is one of the most significant global health threats we face today. AI technologies have the potential to help address many of the open questions and challenges and to accelerate research in AMR. AI models such as AlphaFold–which has already been cited in over 2,500 papers relevant to AMR–are already helping researchers answer important and long-standing questions, while the potential of others, such as Google’s AI co-scientist, is beginning to be demonstrated. However, for the most part, the broad potential of AI remains untapped because the necessary foundations, including AI-ready data and evaluations, are not yet available.
This partnership builds on Align’s work to create open, standardized biological datasets and benchmarks, including its efforts to generate large‑scale microbial phenotyping resources for the global AI research community. Align’s community-driven processes have surfaced high-impact “dream datasets” that evolved into platform designs, technical reports, and collaborative project proposals. In its flagship GROQ‑Seq initiative to measure protein function at scale, Align’s roadmap has already advanced through methods development into active data generation across seven projects, including partnerships with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boston University’s DAMP Lab, Battelle, Profluent, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), and a global network of academic collaborators.
The AMR ideation sessions follow a similar arc, from shared vision to funded, multi-year data generation efforts fueling “dream model” development. These living datasets and data generation platforms will provide a durable foundation for future AI advances in AMR. Together with Google DeepMind, Align aims to ensure that future AMR dataset and evaluation investments accelerate meaningful downstream impact by the end of 2028.
About The Align Foundation
The Align Foundation is a nonprofit research organization accelerating the future of life sciences by building large, open biological datasets to power predictive breakthroughs. Founded in 2021, Align enables dataset creation through high-throughput experimentation, automation partnerships, and global scientific collaboration. Align also hosts competitions to transparently benchmark scientific progress and measure the impact of open data. With support from philanthropic and research funders, Align is creating the reproducible, scalable, and shareable infrastructure needed to unlock the next generation of data‑powered breakthroughs in biology. Learn more at alignbio.org.
About Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind is a leading AI research organization working to build safe and responsible AI systems that can help solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Combining cutting‑edge research with large‑scale engineering, Google DeepMind develops advanced AI models and technologies that power products across Google and support breakthroughs in fields such as science, health, and robotics.
Source: The Align Foundation
The post Align Foundation Partners with Google DeepMind on AI Data Roadmap for Antimicrobial Resistance appeared first on HPCwire.
HANOVER, Md., Feb. 25, 2026 — Building on its long history as the leader in high-speed connectivity – and marking the first product introduction following its acquisition of Nubis Communications – Ciena is unveiling Vesta 200 6.4T CPX, the industry’s highest-density, lowest-power pluggable CPO solution. Designed to reduce power consumption by up to 70%, the solution helps hyperscalers, cloud providers, and data center operators evolve their architectures to reliably address AI workloads in both scale-out networks as well as next generation scale-up networks.
Vesta 200 6.4T CPX Pluggable Co-packaged Optical Engine
“We’re delivering the industry’s first truly flexible, open pluggable optical engine, removing barriers to CPO adoption and giving our customers exactly what they’ve been asking for: greater density, power efficiency, and reliability – all in an open, multi‑vendor ecosystem,” said Dino DiPerna, Senior Vice President of Global Research & Development at Ciena. “We continue to innovate in response to evolving customer needs, allowing operators to scale AI clusters more efficiently, using less energy and space, while lowering overall infrastructure costs.”
Vesta 200 6.4T CPX provides more power-efficient optical interconnect and delivers the chip-edge density required for massive scale-up and scale-out networks on 200G/lane switches, XPUs, and NICs.
Key features include:
Ciena will offer a demonstration of Vesta 200 6.4T CPX at booth #1927 at OFC 2026, taking place March 15-19 in Los Angeles.
About Ciena
Ciena is the global leader in high-speed connectivity. We build the world’s most advanced networks to support exponential growth in bandwidth demand. By harnessing the power of our networking systems, interconnects, automation software, and services, Ciena revolutionizes data transmission and network management. With unparalleled expertise and innovation, we empower our customers, partners, and communities to thrive in the AI era.
Source: Ciena
The post Ciena Unveils New Pluggable Optical Engine to Meet Data Center AI Demands appeared first on HPCwire.
A new advertisement misleadingly accuses a Republican North Carolina legislative candidate of criticizing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
The video ad, paid for by the NC True Conservatives political action committee, is meant to sway Guilford and Rockingham county voters in North Carolina’s 26th Senate District to vote for state Sen. Phil Berger over his GOP primary challenger, Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page.
The ad accurately points out that Trump endorsed Berger, the state’s Senate leader since 2011, partly because of Berger’s support for Trump’s immigration policies. The ad then claims Page "got busted calling Trump’s plan unrealistic."
Here’s a transcript of the ad:
Trump: "Seal the border. Stop the invasion, and send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens the hell back home."
Narrator: "Phil Berger backs President Trump’s plan to stop illegal immigration. That’s why President Trump backs Phil Berger. And Sam Page? He got busted calling Trump’s plan unrealistic."
Page, in what the ad labels a "leaked video" clip: "It is unrealistic to assume that 12 to 14 million people will just leave the United States."
Narrator: "Sam Page — wrong on Trump, wrong on immigration, wrong for us."
Page has been a Trump ally for years, and the ad doesn’t provide any context for Page’s remarks, which were made in 2012. That’s years before Trump filed to run for president the first time — and even longer before Trump had articulated his immigration enforcement plan. The ad also deceptively edited Page’s complete comments.
Page pointed PolitiFact to a YouTube video posted Oct. 12, 2012 showing Page speaking at a lectern.
In it, Page said the federal government needs to do more to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, such as hiring more Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. "Therefore, the National Sheriffs’ Association recommends the following," Page can be heard saying.
"We’re asking for additional ICE agents, Border Patrol agents," Page said. "We’re also asking for continued increased funding for our 287(g) and ‘Secure Community’ program."
He continued: "On the pathway to legal employment and legal status, the National Sheriffs’ Association does, at this point and time, strongly oppose outright amnesty for those individuals currently here illegally. Amnesty does not work. However, it is unrealistic to assume that 12 to 14 million people will just leave the United States if asked. A plausible solution must be developed. And that’s what I’m saying tonight."
Page then encouraged people to watch a documentary on illegal immigration and to call their representatives in Congress to demand a more secure border.
Page said he was reading from a 2011 National Sheriffs’ Association position paper on comprehensive immigration reform.
The association’s position paper read: "When granted in 1986, [amnesty] did little to stop the flow of illegal individuals from coming across the border and, in fact, contributed to thousands of fraudulent applications for amnesty. History cannot repeat itself. However, it is unrealistic to assume that 12 to 20 million people will just leave the United States if asked. A plausible solution must be developed."
When PolitiFact presented this information to NC True Conservatives, group spokesman Lawrence Shaheen said Page’s comments reflect the candidate’s personal beliefs. Shaheen cited a segment of the video when Page says, "And that’s what I’m saying tonight" — as well as an Oct. 8, 2012, Winston-Salem Journal article that read in part:
The goal, Page said, is to motivate people to lobby members of Congress to do something about illegal immigration. Asked what he thinks should be done, Page said he supports comprehensive immigration reform — legislation that would deal with the estimated 11 million to 14 million noncitizens in the U.S. without authorization.
Mass deportations, Page said, would not be an effective way to deal with the issue.
"In the U.S., you can't just deport 14 million people. There is going to have to be some type of fix for the long term."
Page told PolitiFact that he didn’t recall his conversation with a Winston-Salem Journal reporter, but said he was likely attempting to relay the position of the association. After Page campaign attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to Shaheen, lawyers for NC True Conservatives responded to the Page campaign citing the same news article and 2012 video. The group declined to take down the ad.
Page told PolitiFact that his support for that plan is evident through his backing of Trump and tougher immigration policies through the years.
In 2015, Page testified before a Congressional committee on immigration and border security. In a prepared statement, Page expressed support for legislation that would deport undocumented minors to their home countries so long as they wouldn’t face persecution there or face the risk of trafficking.
Page says he co-founded "Sheriffs for Trump" in 2016, when Trump promised to deport every immigrant living in the U.S. illegally, then estimated to be 11 million people. In September 2016, Page told The New York Times: "I believe we need to remove all criminal offenders that are in this country illegally." In January 2017, Page told WXII-TV that he supported Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern U.S. border and crack down on illegal immigration. The next month, Page was one of several sheriffs to visit Trump at the White House and praise his agenda.
Page helped lead Trump’s 2020 campaign in North Carolina, and in recent years supported local legislation that would require North Carolina sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration officers.
Page supported Trump again in 2024, when Trump vowed to carry out the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history." The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump last year provided hundreds of billions of dollars in new Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding to help Trump achieve his goal. Page congratulated Trump for signing the legislation, describing it on X as a "major achievement and bold step forward."
When Trump endorsed Berger in the race in December, the president said Page had been a longtime supporter and described him as an "outstanding" person.
Page also referred PolitiFact to an article by The Assembly, which described him this way: "No North Carolina law enforcement official has cheered President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda as much as Rockingham County’s cowboy hat-wearing sheriff, Sam Page."
The Trump administration has asked immigrants to leave on their own, calling it self-deportation. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced in January that an estimated 2.2 million people had self-deported during the first year of Trump’s second term in office. That number is under scrutiny, however, because the Trump administration hasn’t released monthly detailed deportation data.
But the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement plan shows it isn’t relying solely on self-deportation.
DHS is offering a $2,600 stipend to each immigrant who self-deports and reports it on a government app. The offer comes with a warning: Those who don’t self-deport will be "arrested, deported, and they will never be able to return to the United States." To execute that plan, Trump’s administration is investing billions of dollars to hire immigration agents to conduct what it touts as the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history."
A NC True Conservatives ad claims that Page "got busted calling Trump’s [immigration] plan unrealistic."
The group cited comments Page made about immigration in 2012, years before Trump ran for president. He was repeating a portion of the National Sheriffs’ Association’s position paper at the time, and Page says he was reading them to an audience. He was not commenting on Trump’s immigration plan at all.
Page has been an ardent supporter of Trump’s for years — even after the president’s vows to conduct large-scale deportations. We rate the ad’s claim False.
The prediction market said it suspended Artem Kaptur, an employee of the popular YouTuber MrBeast, for insider trading.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ruled that the Trump administration's policy for swiftly deporting migrants to third countries violates federal immigration law and the Constitution.
Fixing the Space Launch System rocket's helium pressurization problem has pushed the Artemis II launch to at least April 1.
Marco Rubio attended a regional summit to emphasize the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere even as the prospect of conflict in the Middle East looms.
It’s unclear what agents sought at locations tied to Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent of the country’s second-largest district.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations. Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a year ago and a maker of license plate readers. It has faced criticism for allowing federal authorities access to its massive network of nationwide license plate readers and databases at a time when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is increasingly relying on data to raid communities as part of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Flock cameras allow authorities to track where people go and when by taking photos of their license plates from thousands of cameras located across the United States. Flock claims it doesn't share data with ICE directly, but reports show that local police have shared their own access to Flock cameras and its databases with federal authorities. While some communities are calling on their cities to end their contracts with Flock, others are taking matters into their own hands.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Commentary: Galaxy AI is too invasive for my liking.
The 2018 assassination of rights activist and Rio de Janeiro city council member Marielle Franco, a rising star in Brazilian politics, reverberated worldwide.
Critics concerned as Casey Means, aligned with RFK Jr on vaccine stance, does not have active medical license
Casey Means, Donald Trump’s controversial nominee for US surgeon general, appeared before the Senate health committee on Wednesday for a two‑hour hearing in which she defended her medical credentials, side-stepped direct questions on vaccine guidance, and blamed the country’s chronic‑disease burden on “ultra‑processed foods, industrial chemical exposure, lack of physical activity, chronic stress and loneliness, and over‑medicalization”.
As the nation’s prospective top doctor, Means would be responsible for communicating federal public‑health guidance. In her opening remarks, she said Americans were “angry, exhausted and hurting from preventable diseases” and called for a “great national healing”. Her hearing was postponed in October, after she went into labor hours before she was scheduled to testify.
Continue reading...Three research stories show that AI is entering a more mature phase. Scientists are using AI to better understand complex research data and extend foundation models deeper into scientific discovery.
A common theme across these projects is that AI is moving beyond experimentation toward practical integration into research workflows. Researchers are using AI to handle messy scientific data and apply automation to explore ideas without replacing human judgment.
A major obstacle in scientific AI is data heterogeneity – the challenge of dealing with data that comes in many different types and formats that don’t easily fit together. Traditional AI models tend to assume uniformity – that doesn’t work that well in science.
In an effort to overcome this limitation, Penn State researchers have developed a new AI framework, named ZENN, with implications for fields ranging from Alzheimer’s disease research to advanced materials design. ZENN is short for Zentropy-Embedded Neural Networks.
(3rdtimeluckystudio/Shutterstock)
The model is designed to teach AI models to recognize and adapt to hidden differences in data quality rather than ignoring them. It embeds concepts such as those from thermodynamics directly into the learning process.
“Most machine-learning methods assume that all data is homogeneous,” said the researchers, “But real-world data is heterogeneous by nature. If we want AI to be useful for scientific discovery, it must account for that.”
“If you are reading a handwritten note with smudges and stains, you know which marks are meaningful and which are just noise. Traditional AI often treats everything the same. ZENN is designed to tell the difference.”
They tested ZENN on standard AI benchmark datasets and on an experimental scientific problem involving an iron-platinum alloy to see if it could model physical behavior correctly. The researchers claim that ZENN performed better than or matched leading AI models on benchmark tests – it handled messy data more reliably and showed a remarkable ability to learn meaningful patterns and not just rely on data it was trained on. While ZENN still learns from training data, it is designed to recognize that not all data should be treated equally.
Using earthquake data to build a foundation model sounds unexpected, yet that is the direction researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are taking.
The project, called SeisModal, is part of a larger DOE effort (Steel Thread) that brings together scientists from multiple national labs to test whether AI can actually make sense of complex scientific signals – like those from seismic events.
Earthquake data is often incomplete and often arrives in streams rather than tidy datasets. Typically, AI models are built to process datasets that are consistent. Seismic signals rarely behave that way. SeisModal (as the name suggests) is multimodal. This means it can make sense of various types of data, including waveforms, metadata, text, video, and images. With multimodal input, it can provide information about the intensity of the earthquake, its location, timing, and other details that help with emergency assistance and forecasting.
“We’re creating a foundation model with broad capability that can be applied to multiple problems in science with minimal retraining for each application,” said Karl Pazdernik, a chief data scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who is the science lead of the Steel Thread team.
The Steel Thread project includes scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories , as well as PNNL.
A feature of the SeisModal model is its capacity to analyze a “time series”- a series of events or data points, such as tremors from an earthquake or the electrical signals of a heartbeat.
“SeisModal can reason over complex time series data such as seismic waveforms, which is an advance over many current large language models,” said Stewart. “The ability to detect these signals and other uncommon data types opens the door to a wider variety of scientific analysis methods that were previously unavailable.”
One of the great benefits of AI for scientists is that they can automate some processes to free up time so they can focus on tasks that require more human insight or judgment. That is exactly what researchers at the Allen Institute of AI (Ai2) aim to do with AutoDiscovery (AutoDS) – a new AI-powered system they developed to “automate” research. It can be used to generate hypotheses, suggest experiments, run simulations, and analyze results.
How exactly does it work? Well, it all starts with data, which it gets from files uploaded to the system and sets of its own questions to understand the context. The model is based on the principle of Bayesian surprise – which measures how the new findings change or adapt based on what the model expected to see. The more the deviation from expectation, the more attention it receives. As it investigates the patterns that are already known, it can lead to new discoveries.
Ai2 shared that “This design reflects a familiar scientific intuition: results that meaningfully shift our expectations are often more interesting than those that simply confirm what we already assumed.”
“By chasing surprise, AutoDiscovery naturally gravitates toward the unexpected—the results most likely to represent genuine discoveries rather than obvious patterns.”
Ai2 claims AutoDS has been used “to surface surprising, hidden patterns across disciplines, from uncovering trophic relationships in 20 years of marine ecosystem data to identifying mutual-exclusivity patterns in cancer mutations that could inform treatment decisions.” It also published some of the test results in a peer-reviewed paper last November.
While AutoDS is designed to “automate” discovery, the researchers are clear that the goal is not to replace human scientists. Instead they want the model to act as a reliable and fast exploration assistant. Leveraging the power of AI to digest vast data and test various pathways, it can help scientists narrow down the path they want to proceed.
The work is still early, and the researchers acknowledge that. After the results continue to be good after broader testing across domains, AutoDS would be a big step forward in using AI for scientific workflows – in a way that is reliable and easy to set up. With the method it uses, the challenge will be separating statistical novelty from meaningful scientific insight.
None of these systems we covered above replace scientific expertise. However, they suggest AI is moving into a new role where it’s not just analyzing research data, but also helping shape how science itself gets done.
The post Scientific AI Enters a More Mature Phase: Three Projects Explain Why appeared first on HPCwire.
Commentary: You can't spell sustainability without AI.
A Yosemite park ranger was fired last year after helping to display a transgender pride flag from El Capitan.
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Industry’s first global control plane purpose-built for AI data infrastructure spanning hyperscale cloud and datacenter deployments
SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 25, 2026 — Today at VAST Forward 2026, VAST Data announced Polaris, a global control plane designed to provision, operate and orchestrate distributed AI infrastructure across public cloud, neocloud and on-premises datacenter environments. Polaris transforms VAST deployments into a unified, fleet-scale platform, enabling enterprises to manage AI data and infrastructure wherever training and inference workloads run.
As AI pipelines expand across regions and providers, infrastructure is no longer a single-cluster problem. Training may occur in one geography, inference in another, and data collection at the edge, all under strict governance and cost constraints. Polaris introduces a centralized service delivery layer that automates deployment, lifecycle management and multi-cluster orchestration, converting distributed infrastructure into a single operational platform rather than a collection of environments.
Included at no extra cost, Polaris complements the VAST AI Operating System by coordinating how VAST environments are deployed and operated across infrastructure boundaries. The VAST DataSpace unifies data across clusters through a global namespace and distributed fabric, while Polaris governs how those clusters are deployed and lifecycle-managed across cloud and hybrid environments. Together, DataSpace abstracts data location and Polaris abstracts infrastructure location, allowing applications and agents to operate against a single logical environment regardless of where compute or data resides.
“AI infrastructure has outgrown the idea of a single deployment in a single location,” said Jonsi Stefansson, General Manager, Cloud Solutions at VAST Data. “Polaris establishes a global control plane that makes distributed AI infrastructure operationally coherent. It allows enterprises to deploy, scale and govern VAST clusters on any cloud or on-premises, all while managing them as one system.”
A Global Control Plane for the AI Era
Built as a secure, multi-tenant Kubernetes-based control plane with a lightweight agent on every VAST node, Polaris automates provisioning in customer accounts, integrates with cloud marketplaces for subscription and entitlement, and centrally orchestrates upgrades, expansion and node replacement. The platform includes enterprise identity integration, role-based access control and audit logging, delivering cloud-style operational consistency for AI infrastructure that spans hybrid and multicloud environments. Additionally, Polaris can be VAST-managed, partner-managed, or customer-managed and supports cloud service provider partners, as well as sovereign deployments. Designed to scale from the largest cloud providers to global neoclouds, VAST Polaris supports multi-site, multi-cluster deployments under centralized management.
Polaris operates as an intent-driven management layer: administrators define the desired state of infrastructure, and Polaris coordinates both cloud-native services and VAST software to reach and maintain that state. Deployments can be created, expanded and governed through a single API and interface, ensuring consistent configuration, policy enforcement and operational behavior across regions and providers.
By combining global data services with fleet-scale orchestration, the VAST AI Operating System enables AI pipelines to move from isolated deployments to continuously operating systems. Organizations can align compute placement with GPU availability, cost and compliance requirements without changing application behavior or operational models.
Polaris is available as part of VAST cloud deployments, with expanded multi-cluster orchestration capabilities planned in future releases.
More from HPCwire: VAST Data Expands AI Data Stack, Keeps Eye on North Star
About VAST Data
VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.
Source: VAST Data
The post VAST Data Introduces Polaris to Orchestrate AI Data Infrastructure Across Hybrid Multicloud Environments appeared first on HPCwire.
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Antonio Tejero, who has died aged 93, was part of rightwing network whose efforts were thwarted by King Juan Carlos
The Spanish officer who led his armed followers into the Spanish congress in a failed military coup in 1981 has died on the same day that the socialist-led government declassified documents relating to the murky attempt to overthrow the country’s post-Franco democracy.
Antonio Tejero, who died aged 93, was part of a network of rightwing police and military officers whose efforts to seize power were thwarted after King Juan Carlos refused to support the coup and ordered the generals to obey the democratic constitutional order.
Continue reading...Feb. 25, 2026 — Simon Fraser University (SFU) has signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with three strategic partners to build on the industry-leading efficiency and sustainability of the Cedar Supercomputing Centre at its Burnaby campus, which houses Fir, the fastest and most powerful academic supercomputer system in Canada.
The Cedar Supercomputing Centre. Credit: SFU.
The Cedar Supercomputing Centre empowers Canadian companies and public institutions to harness world-class artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, while safeguarding Canadian sovereignty, security and sustainability. AI is a research priority for SFU, and the university ranks in Canada’s top five for AI (AI Rankings, 2025), with more than 100 researchers focused on AI solutions.
The agreements formalize collaborations with industry-leading partners, targeting specialist needs:
Each partnership will further boost the sustainability credentials of the Cedar Supercomputing Centre (CSC), which is powered by clean hydroelectric energy and already boasts an industry-leading power usage effectiveness of 1.07.
“These new agreements will help us take the Cedar Supercomputing Centre to new heights of efficiency and performance, as we continue to support research and innovation across Canada with our secure, high-performance data centre infrastructure hosted right here at SFU,” said Dugan O’Neil, Vice-President, Research and Innovation. “They also reflect our commitment to building partnerships with Canadian companies that are advancing technology and sustainability and investing in our national economy.”
Cerio
Cerio is an Ontario-based company specialized in developing more sustainable data centre infrastructure. Their innovations in composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) enable data centre operators to optimize graphics processing unit (GPU) resource allocation to improve efficiency and reduce power use, while their advanced optical interconnect technology also delivers high-speed connectivity with lower power consumption. The MOU with Cerio formalizes plans to collaborate on expanding the Cedar Supercomputing Centre using Cerio’s products, to further develop SFU’s AI infrastructure, research and training.
“We’re excited to partner with SFU to bring our sustainable infrastructure solutions to one of Canada’s most advanced academic computing facilities,” said Phil Harris, CEO of Cerio. “At Cerio, we believe that the future of AI and high-performance computing must be built on a foundation of energy efficiency and environmental responsibility. Our composable disaggregated infrastructure and optical interconnect technologies are designed specifically to help organizations like SFU maximize their computing power while minimizing their environmental footprint. This collaboration with the Cedar Supercomputing Centre will not only support groundbreaking AI research but also demonstrate how Canadian innovation can lead the way in sustainable data center operations.”
Corix
Since 2012, Corix has operated a district energy system on Burnaby Mountain, first serving the UniverCity community and later expanding to SFU campus buildings. Corix and SFU formalized the Burnaby Mountain District Energy Utility project in 2016, culminating in the construction of a $33-million biomass-based Renewable Energy Centre in 2020. The project has since delivered an 85-per-cent reduction in annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The latest MOU with Corix will explore opportunities to capture and reuse excess waste heat from the Cedar Supercomputing Centre for use within the existing neighbourhood energy system that provides heating and hot water across Burnaby Mountain. The initiative aims to demonstrate the viability of data centers as a source of low-carbon heating source amid accelerating data center growth, constraints to the electrical grid, and the growing importance of securing social license for large energy users.
“This MOU builds on our longstanding partnership with SFU and our shared commitment to a more sustainable future,” said Diego Mandelbaum, Chief Development Officer at Corix. “By harnessing data centre waste heat and putting it to productive use, we are exploring the synergy between data centres and district energy, reducing emissions, easing grid constraints, and delivering lasting value to the Burnaby Mountain community.”
Moment Energy
Moment Energy is North America’s leading large-format battery repurposing company, powering commercial and industrial operations with high-performance battery energy storage systems (BESS). By working with industry partners and major automotive companies, Moment Energy’s technology reduces energy costs, supports grid resilience, and keeps batteries out of landfills. Moment Energy is rapidly scaling to provide worldwide access to affordable, reliable, and clean power.
The company was founded in 2019 by four SFU alumni from the Mechatronic Systems Engineering (MSE) program, and the agreement with SFU is a first step toward Moment Energy installing a reliable backup power system, as well as exploring other clean energy solutions and energy storage projects at the university.
“Moment Energy is proud to partner with SFU, a leader in research and sustainability, to explore how our Canadian-made energy storage solutions can help power the next generation of data infrastructure like the Cedar supercomputer,” said Gurmesh Sidhu, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Moment Energy. “Together, we aim to advance the clean energy transition, promote local innovation, and enhance energy security for Canada’s high-performance computing needs.”
More from HPCwire: Simon Fraser University Installs Fir, Canada’s Most Powerful Academic Supercomputer
Source: Will Henderson, SFU
The post Simon Fraser University Signs MOUs to Advance Sustainability at Cedar Supercomputing Centre appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif. and SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 25, 2026 — Supermicro, Inc. is launching, with VAST Data, the CNode-X Solution, a highly integrated, rapidly deployable AI Data Platform. The VAST AI Operating System, including the VAST InsightEngine and VAST DataBase, together with NVIDIA open models, microservices and libraries, along with Supermicro GPU and storage servers, form a fully integrated AI infrastructure stack, enabling enterprises to rapidly deploy a complete AI solution.
Supermicro VAST Data
“Building on our successful collaboration with VAST Data, this solution brings together Supermicro’s high-performance AI systems, VAST’s software, and NVIDIA’s technology into a truly integrated enterprise AI platform,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “Together, we enable organizations to accelerate AI factory deployment, whether scaling large AI initiatives or deploying enterprise applications like generative AI and video analytics.”
“CNode-X brings together Supermicro’s integrated infrastructure expertise with the VAST AI Operating System and NVIDIA-accelerated compute to deliver a turnkey foundation for enterprise AI factories,” said John Mao, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “Together, we’re making it dramatically easier for organizations to deploy an end-to-end AI data platform – keeping GPUs fed with data, helping teams move faster from deployment to first token, and scaling AI workloads with confidence.”
Supermicro’s existing EBox solution with VAST, which was launched in 2024 and widely adopted by large storage customers based on its space, power, and cost efficiency, combines two different server nodes into a single server. The second-generation EBox solution has been updated to the latest AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs.
The CNode-X solution follows the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference architecture, which incorporates GPU acceleration into the platform to accelerate data vectorization, vector database searching, and inference workloads. The benefits of this solution include:
Supermicro and VAST presented the new AI Data Platform solution at the VAST Forward conference in Salt Lake City February 24-26.
More from HPCwire: VAST Data Expands AI Data Stack, Keeps Eye on North Star
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro and VAST Data Launch New Enterprise AI Data Platform Solution with NVIDIA appeared first on HPCwire.
“These people are crazy! I’m telling ya — they’re crazy,” President Donald Trump exclaimed, pointing to Democratic members of Congress near the start of his lengthy and lie-drenched State of the Union speech.
At that particular moment, the Democrats in question were doing the right thing: refusing to stand and applaud when Trump called for a nationwide ban on the ability for trans kids to exist in public.
“We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately,” the president said.
The Democrats in question were doing the right thing: refusing to applaud Trump’ attacks on trans kids.
The “it” here did not refer only to gender-affirming health care for trans youth, which is already banned or restricted in at least 27 states. Trump appeared to be going even further: The thing he wants banned would be the ability for trans kids to socially transition safely in school.
“Surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will,” said Trump, whose administration has a standing policy of ripping children from their parents’ arms.
In response, Republican members of Congress — supporters of industrial-scale family separations — rose in a standing ovation.
Democrats sat still in their benches.
With midterm elections approaching, Trump will inevitably escalate these attacks on trans kids.
Democrats should refuse to take the bait. They should stay, at least metaphorically, seated. They don’t need to prove to some imagined anti-trans majority that they are not “crazy” for refusing to support persecution of a vulnerable minority.
On Tuesday, the president’s vehicle for attacking trans kids was the story of Virginia teen Sage Blair, a student at Liberty University, whose mother Michele is suing the Appomattox County School Board.
According to reports, Michele is accusing members of the school district of failing to disclose to the family that Sage was identifying as male; she claims this contributed to the teen running away and subsequently facing sexual abuse. Both Sage and Michele attended the State of the Union as Trump’s special guests.
Sage’s tragic story is now being used as the basis for Virginia legislation aimed at forcing schools to notify parents should a student identify with a gender other than their sex as assigned at birth and requiring parental consent to allow a student to use a new name or pronoun in school.
Such a law — essentially mandating forced outing — would put thousands of trans kids at risk. Republican claims to parental rights in such cases are, of course, a laughable fig leaf when the same anti-trans politicians are pushing for laws to prosecute parents as child abusers if they support their children transitioning.
Health care bans, school sports bans, bathroom bans, bans on obtaining the correct identification, and bans on socially transitioning at school – these astroturfed anti-trans policies all come together to make it impossible to safely live as a trans kid and flourish into a trans adult.
Democratic leaders to date have failed to robustly oppose these eliminationist efforts, again and again ceding dangerous rhetorical ground to the anti-trans right.
A false dichotomy has emerged in which supporting trans people is deemed at odds with a focus on key economic, so-called kitchen-table issues.
Just last week, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has a grim record of entertaining anti-trans positions, told CNN that he wants his party to be “less prone to spending disproportionate amounts of time on pronouns, identity politics. More focused on tabletop issues, things that really matter — the stacking of stress in terms of the electricity bills and childcare costs and health care and obviously housing costs.”
Newsom wants, he said, Democrats to be more “culturally normal.”
The idea that establishment Democrats have failed to support policies for the working class because they have been too focused on supporting trans people and minorities is laughable. In response to such a claim, a diligent journalist should surely ask, “When?”
Aside from a few shallow and embarrassing performances, when have Democratic leaders given significant time to advocating for oppressed minorities, in particular trans people? They haven’t — with a few pitiful, symbolic exceptions, such as when they knelt in Kente cloth in 2020 during the George Floyd uprisings.
What we have seen, though, is Democrats like Newsom dedicating airtime to urging other Democrats to throw trans people under the bus. It is a perverse performance of his own criticism — spending disproportionate amounts of time talking about trans people for all the wrong reasons.
None of this, of course, is to say that Democrats have not failed the working class. Of course they have! But it’s not because of trans kids: It is fealty to wealthy donors, Wall Street, and industry lobbies.
In addition to this vile scapegoating of their own shortcomings, Newsom raises another offensive proposition: What constitutes “culturally normal” for his ilk? The ability to remove whole groups of people from access to necessary health care and public life?
Democrats should absolutely run on campaigns that center wages, working conditions, housing, and health care — and they should insist on these being essential issues for all people, including trans people.
Not only is including trans rights in your platform a morally sound position, it can also be good electoral politics: Numerous 2025 election victories — from New York to Pennsylvania to Virginia — saw wins for Democrats who refused to throw people under the bus.
In the months ahead, we can expect more of the same from Trump and his party. They are going to attack trans people, particular trans kids, as a means of cynical fearmongering.
Trump’s anti-trans onslaught is a transparent effort to rally support around a conjured scapegoat as his approval ratings continue to tank. Yet the elimination of trans people, the removal of health care provisions, and attacks on people’s bodily autonomy are not incidental to the Republican project — they are central to it.
Trans people’s survival is not just a distraction and shouldn’t be treated that way. Instead, Democrats need to reject far-right frameworks of “crazy” and “normal” from the jump. They do not need to abandon trans rights to defeat Republicans. And if they pretend otherwise — endangering a vulnerable population in a naked and ill-thought attempt to save their own political hides — they’re not worthy of winning our votes in the first place.
The post Democrats Should Never Again Rise to Trump’s Anti-Trans Bait appeared first on The Intercept.
Federal officials search district chief Alberto Carvalho’s home, but allegations being examined remain unclear
The FBI raided the headquarters of the Los Angeles unified school district, the second largest school district in the US, as well as the home of Alberto Carvalho, the district’s superintendent, federal officials confirmed on Wednesday.
An unnamed source familiar with the investigation told the Associated Press that authorities served warrants that were part of an “ongoing investigation”.
Continue reading...Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition. Microsoft recently announced that Asha Sharma, whose career has focused on AI and software as a service, will replace Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO, and that COO and president Sarah Bond is leaving the company. Blackley said he expects Sharma's role to be that of "a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night," arguing that Satya Nadella's all-consuming bet on generative AI has turned every business unit -- Xbox included -- into a nail for the same hammer. He compared the appointment to putting someone who doesn't like movies in charge of a major motion picture studio, and advised Sharma to either develop a genuine passion for games or find a way to leave the job soon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Shabana Mahmood given green light to take case to court of appeal with ban to remain in place pending outcome
The home secretary has been granted permission to challenge the high court’s ruling that the decision to ban Palestine Action under anti-terrorism laws was unlawful.
An order issued by the high court on Wednesday said Shabana Mahmood could take the case to the court of appeal and that the ban would remain in place pending the outcome of the fresh hearing.
Continue reading...Ten years ago, VAST Data founders pondered what it would take to build a thinking machine, a computer that would continuously learn from new data. While it hasn’t delivered that thinking machine yet, the company took a few more steps toward that goal this week at the inaugural VAST Forward conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.
VAST Data has come a long way since co-founders Renen Hallak, Shachar Fienblit, and Jeff Denworth started the journey to build a thinking machine back in 2016. They started by building a new data storage platform that could capitalize on recent developments, including the widespread availability of solid state drives and the introduction of NVMe over Fabric, and serve data for new exabyte-level HPC, AI, and big data workloads.
VAST PolicyEngine bolsters data security
The cornerstone of the new system was an architecture dubbed Disaggregated and Shared Everything (DASE). The first element built atop DASE was DataStore, which is a unified object and file storage system. That was followed up with a storage system for tabular data (DataBase), a system for executing functions on the data (DataEngine), and a global namespace that united data silos (DataSpace).
Buoyed by early success, the company kept adding to the stack. In October 2024, VAST introduced the InsightEngine to trigger actions on the platform. It added support for Apache Kafka in early 2025, followed by a vector database, support for serverless triggers, and fine-grained access control. In May 2025, it launched what it calls an operating system for AI, with the AgentEngine as the key component. It followed that up in August with SyncEngine to function as a universal data router.
Today at VAST Forward in Salt Lake City, Utah, the company unveiled the next two engines: PolicyEngine and TuningEngine.
PolicyEngine is designed to give fine-grained control over the army of AI agents that are emerging in customer environments. VAST users can set policies governing what data agents are allowed to access and how they can communicate with other agents, tools, and remote data products. The software uses an explicit permission structure to grant or deny access in real time, and can also act upon AI-derived context.
VAST has not wavered from its goal to build a thinking machine
The goal of PolicyEngine is to reduce the chances of data spillage and make agentic AI trustworthy, Denworth said during a press briefing last week
“First, it’s a decisioning framework. But the second thing that it will do, it will determine the types of data and the ways in which data can be presented out to agents,” he said. “There will be interpretation and there will be transformations of data in certain cases where there needs to be some sort of redaction or some sort of transformation of data in order to make it safe for an endpoint to see.”
The VAST Data TuningEngine, meanwhile, complements the AgentEngine runtime to complete the “learning loop” needed to continuously improve AI models in customer environments. TuningEngine collects data that comes out of AgentEngine to create artifact tables that are then fed into a series of tuners, which could be based on LoRA fine tuning, supervised fine tuning, and reinforcement learning methods. TuningEngine uses the results of those fine-tuning runs to create (hopefully) a better AI model, which is then automatically redeployed into the customer environment.
While it’s ostensibly built for fine-tuning, there’s also a security aspect to TuningAgent, Denworth said.
“Our conclusion was if we don’t handle fine tuning, then that’s going to be a security gap that ultimately makes AI less trustable,” he said. “And it just happens to be this is the point in time in terms of our product development, where it becomes the right time to infuse model evolution into the platform to kind of get close, or as close as possible, to that thinking machine vision that we started with 10 years ago.”
Hallack delivers a keynote at VAST Forward 2026
VAST is also delivering a new capability called Polaris that will simplify the management of VAST customer environments. Polaris is a global control plane designed to provision, operate, and orchestrate VAST clusters. It will start with support for major public cloud platforms, and will be expanded to support on-prem systems later.
VAST is making a slew of other announcements at its conference, which is expected to host 1,200 attendees jn Salt Lake City this week.
VAST has not wavered from that initial goal to build a thinking machine. DASE, the AI OS, and all of the many engines are stops on that journey, Hallak said during a press briefing at VAST Forward.
“It took us 10 years. It was a long journey. But over those 10 years we basically built…a lot of the parts that we think are needed to fill out this software infrastructure layer of the AI stack,” Hallak said. “We obviously started from storage and database and then DataEngine. Over the last few years, we’ve been adding more engines into it, to enable agents and to enable RAG and to add observability and security and all of these things that we think that we need for this AI operating system.”
Where will the company go next? It seems likely there will be more engines. But Hallak said that the company has not taken its eyes off the big prize.
“We always have our North Star, and that has been from day one, enabling these very, very large scale AI systems,” Hallak said in the press briefing. “Even before generative AI, it was hedge funds and it was life science institutes. That was our North Star, and it still is. We’re trying to build a thinking machine. We think if we can build a thinking machine, then it solves all the other problems for us.”
The post VAST Data Expands AI Data Stack, Keeps Eye on North Star appeared first on HPCwire.
The president reiterated a plan to ban big investors from buying single-family homes, but some experts say bigger remedies are needed.
Exclusive: Police meet Lindsay Hoyle to explain error after Hoyle shared tip that Mandelson planned to flee UK
The Metropolitan police has apologised to the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, for accidentally revealing he was the source of a tipoff that Peter Mandelson supposedly planned to flee the UK, prompting officers to arrest the former ambassador.
In yet another twist to the saga of Mandelson’s departure from his post and the Met’s investigation into allegations he fed secret government information to Jeffrey Epstein, Hoyle told MPs on Wednesday that he passed the information to police.
Continue reading...Committee to Protect Journalists report says Israel also to blame for 81% of ‘intentionally targeted’ journalist killings
A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, two-thirds of them by Israeli forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
It was the second consecutive year in which killings of members of the press reached unprecedented levels, and the second year running in which Israel was responsible for roughly two-thirds of the total, the New York-based independent organisation, which documents attacks on journalists worldwide, said in its annual report published on Wednesday.
Continue reading...AI is leading the way in the S26 Ultra's cameras, though there are some upgrades for content creators.
Admitting it made some missteps when it announced the changes, Discord is pushing those modifications back to later this year.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high-profile trip to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month sprouted 1,000 takes, counter-takes, editorials, op-eds, and analyses from the right, the center, and the left. Ocasio-Cortez, along with her new foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, attempted to paint a vision for a “progressive foreign policy” that would embrace “working class-centered politics” to “stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.”
It’s a perfectly sensible, and potentially appealing, narrative that speaks to a real truth: There is little doubt rising inequality and decades of neoliberal policy have fueled the rise of the far right. But it was nevertheless jarring to watch an American Democratic politician immediately pivot to a vision of the future where a progressive U.S. president could usher in an era of consistently applied Liberal Rules Based Order without reckoning with their own party’s role in supporting a genocide for 15 months. Aiding and abetting a genocide makes you a war criminal, and progressive Democrats should, in principle, have no issues explicitly condemning war criminals. Genocide is a central moral transgression that needs to be faced head-on, not just referenced opaquely, or in passing, or as an abstraction we need to avoid in the future. Its culprits within the party need to be called out by name and admonished before anyone can move on to this newer, kinder version of the Liberal Rules Based Order.
Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.
Despite her now-infamous lie at the 2024 Democratic National Convention that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” Ocasio-Cortez has a comparatively solid record on Palestine. She was early to call for a ceasefire and to use the word “genocide,” and has been consistent and vocal in her opposition to new military aid to Israel (with a mixed record on Iron Dome funding). But it seems clear that anyone attempting to be a progressive foreign policy leader needs to address a central issue before we move on to articulating a broader vision for the years ahead: What is the plan to hold the Democrats responsible for genocide accountable?
Beyond Ocasio-Cortez, any progressive looking to present themselves as a party leader needs to answer this question. Committing to holding Republicans — who are just as guilty — responsible is an easy “yes.” Committing to holding the previous Democratic administration responsible is far more politically difficult but just as necessary.
There’s been a total erosion of trust between the Democratic Party and large sections of its base on this issue, and there’s reportedly new evidence in the party’s still-secret “autopsy report” that shows Gaza may have been a significant factor in handing the White House back to Donald Trump. But so far, there’s been no discussion or plan from progressives in Congress to lay out what accountability would look like for Biden officials, namely Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Director of Policy Planning Jon Finer, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and the president himself. These officials, among others, not only armed and funded genocide, but worked to cover it up, lied to Congress about it, and repeatedly misled the public.
The Intercept reached out to five members of Congress who are broadly considered leaders on progressive foreign policy and have also called Gaza either a genocide or an ethnic cleansing — Reps. Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, and Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Bernie Sanders — to ask what their vision for accountability would be for Biden and Trump officials alike.
Tlaib, who sponsored the Gaza genocide resolution in the House last November that both Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez co-sponsored, made clear that Biden officials, specifically Blinken, should not only be banished from Democratic Party politics, but also investigated and prosecuted for their role in the genocide.
“U.S. officials should absolutely be held accountable for their role in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” Tlaib said in a statement to The Intercept. “Genocide is the crime of crimes. It is not something you can commit or enable and just move on from without facing justice. This is true for Biden administration officials and Trump administration officials alike. The evidence is clear that high-level Biden officials, such as Secretary of State Blinken, knew exactly what was happening in Gaza, silenced internal reports of war crimes and forced starvation, and proceeded to lie to the American people and continue to arm, fund, and enable mass atrocities.”
Tlaib would go on to demand “the U.S. to fulfill its binding legal obligations as a party to the Genocide Convention, including by investigating and prosecuting individuals in the United States implicated in these crimes.”
Van Hollen, who has called what occurred in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing” (but, somewhat conspicuously, has not labeled it a genocide), offered a firm rebuke of Biden and Trump officials, albeit in vaguer terms than Tlaib, telling The Intercept: “Officials of both parties should be held accountable for U.S. complicity in the man-made humanitarian disaster, indiscriminate killings, and massive destruction we have witnessed in Gaza. Those who have chosen to bury the truth, whitewash the facts, and directly facilitate American complicity should be disqualified from positions in the current and future administrations.”
Sanders did not return multiple requests for comment. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez, who are both seen as strong contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Discussing accountability for an ongoing atrocity might seem premature, especially given that key Democratic leaders, chief among them Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, are still supporting Israel. But for the purposes of giving shape to this topic, holding up Biden’s lockstep backing of genocide in Gaza for 15 months is worth isolating and discussing in its own right.
The reason why it matters, aside from the intrinsic virtue of justice, is that the assumption that those covering up, arming, and funding a genocide could do so, half-heartedly mumble some excuse, and everything would eventually go back to Business As Usual in the coming years was the exact dynamic they were counting on when they helped Israel carry out its genocide. They knew full well this dynamic would play out, as it did for Vietnam, post-9/11 CIA torture, and Iraq before it. Those who unleashed untold horrors, mass death, starvation, and wiped out entire families could — in the event it became a minor PR headache— feign powerlessness, insist they were actually changing things from the inside or index it as a “mistake,” then eventually ease their way back into the liberal foreign policy establishment.
Key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback.
This plan appears to be working, as key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback. Finer and Sullivan started a chummy podcast for Vox and the latter has joined the left-leaning Foreign Policy for America as well as Harvard Kennedy School. Blinken has joined the board of directors of the influential liberal think tank Center for American Progress, with Finer joining him there as a distinguished senior fellow. No harm, no foul; everything is going back to business as usual.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon anyone from the left wing of the party running in 2028 to not only openly reject this dynamic, but also to articulate what real accountability ought to look like for the Democrats who co-authored the deaths of at least 75,000 Palestinians including over 17,000 Palestinian children. It’s not the only step, but it is a requisite first step before anyone can begin to define a populist and humanitarian foreign policy.
The moral minimum would be to support war crime prosecutions, as Tlaib explicitly does, and refer top Biden officials to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. The optical minimum — the bottom of the barrel, the floor under the floor of the barrel — is the wholesale rejection of the genocide’s top architects from polite society, to declare that they ought to have no role in any future Democratic Party event, administration, consultancy, or top think tank.
This, of course, is in no way a sufficient punishment, but it’s the bare minimum for anyone who believes Gaza is a genocide. Any embrace of Blinken, Finer, Sullivan, or Biden in these circles is to desecrate and belittle the very concept of genocide. It is to mock the intelligence of their supporters and the suffering of Palestinians in equal measure.
“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up.
During the 2024 presidential election, anti-genocide progressives framed their falling in line to support genocidal actors as an unfortunate but pragmatic form of harm reduction — that Biden, and later Harris, were the only realistic alternative to Trump, who very much also supported genocide (a claim that has certainly proven to be true). Since the fact of genocide was baked into our electoral duopoly, playing along was a necessary evil to mitigate harms elsewhere, we were told.
Regardless of whether this logic was morally sound, it no longer applies in February 2026, two years away from the presidential primary. There is no need for Biden, Sullivan, Finer, and Blinken. A progressive campaign, whether for the Senate or the White House, can function without them. The only reason why any progressive would condemn a genocide, but refuse to explicitly reject Biden-era war criminals, is because they do not believe their own words. They evoke the word to signal maximum outrage but do not believe it carries inherent obligations and implications.
Under the banner of “unity,” many will insist that rejecting, much less demanding prosecutions of, Biden officials is simply not possible. We’d like to in the abstract, they may insist, but Savvy Pragmatism has once again forced us to “bridge the divide” and unite the left and liberals. This was, albeit in the “bipartisan” context, the logic former President Barack Obama used when he refused to prosecute any Bush administration war criminals for their widespread use of torture. “Look forward, not back,” Obama infamously insisted in 2009 under the auspices of “unity” and “healing.”
This culture of not looking backward helped create the circumstances under which the genocide in Gaza could foment. Biden officials could do whatever they wanted to do, regardless of the depravity and cruelty, knowing full well this cycle of impunity would be fiercely backstopped by elites in both parties.
“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up. Biden officials knew this, Trump officials currently know this, and the next administration that seeks to dispossess, starve, and kill Palestinians will no doubt know it too. If progressives in Congress can’t break this cycle of elite impunity, who will? If they can’t draw a line in the sand, name names within their own party, and have a principled opposition to genocide and its authors, what is the point of having a left wing of the Democrats at all? There will always be some existential election just around the corner to deploy as pretext to discipline the left wing into complying and accepting the unacceptable. Years out from 2028, no such excuse exists now. Biden and his officials remain either obscure or unpopular.
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Khanna not replying to requests for comment on this topic is not, of course, evidence they have no plans to address the matter of accountability at some further date. But at some point in the near future, it’s an issue they will have to confront. Accusations of genocide carry certain obligations and implications. It’s not an abstract moral claim or a box to be checked; it’s a duty to stand in clear opposition to the architects of genocide. If those attempting to articulate a progressive foreign policy cannot do this, if they can’t name names and commit to — at the very least — purging Biden officials from the party and liberal spaces, then how can any progressive vision for foreign policy be seen as remotely credible?
The post There’s No “Progressive Foreign Policy” Without a Reckoning for Dems Who Supported Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.
Together with a team in China a team at TU Wien extends the capabilities of quantum computers: Instead of combinations of 0s and 1s, the new technology uses four different states simultaneously.
Feb. 25, 2026 — The collaboration of TU Wien with research groups in China represents a crucial building block for a new kind of quantum computers: The realization of a novel type of quantum logic gate makes it possible to carry out quantum computations on pairs of photons that are each in four different quantum states, or combinations thereof – an important milestone for optical quantum computers that opens up new opportunities.
Marcus Huber (left) and Nicolai Friis. Credit: Alexander Rommel / TU Wien.
The study has now been published in the scientific journal Nature Photonics.
The basic idea of quantum computers is simple: While a classical computer only works with the values 0 and 1, quantum physics allows for arbitrary combinations of these states. In a certain sense, a quantum bit (qubit) can be in the states 0 and 1 simultaneously. This makes it possible to develop algorithms that can solve some problems much faster than a comparable classical computer.
However, such superpositions can in principle involve more than two states. Depending on what degree of freedom one considers, a quantum system such as a photon may not just have two different settings—two different outcomes of a potential measurement—but many. In this case one refers to the system as a qudit rather than a qubit. For quantum computations this can bring along significant advantages, but ultimately one requires a mechanism by which two such qudits can interact in a controlled way. A research team at TU Wien was able to theoretically design a scheme to jointly process two qudits encoded in two photons—and a team in China successfully realized this scheme in their laboratory, resulting in a novel type of quantum gate, with potentially revolutionary applications.
Until now, quantum-computing experiments with photons have often been carried out by relying on the polarization of photons—a property with two different possible measurement outcomes. From the point of view of quantum physics, the photon can be in a superposition of these two options, like moving simultaneously North and East when walking Northeast.
“We use photons in a fundamentally different way,” explained Nicolai Friis from the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics of TU Wien. “We aren’t interested in the polarization, but in the spatial wave form of the photons, which can be in infinitely many different states, corresponding to different orbital angular momenta.”
The team surrounding Nicolai Friis has developed a procedure that works with two such photons: Both can be in arbitrary superpositions of different wave forms. Through sophisticated manipulation, two initially independent photons can be brought into a joint state—a so-called “entangled” state. Likewise, the new quantum gate can also be used to separate two entangled photons in a controlled way to make the states of the photons independent of each other again.
Exactly such an operation—an entangling quantum gate—is needed to build quantum computers, to carry out calculations on multiple inputs. For a first experiment, the researchers decided to work with four different states. “This is as if, in addition to the North-South and East-West directions, one would have access to two additional axes,” said Friis. “In some sense one is moving in a four-dimensional space, and we can work with arbitrary combinations of such states.”
Realizing their theoretical ideas did not just require a new protocol but also made it necessary to significantly improve the state of the art in technology and experimental precision—an area in which the team of Hui-Tian Wang in China made remarkable progress.
“We were successful in realizing a quantum logic gate that works with two photons that can be prepared in combinations of four different states,” said Nicolai Friis. “We can entangle the photons—and we can do so in a heralded fashion, meaning that we can tell, when the protocol worked. And if it did not, we can repeat the procedure. This is what is needed in practice.”
The new approach is hoped to make quantum information technology more efficient and stable in different areas. “We need fewer particles to carry the same amount of quantum information,” said Marcus Huber (also from the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics of TU Wien). “This has many advantages, also with a view towards the reliability of quantum operations.”
The new study thus—quite literally—opens up new dimensions for quantum technologies.
Original Publication
Z-F Liu et al, Heralded high-dimensional photon–photon quantum gate, Nature Photonics (2026).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-026-01846-x
Source: TU Wien
The post TU Wien Team Advances Optical Quantum Computing with Four-State Photons appeared first on HPCwire.
SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 25, 2026 — Today at VAST Forward 2026, VAST Data announced an end-to-end, fully CUDA accelerated AI data stack, delivered through an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA. With the VAST AI Operating System now running directly on NVIDIA-powered servers, customers can eliminate data bottlenecks across the AI pipeline and deliver ingestion, retrieval, analytics, and inference in a single unified platform.
By accelerating both data services and the compute layer as one coherent system, the VAST AI OS eliminates the operational complexity of stitching together separate storage, database, and AI infrastructure stacks. The result is a simpler and faster path from experimentation to production for RAG pipelines, agentic systems, and continuous AI workloads.
Designed in collaboration with NVIDIA, the VAST CNode-X introduces a new generation of NVIDIA-Certified Systems that transform how AI infrastructure is built and operated. In addition to providing high-performance storage services to NVIDIA GPU-accelerated clusters, the VAST AI OS now runs directly on NVIDIA-powered servers, making these systems first-class infrastructure citizens inside the VAST platform. This architectural shift enables VAST to orchestrate AI pipelines, high performance analytics, vector search, RAG functions, and agent runtimes as a single, unified software stack.
New CNode-X servers provide the computing foundation for the VAST AI OS to leverage a wide variety of NVIDIA software libraries and APIs directly within core VAST software services, including the VAST DataEngine and VAST DataBase. These accelerations are embedded deep inside the platform, delivering higher performance, lower latency, and improved efficiency across real-time SQL analytics, vector search and retrieval, as well as a wide-range of AI inferencing workflows.
“Ten years ago, we set out to build a system that could continuously refine data into intelligence and action,” said Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO of VAST Data. “That future is here. By accelerating both compute and the data paths inside the VAST AI OS with NVIDIA, we’re giving customers a faster, simpler way to operationalize retrieval, analytics, and agentic workflows as one coherent pipeline so AI can move from pilot to durable, production systems.”
“NVIDIA is reinventing every pillar of computing for AI. With VAST Data, we’re transforming the storage of AI infrastructure,” said Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “CNode-X is CUDA-accelerated at every layer to give AI agents persistent memory so they can work on complex problems over days or weeks, and eventually years, without forgetting — opening the world to the next frontier of AI.”
With new GPU-accelerated VAST CNode-X servers as the foundation, VAST is bringing together broad support for NVIDIA-accelerated capabilities inside the VAST AI OS and deploys them within a full-stack software platform that runs and orchestrates AI pipelines, vector search services, and production AI pipelines. New capabilities include:
Hardware Choice for Accelerating the VAST AI Operating System
VAST plans to bring CNode-X servers to market through leading OEM partners, including Cisco and Supermicro, enabling customers to procure GPU-accelerated infrastructure through their preferred vendors while maintaining a consistent VAST software, support, and operational experience.
Through certified configurations delivered with OEM partners, VAST provides a faster and more supportable path to production AI. As enterprise AI pipelines become continuous systems, VAST combines its data platform with full-stack NVIDIA accelerated computing to deliver high-performance retrieval, analytics, and vector search that keep GPUs productive across RAG, real-time analytics, and large-scale AI workloads.
“AI doesn’t scale on isolated components. It scales through integrated systems,” said Jeremy Foster, SVP and General Manager, Cisco Compute. “Customers need infrastructure that keeps data secure and tightly aligned with intelligent networking and GPU-accelerated compute for an efficient, production-ready platform. Cisco’s collaboration with partners like VAST and NVIDIA is delivering the enterprise-ready foundation organizations need to help securely scale AI with performance, resilience, and control.”
“Production AI demands a new level of integration across compute, acceleration, and the data platform,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO, Supermicro. “Together with VAST Data and NVIDIA, we’re delivering a truly integrated AI Data Platform that removes complexity from enterprise AI. By bringing high-performance compute, scalable data infrastructure, and intelligent software together as one solution, we’re enabling organizations to move from experimentation to production faster and unlock real business value from AI.”
More from HPCwire: VAST Data Expands AI Data Stack, Keeps Eye on North Star
About VAST Data
VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.
Source: VAST Data
The post VAST Data Introduces End-to-End Fully Accelerated AI Data Stack with NVIDIA appeared first on HPCwire.
Settling debt for $0.20 on the dollar sounds too good to be true, but is that type of agreement really realistic?
Aliya Rahman, who was dragged out of her car in January by agents, arrested for ‘refusing to obey orders’ to sit down
A guest of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, was arrested by Capitol police during the State of the Union address.
Omar had invited Aliya Rahman, a US citizen and Minneapolis resident who in January was removed from her car and dragged by immigration agents in the city as part of the Trump administration’s increased efforts to arrest and deport alleged undocumented immigrants. The officers had been shouting at her to move.
Continue reading...Organizers scramble for new venue after University of Southern Maine cites sanctions over Francesca Albanese’s virtual talk
The University of Southern Maine abruptly revoked access to an on-campus venue days before a conference about Palestine was to take place there, citing the participation in the program of an individual under US sanctions and following pressure from local legislators.
More than 300 participants have registered to attend the “Consequence of Palestine” conference, which was slated to include remote participation from Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, who has been under sanction by the Trump administration since last year.
Continue reading...
EAMON BONSALL
Opinion Columnist
During a very unproductive and boring day last week, I decided that I was in the mood for a movie. However, I realized that my first instinct was not to look on Main Street Movies 5’s website, but instead to search through a plethora of streaming services for a movie to watch.
It’s a little sad to think about how the days of Redbox and CDs are over, but the emergence of new digital technologies have made inroads in improving film quality, efficiency and more.
However, the development of streaming services and the declining popularity of movie theaters raise concerns about the future of contemporary American filmmaking.
It seems now that modern American films fall into one of two categories: remakes of already popular, well-known films, or poor quality movies that only aim to make a quick million dollars.
How did we get here? Films from the start of the century, such as “Memento” (2000) and “Shutter Island” (2010), would never be made today because they require too much effort and thought.
I believe that one of the reasons why original, well-developed films are not made today is because of the reduced attention spans of Americans, with entertainment forms such as TikTok and Instagram reels being a primary source of enjoyment for young people.
If filmmakers believe that young people aren’t willing to participate in a two-hour plus movie, then why would they devote care and attention into making them? Surely, it would be much easier to make a cheap, unoriginal and short movie worth millions of dollars.
The emergence of lazy filmmaking is turning a classic art form into a cheap caricature of its former self. If we continue to make poor films, then maybe one day we’ll be in a world of writing poor books and painting poor art. Some would say we’re already there.
The world of American filmmaking has changed a lot over the course of the past century. We have gone from soundless, slow-paced, black-and-white pictures to the modern, fast-paced action and thriller films we’re used to today.
One of the main reasons for this shift of interest is that the American zeitgeist has simply diverted its attention to faster-paced media. While at one point a slow romance film was enough to whet the appetite, now a movie has to be action-packed and fast-paced to satiate the average American viewer.
Creating a film also used to be significantly more difficult and expensive than it is now. While some high-caliber action movies have budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, anyone can create a movie with their iPhone and a tripod.
It’s very hard to pinpoint what exactly went wrong with modern cinema. What was once an iconic and trailblazing art form has devolved into a quick way to make some money and garner some social media attention.
It’s an unfortunate truth we have to accept, that American film may never return to what it was even 10 or 15 years ago. We didn’t realize how good we had it in entertainment until a great era of film was already over.
However, like the real Great Depression of the late 1920s, there is still some hope that the entertainment industry can recover from this deficit.
If we want to see change in the American film industry, we have to be willing to see and experience new things we’ve never seen before. A lot of people I know are very against “artsy” films by independent filmmakers.
One of the best examples of modern and inventive filmmakers is Robert Eggers. Movies such as “The Witch” (2015) and “The Lighthouse” (2019) are artistic and emotionally deep, so long as the viewer is able to convince themselves to wait for the payoff.
Sometimes, the longest waits can deliver the sweetest reward. Modern audiences are too focused on quick, swift gratification rather than the indulgence of a prolonged adventure. Eggers is an example of someone who provides such an adventure.
I get why people don’t like these artsy, independent films. Sometimes they’re a little slower and less action-packed, but what audiences need to understand is that not every movie is going to be “thrilling.” Sometimes, what makes a film great is its story and artistic value.
A great example of a well-made, action-packed film is “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” (2022). The movie perfectly captures a captivating story combined with the deep emotion of a mother and daughter at odds with each other. It’s the perfect way to combine an art form and the silver screen.
Film is not everyone’s cup of tea, which I totally understand. Modern cinema especially, can be particularly drab, but if we are able to promote the idea of original, creative films, we could return to an age of greatness in American movies.
Eamon Bonsall is an opinion columnist at The Review. His opinions are his own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. He may be reached at ebons@udel.edu.
A hacker exploited Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday. The activity started in December and continued for roughly a month. In all, 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data was stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter records, government employee credentials and civil registry files, according to the researchers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sharon Graham tells chancellor she should ‘back British industry’ by increasing military spending
The head of Britain’s largest trade union has demanded that Rachel Reeves be sacked as chancellor if the Treasury continues to hold up a multibillion-pound defence investment plan.
Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, said tens of thousands of jobs were at risk from political dithering and called on ministers to “back British industry” by signing off on future defence contracts.
Continue reading...Currently available for testing, Oura wants your feedback on this women's health AI chatbot.
Drivers of SUV and pickup truck emerge unscathed from incident in trendy section of Nebraska city
Surveillance video captured the dramatic moment a sinkhole opened up on a busy intersection in south-central Omaha, Nebraska, swallowing up two vehicles.
The incident happened on Tuesday afternoon in a trendy section of the midwest city, when a sport utility vehicle and a pickup truck waiting at a traffic light dropped into a hole several feet deep as the pavement under them suddenly gave way. Neither driver was injured, police said.
Continue reading...The Broadway actor’s nine-decade career included beloved screen roles and coaching Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda
Sondra Lee, the Broadway and film star, died on Monday of natural causes at the age of 97.
The news of her death came from her collaborator and friend the Rev Joshua Ellis, a former Broadway publicist and an interspiritual minister.
Continue reading...Former Northern Ireland correspondent Vincent Kearney subjected to ‘unprecedented’ surveillance, says lawyer
Police and MI5 subjected a BBC journalist to a “long and consistent campaign of unlawful interference” by obtaining communications data from his mobile phone, a tribunal has heard.
The surveillance was targeted at Vincent Kearney, who was the BBC’s Northern Ireland home affairs correspondent, and occurred over an eight-year period as authorities sought to identify his sources.
Continue reading...Ex-US ambassador’s media strategy looks set to be ‘attack as best form of defence’, PR consultants suggest
For those seeking to understand Peter Mandelson’s media strategy as he navigates the greatest crisis of a crisis-strewn life, the latest instalment of the Jeffrey Epstein files may offer a steer.
“You and your lawyers must start setting down the irrefutable facts, build a narrative and fight back,” Mandelson advised the disgraced financier in May 2011, according to the emails released by the US Department of Justice.
Continue reading...Commentary: Samsung needed to give us a reason to be excited about its latest flagship. It delivered.
I have noticed a relationship between the gap between the tire and footpads/enclosures and the efficiency of the motor. In short, when the gap is too small, objects picked up by the tire are impacting the footpads/enclosures causes small spikes in current. These add up to a 10-15% efficiency loss.
The reason I noticed this is because I build my own rails. I prefer the board to be as short as possible for agility, so minimizing the tire gap is a priority. Having a gap that is too small can be an issue for mud and sticks that can get caught in the gap, so I have always preferred a gap of 1/4" or more.
With growler sized rails and tires, the distance between the footpad/enclosures is about 11" and the tire is 10.7-10.8". This gives only about 1/8" tire gap. At this gap I notice decreases in efficiency from 20-22 wh/mi to 25-28 wh/mi on streets and 38-42 wh/mi to 44-48 wh/mi trail, compared to a gap of at least 1/4".
This has also translated to increased motor temperatures when trail riding. This is harder to quantify. I have a bit of a sixth sense about when the motor will overheat from experience. I noticed it overheating slightly sooner than expected. I checked all my wires and connections searching for added resistance that would produce this heat, In the end, I found it was the tire gap causing the issue.
I believe this is less of an issue with slick tires since they pick up less debris. I definitely notice this on the newer soft, treaded tires, but it has also been an issue for me with the original hoosier treaded I used to ride.
A hot phone can kill your battery quicker. Cooling it better will hopefully mean fewer abrupt shutdowns.
This March could be a smart time for seniors in need of extra financing to pursue a reverse mortgage. Here's why.
Commentary: This new Galaxy S26 feature gives me hope for this year's batch of AI integrations on smartphones.
Peter Kyle signs cooperation deal on competition and says it is not a case of being nostalgic for pre-Brexit past
The British public are “not nostalgic” for the pre-Brexit past but are pragmatic and want to move forward and “deepen” ties with the EU on trade and the economy, the business secretary, Peter Kyle, has said.
Signing an agreement in Brussels to cooperate closely on competition issues, Kyle said he thought the deal was “a real vindication of the reset and the relationships that have emerged between the EU and the UK” since Labour came to power.
Continue reading...The new $250 Galaxy Buds 4 Pro have definitely improved in design and performance. Here's why I awarded them a CNET Editors' Choice.
Here's how the new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra compares with its Apple rival, the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Samsung's high-end phone gets a subtle makeover, as well as some improvements to the camera, battery and display. Plus, lots of AI.
I went hands-on with Samsung's newest base and plus model phones. The Galaxy S26 has a larger screen and a bigger battery, while the S26 Plus is a lot like the S25 Plus.
DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S. Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, confirmed significant year-over-year sales increases that its president credits to younger customers. Vidiots, a video store in Los Angeles, averaged 170 rentals a day in January 2026 -- its biggest month ever -- after loaning about 22,000 discs total in 2023 and roughly 50,000 in 2024. Barnes & Noble reported DVD and Blu-ray sales growth of "mid-double digits" over the past year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exclusive: Jamie Raskin, top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, asks for justice department briefing
House Democrats on Wednesday demanded a briefing from the justice department on the removal of Gail Slater, who was forced to resign as head of the antitrust division this month under a cloud of controversy and fraught tensions with her bosses inside the Trump administration.
The request from Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, and Jerry Nadler, a Democratic New York congressman, marked the first step in what is almost certain to become a much larger investigation should Democrats reclaim the House majority in the midterm elections and gain subpoena power.
Continue reading...Emergency meeting called to discuss festival’s ‘future direction’ after series of controversies
The organisation that manages the Berlin film festival is to meet for talks amid reports that its American director faces dismissal after a series of rows over Gaza.
In a statement on Wednesday, the office of Germany’s federal government commissioner for culture and media said the emergency meeting on Thursday had been called to debate the “future direction of the Berlinale”.
Continue reading...If it's time for a new desk, why not look at the best desks?
Four House Democrats demanded the top Federal Bureau of Prisons official explain how he plans to address the agency’s “persistent, unsafe conditions” and “pervasive shortage of critical staff,” driven in part by corrections officers fleeing the bureau for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Outlined in a six-page letter sent Friday to BOP Director William Marshall III, the lawmakers’ questions come after a ProPublica investigation found that workers at federal lockups from Florida to California had been lured away by the $50,000 starting bonus and higher pay at ICE, which more than doubled its number of officers and agents last year during the Trump administration’s monthslong recruiting blitz. The prisons bureau, meanwhile, lost a net of more than 1,800 workers last year.
“We are deeply concerned that these developments compromise the safety and security of both inmates and staff,” Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Lucy McBath of Georgia, Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Joe Neguse of Colorado wrote in their letter. “The shrinking existing workforce has been left to contend with an ever-growing use of overtime, which leads to fatigue, burnout, and increased attrition.”
The representatives said that short staffing, in turn, has led to more lockdowns, more violence and less access to recidivism-reducing programs for prisoners. Their letter also raised questions about the cancellation of the union contract, which they noted critics have said “appears retaliatory,” and the ongoing reliance on “augmentation” — the practice of forcing nurses, teachers and plumbers who work in the prisons to fill in as corrections officers — to plug staffing gaps.
“We believe these deeply troubling issues require concrete answers,” the lawmakers wrote. They set a 30-day deadline for the bureau to respond in writing.
Prison union officials have also pressed the case, urging lawmakers to insist that Marshall and his deputy, Josh Smith, testify before Congress on the issue.
The prison agency declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the lawmakers’ letter, saying it would respond directly to Congress.
In a statement, a spokesperson said that the BOP “continues to prioritize efforts” to increase staffing, adding that some staff will always have to step in as corrections officers “for the safety and security of staff, inmates and the public.”
The BOP has long struggled to hire and retain enough workers to staff its facilities, where roughly 34,700 employees are responsible for more than 138,000 prisoners. As of 2023, union officials said some 40% of corrections officer jobs remained vacant. That same year, the lack of staff helped land the prison system on a government list of high-risk agencies with serious vulnerabilities.
As part of a long-term hiring push, the bureau turned to signing bonuses, retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. Although those efforts drew in a net of more than 1,200 people in 2024 — the bureau’s largest workforce increase in a decade — the cost of hiring incentives, along with raises, overtime and inflation, strained an already-stagnant budget.
Early last year, the agency paused hiring and retention incentives to save money, a move that threatened to undermine the prior year’s staffing gains. Still, the financial strain continued and, by the fall, dozens of staff and prisoners were telling ProPublica about unusual scarcities in facilities across the country. Some prisons fell behind on utility and trash bills, while others ran out of staple foods including eggs and beef. At one point, a prison in Louisiana came within days of running out of food for inmates before union officials intervened and urged agency leaders to fix the problem.
In their letter last week, the representatives said they were “alarmed” by the financial shortfalls ProPublica reported, as well as by the worsening staffing figures. Last year, the bureau’s net loss of employees was larger than in any other year since 2017, according to data ProPublica obtained through an open records request.
With a dwindling workforce, the bureau’s overtime costs have soared. According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, in 2025 the federal prison system spent more than $387 million on overtime, a number surpassed only once in the past decade.
Several prison officials who asked to remain anonymous told ProPublica this month that officers at some facilities are often forced to work two to four double shifts per week, sometimes putting in so many overtime hours that prisoners have expressed concern.
“The only ones who like it are the predatory inmates,” one corrections officer told ProPublica. “Inmates don’t like super cops, but they at least want to feel like if they are attacked, someone will see it and stop it as quickly as they can. You ain’t getting that with a CO on a double who can barely keep his eyes open.”
Meanwhile, the lawmakers said they were “gravely concerned” about some of the ways BOP leaders have tried to save money and minimize the use of overtime, including by locking down facilities and skimping on staff, which, lawmakers said, the bureau then attempted to cover up.
When the Office of Inspector General visited one facility last year, the housing units were all well staffed, “a trick” the lawmakers said was accomplished only by extreme use of augmentation. “Reportedly, after the visit, the facility immediately resumed short-staffing units,” the lawmakers wrote. “Committee staff have reviewed housing unit staffing and augmentation rosters documenting this apparent effort to mislead the OIG.”
Last year, prison employees worked more than 700,000 augmentation hours, the most in any single year for at least a decade, according to the Congressional Research Service report.
“That’s why I left,” one former prison official told ProPublica last year, explaining that he chose to retire instead of being forced to abandon his duties resolving discrimination complaints to instead work as an officer on a housing unit two days a week.
The post Democrats Demand Answers for Federal Prison Staffing Shortage After Corrections Officers Flee for ICE Jobs appeared first on ProPublica.
João Francisco Inácio Brazão and Domingos Inácio Brazão sentenced for murder of Marielle Franco, a gay Black woman and rising political star
Two influential Brazilian politician brothers have been convicted by Brazil’s supreme court of ordering the murder of Marielle Franco, the Rio de Janeiro city councillor, nearly eight years ago.
João Francisco Inácio Brazão, the former congressman known as Chiquinho, and the former adviser to Rio’s court of auditors Domingos Inácio Brazão were sentenced to 76 years and three months in prison for the murders of Franco, 38, and her driver, Anderson Gomes, 39.
Continue reading...The State of the Union address has been in decline for decade as a TV spectacle, and Trump probably hastened that trend
In fulfillment of clause 1 of section 3 in article II of the US constitution, Donald Trump duly gave Congress “Information of the State of the Union” last night.
Information … and more information. At an hour and 47 minutes, this was the longest State of the Union address in history. As he has so often done in the past, Trump bobbed and weaved impressively (“the weave” is his own term for his meandering speaking style). He zigged and zagged, taunting Democrats for much of the speech (he called Zohran Mamdani a “communist” and took pot shots at Democrats throughout the night), while claiming to be a unifier when the mood struck.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was looking to repair the Druzhba oil pipeline but “it was not so fast,” Reuters reported.
Shipments of Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia have been cut off since 27 January, when Kyiv says a Russian strike hit pipeline equipment in western Ukraine.
Continue reading...Israel welcomes move described by Palestinian Authority as undermining possibility of an independent state
The US will provide on-site consular services in two Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank for the first time, breaking with previous policy, in a move that has been criticised by Palestinian officials as “a clear violation of international law”.
In a post on X, the US embassy in Jerusalem said that as part of an initiative to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence, it would provide Americans with routine passport services in the West Bank settlement of Efrat on Friday “for one day only”.
Continue reading...Fight the mental fatigue and shoulder stiffness of daily desk life with the best standing desks.
Democrats accuse president’s address of litany of lies as Republicans hail his bullish claims about year back in office
Congressional Democrats lined up on Tuesday night to call Donald Trump a liar and Republicans said America had never been greater. The country’s longest-ever State of the Union address had ended, and the two parties had, again, watched entirely different speeches.
Trump’s address ran for nearly two hours, with the president touching on tariffs, border security, military recruitment and energy production, among other topics. He told the country the economy was booming, inflation was under control and a golden age was at hand, but Democrats were not persuaded.
Continue reading...Drinks maker reduces sales and profit forecast for second time in four months amid weak demand in US and China
Diageo has slashed its dividend and cut its annual sales and profit forecast for the second time in four months, as the maker of Guinness warned of capacity constraints affecting drinkers of “the black stuff” in London pubs.
The world’s largest spirits maker – which owns brands including Smirnoff vodka, Johnnie Walker whisky and Don Julio tequila – lost more than £5bn of its market value on Wednesday as it reported weak demand in the US and China in the first results released under the new chief executive, Sir Dave Lewis.
Continue reading...Officers say flood of low-quality reports is draining resources and slowing cases amid New Mexico lawsuit
Meta’s use of artificial intelligence software to moderate its social media platforms is generating large volumes of useless reports about cases of child sexual abuse, which are draining resources and hindering investigations, said officers from the US Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) taskforce.
“We get a lot of tips from Meta that are just kind of junk,” Benjamin Zwiebel, a special agent with the ICAC taskforce in New Mexico, said last week during his testimony in the state’s trial against Meta. The state’s attorney general alleges the company’s platforms are putting profits over child safety. Meta disputes these allegations, citing changes it has introduced on its platforms, such as teen accounts with default protections. The ICAC taskforce is a nationwide network of law enforcement agencies coordinated with the US Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute online child exploitation and abuse cases.
Continue reading...About 50 million workers lack access to employer-sponsored retirement plans, a hurdle to setting aside money for old age.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will resign from his remaining roles at Harvard over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the university confirmed to CBS News.
Consumers today can easily spend more than $1,000 a year for streaming TV, music and other widely used apps, new analysis finds.
Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has apologized to staff of his foundation over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
The Parisians look to get the job done at home in this delicately poised UCL playoff.
Los Blancos take a slender lead home to the Bernabéu for the second leg of this fractious knockout playoff.
The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E. Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fractures and the sound waves they generate in the surrounding air. The team's earlier work, in 2010, had identified a sequence of transverse cracks racing across the width of the adhesive during peeling, and a 2024 follow-up established a direct correspondence between those cracks and the screeching sound, but neither study pinpointed a mechanism. The new findings show that a partial vacuum forms between the tape and the surface as each crack opens, and because the crack moves faster than air can rush in to fill the void, the vacuum travels along until it reaches the tape's edge and collapses into the stationary air outside, producing a discrete sound pulse.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nobel laureate Richard Axel announced resignation as co-director of Columbia University’s neuroscience institute
Dr Richard Axel, a molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, has announced that he is stepping down as the leader of a prestigious neuroscience institute at Columbia University over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Axel, who has taught at Columbia for 53 years, said in a statement on Tuesday that he would be leaving his post as co-director of the university’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute to “focus on research and teaching in my lab”.
Continue reading...Unimpressed tech equity campaigners compare move to ‘inviting in foxes to consult on the future of the henhouse’
Ministers have called in Tony Blair’s thinktank and private tech companies to guide them on deploying AI across the UK government in a move campaigners compared to “inviting in foxes to consult on the future of the henhouse”.
James Murray, chief secretary to the Treasury, chaired a meeting on Wednesday with the director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), the chair of IBM and senior executives at AI companies including Faculty AI, now part of Accenture, and Dex Hunter-Torricke, a former communications adviser at Google, Facebook and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Continue reading...A British gym chain is offering classes in "kidulting," luring adults into fitness with classes built around playground and PE class classics.
Australian detectives arrested two men over the alleged kidnapping and murder of an elderly grandfather in a suspected case of mistaken identity.
Government reviews options for university graduates on Plan 2 loans, such as increasing repayment thresholds
Ministers are examining ways to ease the burden of student loans after weeks of pressure over a policy pulling more people into repayments, the Guardian understands.
The Treasury and the Department for Education are reviewing different options to offer relief to graduates with Plan 2 student loans, often paying tens of thousands more than their original loan amount.
Continue reading...Minister told MPs the deal had been been paused, but that was immediately denied by the Foreign Office
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published figures showing that local authorities in England dealt with 1.26m flytipping incidents in 2024/25 – 9% increase on the previous year.
And there was an 11% increase in incidents involving a “tipper lorry load” amount of rubbish. There were 52,000 of these, up from 47,000 in 2023/24. Defra said these alone cost councils £19.3m.
These figures show the equivalent of 142 monster landfills a day took place, confirming what communities across the country know all too well – our beautiful countryside is being used by criminal gangs as their personal landfill.
For far too long, waste gangs have pocketed millions in illegal earning, poisoning our environment and our health without consequence. The Liberal Democrats are demanding an end to this environmental vandalism.
Continue reading...Minister ‘misspoke’ by telling MPs UK was ‘pausing for discussions with our American counterparts’, officials say
Plans to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius are still on track, the UK government has insisted, after a minister caused confusion by telling MPs that the deal was “paused”.
Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, was speaking on Wednesday as the deal came under increasing pressure from opposition parties in the UK and from Donald Trump.
Continue reading...Having Perplexity's AI and models on phones from the world's biggest phone-maker puts the company under a brighter light.
Gold is grabbing headlines, but silver, platinum and palladium tell a different investment story in today's market.
Feb. 25, 2026 — Researchers at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have developed a new tool providing a first step toward the ability to forecast space weather weeks in advance, instead of just hours. This advance warning could allow agencies and industries to mitigate impacts to GPS, power grids, astronaut safety and more.
The left figure shows solar observations of two warped toroid patterns (derived from SDO/HMI magnetograms) in the southern and northern hemispheres. PINN-derived results (center) show magnetic vectors (black arrows) overlaid on bulges (red) and depressions (blue) match with observed toroidal bands. The velocity field is marked with black arrows in the right image. These results provide clues about the global sources of active regions that produce space weather, which can impact our technical society.
The research team’s newly published research highlights a tool they developed called PINNBARDS (PINN-Based Active Regions Distribution Simulator), which bridges surface observations of solar active regions and deep solar magnetic dynamics. The PINNBARDS framework is advancing a new generation of physics-informed, AI-enabled forecasting tools to better understand and anticipate extreme space weather. PINNBARDS offers the potential for substantially longer forecast lead times, which is critical for safeguarding satellites, communications infrastructure and future human space exploration.
“The reconstructed subsurface states from PINNBARDS provide initial conditions for forward simulations of solar magnetic evolution, opening the door to predicting where and when large, flare-producing active regions are likely to emerge weeks in advance,” said Mausumi Dikpati, NSF NCAR senior scientist, who led the team and co-authored the paper.
The simulations for the research – including code development, testing, and production runs – utilized the Derecho supercomputer at the NSF NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer Center. The research was funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Guest Investigator Open (HGIO) program and Consequences of Fields and Flows in the Interior and Exterior of the Sun (COFFIES) DRIVE Center, a NASA-funded initiative where Dikpati is a co-investigator.
“One of COFFIES aims is to predict where and when the Sun will produce its next big, flare-generating active region,” said Todd Hoeksema, Stanford University professor and the lead of the COFFIES DRIVE Center. “By combining physics-based modeling with AI, this work lets us peer beneath the Sun’s surface and reconstruct the magnetic conditions that give rise to those regions.”
For more about the research, see the SwRI news release here.
About the Article
Title: A Physics Informed Neural Network for Deriving MHD State Vectors from Global Active Regions Observations
Authors: Subhamoy Chatterjee and Mausumi Dikpati
Journal: The Astrophysical Journal
More from HPCwire
Source: Audrey Merket, NCAR
The post NCAR: New Research Takes 1st Step Toward Advance Warnings of Space Weather appeared first on HPCwire.
States call move an illegal threat to public health and argue CDC puts children’s lives at risk with new guidance
More than a dozen states, including California, sued the Trump administration over its rollback of vaccine recommendations for children, calling the move an illegal threat to public health.
The states argue that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put children’s lives at risk when it announced last month that it would stop recommending all children get immunized against the flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis and RSV. Under the new guidance, which was met with criticism from medical experts, protections against those diseases are recommended only for certain groups deemed high risk or when doctors recommend them in what’s called “shared decision-making.”
Continue reading...Casey Means is an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and an advocate for his "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.
Fines for illegal dumping decreased over past year with only 0.2% of incidents resulting in court action
Fly-tipping incidents across England have reached the highest level since current records began, with most offences continuing to involve household waste.
In 2024-25, 1.26m fly-tipping incidents were recorded by local authorities, an increase of 9% on the 1.15m reported in the year before, according to data released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on Wednesday.
Continue reading...We're reporting live from Samsung's Unpacked event in San Francisco, where the company's expected to reveal the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra.
Corporation says broadcasting of N-word by Tourette syndrome campaigner was ‘serious mistake’
The BBC is to undertake a fast-track investigation into the broadcasting of a racial slur aired during its coverage of the Bafta film awards, amid rising anger inside the corporation over the error.
Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson could be heard shouting the N-word as Sinners stars Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for special visual effects at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan's Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan's offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The source said Japan's antitrust authorities would also be seeking clarification from Microsoft's parent company in the United States. Microsoft Japan is suspected of setting conditions that effectively shut out other services by limiting access to popular services on other cloud platforms, the source said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Water leak detectors can warn you this winter before pipes freeze and burst. These smart detectors performed the best in our tests.
Will recent declines in the mortgage interest rate climate continue this March? Here's what experts are expecting.
The Sharp Celerity oven harnesses the power of three types of heat to blast food to doneness even faster than an air fryer.
Looking to buy a home or refinance your current one? Here are the mortgage interest rates to know right now.
Microsoft co-founder admits affairs and calls meetings ‘huge mistake’ but denies involvement in Epstein’s crimes
Bill Gates apologized to staff of his foundation for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and admitted to two affairs but stated he did not participate in the convicted sex offender’s crimes, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
At a town hall on Tuesday, Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, said it was a “huge mistake to spend time with Epstein” and to bring Gates Foundation executives to meetings with Epstein.
Continue reading...I looked back to discover the untold story of how western intelligence was misread, even in Kyiv. The conclusion offers a stark warning for the future
Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and at this time of year it’s hard not to recall memories of the morning of 24 February 2022, when the fate of Ukraine and the history of Europe were irrevocably changed by the decision of the man in the Kremlin.
Around 9pm the evening before, I had received a message from a colleague at another news outlet. It was an unequivocal warning from an intelligence source that the war would start that night. We discussed it among the Guardian’s Ukraine reporting team and international editors. My colleague Emma Graham-Harrison, who was on an overnight train from Kyiv towards the frontline city of Mariupol, decided she would get off halfway, in the middle of the night, and beg a spot on the first train heading back to Kyiv. It turned out to be a wise move: Mariupol was soon under siege and the scene of much of the worst carnage of the war. Emma remained in Kyiv, part of our team covering the initial Russian attack on the capital.
Continue reading...“The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me,” says Jordan Uhl of Donald Trump’s Tuesday evening State of the Union. This week on the Intercept Briefing, co-hosts Uhl, Akela Lacy, and Jessica Washington disentangle Trump’s nearly two-hour-long speech so you don’t have to.
“This is who these people are. In some ways, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it,” says Lacy, in reference to Trump talking about kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “It is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.”
Washington adds, “The whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech.”
The co-hosts also dissect the Democratic Party’s official response to the State of the Union, delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl, Intercept contributor and co-host of this podcast, joined by my co-hosts.
Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.
JU: Akela, Jessica, it is late. We just sat through — endured, rather —nearly two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union and the multiple responses. We’ll get into some of what will surely be the main takeaways from this speech, but in a word or a few words, what are both of your initial reactions to tonight’s State of the Union?
JW: My word is “long.” I don’t think it needs an explanation.
AL: This is not a word, but I kept having an image in my head of villains in a superhero movie, standing around, laughing at what they’ve accomplished. [laughs]
JW: No, but you’re totally right because that one line about the food stamps. So there was this line from the very long speech that we’re describing where Donald Trump says that, he — I can’t remember exactly what word he gave.
AL: “Lifted off.” I think he said “lifted off.”
JW: Lifted off.
AL: Yeah.
JW: Lifted off 2.4 million people from food stamps as like an economic accomplishment. And that does give like Disney villain in a very specific way.
AL: “Dark” — dark is my one word.
JU: Yeah, that was certainly one way to frame plunging millions of people into food insecurity. And of course that was an applause line.
My takeaway would be the weaponized contrast. One thing I thought was a significant departure from past State of the Unions was how Trump specifically leaned into Democrats not standing and clapping for certain talking points. Now in the state of the union’s past, of course, the opposition party for the most part remains seated, but tonight felt like a slight departure from that partisan tradition where he singled them out. Repeatedly pointed out that they weren’t standing and clapping, and even on some points remarked how he was surprised that they even clapped.
Trump specifically leaned into Democrats not standing and clapping for certain talking points.
Trump delivered his last [joint session of Congress] address a year ago in a very different environment, coming off winning the presidency for a second time and major GOP wins that year. Things aren’t so rosy this time around. What do you both think has been the biggest change for Trump? What was the primary obstacle that he needed to clear or try to spin in tonight’s speech?
JW: There’s a lot that he had to clear up. I think there’s his loss on tariffs, obviously he’s still smarting from that, now saying that he’s going to do it anyway. A little bit confusing on what he means by that.
I think his “anti-war” agenda that he’s been trying to spin himself as very anti-war is difficult when he just did what he did in Venezuela and when we’re watching the preparations for a very likely strike on Iran. So he’s got a lot that he has to spin because he’s tried to create this image of himself as anti-war, as good on the economy — and those things are not panning out even remotely close to what he’s promised.
AL: And the Epstein files blowing up in his face. There was reporting today that apparently DOJ scrubbed allegations against Trump sexually abusing a minor, and we have some Democrats, I think Rashida Tlaib was yelling at him during this to release the Epstein files. And this is high on many Democrats’ mind, but obviously not that he would address this, but that’s in the background here. Not even in the background, it’s in the foreground right now.
And then, yeah, his approval ratings are lower than they were at this point in his first term. His disapproval ratings, I would say are higher, and his approval is about the same.
And there are two very different stories being told about the economy right now. Obviously, Democrats are — we’ll get to the response later — but trying to focus on affordability issues. And you have Trump pretty much making a mockery of that and trying to throw that in their faces while claiming that everything is fine and dandy when we know very clearly that it’s not, people have lost their health care, are paying exorbitant amounts just to get through on a day-to-day basis.
And I feel like this didn’t really come through. If you haven’t been paying attention, and you might have just been watching the State of the Union for pleasure — which I don’t know many people who are doing that — but he was able to get the One Big Beautiful Bill. As Jessie mentioned, the tariffs are falling apart. That was another major part of his economic agenda.
But you also have Republicans who are saying that they’re not necessarily going to go through with his pressure to have them codify tariffs or codify any of these other things into law. And this is not a “Let’s hand it to Republicans” moment, but they have also broken with him on Epstein in very small numbers. But not everything is hunky dory with him and the Republican caucus right now as well.
JU: I think any Republican opposition in Congress to another attempt to institute tariffs isn’t out of concern for those costs being passed on to the consumer. It’s simply out of fealty to corporate interests, the Chamber of Commerce, their donors.
That’s where he would meet opposition, not out of any purported concern for their base. And like you’re saying, there are two different stories about the economy. He’s bragging, similar to Pam Bondi in the Epstein hearing, about the Dow hitting 50,000. He’s bragging about the stock market.
Donald Trump: The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year.
JU: Those gains rarely affect the average working person. And then on the other side, you have “60 Minutes” reporting that SNAP and Medicaid benefits are facing the biggest federal funding cuts in history.
Another part of the speech that stood out was the focus on militarism. Along those lines on these funding cuts for these social safety net programs, we’re seeing a massive uptick in military spending. He’s committing to 5 percent of GDP in our military spending. And we saw a report over the past few days from Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that said a requested $500 billion increase in military spending is slowing down the budget process because the military doesn’t even know how they would spend that additional $500 billion.
So I’m curious, from both of your perspectives, how do you think this lands in the minds of the average voter? Granted, like you said Akela, who’s watching this for fun? But we live in a shortened attention span economy where people will see clips, and surely some of these narratives will filter out. So when they see him bragging about the economy saying it’s robust and strong, meanwhile they’re looking at their bank accounts and they see a totally different story but ratcheting up military spending, how does this land?
JW: Yeah, I think that kind of stuff backfires. I think you’re talking about kind of two separate but connected things, which is military interventions, which we know are unpopular with a lot of, even the Republican base, a lot of Trump’s base is uninterested in that.
And then there’s also — which is the same mistake that the Biden administration made — which is telling people what the economy looks like for them. And I interviewed members of the Biden administration during the presidential election. And something that they kept saying was, people feel great, the economy is strong, people are doing fine. And people didn’t feel that, and they didn’t vote that way.
And so I think they’re going to run into the exact same problems that every administration runs into, when they’re campaigning on their accomplishments, which is, it actually has to match up with how people are feeling economically, and the indicators just aren’t there.
I also listened to Summer Lee’s rebuttal for the Working Families Party, and this was something she brought up really directly. And I think this is something that has been talked about in our politics a lot recently, which is, we have money for bombs overseas, but we don’t have money for health care. We don’t have money to actually provide a good life for our citizens. And that’s something that Summer Lee brought up. They’re trying to distract you with all these different issues when the real problem is we’re giving money to corporations, we’re spending money on bombs, and we’re not spending money feeding people as Donald Trump himself pointed out. And we’re also not spending money on people’s health care.
Summer Lee: Don’t let anybody tell you we can’t afford it. We somehow find endless money for ICE, for private prisons to warehouse Black and brown people and for bombs to be sent abroad. But we’re told health care and childcare are too expensive. And when we begin questioning those priorities, the powerful try to divide us once more. But that old playbook is losing its grip.
AL: I was reading some reporting in Punch Bowl on Tuesday that Republicans were talking about how they wanted Trump to frame this military spending. This is talking about him wanting to increase Pentagon funding by 50 percent. And they’re like, we don’t want him to sit to say the number $1.5 trillion. We want him to talk about it as a percentage of GDP and how it compares to past decades of military spending. Basically so it doesn’t sound as bad, but they also want him to frame it as what we’re doing to modernize the military and counter threats from our enemies around the globe.
“It’s an artful exercise in cognitive dissonance, the way that they’re trying to frame this stuff to people.”
Which we did hear him, reverting to this, what is a theme for him, painting this image of himself as a strongman, like policing the world while also telling everyone that he’s not policing the world and he’s the president of peace. So it’s an artful exercise in cognitive dissonance the way that they’re trying to frame this stuff to people.
But to their credit, Republicans are at least acknowledging openly that you have to frame this in a way that makes sense to the American public, whether it’s accurate or not. And I think that is the one thing that if you’re someone who is already giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and you listen to this, that sounds good, right, on its face?
JU: Yeah. It’s much more abstract when you’re talking about percentages of GDP than a $1 trillion-plus military budget.
JW: You guys can’t forget that he ended the war in the Congo, though. That was a key accomplishment from the speech. [laughs]
JU: Oh, who could forget? Where were you?
AL: Can we talk about the Venezuela thing? Because that —
JW: Please,
AL: Freaked me out to my core. Like jokingly, let’s not forget about our buddy Venezuela, when you kidnapped the fucking president, and JD Vance and Mike Johnson are behind him, like, laughing. I don’t know, that moment for me was just so blatantly, this is who these people are. In some ways, yes, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways, they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it. And it is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.
JW: Yeah.
JU: Yeah. Not just that, but the deliberate reckless killing of fishers. Yeah, that was a laugh line. Yeah. Oh, we decimated their fishing industry, and you get hardy laughs from the Republican caucus.
DT: We have stopped record amounts of drugs coming into our country and virtually stopped it completely coming in by water or sea. You probably noticed that. [Laughter]
We very seriously damaged their fishing industry. Also nobody wants to go fishing anymore. [Laughter]
JW: The Intercept’s reporting, which we’ve done a lot of great reporting on this from Nick Turse. But we’re talking about these strikes where people were clinging, dying with no relief. Just like these strikes are horrific, if you read about them the strikes have now passed over 150 dead. So just to keep that in mind for the laugh line there.
JU: The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me as yet another departure from past State of the Unions, and we saw that also in how they talked about the Somali population in Minnesota. Trump made, if you want to call it a joke, that once they crack down on Somali fraud in Minnesota to a sufficient extent, we will balance our budget. And this served as a segue to brutal crackdowns in our cities, the deliberate targeting of certain populations in places like Minneapolis and St. Paul. And what was also interesting to watch in this part of the speech was the vocal opposition from Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Talib. Now, what were both of your reactions during this part and what stood out to you?
AL: What really stood out to me beyond the disgusting racism was the fact that he telegraphed that they’re going to do this in other states. At the end of that whole thing, he was like, oh, the number of this fraud is much higher in California, Massachusetts, and Maine. Places where he’s also been sending ICE. There’s been ICE agents terrorizing people all over those states and ramping up operations in Maine, particularly after Minneapolis. So that was alarming.
DT: There’s been no more stunning example than Minnesota. Where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information, and in actuality, the number is much higher than that, and California, Massachusetts, Maine, and many other states are even worse.
This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe. So tonight, although started four months ago, I am officially announcing the War on Fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance.
AL: We’ve been talking about this and doing a lot of reporting on this, but a perfect and fully disturbing example of how the racist conspiracy theories that incubate in the far-right corners of the internet, become policy like that in this administration. And where like where this whole thing came from is a far-right influencer who started peddling this online. Chris Rufo picked it up and a couple months later, ICE agents killed two people in Minneapolis.
Like these are the consequences of this. And I think people understand that is directly linked to what he’s doing with ICE. This is obviously not about fraud. This is about creating a pretext to unleash this country’s military power on its own citizens.
“This is obviously not about fraud. This is about creating a pretext to unleash this country’s military power on its own citizens.”
JU: Chris Rufo, of course, for those unfamiliar, is with the Manhattan Institute and has been a key player in nationalizing right-wing controversies and culture wars, specifically the rights fight against “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — initiatives among other “hot-button issues.” He really does have a significant and outsized ability to shape narratives on the right.
AL: And while we’re talking about DEI, there was raucous applause to Trump saying we ended DEI. I think that was the most applause that I heard the whole time. And like, people were cheering.
JU: Kitchen table issue.
AL: You can also thank Chris Rufo for that.
JW: To your point, the whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech — not all of it, but large sections of it. Particularly when he says that Somali pirates are coming to commit fraud and also to ruin the culture. The cultural elements of the ways he was talking about Somali people, I think are some of the most kind of clearly racist elements.
“In some ways, he’s broken the racism barrier.”
But I have been just thinking about the State of the Union in the light of Trump posting that really racist image of the Obamas, because in some ways he’s broken the racism barrier is the way I would think about it is that he’s done something so blatantly racist in our culture. And just to be clear, I’m referring to the photo, sorry, the AI image that he posted on Truth Social of the Obamas as apes. So he’s already broken this racism barrier. So there is almost no point. to a certain extent, in even talking about him saying that Somali people are ruining the culture, the kind of Hitler-esque things that he said before about immigrants poisoning the blood — there is no deniability at this point about who and what he is. And so this white national speech, it just makes sense. It’s in character and it’s almost un-newsworthy in that way.
“There is no deniability at this point about who and what he is. … It’s in character and it’s almost un-newsworthy in that way.”
AL: It just makes me so upset because each of these things are issues where Democrats seeded so much ground in the beginning that like allowed him to just be like, OK, actually yeah, now we’re just doing racist stuff because you guys let us get really far on immigration and claiming this was a problem and claiming there were people flooding in.
They’re like, some people are ruining the culture, not quite in the way that you’re saying it. Some people are creating all this crime problem, not quite in the way that you’re saying it, and like that being their strategy to win back voters is like to seed ground on these issues effectively. And it just makes me really mad when I think about it for too long. That’s what you saw in my eyes.
JW: On that point, I do want to talk about his anti-trans rhetoric. Speaking of Democrats seeding ground on issues, Donald Trump brought a Liberty University college student at one point, who he had brought as a guest, to make this point about transgender children, essentially. And so he had said that a school had enabled her to transition, which had then led her to run away and be kidnapped and sex trafficked. Now the mom and this girl are suing multiple entities that they hold responsible, including the school. But Donald Trump really used this moment to try and fearmonger against trans children.
This kind of idea on the right that they’re going to kidnap your children and make them trans — I think this is really an issue where we’ve seen a lot of Democrats seed ground. Obviously there was the infamous Seth Moulton comment about not wanting his kid, his young daughters, to play with males — referring to trans children that they would potentially be playing soccer with, trans girls.
So we’ve seen Democrats really seed ground on this issue and say it’s fair that people have these concerns. It’s fair that people are scared about their children being kidnapped and turned trans — which is not a thing that’s happening.
But it’s really just this massive seeding of ground. We’ve seen obviously outlets like The Atlantic, the New York Times have obviously really contributed to this paranoia. And it’s legitimizing this fearmongering that Republicans have invested millions and millions of dollars, and it’s doing the work for them instead of actually talking about this issue directly or not just throwing trans kids under the bus is another option. So that’s my little rant.
AL: I’ll also just add one thing on that, I am not a fan of Abigail Spanberger. She’s a moderate and she’s an ex-CIA agent. We’ll leave it at that. But the fact that she delivered the Democratic response after winning a gubernatorial election, in which her Republican opponents repeatedly tried to bait her on trans issues and weaponize this issue against her — We did some reporting on that, talking with analysts about how her win was an example of Democrats sticking to their values on this issues is not necessarily a liability. I can’t speak to her record throughout Congress on this stuff, but at least in charting the path for midterms for both parties tonight and the Democratic response, I just thought that was interesting, that like after doing this whole dog-and-pony show over trans stuff, like they picked someone who stood firmly on that to give the response.
JW: I will also say anecdotally, so I’ve been covering the Senate primary race between Seth Moulton and Ed Markey, and I would say anecdotally, people are still really upset about those comments that Seth Moulton made about trans children.
And so there’s this idea that there’s only political upside to throwing part of your base and parts of your base that your base also cares about, right, even if they aren’t a large part of your voting block. I think there is a political penalty for that that Democrats don’t see, and I think that’s true with immigrants. That is true on issues related to transgender people. They only see the upside of winning over this kind of mythical moderate and they never seem to see the downside, where you lose people who actually thought that you supported their values.
[Break]
JU: One of the other areas on the topic of seeding ground that I’m really fascinated by that Trump talked about in this speech were his purported desires to ban private equity in Wall Street from buying single-family homes and his calls for Congress to pass a ban on congressional stock trading. Now the devil’s in the details with these sorts of things and with the stock trading ban further reporting shows that he opposes a version of this bill that would also apply to himself, the White House and the judiciary.
Then while he says he wants to stop Wall Street and private equity from buying single-family homes, he’s calling on Congress to do that. And similar to the expected opposition from Republicans in Congress on tariffs at the behest of corporate interests, I expect similar opposition on this. But in rhetoric alone, I do think those are two things that resonate with the average American. What did you both make of those two points tonight?
AL: It’s one of those things where he knows what to say. He knows to say the right thing. Less than 1 percent of the population is going to be like, is this true? Maybe that’s ungenerous, but you know what I mean. Democrats, on the flip side, tangle themselves up in the these particular issues, not only because they’re doing the thing that’s bad, like they’re doing insider stock trading, they’re siding with corporate landlords and fighting or doing everything they can to not really do anything on housing, but they’re so afraid to say something that isn’t poll tested that again, they’re seeding ground to him on this when he’s clearly lying and enriching himself and doing all these things that would negate this behind the scenes, particularly for himself, as you’re saying.
But the fact that Democrats are also hypocrites on this doesn’t really work because they won’t say the thing. It’s not that hard to go toe to toe with him. It’s actually very simple, but you’re so concerned about making sure that you’re not turning off again, this middle of the road person, that you don’t take this low-hanging fruit.
And like you saw Elizabeth Warren standing up. This is the only part that they panned to her during this. I don’t know if she stood otherwise, but she was like pointing at him, being like, what about you? OK, let’s get that. Let’s get that in the response. Let’s get Abigail Spanberger hitting that on the head.
JW: Yeah. To your point, Akela, in her response for the Working Families Party, Summer Lee brought up the fact that Democrats are hamstrung by their commitment to corporate donors.
SL: The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. On one side are millions of working people demanding bold action, lower costs, higher wages, Medicare for all. On the other side are corporate donors and consultants who are terrified of upsetting the very interests that rigged this economy in the first place.
JW: You cannot be sworn to the American public, sworn to working people and to their benefit, and also sworn to corporations that we cannot bring down MAGA while also making billionaires comfortable. And I think she’s really poking at that weak center point of the Democrats that you keep mentioning, which is that they are unwilling to, I think there’s both the issue of everything needs to be tested, but they’re also unwilling to throw off the shackles of corporate money, corporate interests.
JU: And to add some context to Trump’s investments, specifically Dave Levinthal in NOTUS has a piece from December 23, 2025, where he wrote that Trump has invested tens of millions of dollars into corporate and government bonds, including those of companies and local governments his administration’s decisions could affect according to a new financial disclosure. So it’s not just that he’s enriching himself off of dealings with other governments, dealings with other oil Gulf state figures. He’s also making money in the market and his own decisions influence the performance of those investments. So of course, he’s going to oppose applying a stock trading ban to himself.
But I also want to go back to Spanberger and the Democratic Party’s decision to pick her to deliver the official response. Like you said Akela, you’re not necessarily a fan, she’s extremely moderate, we’ll say, former CIA official. What do you think this says at a time where we’re seeing surprising flips in state legislatures in red states, massive swings in favor of Democrats, poll numbers for Trump in the tank, you’re seeing Trump voters, some of Trump’s loudest supporters switch? They’re changing their tune entirely. They’re criticizing him over his handling of the Epstein files, of ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies’ presence and actions in cities across this country. That seems like a window where they can shift things more to the left, but here they rolled out Abigail Spanberger. Does that send up a red flag for you going into the midterms?
AL: I’m of two minds about this because you can’t ignore the fact that she just won her race and that Glenn Youngkin was the governor of Virginia. For a while, Democrats thought they had it in the bag. She was openly talking about her win in her response, pointing to the fact that they had Republican voters, Independent voters, Democratic voters, this big tent. And that’s important in a state like Virginia.
Is that a roadmap? Is that what’s going to help them win back the house? Wild card Senate even might be up for grabs. Republicans seem really concerned about this. I don’t think so, but I do think, again, the fact that she didn’t see it on some of these “cultural war” issues in her last race is a positive sign. Do I think that means that’s how Democrats are going to play this? Absolutely not.
I’ll also mention that Abigail Spanberger was a pretty big recipient of corporate PAC money while she was in the House and during the 2023 to 2024 cycle. AIPAC was her top single donor. So these are all issues that we know have lost Democrat support and mixing that with a couple of things that are positive and helped her win her election, I don’t think that’s enough to get them where they want to be.
I was not shocked at all that they pick someone like Abigail Spanberger. They typically pick a moderate. I was pleasantly surprised, I would say, because the bar is on the floor, the fact that she was saying Trump is not telling you the truth, talking about the fact that he’s enriching himself, talking directly about the impact that him unleashing federal agents on U.S. cities has had.
Abigail Spanberger: In his speech tonight, the president did what he always does. He lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted, and he offered no real solutions to our nation’s pressing challenges, so many of which he is actively making worse. He tries to divide us. He tries to enrage us to pit us against one another, neighbor against neighbor. And sometimes he succeeds.
And so you have to ask who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, the short list of laws he’s pushed through this Republican Congress? Somebody must be benefiting. He is enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented.
AL: She didn’t say this explicitly, but shortly after being sworn in as governor, she said Virginia law enforcement was going to stop cooperating with ICE. These are things that we know are moving Democrats. And so whether that translates into the whole party getting on board with this, I think the answer is a pretty clear no. But it wasn’t like, didn’t Elissa Slotkin give the response one year? And I just remember sitting there and being like, this is worse than the State of the Union, and I didn’t feel that way coming out of this. So what does that mean? I don’t know.
JU: I guess that’s good.
JW: That was a ringing endorsement from Akela [laughs]: The speech didn’t make me feel like it was worse than the two-hour speech we all just listened to from the president.
AL: Sorry, the thing that pissed me off the most about Abigail Spanberger’s speech, I will say, and I think this gets to the heart of the issue, was that she’s in Virginia, she’s in Williamsburg where I went to college. So I understand sort of the nerdy allusions to what our Founding Fathers would’ve wanted.
“It’s just like third-grade patriotism.”
But she was using this like trite device to be like, Trump is ruining the America that our Founding Fathers wanted for us. And we could sit here and talk about all day how stupid that is. But that is like the model: It’s just like third-grade patriotism — a couple of jabs here and there, and we’re going to get everyone back on board. Again, I just don’t think it’s enough.
JW: Like you said, I’m not at all surprised that they picked her. They want a moderate. It obviously looks good for the Democrats to have a woman combating Trump. So that’s clearly part of the calculus as well. Spanberger did just win her election, flip the governor’s mansion, if you want to call it that. But with Spanberger’s election, you also have to keep in mind the context of Trump and what he did to the federal government.
He decimated the economy of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The massive layoffs, the anger at Trump in this area is astounding, so it’s not at all shocking, frankly, that she would win in this exact moment. Is that something that can be replicated throughout the country? Are they feeling the same direct impacts of Trump? I think in some ways, they are. When you look at SNAP cuts, when you look at cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, when you even just see videos of the violence happening in cities from ICE. But it doesn’t have that same direct impact, and so I don’t know if she’s as exciting [for] somewhere that’s not Virginia.
JU: As we wrap, we’re all exhausted. We’re fed up. What was the bright spot tonight for both of you? Was there a funny moment?
JW: This is not necessarily funny, but it made me think of a funny joke, when he brought out the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Now, they’d also had this kind of video stunt where the team had also been hanging out with Kash Patel, the FBI director; they had Trump on the phone where he made a joke about, I’ve gotta invite the women’s hockey team [or be impeached] — which, by the way, declined.
But the only thing that kept going through my mind was that this was terrible hockey PR. And “Heated Rivalry” had worked so hard to get us all into the spirit, to get all of us woke people who are too woke for hockey into it, and they’ve just tarnished the reputation of hockey. Once again, it can’t recover.
JU: Akela, what about you?
AL: I’m somewhere between the communist mayor of New York City, his little homage to Zohran Mamdani, who he’s obsessed with, and I just think it’s funny. And said again, I don’t like his policies, but I like him a lot [laughs] which honestly probably applies to like more than 75 percent of people outside of New York in his age demographic. They’re like, there’s something about this guy, I like him.
Either that, or this is just my brain being broken, because this made me laugh — this is not funny at all, but the response was funny — when he was like, “This should have been my third term.” And in the audience, you hear — I heard — like a mixture of what sounded like “Awww” and like boos. And I was just like, yeah, that sums it up pretty much.
JU: Someone did yell out “Four more years,” which is —
JW: Oh, great.
JU: Disconcerting. I’d say mine was, again, not funny subject matter, but the reaction was funny when he was talking about Iran yet again, trying to escalate tensions there, making not-so-veiled threats. Credit to the camera people and the control room for the event because somebody wisely fixated their camera on Lindsey Graham, who looked like he had reached another plane — like just the bliss that was so visible on his face throughout his body did make me laugh, as horrifying as it is. And that one was mine.
AL: “Operation Midnight Hammer.”
JU: Yeah. Good Lord. I want to thank you both for suffering through this with me, and hopefully we saved the listeners two hours of their precious lives.
JW: Thanks, Jordan.
AL: Thanks, Jordan.
JU: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
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Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl.
The post Rambling Man: Trump’s State of the Union appeared first on The Intercept.
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Users can now access advanced compilation techniques from both tools by adding a single line of code to their PennyLane programs. This integration works seamlessly in the background and lowers barriers for designing quantum algorithms using software – allowing researchers and developers to focus on innovation rather than managing complex software configurations.
“This integration represents a significant step forward for the quantum software ecosystem and a great collaboration between leading players from Canada and Europe,” said Robert Wille, Full Professor representing TUM.
Lukas Burgholzer, Chief Technology Officer of MQSC, adds: “By bringing MQT’s advanced tools for verifying and optimizing quantum programs directly into the Catalyst infrastructure, we are giving researchers and developers the best of both worlds: a convenient frontend with state-of-the-art tools underneath that run automatically and efficiently.”
“To make quantum computing practical, we need a software stack that is both modular and high performing. Our work with TUM and MQSC demonstrates the power of unifying tools with unique specializations into a single, cohesive workflow,” said Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “We are accelerating the development cycle and ensuring that quantum programs are not only faster but also more efficient by enabling PennyLane users to leverage MQT’s methods without changing their code structure.”
The project highlights the use and value of modular infrastructure for quantum software. Connecting complementary technologies from different sources – such as those from Xanadu, TUM, and MQSC – allows for a “mix-and-match” approach that unlocks the software stack to become more accessible for users. The result is a flexible infrastructure where specialized technologies can interoperate freely, fostering greater connectivity across the growing quantum software ecosystem.
About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies. The company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.
Source: Xanadu
The post Xanadu’s PennyLane Integrates with Munich Quantum Toolkit to Advance Quantum Compilation appeared first on HPCwire.
Talks reportedly focused on assets of owner Jim Ratcliffe’s vinyls business Inovyn as group scrambles to cut costs
The chemicals empire owned by the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is in talks to sell parts of the business in the hope of raising hundreds of millions of pounds to tackle its rising debts, according to a report.
The talks are at an early stage but have focused on selling assets from Ratcliffe’s vinyls business, Ineos Inovyn, the Financial Times said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Continue reading...The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2026 list of nominees, including Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Wu-Tang Clan and more.
Feb. 25, 2026 — Two researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have been named recipients of 2025 Early Career Research Program awards from the DOE Office of Science. David Kaphan and Yong Zhao will each receive $550,000 per year for five years to further their research.
Two Argonne scientists selected for DOE early-career support for projects in catalysis and nuclear physics.
This DOE Office of Science program seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national labs based on peer review by scientific experts.
David Kaphan is a chemist in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division. His research focuses on designing a new generation of catalysts — materials that speed up chemical reactions — for chemical transformations to overcome key kinetic limitations of today’s catalysts. His project aims to explore the potential of electric field-responsive oxides, such as ferroelectrics, to actively control the surface-level electronic characteristics of catalytic active sites. This approach could enable the development of catalysts that adapt during chemical transformations, optimizing reactivity for different phases of chemical synthesis processes.
Kaphan’s project will study the complex role that external electric fields can play in the modulation of electronic surface properties during catalytic processes. He will use X-ray absorption spectroscopy techniques and other methods at the Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials — both DOE Office of Science user facilities at Argonne — to measure properties such as field responsive surface electron density and catalytic reactivity. Additionally, the project will integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the exploration of reaction parameters and electric field conditions. This work has the potential to revolutionize catalyst design for critical processes such as selective methane oxidation and ammonia synthesis.
“Stimulus-responsive, nonequilibrium catalysis represents an exciting opportunity to overcome the classical limitations of static processes and increase efficiency in chemical transformations,” said Kaphan. “This support will allow us to explore new frontiers in field-responsive dynamic catalyst design and develop new solutions to address key challenges in energy-related chemistry.”
Yong Zhao is an assistant physicist in the Physics division. His research seeks to address one of the most fundamental questions in nuclear physics: understanding the internal structure of protons and neutrons. These are key objectives of multidimensional proton imaging efforts at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Both protons and neutrons consist of different combinations of quarks and gluons. Zhao plans to develop a new theoretical approach and use lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) for precise calculations of the underlying multidimensional quark and gluon structures. This approach will enable high-precision imaging of the proton, as well as reveal the contributions of quark and gluon spin and orbital angular momentum to the proton’s spin.
Using the Aurora and Polaris supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility, Zhao’s project aims to reduce systematic uncertainties and improve numerical precision in proton and neutron structural studies. Its insights will provide crucial theoretical guidance for experiments at Jefferson Lab, Brookhaven and other facilities.
“This award is a tremendous opportunity to push the boundaries of our understanding of the strong force and the fundamental building blocks of matter,” said Zhao. “I am grateful for the support that will allow us to make significant strides in this area of research.”
“Sustained investment in early-career researchers is essential to the long-term vitality of the nation’s scientific enterprise,” said Kawtar Hafidi, associate laboratory director for Argonne’s Physical Sciences and Engineering directorate. “Programs like the DOE Early Career Research Program help ensure that bold ideas and new approaches have the support they need to advance fundamental science and deliver lasting impact for the nation.”
Source: Argonne National Laboratory
The post Argonne’s David Kaphan and Yong Zhao Receive 2025 DOE Early Career Research Awards appeared first on HPCwire.
Man, 32, shot dead by deputy after stabbing attack was the subject of domestic violence protection orders
A man shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy after he fatally stabbed four people outside his mother’s home near Gig Harbor, Washington, on Tuesday morning was the subject of domestic violence protection orders recording mental health and substance abuse issues stretching back at least five years.
Records reviewed by Associated Press show that the woman living at the address had obtained a 12-month protection order against her 32-year-old son in May. The order noted that he struggled from substance abuse, and had threatened his mother saying that her “grave has been already dug up”.
Continue reading...Oklahoma prosecutor Jimmy Harmon was making his usual points about why Richard Glossip belongs behind bars when he trotted out a not-so-casual dig at his opposing counsel.
It was mid-February in Oklahoma City, and one of Glossip’s lawyers had just explained the main reason why his client should be released on bond. Under Oklahoma law, defendants like Glossip are entitled to bail unless there is a firm basis to believe they are guilty. The evidence against Glossip had never been strong — and the U.S. Supreme Court demolished the state’s case when it vacated Glossip’s conviction over false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, the attorneys argued, there was no justification for keeping him in jail.
Harmon responded with scorn. “The defendant’s argument reminds me of a Bruce Springsteen song,” he said. “It’s called ‘Glory Days.’”
“The gist of that song is that glory days will pass you by,” he went on. Glossip’s attorneys were clinging to their cherished Supreme Court victory because, after years of losing in court, “they finally won one,” he said. “And they want to wave that Supreme Court opinion around.”
In other words, Glossip’s lawyers were like Springsteen’s former high school baseball star — still talking about his winning fastball at a roadside bar.
In the quiet courtroom, Harmon’s zinger landed with a thud. The comparison was clumsy and ill-fitting; a Supreme Court victory is anything but fleeting. Lawyers and courts are bound by Supreme Court decisions — invoking its rulings is sort of the point.
Glossip, meanwhile, sat at the defense table in his orange prison garb over a thermal shirt. Oklahoma County District Court Judge Natalie Mai — the seventh judge assigned to his case since the high court sent it back to Oklahoma — had allowed him to be unshackled for the hearing. Just a few days earlier, Glossip had turned 63, his 29th birthday behind bars. He knew more than most people about time you can never get back.
Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of town. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese but insisted that Glossip pushed him to do it. Sneed’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip — and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.
But the case began unraveling soon after Glossip arrived on death row. Footage of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip. In the decades that followed, Glossip’s attorneys discovered that prosecutors hid and destroyed evidence in the case — and that Sneed had attempted to recant his testimony multiple times.
The case ultimately ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Glossip’s favor on February 25, 2025. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, that prosecutors had failed to correct his testimony, and that additional evidence of prosecutorial misconduct “further undermines confidence in the verdict.”
Yet one year later, the case is far from over. Rather than release Glossip, as advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder — and asked a judge to keep him in jail awaiting trial. An Oklahoma County judge granted the request and refused to release Glossip on bond, only to later step down from the case after admitting that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at his second trial. A revolving door of recusals followed, with five more criminal court judges leaving the case due to their own ties to the district attorney’s office that sent Glossip to death row.
Natalie Mai is the seventh judge assigned to Glossip’s case since the Supreme Court sent it back to Oklahoma.
Mai, a civil judge, was assigned to the case in December. It was now up to her to reconsider whether Glossip should be released from jail. Standing before her, defense attorney Corbin Brewster urged Mai to consider the Supreme Court’s decision before weighing the other factors that judges use to make bond decisions — whether a defendant is a flight risk, for example, or a danger to the community. The “threshold question” before the court, he said, was whether prosecutors could show by clear and convincing evidence that Glossip should be presumed guilty of murder. The answer was clearly no. If Mai agreed, she could rule from the bench and free Glossip that day.
But Mai wasn’t ready to do that. She told Brewer that she had reserved the whole day for the hearing and would issue an order after considering all the evidence. “I would like to get all the information today, so that way I can make a written finding in an expedient manner,” she said.
After three decades insisting on his innocence, Glossip would have to wait a little bit longer.
The 2025 ruling in Glossip v. Oklahoma was momentous: an astonishing victory for a man who had stared down nine execution dates and lived. For Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, the ruling should have marked the end of a protracted legal battle that had made his client the most famous death row prisoner in the country — and which had won the support of the Oklahoma attorney general himself.
Drummond, who entered the attorney general’s office in 2023, once took unprecedented steps to stop Oklahoma from killing Glossip. After commissioning an independent investigation into his case, he asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn Glossip’s conviction. When the court refused, setting Glossip up for execution, Drummond personally testified before the state’s pardon and parole board, urging them to spare Glossip’s life.
But things changed in the months following the Supreme Court’s decision. After initially basking in the justices’ ruling, Drummond vanished as the public face of the case. In June, he shocked Glossip’s longtime supporters — including conservative allies of the Republican attorney general — by announcing he would retry Glossip.
The most obvious explanation was politics: Drummond’s decision coincided with his run for governor — and his previous interventions in Glossip’s case had infuriated members of Oklahoma’s conservative legal establishment. In the months after the ruling, Drummond lurched noticeably to the right, going out of his way to align himself with the Trump administration’s political agenda. In the meantime, he left it to one of his deputies, Harmon, to retry Glossip’s case.
Harmon has since downplayed the significance of the Supreme Court ruling while peddling a warmed-over version of the state’s discredited case. The lack of new evidence was striking at Glossip’s first bond hearing, when he introduced exhibits designed to cast Glossip in a sinister light — but which fell far short of proving he was capable of murder. He presented affidavits from Glossip’s ex-wife and another woman who had previously provided him with financial support, both of whom wrote that they later felt used and manipulated. Harmon also played a recording of a phone call between Glossip and a third woman, in which Glossip expressed estrangement from his family — an attempt to show that he had no deep ties to Oklahoma.
At the time, Oklahoma County Criminal Court Judge Heather Coyle seemed somewhat skeptical of the evidence. She reminded Harmon that she needed “clear and convincing evidence” that Glossip was likely to be found guilty at a third trial, asking him to “please expand on the facts that support that.” Harmon directed her to the transcripts from Glossip’s previous trials, which ultimately proved persuasive enough.
There was little guarantee that the same approach would prove convincing to Mai. Yet Harmon mostly repeated his prior presentation, resubmitting the affidavits and phone recording, along with the transcripts from Glossip’s two trials. “We have a plethora of evidence,” he told Mai, only to acknowledge that there was nothing new. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” he said.
“The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials.”
Harmon also insisted that Glossip posed a danger to the community. “He’s not as young as spry as he was,” he said. But “Mr. Glossip’s manipulative behavior is dangerous in and of itself.”
Glossip’s attorneys, too, repeated arguments from the prior hearing. But there was one major development that had unfolded since then. In July 2025, while the decision to grant bond was pending before Coyle, Glossip’s lawyers revealed a secret deal between Knight and Drummond dating back to 2023. The attorney general had agreed to let Glossip plead to a lesser charge and then walk free. Although the deal was based on the erroneous assumption that the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals would grant Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction, it remained current well after the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a lengthy affidavit filed by Knight last summer.
Lawyers for Glossip asked the court to enforce the agreement — an issue that is being litigated separately. At the bond hearing, Brewster invoked the deal to remind Mai that Drummond himself clearly did not buy Harmon’s portrayal of Glossip as a “killer.” If he did, he would never have agreed to a deal that allowed for Glossip’s immediate release.
At the end of the hearing, Mai told the lawyers she needed time to review the full record, which she had yet to receive from the state. She also requested a last round of briefs from both sides. “If you can get that to me in about 30 days, and give me another 15 to 30 days to work with it, I promise I will try to get it out as soon as possible,” she said. “But the reality is my docket is just so full right now, and so I’ll work on it to the extent that I can.”
Shortly afterward, Glossip was placed back in shackles and escorted out of the courtroom. Sheriff’s deputies took him down the elevator to await transfer back to the county jail. Speaking to reporters, Knight reiterated that Drummond should honor their previous agreement to release Glossip — and if he refuses, the court should make him do it.
Knight expressed some hope that, by taking the time to study the record, Mai might see the case for the travesty it is — and give his client a long-overdue taste of freedom. Nobody should have to spend so much time waiting for their first fair trial. “This is wrong,” he said. “It’s been wrong for 30 years.”
Jordan Smith contributed to this report.
The post A Supreme Court Win Didn’t Free Richard Glossip. But This Judge Could. appeared first on The Intercept.
Whether you want a video doorbell to keep track of packages or visitors, these popular models from Ring, Blink and more will get the job done.
The company's new eSIM option should allow for a faster sign-up experience.
Adobe Firefly's Quick Cut tool clips and combines all your raw footage into a video in under two minutes.
Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry's most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy -- a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. "We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments ... if competitors are blazing ahead," chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME. The overhauled policy, approved unanimously by CEO Dario Amodei and Anthropic's board, instead commits the company to matching or surpassing competitors' safety efforts and to delaying development only if Anthropic considers itself to be leading the AI race and believes catastrophic risks are significant. The company also plans to publish detailed "Risk Reports" every three to six months and release "Frontier Safety Roadmaps" laying out future safety goals. Chris Painter, director of policy at the AI evaluation nonprofit METR, who reviewed an early draft, told TIME the shift signals that Anthropic "believes it needs to shift into triage mode with its safety plans, because methods to assess and mitigate risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Night owls will be able to check out the lunar eclipse when it appears this March.
Jamieson Greer warns tariffs may climb from 10% after Trump imposed global levy amid US supreme court setback
The US tariff rate for some countries will go up to 15% or higher from the newly imposed 10%, Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, said on Wednesday, without naming any specific trading partners or other details.
“Right now, we have the 10% tariff. It’ll go up to 15 [%] for some and then it may go higher for others, and I think it will be in line with the types of tariffs we’ve been seeing,” Greer said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria program.
Continue reading...Milwaukee city council member calls for inquiry into Uline’s previous ‘shuttle program’ to bring in Mexican workers
A Milwaukee city council member has called for an investigation into the immigration policies at Uline, the office supply company owned by Liz and Richard Uihlein, two of the biggest donors to Maga Republicans in the 2024 election.
The statement by JoCasta Zamarripa, who is running for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin secretary of state ahead of November’s election, follows an investigation by the Guardian into Uline’s previous use of a so-called “shuttle program”. It involved the company bringing workers from its facilities in Mexico to staff warehouses at its headquarters in Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania, for weeks and even months at a time, using visas that are meant for workers who are being trained – not working regular full-time jobs.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Alvi Choudhury claiming damages against Thames Valley police after biased technology confused him with man looking ‘10 years younger’
Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.
Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.
Continue reading...If the future of toilets is one in which our toilet can clean itself in just one flush, that's a future we can get behind.
Iran accuses Trump of lying in his State of the Union about the country's nuclear ambitions, as the next round of bilateral talks looms.
The newly crowned Olympic champions were warmly greeted by both Republicans and Democrats. They were also used as props by the president
During Tuesday’s State of the Union, Donald Trump welcomed members of the US men’s national hockey team to the House gallery to chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A!”. Trump revealed that Team USA’s goaltender, Connor Hellebuyck, will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “What special champions you are,” Trump told the players, who had beaten Canada on Sunday in the gold medal game of the Winter Olympics.
In Trump’s America, proximity is never neutral.
Continue reading...The Democratic congressman Al Green has addressed his protest at Donald Trump's State of the Union speech, in which Green held up a handwritten sign that read 'Black people aren't apes!'. The sign referenced a racist depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama that the president had shared on social media. After being ejected from the event, Green told journalists he had wanted to take a stand against the president doing 'these dastardly things with impunity'
Continue reading...The bill would ban distribution of taxpayer money for any "January 6th compensation fund" and any further refund of damage payments made by convicted Capitol rioters.
Tommy Schaefer was sentenced for the 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, the mother of Heather Mack, during a luxury vacation.
Leaked draft of $1bn memorandum of understanding reveals mandatory targets, sharing of data, and reported access to mining concessions
The US has been accused of “shameless exploitation” over a health financing agreement with Zambia worth more than $1bn (£740m), amid warnings that the country is getting a raw deal from the Trump administration.
A leaked draft of a five-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the two countries, seen by the Guardian, reveals that Zambia may accept terms worse than health financing agreements the US has reached with 16 other African countries.
Continue reading...Study finds participants saw reduction in depressive symptoms as researchers welcome ‘promising’ results
A phase II clinical trial has found dimethyltryptamine (DMT), one of the psychoactive components traditionally used in the Amazonian psychedelic ritual ayahuasca, might be a promising therapy for depression.
The psychedelic pharmaceutical company Small Pharma (now Cybin UK) sponsored and designed the trial, which was led by Dr David Erritzoe, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Imperial College London. The results were published in Nature this month.
Continue reading...International conference circuit gives worldwide right wing opportunities to share ideas and learn from each other
The president of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) is a featured speaker at a conference this week in Pretoria, South Africa, hosted by an Afrikaner nationalist group whose founder was instrumental in persuading the American right that white South African farmers face systematic attacks.
Stefano Forte, also the executive director of the billionaire-funded 1776 Project Pac, will speak at the Lex Libertas Future of Nations conference on 25 February alongside leading figures from the Afrikaner Solidarity Movement, members of Belgium’s far-right Vlaams Belang – whose predecessor was outlawed for racism – and a political analyst from a thinktank wholly funded by the regime of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Continue reading...We break down the complex tax rules for capital gains, pass-through entities, foreign investments and real estate to help you file your taxes in 2026.
A New Hampshire resident has been charged after a shooting involving a Border Patrol agent at a Canada crossing, the DOJ says
Witness claims suspect entered mosque during Ramadan evening prayers armed with axe
Police in Manchester have arrested a suspect after he allegedly entered Manchester Central Mosque with an axe and a knife.
Police were called at about 8.40pm to reports that two men had entered Manchester Central Mosque on Upper Park Roadand were acting suspiciously.
Continue reading...President’s address littered with false and misleading claims. Plus, how Trump’s big climate finding repeal could actually hurt big oil
Good morning.
Donald Trump declared his first year in office a success during his rambling State of the Union address, despite his presidency being plagued by low public approval ratings.
What misleading and false claims did Trump make? He presented the US economic situation positively, when job gains slowed in 2025; claimed that Iryna Zarutska was killed by an immigrant (false); and claimed that energy prices have fallen, when household energy bills have risen. Here are the biggest false claims, debunked.
What is Anthropic resisting? Anthropic has reportedly resisted allowing its product to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems that can use AI to kill people without human input.
Continue reading...Details emerge after struggling carmaker reports pre-tax losses of £363.9m for 2025
The luxury carmaker Aston Martin Lagonda is to cut its workforce by 20% as it looks to save about £40m after reporting widening losses.
The group, which said earlier this month it was consulting on its latest redundancy programme, said it would reduce its workforce by up to a fifth, or about 500 employees, after action at the start of last year that cut 170 jobs.
Continue reading...With its longtime figureheads stepping aside, Microsoft’s gaming division faces a pivotal moment, raising questions about whether it can still balance creative ambition with corporate strategy in the age of AI
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And so it’s all change at Xbox. Last Friday it was announced that the CEO of Microsoft’s gaming division, Phil Spencer, is to retire, while its president Sarah Bond is resigning. In their place, a new partnership: Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to chief content officer, while the new CEO is Asha Sharma, who moves from her post as president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product.
In a company-wide email, Spencer stated that he would stay on until the summer in an advisory role before, “starting the next chapter of my life”. For her part, Bond issued a statement on her LinkedIn account: “I’ve decided this is the right time for me to take my next step, both personally and professionally.” It was all extremely good natured, but its doubtful these airy missives tell the full tale.
Continue reading...During his State of the Union, President Trump honored several service members and an Olympic athlete with awards that included the Purple Heart, the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Legion of Merit and the Medal of Freedom.
Tommy Schaefer released early from sentence for murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack and will face US federal charges
Indonesia has freed and deported a US man after he spent 11 years in prison for the premeditated murder of his then girlfriend’s mother on the tourist island of Bali, and he will now faces federal charges in the US.
Tommy Schaefer was sentenced to 18 years in prison in Bali for the 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, the mother of Heather Mack, during a luxury holiday, in a case that became known as the Bali suitcase murder. Prosecutors allege the couple were trying to gain access to a $1.5m (£1.1m) trust fund.
Continue reading...Lilia Valutyte was attacked by Deividas Skebas, 26, in Boston in July 2022 while playing outside her mother’s shop
A man who murdered a nine-year-old girl by stabbing her in the heart while she played with a hula hoop in the street has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years.
Lilia Valutyte was attacked by Deividas Skebas, 26, in the town centre of Boston, Lincolnshire, on 28 July 2022, while she was playing outside her mother’s embroidery shop.
Continue reading...Christophe Leribault, most recently Versailles director, will be tasked with improving security and ‘restoring climate of trust’
France has appointed Christophe Leribault as the new head of the Louvre, bringing in the director of the Palace of Versailles to turn around the world’s most visited museum after a humiliating jewellery heist and staff strikes.
Leribault, who was chosen by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, will succeed Laurence des Cars, who resigned on Tuesday. Des Cars had faced intense criticism since burglars made off in October with jewels worth an estimated $102m, exposing glaring security gaps at the museum. The jewels are still missing.
Continue reading...The TCL X11L is the first TV to feature Super Quantum Dots, which promise better color than ever before, and I went eyes-on.
Printers may be inexpensive, but the true cost of ownership is the ink refills. Here's why.
Apple has an epic roster of sci-fi shows.
The GR IV is a mild update to one of my favorite compact cameras that's perfect for travel and street photography.
He was at the heart of 1960s counterculture, then paved the way for the libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley. At 87, Brand is still keen to ensure the world is maintained properly – not just today, but for the next 10,000 years
Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale – as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog – and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing. In fact, he was arguably the bridge between the San Francisco counterculture of the 60s and present-day Silicon Valley: in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs eulogised the Whole Earth Catalog and Brand’s philosophy, and echoed its farewell mantra: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
You could say that Brand has also lived big and long. He is now 87 years old, in the final chapters of an eventful and adventurous life that has crossed paths with some of the most consequential events and figures of his era. He has been a writer, an editor, a publisher, a soldier, a photojournalist, an LSD evangelist, an events organiser, a future-planning consultant, even a government adviser (to the California governor Jerry Brown in the late 70s). “There was a time when people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I find things and I found things,’” says Brand, as in he is a founder. He is speaking from a library where he likes to work in Petaluma, California, not far from his houseboat in Sausalito. “I’m always searching for good stuff to recommend, and good people.”
Continue reading...HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM's contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreements for the year and also "qualified new suppliers [and] built in strategic inventory positions for key platforms and cut the time to qualify new material in half to accelerate our product configuration changes." That sounds a lot like HP Inc is signing up new suppliers at a brisk pace. Broussard said the company has also "expanded lower-cost sourcing across our commodity basket, lowering logistics costs with agile end-to-end planning processes." The company is using its internal AI initiatives to power those new processes. The company is also "configuring our products and shaping demand to align the supply we have with our customer needs" and "taking targeted pricing actions to offset the remaining cost impact in close partnership with both our channel and direct customers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The artist, who was controversially revoked and then reinstated by his government, is planning a ‘nurturing experience’ to bring people together
Australia’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in May will be a “nurturing experience” designed to bring people together – in the aftermath of one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in the country’s 72-year history at the prestigious international art festival.
Artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, who were controversially dumped and then reinstated as Australia’s representatives, will present not one but two major works at the Venice Biennale in May – both informed by Sabsabi’s practice as a Sufi Muslim and exploring “spirituality, migration, and the vastness of shared humanity”.
Continue reading...Bank reports better-than-expected annual results and CEO signals overhaul of lender is almost over
Bankers at HSBC are to share a bonus pot worth $3.9bn (£2.9bn), the highest in more than a decade, after Europe’s largest lender reported better-than-expected annual results.
The bonus pool for staff is 10% higher than a year earlier and the bank said it had determined it “based on a review of our performance against financial and non-financial metrics”, while the bank’s chief executive’s pay also rose.
Continue reading...If you're 55 or older you can save money using AT&T and T-Mobile. Here are the best discounts and special phone plans for people in their golden years.
President Trump delivered his 2026 State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Read the transcript and watch the full video.
Your rice cooker is far more versatile than the name implies.
It's great to see Dell bring back the XPS and do so with such style.
Glowfrog Games; PC
Short but very sweet tale asks the player to compile a scrapbook of mementoes telling the story of a heartfelt bond that frays over time
There are few things sadder than the end of a close friendship. Whether it happens in a sudden moment of betrayal or after years of gradual separation, the feelings of loss can stay with you for a lifetime.
This is the theme of Pieced Together, a quiet, charming narrative game about best pals Connie and Beth, who meet at school in the 1990s and form an immediate, seemingly inseparable bond. Through the ingenious medium of an interactive scrapbook, we play as Connie, glueing in photos, notes and memories of her friend after years of separation. The game begins with several attempts to write Beth a letter, before we cut-out, stick and sort the story of their lives together.
Continue reading...In his new memoir, Art Manteris recalls raucous times in Nevada, and explains why the explosion of sports betting in the US presents serious risks
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Continue reading...Donald Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections in which voters could hand control of Congress back to the Democrats. Trump spoke for two hours addressing a host of issues, from his supreme court challenges to Iran, with some Democrats reacting by walking out, holding signs and verbally clashing in the chamber
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Saw dome geese fly overhead last night which is usually a good indication the weather is going to be good again 🥰
President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address showed how much more public political vitriol has become. At this watch party, viewers were waiting for it.
In the first State of the Union address of his second term, President Donald Trump proclaimed that “our nation is back, bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.”
“What a difference a president makes,” Trump said. “A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
But our review of his speech found that he distorted a number of facts about the state of the economy, health care, immigration and other topics.
Trump’s Feb. 24 address was longer than any prior SOTU, clocking in at over 1 hour and 47 minutes, as measured by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Trump falsely claimed that he inherited “a stagnant economy” with “inflation at record levels.”
Economists have told us that the U.S. economy under Joe Biden was not stagnant. “Real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us for a Feb. 11 story.
Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that under Biden, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation), grew at an annual rate of 6.2% in 2021 (during the COVID-19 recovery), 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023 and 2.8% in 2024. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate also decreased under Biden, going from 6.4% when he was inaugurated to 4% in his last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average monthly unemployment rate for Biden’s presidency was 4.1%, below the historical average
As for inflation, when Trump took office, the annualized rate of inflation was 3%, based on the Consumer Price Index. That was far from the 9.1% rate in June 2022, under Biden, which was the highest 12-month increase since November 1981, according to the BLS. The worst inflation in U.S. history was not long after World War I, when the Consumer Price Index was up 23.7% for the 12 months ending in June 1920.
Trump later said in his speech that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” But under Trump, real GDP growth was down to an annual rate of 2.2% in 2025, and the unemployment rate was up to 4.3% as of January.
Trump also claimed that the 43-day shutdown of the federal government ended up “costing us two points” on GDP.
Fourth quarter growth in 2025 was 1.4%, much lower than economists had projected. The Bureau of Economic Analysis said that was partly due to the extended shutdown, but attributed just 1 percentage point — not 2 — of reduced GDP growth to the shutdown.
Trump misleadingly claimed to be bringing down “high prices” he blamed on Democrats.
“Their policies created the high prices,” the president said. “Our policies are rapidly ending them. We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward.”
He went on to name some food items that he claimed have seen average price declines and cited energy prices as well. “Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers, especially energy,” he said. “When they see energy going down to numbers like that, they cannot believe it.”
Prices had increased substantially during the first half of Biden’s term, due largely to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic — not just Democratic policies.
Furthermore, overall prices are not down under Trump. As we said, in January, the annual inflation rate was down to 2.4%, which is above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. So, prices are still increasing, but at a slower pace than when Trump took office.
In addition, while the average price of some grocery items, such as eggs and bread, have come down since the start of Trump’s second term, other items, such as beef, or ground chuck, have seen an average price increase, contrary to what Trump said. And average food prices overall are up instead of down. As of January, the Consumer Price Index for at-home food products purchased at a grocery store or supermarket had increased about 2.2%, year over year, according to the most recent BLS data.
As for energy prices, it wasn’t clear from his remarks which energy prices Trump was referencing. The CPI for energy overall was down 0.3% for the 12 months ending in January, while the index for household energy specifically rose 6.6% in that period, according to BLS data. Also, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour has risen about 7.3% in the last year.
During the speech, Trump claimed, “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.” While accurate, the statistic loses some luster when factoring in steady U.S. population growth. In fact, job growth slowed and the employment-to-population ratio declined a bit in the first year of Trump’s second term.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,627,000 people employed in the U.S. in January, and that’s the highest number on record. But by and large, as the population of the U.S. has grown over the years, so too has the number of people employed in the U.S., with notable exceptions during recessions.
Since employment recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2022, jobs have reached new highs nearly every single month. Trump’s claim also overlooks that job growth was lower between January 2025 and January 2026 under Trump — a gain of 359,000 jobs or 0.2% — than it was for Biden’s final year — a gain of 1.2 million jobs or 0.8.%.
There are other, more relevant statistics, on employment growth that factor in population growth. BLS’ employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population that is working, declined from 60.1% in January 2025 to 59.8% in January 2026. Another measure is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work. That rate has stayed relatively the same, going from 62.6% in January 2025 to 62.5% in January 2026. The so-called “prime age” labor force participation rate, focusing just on those ages 25 to 54, rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026.
Trump misleadingly said that he had taken prescription drugs “from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest.” He also said that Americans “will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs.”
The Trump administration’s negotiations with drugmakers may have lowered prices for specific drugs to some degree, and in limited situations. However, there’s no evidence of a broad decrease in U.S. drug prices, as we wrote in a recent story. In fact, the median list price for hundreds of brand-name drugs rose by 4% in 2025 and in 2026 thus far, according to the research firm 46brooklyn.
Trump’s drug pricing strategy is based on the concept of most favored nation pricing. Under an MFN policy, a country bases its prices off of those in other countries.
So far, the Trump administration has made deals with 16 drug companies, securing commitments to offer selected brand-name drugs at discounted cash prices for people not using insurance. Companies have also promised to launch new drugs and offer drugs to Medicaid at MFN prices. In return, companies have gotten various benefits, including promised exemptions from tariffs and from future mandatory MFN policies.
TrumpRx, the federal website designed to highlight the administration’s cash deals, launched on Feb. 5 and so far shows cash prices for 43 brand-name drugs from the first five companies to make deals with the administration.
However, experts previously told us that while the site does offer a few good deals — for example, for people taking fertility or weight loss drugs that are often not covered by insurance — its impact is limited.
“Manufacturers have agreed to discount prices on some drugs that are not well covered by insurance or already have generic competition, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not necessarily going to help a lot of people, right now anyway,” Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, told us.
For most people, insurance will offer a better deal, she said. And even for people paying for their drugs in cash, at least 18 of the drugs on TrumpRx are available as generics for lower prices elsewhere, an analysis from STAT found.
Trump claimed that the prices are now the lowest in the world, but even for the select drugs on TrumpRx, it’s not clear if that’s true. A spokesperson for the White House previously told us the administration was using prices from other G7 nations as comparators on the site but didn’t specify what prices were being compared. Cubanski told us that it’s difficult to determine whether the prices are the lowest internationally, as countries may get rebates or discounts that are not disclosed.
Trump said he was asking Congress to “codify” his MFN program but his Great Healthcare Plan is light on specifics regarding the legislation he is suggesting Congress should pass.
Trump repeated a regular talking point, saying, “In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.” That’s an unsubstantiated figure.
A White House website tallying such promises puts the total at $9.6 trillion for “U.S. and Foreign Investments,” providing very few details on these agreements. But as we’ve written before, even that number is shaky because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not happen.
“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April 2025 analysis when Trump began making such claims.
In looking at the White House list in May, we found that some investments may not be due to Trump. A $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, for example, was reportedly in the planning stages in March 2024, well before the election. And both a labor union and a Democratic governor took credit for the announced reopening of an auto assembly plant that also was on the Trump administration’s list.
Trump made the unsupported claim that “the flow of deadly fentanyl across our border is down by a record 56% in one year.”
Experts who study drug flow and policy have told us before that it’s not possible to know how much more or less of an illicit drug is getting into the U.S. That’s because there is no comprehensive data on the total flow of drugs into the country, which includes drugs that have not been detected by authorities, as the Congressional Research Service has reported.
“The best thing that we have as a gauge for what comes into the country is the seizure data,” and that “is not a metric of how much is actually coming into the U.S.,” Katharine Neill Harris, a fellow in drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us for an October 2024 story. “This is just the data that’s coming through the border security,” she said, noting that this excludes drugs that are smuggled into the country other ways, such as by mail.
Some use the seizure data as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected, with more drug seizures suggesting that more drugs are coming into the country — or vice versa.
The amount of fentanyl seized by federal border officers decreased by about 49% in the first year of Trump’s second term, going from 21,075 pounds seized in Biden’s last full 12 months in office to 10,674 pounds seized in Trump’s first full 12 months, according to the most recent Customs and Border Protection data. A White House spokesperson pointed to a CBP announcement in September that said since Trump took office in January, “fentanyl trafficking at the southern border is down by 56% compared to the same period in 2024.”
The number of pounds seized has been on the decline since peaking in fiscal year 2023. The fact that the seized amount has gone down could mean that less of the drug is being trafficked to the country, but it could mean that authorities are simply catching less of it. (The declining number of fentanyl overdose deaths since late 2023 suggests that it may be the former.)
But not having the figure for the total fentanyl flow to the U.S. makes it difficult to know if the president’s claim is accurate. “If you don’t know the denominator, you can’t have an answer,” David Luckey, director of the RAND Rural America Partnership Initiative and professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy, told us in 2024.
Trump continued to making false claims about gasoline prices, saying: “Gasoline — which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor was, quite honestly, a disaster — is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states. And in some places, $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.”
As of Feb. 24, there were no U.S. states where the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was below $2.30, according to state price data from AAA. Oklahoma was the closest to that figure, with an average price of $2.37. That also means there are no states with an average price below $2 per gallon. In Iowa, the state Trump mentioned, the average price statewide was $2.55, at the time of his remarks.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us for a Feb. 19 story that, as of Feb. 14, there were “about 40 stations in the nation with gasoline below $2/gal, which is what we’ve generally seen on a daily basis for February thus far.” In a Feb. 24 post on Substack, he wrote that, as of that date, $2.69 was the “most common price being charged at stations nationwide.”
Nationwide, gasoline prices are roughly 17 cents (or about 5%) lower than they were when Trump took office. As of the week ending Feb. 23, the average price in the U.S. for a gallon of regular gasoline was almost $2.94, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Trump continued to make his inflated claim about ending “eight wars.”
“My first 10 months, I ended eight wars, including Cambodia,” Trump said. “Cambodia and Thailand, Pakistan and India would have been a nuclear war. Thirty-five million people, said the prime minister of Pakistan, would have died if it were not for my involvement. Kosovo and Serbia, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Congo and Rwanda. And, of course, the war in Gaza, which proceeds at a very low level, it’s just about there.”
When his claim was seven wars last year, experts in international relations told us that Trump played a substantial role in ending fighting in four of those conflicts — although the Indian government denied that the U.S. played a role in negotiating the ceasefire with Pakistan. Trump also counts some international disagreements that weren’t wars, as well as some battles that haven’t ended.
Trump includes the more than two-year-long war between Israel and Hamas as the eighth war, as the two sides agreed in October to a ceasefire and the return of hostages and prisoners. Many have said that Trump should get credit for getting the deal done, including Biden’s former national security adviser.
Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that implementing Trump’s 20-point peace agreement comes with challenges. “Whether this leads to an end to the war remains an open question,” Cook said.
We’d note that both Israel and Hamas have accused the other of violating the terms of the ceasefire deal.
Trump claimed to have presided over a “tremendous renewal” of religion in America, but recent polling has found the opposite.
A Gallup poll conducted in November found that less than half of Americans reported that religion was an important part of their daily lives, which is a 17 percentage point decline since 2015, the year before Trump won his first election.
“The steady decline in U.S. religiosity over the past decade has been evident for years,” according to Gallup. “Fewer Americans identify with a religion, church attendance and membership are declining, and religion holds a less important role in people’s lives than it once did.”
That contradicts the president’s claim that “during my time in office, both the first four years, and in particular, this last year, there has been a tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity and belief in God.”
Trump went on to claim, “This is especially true among young people, and a big part of that had to do with my great friend, Charlie Kirk.”
A study released by the Pew Research Center in December found that Americans have remained roughly steady in whether or not they identify as religious since 2020, and that there is no surge in religious belief among the young.
“On average, young adults remain much less religious than older Americans,” according to Pew. “Today’s young adults also are less religious than young people were a decade ago. And there is no indication that young men are converting to Christianity in large numbers,” as had been suggested in some recent reporting.
The president touted the so-called “warrior dividend” bonus checks that were sent to military personnel in December.
“Every service member recently received a warrior dividend of $1,776,” Trump said, later adding, “we got the money from tariffs and other things.”
It’s true that about 1.5 million active-duty and reserve military members received checks, but the money didn’t come from tariffs.
Those bonuses were a reallocation of funds initially earmarked for an increased Department of Defense housing allowance, funded by a $2.9 billion appropriation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
During his address, Trump repeated — as he does in virtually every speech — his unsupported claim that many of the immigrants who came to the U.S. during the Biden administration “poured in by the millions and millions, from prisons, from mental institutions” in other countries. Trump has never provided any credible evidence of that.
Trump also claimed that Biden’s immigration policies allowed the entry of “11,888 murderers.” He has been citing variations of this figure for more than a year. But as we’ve written, he’s referring to noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list, known as the agency’s non-detained docket, included 13,099 people as of July 21, 2024. The “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a 2024 statement, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders.
Trump boasted, “The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year. Boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and millions of Americans are all gaining. Everybody’s up, way up.” The stock market is up in Trump’s first year, but it’s down from the gains seen in the last two years under Biden.
Since Trump took office, the S&P 500 has risen 14.9% (that’s for the period between the close of the market on Jan. 17, 2025, the last business day before the inauguration, and the close of the market on the Feb. 24, 2026). Although Trump has said stocks far outperformed Wall Street expectations, that’s only a little better than many financial analysts forecast for 2025 just before Trump took office.
As Yahoo! Finance wrote on Jan. 2, 2025, “The median year-end target for the S&P 500 among strategists tracked by Yahoo Finance sits at 6,600. This would represent about a 12% increase from the index’s current level.”
Trump claimed the Dow Jones “broke 50,000 four years ahead of schedule, and the S&P hit 7,000 where it wasn’t supposed to do it for many years.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, reached 50,000 in early February, but has since dropped a bit, and was at 49,174 at the close of the market on Feb. 24.
Although Trump’s claim may make it seem like the stock market rebounded since he took office, the stock market performed well in Biden’s final two years in office — with the S&P 500 rising over 20% each of those years — better than the 13% gain Trump saw in his first year. As we wrote in our story, “Biden’s Final Numbers,” the S&P grew by nearly 58% over the entirety of Biden’s four years. The stock market has been on a good long-term run, with the S&P rising nearly 68% during Trump’s first four years in office and by 166% during the eight years under President Barack Obama before that.
We also note that while Trump said that “everybody’s up, way up,” only about 62% of Americans own any stock, according to a Gallup poll in 2025. Ownership of stock skews heavily to the wealthy — 87% among those in households earning at least $100,000. It was 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.
“With the great Big Beautiful Bill, we gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors,” Trump said, recycling some of his favorite short descriptors to describe the reconciliation bill he signed into law in July.
As we’ve noted before, the law boosted the number of people who don’t have to pay any tax on their Social Security benefits through 2028, but does not eliminate the tax for all seniors since there is a phase-out for those with higher incomes.
According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, 88% of Social Security recipients 65 years or older will not pay any tax on those benefits under the law. That’s up from the 64% of senior recipients who already did not have to pay. (The law does not exempt individuals younger than 65 from having to pay taxes.)
The situation is similar with Trump’s claims of “no tax” on overtime or tips, which are also temporary and have phase-outs as income increases and other limitations. There is a maximum deduction of $25,000 for tips and $12,500 for overtime pay.
As he has for years, Trump insisted, without evidence, that “cheating is rampant in our elections.”
Trump urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and also photo identification to vote in federal elections. Under the current law, registrants must attest that they are a citizen under penalty of perjury, and noncitizens who vote risk deportation and being permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states and Washington, D.C., don’t require identification at the polls.
We’ve written a lot of articles about Trump’s false, misleading and unfounded claims about fraud in the 2020 election (and other elections). We’ve also looked at the Trump campaign’s 2020 legal challenges, which lacked evidence of voter fraud and were almost universally dismissed by judges.
Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” And William Barr, U.S. attorney general in Trump’s first term, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud.” Barr told the committee the election fraud narrative the Trump campaign was “shoveling out to the public … was bullshit.”
Trump said the SAVE America Act was needed “to stop illegal aliens and others — they’re unpermitted persons — from voting in our sacred American elections.” He called that kind of illegal voting “rampant” in American elections. But that’s not what was found when numerous states used a program called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to check the citizenship status of people on the voter rolls in numerous states.
According to the New York Times, of the 49.5 million voter registrations checked, the Department of Homeland Security referred about 10,000 cases to investigators. As the Times noted, that’s about 0.02% of registrations that were flagged as potentially being noncitizens. But even that number is inflated. The Times found that when several counties began looking into those on the voter rolls who were marked as potentially noncitizens, it turned out that only a fraction of them were. Moreover, there was no indication of how many of those who may have improperly registered to vote actually voted.
A spokesperson for the Trump administration noted that most of the states using the verification program are Republican-led states, and that the program might identify more noncitizens if it were embraced by Democratic-led states, many of which have less strict voter ID laws.
A systematic review and analysis of claims about noncitizen registrants and voters in all 50 states by the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, updated in February, found that “sweeping allegations about noncitizen registrations or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data. In every examined case, when claims about large numbers of noncitizens on voting rolls are subject to scrutiny and properly investigated, the number of alleged instances falls drastically.”
Trump also criticized mail-in ballots, calling them “crooked,” and saying they should only be allowed, “for illness, disability, military or travel.”
Mail-in voting is widely used around the country. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 28 states offer “no excuse” mail-in voting, meaning that any voter can request a mail-in ballot without needing to provide a reason. As we have written, experts have told us that voter fraud via mail-in ballots is rare, though more common than in-person voting fraud.
Trump made the dubious claim that the federal budget can be balanced by eliminating fraudulent spending.
“I am officially announcing the war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance,” he said. “We’ll get it done, and if we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly.”
In a 2024 report, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the entire federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” But the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2025, which ended on Sept. 30, was nearly $1.8 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office projected in its February budget outlook that the deficit will be $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2026 and rise to $2 trillion or more in 2028 and subsequent fiscal years.
Trump claimed that he inherited “rampant crime at home” and later boasted “last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history. This is the biggest decline, think of it, in recorded history, the lowest number in over 125 years.”
Crime data show that violent crime continued to decline in 2025, but the trend began in 2022 after a spike in crime, particularly murders, in 2020 — the year the pandemic began and the last year of Trump’s first term. Trump is right in touting the good news that violent crime continues to fall, but he wrongly paints this as a stark turnaround from when he took office.
U.S. violent crime rate peaked in the early 1990s and has generally declined since, even with the bump up in 2020. The rate dropped by 33.2 percentage points under Biden and was less than half the 1990s peak in 2024, the year before Trump took office, according to estimates from the FBI, which relies on voluntary reports from law enforcement agencies nationwide. The number and rate of murders also declined since 2020.
In 2024, Trump claimed such crime data amounted to “fake numbers.” But now that he’s in office, and the drop in crime continues, he has embraced those numbers.
Full-year nationwide data from the FBI won’t be released until later this year, but, as we reported last month, other groups that aggregate crime data reported by law enforcement agencies across the country show violent crime, including murder, went down again in 2025. Trump has highlighted a report by the Council on Criminal Justice that found a 21% decline in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025 in 35 cities.
CCJ reported, “When nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.”
The nationwide homicide rate was 5 per 100,000 in 2024.
Trump has attributed the crime drop to his policies of sending federal law enforcement, including the National Guard or immigration officers, into cities, as he mentioned repeatedly in the NBC News interview. But crime experts say such claims need robust research. “Without rigorous evidence, it is not possible to confidently pinpoint the factors fueling the drop in homicide,” the CCJ report said. “Any assertive claims about the influence of specific policy interventions, such as National Guard deployments and increased immigration enforcement or expanded community violence intervention programs, should be supported by robust research designs intended to measure their causal effects.”
Trump repeated a dubious claim he’s made several times before — and we’ve written about twice — regarding the ability of his increased tariffs to replace income taxes.
“I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” the president said.
But, as we’ve explained, there’s a wide margin between the revenues raised from personal income taxes versus those raised from tariffs.
For example, the federal government brought in a total of $560 billion in January, according to the Treasury’s most recent monthly report. More than half of that revenue came from individual income taxes, while just 5% came from tariffs.
“It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes,” Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, economists with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in 2024. “Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.”
Replacing the income tax with higher tariffs would cause job losses, higher inflation, larger federal deficits and a recession, Clausing and Obstfeld said.
“It would also shift the tax burden away from the well off, substantially increasing the tax burden on the poor and middle class,” they argued.
Many economists also say Trump is wrong to say tariffs are “paid for by foreign countries.” A Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis published on Feb. 12 concluded that “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.”
White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett blasted the report as an “embarrassment,” saying, “It’s, I think, the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system.” Hassett claimed the authors “put out a conclusion which has created a lot of news that’s highly partisan based on analysis that wouldn’t be accepted in a first-semester econ class.”
But the New York Fed is hardly alone in holding that position. A working paper revised in February from Harvard University professor and former International Monetary Fund economist Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that “tariff pass-through to U.S. import prices is almost 100 percent, so the United States is bearing a large share of the costs.”
Trump said that last year, the U.S. “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and “wiped it out.” But experts told us at the time that the June bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities damaged the country’s nuclear capabilities but that they were not “obliterated.” A preliminary classified intelligence assessment, described by CNN and the New York Times, said that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back by just a few months.
Indeed, Iran’s nuclear program continues. On Feb. 21, special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.” Meanwhile, the U.S. has been amassing warships and warplanes in the Middle East, and Trump has threatened military action against Iran. There will be further talks between the U.S. and Iran about the Iranian nuclear program on Feb. 26.
“We will always protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,” Trump insisted, about a third of the way through his speech.
To partially pay for the tax cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans cut more than $990 billion in spending on Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for people who have low incomes or disabilities. The law has many Medicaid-related provisions, but a major way spending was brought down was by modifying Medicaid eligibility requirements and introducing new work requirements. With fewer people on Medicaid, the program costs less.
Republicans have previously argued that Medicaid remains available and has not changed, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicaid-related changes in the law would result in 7.5 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 2034. A much smaller number of people — 100,000 — would lose coverage in a decade as a result of changes to Medicare under the law, CBO said. Another 2.1 million were estimated to lose coverage as a result of changes to the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
Trump exaggerated the increase in U.S. oil production and gave himself too much credit for the country’s record output of natural gas.
“American oil production is up by more than 600,000 barrels a day, and we just received, from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil,” he said. “American natural gas production is at an all-time high because I kept my promise to drill, baby, drill.”
As of November, U.S. crude oil production had increased to an average of more than 13.6 million barrels per day in Trump’s first full ten months in the White House, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s up about 2.5%, or 334,600 barrels per day, from less than 13.3 million barrels per day during the same period in 2024.
Before Trump was inaugurated, and before any of his policies were in place, the EIA had already projected in its January Short-Term Energy Outlook that average daily production would increase to a 13.5 million barrels a day in 2025 — up from the previous record of 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024.
Meanwhile, through November, production of dry natural gas had increased to an average of nearly 3.3 trillion cubic feet per month in Trump’s first full ten months in the White House, according to EIA data. That’s up about 4.2% from more than 3.1 trillion cubic feet produced per month during the same period in 2024, which was already a record year for natural gas production in the country, the EIA said.
Correction, Feb. 25: We have corrected Trump’s quote about the price of gasoline. He said gasoline is “now below $2.30 a gallon in most states,” not $2.36.
Clarification, Feb. 25: We edited the summary to make clear that the annual inflation rate was 3% when Trump took office in January 2025, not 9.1%.
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The post FactChecking Trump’s State of the Union Address appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Film screening: Oscar-shortlisted The President’s Cake 9 April 2026 — 4:30PM TO 7:30PM Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House
Join us for a screening and panel discussion of the critically acclaimed film offering lessons from Iraq on dictatorship, corruption and the long-term impacts of sanctions.
Join us for a screening and panel discussion of the critically acclaimed film offering lessons from Iraq on dictatorship, corruption and survival under sanctions
From debut Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, The President’s Cake is a poignant story of love, friendship and resilience told through the eyes of a child growing up under Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime. It was the first Iraqi film to feature at the Cannes Film Festival, premiering in Directors’ Fortnight and winning both the section’s Audience Award and the festival’s prestigious Camera d’Or.
As many states in the Middle East continue to prioritise internal control and regime durability, The President’s Cake shows how power is sustained not only through coercion, but also through everyday social practices that shape behaviour and reinforce compliance. These dynamics remain central to understanding current political trajectories, state–society relations, and the prospects for meaningful reform.
A panel discussion following the screening, featuring the director and leading Iraq experts, will explore these themes in greater depth–drawing lessons from Iraq’s experience on authoritarian resilience, social cohesion, and the long-term legacies of political control.
Click here for The President’s Cake official trailer.
The event will be followed by a drinks reception for guests.
Opposition campaigners claim top figures in regime use state wealth to fund lifestyles counter to those they preach
Members of Iran’s ruling elite have been accused of brazen hypocrisy by allegedly using the state’s wealth to help to fund their adult children’s lives in the west while presiding over growing economic misery and repression at home.
Opposition campaigners made the accusation against some of the clerical regime’s most powerful figures as a military confrontation with the US appears increasingly likely. Donald Trump has deployed a vast armada in the Middle East and confirmed he is considering strikes.
Continue reading...Lio Cundiff, who is trans, told the Guardian he hopes the act shows everyone how ‘human we are – because all I did was a human act’
A Chicagoan who recently jumped into a perilously cold lake to help rescue a baby whose stroller was blown into the water by a wind gust has implored everyone in the US to “just take care of one another”.
In an interview Tuesday, Lio Cundiff, who is a trans man, said of himself: “All I did was a human act. I’m just a human who did the most human thing you could do – which is save someone who can’t save themselves.”
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s guest to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address helped protect a Delaware citizen from the administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement last year.
A tenacious Delaware immigrant rights advocate accompanied U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester to President Donald Trump’s second State of the Union Address on Tuesday — an attempt to underscore Delaware’s aid efforts following a year of heightened federal immigration enforcement.
Blunt Rochester invited Maria Mesias-Tatnall, director of outreach services for immigration assistance with Delaware’s Office of the Attorney General, to be her guest to the president’s annual speech to a joint session of Congress.
Mesias-Tatnall was chosen because she “epitomizes the moment,” as dozens of advocates work to help Delaware’s immigrant communities that are living in “terror,” Blunt Rochester said. Mesias-Tatnall played a crucial role in rescuing a survivor of domestic violence who was on the verge of being deported back to her abuser last spring — a story recounted by Spotlight Delaware last year.
The woman — who was identified under the pseudonym of “Isabela” in order to protect her identity — was in the process of obtaining a visa reserved for victims of crime and was temporarily shielded from deportation. Still, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested the mother of two with no criminal history inside her Sussex County home in March 2025, before she was sent to a detention center in Louisiana.
“We represent the people who cannot come in front of the camera,” Mesias-Tatnall said.
Earlier this month, Blunt Rochester hosted a roundtable discussion in Georgetown with leaders and members of Delaware’s Haitian and Latino immigrant communities, with Mesias-Tatnall in attendance. During the meeting, several attendees reported that people have not shown up to medical appointments while some families have stopped sending their kids to Head Start programs.
“It’s not just happening in one part of the country, it’s also happening right here at home,” Blunt-Rochester said.
On Feb. 3, the Department of Homeland Security moved to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants in the U.S. The termination would leave about 330,000 Haitian immigrants nationwide open to potential deportation.
But, that same day, a federal judge temporarily blocked the termination from taking place, setting up a legal battle that is slated to end with a Supreme Court decision.
In the days following the judge’s ruling, Blunt Rochester — alongside all Senate Democrats and Independents — sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, demanding that she reverse her directive to end TPS for Haitians.
In March 2025, ICE agents burst into Isabela’s house in the middle of the night – without presenting an arrest warrant – looking for her brother. The agents arrested Isabela in front of her two children as they searched the house,
Agents did not ask about Isabela’s immigration status before she was taken away in handcuffs as a collateral arrest, she told Spotlight Delaware.
Isabela was living in Delaware under the legal protection of “deferred action” as part of the lengthy U visa process, which helps victims of crime who assist law enforcement in catching criminals. Other U visa holders across the country, who have temporary legal status, have also been detained and deported as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
As a victim of domestic violence, Isabela helped police find, prosecute and deport her ex-husband who stabbed her in 2019.
A U visa allows undocumented victims of crime to live and work in the U.S. for up to four years and places them on a pathway to citizenship. The status is intended for crime victims who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement during the investigation.
ICE moved Isabela to Baltimore and then to a Louisiana detention center. After nearly a month in custody, Isabela’s release was negotiated through the efforts of the Delaware Attorney General’s office and Community Legal Aid Society Inc.
ICE planned on dropping Isabela at Louisiana’s Monroe Regional Airport with no documentation, phone, or money. As a result, Mesias-Tatnall boarded a Louisiana-bound flight to meet Isabela and bring her back home.
Mesias-Tatnall arrived at Isabela’s hotel room door at midnight. Isabela skeptically opened the door, wearing the same pajamas she wore the night ICE took her.
“You’re safe,” Mesias-Tatnall said. “We got you.”
Isabela threw her arms around Mesias-Tatnall and cried.
Following the rescue, Mesias-Tatnall visited Isabela just before Christmas. Isabela and her family have since moved to a new house and her children are getting therapy, Mesias-Tatnall said.
The post Blunt Rochester invites immigrant advocate to State of the Union amid heightened enforcement appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
From fire alarms to telephone cables, low voltage contractors are behind a lot of the wiring that powers peoples’ daily lives. Discussions of new licensing and inspection requirements have raised concerns about what the future of the low voltage electrical industry could look like in Delaware.
Delaware’s electrical workers are in a state of uncertainty as an oversight board considers implementing new requirements that could fundamentally change low voltage electrical work processes.
In August, the Delaware Board of Electrical Examiners, a little-known state regulatory body, introduced a proposal that would make low voltage electrical workers, who install “energy limited” wiring like telephone systems, fire alarms and satellite dish antennas, obtain an electricians’ license to do their work.
Completing a full electricians’ license, which includes an apprenticeship and classroom instruction, typically takes at least four years. Low voltage workers, who install systems under 50 volts, often undertake specialized training depending on what they are installing, but are exempt from acquiring an electricians’ license under existing Delaware code.
Low voltage workers and contracting associations protested the board’s licensing idea en masse, both at meetings during the fall and online, prompting the board to later withdraw the proposal.
“By eliminating that exemption, they would have required all the voltage work to be done by a licensed electrician,” said Jen Cohan, president of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Delaware trade association.
The saga continues, however, as the board of examiners – which falls under the state’s Division of Professional Regulation – discussed at its most recent meeting on Feb. 17, implementing an inspection requirement as part of the installation process for low voltage cabling instead of full licensure.
What exactly the inspection requirement might look like, and why the board began exploring changes to the low voltage work systems in the first place, remain unclear.
Some low voltage electrical workers and contracting associations told Spotlight Delaware that they did not know why the board was looking at changing the processes for low voltage work, especially when there does not appear to be a problem with those operations in the first place.
“I don’t know what problem the board is trying to solve,” said Dave Sweeney, regional director for the company Advantech Security, which installs various types of low voltage cabling.
Many also pointed to a rumor circulating the electrical industry that the state fire marshal was advocating for the licensing and inspection requirements due to some fire safety concerns that had arisen.
State Fire Marshal John Rudd, however, said that was a “misconception,” and he had not brought any suggestions to the board of examiners.
“We haven’t really recommended anything to the board,” Rudd told Spotlight Delaware. “We defer to the board on their recommendations because they are the ones that are in charge of all that stuff.”
Members of the Board of Electrical Examiners did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s multiple requests for comment.
Get Involved
The Board of Electrical Examiners is scheduled to meet next on Wednesday, March 4, at 8:30 a.m. inside the Cannon Building, located at 861 Silver Lake Blvd. in Dover.
Recent discussions of low voltage contract work provided more questions than answers about the board’s goals, and how it intends to move forward with the requirements.
At the Feb. 17 meeting, board president Karl Segner said the goal of an inspection requirement would be to ensure that low voltage projects are installed properly, and are in line with local and state codes.
He did not elaborate as to whether there have been incidents of low voltage installation not being up to code, or other safety concerns with low voltage work.
The Delaware Board of Electrical Examiners code defines low voltage contractors as those who install wiring for telephone systems, sound systems, cable television systems, closed circuit video systems, satellite dish antennas, and instrumentation and temperature controls.
To Sweeney, the Advantech director, it functions to “lump” all different types of low voltage workers into one licensing exemption, but trying to create a blanket licensing or inspection requirement for such varied low voltage jobs, he said, does not work.
“The board is going to have to take a more granular approach and look at specific trades or specific subsets of the low voltage industry,” he said.
Members of the Board of Examiners said at the meeting that they were not sure whether an inspection would be necessary for every single cable installation, or only for installations of a certain size.
They also mentioned that creating a new, separate licensing process for low voltage contractors, instead of the previous idea of combining them with electricians’ requirements, could be a possibility.
Some board members mentioned that nearby Cecil County, Md., has required inspections and licenses for low voltage work, which could serve as a model for a similar program in Delaware.
Cecil County did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment about their low voltage work requirements.
Sweeney, along with two other low voltage contractors, were asked to weigh in on the inspection and licensing discussions at the Feb. 17 meeting. Sweeney said he anticipates continuing to weigh in on the board’s discussions.
Cohan, with the builders and contractors association, said her group also plans to be involved in discussing ways to implement inspections with the board in the coming months.
Eddie Lesniczak, vice president of IBEW 313, the state’s electrical workers union, said he too has been following the discussion at recent board meetings, and has concluded there has been a lot of “confusion in the room” about what the board is trying to accomplish.
Lesniczak said he could see the merits of creating some licensing requirements for low voltage workers, but that those licenses should be entirely different from electricians’ licenses, as they are different crafts.
He added that the union has been struggling with workers who pretend to be certified electricians or pretend to know how to do low voltage cabling, and then they do installation projects incorrectly, so more verification of electricians’ licenses could be a way to assuage those concerns.
Amid the confusion about what inspired the low voltage discussion, rumors have circulated that the union encouraged the board of examiners to consider the licensing concept.
Lesniczak, however, said that is not the case.
“I’ve seen a lot of people’s comments pop up that the union is behind it,” he said. “We’re not behind this at all. It’s kind of surprising.”
Republican state lawmakers have also jumped into the conversation, criticizing the board’s proposals as a regulatory overreach and a detriment to the electrical work industry.
Senate Minority Whip Brian Pettyjohn (R-Georgetown), who has a background in data cabling work, said he does not understand why there is a conversation surrounding licensing and inspection because there is not a safety or fire risk with such low voltage cabling.
Pettyjohn added that low voltage cabling is an entirely different field from bigger electrical work, so the requirements must be kept separate.
“You’re talking about two different types of art,” he said. “And to lump them into one is something that would be devastating to the folks that do that now and drive up costs.”
House Minority Whip Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton) said similarly that there is already a labor shortage in the trades, and adding more steps for electrical workers will only cause more problems, “without really solving anything.”
The board will continue discussing low voltage inspection requirements at its next meeting on March 4.
The post Low voltage electrical work discussion prompts widespread confusion, pushback appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The Maduro raid encouraged anti-government activists in Iran, some of them said. But it doesn’t appear to have sent a clear message to Tehran’s leadership.
The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.
Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.
But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.
“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.
Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.
Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.
Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government.
Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.
“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.
Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”
Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.
Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.
“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.
A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.
National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.
In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.
President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.
More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.
The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.
Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.
On Sept. 22, the Trump administration also designated the loosely organized antifascist political movement antifa as a terrorist group, despite the lack of any federal law authorizing it to do so. Weeks later, the administration named four European militant groups said to be aligned with antifa to the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.
The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.
The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.
That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.
Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.
Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.
However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.
The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.
The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.
The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.
“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”
The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”
Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.
The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.
Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.
“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”
Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.
But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.
Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.
The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.
Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.
The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.
In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.
Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.
In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.
“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.
When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.
The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.
Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.
While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.
The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.
The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”
In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.
At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.
The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.
The post Trump Administration Moves to Allow Intelligence Agencies Easier Access to Law Enforcement Files appeared first on ProPublica.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The plans for several data centers in Delaware have garnered backlash from residents who are worried about their potential impact on energy costs and the environment. The outcome of this fight over environmental law will impact several of those proposals.
The developer behind a billion-dollar plan to build a data center near Delaware City is not giving up without a fight.
Last week, Starwood Digital Ventures appealed a state decision issued last month by Environmental Secretary Greg Patterson that the data center is not allowed under the Coastal Zone Act — a landmark Delaware law designed to limit heavy industry along the state’s shorelines.
The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control publicly released the appeal on Tuesday.
In it, Starwood’s attorney Jeffery Moyer argued that the data center plan, dubbed Project Washington, does not have the characteristics of heavy industry, such as smokestacks, chemical processing equipment or waste-treatment lagoons.
“Project Washington will be a non-manufacturing data-center campus that stores and manages data,” Moyer stated in the appeal.
In recent years, the data center industry has been among fastest growing in the country, with investors seeking the profits from an ongoing artificial intelligence boom. The exuberance appeared in Delaware in recent months with developers proposing several data center plans.
One of them, proposed near land that hosts the popular Halloween attraction Frightland north of Middletown, also sits within Delaware’s coastal zone boundaries and may have to comply with the provisions of the act.
The Delaware General Assembly passed the Coastal Zone Act in 1971 to protect the state’s environmentally sensitive shorelines by prohibiting new heavy industry from them.
In his decision on the Starwood proposal, Patterson pointed to the data center’s proposed use of 516 backup diesel generators, which would operate in the case of a power outage, as a reason for the heavy industry classification.
Together, they would rely on 2.5 million gallons of stored diesel, which Patterson called “entirely unprecedented” in his ruling.
Moyer — who represents Starwood as an attorney with Wilmington-based Richards, Layton & Finger — argued in the appeal that Patterson’s analysis “improperly” determined that the diesel engines’ exhaust and fuel storage amounted to tanks and smokestacks, under the law.
The Delaware Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board will decide whether to reverse Patterson’s decision. The date of the hearing has not yet been determined.
Despite Pattenson’s Coastal Zone Act decision, Starwood is continuing to progress through its other county and state regulatory processes.
In January, the company filed a request with New Castle County’s Board of Adjustments for a special use permit to allow it to build an electric switch station for the project. The board will consider the request during a hearing on March 5.
Starwood’s plan is also continuing to move through the state’s land-use review process – in which representatives from multiple state agencies offer comments about how the data center plan may be impacted by their respective regulations. Among the agencies that typically participate in the process is Patterson’s DNREC.
The process is conducted by the Delaware Preliminary Land Use Service board, which does not have the power to make final decisions. Still, its recommendations can influence the ultimate decisions that local governments make.
Get Involved
The Board of Adjustments will meet at 6 p.m. on March 5 at 67 Reads Way in New Castle. Members of the public can also attend the meeting over Zoom. The Preliminary Land Use Service will meet from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on March 5
Moyer, Starwood’s lawyer, also stated in the appeal that Patterson should not have relied on a worst-case scenario when calculating the potential emissions from the backup generators.
In its Coastal Zone application, Starwood reported that the maximum possible hours the generators could operate would be 500 hours, or a little over 20 days, per year.
“Under this worst-case assumption, this proposed campus has the potential to emit more tons of nitrogen oxides than any other industrial use in the coastal zone, with the exception of the Delaware City refinery,” Patterson said.
Starwood’s Coastal Zone Act application did say the generators could operate for that long in the worst-case conditions.
But Moyer said that Patterson “downplay[ed] the project’s actual expected operating scenario” of the generators running 20 hours per year “and failed to evaluate the potential to pollute under realistic operating conditions.”
Patterson did reference the 20-hour estimate in his decision. But he used the 500-hour scenario to calculate potential emissions.
Those familiar with the Coastal Zone Act decision process are unsure of whether Starwood has a case.
Kenneth Kristl, former director of the Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University’s Delaware Law School, said Patterson, as DNREC’s secretary, generally has considerable discretion about how the Coastal Zone Act is implemented.
Still, whether large-scale data centers count as heavy industry has not yet been litigated, he said.
“To me, it’s an intriguing legal question that needs to be resolved,” Kristl said.
New Castle County Councilman Dave Carter, who is trying to regulate data centers, said he has been on both sides of the Coastal Zone Act decision process, as a DNREC employee and as a litigant.
He thinks Patterson’s decision that Project Washington is heavy industry aligns with the “functional reality” of the plan, not how the developers are labeling it.
“You can do all the wordsmithing you want, but if you look at the actual impact … it’s clearly heavy industry,” Carter said.
Carter said regardless of what the Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board decides, he thinks the losing side will likely appeal the decision to the Delaware Superior Court, then the Delaware Supreme Court.
“This could take years,” he said.
Kristl agreed, saying he thinks the whole process will take between 18 months and three years.
The post Delaware City data center developer appeals Coastal Zone denial appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
President Trump defended his first year back in office in his 2026 State of the Union address, touting his record on immigration, the economy, tariffs and more.
Poet’s second collection The Rot won the Victorian prize for literature and the Indigenous writing category
Evelyn Araluen has won both the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature and the $25,000 Indigenous writing category at this year’s Victorian premier’s literary awards, for her second poetry collection The Rot.
Selected from almost 700 books entered for the prize, The Rot won the two awards on Thursday night, having also been shortlisted in the poetry category. The Goorie and Koori poet won the 2022 Stella prize, and was shortlisted for three premier’s literary prizes, for her debut collection Dropbear.
Continue reading...Rumors point to new Galaxy Watches on the way, but the rugged Ultra may steal the spotlight this year.
Apple's forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models -- the company's first-ever laptops to support touch input -- will feature the iPhone's Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans. The 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release toward the end of 2026 and won't be part of Apple's product announcements in the first week of March. The redesigned interface brings up a contextual menu surrounding a user's finger when they touch a button or control, and enlarges menu bar items when tapped, adapting the available controls based on whether the input is touch or click. Apple does not plan to position the machines as iPad replacements or describe them as touch-first; the physical design retains the full keyboard and large trackpad of the current MacBook Pro. Last year's Liquid Glass redesign in macOS Tahoe, which added more padding around icons and touch-optimized sliders in the control center, was partly groundwork for this shift.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This blog is now closed
Trump claims host of successes and attacks old foes in longest State of the Union
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Erika Kirk, the widow of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, will attend tonight’s State of the Union address as a special guest of the president.
After her husband was assassinated at a college event for his non-profit Turning Point USA, Erika Kirk took over the organization.
If he’s coming to our house, you got to be there. Otherwise, you let him own the house.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: With the latest supreme court ruling exposing the president’s tariff plans as unlawful, US politicians and the American people have found them to be unworkable. Where does Trump go from here?
Good morning. Let’s delve into the two Ts shaping the global economy right now: tariffs and Trump.
Last week, the US supreme court ruled that Donald Trump had unlawfully used executive powers to impose sweeping global tariffs. In a 6-3 decision, the court found that the 1977 law Trump relied on did not give him the authority he claimed to introduce tariffs across the world. The ruling dealt a significant blow to a central plank of the president’s economic and geopolitical agenda.
US news | Donald Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address overnight, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections.
UK news | Peter Mandelson condemned the police for his arrest and claimed he was only taken into custody because detectives had wrongly believed he was about to flee the country.
Reform | Unions and renters’ groups criticised Reform UK after the party’s business spokesperson pledged to introduce a “great repeal act” that would abolish Labour legislation on workers’ rights and protection for tenants.
Education | Teachers and schools face “a huge ask” implementing the government’s special needs proposals, according to education leaders and MPs who otherwise gave the plans a cautious welcome.
Health | Almost half the public delay or avoid contacting their GP surgery when they are ill, mainly because they think they will struggle to get an appointment, a survey found.
Continue reading...Throughout the speech, Trump seemed tired. He had difficulty reading from his teleprompter; he gripped the podium with a tightness bordering on desperation
It is one of Donald Trump’s unique talents that he reveals the absurd obsolescence of long-held traditions. In presidential election years, his screaming bloviations on stage make the exercise of gathering the candidates together seem futile. In power, when he divorces facts from policymaking and relies instead on myth and grift to guide his decisions, he renders useless and impotent vast fields of expertise.
When he lies in public, and insists that his fantasies and distortions will dictate the course of government action, he makes those of us in the news business wonder if there’s any point, any more, in gathering and printing the truth.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Continue reading...  | I recently replaced my Pint X Enduro tire (soft) and the wear on the shoulders is significant, especially on my toe edge. If you look closely, you can see the surface is no longer flat as it is on the new tire. The old tire has 1200+ miles on it. [link] [comments] |
The City of Newark is inviting residents to learn about solar power, and all attendees will receive a $40 credit on their electric bill just for showing up.
Surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, will be located on Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island
Japan will deploy missiles to a tiny island near Taiwan within five years, its defence minister has said, in a move that is likely to inflame tensions with China.
The surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, will be located on Yonaguni – Japan’s westernmost island – by March 2031, Shinjiro Koizumi said.
Continue reading...Virginia’s new governor gives State of the Union rebuttal while Alex Padilla echoes similar themes in Spanish response
Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger gave a crisp and pointed rebuttal to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, focusing on what she called the president’s failure to deliver costs, safety and humanity to the American people.
“We did not hear the truth from our president,” Spanberger said in the 12-minute speech on Tuesday night, asking voters to reflect on how Trump’s agenda has directly affected their lives. “So let’s speak plainly and honestly,” she said. “Is the president working for you?”
Continue reading...Hi guys!
I recently got my first onewheel (pint) and I really want to screw around with VESCing the board, but there isn't a ton of information readily available. I have lots of questions, but I will try to be brief xD.
I'm a budget baller (obviously very difficult for onewheel, but 🙄) but it seems the easiest VESC to start with would be the floatwheel one. My main questions come from what kind of performance I could expect from various configs. Main two choices being: keeping the stock BMS and just building a higher quality battery than the stock one (21700s maybe), or fully upgrading and going to 20s or so. I really just want a speed increase (cruise 20-25mph or so). I really just want to hear more options and how different configs affect the final result.
TLDR: How good is the performance difference just by upgrading the controller?
Candidates wishing to run for school board have until March 6 to file to run in the May 12 election.
Not all partnerships are worth reviving.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic response to President Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night as the party attempts to counter the president's message.
Secretary of state makes rare briefing to so-called ‘gang of eight’ as US deploys largest force of aircraft and warships to Middle East since 2003
Marco Rubio delivered a rare briefing to top US lawmakers on Iran, just a few hours before Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to say that Tehran would never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
Amid the largest deployment of aircraft and warships to the Middle East since the 2003 buildup to the Iraq war, Trump said he wanted to solve the confrontation with Iran through diplomatic means while claiming that Tehran was seeking to develop ballistic missiles that could reach the US, without providing further details.
Continue reading...During the State of the Union address, President Trump awarded Royce Williams a Medal of Honor for his actions in a secret mission during the Korean War.
President Trump touted his work during his first year back in office, saying, "inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before."
President Trump pressed the Iranian government to reach a deal on its nuclear program as he weighs possible military action against the country.
Connor Hellebuyck stopped 41 of Team Canada's 42 shots in the Olympic gold medal match.
The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill. The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects. In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rebound in the country – which has been having demographic crisis – said to be partly because of 3.6 million born between 1991 and 1995 having children
South Korea recorded 254,500 births in 2025, the largest annual increase in 15 years, driven largely by a temporarily enlarged generation – known as “echo boomers” – now in their early thirties, alongside marriage rates recovering from Covid-era delays.
The country’s fertility rate – the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime – rose to 0.80 from 0.75 last year, returning to the 0.8 range for the first time since 2021, according to provisional figures released by South Korea’s ministry of data and statistics on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 25.
Just got myself a pint x just this last saturday and have been ripping it around town and all about learning a getting the feel for it. I was wondering what shoe helps with foot fatigue abit I've seen some things about vans mte, I know that I'm still new an my muscles have grow for this but once I ride for a while mostly my feet hurt I can put up with the leg pain.
The U.S. men's hockey team also visited the White House on Tuesday following their gold medal win at the Winter Olympics.
I tried skating once or twice in my youth and struggled to push my board and keep my balance on the board at the same time. Has anyone found their skills learned from riding a Onewheel helped learn using a regular skateboard? Thinking about grabbing a cheap board next time I see one at the thrift store.
Four-day Caricom summit dominated by debate about US interventions in the region as military strikes against suspected drug boats continue
US interventions dominated speeches at a summit of 15 nations from the Caribbean and the Americas on Tuesday, as the region’s leaders met amid deadly military strikes against suspected drug boats and an oil blockade on Cuba.
During the opening ceremony of the four-day Caricom summit in St Kitts and Nevis, leaders of the regional bloc called for a strategic collaborations to deal with the impact of recent US policies.
Continue reading...Dick Durbin accuses FBI chief of ‘irresponsible joyriding’ and says agency’s work marred by Patel’s poor decisions
A top Senate Democrat alleged on Tuesday that FBI director Kash Patel’s personal travel and decision-making have undermined high-profile investigations, citing a whistleblower report.
Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, wrote in a letter to two government watchdogs that Patel has “seemingly engaged in what amounts to irresponsible joyriding on DoJ and FBI-operated aircraft at the expense of the American taxpayer and to the detriment of ongoing bureau operations”.
Continue reading...I’m looking for a handle - I’ve seen some of you use a paranoia concoction or similar. What are you using to carry your ride like a briefcase?
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 25, No. 520.
A man fatally stabbed four people before being shot dead by a sheriff's deputy outside a home northwest of Tacoma, Washington, authorities said.
The Democratic Women's Caucus wore pink to President Trump's address to Congress last year. This year, they're returning to white.
Critics say proposal to fold department into a new ‘mega ministry’ will dilute accountability and put nature protections at risk
New Zealand’s government is seeking to abolish its dedicated environment ministry to cut down on bureaucracy, a move critics say could dilute environmental protections.
Under the plan, the department would be folded into a new “mega-ministry” that will cover housing, urban development, transport, local government and the environment.
Continue reading...A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024. Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell's transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them. Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation -- her mother had received her older sister's womb in January 2023. Globally, more than 100 womb transplants have been performed, resulting in over 70 healthy births.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 25, No. 1,712.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 25, No. 724.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 25 #990.
Savannah Guthrie said in a new video that the family is offering an additional reward of up to $1 million for information about their mother Nancy Guthrie's whereabouts.
Toby Walsh says he despairs at Australian government’s lack of regulation of artificial intelligence
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A leading AI expert has warned some Australians are showing signs of psychosis or mania in their interactions with chatbots, arguing Silicon Valley is being “careless” with the technology amid a pursuit of profit.
During an address at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Toby Walsh, scientia professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, said he believed the AI race will be both “boom and doom”, with some benefits.
Continue reading...The acquisition, covering more than 13,000 parking locations, is aimed at commuters, large events and airports.
A federal magistrate judge has blocked the DOJ from searching through a Washington Post reporter's devices after they were seized by the FBI last month, instead ruling that the court would conduct a search.
Lawmaker says DoJ appears to have withheld interviews with survivor who accused Trump of ‘heinous crimes’
Democrats on the House oversight and government reform committee announced on Tuesday the launch of an investigation to determine whether the US Department of Justice (DoJ) purposely withheld materials that pertain to allegations against Donald Trump in the government’s release of the Epstein files.
The lawmakers pledged to look into a report that Trump had been accused by a woman of sexually abusing her decades ago when she was a minor, and that material relating to the allegation in the Epstein files has not been released to the public.
Continue reading...Anthropic presents itself as most safety-forward AI firm and Pentagon has threatened penalties if it does not yield
US military leaders including Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, met with executives from the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic on Tuesday to hash out a dispute over what the government will be able to do with the company’s powerful AI model. Hegseth gave Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, until the end of the day on Friday to agree to the department’s terms or face penalties, Axios reported.
Anthropic, which presents itself as the most safety-forward of the leading AI companies, has been mired in weeks of disagreement with the Pentagon over how the military is allowed to use its large language model, Claude. US defense officials have pushed for unfettered access to Claude’s capabilities, while Anthropic has reportedly resisted allowing its product to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems that can use AI to kill people without human input. The Department of Defense (DoD) has integrated Claude into its operations, but has threatened to sever the relationship over what its top brass perceives as roadblocks erected by Anthropic.
Continue reading...Melvin Trotter, 65, gets lethal injection for 1986 stabbing death, becoming second person executed by state this year
A man convicted of killing a 70-year-old grocery store owner was put to death Tuesday in Florida, becoming the second person executed by the state this year after a record 19 executions in 2025.
Melvin Trotter, 65, was pronounced dead at 6.15pm following a lethal injection at Florida state prison near Starke for the 1986 stabbing death of Virgie Langford, according to authorities. Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesperson for Republican governor Ron DeSantis, said there were no complications.
Continue reading...Lawsuit is latest action by Trump administration against a university and escalation of president’s feud with California
The justice department sued the University of California, Los Angeles on Tuesday, alleging the university created a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff after protests against the war on Gaza broke out across campus.
The lawsuit claims UCLA violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by “failing to prevent and correct discriminatory and harassing conduct” after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war on Gaza. The lawsuit is the latest action against a US university by the Trump administration since the president took office last year, and an escalation of Donald Trump’s feud with the state of California.
Continue reading...In new CBS News poll, most describe the state of the country as "divided;" Republicans are optimistic. Democrats and Republicans alike want to hear Trump talk about the economy and the cost of living.
Most believe they will struggle to get an appointment, with over a quarter choosing to manage ailment themselves
Almost half the public delay or avoid contacting their GP surgery when they are ill, mainly because they think they will struggle to get an appointment.
Overall 48% of people across the UK did not bother to ask their family doctor for help – either initially or at all – when they got sick over the past year, a survey found.
Faster access to GPs and A&E are the public’s top priorities for the NHS.
Only 32% believe the NHS provides a good service nationally.
42% think the standard of NHS care has worsened over the past year and only 12% think that it has improved.
47% fear NHS care will decline further over the next year and just 15% expect it to get better
Continue reading...A rider is an additional provision added to a bill, often unrelated to its main purpose, and considered as part of the full legislation.
A roll call vote records each legislator’s individual vote—yea, nay, or present—creating an official public record for transparency.
A federal EAP offers voluntary, confidential support for personal or workplace concerns, providing counseling, referrals, and guidance.
The order of business is the structured sequence a legislative body follows to conduct work, set schedules, and ensure proceedings follow established rules.
This blog is now closed. You can find our live coverage of the State of the Union here:
About 30 members of Congress are planning to attend a Democratic counter-program event tonight instead of the State of the Union, according to the organizers of the “People’s State of the Union,” led by liberal group MoveOn and progressive media outlet MeidasTouch.
Here are the lawmakers who are expected to attend the separate event and skip the Trump speech:
Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA)
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)
Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Senator Tina Smith (D-MN)
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)
Representative Yassamin Ansari (AZ-03)
Representative Becca Balint (D-VT)
Representative Greg Casar (TX-35)
Representative Lizzie Fletcher (TX-7)
Representative Maxwell Frost (FL-10)
Representative Robert Garcia (CA-42)
Representative Adelita Grijalva (AZ-07)
Representative Jim Himes (CT-04)
Representative Sara Jacobs (CA-51)
Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07)
Representative John B. Larson (CT-01)
Representative Summer Lee (PA-12)
Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez (NM-03)
Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37)
Representative April McClain Delaney (MD-6)
Representative Christian Menefee (TX-18)
Representative Chellie Pingree (ME-01)
Representative Ayanna Pressley (MA-7)
Representative Emily Randall (WA-6)
Representative Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-05)
Representative Melanie Stansbury (NM-01)
Representative Delia Ramirez (IL-03)
Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12)
Continue reading...The Supreme Court decision spiking Trump’s tariffs threatens to undermine the White House’s China strategy, just weeks before the two leaders are expected to meet.
Firefighters search for 39 people missing in debris after river burst and houses were swept away
Three firefighters pulled a man’s body from the mud amid the rubble of houses swept away in a landslide in south-eastern Brazil, where 30 people died and 39 were still missing on Tuesday after torrential rains.
A river in the state of Minas Gerais burst its banks and streets became raging currents of brown water after an overnight downpour in a region that has seen record rain this month.
Continue reading...Zohran Mamdani calls for ‘respect’ of New York police as hundreds of thousands in US still face power outages
New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, called for “respect” of local police officers in the wake of Monday’s blizzard after a viral video showed some getting pelted by snowballs in Washington Square Park while responding to a large snowball fight.
In the video, a crowd of people boo and jeer at two officers, and some throw snowballs in their faces. At one point, the officers push at least two people to the ground in response to the snowballs.
Continue reading...The Senate failed to advance a measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday, 11 days into a partial government shutdown with no apparent end in sight.
Warner Bros. Discovery said it will engage with Paramount Skydance to assess if its latest offer is superior to Netflix's $83 billion bid.
The Pentagon inspector general recommended the military reduce the number of military working dogs until there are enough caretakers to provide all dogs with satisfactory care.
Government ignores pleas for a grace period before new rules come into force on Wednesday
British citizens with a second nationality risk being blocked from entering the UK from Wednesday, the Home Office has confirmed.
The government has decided to ignore pleas from families, the3million campaign group, the Liberal Democrats and the former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis for a grace period to allow British dual nationals to adapt to the new rules they face.
Continue reading...Republican Tony Gonzales allegedly pressured Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, who died by suicide, into sexual relationship
US congressman Tony Gonzales refused growing calls to resign from his fellow Republicans on Tuesday amid a furore over allegations that he had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.
Gonzales has been accused of sending sexually explicit text messages in which he appeared to pressure the senior staffer to share images of herself and, eventually, coerced her into a sexual relationship.
In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CBS News that GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales should resign, after a set of text messages drew fresh scrutiny to an alleged affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.
A college degree still provides an edge when it comes to finding a good job, but a person's major may be just as important to career stability, research suggests.
Feb. 24, 2026 — CSCS is pleased to announce the Eurohack26: High-Performance Computing Applications Programming hackathon. Eurohack26 is devoted to porting scientific applications to GPUs of different vendors or other massive parallel architectures, as well as optimizing existing high-performance computing applications. AI applications are welcome if they require massive compute power provided by parallel architectures.
The event will take place in person, from September 7 to 11, 2026, at Hotel de la Paix in Lugano, located in the Italian speaking area of Switzerland.
Background
High Performance Computing utilizes more and more parallelism provided by modern supercomputers. One development is General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), which offers exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications together with many parallel programming units. Another development is increased parallelism in multicore processors. Today, these devices can be programmed with the CUDA/C++ programming platform, HIP or with OpenACC directives for accelerators, which offer straightforward extensions to C++ and Fortran to address this programming hurdle. Alternative programming paradigms such as OpenCL or Kokkos can also be employed.
The workshop does not solely focus on the programming techniques but also on the algorithmic aspects of the codes. These algorithms could be numerical ones such as parallel methods for linear algebra as part of parallel solutions of partial differential equations, but also non-numerical aspects for optimal performance like sorting of data and the optimal choice of communication patterns. Adaptations and redesign of codes will be discussed to accommodate massive parallelism.
Workshop Goal
EuroHack provides an opportunity for current and prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU–GPU systems to (1) port (potentially) scalable applications to GPU accelerators, (2) optimize existing GPU-enabled applications on a state-of-the-art GPU system, or (3) optimize applications for multicore architectures.
In all cases, the focus is on improving application-level parallelism. For AI workloads, particular emphasis will be placed on extending applications from single-GPU execution to multi-GPU and multi-node configurations.
By the end of the week, participating teams are expected to have applications that run more efficiently, or a clearly defined roadmap for achieving improved performance. The workshop will combine technical discussions with hands-on development and structured scrum sessions.
Target Audience and Format
This program is addressed to small teams of 3 to maximum 4 developers interested in porting or optimizing their application on a cluster of CPUs and GPU accelerators in a short but extremely intense time window. This is a great opportunity for grad students and Postdocs.
Collectively, the team should know the application intimately. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop. Mentors come from universities, supercomputing centers and industry, and they bring their extensive experience in programming GPGPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define the OpenACC standard.
The in-person portion of the event will be limited to 5 or 6 teams of 3 to 4 developers with 2 mentors for each team.
Submissions
Submissions for EuroHack26 are now open. CSCS invites teams to propose an application to be ported to or be optimized on GPU or other massive parallel architectures. The CSCS “Alps” Grace-Hopper machine will be utilized for the workshop. The selected teams will be joined by two mentors with extensive programming experience.
The submission deadline is April 30, 2026, anywhere on Earth.
Full details including the link for submissions can be found in the event page here.
Source: CSCS
The post CSCS Opens Submissions for EuroHack26 HPC and GPU Optimization Workshop appeared first on HPCwire.
JESSICA BASSION
Copy Desk Chief
Edward A. “Nick” Nickerson, founder of the university’s journalism program, passed away on New Year’s Day at the age of 100.
The program began in Nickerson’s windowless office in the basement of Memorial Hall. There, he built it from the ground up — teaching everything from news reporting to radio writing. Prior to his retirement, Nickerson led the program for 21 years.
“He had fun,” Matt Nickerson, his son, said. “He liked jumping on his desk. He liked making up songs. He just got a kick out of being a teacher.”
On his centennial birthday, Nickerson’s family gifted him a book that combined his writings with letters and reflections from those who cherished him.
Each tribute made clear that Nickerson demonstrated a commitment to service in all aspects of his life.
Nickerson fought in the Apennine Mountains of Italy in 1945 after joining the 10th Mountain Division in 1943. He was awarded the Silver Star medal by the United States Army for “gallant conduct under fire,” and “disregard for his own safety to save the lives of his comrades.”
McKay Jenkins, the Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English at the university, is the author of “The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe.”
“Ed granted me a lengthy interview about his experiences, and generously invited me to join him for a gathering of vets,” Jenkins said. “He was a gregarious, witty and entirely charming guy, and I felt honored to know him.”
After the war, Nickerson attended Dartmouth College where he majored in English and served as the associate editor of The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s student newspaper. He later returned to Italy for a year to study at the University of Rome.
Nickerson began his professional career at the Rutland Herald, a Vermont newspaper. He then joined the Associated Press (AP) wire service, working first in its Baltimore bureau and then at its New York headquarters. Eventually, he received a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Albany.
Still, his greatest contribution came through his work as a teacher.
“He checked his ego at the door and channeled his energies into delivering great experiences — and wonderful stories of his career — to his students,” Blake Wilson, a former student, said. “Thanks to his ability to paint a picture with his storytelling, the Rutland Herald and Associated Press seemed bigger than life to me.”
Wilson spent nine years in journalism, then pursued a 38-year career in public policy. Nickerson’s teaching extended beyond journalism; his lessons guided his students throughout their lives.
“Nick always closed his messages with the tagline ‘keep the faith,’” Wilson said. “This had such an influence on me that for decades I have used the same closing. I continue to use it today, nine years into retirement.”
Many of Nickerson’s students went on to have distinguished careers. His friends and family counted six Pulitzer Prize winners among his former students.
After Nickerson retired from the university in 1991, he volunteered to teach extension literature classes and sang in a barber shop group called the HousaTonics.
As he neared 100, Nickerson survived cancer, COVID and pneumonia.
“Nick has a zest for life and has never given up, even as his abilities have become diminished,” Liz Nickerson, his daughter-in-law, said in a tribute written to him.
Nickerson’s memory also lives on in the archives of The Review, where he once served as an advisor.
In a farewell article, Nickerson contributed to The Review as a guest columnist, thanking the staff who he said, “present the student perspective as no house organ of the university is capable of doing.”
“They share my faith that despite all the flaws of journalism, printing the news is worthwhile, for the simple reason that knowledge is better than ignorance, openness better than secrecy and light better than darkness.”
Nickerson signed his farewell article the same way he did with all closing remarks.
“Keep the faith.”
September can't come quickly enough.
This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren’t swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there’s just nothing out there that fits one’s needs.
When I walked into a phone shop, I expected to witness with amazement how much technology has advanced in the present day compared to my eight-year-old model, and for the power of marketing to mind control me into buying a new phone that would bring all sorts of benefits to my life. But instead, I felt disappointed that I’d be forced to choose between two suboptimal devices, either of which would be a compromise compared to what I already have. I felt frustrated that my OnePlus 5T, which still meets my needs and is working wonderfully (apart from the volume buttons), is being taken from me by the 3G shutdown.
↫ Cadence
It’s remarkable how a market that was once rife with competition and choice, has now been reduced to well I guess I’ll settle for this one then in such a short time frame. There’s barely any competition, the number of device makers in (western or western-adjacent) countries has dropped to two, maybe three, and all of them are making what is essentially the exact same device with only the smallest of differences between them. For most average, normal people, it’s some model by either Samsung or Apple.
There’s definitely more choice once you’re willing to leave local stores (and thus, easy and quick repairs) behind, but most normal people who just want a phone aren’t going to do that. You can also spend like twice or thrice the amount of money to get some foldable thing, but again, if you’re just looking for a bog-standard normal-person phone, that’s not a realistic option either. Smaller devices, headphone jacks, SD card slots – so many things have just disappeared from the face of the earth for most people, something that will definitely come as a huge, unpleasant surprise if you’ve been happy with an older phone that just had those things.
It’s like driving the same car for a decade and needing a new one, but you can only choose between a Toyota and a Volkswagen that look and feel entirely the same. And also the seats are now candles, door handles are gone, and there’s no trunk.
Eufy's new Omni C28 robot vacuum comes with an extra-long roller mop and some premium features often seen on high-end models.
Hours before President Trump's State of the Union address, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CBS News the U.S. economy is on the right track — but inflation hasn't been "completely fixed yet."
Donald Trump invited team after Olympic gold
Women’s team chose to skip event
The victorious US Olympic men’s ice hockey team visited the White House on Tuesday, although there were several notable absences.
Donald Trump invited the team to celebrate in Washington DC after they beat Canada in a dramatic Olympic final on Sunday. He also invited the US women’s team, who declined citing “timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments”.
Continue reading...Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales has been accused of having an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical. The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Should legislation pass House of Lords, the matter will require another vote after May’s Welsh elections
Wales’s Senedd has voted in favour of implementing Westminster’s assisted dying bill, overcoming a constitutionally awkward situation that could have forced terminally ill people who wish to end their lives to travel to England or seek private provision.
In a debate stretching into Tuesday night in the Senedd’s newly expanded chamber, members voted 28 for and 23 against, with two abstentions. Should the legislation pass the House of Lords, the matter will require another Senedd vote after May’s Welsh elections.
Continue reading...SambaNova today unveiled its latest chip, the SN50, which it says is five times faster than Nvidia Blackwell and offers 3X the throughput, enough oomph to run agentic AI models exceeding 10 trillion parameters. It also announced the deployment of SN50s into Japan’s SoftBank, a new partnership with Intel, and a $350 million fundraising round.
SambaNova is one of the new chipmakers looking to capitalize on the AI boom and the insatiable demand for data processing that it has unleashed. The company developed its Reconfigurable Data Unit (RDU) architecture, which implements custom processing pipelines where data flows through the complete computation graph, to address the inefficiencies in data movement experienced by instruction set architecture (ISA) used by traditional CPUs and GPUs.
Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO, and the new SN50 chip
Like the SN40, the SN50 features a tiered memory architecture that combines 64GB of high‑bandwidth memory (HBM), 432 MB of static random-access memory (SRAM), and 256 GB to 2 TB of DDR5. SambaNova says this memory architecture allows it to host the largest AI models, including models with up to 10 trillion parameters. “Models residing in HBM and SRAM can be hot swapped in milliseconds, a capability that is essential for agentic workloads switching frequently between multiple models,” the company writes in a blog post today.
SambaNova says the SN50 delivers five times more compute per accelerator and four times more network bandwidth than the SN40. It says that internal benchmarks show that, compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 GPU, the SN50 delivers 5X the maximum speed and more than 3X the throughput for agentic inference workloads running on models like Meta’s Llama 3.3 70B.
SambaNova sells its chips in preconfirgured racks, called SambaRacks, which can contain up to 16 individual SN50. The company supports the capability to scale its SambaRacks outward to support a cluster with up to 256 SN50s connected across a multi‑terabyte‑per‑second interconnect. Each SambaRack consumes an average of 20 kW of power, which allows it to use air cooling rather than liquid cooling.
AI inference workloads are the target for SambaNova and its chips, and that story hasn’t changed with the SN50. The company says that its capability to cache input tokens in memory reduces the time-to-first-token (TTFT) relative to mainstream GPU architectures. It can also keep multiple AI models in memory and swap them in a fraction of the time that it takes Nvidia GPUs, the company claims.
SambaNova chips support a reconfigurable dataflow architecture
SoftBank will be the first company to deploy the SN50, SambaNova said. The Japanese company will deploy SN50 in its next-generation AI data center, SambaNova said.
The company also announced a new collaboration with Intel, which reportedly tried to buy SambaNova in January for $1.6 billion. Instead, Intel is a participant in SambaNova’s Series E round of financing worth $350 million, which it says it will use to expand manufacturing and cloud capacity.
“AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model,” Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO of SambaNova, said in a press release. “With the SN50 and our deep collaboration with Intel, the real race is about who can light up entire data centers with AI agents that answer instantly, never stall, and do it at a cost that turns AI from an experiment into the most profitable engine in the cloud.”
The post SambaNova Eyes 10-Trillion Parameter Models for Agentic AI with New Chip appeared first on HPCwire.
Volunteer group Citizens of the Reef made the find as part of the Great Reef Census
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Citizen scientists have discovered what they believe is one of the largest coral colonies ever documented on the Great Barrier Reef.
The coral spans approximately 111 metres in maximum length and covers an estimated area of 3,973 sq m – about half the size of a soccer field.
Continue reading...You're probably curious about these beverages. Here's what to know first.
 | For a big guy 260, I feel so much more comfortable cruising on my XR now. I don’t push it and just go 10-12 mph cruising around my neighborhood, carving and what not. I used to skateboard as teen so this is what got me attracted to Onewheel. I plan to ride this XR for a bit as a practice board and will get the XRC or GT later this year. Maybe the GTS if I can afford it. But man this is so much fun! [link] [comments] |
You can buy tickets to watch the limited event at select theaters.
Apple will begin manufacturing the wee desktop computer in Houston later this year.
Six in 10 employers want workers with AI skills, but few are offering higher base pay or bonuses for the know-how.
Meta will take a stake in the chipmaker in exchange for a commitment to buy billions of dollars' worth of AI chips.
The Pentagon may decide to officially designate Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" to push them out of government, sources say.
Dozens of Democrats are boycotting the State of the Union on Tuesday, as many opt to hold nearby counterprogramming rather than signs of protests like those seen within the House chamber in recent years.
What started as a joyous snowball fight Monday in New York City morphed into a political tempest after residents began pelting police officers with snow and ice.
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The close friend and passenger of a 23-year-old American citizen who was killed by an ICE agent in Texas last year disputed officials' account of the fatal shooting.
Former Labour grandee’s arrest over his links to Epstein came after Met police informed he was preparing to fly to British Virgin Islands
Peter Mandelson condemned the police for his arrest on Monday and claimed he was only taken into custody because detectives had wrongly believed he was about to flee the country.
In a remarkable rebuke to the Metropolitan police, lawyers for the former peer challenged the force to provide the evidence to justify their actions, insisting it was prompted by a “baseless” suggestion that he was planning to move abroad.
Continue reading...Former US ambassador issues statement via lawyers saying his priority is to cooperate with police and clear his name
Keir Starmer is taking part in a coalition of the willing video call to discuss Ukraine. There is a live feed of his public contribution here.
Kemi Badenoch is holding a press conference now. She is appearing with the relatives of children who she says have died as a result of social media – either because they took their own lives, or because it led to them being attacked. She says she wants to give them a platform to tell their stories.
Continue reading...Sammy Azdoufal alerted New York-based outlet the Verge after he took control of DJI Romo devices around the world
A Spanish software engineer reportedly contacted a New York-based tech outlet recently to reveal he had remotely taken control of about 7,000 vacuum cleaners worldwide, in the process shedding light on a broad vulnerability with smart products, according to a cybersecurity expert.
The Verge reported that the situation came to light when Sammy Azdoufal was trying to reverse-engineer his new DJI Romo vacuum so that he could control it with his Playstation 5 gamepad.
Continue reading...Funds promised for security have not been received
Officials warn of potential cancellations to fan festivals
Local and national officials expressed concern on Tuesday that the ongoing partial government shutdown in the United States could adversely affect planning and preparation for the 2026 World Cup, which is just over 100 days away.
In a hearing before the House committee on homeland security, representatives from Miami, Kansas City and New Jersey – three locations that will host a combined total of 21 matches in the tournament, including the final – said they are still waiting on federal funds to be released to their respective local agencies. Last July, lawmakers pledged $625m in federal assistance toward World Cup security via the Trump administration’s “big beautiful” policy bill.
Continue reading...Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it’s no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16.
In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law.
This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy.
↫ Waydell D. Carvalho
The answer to the dangers of social media is not to ban social media use among minors, for a whole variety of reasons. There’s data privacy, as the linked article goes into, but there’s also the fact that for a lot of people, including minors, who live in regressive, backwards environments and/or are victims of abuse, social media is their only support network. Cut them off from social media, and you cut them off from the very people who can save them from further abuse.
The problem isn’t social media in and of itself – it’s profit-seeking social media. Companies like Facebook and TikTok spend billions to hyper-optimise and hyper-target vulnerable people, much like how tobacco companies and drug dealers do, to feed and worsen their addiction because keeping people addicted is how they maximise profits. The solution to the dangers of corporate social media is to strictly regulate their behaviour, something we already do with countless dangerous products and services.
I’m obviously not qualified to come up with specific measures that would need to be taken, but I think we can all agree that whatever corporate social media have been and are doing is dangerous, unethical, should be stopped.
SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — SambaNova today announced the SN50 AI chip, a new processor designed for large-scale AI inference workloads. The company also outlined plans to collaborate with Intel on high-performance AI inference systems and disclosed additional funding totaling more than $350 million from new and existing backers. The SN50 will be shipping to customers later this year.
SambaNova SN50 chip
To quickly scale and distribute SN50, SambaNova is collaborating with Intel, and has obtained $350 million in strategic Series E financing to expand manufacturing and cloud capacity.
“AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model,” said Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO of SambaNova. “With the SN50 and our deep collaboration with Intel, the real race is about who can light up entire data centers with AI agents that answer instantly, never stall, and do it at a cost that turns AI from an experiment into the most profitable engine in the cloud.”
“Customers are asking for more choice and more efficient ways to scale AI,” said Kevork Kechichian, EVP, General Manager, Data Center Group, Intel. “By combining Intel’s leadership in compute, networking, and memory with SambaNova’s full-stack AI systems and inference cloud platform, we are delivering a compelling option for organizations looking for GPU alternatives to deploy advanced AI at scale.”
SambaNova says the SN50 delivers five times more compute per accelerator and four times more network bandwidth than the previous generation. It links up to 256 accelerators over a multi‑terabyte‑per‑second interconnect, cutting time‑to‑first‑token and supporting larger batch sizes. The result: Enterprises can deploy bigger, longer‑context AI models with higher throughput and responsiveness — while keeping performance high and costs and latency under control.
“AI is moving from a software story to an infrastructure story,” said Landon Downs, co-founder and managing partner at Cambium Capital. “SN50 is engineered for the real-world latency and economic requirements that will determine who successfully deploys agentic AI at scale.”
The news follows SambaNova’s record bookings and revenue as they closed out 2025, reflecting accelerating demand for production-ready AI systems across financial services, telecommunications, energy, and sovereign deployments worldwide.
SoftBank Deploys SN50 Within Its AI Data Centers in Japan
SoftBank Corp. will be the first customer to deploy SN50 within its next‑generation AI data centers in Japan. The deployment will power low‑latency inference services for sovereign and enterprise customers across Asia‑Pacific, supporting both open‑source and proprietary frontier models with aggressive latency and throughput requirements.
“With SN50, we are building an AI inference fabric for Japan that can serve our customers and partners with the speed, resiliency and sovereignty they expect from SoftBank,” said Hironobu Tamba, Vice President and Head of the Data Platform Strategy Division of the Technology Unit at SoftBank Corp. “By standardizing on SN50, we gain the ability to deliver world‑class AI services on our own terms — with the performance of the best GPU clusters, but with far better economics and control.”
The SN50 deployment deepens SambaNova’s existing relationship with SoftBank Corp., which already hosts SambaCloud to provide ultra‑fast inference for developers in the region. By anchoring its newest clusters on SN50, SoftBank positions SambaNova as the inference backbone for its sovereign AI initiatives and future large‑scale agentic services.
SambaNova and Intel Plan Multi‑Year Collaboration
SambaNova and Intel have entered into a planned multi‑year strategic collaboration to deliver high‑performance, cost‑efficient AI inference solutions for AI‑native companies, model providers, enterprises, and government organizations around the world. The collaboration will give customers a powerful alternative to GPU‑centric solutions, offering optimized performance for leading open‑source models with predictable throughput and total cost of ownership.
As part of the collaboration, Intel plans to make a strategic investment in SambaNova to accelerate the rollout of an Intel‑powered AI cloud. The collaboration is expected to span three key areas:
Together, SambaNova and Intel aim to shape the next generation of heterogeneous AI data centers — integrating Intel Xeon processors, Intel GPUs, Intel networking and storage, and SambaNova systems — to unlock a multi‑billion‑dollar inference market opportunity.
Raises $350M+ Series E
The oversubscribed Series E round was led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, with strong participation from Intel Capital. New investors joining the round include: Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Gulf Energy, Mayfield Capital, Saudi First Data, Seligman Ventures, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. Existing investors participating include: A&E, 8Square, Atlantic Bridge, BlackRock, GV, Nepenthe, Nuri Capital, and Redline Capital.
As agentic workloads expand, enterprises are discovering that infrastructure optimized for training struggles to meet production latency and cost requirements: “We’re proud to be investing in SambaNova at such a pivotal time in the company’s growth,” said Monti Saroya, Partner at Vista Capital. “SN50 is engineered for agentic AI systems that orchestrate multiple models and process requests in near real-time, and more efficiently than traditional GPU-centric systems.”
Proceeds will be used to expand SN50 production, scale SambaCloud, and deepen enterprise software integrations.
More from HPCwire: SambaNova Eyes 10-Trillion Parameter Models for Agentic AI with New Chip
About SambaNova
SambaNova is a leader in next‑generation AI infrastructure, providing a full stack platform that powers the fastest, most efficient AI inference for enterprises, NeoClouds, AI labs and service providers, and sovereign AI initiatives worldwide. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., SambaNova delivers chips, systems and cloud services that enable customers to deploy state‑of‑the‑art models with superior performance, lower total cost of ownership and rapid time to value.
Source: SambaNova
The post SambaNova Introduces SN50 AI Chip, Intel Collaboration, and $350M in New Funding appeared first on HPCwire.
RALEIGH, N.C., Feb. 24, 2026 — Red Hat today announced the Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA, a co-engineered software platform that combines Red Hat AI Enterprise and NVIDIA AI Enterprise to provide an end-to-end AI solution optimized for organizations deploying AI at scale. Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA is the latest milestone in the companies’ deep collaboration, accelerating the delivery of the newest AI innovations to enterprise customers today while also delivering Day 0 support for NVIDIA hardware architectures.
With enterprise AI spending expected to reach over $1 trillion by 20291, driven in large part by agentic AI applications, organizations are looking to shift their strategies toward high-density, agentic workflows and address the resulting demands on AI inference and infrastructure. To help organizations keep pace, Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA empowers IT operations teams to streamline management of both traditional infrastructure and the evolving demands of the AI stack.
“The shift from AI experimentation to industrial-scale, enterprise-wide production requires a fundamental change in how we manage the AI computing stack,” said Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Global Engineering, Red Hat. “We’re accelerating the path to deploy AI and move quickly to production using Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA. With a stable, high-performance foundation driven by our proven hybrid cloud offerings, we’re enabling our customers to own their AI strategy and scale with the same rigor they apply to their core IT platforms.”
Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA accelerates the path to production AI and delivers the software platform for AI factories, running on accelerated computing infrastructure that fuels higher performance for the models and NVIDIA GPUs driving the inference stack. The platform is supported on AI factory infrastructure from leading systems manufacturers, including Cisco, Dell Technologies, Lenovo and Supermicro. This empowers IT administrators and operations teams to scale and maintain AI deployments with the same operational rigor and predictability as any enterprise workload.
This co-engineered software platform integrates the open source collaboration, engineering and support expertise of both Red Hat and NVIDIA to deliver a trusted, enterprise-grade solution. The Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA provides a highly scalable foundation for AI deployments across any environment, whether on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge. It includes core capabilities for high-performance AI inference, model tuning, customization and agent deployment and management, with a focus on security. This allows organizations to maintain architectural control from the datacenter to the public cloud, delivering:
Availability
Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA is available now. Learn more here.
About Red Hat
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.
Source: Red Hat
The post Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA Accelerates the Path to Scalable Production AI appeared first on HPCwire.
NAPA, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — The PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub for open source AI under the Linux Foundation, today announced significant expansion of its membership, with nine new members joining since December 2025. New members include Carnegie Mellon University, Clockwork.io, CommonAI CIC, Emmi AI, Monash University, National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), Nota AI, University of Leicester, and yasp.ai.
New PyTorch Foundation membership signals sustained growth and progress in agentic AI innovation, with the Foundation leading the way on open, community-driven AI. Fueled by industry participation from leading universities, AI startups, global governments, and more, the PyTorch Foundation’s production-ready tools and libraries – including PyTorch, vLLM, DeepSpeed, and Ray – play integral roles in the AI stack.
“There are no agentic systems without the models that power them,” said Mark Collier, GM of AI at the Linux Foundation and Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation. “From training frameworks like PyTorch and optimization systems like DeepSpeed that create capabilities such as advanced tool calling, to inference engines and orchestration layers like vLLM and Ray that operationalize them, the Foundation hosts critical layers of the open source AI stack. The growth of our membership reflects a shared recognition that these capabilities must be built collaboratively in a vendor-neutral environment.”
Clockwork.io, Emmi AI, NIPA, Nota AI, and yasp join the foundation as Silver members. CommonAI CIC, Carnegie Mellon University, Monash University, and University of Leicester join as Associate members.
This news follows Ray joining the PyTorch Foundation as a foundation-hosted project in October 2025. The open source distributed computing framework for AI workloads, developed by Anyscale, offers development teams a seamless way to execute data processing, forming an integrated open source distributed computing layer for agentic AI alongside vLLM and PyTorch as part of the foundation.
To learn more, join the global PyTorch community in Paris, France from April 7-8, 2026 for the inaugural PyTorch Conference Europe. Register here for early-bird pricing on the latest in open source AI and machine learning.
“At Emmi AI, PyTorch is a key part of how we bring AI into real-world engineering workflows. Becoming a member of the PyTorch Foundation is a natural step for us as we contribute to an open ecosystem that accelerates research, deployment, and impact,” said Miks Mikelsons, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder, Emmi AI.
“Open source AI plays a critical role in bringing research innovations into real-world applications. By joining the PyTorch Foundation, we look forward to collaborating with the community and contributing our experience in AI model optimization,” said Tae-Ho Kim, CTO, Nota AI.
“AI teams shouldn’t have to redesign their models every time the hardware changes,” said Reza Rahimi, CTO, yasp. “Our work focuses on separating model innovation from infrastructure constraints, so developers can run efficiently anywhere. Becoming part of the PyTorch Foundation aligns with our belief that open ecosystems are essential to reduce friction, avoid lock-in, and scale AI sustainably.”
About the PyTorch Foundation
The PyTorch Foundation is a community-driven hub supporting the open source PyTorch framework and a broader portfolio of innovative open source AI projects. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the PyTorch Foundation provides a vendor-neutral, trusted home for collaboration across the AI lifecycle—from model training and inference, to domain-specific applications. Through open governance, strategic support, and a global contributor community, the PyTorch Foundation empowers developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and deploy AI at scale. Learn more at https://pytorch.org/foundation.
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
Source: PyTorch Foundation
The post PyTorch Foundation Announces New Members as Agentic AI Demand Grows appeared first on HPCwire.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, today announced that it will demonstrate PCIe 8.0 SerDes running at 256 gigatransfers-per-second (GT/s) data rate in the Marvell booth #904 at DesignCon 2026, February 24 to 26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.
As AI workloads continue to drive a massive expansion in data center infrastructure requirements, PCIe technology continues to evolve to deliver higher bandwidth for in-chassis, in-rack and across-rack connectivity. Expected to be finalized by 2028, the PCIe 8.0 specification is expected to double the bandwidth of the PCIe 7.0 specification for up to 1 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth, supporting demanding applications including AI, machine learning, high-speed networking and other data-intensive workloads.
In preparation for the PCIe 8.0 specification, hyperscalers and cloud data center operators can start pathfinding now, solidifying strategies to re-architect their infrastructure and take full advantage of the new specification when it is released. Providing an early demonstration of the PCIe 8.0 specification with the TE Connectivity AdrenaLINE Catapult connector at DesignCon 2026, Marvell is committed to helping the industry scale beyond traditional copper interconnects.
Enabling low power, low latency and low bit-error-rate transmission over copper and optical channels, the Marvell Alaska P PCIe 6.0 retimer and its PCIe 7.0 and PCIe 8.0 SerDes technology will deliver the scalability, power efficiency and high performance required for next-generation infrastructure to support tomorrow’s AI and data center bandwidth demand.
“Marvell continues to drive industry leadership in the critical connectivity technologies that power the most demanding AI workloads,” said Xi Wang, senior vice president and general manager, Connectivity Business Unit at Marvell. “We enable hyperscalers and cloud data center operators to optimize their AI architectures for maximum performance and scalability, and we will provide the technologies and support required to prepare the industry take full advantage of the benefits of the PCIe 8.0 specification when it is released.”
“As AI and other data-intensive workloads stretch the capabilities of the data center, the industry is continually looking for new ways to increase performance, scalability and power efficiency,” said Alan Weckel, co-founder and analyst of 650 Group. “With support for the PCIe 8.0 specification and other innovations, Marvell continues to push the envelope in delivering the technologies to fulfill the demands of AI hyperscalers and data center operators today and well into the future.”
About Marvell
To deliver the data infrastructure technology that connects the world, we’re 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.
Source: Marvell
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Savers who built a reserve worth $10,000 can boost it further in 2026 with select savings accounts. Here's how.
Collaboration with quantum computing company, co-founded by 2025 Physics Nobel Laureate Professor John Martinis, starting with new cryogenic filters development to address a critical bottleneck in building larger, more powerful quantum computers
SINGAPORE, Feb. 24, 2026 — Singapore is strengthening its role in the global quantum hardware ecosystem through a new collaboration between researchers at the National Quantum Federated Foundry (NQFF) and Qolab, a quantum computing company co-founded by 2025 Physics Nobel Laureate Professor John M. Martinis.
Credit: Singapore NQO
Drawn by Singapore’s strong semiconductor and deep tech ecosystem, Qolab will work with Singapore researchers to develop new components essential for scaling next-generation quantum computing systems.
The research focuses on developing critical components, specifically cryogenic low-pass filters, for quantum processor chips1. These filters address a critical bottleneck in building larger, more powerful quantum computers.
“Building useful quantum computers requires scaling from dozens to millions of qubits, and that means we need not just more qubits but also reliable, manufacturable supporting hardware,” said Professor Martinis, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Qolab. “Singapore’s strong capabilities in advanced semiconductor manufacturing makes it an ideal partner for Qolab as we develop critical components that will support the next generation of quantum computing.”
This collaboration comes as global momentum in quantum hardware accelerates. Through sustained research, innovation and enterprise (RIE) investments, Singapore has continued strengthening its capabilities across semiconductor manufacturing, advanced engineering, and quantum device development. This unique intersection of strengths, combined with Singapore’s open and collaborative approach to international partnerships, has positioned the country as an attractive base for leading quantum technology companies looking to develop and scale critical hardware.
The Role of Cryogenic Filters in Quantum Computing
Superconducting qubits are one of the most mature and pioneering technology used by technology industry leaders to power quantum processors. These operate at temperatures close to absolute zero and are extremely sensitive to environmental noise. Cryogenic low-pass filters act as shields, blocking unwanted high-frequency signals. However, conventional filter solutions currently used in quantum computers are large, subject to errors, and difficult to manufacture at scale.
The collaboration will leverage complementary strengths from NQFF’s quantum device nanofabrication capabilities, and Qolab’s quantum computing systems expertise towards developing cryogenic filters that can be manufactured on semiconductor wafers – similar to how computer chips are made. This approach enables denser integration of filters directly with qubit circuits, allowing more qubits to fit into smaller, more reliable packages. The filters are expected to be deployed in quantum systems at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
“This collaboration demonstrates how Singapore can contribute critical quantum hardware components to the global ecosystem,” said Mr Ling Keok Tong, Executive Director of the National Quantum Office. “It brings together our strengths in semiconductor engineering, advanced manufacturing and quantum research to address real-world hardware challenges. With partners such as UCLA already committed to deploying these filters, it signals growing confidence in Singapore’s capabilities and strengthens our role in the global quantum supply chain.”
The research collaboration agreement was signed between NQFF and Qolab and witnessed by Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo. It was part of a quantum-related event today which commenced with opening remarks by Guest-of-Honour Minister Josephine Teo.
The event featured a public guest lecture – organized by the National Quantum Office (a national platform hosted by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research) and the National Research Foundation – by Professor Martinis on the history of superconducting qubits and the NQFF Industry Day, which showcased quantum hardware developments from industry partners and leading global players.
[1] About cryogenic low-pass filters and quantum processors
Cryogenic low-pass filters are specialized components that operate at extremely low temperatures (near absolute zero). They play a critical role in ensuring the accurate operation of the qubits by shielding the superconducting circuits from unwanted microwave noise.
The filters being developed through this collaboration are designed for solid-state quantum processors, including superconducting qubit systems (used by leading technology companies) and spin qubit systems (an emerging approach using electron or nuclear spin). Both types require precise signal control and noise reduction to scale effectively.
Source: National Quantum Office, Singapore
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An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims' cloud infrastructure undetected.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Paris-born artist reinvented the synthesizer through meditative and feedback-drenched sonic explorations
The French composer and musique concrète pioneer Éliane Radigue has died at the age of 94.
“It is with immense sadness that we learn of the passing of Éliane Radigue at the age of 94,” the Paris-based experimental music center INA GRM posted on Instagram. “A major figure in musical creation has left us.”
Continue reading...National security committee warns until tougher safeguards are in place, UK elections dangerously exposed to covert foreign money
Political donations in cryptocurrency should be subject to an urgent temporary ban to stop foreign interference in British elections, the chair of the national security committee has said.
Matt Western, who leads the committee of MPs and peers, said a moratorium was needed until the risks of donations in cryptocurrency have been dealt with – including adequate checks on the source of the money.
Continue reading...Richard Tice echoes Donald Trump with pledge of ‘great repeal act’ and ‘tight quotas and significant tariffs’
Unions and renters’ groups have criticised Reform UK after the party’s business spokesperson, Richard Tice, pledged to introduce a “great repeal act” that would abolish Labour legislation on workers’ rights and protection for tenants.
In his first speech since being appointed by Nigel Farage to a portfolio covering business, trade and energy, Tice promised a bonfire of regulations, including an end to net zero targets and a new push for home-produced shale gas using fracking.
Continue reading...Operating from the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre, the new spin-out is the only company in the UK manufacturing niobium-based components.
Feb. 24, 2026 — Quantcore, a University of Glasgow spin-out, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding to create a sovereign supply chain, as the UK races to build domestic capacity in technologies critical to national security and economic competitiveness. The round was co-led by PXN Ventures, Blackfinch Ventures and Scottish Enterprise, with investment also coming from Quantum Exponential and STAC.
Pictured left to right, Quantcore co-founders Dr Valentino Seferai (CTO), Dr Jack Brennan (CEO), Wridhdhisom Karar (Measurement Lead), and Prof Martin Weides (Scientific Advisor).
Quantcore is the only company in the UK manufacturing niobium-based components. One benefit of niobium is it can operate at higher temperatures than aluminum, which is one of the most common materials used by Quantcore’s global competitors.
Thanks to the use of niobium, Quantcore is helping its customers, which include UK national laboratories, to save energy and do more with its quantum components at a more scalable rate.
Operating from the University of Glasgow’s James Watt Nanofabrication Centre, the company designs, manufactures and tests the superconducting processors, resonators and sensors that form the core of quantum computers and advanced sensing systems.
Beyond computing applications, Quantcore’s quantum sensors enable secure communications and unprecedented accuracy in medical imaging that classical technology cannot achieve, which could lead to breakthroughs in areas such as neuroscience, early disease detection, secure infrastructure, and fundamental physics.
Following the investment, Quantcore plans to grow its team from four to 12 employees over the next 18 months, with engineering roles across design, manufacturing and cryogenic testing as well as non-technical positions to aid its commercial strategy.
Dr Jack Brennan, CEO and co-founder of Quantcore, said: “This technology is extremely powerful. One of the main features of quantum computers is that they will be really good at cracking codes. So, as a country, you have to ask: do you want to wait until other countries have this capability, or do you want to get there first?
“The world is not what it was. If you want this technology, which you do, you need to be able to manufacture it domestically so you can control every part of it. That’s what we’re building from Scotland.
“Classical computers are hitting a plateau as silicon reaches its limits. We’re entering a new paradigm based on fundamental physics, and it’s coming whether we like it or not. There’s no reason all the advanced tech in the UK has to be in London, Cambridge, and Oxford. Why not build it here?”
The investment comes at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and follows the UK government’s pledge to invest £670 million into quantum computing as part of its 10-year modern industrial strategy, with the global quantum computing market projected to reach $20.2 billion by 2030.
Quantcore was founded by Dr Jack Brennan, Dr Valentino Seferai, Wridhdhisom Karar, and Prof Martin Weides, and spun out from the University of Glasgow in August 2025. The company was also part the first cohort of deep tech startups to take part in the university’s Infinity G accelerator program, led by STAC.
Uzma Khan, Vice Principal, Economic Development and Innovation, University of Glasgow, said: “Quantum technology is a core area of research excellence for the University. This activity is generating new innovations with potential for scalable economic impact via spin-out company creation.
“Quantcore Technologies has the potential to become a market leader in supply of hardware for quantum computing. We wish the founding team and their investors every success.”
As a crucial anchor driving regional economic growth, the University of Glasgow is working to translate its research into commercial opportunities in sectors like life sciences and quantum technologies to create jobs and boost prosperity.
Spin-outs formed since 2020 have collectively secured over £100 million in investment, demonstrating the growing strength of the University’s innovation pipeline.
Meanwhile, the University is working with its partners Scottish Enterprise and Glasgow City Council to deliver jobs, training opportunities and economic growth through Glasgow Riverside Innovation District.
Source: University of Glasgow
The post Quantcore Raises £2.5M to Build UK Supply Chain for Quantum Hardware appeared first on HPCwire.
"We play for one team," House Speaker Mike Johnson told "CBS Evening News" anchor Tony Dokoupil ahead of the State of the Union. "We're all for America."
Huw Pill warns combined effect of national insurance and minimum wage rises have ‘acute’ effect on youth employment
The negative effect of a combined increase in employers’ taxes and minimum wages has been “particularly acute” for young people, the Bank of England’s chief economist has warned.
Huw Pill said on Tuesday that the increase in national insurance contributions (NICs) from April last year and the government’s efforts to equalise the “national living wage” had caused a particular problem for young people trying to find jobs.
Continue reading...The US president fights 1970s battles in a financialised age. America faces not a payments crisis but a slow erosion of industrial and technological power
When the US supreme court voted 6-3 last Friday to strike down Donald Trump’s tariffs, he was incandescent. Two judges he had elevated – Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett – were suddenly recast as traitors to the cause. Both were, he insinuated, under the sway of foreign interests. The court ruled that the tariffs overstepped the powers the US Congress granted under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Mr Trump responded by reaching for a 1974 trade law, invoking “international payments problems” to slap on a 10% tariff for 150 days.
Mr Trump was moulded by the 1970s. His political DNA was formed in that era’s crises and he governs as if America were still in the Nixon era of shock politics. In some ways there are parallels. The political mobilisation around economic insecurity echoes that period, as does distrust in elite authority. This explains why many populist politicians on the right reach for the 1970s, which fits the mood of decline and rivalry and offers a narrative of “restoring strength”. Internationally, Mr Trump also sees the world through the 1970s lens of industrial rivalry and trade grievance. But the world today is in a far more financialised and interdependent state.
Continue reading...The passenger received medical attention after the plane returned to Wichita, Kansas, Alaska Airlines and the FAA said.
Looking to avoid an endless scroll? Check out these essential Hulu movie picks for a guaranteed good night in.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs. The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good," a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feb. 24, 2026 — QEC4QEA, funded by the EuroHPC JU, is one of two Quantum Excellence Centres established in Europe. It will enhance the uptake of quantum computing technologies and the development of applications to ensure Europe’s leadership in quantum computing.
QEC4QEA (Quantum Excellence Centre for Quantum-Enhanced Applications) is designed to make quantum computing more accessible and easier to use. It will connect end users with quantum application developers, experts, and computing providers. By bringing these groups together, QEC4QEA will help users navigating the complexity of quantum computing technologies and apply them effectively in real-world workflows. For this purpose, the project builds on European quantum computing infrastructure that combines quantum and high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities.
QEC4QEA will support users at every stage of the application journey. It will provide access to guidance, tools, and services needed to develop, test, and run quantum-enhanced applications. These services will include training, support in selecting appropriate computing resources, and assistance with efficient execution. The goal is to provide a complete and practical support chain that allows users to focus on results rather than technical barriers.
By guiding users to the most suitable resources and helping them optimize their workflows, QEC4QEA will enable applications to run efficiently and cost-effectively on European quantum computers and hybrid quantum-HPC systems operated by EuroHPC JU and national organizations. This approach is expected to accelerate innovation across Europe, encourage the development of new quantum-enhanced applications, and build lasting expertise and interest in quantum technologies.
Together with its sister project QEX, QEC4QEA supports EuroHPC JU’s vision of strengthening Europe’s knowledge base and building a thriving, sustainable quantum ecosystem.
More Details
The QEC4QEA project is coordinated by Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and brings together 19 partners from eight EuroHPC JU participating countries (France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey), representing a broad range of scientific and technical expertise.
QEC4QEA is structured into five clusters led by major European supercomputing centers that are deploying and operating the EuroHPC quantum-HPC infrastructure: Forschungszentrum Jülich, CEA, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), CINECA, and PCSS. Led by these centers, the clusters combine advanced supercomputers and quantum computers with strong technical expertise, established application portfolios, and direct access to cutting-edge HPC and quantum computing infrastructures. This federated model will strengthen cross-regional cooperation, maintain close proximity to users, maximize synergies, and ensure scalable impact at the European level.
The consortium will also closely work with key European Quantum Flagship projects, including OpenSuperQPlus, PASQuanS2, and QuIC, as well as major national initiatives such as QSolid (Germany), HQI (France), Quantum Spain (Spain), and KCIK (Poland).
The QEC4QEA Quantum Excellence Centre has been selected following the call HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-QEC-05-01 and is funded by the Horizon Europe program, with a total EU contribution of around EUR 4.9 million.
Source: EuroHPC
The post QEC4QEA to Support Development of Quantum-Enhanced Applications Across Europe appeared first on HPCwire.
State District Judge Tony Graf decided in a Tuesday ruling to keep the Utah County Attorney's Office on the case against the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk.
A new player in the U.S. military’s decadeslong war on drugs announced itself to the world on Sunday, providing intelligence that supported a Mexican military operation that killed the head of the infamous Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Though details continue to emerge from the operation, which set off a spasm of violence that left at least 70 people dead, some of the information that led Mexican security forces to Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was delivered by a new Joint Interagency Task Force called Counter Cartel, based out of Southern Arizona.
The outfit operates out of Fort Huachuca, a military intelligence hub nestled in a rugged mountain chain 15 miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border. According to media reports, the task force, staffed by a combination of some 300 military and civilian employees, provided its Mexican counterparts with a “detailed target package” in the run-up to Sunday’s operation. The CIA also provided key support for the mission.
Existence of the task force was first revealed in a little-noticed ceremony at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, last month. Its online footprint is slight. The information that is publicly available, however, confirms deepening ties between President Donald Trump’s domestic homeland security agenda and his lethal drug war operations abroad.
Known internally as JIATF-CC, the task force is part of the U.S. Military’s Northern Command, once considered a backwater that today enjoys renewed prominence under Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. In the past year, Trump and Hegseth have used the Southern Command, NORTHCOM’s counterpart in the Western Hemisphere, as well the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, to conduct the kinds of targeted killing missions long associated with the war on terror against targets in Latin America.
To date, the military has conducted more than 40 airstrikes against alleged drug traffickers, killing at least 137 people without producing a shred of evidence to support its claims. While those strikes have been concentrated in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, the task force involved in Sunday’s Mexico operation is distinct for its focus much closer to U.S. soil.
“What the Trump administration has done more than its predecessors is give NORTHCOM a hugely bigger role,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group.
With that newfound stature has come a greater level of secrecy over what, exactly, the command is up to — and whether its operations might spill back over the border into the U.S.
In years past, when his organization would raise concerns over U.S. operations, the military would make available attorneys who could quote the Posse Comitatus Act — the law restricting military involvement in domestic policing — by chapter and verse, Isacson recalled. No more. Even his contacts on Capitol Hill, staffers working on armed services and homeland security issues, have found their letters to department chiefs met with silence.
“It freaks me out when I talk to oversight staff,” he said. “They’re just not getting answers.”
In a sparse January press release, Northern Command said the JIATF-CC is a component of the Homeland Security Task Force National Coordination Center. Its mission, the release said, is to “identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel operations posing a threat to the United States along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
While information on the coordinating center is similarly scant, FBI national security branch operations director Michael Glasheen testified in December before the House Committee on Homeland Security that the president created a wide network of Homeland Security Task Forces in accordance with an executive order he signed on his first day back in office in January 2025.
Titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” the order called on the attorney general and the DHS secretary to “jointly establish Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) in all States nationwide.” Their shared mission would be to “end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States” and “dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks.”
Though the order made no mention of the U.S. military, Glasheen’s testimony confirmed the Pentagon had joined the HSTF mission.
“This task force construct is the first of its kind,” he told lawmakers, taking a “whole-of-government” approach and “consolidating all of U.S. law enforcement, military, and intelligence efforts into a targeted effort in combatting these threats.” According to Glasheen, individual task forces are led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the powerful investigative wing of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In addition to more than 8,500 federal agents and officers, hundreds of analysts and legal attachés from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies support the HSTF mission worldwide, Glasheen testified. The national coordination center that the new border-focused JIATF-CC belongs to, he continued, “serves as the primary federal coordinating entity to align law enforcement, defense, and intelligence efforts.”
A recent job posting for a database administrator for the center — requiring at least a “secret” security clearance and paying upward of $189,750 a year — described the “care and feeding” of hundreds of terabytes of law enforcement data.
The precise relationship between the U.S. military and federal agencies like ICE and the FBI in support of the president’s homeland security mission is unclear. Northern Command did not respond to The Intercept’s request for an interview.
For generations, the U.S. military has played a driving role in the drug war abroad, training allied security forces, sharing intelligence on wanted drug traffickers, and facilitating covert kill-capture operations in nations such Colombia and Mexico.
Beginning under President Ronald Reagan and continuing into the administration of Bill Clinton, Northern Command oversaw a steady growth in military counternarcotics operations on the U.S.–Mexico border, including on U.S. soil. Those operations ended when a Marine sniper team killed an American teenager named Esequiel Hernández while he was tending his family’s goats in West Texas in 1997.
Since then, the Pentagon has largely kept its focus south of the border. That, however, may be changing. A defense official speaking to Reuters said the new Arizona task military force is working to map suspected drug cartel networks on both sides of the international divide.
The director of the task force, U.S. Brig. Gen. Maurizio Calabrese, compared his team’s mission to the targeted killing campaigns previously waged against terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The motivations were different, he said, but in terms of sheer size, the drug cartel threat was perhaps even larger.
The general estimated that hundreds of leaders occupied the upper echelons of Mexican organized crime, supported by as many as a quarter-million lower-level operatives, which he referred to as “independent contractors.”
Correction: February 24, 2026, 2:26 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story contained an errant reference to the military command responsible for strikes against alleged drug smugglers. It has been corrected to reflect that the strikes were carried out by the Southern and Special Operations Commands.
The post Mexico Got Help Killing Drug Lord From Secretive U.S. Campaign Led by FBI and ICE appeared first on The Intercept.
Chiquinho and Domingos Brazão accused of ordering shooting of Marielle Franco and her driver in 2018
Brazil’s supreme court has opened the trial of politicians accused of ordering the 2018 murder of Rio de Janeiro councillor Marielle Franco, a case that exposed deep ties between politics and organised crime in the city.
Franco, an activist who grew up in a favela and became an outspoken critic of Rio’s powerful militia groups, was 38 when she was shot dead in the city centre alongside her driver, Anderson Gomes.
Continue reading...Market swings can quietly reshape your nest egg, but there are ways to protect your retirement plan from losses.
Laurence des Cars steps down days after parliamentary inquiry called Paris museum a ‘state within a state’
The president of the Louvre in Paris has resigned, four months after a gang of thieves broke into the museum’s Apollo gallery and made off with €88m (£76m) of Napoleonic jewellery in France’s most dramatic heist in decades.
Laurence des Cars, who had offered to step down in the immediate aftermath of the burglary, tendered her resignation to Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday in what the French president called “an act of responsibility”, the Elysée Palace said.
Continue reading...Smart glasses let you follow a recipe and ask basic cooking questions hands-free. Here's how my first experience cooking with smart frames went.
Ursula von der Leyen talks up prospect of €90bn loan but appears cautious on timetable for Ukraine joining bloc
Zelenskyy says “we must be just as determined and strong as we were when the invasion began,” as “the threat hasn’t become smaller.”
He says Europe can only respond to this war working together with the US, even as he remarks it “is not an easy task to maintain transatlantic unity and cooperation in the current conditions.”
“So there must be no place in the free world for Russian oil, for Russian tankers, Russian banks, Russian sanctions …, schemes, or for any Russian war criminals. The time has come to fully ban all participants in Russia’s aggression from entire Europe.”
Continue reading...More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 -- neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it. The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-olds worldwide showing a stark correlation between time on school computers and worse scores. A 2014 study of 3,000 university students found they were off-task on their machines nearly two-thirds of the time. Fortune reported back in 2017 that Maine's own test scores hadn't budged in the 15 years since the program launched, and then-governor Paul LePage called it a "massive failure." Horvath framed the generation's eroding capabilities not as a personal failure but a policy one, calling them victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sunset phenomenon at national park’s Horsetail waterfall still drew large crowds even with freezing temperatures
Heavy snow did not deter visitors from flocking to Yosemite in recent days, in hopes of seeing the park’s spectacular natural light show.
Firefall occurs each year in February during sunset when the light hits Horsetail Fall in such a way that, for a brief period, the waterfall appears illuminated by lava. In recent years, the phenomenon has drawn large crowds – and lots of photographers.
Continue reading...AI safety, especially around images and videos, continues to be an evolving challenge.
Chatham House appoints Owen Jenkins as Research Director for Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia Pacific News release jon.wallace
Owen will join Chatham House on 9 March.
Owen Jenkins will join Chatham House as Research Director for Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia Pacific on 9 March.
Owen is a senior British diplomat and highly experienced leader in international affairs. He most recently served in the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) as Director General for the Indo-Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, and was previously the UK’s ambassador to Indonesia and Timor-Leste.
Earlier in his career, he worked as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan to two prime ministers, and held diplomatic roles in Turkey, Argentina, Brussels and India.
Bronwen Maddox said:
‘Owen’s depth of regional and global experience makes him exceptionally well suited to join our Executive Leadership Team, providing leadership across Chatham House’s Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia Pacific Programmes.
‘This role is central to guiding our work on the evolving world order and shifting global alliances – questions shaped by the increasing influence of China, the assertiveness of regional powers, and the ambitions of countries across the Global South.
‘Owen’s experience working at the highest levels of diplomacy will be invaluable in sharpening our analysis, strengthening our external influence and developing our ideas.’
Owen said:
‘I’m thrilled to be taking up this great job at one of the world’s leading international policy institutes. I have drawn on Chatham House’s expertise in every job I’ve done, from gaining insight into the Balkan wars in the 1990s to understanding Indonesia as British ambassador there.
‘I look forward to working with the impressive teams in the Africa, Middle East and North Africa and Asia Pacific programmes and to using my own knowledge to increase still further the impact of Chatham House’s work.’
US president had said he would raise levy to 15% after last week’s supreme court ruling
Donald Trump’s new global tariffs have taken effect at 10%, even though last weekend he had threatened a higher rate, of 15%, providing “some relief” for British businesses, according to a lobby group.
After the US president suffered a defeat at the hands of the supreme court on Friday, which struck down his sweeping “liberation day” tariffs imposed last year, he angrily reacted by announcing a 10% global tariff, which he raised to 15% on Saturday in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Continue reading...Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Uranus and Neptune will all be in the night sky at the same time.
Mexico’s president says there is ‘no risk’ for those visiting for Fifa games after military killed drug lord ‘El Mencho’
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has said that there is “no risk” for visitors coming to Fifa World Cup games scheduled to be held in the country, after the death of a top cartel boss triggered a wave of retaliatory violence from gunmen who blocked roads and attacked security forces across the country.
The Mexican military attempted to detain “El Mencho”, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, in a dawn raid on Sunday, leading to a firefight in which he was fatally wounded, before dying while being airlifted to hospital.
Continue reading...Charles Kushner, father of president’s son-in-law Jared, failed to show up to meeting to explain US comments relating to death of far-right activist
Donald Trump’s envoy to Paris has called France’s foreign minister and pledged not to interfere in the country’s domestic affairs, a day after he was barred from talking to government officials for failing to attend a formal meeting at the ministry.
The foreign ministry said on Monday that Charles Kushner would not be permitted to carry out his diplomatic duties until he had explained his refusal to comply with the summons over US comments about the killing of a far-right activist in France.
Continue reading...A newly revealed text exchange appears to show Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales encouraging an aide who later died by setting herself on fire to send him an explicit photo.
According to sources close to the investigation, there are concerns that DNA recovered from Nancy Guthrie's home may not yield a usable profile for comparison.
Russia is intensifying efforts to push users away from foreign messaging apps and toward a domestic platform that has been criticized as a surveillance tool.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base. The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is based on several assumptions, the first of which is that agentic coding assistants "give senior engineers an AI boost... while imposing an AI drag on early-in-career (EiC) developers to steer, verify and integrate AI output." In an earlier podcast on the subject, Russinovich said this basic premise -- that AI is increasing productivity only for senior developers while reducing it for juniors -- is a "hot topic in all our customer engagements... they all say they see it at their companies." [...] The logical outcome is that "if organizations focus only on short-term efficiency -- hiring those who can already direct AI -- they risk hollowing out the next generation of technical leaders," Russinovich and Hanselman state in the paper.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sony, Bose and Apple are often considered the top names in premium wireless noise-canceling earbuds, but each has pros and cons. Here's how they compare in my testing.
Until now, you needed to upgrade to a pricier plan for these features.
Getty Images photographer Elsa Garrison shares how she managed to capture a "pretty iconic" image of Team USA's Jack Hughes.
Former US president’s part in ending the Troubles threatened by fallout from Epstein scandal, which has tainted his former envoy, George Mitchell
When Bill Clinton testifies later this week at a congressional investigation into Jeffrey Epstein there is unlikely to be any reference to his most precious foreign policy achievement – helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
Whether Clinton is linked to Epstein’s predations or turns the tables on his inquisitors, his legacy in Northern Ireland might appear to stand apart, a jewel of his presidency that is immutable, enshrined in history.
Continue reading...Drowning in debt? Both Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy could offer relief, but they work very differently.
The rumored shade is reminiscent of OPI's Big Apple Red.
American snowboarder Chloe Kim told "CBS Mornings" she had to relearn some of her tricks for the Winter Olympics due to a shoulder injury.
Thinking about putting $100,000 of your investment funds in gold? Here's what that looks like in this market.
A grand jury refused to return an indictment against the six Democratic lawmakers earlier this month.
Richard Blumenthal seeks records from FCC and Paramount Global amid claims of political censorship
US Senate Democrats are launching an investigation into whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the CBS parent company, Paramount, prevented Stephen Colbert, the network’s talkshow host, from broadcasting an interview with the Texas Democratic candidate, James Talarico.
Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, has written to the FCC’s enforcement bureau and to the CEO of Paramount Skydance, David Ellison. The Democratic senator demands information and documents relating to the Colbert controversy, including any communications with Donald Trump’s White House.
Continue reading...Credit card debt forgiveness may be worth exploring this March, but borrowers should first consider certain items.
Claim of ‘abetting terrorist activities’ comes as Kremlin attempts to steer users on to state-controlled app
Russia has launched a criminal investigation into the Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, on suspicion of “abetting terrorist activities”, further escalating the Kremlin’s standoff with the widely used messaging app.
The state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported on Tuesday that a case had been opened “based on materials from Russia’s federal security service”, which accused the app of being compromised by western and Ukrainian intelligence.
Continue reading...Christopher Trybus charged with manslaughter of Tarryn Baird, rape and coercive and controlling behaviour
A woman who took her own life after being subjected to a campaign of “physical and sexual violence” by her husband told her family “I am so sorry but I just couldn’t take it any more”, a court has heard.
Tarryn Baird, 34, was found dead at her home in Swindon, Wiltshire, on 28 November 2017.
Continue reading...SANTA CLARA, Calif. and MENLO PARK, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — AMD and Meta today announced a 6-gigawatt agreement to power Meta’s next generation of AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs. This agreement expands on the companies’ existing strategic partnership and aligns roadmaps across silicon, systems and software to deliver AI platforms purpose-built for Meta’s workloads.
Credit: Shutterstock
The first deployment will use a custom AMD Instinct GPU based on the MI450 architecture to deliver AI platforms that are optimized for Meta’s workloads at gigawatt-scale. Shipments supporting the first gigawatt deployment are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026 powered by the custom AMD Instinct MI450-based GPU and 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, codenamed “Venice,” running ROCm software and built on the AMD Helios rack-scale architecture. AMD Helios was developed jointly by AMD and Meta through the Open Compute Project to enable scalable, rack-level AI infrastructure.
“We are proud to expand our strategic partnership with Meta as they push the boundaries of AI at unprecedented scale,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD. “This multi-year, multi-generation collaboration across Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs and rack-scale AI systems aligns our roadmaps to deliver high-performance, energy-efficient infrastructure optimized for Meta’s workloads, accelerating one of the industry’s largest AI deployments and placing AMD at the center of the global AI buildout.”
“We’re excited to form a long-term partnership with AMD to deploy efficient inference compute and deliver personal superintelligence,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta. “This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute. I expect AMD to be an important partner for many years to come.”
In addition to the collaboration on GPUs, AMD and Meta are expanding their AMD EPYC processor partnership. Meta has been a close partner over multiple generations, deploying millions of AMD EPYC CPUs and significant deployments of AMD Instinct MI300 and MI350 series GPUs across their global infrastructure. As AI infrastructure grows in scale and complexity, CPUs are a strategic pillar of the AI compute stack, enabling efficiency, scalability and orchestration alongside GPUs. Building on deep roadmap alignment, Meta will be a lead customer for 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, codenamed “Venice,” and “Verano,” a next-generation EPYC processor designed with workload-specific optimizations to deliver leadership performance-per-dollar-per-watt.
As part of the agreement, to further align strategic interests, AMD has issued Meta a performance-based warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, structured to vest as specific milestones associated with Instinct GPU shipments are achieved. The first tranche vests with the initial 1-gigawatt of shipments, with additional tranches vesting as Meta’s purchases scale to 6 gigawatts. Vesting is further tied to AMD achieving certain stock price thresholds and exercise is tied to Meta achieving key technical and commercial milestones.
“We expect this partnership to drive substantial multi-year revenue growth and be accretive to our non-GAAP earnings per share, marking another significant step forward in delivering on our ambitious long-term financial model,” said Jean Hu, EVP, CFO and treasurer, AMD. “The performance-based structure also tightly aligns AMD and Meta around execution and long-term value creation.”
Together, AMD and Meta are collaborating across silicon, systems and software to enable AI infrastructure at a global scale that accelerates AI innovation and brings AI-powered services and experiences to billions of users.
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
Source: AMD
The post AMD and Meta Announce Expanded Strategic Partnership to Deploy 6 Gigawatts of AMD GPUs appeared first on HPCwire.
Campus clashes provide uneasy backdrop to third round of talks on nuclear programme in Geneva
Plainclothes police and security forces, many of them armed, have tried to flood Iran’s remaining open universities in an attempt to crush a fourth day of student protests against the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Running battles were reported on some campuses, with videos showing fistfights between the Basji state-backed militia and students at the University of Science and Technology in Tehran. Pick-up trucks with machine-guns were photographed parked outside the University of Tehran, with demonstrations also in Mashhad.
Continue reading...ATLANTA, Feb. 24, 2026 — Morehouse College has received a prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to participate in a $457 million project to build one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the southeast. This historic investment in higher education cyberinfrastructure will elevate Morehouse’s ability to provide access to world-class computational resources for its students, faculty, and HBCUs nationwide.
Morehouse College students, faculty, and HBCUs nationwide will benefit from access to the supercomputer.
The Morehouse Center for Broadening Participation in Computing has received an initial $5 million portion of the NSF grant to start construction on a site that will house the cutting-edge supercomputer, Horizon, part of the NSF’s Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF). More funds will be disbursed to support ongoing operations. The supercomputer will push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, providing greater access to areas such as climate modeling, machine learning, and biomedical research.
The computing project is being led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. As a primary partner in the LCCF project, Morehouse will play a pivotal role in the deployment of Horizon. In addition to housing the system, Morehouse will serve as a national epicenter for programmatic support, leading free initiatives such as a summer enrichment program for middle and high school boys, a postbaccalaureate program in artificial intelligence, and three weeklong faculty accelerators in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, focused on research, teaching, and grant proposal writing.
“Morehouse College is honored to partner with the NSF and the University of Texas at Austin on this transformative project,” said Dr. F. DuBois Bowman, 13th President of Morehouse College. “By hosting one of the Southeast’s most powerful academic supercomputers, we are providing HBCUs with unprecedented computational power to explore bold ideas, accelerate discovery, and unleash new frontiers of creativity and innovation. This investment positions our students and faculty to help shape the future of science, technology, and global problem-solving.”
“This contribution cements Morehouse’s place as the undisputed HBCU leader in artificial intelligence,” says Dr. Kinnis Gosha, Principal Investigator of the grant and Hortinius I. Chenault Endowed Professor and Chair of Computer Science. “As a national resource provider, we will empower other HBCUs and non-research-intensive institutions to contribute to growing their research capacity and enhancing student learning.”
The NSF partnership underscores Morehouse College’s commitment to academic rigor and its growing influence as a leader in global STEM research. It reinforces the College’s position as a champion for equity in the technological landscape, a field with a workforce that is still lacking diversity. According to national labor statistics, some 62 percent of tech jobs are held by White Americans.
Morehouse will share its research and project progress at the Integrating Supercomputing-Powered Instruction, Research, and Entrepreneurship (InSPIRE) Workshop, which is held annually in Austin, Texas. The conference offers support to faculty and students using AI research in teaching and entrepreneurial endeavors.
For more information on Morehouse’s role in the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility or other AI initiatives offered by the Morehouse Center for Broadening Participation in Computing, please visit https://morehouse.edu/academics/centers-and-institutes/cbpc.
About Morehouse College
Founded in 1867, Morehouse College is the nation’s only college founded to educate men of color. Ranked as Georgia’s top liberal arts college for men, Morehouse produces more Black men who go on to receive doctorates than any other college in the country and is a top feeder school for Black men entering prestigious graduate schools and MBA programs. Also named Georgia’s #1 small college, Morehouse educates a selective group of some 2,800 students each year, 60 percent of whom come from families with household incomes of $40,000 or less, yet many of whom are highly recruited by Fortune 500 companies. The College has created more Rhodes Scholars than any other HBCU and has the #1 core curriculum among HBCUs nationally. It is the nation’s top producer of Black male graduates in the social sciences, and the top HBCU producer of Black male graduates in business administration, management, operations, English, foreign languages, mathematics, statistics, philosophy, religious studies, and physical sciences. As the national epicenter for thought leadership on human rights and equity, Morehouse is committed to helping the nation address the challenges caused by institutional racism, income and health care disparities, lack of access to capital, detrimental public policy, and the need for high-quality education.
Source: Morehouse College Office of Institutional Advancement
The post Morehouse College Selected as Host Site for NSF Supercomputing Project appeared first on HPCwire.
Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes. The brand started as a powerful video game console, but Game Pass and cloud gaming pushed it toward a hazier identity: the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign tried to redefine it as any device that could play Xbox games, whether a PC, a smart TV, a phone, or a Windows handheld. Microsoft then went further and started publishing its biggest franchises on PlayStation, making it one of the largest third-party publishers on a rival's platform. Phil Spencer, who led the division for over a decade and drove the subscription pivot, announced his retirement last week, and incoming CEO Asha Sharma has pledged "the return of Xbox" -- though her memo also talks about expanding across PC, mobile, and cloud, which sounds a lot like the status quo.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Information Commissioner’s Office imposes largest fine yet for a breach of children’s privacy
The UK information regulator has fined the social news service Reddit £14.5m for using the data of children under the age of 13 unlawfully and potentially exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content.
The hefty punishment from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the largest fine yet for a breach of children’s privacy and comes after the US-based company introduced age checks in July, including age verification to access mature content. Prior to this, the ICO said, there were “a large number of children under 13 on the platform and Reddit did not have a lawful basis for processing their personal information”.
Continue reading...Partnership with Idaho National Laboratory boosts computing power for Idaho universities, accelerating discovery, funding competitiveness and workforce development
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, Feb. 24, 2026 — A powerful supercomputer is expanding high-performance computing for researchers across Idaho, enabled by a partnership between Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the state’s public research universities.
High-performance computing systems like this enable researchers to run complex simulations and analyze large datasets in a fraction of the time required by standard computers.
The system, known as Lemhi, serves researchers at University of Idaho, Boise State University and Idaho State University and replaces the Falcon supercomputer, delivering substantially faster performance and improved efficiency. The upgrade strengthens Idaho’s capacity for research, education and innovation and provides computing capabilities comparable to those at major national research institutions.
“Access to this level of computing allows Idaho to punch well above its weight,” said Luke Sheneman, director of research computing and data services at U of I. “It helps us attract top faculty and graduate students, compete for federal research funding and tackle problems we could not address without this kind of infrastructure.”
High-performance computing, often called supercomputing, allows researchers to solve problems that require enormous computational power, not because of the amount of data involved, but because of the complexity and scale of the problem itself. These systems process information faster than standard computers, accelerating discovery across disciplines such as artificial intelligence, energy systems, engineering, health sciences and natural resources.
“My research uses large-scale molecular simulations to better understand how chemicals interact with liquids, which is important for applications ranging from drug development to energy storage,” said Bourgeois Gadjagboui, a doctoral student at Boise State. “Lemhi enables this work to scale by providing the computing power and data infrastructure needed to analyze thousands of molecules efficiently and support>
Researchers throughout the state can access Lemhi remotely using their university credentials, allowing them to complete computing tasks in just hours or days that might otherwise take weeks or months on a regular computer. This level of access supports advanced research, workforce development and collaboration among institutions.
Keith Weber, director of the GIS Training and Research Center at Idaho State University, said a task that previously took 12.8 hours on a Windows workstation was completed in six minutes on the supercomputer. The faster processing enabled researchers to create digital terrain and ladder fuel models used in pre-wildfire mitigation efforts and post-fire management studies funded by FEMA and NASA.
Lemhi is hosted at INL’s Collaborative Computing Center in Idaho Falls, where INL provides the secure facility, power and core infrastructure required to operate and sustain a supercomputer. U of I currently oversees day-to-day operations, with leadership set to rotate among the three universities in the future. Boise State is expected to assume the lead role in late 2026.
Both Falcon and Lemhi are the result of a long-standing collaboration between INL and Idaho’s research universities. As INL modernizes its computing systems, select resources are made available for academic use, extending the value of major research investments before systems are eventually retired through federal surplus processes.
INL researchers used Lemhi for approximately six years before making it available for academic research, reflecting INL’s ongoing commitment to supporting university partnerships. This approach helps maximize the value of advanced computing investments while expanding access to cutting-edge tools for education and research.
“Scientific computing and artificial intelligence are critical enablers of Idaho’s leadership in research and engineering,” said Eric Whiting, senior advisor of scientific computing and AI at INL. “University access to capable computer systems such as Lemhi will continue to elevate Idaho’s scientific reputation and create positive impacts for both the state and INL.”
By supporting research across a wide range of disciplines, Lemhi helps Idaho institutions compete for federal funding, attract top researchers and train the next generation of scientists and engineers, reinforcing the statewide impact of INL’s long-term investment in research excellence.
More from HPCwire: Idaho National Laboratory Deploys Teton Supercomputer to Expand Multiphysics Simulations
Source: University of Idaho
The post Lemhi Supercomputer Expands Idaho Research Capacity appeared first on HPCwire.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
While many exporters around the world cheered when the supreme court ruled against Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs last week, the unintended consequence could be that the trade war escalates further, says Neil Wilson at the broker Saxo Markets.
Trump warned countries not to ‘play games’ and threatened ‘a much higher tariff’ than they had agreed to...the unintended consequence of the Supreme Court ruling could be an escalatory trade war that markets hadn’t anticipated. Or as Trump put it the Supreme Court had ‘unwittingly’ handed him ‘far more powers and strength’ to levy fresh tariffs than before the ruling.
… The White House insists it’s working on a 15% levy at a later date, which gives the president a degree of optionality, but this is evolving into a far messier situation than we had a week ago.
We can all agree that the US is not facing a balance of payments crisis, which is when countries experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access to financial markets.
Continue reading...The US men’s and women’s teams claimed titles at the Winter Games this past week. The warm fuzzy feelings didn’t last long
Keeping politics at arm’s length for the US men’s hockey team’s gold-medal matchup with Canada was always going to be difficult.
The game fell on the 46th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, when an underdog group of US college players upset the mighty Soviet Union team against the backdrop of the cold war. But the US team who took the ice on Sunday were no plucky band of amateurs making a stand for democracy against authoritarianism – a point underscored when the US and Canada met last year in the 4 Nations Face-Off. Canadian fans booed the Star-Spangled Banner and the US players, either unaware of, or unsympathetic to, Canadian desires to be neither the 51st US state nor the USA’s opponent in a scorched-earth trade war, dropped the gloves to fight their opponents as soon as the game commenced.
Continue reading...Nancy Guthrie has been missing for three weeks and officials believe she was kidnapped from her Arizona home
Savannah Guthrie’s family has offered up to $1m for information leading to the return of her 84-year-old mother, Nancy, who has been missing since 1 February.
The NBC Today show host posted the offer in a video on Instagram Tuesday, more than three weeks after Nancy’s disappearance. “Someone out there knows something that can bring her home,” Guthrie says in the clip. “We are begging you to please come forward now.
Continue reading...Natalie Fleet MP says politicians should not expect ‘death threats as standard’, as Lancashire councillor apologises
A Labour MP has said politicians should not expect to face “death threats as standard” after a Reform UK councillor shared a Facebook post which said she “should be shot”.
The picture of Natalie Fleet, who has spoken previously about being groomed and raped as a teenager, was accompanied by a fake quote misattributed to her, which read: “I voted against the grooming gang enquiry.”
Continue reading...Looking for recommended chargers for an ADV PRO on Amazon, must be prime so I can have it shipped to a locker location.
Thanks!
Shares in Uber, Mastercard and American Express fall on back of apocalypse scenario posted on Substack
US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.
The latest foreboding is from Citrini Research, a little-known US firm that provides insights on “transformative ‘megatrends’”. Its post on Substack, which it called a “scenario, not a prediction”, rattled investors by portraying a near future in which autonomous AI systems – or agents – upend the entire US economy, from jobs to markets and mortgages.
Continue reading...Little sign Moscow’s ability to continue waging war for a fifth year is diminished, analysis suggests
Russia will be able to sustain its invasion of Ukraine throughout 2026 even allowing for emerging economic and manpower pressures, while its missile and drone threat to Europe is growing, according to a leading military thinktank.
Bastian Giegerich, the director general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said there was “little indication” that “Russia’s ability to continue its war against Ukraine for a fifth year is diminished”.
Continue reading...Starting in 2027, the Danish pharma firm will sell its weight-loss and diabetes drugs for $675 per month.
Stepbrother, 16, was charged in the death of Anna Kepner, a high schooler found dead on a Carnival cruise in November
A 16-year-old from Florida has reportedly been charged with homicide as a minor in the death of his stepsister, Anna Kepner, in November on a Carnival cruise ship.
News of the charges against the teen boy surfaced in court documents first reported on Monday by the Florida news outlet Wesh 2 News. CBS News also reported having seen the documents.
Continue reading...Read on for how to tune into the hit show starring Kaitlin Olson on ABC and Hulu.
New constructions delayed or cancelled, raising questions about US’s ability to expand infrastructure to support boom
Cancellations and delays of new US datacenters have increased as the artificial intelligence boom runs up against a slate of issues, including supply chain snags, energy shortages and tariff-induced restraints.
Grassroots opposition from local communities has also derailed some plans, and some investors have grown wary of datacenters amid fears of an AI bubble.
Continue reading...Toaster ovens are one countertop appliance you don't want to skip. Here's everything to know about choosing the right one.
A Pew Research Center survey found that just 4 in 10 parents talk to their teens about AI usage.
Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded." After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused Discord of "lying" about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord's partnership with Persona, an age verification provider also used by Reddit and Roblox.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In a tearful video, “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie, the missing 84-year-old’s daughter, pleaded with the public for help.
One deputy is killed in a traffic stop and a second dies when deputies track suspect to woods, sheriff says
Two Missouri sheriff’s deputies were fatally shot, one during a traffic stop and the other hours later during an exchange of gunfire with the suspect, who was also killed, authorities said.
Brad Cole, the Christian county sheriff, said the initial shooting happened during a traffic stop south of Highlandville on Monday in south-west Missouri, news outlets reported.
Continue reading...CAMBRIDGE, England, Feb. 24, 2026 — 4colors Research today announced that a consortium led by the company and comprising Airbus, DNV, NQCC, and ORCA Computing has been awarded an NQCC SparQ Grant under the 2025 STFC Cross Cluster Proof of Concept: SparQ Quantum Computing Call. The program is funded by the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) in the UK. The award will support a collaborative project titled “Quantum-Accelerated Mixed-Integer Optimisation for Aircraft Loading” whose goal is to develop a quantum computing use case in aerospace logistics.
“Through the SparQ program, NQCC is supporting important, industry-led projects that explore how quantum computing can deliver real-world impact,” said Dr. Rob Whiteman, Quantum Readiness Delivery Lead, NQCC. “This consortium exemplifies the collaborative innovation needed to advance practical quantum optimization.”
Advancing Aircraft Loading with Hybrid Quantum Computing
The project aims to demonstrate how hybrid classical–quantum computing can help solve the complex and high-impact problem of aircraft cargo loading. Optimizing both what to load and where to stow it, while satisfying trim, centre-of-gravity, structural, and operational constraints, can yield substantial benefits for airlines and cargo operators. Even small improvements in this process can lead to lower fuel burn and CO₂ emissions, faster turnaround times, and better utilization of existing fleet capacity.
Aircraft loading is a challenge faced by manufacturers as well as airlines and operators. Like other combinatorial optimization problems, it is computationally demanding yet critically important to operations. Enhancing efficiency improves payload utilization and overall performance, making the search for better algorithms essential. This project focuses on harnessing the power of quantum computing to deliver practical and sustainable benefits for industry.
“The NQCC SparQ grant brings together partners with complementary expertise, spanning aerospace, logistics, quantum hardware, and advanced algorithms,” said Dr Marcin Kaminski, Founder and CEO of 4colors Research. “We are excited to collaborate on this use case and, more broadly, to push forward quantum solutions for combinatorial optimization.”
“Hybrid quantum–classical optimization has real potential to unlock efficiencies in complex industrial workflows,” said James Fletcher, Head of Solutions Architecture at ORCA Computing. “We’re pleased to contribute our photonic quantum systems to this consortium and help advance a commercially relevant use case for aerospace.”
About 4colors Research
4colors Research is an algorithm technology company that develops and commercializes innovative classical and quantum algorithms for complex optimization problems. Based in Cambridge, UK, the company partners with industry leaders worldwide to deliver solutions that combine emerging computational technologies with rigorous scientific and optimization expertise. 4colors was the winner of the 2024 Airbus × BMW Quantum Computing Challenge and a semi-finalist in the 2025 XPRIZE Quantum Applications Competition.
About DNV
DNV is a global leader and independent expert in risk management and assurance, operating in more than 100 countries, helping customers safeguard life, property, and the environment through evidence‑based decisions. DNV brings a powerful combination of domain science and digital trust capabilities, covering digital assurance, data quality and governance, interoperability and conformance testing, and applied AI/ML analytics to ensure that data, models, and software‑enabled processes are transparent, secure, and reliable across the value chain.
About The National Quantum Computing Centre
The National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), based at the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, UK, is a national facility dedicated to accelerating the development and adoption of quantum computing. Established as part of the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme, the NQCC works with industry, academia and government to bridge the gap between quantum research and real-world applications, providing access to quantum computing hardware, expertise and collaborative programmes.
About ORCA Computing
ORCA Computing, headquartered in London, UK, with offices in the United States, is a leading developer and provider of full-stack photonic quantum computing systems. The company delivers an innovative approach to quantum computing, providing robust, high-performance, and data center-standard systems for machine learning, generative AI and optimization workloads. ORCA Computing has successfully delivered ten on-premises quantum computers to leading global customers, including the UK National Quantum Computing Centre, Montana State University, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center.
Source: 4colors Research
The post 4colors Research Leads NQCC SparQ Project on Quantum Optimization for Aircraft Loading appeared first on HPCwire.
We report from California’s Silicon Valley, where billionaires pour money into midterms, and the AI Impact summit, where India pushes back on ‘AI monopoly’ held by US and China
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, we’re examining the tech industry’s push for influence in two places separated by a time difference of 13 hours and 30 minutes. The first is where tech sees its next big market, the second its home turf. My colleague Robert Booth reports from last week’s India AI Impact summit, where tech companies pledged to spend tens of billions in the coming year to build customer bases and datacenters in the subcontinent. Dara Kerr and Lauren Gambino reported from Silicon Valley, where billionaires are marshalling their wealth to influence California’s politics at greater levels than they ever have before.
Nascent tech, real fear: how AI anxiety is upending career ambitions
How the anxiety over AI could fuel a new workers’ movement
The bogus four-day workweek that AI supposedly ‘frees up’
Continue reading...Hey everyone, thought I would hop on here and gauge interest in my board.
Selling my Onewheel GT with ~1,700 miles. Board is in great mechanical condition and rides smooth.
Upgrades & Included Extras:
• New fm treaded performance tire (only ~100 miles on it)
• NSK bearings installed with the tire
• Float Life rim savers
• Includes pink bumpers (no stock bumpers)
$1100 OBO
I also have a pair of used lowboy footpads I would throw in for $100 extra
I am located in the SLC area for all of those interested
Dm me for photos
Should a person be deported because once, a decade and a half ago, they left their toddlers home alone for a half hour to buy them pajamas at Walmart? That’s what the Trump administration is arguing in a little-noticed federal appeals court case being decided in California, with sweeping implications for both the immigration and child welfare systems. A ruling is expected in the coming months.
In 2010, Sotero Mendoza-Rivera, an undocumented farmworker who’d immigrated from Mexico 10 years earlier, made a fateful decision. He drove with his girlfriend, Angelica Ortega-Vasquez, to their local Walmart in McMinnville, Oregon, according to a police report. The store was seven minutes from their apartment. In addition to the pajamas, they purchased motor oil and brake fluid for their car.
When they got back to the apartment, their 2-year-old son, who’d been in bed asleep when they’d left, had woken up and somehow gotten out the door. A bystander found him by the street outside the complex, baby bottle in hand, and called the police.
The responding officer issued Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez a misdemeanor citation, which they resolved with a guilty plea, a fine and probation. The officer stated in his report that the little boy and his 3-year-old sister were healthy and clean, that the apartment was well-kept and stocked with food, and that a neighbor said that the mother was usually home with the kids.
The Obama administration then opened deportation proceedings against Mendoza-Rivera, but did not keep him in detention. He appealed, and the case wound its way slowly through the legal system before hitting a backlog at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where some immigration matters from nearly a decade ago are still being decided.
But in August, amid the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Mendoza-Rivera and locked him up in another state. And the Department of Justice is now arguing that what he did in 2010 (the current case is against him only) is a crime deserving of immediate removal from the country. A DOJ lawyer argued before a panel of the 9th Circuit in Pasadena, California, last month that it doesn’t matter if no harm to children occurred, saying an immigrant parent should still get deported if their parenting decision involved a “substantial” deviation from a “normal” standard of care for kids.
Child welfare officials and experts told ProPublica they are deeply concerned by the case, as well as several others like it that have been making their way through the courts and are now reaching a decisive point. “Imagine what a weapon it would be in ICE’s hands if child welfare is added to all the other areas where a conviction for the most minor offense means deportation,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group.
Indeed, if Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team wins this case, thousands of immigrant moms and dads could be exposed to deportation for minor involvement in the juvenile court system, a new realm for President Donald Trump’s deportation regime. There aren’t exact numbers as to how many immigrants are accused of low-level parental negligence in juvenile courts. But as ProPublica has previously reported, millions of parents are accused of child neglect every year in this country, in many instances for reasons stemming from poverty like a lack of child care or food in the fridge, rather than physical or sexual abuse.
Immigrant parents are no more likely than U.S.-born parents to abuse children. But undocumented parents may be more likely to be accused of certain low-level forms of neglect, according to legal aid attorneys. For one thing, due to their lack of legal status, they sometimes avoid interactions with officials at schools and hospitals, leading to potential allegations against them for neglecting their kids’ health or education. They also disproportionately work long and unpredictable hours, sometimes having their older children look after their younger ones, which in the U.S. can be deemed inadequate supervision. Differing cultural norms regarding how much hands-on supervision is necessary also play a role.
There is no evidence yet that ICE has been actively looking for cases like these to identify parents to deport, according to interviews with over a dozen federal and state child welfare officials. But data on specific child welfare cases is reported from states to the federal government annually, via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. (The data contain identifiers for children but not their names, though state agencies have those.)
“The million or so reports in NCANDS would be a gold mine for Noem and Miller,” said Andy Barclay, a longtime child welfare statistician, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
The first Trump administration did not seek to use such data for deportations, according to Jerry Milner, who was appointed to oversee the U.S. child welfare system as head of the federal Children’s Bureau from 2017 to 2021. “I never had any of those discussions around the data,” Milner told ProPublica. “I can’t guarantee that others did not, but they never made it to me.” But, he said, “things are different now.”
“I would have strong concerns if any of the data are used for purposes other than what they were intended for,” Milner said.
Medicaid data, for instance, is now reportedly being shared with the Department of Homeland Security, and those files can have more identifying information than NCANDS does on families with child welfare cases. DHS has also accessed Office of Refugee Resettlement data on migrant children, which can be used to identify young people’s locations and the (sometimes undocumented) adults taking care of them. Indeed, DHS and FBI agents have visited migrant kids at the homes of their caretakers, ostensibly to perform “welfare checks.”
The White House declined to answer questions for this article. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesperson in an email accused the Biden administration of letting Mendoza-Rivera’s case languish and said that “as part of this Administration’s commitment to making America safe again, the Attorney General will continue to defend efforts to remove criminal illegal aliens, especially those convicted of offenses which place children in situations likely to endanger their health or welfare.”
The Trump administration’s view, according to the Justice Department’s filings in Mendoza-Rivera’s case, is that undocumented parents convicted of even the most minor forms of parental negligence should be ineligible for a type of legal relief called “cancellation of removal.” (Mendoza-Rivera sought this relief during his initial deportation proceedings, which is part of what spurred the current appeals case.) It’s an off-ramp from deportation that until now has been available to such moms and dads if they’ve been in the U.S. for 10 or more years, they have “good moral character,” and their deportation would cause extreme hardship to their U.S. citizen children. This would apply to Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez’s kids, who are American citizens.
One of the main federal laws that the Trump administration has been relying on in its effort to deport millions of people comes from the Bill Clinton era. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act overhauled immigration enforcement in part by stating that noncitizens, even lawful permanent residents, must be expeditiously deported if they’ve been convicted of certain offenses, including aggravated felonies, crimes of “moral turpitude,” drug crimes or domestic violence, or a “crime of child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.”
The motivation for including this sort of language, at the time, was clear. Amid the violent crime wave of the ’90s, the law’s co-author, Bob Dole, said on the Senate floor that the crimes he wanted to make deportable included “vicious acts of stalking, child abuse and sexual abuse.”
Yet over the three decades since, societal norms around what constitutes bad — and even criminal — parenting have come to include all sorts of nonviolent and even harmless behavior. A range of parenting practices that were considered normal for most of the 20th century are now investigated and prosecuted as child maltreatment in many states; letting your kids play at the park and walk home alone could be “neglect,” especially if you’re poor and a person of color. So could leaving them in their car seats briefly with the windows cracked and the car alarm on while you run into a store to buy diapers, or failing to properly secure their bedroom windows at night.
Some rulings by other courts have blocked deportations for people with these sorts of alleged parenting lapses, while the federal Board of Immigration Appeals has offered changing guidance on the issue. Immigration advocates fear that the current appeals court proceeding, which groups together several similar cases including Mendoza-Rivera’s, could become hugely influential across the legal system — and with much higher stakes now given the present administration’s enforcement focus.
Although the Obama and Biden administrations took similar positions to the Trump administration on this point, in general they didn’t pursue deportations as aggressively. “There was some discretion being exercised,” said David Zimmer, Mendoza-Rivera’s appellate attorney. “So it was at least possible, in a given case, that they might have decided not to pursue removal if the parent hadn’t done anything meaningfully wrong.” That’s no longer the case in a regime that is seeking any reason to expel an immigrant, Zimmer said.
This case could be heard by the full 9th Circuit next and then head to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the justices choose to take it up. Much of the debate rests on the question of whether it matters if immigrant parents meant to harm their children, given that intention is part of the definition of most crimes. If the parent both didn’t harm and wasn’t aware they might harm their child, advocates argue, it shouldn’t qualify as a “crime” worthy of deportation.
The Oregon misdemeanor negligence statute under which Mendoza-Rivera was convicted doesn’t require proving any intent to harm a child, any actual harm to a child or even exposure of a child to any harm, acknowledged Justice Department lawyer Imran Zaidi at a 9th Circuit hearing in January. But negligence is still a “culpable mental state” deserving of deportation, he said, because it is “incompatible with a proper regard for consequences.”
Jed Rakoff, a New York federal district judge serving as a visiting member of the 9th Circuit panel, responded that he’s been hearing this argument since “my first year of torts class.” Negligence, he said, is by definition unconscious; otherwise it would be “recklessness,” which is a different, more serious act involving consciously disregarding potential harm. In the context of these family court cases, it is often just conduct that’s a small deviation from some middle-class “reasonable person’s” — a neighbor’s, a caseworker’s — subjective opinion of what “good” parenting looks like.
“I’m talking about the term ‘crime’: What did Congress mean by that single word?” Rakoff said, referring to the 1996 law’s description of a “crime” of “child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.” Lawmakers clearly meant something more serious than briefly leaving kids unattended, Rakoff continued. After all, the consequence they were prescribing — deportation — was so much more severe than any other possible consequence for any similar misdemeanor.
Zaidi, the Justice Department lawyer, responded that if many state laws say that something is a crime of child neglect, then it is a crime of child neglect, and Congress said that a crime of child neglect is deportable. The two judges other than Rakoff seemed more open to this argument.
The fundamental question that the appeals court is considering, then, is whether these essentially harmless parental “crimes” alleged by increasingly hands-on local child welfare authorities are the same category of crime that the U.S. Congress was talking about when it passed a law on immigrants committing violent crime, domestic violence and terrorism.
Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Columbia Law School Family Defense Clinic, said that it appears Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez “were not a safety threat to their children, let alone to anyone else,” even if they showed bad judgment by leaving toddlers alone for a half hour. So it is “fair to question,” he said, how pursuing either of their deportations serves the Trump administration’s “stated interest in public safety.”
McMinnville, Oregon, where Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez bought those pajamas at Walmart, is where they’ve lived for nearly a quarter century and where they had their two children, who are now teenagers. It’s also where Mendoza-Rivera spent all those years picking and packaging produce.
But he has now been locked up for months in a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and his family has in turn lost much of its income. His kids are without him. And if the Trump administration gets to use a law against him that was intended to protect children, they will lose their dad to a foreign country for good.
The post Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases appeared first on ProPublica.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2026 — Scality and WEKA today announced a new jointly validated solution that combines WEKA’s NeuralMesh high-performance storage with Scality RING’s cost-efficient object tier. The solution offers enterprises the best of both worlds: flash-speed performance for active AI and high-performance computing (HPC) data, combined with scalable, durable capacity for large datasets, while reducing cost and complexity without compromising speed.
WEKA Delivers Ultra-High-Performance, Scality Extends the Capacity and Economic Benefits, Providing Faster Data Pipelines with Lower Cost for AI and HPC Workloads.
At the heart of the new solution is Scality’s proven object connector for NeuralMesh, a lightweight, REST-based integration validated by WEKA at scale. Compared to conventional S3 interfaces, Scality RING achieved up to 10x faster performance on similar hardware in Scality testing, with up to 20% lower infrastructure costs. This enables organizations to extend their NeuralMesh-powered AI and HPC data pipelines more economically while avoiding the management overhead associated with traditional object stores.
“WEKA’s NeuralMesh storage system delivers the high-performance software foundation modern AI pipelines require to run optimally. Enterprises that leverage the Scality RING lightweight connector together with NeuralMesh can achieve additional economic benefits, leveraging a cost-efficient object tier,” said Nilesh Patel, chief strategy officer at WEKA. “This enables our mutual customers to achieve their AI project outcomes faster and more efficiently.”
The joint solution architecture keeps new and active data on WEKA’s NeuralMesh flash tier, while seamlessly tiering data to Scality’s exabyte-scale, resilient object storage. This ensures optimal performance and long-term cost control — without forcing customers into expensive, all-flash deployments.
Customer Benefits Include:
“Our partnership with WEKA provides enterprises a smarter way to extend the economics of their AI pipelines,” said Erwan Girard, Chief Product Officer at Scality. “WEKA drives the performance; Scality provides the scale. Together, we help customers reduce infrastructure costs and management complexity while keeping their AI and HPC environments running at peak efficiency.”
Availability: The integrated Scality RING with NeuralMesh by WEKA solution is available now, detailed information is available at https://www.scality.com/partner/weka.
About Scality
Scality solves organizations’ biggest data storage challenges — growth, security, performance, and cost. Designed for end-to-end cyber resilience, only Scality S3 object storage with CORE5 safeguards data at every level of the system, from API to architecture. Its patented MultiScale Architecture enables limitless, independent scalability in all critical dimensions to meet the unpredictable demands of modern workloads. The world’s most discerning companies depend on Scality to accelerate high-performance AI initiatives, optimize cloud deployments, and defend their data with confidence. Recognized as a leader by Gartner, Scality software is reliable, secure, and sustainable.
About WEKA
WEKA is transforming how organizations build, run, and scale AI workflows through NeuralMesh, its intelligent, adaptive mesh storage system. Unlike traditional data infrastructure, which becomes more fragile as AI environments expand, NeuralMesh becomes faster, stronger, and more efficient as it scales, growing with your AI environment to provide a flexible foundation for enterprise and agentic AI innovation. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50 and the world’s leading neoclouds and AI innovators, NeuralMesh maximizes GPU utilization, accelerates time to first token, and lowers the cost of AI innovation.
Source: WEKA
The post Scality and WEKA Partner to Deliver High-Performance AI Storage with Efficient Object Tiering appeared first on HPCwire.
Hungary’s veto over European funding could constrain Ukraine’s ability to fund its army and weaken its hand in U.S. talks with Russia over the war.
Leader says Vladimir Putin has not achieved his goals and visit by Trump might make clear ‘who the aggressor is’
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appealed to Donald Trump to visit Kyiv, in a video address on the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, and said Ukraine would not betray its people in any negotiations with Russia.
Zelenskyy said Putin had not achieved his original war goals or “broken the Ukrainian people”. “He has not won this war,” he said. “We have preserved Ukraine, and we will do everything to achieve peace. And to ensure justice.”
Continue reading...Almost a year after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was first targeted by the U.S. government as part of its violent mass deportation campaign, the Trump administration is still not done punishing him.
The 30-year-old father of three became an emblem of Trump’s cruelty and lawlessness after being abducted and sent to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran torture prison where hundreds of people were incarcerated last year at the behest of the White House. After conceding that Abrego had been expelled in “error” — violating a court order barring Abrego’s deportation to his country of origin — the Trump administration nonetheless refused to bring Abrego back to the U.S., smearing him as a terrorist and leaving him to endure months of violence, deprivation, and psychological torture.
Abrego was finally returned last June. But his arrival only marked a surreal new chapter in his ordeal. Rather than bring him back to Maryland, where he lived with his wife and young children, he was jailed in Tennessee, as federal prosecutors devised a dubious new case against him. Before he’d even landed on U.S. soil, Abrego was indicted on sweeping criminal charges for allegedly smuggling gang members across state lines over the course of a decade.
Abrego, who has pleaded not guilty, was supposed to go to trial in January at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. But late last year, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw canceled the trial date, instead scheduling an evidentiary hearing on a pending question before the court: whether Abrego is the target of a “selective and vindictive prosecution” by the Trump administration.
The hearing, set for Thursday morning at the federal courthouse in Nashville, will ultimately determine whether the criminal case against Abrego moves forward. If Crenshaw concludes that Abrego was indeed the target of a revenge campaign, he could dismiss the case altogether.
As a legal and historical matter, this would be a big deal — and a major defeat for federal prosecutors. But it would also fall far short of accountability for those who have dedicated themselves to ruining Abrego’s life. Nor does it stand to impact the countless others whose lives have been destroyed by Trump’s lawless mass deportations. Abrego’s case, which so shocked the American public in the early days of the president’s term, was a harbinger of things to come. “We really thought this was going to be one of a kind,” one of his immigration lawyers recently told NPR. “If anything, it was just the tip of the spear.”
Abrego was released from jail last year and spent the holidays with his family. While not currently incarcerated, he remains under federal supervision and still faces deportation. He entered the country illegally as a teenager to escape gang violence in El Salvador, was given “withholding from removal” status by an immigration judge in 2019, which allowed him to live and work in the U.S. while checking in once a year with ICE. But the Trump administration dismantled such protections, arresting Abrego in March 2025. While his criminal case has placed his removal on hold, the federal government has gone to extreme lengths to make his eventual deportation a punishment unto itself, scheming to send him to a third country in Africa rather than Latin America.
Abrego’s prosecution is also a potent example of Trump’s eagerness to weaponize the Justice Department against those who cross him. In the year since Abrego was sent to CECOT, the DOJ — whose headquarters now feature a large banner of Trump’s face — has dropped any pretense of independence. One associate deputy attorney general who was apparently instrumental to Abrego’s prosecution reportedly told U.S. attorneys last month that Trump is their “chief client.”
This makes Abrego’s upcoming hearing a new test of the courts. Crenshaw, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2015, has already put himself in the crosshairs by considering Abrego’s rare vindictive prosecution challenge. The hearing comes at a moment when federal judges are increasingly vocal about the threat posed by the Trump regime, while the president and his backers increasingly villainize the judges who stand in their way.
On the surface, the question of whether Abrego is the target of a “vindictive prosecution” is no mystery. The government’s brazen retribution campaign has been publicized at every turn.
To recap: After Trump invoked the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to declare an “invasion” of gang members in mid-March 2025, exiling hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men to CECOT, Abrego appeared in a photo taken at the prison, released by the Salvadoran government. The overhead image showed two rows of men kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their shaved heads. His wife recognized Abrego from his tattoos.
On March 24, 2025, Abrego sued for his release. Less than two weeks later, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego’s return — and the Supreme Court upheld her order. Rather than complying, Trump held a backslapping Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, where U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to Bukele, not Trump, to bring Abrego back to the U.S.
For the next several weeks, the Trump administration demonized Abrego, repeatedly labeling him a gang member and releasing records showing that his wife took out an order of protection against him years earlier. The Department of Homeland Security posted on X that Abrego was “not the upstanding ‘Maryland Man’ the media has portrayed him as” — a line loudly amplified by Trump’s supporters.
Abrego was finally flown back to the U.S. in June 2025 — but only after the DOJ laid the groundwork for a new criminal case against him, which allowed Trump to put a new spin on the government’s narrative. At a press conference on June 6, Bondi announced that Abrego had been indicted for playing a “significant role in an alien smuggling ring” — crimes she described as his “full-time job — and that he had been returned to the U.S. to face justice.
The same line was parroted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, on Fox News. As Abrego’s lawyers lay out in their vindictive prosecution motion, Blanche — who was previously Trump’s defense attorney — declared that the DOJ began investigating Abrego only after “a judge in Maryland” interfered with Trump’s decision to deport him.
Abrego’s motion also points to comments made by Trump aboard Air Force One, in which he said the DOJ made its decision in response to “these judges [who] want to try and run the country.” Asked by a reporter how the criminal case came to pass, Trump said, “I could see a decision being made — bring him back, show everybody how horrible this guy is. And frankly we have to do something because the judges are trying to take the place of a president that won in a landslide.”
Finally, Abrego’s lawyers highlight the resignation of Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Schrader, who quit his position as chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee the same day Abrego was indicted, “reportedly over concerns that the case was being pursued for ‘political reasons.’” (In an email to The Intercept, Schrader, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on the case.)
These arguments have already proven persuasive to Crenshaw. The federal district judge concluded last year that there was at least some evidence to show that Abrego’s prosecution was retaliatory in nature. “The totality of events” point to a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,” he wrote last fall. He was struck by the timing of the government’s investigation of Abrego, which came “a mere seven days after he prevailed” at the Supreme Court, as well as by Blanche’s “remarkable statements,” which appeared to confirm that the prosecution was born of revenge for Abrego’s successful lawsuit “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”
Another STRONG SIGN that Abrego is the target of a vindictive prosecution is the weakness of the government’s criminal case itself. While the DOJ has insisted that it has damning evidence to show that Abrego is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the allegations look increasingly like a house of cards.
In September, prosecutors submitted a sworn affidavit laying out how the case against Abrego unfolded. The document, which was signed by Acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire, traces the case back to November 30, 2022, when Abrego was pulled over on the highway in Putnam County, Tennessee, while driving a Chevy Suburban carrying eight passengers, all of whom were Latino. State troopers questioned Abrego but ultimately sent him on his way without a ticket.
The affidavit acknowledges that the traffic stop did not lead to a prosecution until 2025. As McGuire tells it, he got a call the night of April 27, 2025, from the local Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations about “potential human smuggling committed by Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia,” who by then was already famous for being sent to CECOT. According to the affidavit, McGuire, who had experience with smuggling cases, “decided to handle the matter himself.” After examining body camera footage from the Tennessee Highway Patrol, he “immediately noted the similarities” between the footage and cases he had handled.
“Over the next several weeks, law enforcement conducted multiple interviews of individuals with information about Abrego Garcia’s activities in Tennessee and elsewhere,” the affidavit goes on. McGuire ultimately concluded that Abrego “had been involved in a human smuggling conspiracy for years.” The evidence was in fact “overwhelming.”
But at a lengthy detention hearing last year, the government’s case against Abrego looked flimsy at best, cobbled together from dubious statements made by highly incentivized federal informants, none of whom actually took the stand. Prosecutors’ sole witness was an HSI special agent whose testimony was based on interviews he neither conducted nor attended — evidence the presiding judge skeptically described as “multiple levels of hearsay.”
McGuire, who represented the government at the hearing, also sought to link Abrego to “a mass casualty event” involving some of the “same actors” involved in his alleged smuggling scheme. But when the judge asked whether any testimony would show that Abrego himself was involved in this mass casualty event, McGuire said no.
“The cooperators the government is relying on here have very serious credibility issues.”
Lawyers with the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee, which represented Abrego at the time, pointed out myriad holes in the government’s case. “The cooperators the government is relying on here have very serious credibility issues,” one attorney argued. The informants provided their statements as part of deals that would allow them to avoid deportation, giving them an obvious incentive to lie. What’s more, “their stories are facially implausible.” The informants claimed that Abrego often brought his own children with him as he zig-zagged across the U.S. for his smuggling operation. “The idea that he is taking them on these cross-country trips multiple times per week is just ridiculous on its face.”
A few weeks later, the judge ruled in Abrego’s favor, finding that there was no evidence that justified keeping him in jail while awaiting trial. But she noted that he would almost certainly be kept behind bars either way, given the “anticipated removal proceedings that are outside the jurisdiction of this Court.” While this might make her decision appear to be “little more than an academic exercise,” she wrote, “the foundation of the administration of our criminal law depends on the bedrock of due process. … The Court will give Abrego the due process that he is guaranteed.”
In their motion alleging that Abrego is the target of a selective and vindictive prosecution, his lawyers acknowledge that the legal threshold is high. To win, they must prove that Abrego was specifically targeted for exercising his constitutional rights in court. Such claims “are infrequently made and rarely succeed,” they write. “But if there has ever been a case for dismissal on those grounds, this is that case.”
Indeed, as the lawyers lay out, Abrego was sent to CECOT, successfully sued for his release, and was then slapped with a dubious and apparently politically motivated criminal case. “This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice.”
In the six months since they first asked Crenshaw to throw out the case on these grounds, the evidence supporting their argument has only gotten stronger. Crenshaw has repeatedly ordered the DOJ to turn over materials that might further illuminate the DOJ’s decision to prosecute Abrego, often to no avail. When prosecutors have turned over evidence, the disclosures have undermined their own case.
“This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice.”
On December 30, Crenshaw unsealed an order that appeared especially damning. The judge had examined thousands of pages of government documents submitted for his review, ultimately determining that a portion should be turned over to Abrego’s legal team. “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker,” Crenshaw wrote, “but he, in fact, reported to others in DOJ with others who may or may not have acted with improper motivation.”
The “others” in question include Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, who works under Blanche, and who appeared to have “a leading role” in the decision to prosecute Abrego. A recent Bloomberg Law profile of Singh described the former gang prosecutor as “the Trump Justice Department’s brashest enforcer when it comes to clamping down on US attorneys’ autonomy,” noting that Singh pushed prosecutors to go after people like Abrego, former FBI Director James Comey, and former CNN host Don Lemon.
Crenshaw’s order supports this characterization, highlighting emails and conversations between Singh and McGuire last year. On April 27, 2025 — the same day McGuire reportedly heard about HSI’s investigation into a potential smuggling case against Abrego, according to the previously submitted affidavit — Crenshaw noted that Singh contacted McGuire “to discuss Abrego’s case.” This detail was not included in the government’s original narrative.
Also absent from McGuire’s affidavit was the fact that Singh told McGuire that Abrego’s prosecution was a “top priority” for Blanche — and that McGuire, who explicitly said that he’d decided to handle the Abrego case “himself,” later wrote to his staff in mid-May that Blanche wanted Abrego charged “sooner rather than later.”
To Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who famously traveled to El Salvador to see Abrego and remains an outspoken advocate in his case, the disclosures were a “smoking gun.” As he told CNN, the unsealed document shows that the DOJ “decided to bring these charges against [Abrego] because he asserted his due process rights when they illegally shipped him off to CECOT.”
With the evidentiary hearing approaching, the Trump administration has kept stalling, rather than turn over additional evidence. Last month, prosecutors filed a new motion explaining why it should not have to provide material it had previously agreed to disclose. Whereas the DOJ once agreed it was obligated to turn over the prior statements of the witnesses they planned to call to the stand — tentatively two HSI investigators, as well as McGuire himself — prosecutors now argued that, in fact, they do not have to turn those statements after all. Their previous position was rooted in “an honest misunderstanding” of the applicable law, they wrote, a mistake “largely based on the fact that these kinds of hearings are exceedingly rare.”
Whether or not DOJ prosecutors ever turn over the materials in question, the government’s witnesses could face a hard time if called to testify on Thursday. Crenshaw already appears to have caught the Trump administration in a series of lies, which could ultimately prompt him to simply call the government’s bluff and just end the farcical prosecution altogether.
“If there were any communications or documents that helped the government prove its narrative that this case was not motivated by vindictiveness, the government would no doubt have produced them,” Abrego’s lawyers wrote last month. “The Court should draw the obvious inference that flows from the government’s stonewalling: the presumption of vindictiveness is warranted and unrebutted, and this case must be dismissed.”
The post Trump Won’t Stop Trying to Punish Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared first on The Intercept.
Ashley Fairbanks launched Stand with Minnesota as ICE raids rocked her home town – now donations are pouring in, and families’ rent is being paid
From thousands of miles away in San Antonio, Ashley Fairbanks watched the news pour out of her home town of Minneapolis– federal immigration authorities flooding the streets and regular people stepping up to defend and care for their communities. She knew she had to do something. So the 39-year-old writer, artist and digital strategist started a Google Doc.
Soon, the list of resources for residents grew so long it became unwieldy, and Fairbanks, who builds websites for a living, launched Stand With Minnesota.
Continue reading...COLLEGE PARK, Md., Feb. 24, 2026 — IonQ is pleased to announce it was awarded a contract under the Missile Defense Agency Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract with a ceiling of $151 billion. This contract encompasses a broad range of work areas that allows for the rapid delivery of innovative capabilities to the warfighter with increased speed and agility.
IonQ is among more than 2,400 companies eligible to compete for future task orders issued under the SHIELD IDIQ contract framework.
IonQ delivers a full portfolio of quantum technologies spanning quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, and quantum security. The company also includes subsidiaries with established capabilities across space-based intelligence, secure communications, and precision timing technologies.
IonQ’s subsidiary companies include Capella Space, which provides on-demand, all-weather synthetic aperture radar imagery from space to support data-driven decision-making for operational and security missions; Skyloom, which delivers high-capacity optical communications technologies designed to enable secure, high-speed data transfer between space and ground systems; and Vector Atomic, which develops precision timing and navigation technologies designed to support system performance in GPS-degraded or denied environments.
“IonQ brings together a broad set of quantum technologies and supporting capabilities that reflect years of investment across computing, networking, sensing, and security,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “We look forward to continuing our work with U.S. government partners across a range of research, development, and innovation programs.”
Participation in the SHIELD IDIQ contract provides a contractual framework through which IonQ may compete for future task orders, subject to agency requirements, and competitive selection processes.
IonQ has a history of supporting U.S. government research and development initiatives, including work with agencies such as DARPA, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and organizations across the national security community.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the forthcoming IonQ Tempo, will be the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve 20x performance results 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.
Source: IonQ
The post IonQ Selected to Support Missile Defense Agency SHIELD IDIQ Contract appeared first on HPCwire.
Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services. The articles, credited to materials from Russia's FSB security service, accused Telegram of enabling attacks in Russia and said that Durov's "actions ... are under criminal investigation." Russia has restricted Telegram's functions, accusing it of flouting the law and is seeking to divert users towards Max, a state-run rival messenger. The steps escalate pressure on a platform that remains deeply embedded in Russian public life.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Two sheriff's deputies were killed and two more were wounded in southwestern Missouri, after a suspect opened fire during a traffic stop and fled.
‘Extraordinary’ golden lamb’s head pillaged in 1874 from what is now Ghana remains hidden in officers’ mess
The Royal Artillery is facing criticism after it emerged they are refusing public access to an “extraordinary object” looted by the British army in the 19th century from the Asante people in modern-day Ghana.
The glistening golden ram’s head would seemingly be worthy of any museum, but it remains hidden within the regiment’s mess at Larkhill in Wiltshire.
Continue reading...From AI hardware to wearable phones, these products promised a lot. So what happened to them?
Facebook owner’s investment described by semiconductor company as ‘big bet’ on artificial intelligence
The owner of Facebook has agreed to buy $60bn (£44.5bn) of artificial intelligence chips from the US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices – despite fears about the vast sums committed to AI infrastructure projects.
It is one more massive deal in a year in which US tech companies are expected to spend $660bn on AI assets, and may represent part of a broader pivot in Meta’s AI strategy, said Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester.
Continue reading...Joshua Orta was passenger when Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot in his car by immigration agent in March 2025
The passenger in the car when Texas driver Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot in March 2025 by a federal immigration agent gave a lengthy statement to lawyers for the slain man’s family disputing the government’s version of events.
That witness died on Saturday in a fiery car crash in San Antonio, a lawyer for Martinez’s family said.
Continue reading...New York City, New Jersey, southern New England and coastal communities along the East Coast faced blizzard warnings and some of the biggest snowfall totals in years.
Ford is recalling almost 413,000 Explorers from model years 2017 through 2019 due to a defect that could cause drivers to lose steering control, the U.S. auto safety regulator said
Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanitizer API support, WebGPU enhancements, and a variety of other changes. Developer chances can be found at developer.mozilla.org. Binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The president and his aides vilify the judiciary with brutal rhetoric, hoping to delegitimize a co-equal branch of government
When Donald Trump attacked several supreme court justices as “fools”, “lapdogs”, “disloyal to our constitution” and a “disgrace to our nation” after they ruled against his tariffs on Friday, it was probably the most vicious public tirade that a US president ever leveled against the country’s highest court. But as extraordinary – and extraordinarily ugly – as Trump’s rant was, everyone should realize that it was part of a systematic campaign in which Trump and his top aides have vehemently denounced and smeared judges as part of Trump’s quest for ever more power.
Whether it’s Trump, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi or others, Trump and his lieutenants often pummel judges with brutal rhetoric. To many judges, these attacks no doubt spur fears that some Trump loyalists will threaten them or worse.
Continue reading...Mixtape is an upcoming game about being a teenager when "everything meant the end of the world or the start of the world."
Raising the rainbow Pride flag instead of the more inclusive Progress flag excludes the trans community, activists say
Thousands of protesters gathered outside the iconic Stonewall Inn on a near-freezing night last week to re-raise the rainbow Pride flag in defiance of the Trump administration, which had unceremoniously ordered its removal days earlier.
It was meant to be a joyous occasion, an act of protest for the New York City LGBTQ+ community, but trans activists in the crowd were deeply disappointed by what they say was exclusion of their community in choosing to raise the historic rainbow Pride flag instead of the newer, inclusive Progress Pride flag.
Continue reading...Choice of Virginia governor to give Trump rebuttal suggests DNC believes moderate approach could bring midterm wins
On Tuesday night, Abigail Spanberger will walk out on to the historic grounds of Colonial Williamsburg and deliver the Democratic response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. With midterm elections approaching and Democrats desperately searching for a roadmap back to relevance, the party has turned to a moderate who once flipped a Republican-held congressional seat in the suburbs of Richmond and then parlayed that into the governorship by 15 points.
Since taking the office from Republican Glenn Youngkin in January, Spanberger has moved with lightning speed that has caught conservatives flat-footed, much to the delight of those who still identify as liberal.
Continue reading...Once a left-leaning political campaigner, Brand has rebranded himself as a conservative guru to millions of social media followers
David Lammy backs jury trial measures as Ministry of Justice figures published
The backlog in criminal courts in England and Wales will continue to rise for nearly a decade before it falls despite radical reforms including curtailing jury trials, according to figures from the Ministry of Justice.
The justice secretary, David Lammy, said the government was determined to press ahead with the jury trial reforms despite a potential rebellion from Labour MPs, warning that no other measures would stop the backlog from rising exponentially.
Continue reading...This iPhone feature has helped me get better sleep over the past five years, even when I travel.
Without federal climate regulation, fossil fuel industry may be more vulnerable to local lawsuits
The Trump administration’s repeal of a foundational climate determination could clear a path for new litigation and policies targeting big oil, legal experts say.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule revoking the “endangerment finding”, a 2009 determination that established that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The move eliminated federal limits on climate-warming emissions from motor vehicles, and is expected to extend to all other pollution sources.
Continue reading...Europe is helping Ukraine resist a US push for peace at any price Expert comment LToremark
European governments are realizing how Ukraine is helping fill the void left by a diminished US presence.
The latest round of US-brokered talks between Russia and Ukraine concluded without a significant breakthrough. While the parties reached near-consensus over a ceasefire monitoring mechanism, they remain deadlocked over the key issue of territory. Kyiv maintains that a comprehensive ceasefire must precede any peace agreement or elections. Meanwhile, Moscow insists that Ukraine must cede the entire Donbas region – including territories Russia has failed to secure militarily – before fighting can stop.
Moscow has managed to convince US President Trump’s team that it is engaging in peace talks ‘in good faith’ and that ceding Ukrainian-held territory is the only path to a lasting peace. This has added pressure on Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to finalize a peace settlement and establish a timeline for national elections by the summer. Increasingly aware of Ukraine’s importance to European security, Europe has stepped up to help Kyiv withstand US pressure for a quick deal – which would only embolden the Kremlin.
Notwithstanding US diplomatic pressure, Zelenskyy’s main constraint is the risk of a domestic backlash against terms perceived as a betrayal of the nation’s wartime sacrifices. Zelenskyy has warned that he cannot accept territorial concessions because the Ukrainian people would ‘never forgive this’. According to a January 2026 survey, 54 per cent of Ukrainians categorically reject the idea of Ukraine withdrawing its troops from parts of Donbas it still controls and transferring these to Russia in exchange for Western security guarantees. Cementing Russian control over Donbas would leave Ukrainians vulnerable to further Russian attacks. Any changes to Ukrainian territory would also require a nationwide referendum, which must be approved by parliament. Not only would a referendum face severe security and legal challenges but any conditions that would undermine Ukrainian sovereignty would likely be rejected.
In terms of pressure to hold elections, Ukraine is currently under martial law and thus constitutionally barred from holding elections. There are other concerns too. Without a ceasefire, polling stations would become targets for Russian missile strikes. A quarter of the country’s population are internally displaced or have fled the country, meaning voter registration data is largely outdated. Millions are still serving in the military or living under occupation and would be unable to cast ballots or run for office. There would also be the threat of destabilizing Russian influence campaigns during the election. A December 2025 survey showed that 59 per cent of Ukrainians oppose holding elections before fighting ends and a peace deal is reached.
As the US scales back its military support for Ukraine and pushes for a quick deal, European governments have stepped up to ensure Ukraine is able to defend itself and negotiate from a position of strength. Europe has effectively replaced the US as Ukraine’s main donor. EU military aid rose by 67 per cent in 2025 and the EU has approved a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for budgetary and military support in 2026–27.
Increased European burden-sharing has provided Kyiv with a defensive buffer. The responsibility for funding new advanced equipment (like Patriot air defence systems) has shifted from the US to European NATO allies through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL). Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has indicated that the alliance could secure an additional $15 billion in 2026 (on top of the $5 billion allocated in 2025) to sustain Ukraine’s military needs. With the US stepping back from the Ukraine Defence Contact Group (the ‘Ramstein format’), the UK and Germany assumed co-leadership to ensure the continued coordination of weapons deliveries.
European leaders are also working to ensure Kyiv is not coerced into a bad deal. The ‘coalition of the willing’ – led by France, the UK and Poland – has proposed security guarantees that include potential European troop deployments to enforce any future ceasefire. Critics fear that post-ceasefire deployments create an incentive for Russia to prolong the conflict. But this commitment sends an important signal that Ukraine is now an inextricable part of Europe’s future security architecture – and boosts Zelenskyy’s leverage.
An even stronger signal is Ukraine’s integration into Europe’s defence industrial base. The EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defence fund offers member states up to €150 billion in loans for long-term rearmament and allows Ukraine to participate in joint procurement. This mechanism will reduce Europe’s reliance on US supply chains, scale up domestic arms production, and enhance interoperability. There are other innovative schemes too. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway are funding weapons production inside Ukraine through the so-called ‘Danish model’. Meanwhile, major European firms like Rheinmetall (Germany) and BAE Systems (UK) have established production hubs inside Ukraine under the ‘Build in Ukraine’ initiative.
There is also increasing cooperation on drone production as Europe aims to bolster its defences against Russia’s sub-threshold operations. European defence giants have high-quality tech but suffer from slow production cycles and high costs. Ukraine, meanwhile, is a world leader in producing cheap and effective drones capable of destroying multimillion-dollar assets. Ukraine’s defence sector has developed a direct feedback loop between frontline units and producers, adapting technology to battlefield realities in real time. The UK–Ukraine Project Octopus leverages Ukrainian battlefield innovation and British industrial capacity to mass-produce autonomous interceptors that cost less than 10 per cent to produce than the Russian strike drones they are designed to destroy. There is also a new joint venture to mass-produce Ukrainian-designed drones in Germany.
Europe is wielding its financial, diplomatic and industrial leverage to support Ukraine, but significant challenges remain.
One is continued European hesitation to repurpose frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine. Europe’s seizure of these funds would send the message that Moscow will be held liable for war damages without burdening European taxpayers. Even if the rift in the transatlantic alliance deepens, this move would secure funding for Ukraine’s long-term defence and recovery.
Film-maker Jonte Richardson cites ‘harm inflicted on both the black and disabled communities’, while New Black Film Collective and MP Dawn Butler criticise BBC’s failure to edit
A black British film-maker has said he will step down as a Bafta judge over the organisation’s handling of the incident during Sunday’s ceremony during which a Tourette syndrome campaigner shouted a racial slur while two black actors were on stage.
Sinners stars Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan were presenting the award for special visual effects when John Davidson, whose life story was adapted into the acclaimed film I Swear, shouted the N-word from the stalls. The actors continued with their presenting duties but appeared shocked.
Continue reading...A 10% levy has been put in place, but the US leader has other economic ‘bazookas’ he can fire in his trade battle
Donald Trump did not carry through his threat to introduce 15% tariffs overnight.
However, he did impose 10% tariffs on imports into the US on Tuesday, and the threatened 15% may be the least of his trade partners’ worries.
Pharma and active ingredients.
Processed critical minerals.
Commercial aircraft and jet engines.
Polysilicone used in solar panels and semiconductors.
Drones.
Wind turbines.
Robots.
PPE and medical devices.
Continue reading...Robert Carradine, a member of a famed acting family, has died aged 71. He made his film debut alongside John Wayne in The Cowboys in 1972 and later became best known for his roles in Revenge of the Nerds and Lizzie McGuire
Continue reading...The traffic stops on a rural California base appeared routine – until immigration agents showed up. Experts and lawmakers say the incidents could violate US law
Francisco Galicia paced his cell at Fort Hunter Liggett, a vast army base 160 miles south of San Francisco, on a Friday evening in January. His mind raced with thoughts of his five daughters waiting for him at home.
Over several hours, immigration agents brought six more men into the frigid, cement-walled cell. As the men shared eerily similar stories of their arrests, Galicia realized they had all driven straight into a trap.
Continue reading...From brushes for those on a budget to the best high-end model, these are our favorite picks.
Commentary: Here's what Samsung needs to do to make its next Galaxy Ultra phone even better. We'll soon find out whether the company delivers at its next Galaxy Unpacked event.
A trusted associate of one of the cartel leader's romantic partners escorted the woman to Tapalpa, Jalisco, for a meeting with the drug lord, officials said.
The highest-ranking officials in Washington will be present for President Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night — here's what to know about where they're sitting.
Before she took her own life at 14, Molly Russell accessed thousands of harmful posts on Instagram and Pinterest. A new documentary recreates the inquest where her father was told the images were safe
Molly Russell was 14 when she took her own life in 2017 after months of viewing content relating to self-harm and suicide on social media. Nearly a decade later, her best friends from school, interviewed for this documentary, have grown into articulate, impressive women in their early 20s. Watching them, you can’t help but be struck all over again by the terrible tragedy of Molly’s death and the loss to her family, who will never see the young woman Molly would be now. Her father, Ian Russell, says life before Molly’s death was absolutely normal; in the years since, he has become a leading campaigner for better online protection for children.
On the night Molly died, Russell says, they sat down together as a family, in front of the TV. Molly’s last message to her friend Nieve was two laughing emojis. She had been feeling depressed, but no one suspected how bad it was. Nor were they aware of the content being fed to Molly by Instagram and Pinterest’s algorithms. In the months before her death she accessed thousands of harmful social media posts. One reads: “Dear me, I hate you. You’re weak. You deserve the pain. You’ll never be good enough. I hope you die.” At the inquest into Molly’s death, Meta’s head of health and wellbeing policy, Elizabeth Lagone, told the court the majority of posts Molly saw were “safe” for children. Nothing to see here.
Continue reading...The US president will deliver his State of the Union address this evening – here’s what you need to know
Donald Trump will deliver the State of the Union in Washington on Tuesday, his second major address to Congress this term and the last before the 2026 midterms. It’s also the first time Trump will be confronted with the supreme court justices since they ruled his tariffs illegal.
Historically, the State of the Union is an opportunity for the president to lay out their agenda and talk about key policy objectives. While it’s not officially a campaign event, it’s likely Trump will use the speech as an opportunity to tout his accomplishments.
Continue reading...U.S. envoy Charles Kushner will be denied access to French government ministers due to his lack of attendance after comments about the death of a far-right activist
More than 385,000 Ukrainian teenagers are enrolled in a defense course, expecting war, or threats, to go on for years. In Russia, children are learning the same skills.
Want to make your own app or create a dream project? It's all about the prompt.
Comedian denies one count of rape and one count of sexual assault related to two women
Russell Brand has pleaded not guilty to two further sexual offences, including rape.
The 50-year-old comedian was charged in December with one count of rape and one count of sexual assault in relation to two women. The two alleged offences took place in 2009.
Continue reading...President has not yet made a final decision on any strikes as the US prepares for ‘last-ditch’ negotiations on Thursday. Plus, most US adults feel the country is moving in the wrong direction
Good morning.
Donald Trump’s decision on whether to order airstrikes against Iran will depend partly on the judgment of Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner about whether Tehran is stalling over a deal to relinquish its nuclear capacity, according to people familiar with the matter.
What will happen if there’s no deal? Trump has told advisers he is considering limited strikes to put pressure on Iran and, failing that, a far larger attack to force regime change.
What has Iran said about how it might respond? Iran has vowed to retaliate as hard as possible against any US attack, and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said last week that he had the ability to sink a US warship.
What about the 15% tariff? The uplift to 15% announced by Trump on social media on Saturday has not yet been implemented – but could come at any time.
Want the latest business news? Follow along on our live blog.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
New Castle County residents have pushed back against large-scale development projects in recent years, with many complaining that the county’s land-use process is not transparent. Now, some council members want to give the neighbors earlier notice of development proposals.
It’s no secret that many New Castle County residents do not pay close attention to the goings on of their local government. Some may not even hear about a county land-use approval for a large development near their house until shovels are in the ground.
Now, three New Castle County Council members want to change how residents learn about land-use plans — just as increasingly controversial proposals for big commercial developments creep closer to isolated neighborhoods.
During a meeting on Tuesday, Councilmembers Brandon Toole, Dave Tackett and Dee Durham will introduce an ordinance that proposes to widen the circle of who gets advance notice when a developer first proposes a building project.
This move comes after the County Council faced citizen backlash in recent years to several large-scale building projects, such as the proposed data center near Delaware City and a massive warehousing complex near Middletown.
Under current rules, county officials must mail land-use meeting notices to all owners of property that sit within 300 feet of a new building project. In an email, Durham said she thinks that radius – which is about the length of a football field – is too small.
“That is simply not sufficient public notice about major projects being proposed,” she said.
The new ordinance would increase the radius to 1,000 feet. It would also require developers to update yellow notice signs posted at properties with the dates of upcoming hearings if the plan for the development changes.
Tackett said he hopes the ordinance will encourage more people to get involved with the public hearing process.
“The changes are really about transparency and accountability,” he said.
Though the ordinance will be introduced on Tuesday, the County Council won’t discuss it until the following week, or perhaps later, Durham said.
Three years ago, then-New Castle County Council President Karen Hartley-Nagle proposed a similar public notice ordinance amid the controversy surrounding a comprehensive rezoning of more than 80 different properties across New Castle County.
The rezoning plan at that time faced fierce pushback, largely from suburban residents who feared it would accommodate plans for distribution warehouses and other large developments.
Among those criticising the comprehensive rezoning plan then was Dale Swain, a local land-use activist. On Monday, he said the idea for the increased radius came as part of a larger conversation in the past surrounding how to better notify the public about developments.
“Not that you’re going to stop the development, but it would at least be nice to know about it,” Swain said.
Hartley-Nagle said the council did not pass her ordinance three years ago, partially because New Castle County staff said it would cost too much to send notices to more people. Her original proposal would have required residents to sign the mail to show they received it.
But, she said, it would be a worthy use of public funds because it would directly help people.
“We spend a lot of money for things [constituents] never see,” Hartley-Nagle said.
Tackett said New Castle County staff wrote the ordinance at his direction and did not raise any concerns about cost.
Swain said he and others residents have also discussed cheaper ways to notify residents of developments proposed nearby, such as emails or clearer posts on the county website.
The post Who should be alerted to new developments? NCCo to consider widening the circle of neighbors appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Sometimes, even when it’s wrong it’s right.
Drug Lord Killed: Or, one El Mencho down, who knows how many to go.
Video Break: Jack Hughes, because he can.
Iran and the Cosy Crypto Cache: What’s it like to have friends in high places.
It’s the Zombies: No, not the ‘60s band or the movie villains…
What I’m Watching: The latest by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Jukebox Playlist: The Harder They Come
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” —usually attributed to Mark Twain
This is not an actual quote from Mark Twain. It’s attributed to him only because it fits snugly into something he might’ve said. When I looked to see who actually said it, the answers were less than satisfying, so we’ll have to say “anonymous” for now. But there’s a reason the line, whoever’s it is, hits so hard. It’s not just about a person being tricked. Being tricked is the easy part. It’s about that uncomfortable sensation of realizing the ground you were standing on isn’t nearly as solid as you thought.
I’ve seen this play out in sports, in politics, in business, in everyday life. When I was younger, I thought being wrong meant something was wrong with me. That’s a heavy weight to carry. Most people feel the same way, even if they don’t say it out loud. And that’s scary and embarrassing as hell. So, instead of admitting we were misled, we double down. We defend the thing that fooled us because it feels safer than facing the shame of being wrong. Because being wrong begs the question: “What else have I been wrong about?” And that’s where the proverbial ground starts to shake.
But here’s the truth I learned over the years, especially during my time in the NBA and then later as a writer: being wrong is not a character flaw. Ignorance doesn’t equal stupidity. But staying wrong because you’re afraid to face the truth, is where the real damage happens. (And, frankly, it’s also where ignorance ends and stupidity begins.)
You see this everywhere today. Leaders promise simple fixes to complicated problems. Companies talk about “transparency” while hiding what really matters. Institutions tell us they’re protecting us, even when the results say otherwise. And when the truth finally comes out, people cling to the original story because it’s familiar and comfortable. It’s what they voted for, what they pledged allegiance to, what they were certain they learned, what they based their future on. It’s become a part of them, and suddenly the truth is suspect, even dangerous.
Admitting you were fooled means admitting you trusted the wrong person, or believed the wrong headline, or followed the wrong crowd. I try to remind myself that changing my mind is a sign of strength, not weakness. The world is full of people who will lie to protect their power, money and image. But the only person who can keep me stuck in a lie is me.
The real courage is in saying, “I didn’t know then what I know now.”
The real maturity is in choosing truth over pride.
The real freedom is in letting go of the story that fooled you and writing a better one.
Whoever came up with the supposed Mark Twain quote wasn’t warning us about con artists. It was, and is, a warning about ourselves, about how easy it is to hold onto the wrong thing just because it feels familiar. But every time we learn to face the truth, even when it stings, we become that much harder to fool the next time.
So, even if Mark Twain didn’t say it, or especially because he didn’t, let’s keep it in mind. And if we’ve been fooled, let’s admit it and move on.
The LG Evo AI G5 OLED has set a new standard for gaming and movie watching among premium TVs.
In Milan, athletes showed that patriotism can be generous. In Los Angeles, that definition will be tested on the biggest, loudest stage sport can offer
The Milano Cortina Winter Games ended on Sunday night as the Olympics always do: in light, spectacle and speeches about unity. In Verona, the Olympic flag passed to the French Alps and the twin flames were extinguished. But unofficially, at least, a flame also flickered 6,000 miles west.
If these Games felt political, just wait until Los Angeles a little more than two years from now.
Continue reading...Trump doesn’t deserve our attention. And we already know the state of the union – it sucks
I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.
I hope Neilsen (or whoever makes such estimates these days) will find that far fewer Americans watched Donald Trump’s State of the Union than have watched any other State of the Union in recent memory. It will drive Trump crazy.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now
Continue reading...These are the best TVs I’ve reviewed for every budget, including top brands, including LG, Samsung and TCL.
These are the kitchen scales that met our testing criteria.
Here's why we believe our rigorous, objective TV reviews are the best in the industry.
Some House Republicans have rebuked Mr. Trump on tariffs, war powers and the Epstein files, and defections could grow as the midterms approach.
Exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had fled to Italy translated Hebrew bible into their common language
In 1553, a community of exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had found refuge and patronage in the northern Italian city of Ferrara did something that would have been unthinkable, and very possibly fatal, in their former homelands.
They printed their own Hebrew bible in Spanish.
Continue reading...Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy marked the start of the fifth year of the Ukraine war by saying Russia has failed to achieve its goals — and the Kremlin agreed.
Add percussive therapy to your post-workout routine with our expert picks, including mini and deep-tissue models. Plus, a brand new frontrunner now in top spot
• The best running shoes, tested
Massage guns are often pitched at the highly active. They can help you warm up for workouts, accelerate recovery and generally keep things loose and injury-free. However, you don’t have to be training for an Ironman triathlon to benefit from a percussive pummelling. A good session can also alleviate the general soreness, stiffness and pain that comes from desk-bound days and the daily grind – all without having to cough up for a spell on a masseuse’s table or be handled by a stranger.
These personal-care power tools use rapid, repetitive pressure and vibrations to penetrate tired muscles, with a selection of heads, variable speeds and even automated routines to tailor treatments towards tight trouble spots. Dozens of massage guns are available from various brands, and you can spend anything from £50 to £500. But not all muscle massage guns are made equal.
Best massage gun overall:
Therabody Theragun Sense 2
Best budget massage gun:
Renpho Active Thermacool 2
Not enough support for freed victims, say aid agencies, with growing numbers sleeping on the streets, unable to travel home without passports or money
Charities and aid workers have called for urgent international government support for victims of south-east Asia’s deadly scam compounds, following a damning report by Amnesty International.
The numbers of survivors of cyberscam “farms” left destitute and abandoned on the city streets of Cambodia and Myanmar is an “international crisis”, according to the research published in January.
Continue reading...The so-called ‘pocket book’ sold in supermarkets is being phased out across the US, the latest sign of an ongoing shift in how people are choosing to read
Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,” she recalls. “The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.”
For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.
Continue reading...We explore the strange food-obsessed world of a new game whose tech was once called ‘an insult to life itself’ by Hayao Miyazaki, the film-maker behind Spirited Away
A strange piece of software has recently landed on the PC gaming store Steam. And “software” feels like the cleanest way to describe it. Existing somewhere between a full-blown life sim, a science project and a kind of haunted fish tank, Anlife: Motion-learning Life Evolution probably would have disappeared without making much impact if it wasn’t for one unusual factor. Several years ago some of its creators were absolutely roasted on camera by one of the genuine legends of Japanese animation.
Back in 2016, Hayao Miyazaki, the director of movies such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, was shown new technology that used AI in order to animate models. Faced with a zombie that utilised its head to move by knocking its skull against the ground and wriggling its body like a fish, Miyazaki declared what he had seen was “an insult to life itself”. It’s hard not to watch the clip without feeling slightly seared – but now, a decade later, the ashen-faced developers from that room have sufficiently recovered to make their work widely available.
Continue reading...The Texan made the mistake of his life when he ordered gummies to soothe symptoms of Crohn’s disease. Now his health is suffering in a foreign jail
Jarred Shaw is locked up in an Indonesian prison – but at least he isn’t facing execution, something that appeared a possibility less than a year ago.
The 35-year-old American was a key member of the Prawira Bandung team who won the Indonesian Basketball League (IBL) in 2023, the latest highlight in a fascinating professional career that had taken him to countries as varied as Tunisia, Lebanon, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia and Japan.
Continue reading...Daughter was ‘heartbroken’ after Michelle Hundley Smith requested her location not be disclosed to family she had walked away from
A North Carolina woman says she was simultaneously “ecstatic … pissed … [and] heartbroken” to learn authorities recently found her mother living safely and well – while also wanting her location kept secret – more than 24 years after she suddenly vanished from her family.
“I am all over the map!” Amanda Smith, the daughter of Michelle Hundley Smith, wrote in a lengthy statement on a social media page dedicated to searching for her mother. “Will I have a relationship once more with my mom? Honestly, I can’t answer that [because] I don’t even know.
Continue reading...Elected officials visited Trump properties 145 times since his inauguration, records show
Elected leaders from Israel to Iowa have visited Donald Trump’s various properties 145 times since his inauguration last year, according to a new report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a political watchdog group.
Trump’s luxury resorts have offered the chief executive an unusual political arena – and a source of profit. A Guardian analysis of campaign finance records found that US political campaigns and committees spent at least $1.3m at Trump properties since January 2025.
Continue reading...Documents might help scientists shed light on unexplained phenomena and government secrets, experts said.
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem. "We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project," Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. "We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Speech comes as midterms loom and opinion polls show more voters disapprove than approve of his performance
The last time Donald Trump delivered a State of the Union address, it produced the memorable optics of Nancy Pelosi ripping up his speech after he finished talking.
Pelosi’s theatrical gesture at the end of the February 2020 address (his 2025 speech was technically a joint session of Congress, not a State of the Union) eloquently expressed the Democrats’ contempt for Trump’s rosy description of the union he presided over, when he boasted of a booming economy and restoring US strength in characteristic Maga (make America great again) rhetoric.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
Measles is a highly contagious virus able to spread quickly among people. Though it has been considered “eliminated” in the U.S. since 2000, cases have been rising in recent years in states like South Carolina and Utah. A reported exposure at a Wilmington area children’s hospital could bring the virus to the First State.
Delaware’s principal pediatric facility, Nemours Children’s Health, reported a measles exposure in its emergency room last week, which could lead to the first case of the virus in the state in more than a decade. The state says it is still in the process of contact tracing and will notify those who may have been exposed.
There have not been any confirmed measles cases in Delaware since the exposure, a spokesperson for the state’s health department said, and the incident involved someone from out of state who sought care at the Wilmington-area hospital.
In a statement from Nemours, a spokesperson said that the hospital is following “all public health guidelines” surrounding the exposure at the hospital.
“We will continue to work with the Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Nemours Children’s Employee Health for appropriate follow-up for individuals in line with all public health guidelines,” the spokesperson said.
For those exposed, early symptoms of measles could include a fever, runny nose, cough and pink eye. After three to five days, a rash around the face could appear and spread down the body. In severe cases, measles could lead to brain inflammation, pneumonia or death.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), most measles deaths in 2024 were unvaccinated children younger than 5 years old. The WHO also said vaccination is the best way to prevent getting measles.
In 2000, the U.S. declared measles was eliminated. But last year, cases hit their highest level since that elimination declaration amid a wave of vaccine skepticism, according to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In South Carolina, where a measles outbreak has reached nearly 1,000 cases, officials have recommended that residents seek vaccination.
Last March, as the number of measles cases continued to rise across the country, state officials released information on how to protect children from contracting measles and information about vaccines. According to that release, Delaware had not experienced a case of measles in more than a decade.
A report from the News Journal in 1926 said the state had experienced 410 cases of measles since the start of that calendar year. That same report also said state officials weighed closing public schools as the cases started to rise.
Measles is highly contagious, and one person can infect multiple other people if those people aren’t vaccinated. Symptoms can take days, or even weeks, to show themselves, the state said.
If someone is exposed or begins showing symptoms, the state health department said they should call its Office of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. The state offers two phone numbers, one for business hours, as well as a 24-hour hotline:
The state recommends that people exposed to measles find a dose of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine within three days. According to a press release, these vaccines can be found at primary care clinics and pharmacies, and residents should notify their preferred providers to find out more.
Two of the nation’s top pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens, both offer the MMR vaccine. Patients can schedule appointments online:
Children ages 1 through 12 are eligible for the vaccine and usually receive two doses. The first dose is usually administered after a child’s first birthday and then again after a few years.
According to the state, those who receive the vaccine are protected for life if they receive both doses, though like all vaccines, the state says there is still a nominal chance someone could contract the virus if they are vaccinated.
The post Delaware reports measles exposure in Wilmington appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The buildup comes after a round of nuclear talks between the two nations concluded last week without a deal.
Traders appear to be hedging against worst-case scenario of a conflict between the two nations, analyst says
Oil prices have reached seven-month highs, as traders reacted to heightened tensions between the US and Iran ahead of nuclear talks this week.
US crude futures rose to $67.28 a barrel on Monday, while Brent crude touched its highest level since 31 July at $72.50 a barrel. Prices fell back late in the session, but were up again on Tuesday morning, approaching Monday’s highs.
Continue reading...Booking system freezes and screens crash amid rush of fans trying to secure tickets to 21 March free concert
Tickets for BTS’s comeback concert in central Seoul were snapped up almost immediately on Monday night, with authorities expecting an estimated 260,000 fans to descend for the K-pop group’s first full performance in nearly four years.
At one point, more than 100,000 people flooded the booking website when sales opened at 8pm for the free concert at Gwanghwamun square on 21 March, causing screens to crash and booking systems to freeze.
Continue reading...Grace Bell says she is ‘the happiest I’ve ever been in my life’ after giving birth to baby Hugo in UK first
A baby boy named Hugo is the first child to be born in the UK to a mother with a womb transplant from a dead donor.
Hugo Powell was delivered at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospital in London weighing 3.09kg (6lb 13oz), after his mother, Grace Bell, received a transplanted womb from someone who had died.
Continue reading...A record-setting snowstorm has prompted managers of The Boston Globe to postpone the printing of their daily newspaper for the first time in its 153 year history.
Detectives say tools supplied by Palantir were integral to convictions of a criminal gang that stole £800,000
It was fraud on a grand scale. The “Fuck the Police” criminal gang based in Luton and Romania stole £800,000 in more than 3,000 withdrawals from cash machines in dozens of locations throughout 2024.
The police investigation matched the crime in its complexity. When detectives in Bedfordshire seized the suspects’ two dozen smartphones, they were faced with a mountain of potential digital evidence – 1.4 terabytes of information, according to the authorities, connecting co-conspirators across eastern England and the Bacau region of Romania.
Continue reading...Exclusive: NCA’s Alex Murray says he hopes new £115m police AI centre can limit unfairness found in tools
A police chief has admitted artificial intelligence used to boost crime fighting will contain bias but pledged to combat the risks.
Labour wants a dramatic expansion of police use of AI within England and Wales, with police chiefs also believing it could help keep law enforcement up to date with new criminal threats.
Continue reading...U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GWh of commercial and industrial systems and 9 GWh of residential storage. Analysts expect the growth streak to continue. More than 600 GWh of energy storage is projected to be deployed nationwide by 2030, even as the Trump administration targets clean energy industries. Two-thirds of utility-scale storage installed in 2025 was built in red states, including nine of the top 15 states for new installations. Texas is projected to surpass California as the countryâ(TM)s largest battery storage market in 2026. Standalone battery projects accounted for nearly 30 GWh of new capacity in 2025, while solar-plus-storage installations made up about 20 GWh. Residential storage deployments reached 3.1 GWh last year, a 51% increase year-over-year. Analysts say virtual power plant programs in states such as Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois are helping drive adoption by reducing costs and easing strain during peak demand periods. The supply chain is shifting to support the boom. In 2025, some battery cell manufacturers pivoted production from EV batteries to dedicated stationary storage cells, converting existing lines and adjusting future plans. Lithium-ion cell manufacturing for stationary storage reached more than 21 GWh in 2025, enough to power Houston overnight, according to SEIAâ(TM)s Solar and Storage Supply Chain Dashboard. Meanwhile, US factories now have the capacity to manufacture 69.4 GWh of battery energy storage systems annually.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Longtime residents remember it as the motel where college freshmen Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson dumped their newborn baby in the trash in 1996, bringing national media attention to Newark.
How Tokyo is adjusting to a more dangerous world.
U.S. military strikes and the risk of a quagmire.
 | Opened my brand new onewheel pint, and it started making this weird sound. If this is a completely normal sound and I’m just freaking out over nothing please don’t make fun of me. I’m new to Onewheel. And I also rode about 8 miles on it. [link] [comments] |
The Supreme Court agreed to take up an effort by energy companies to end a lawsuit filed in state court that seeks billions of dollars in damages.
An image the FBI released of the suspect at Nancy Guthrie's front door, without a backpack, was captured by her Nest doorbell camera prior to the night of her abduction.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 24.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer (PDF) had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacenter. "You don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone, I'm satisfied," Huddleston, 82, later told the men. As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price. In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | I ride my XR Classic like I stole it and never hold back! It's competed in battle for the rail, raced in Seek and Shred, and was the mileage leader for over 1000 miles, and is still #14 on the mileage leaderboard. After all that, how do you think it aged? [link] [comments] |
In her first major interview as Microsoft's new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that "great games" must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has "no tolerance for bad AI." Stepping in after Phil Spencer's retirement, she's pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters a new era. Variety reports: Sharma was quick in laying out her top priorities for Microsoft Gaming in an internal memo announcing her promotion, noting "great games," "the return of Xbox" and the "future of play" as her three main commitments to the gaming community. So first, what makes a great game for Sharma, whose roles prior to CoreAI include top positions at Instacart and Meta? The new Microsoft Gaming CEO tells Variety it's all about games with "deep emotional resonance" and "a distinct point of view." She wants to develop stories that make players "feel something," like the kind of feelings Campo Santo's 2016 first-person mystery "Firewatch" elicited in her. Sharma takes on the mantle as head of the leading competitor to Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo knowing full well she's entering the role as an outsider to the larger gaming community and has "a lot to learn" still. But Sharma says she's got a commitment to "being grounded in what the community is telling us." "I'm coming into gaming as a platform builder," Sharma said, adding that her goal is to "earn the right to be trusted by players and developers" and show the fanbase that "consistency" over time. In her interview with Variety, Sharma acknowledged the tumultuous state of the gaming industry, referencing Matthew Ball's recent State of Video Gaming in 2026 report as evidence that the larger "transformation" of the sector is "protecting what we believe in while remaining open-minded about the future." Due to her strong background in AI, initial reactions to Sharma's appointment have raised concerns about what her specific views are on the use of generative AI in game development. Sharma says her stance is simple: she has "no tolerance for bad AI." "AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be," Sharma said, noting that gaming needs new "growth engines," but that "great stories are created by humans."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anna Kepner, 18, was on a Caribbean cruise with her father, stepmother and three stepsiblings when she was discovered dead on the Carnival Horizon in November.
Firm does not specify amount but seeks reimbursement after supreme court ruled against president last week
FedEx sued the US government on Monday, seeking a refund for the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump that were deemed illegal by the US supreme court last week.
The lawsuit marks the first attempt by a major company to receive reimbursement of their share of an estimated $175bn in levies after the highest court found Trump had overstepped his authority in issuing the tariffs. Other companies are expected to follow.
Continue reading...joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse pointer vanished while using the app. [...] Microsoft explained in a recent support document that the mouse pointer (and in some cases the cursor) will suddenly vanish as users move it across Outlook's interface. "When using classic Outlook, you may find that the mouse pointer or mouse cursor disappears as you move the pointer over the Outlook interface," it said. "Although the mouse pointer is not there, the email in the message list will change color as you hover over it. This issue has also been reported with OneNote and other Microsoft 365 apps to a lesser degree." Microsoft added that the Outlook team is investigating the issues and will provide updates as more information becomes available. While a timeline for a permanent fix is not yet available, Microsoft has offered three temporary workarounds that require affected users to click an email in the message list when the cursor disappears, which may cause it to reappear. Alternatively, switching to PowerPoint, clicking into an editable area, and then returning to Outlook may also restore the mouse pointer.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Newsom's remarks about his 960 SAT score went viral as he told Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and a packed auditorium: "I'm not trying to impress you, I'm just trying to impress upon you I'm like you, I'm not better than you."
Part 6 of the Delaware Civics 101 Series:
Understanding How Delaware Organizes, Spends, and Balances Its Money
When economic headwinds begin to blow, small states feel them quickly.
Delaware enters the 2026 budget cycle in a position that is both stable and delicate. The state maintains a AAA bond rating, fully funded reserve accounts, and a globally respected corporate legal system that drives significant revenue to the state’s budget. Yet beneath that stability lie slower economic growth, rising fixed costs, and intensifying pressure to fund competing priorities.
At the center of nearly every budget conversation is a structural reality: Delaware’s corporate franchise system generates roughly $1.8 billion to $2 billion annually, accounting for about 25% to 30% of the General Fund. Next to personal income taxes, it is the largest single funding pillar supporting education, healthcare, public safety and infrastructure.
Understanding the coming fiscal debate means understanding seven distinct headwinds — and how they interact.
Delaware’s operating budget has grown from about $2.1 billion in 2000 to roughly $6.5 billion in
FY2026 — an increase of nearly 210%.
In FY2026 alone, the operating budget rose about 7.3% year over year, exceeding the roughly 4% annual growth rate often considered sustainable over the long term.
Gov. Matt Meyer’s FY2027 proposal aims to slow that pace to around 5%, signaling a shift toward restraint. But maintaining discipline over multiple years will require careful prioritization.
When spending grows faster than recurring revenue, lawmakers face three options: slow growth, raise revenue, or risk structural imbalance. None are politically simple.
Delaware’s five-year GDP growth rate — approximately 1.9% — ranks near the bottom nationally. National forecasts suggest U.S. GDP growth could slow into the high-1% range in 2026.
Slow growth affects corporate profits, wage growth, consumer spending and investment — all of which influence state tax collections.
In a slower-growth environment, revenue gains flatten even as spending demands rise. For a state heavily dependent on corporate-related revenue, economic momentum matters greatly.
Like most states, Delaware faces steadily increasing obligations in healthcare programs, public education salaries, pensions and retiree benefits, and state employee compensation.
These fixed costs are difficult to reduce quickly and consume a growing share of available revenue.
If franchise-tax collections were to weaken during a period of slow economic growth, fiscal pressures would intensify rapidly.
If nearly a third of Delaware’s budget rests on franchise-related revenue, a natural question follows: Should the state broaden its base?
Recent efforts to restructure income-tax brackets — projected to raise about $15 million annually — stalled amid concerns about economic impact. The governor has proposed higher tobacco taxes, but even a significant increase would generate only a fraction of what franchise taxes provide.
The larger conversation is less about replacing the franchise system and more about reducing concentration risk.
Possible long-term strategies include modernizing the franchise framework for digital-era and emerging entities, strengthening Delaware’s role as a fintech and financial-services hub, expanding high-wage sectors such as biotech and advanced manufacturing, updating land-use and housing policies to attract employers and expand the personal income-tax base, and reviewing certain fees or consumption-based taxes that distribute revenue impact more broadly.
None of these represent quick fixes. They are structural growth strategies.
As DEFAC Chair Alan Levin has observed, “Almost a third of the budget comes from the corporate franchise, so if it changes markedly we’d have to go find that revenue somewhere else.”
That is not alarmism. It is arithmetic.
Diversification is not ideological. It is insurance.
Lawmakers face ongoing pressure to invest more in affordable housing, early childhood education, energy affordability, public education and infrastructure improvements.
At the same time, others call for fiscal caution.
One stabilizing factor is Delaware’s reserve structure. The Rainy Day Fund holds roughly $360 million, and the Budget Stabilization Fund adds nearly $470 million — together providing a cushion of roughly 12% of the operating budget, stronger than many neighboring states.
That cushion provides protection — but not permanent immunity from structural imbalance.
In recent years, Delaware has used surplus revenue and pay-as-you-go funding to reduce reliance on borrowing for infrastructure. That strategy has helped limit long-term debt.
But if recurring programs depend on temporary surpluses, structural gaps can appear when economic conditions tighten.
Understanding the difference between one-time money and recurring commitments remains critical to long-term fiscal stability.
Delaware’s corporate franchise system is not an accident. It is the product of more than 125 years of legal development and policy refinement.
The Delaware General Corporation Law, established in 1899, is widely viewed as the model corporate statute in the United States. More than a century of case law — developed primarily through the Court of Chancery — has created predictability valued by corporations nationwide.
Delaware’s Court of Chancery is staffed by non-elected judges with deep expertise in corporate and business law. Their specialization and consistency have made Delaware the most recognized business-law jurisdiction in the country.
That legal framework is reinforced by responsive state agencies, including the Secretary of State’s Office and the Division of Corporations, which are capable of processing filings within hours rather than days. The state also benefits from a deep bench of nationally recognized attorneys whose practices span corporate governance, alternative entities, bankruptcy, intellectual property, and complex commercial litigation.
The Corporate Law Council of the Delaware State Bar Association — made up of 30 practitioners — meets regularly to consider updates to the General Corporation Law. They present their proposals to the DSBA who then present them to the Delaware General Assembly. Any changes must ultimately pass the General Assembly by a two-thirds vote, preserving stability while allowing modernization.
Recent high-profile criticism prompted legislative adjustments designed to maintain confidence in the system. So far, incorporation activity remains steady, and revenue from alternative entities such as LLCs and LPs continues to broaden the base.
The franchise ecosystem also supports high-wage jobs — attorneys, finance professionals, technologists, paralegals, hospitality workers and many others.
But reliance carries responsibility.
If franchise revenue were to shift significantly, Delaware would need to replace it. That would be neither simple nor painless.
Delaware is not in crisis.
The state retains strong reserves, stable employment and a diversified professional economy. Revenue growth has moderated from the rapid pace of the early 2020s, but Delaware remains fiscally sound.
Stability, however, requires awareness.
Throughout this Civics 101 series, we’ve explored:
When citizens understand those mechanics, budget debates become grounded in shared facts.
If spending has grown faster than sustainable benchmarks, pacing matters.
If nearly a third of the General Fund comes from franchise-related revenue, protecting and diversifying that base matters.
If fixed costs are rising, prioritization matters.
None of those realities require fear.
They require prudence.
With a shared foundation of understanding, Delawareans are more likely to develop common-sense solutions, debate options constructively and resolve fiscal challenges responsibly.
The purpose of this Civics 101 series is not to predict crisis.
It is to encourage informed citizenship.
Because when Delawareans understand how the budget works — where our money comes from, how it is spent and how it is structured — we are better prepared to shape it.
And better prepared to plan wisely for Delaware’s future.
About the Civics 101 Series: Civics 101 is a continuing explanatory series by Delaware LIVE and the Spotlight Delaware content marketing team designed to help readers understand how state government works and how budget decisions affect everyday life in Delaware. To read other stories in the series, visit the Civics 101 home page.
The post Civics 101: To understand Delaware’s budget, you must also appreciate its challenges appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Internal investigators said at least two accounts allegedly saw $1.7bn move to Iranian-backed groups
Shortly after Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, last fall, company employees revealed the cryptocurrency exchange may have funded Iranian entities with billions of dollars, according to a report by the New York Times.
The discovery was made by a group of internal Binance investigators, who reportedly found that people in Iran had accessed more than 1,500 accounts on the crypto platform. Two of those accounts allegedly saw $1.7bn move to Iranian-backed groups that included Yemen’s Houthi militants throughout 2024 and 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading...So I was riding my one wheel with my dog and we had to go up on the sidewalk well, she just wanted to sniff some shrubs. Anyways, in low confidence I go up the curb and surprisingly it was easy and I stayed on but, my low confidence led me to sort of jump off because I had assumed I was about to fall. Anyways, I rolled my ankle pretty bad and just stood there for a minute and then ride home just a few houses away. It doesn’t hurt it just feel like it’ss throbbing but I know I’ll probably feel it for the next few days. As if last week I no longer have health insurance I guess I aged out if my parent’s plan so I can’t get it checked out. I mean I’ve gotten injured far worse than this and all I had to do was keep a splint on it and stay off it as much as I can so that’s what I’ll do. Think it’ll be good?
China has opposed the ‘smearing of its nuclear policy’ while insisting Beijing would not ‘engage in any nuclear arms race’
The US has accused China of dramatically expanding its nuclear arsenal, while doubling down on claims that Beijing had conducted secret nuclear tests.
Washington said the lapsing of New Start – the last treaty between top nuclear powers the US and Russia – earlier this month presented the possibility of striking a “better agreement” that included Beijing.
Continue reading...Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 24, No. 723.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 24, No. 519.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 24, No. 1,711.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 24 #989.
The U.S. women's ice hockey team said Monday they will not be attending President Trump's State of the Union address, citing scheduling conflicts.
 | Hello everybody! [link] [comments] |
On Sunday, in the wake of a military operation to kill one of the country’s most infamous drug traffickers, clashes broke out across the Mexico, leaving dozens dead and producing shocking images of roadblocks, armed men in the streets, and panicked civilians ducking for cover.
Within hours of the operation in which troops killed cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” in a rural hideout outside Guadalajara, gunmen loyal to his Jalisco New Generation Cartel group poured into the streets of several cities, burning buses and firing automatic weapons.
“The city was completely emptied,” said David Mora, an International Crisis Group analyst who happened to be in Guadalajara on Sunday, of the aftermath of the violence. “I mean it was a ghost town — there was no one on the streets yesterday.”
The fighting left at least 70 people dead, including 25 members of Mexico’s National Guard, which carried out the mission guided by intelligence from counterparts in U.S. military and law enforcement, according to President Claudia Sheinbaum.
“The country is at peace,” Sheinbaum said at her daily press conference Monday. “It’s calm.”
The spasm of violence came amid a heavy-handed pressure campaign by the Trump administration, which for the past year has explicitly blamed Sheinbaum’s government for allowing traffickers to flood the U.S. with fentanyl and other drugs. President Donald Trump has previously insinuated that the government of Mexico is captured by trafficking networks, and threatened unilateral military action to stop the flow of drugs.
“Going after a big fish like this was kind of an indication of the new framing of this government’s security strategy,” said Mora. “But it also has to do with the elephant in the room, which is the pressure that Donald Trump is putting on Mexico to deliver this.”
Despite an almost unprecedented willingness on the part of Sheinbaum to hand over high-profile narcos to stand trial in the U.S. — and Trump’s willingness to pardon convicted drug traffickers — Trump has given little indication of relenting. Even as top U.S. officials took a victory lap and the deadly cost of the operation was just beginning to become clear, Trump hardly seemed satisfied.
“Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!” he wrote Monday on his social media platform.
“Now the question now is: What are you going to do to reduce demand and consumption?”
In Mexico, however, the death toll, which is likely higher than what has so far been reported, and the chaos that was unleashed were a stark reminder of the heavy cost paid by Mexicans in a war on organized crime that is dictated in large part by pressure from Washington — even as the paramilitary groups in question are armed with guns and ammunition from the U.S. and fueled with money from drugs consumed by people north of the border.
“This is a breakthrough,” said Jesús Esquivel, a journalist with La Jornada and a longtime chronicler of the war on drugs. “But now the question now is: What are you going to do to reduce demand and consumption? What are you going to do to stop arms trafficking?”
In many ways, the violence that played out on Sunday was a familiar scene. On multiple occasions over the past decade, confrontations with high-profile drug traffickers have sparked bloody battles with heavily armed paramilitary groups, leaving numerous people dead and cities paralyzed.
Perhaps the most controversial incident of this scale came in 2019, when Mexican troops seized Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, only to release him following a siege of the city of Culiacán by gunmen loyal to Ovidio and his brothers.
In previous operations, Mexican troops and Marines have frequently operated in conjunction with “advisors” from the Drug Enforcement Administration and occasionally with the help of special operations forces and the CIA. Details are still emerging about how exactly the operation played out on Sunday, but it appears to have been carried out entirely by Mexican security forces.
“For the first time, I feel proud of the Mexican Army,” said Esquivel. “It’s a message to the U.S. government, and especially to Trump, that we may need your information, but we don’t need you to intervene unilaterally in our territory. We can take care of these guys.”
For others, the scenes that unfolded on Sunday had a grim sense of repetition. It has been almost 20 years since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels, a heavily militarized, U.S.-backed mission that has — despite endless arrests of high-level narcos — has done virtually nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. Instead, Mexico has faced decades of horrific violence, a widespread paramilitarization of drug gangs, and a fractured criminal landscape that has turned many areas of the country into low-intensity war zones fueled by weapons from the United States.
As the smoke clears in Jalisco, there are fears that a familiar pattern will repeat itself. In other areas in which a top trafficker was arrested or killed, it has become common for criminal groups to atomize into warring factions, according to Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist who studies organized crime in Mexico.
“This is a continuation of this militarized approach to organized crime,” said Jusionyte. “With the fracturing of these organized crime groups, there is more violence, but the structure remains intact — the drug demand in the U.S. and the gun supply from the U.S. remains, and in Mexico the impunity and the weakness of the justice system remain.”
The post Trump Demanded El Mencho’s Head. Mexicans Are Paying the Price. appeared first on The Intercept.
A 7,000-word "doomsday" thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, "painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work," reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are out. Worries of software-industry disruption don't go far enough. The "global intelligence crisis" is about to hit. The new, broader question: What if AI is so bullish for the economy that it is actually bearish? "For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input," Citrini wrote in a post it described as a scenario dated June 2028, not a prediction. "We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium." Many of Monday's moves roughly aligned with the situation outlined by Citrini, in which fast-advancing AI tools allow spending cuts across industries, sparking mass white-collar unemployment and in turn leading to financial contagion. Software firms DataDog, CrowdStrike and Zscaler each plunged more than 9%. International Business Machines' 13% decline was its worst one-day performance since 2000. American Express, KKR and Blackstone -- all name-checked by Citrini -- tumbled. That anxiety, coupled with renewed uncertainty about trade policy from Washington, weighed down major indexes Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average led declines, falling 1.7%, or 822 points. The S&P 500 shed 1%, while the Nasdaq composite retreated 1.1%. [...] Monday's market swings extended a run of AI-linked volatility. A small research outfit that has garnered a huge Substack following for macro and thematic stock research, Citrini said in its new post that software firms, payment processors and other companies formed "one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth" that AI is poised to disrupt. [...] Shares in DoorDash also veered 6.6% lower Monday after Citrini's Substack note called the delivery app a "poster child" for how new tools would upend companies that monetize interpersonal friction. In the research firm's scenario, AI agents would help both drivers and customers navigate food deliveries at much lower costs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FedEx sued the Trump administration over its tariffs on Monday, asking for a "full refund" of all payments it made to the government under a set of tariff policies that were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.
WBD board says it is assessing revised offer as Paramount seeks to trump agreed offer by Netflix
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has said it is reviewing a sweetened takeover bid from Paramount Skydance but did not reveal details of what its board had asked to be Paramount’s “best and final offer” to attempt to derail Netflix.
Last week, WBD, which has so far stuck to its binding agreement with Netflix, had given Paramount seven days to table its final offer to best the $82.7bn deal with the streaming company.
Continue reading...First amendment group criticizes Aileen Cannon’s order to permanently block release of Jack Smith report after dismissing case against Trump in 2024
Major institutions of higher education in the US are reckoning with the latest release of the Epstein files after discovering the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with board members, professors and administrators on campuses across the country.
In some cases, professors have been placed under review, research centers closed or conferences canceled. Students and staff have responded in different ways, including petitions, open letters and campus forums.
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling.
For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used.
Continue reading...Military planners are advising President Trump that any strike on Tehran's assets would almost certainly not be a singular, decisive blow.
Aileen Cannon denounces ‘brazen’ special counsel for compiling report after she had dismissed case in 2024
A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump permanently barred the justice department on Monday from releasing the former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the president’s mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club after his first term.
The ruling by US district judge Aileen Cannon marked the latest effort to stop the report from being sent to Congress or otherwise becoming publicly available.
Continue reading...The killing of El Mencho triggered violence across Mexico. In cities including Puerto Vallarta and Cancún, the U.S. warned citizens to shelter in place.
Dominic Ethan Stewart was among 19 killed when vehicle veered off road and plunged down mountainside
Tributes have been paid to a young British hiker who was among 19 people killed when a packed passenger bus veered off a treacherous stretch of road and plunged 200 metres down a steep mountainside in Nepal.
Twenty-five others were injured in the pre-dawn crash in the Himalayan foothills on Monday. The bus was carrying 44 people, including a number of tourists.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave's economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin -- a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar -- are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could be introduced in Gaza remain to be determined. But officials have discussed the idea as part of their plan for the future of the enclave, where economic activity collapsed during Israel's two-year war with Hamas and the traditional banking and payments system has been severely impaired. A person familiar with the project said the stablecoin was expected to be tied to the US dollar, with the hope that Gulf Arab and Palestinian companies with expertise in the field of digital currencies will help spearhead the effort. "This will not be a 'Gaza Coin' or a new Palestinian currency, but a means to allow Gazans to transact digitally," the person said. Work on the idea is being led by Liran Tancman, an Israeli tech entrepreneur and former reservist who is now working as an unpaid adviser to Trump's "Board of Peace," the US-led body tasked with rebuilding Gaza, according to two people familiar with the matter. [...] According to the person familiar with the project, the "Board of Peace" and NCAG will decide on the stablecoin's regulatory framework and access, although "nothing definitive" has yet been finalized. Speaking at a meeting of the "Board of Peace" in Washington last week, Tancman said the NCAG was working on building "a secure digital backbone, an open platform enabling e-payments, financial services, e-learning, and healthcare with user control over data", but did not elaborate.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Criminal barristers welcome justice secretary’s move to remove limit on hearing days at crown courts in England and Wales
A cap on court sitting days is to be lifted as the government seeks to ease the cases backlog, David Lammy has announced.
The justice secretary and deputy prime minister said every crown court in England and Wales would be funded to hear more cases in the next financial year.
Continue reading...Prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand say they would not object to his removal from royal succession line
A parliamentary inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein is a matter for MPs, Downing Street has said, as ministers faced a new push to uncover details about the former prince’s role as a trade envoy.
It comes as the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, wrote to Keir Starmer to say his country would have no objection to Mountbatten-Windsor being removed from the royal line of succession. Later, a spokesperson for New Zealand’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, said his country would also support the proposals.
Continue reading...Dr. Peter Attia has stepped down from his CBS News contributor role weeks after crude emails he exchanged with Jeffrey Epstein were made public.
As Iran's new academic year began over the weekend, large-scale protests erupted across several universities.
While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME’s insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them. On top of that, Libadwaita’s/GNOME’s CSDs can interfere with non-GNOME window managers and their functionality, causing a whole host of problems.
But what if you could turn CSDs off?
GTK-NoCSD is an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSD in GTK3/4, LibHandy, and LibAdwaita apps.
CSD is client side decoration, there is also server side decoration, SSD, both serving as the titlebar of windows. GTK3 adopted CSD, where this thick headerbar is used with application controls embedded.
This continued into the platform library, LibHandy, then into GTK4 and the platform library of that, LibAdwaita. This looks good on Gnome and makes these applications alike, but looks off everywhere else and can potentially break window managers and remove window manager provided functionality.This library restores the server side decoration, getting back the window manager titlebar, and moves the controls from the CSD to under it, into the window content.
↫ GTK-NoCSD’s Codeberg page
This isn’t the first attempt at such a solution, and certainly won’t be the last, and I’m glad they exist. Do note that if you decide to use this library, any problems or bugs you run into in an application ‘modified’ by it should never be reported to the application’s developer, but to the developer of this library. If you encounter a bug in an application modified by this library, test the application in its unmodified state to ensure it’s actually a bug in the application before reporting it to the application’s developer. Developers who choose to use client-side decorations are not responsible for bugs and issues arising from you removing the CSD.
Keep that in mind.
That being said, whatever pixels appear on your screen is entirely up to you as a user, and you have the right to theme, alter, butcher, or mangle whatever application is running on your computer. If you dislike the way CSDs look and feel on your computer, you can opt to resort to a solution like this one, and that’s entirely fair game. There’s packages for Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, and of course, you can build it yourself.
As for my personal opinion – well, let’s just say I prefer KDE for many, many reasons, and my disdain for CSDs is certainly one of them. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-touch, but I like the classic distinction between titlebar, menubar, and toolbar.
OpenAI has formed a multi-year "Frontier Alliance" with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterprise products. OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI's enterprise-focused technologies like OpenAI Frontier into customers' tech stacks. The company launched OpenAI Frontier in early February. The no-code open software allows users to build, deploy, and manage AI agents both built on OpenAI's AI models and beyond. OpenAI argues in its latest announcement that consultants are the right avenue to get enterprises on board. "AI alone does not drive transformation. It must be linked to strategy, built into redesigned processes, and adopted at scale with aligned incentives and culture to deliver sustained outcomes," BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer said in OpenAI's blog post. "Our expanded partnership combines OpenAI's Frontier platform with BCG's deep industry, functional, and tech expertise and BCG X's build-and-scale capabilities to drive measurable impact with safeguards from day one."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A memo shows Jeffrey Epstein was the subject of a previously undisclosed U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency investigation targeting him and 14 others for suspicious money transfers possibly linked to illegal narcotics.
When the most profound human emotion becomes an automated transaction in an online shop, the techlords have won
The Guardian reported on the arrival of “Fate” and, friends, I laughed. Or maybe I cried.
It’s apparently the first “agentic AI dating app”. An AI personality named “Fate” interviews users, runs data matches on their hopes and dreams, then suggests five potential matches based on the hard data of observable complementary language patterning, “No swiping involved!”.
Continue reading...Anthropic says three Chinese firms used ‘distillation’ technique to extract information from its Claude chatbot
US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. OpenAI leveled similar charges last month.
Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation” – using outputs from a more powerful AI system to rapidly boost the performance of a less capable one.
Continue reading...Company had suspended account of Tumbler Ridge shooter in June 2025 over ‘furtherance of violent activities’
Canada’s artificial intelligence minister says he has summoned representatives from the technology company OpenAI after the company declined to alert police after suspending the account of a user who became the perpetrator of one of the country’s worst-ever school shootings.
Evan Solomon says he is “deeply disturbed” by reports that the company, which operates the popular ChatGPT chatbot, suspended the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar over the “furtherance of violent activities” in June 2025 but did not reach out to Canadian law enforcement.
Continue reading...Feb. 23, 2026 — Begun as an exploratory software project at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory focusing on parallel numerical algorithms for partial differential equations, PETSc has evolved into one of the world’s most widely used software libraries for high-performance computing, with a core development team and numerous contributors. But with such a long history, a challenge has emerged: important knowledge is getting lost or buried.
“We’ll have developers thinking, ‘I’m sure we solved this problem back in 2015 — but where’s the solution?’” said Barry Smith, one of the original PETSc developers. “And sometimes developers get nuanced questions from users that the developers recall were discussed at length and could not be answered simply; but those discussions are buried in thousands of emails or GitLab issues or the like.”
PETSc has two types of knowledge. “Dry” knowledge is written down and can be read by computers; it includes official material that has undergone review and unofficial knowledge, such as emails, that has not been reviewed. In contrast, “wet” knowledge is unwritten and is not machine accessible. Both “wet” and “dry” knowledge bases are hard to search through — especially the “wet” kind — and even the written material is often unorganized or hard to find.
Now, new tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) could help change that.
Can AI Help PETSc?
One promising AI tool is the large language model, or LLM — like ChatGPT. LLMs are designed to understand and generate human language based on patterns learned from large amounts of text. That sounds perfect for making sense of PETSc’s vast information — from documentation to emails to user questions.
Types of knowledge in PETSc. Credit: Argonne.
But LLMs have a big drawback: they sometimes make things up — a problem known as “hallucination.” In science and high-performance computing, where accuracy is everything, that’s a serious issue.
Still, the PETSc team saw potential. So they decided to create a custom AI system — not just using LLMs off the shelf, but designing tools specifically built for PETSc.
“Our vision is to create PETSc AI assistants — kind of like virtual team members — that can help users ask questions, support developers and organize information more effectively,” said Lois McInnes, a senior scientist at Argonne and long-time PETSc developer.
Their first steps are outlined in a paper titled “AI Assistants to Enhance and Exploit the PETSc Knowledge Base.” In it, they describe six key areas where AI could help — from answering user questions to customizing user guides, checking code, exploring new research ideas and even helping manage team tasks.
Why Not Just Use ChatGPT?
The team considered using already available tools like ChatGPT, but such general LLMs aren’t trained specifically on PETSc. That means they often give incomplete or wrong answers about it.
“Mainstream AI tools just don’t have enough knowledge about PETSc,” said Junchao Zhang, another PETSc developer at Argonne. “So we built a special AI system that brings PETSc-specific information into the mix — which helps avoid those made-up answers.”
The PETSc team also designed a workflow that brings developers into the question-answer loop. Developers review the answer generated by the LLM and decide whether to approve, revise or discard it.
Finding and Reordering Relevant Information
Another method the team used is called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. When a user asks a question, the system first searches PETSc’s knowledge base for relevant information. That information is then added to the original question before being sent to the LLM, leading to a more accurate answer.
They also used a method called reranking, which improves how search results are ordered. Instead of just grabbing the fastest results, the system looks for the most relevant ones and puts those at the top.
“Using RAG and reranking together means our AI assistant can find better, more accurate answers,” Smith said.
In the future, the PETSc team hopes their AI assistants will work alongside real developers — helping speed up work, support users, and even spark new scientific discoveries.
For further information, see the full paper “AI Assistants to Enhance and Exploit the PETSc Knowledge Base,” by Barry Smith, Junchao Zhang, Hong Zhang, Lois Curfman McInnes, Murat Keceli, Archit Vasan, Satish Balay, Toby Isaac, Le Chen, and Venkatram Vishwanath; available here.
Source: Gail Pieper, Argonne National Laboratory
The post Argonne: Using AI to Unlock 30 Years of PETSc Knowledge appeared first on HPCwire.
Einstein is a new AI tool that can watch lecture videos, read essays, write papers, complete quizzes and basically take your class for you.
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Feb. 23, 2026 — The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), today announced the launch of a cloud service providing access to Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) developed by TII’s Quantum Computing Hardware Lab. Initially available to TII partners, the service enables users to run quantum workloads directly on TII’s physical quantum hardware in the cloud.
Established four years ago, the Quantum Research Center’s Quantum Computing Hardware Lab has advanced from foundational capability-building to delivering cloud-accessible quantum systems based on superconducting devices. The lab currently operates multiple QPU systems ranging from 5 to 25 qubits, including in-house fabricated chips that demonstrate quantum coherence times up to ten times longer than TII’s first-generation prototypes. These advances reflect growing in-house expertise across quantum design, fabrication, and system-level integration.
The launch is the result of a coordinated effort between the Quantum Computing Hardware Lab and TII’s Quantum Middleware team, with Qibo serving as the software layer for job submission and execution workflows. Qibo is TII’s open-source quantum software framework that enables users to build quantum circuits and hybrid quantum-classical workflows, and to execute them seamlessly across simulators and QPU backends through a unified interface.
Dr. Leandro Aolita, Chief Researcher of TII’s Quantum Research Centre, said: “Launching a cloud-accessible QPU service only four years after establishing the lab demonstrates both the pace and ambition of our quantum program. Until now, this infrastructure has been used internally by TII’s Quantum Algorithms team to develop, validate, and benchmark quantum workflows. With today’s launch, we are extending that same cloud-based access model to our partners, providing a practical platform to accelerate experimentation and hybrid quantum-classical development on locally developed infrastructure.”
The service will continue to expand over time, with additional capabilities, system upgrades, and partner access pathways introduced as the quantum ecosystem matures.
By enabling cloud-based access to its physical quantum hardware, TII is advancing applied quantum research and hybrid quantum–classical experimentation on locally developed systems. To learn more, visit: https://q-cloud.tii.ae.
Source: TII
The post TII Launches Cloud Service Providing Access to In-House Quantum Processing Units appeared first on HPCwire.
US president suggests trade war could escalate as administration says it will stop collecting levies ruled illegal by supreme court
Donald Trump has declared that he can use tariffs in a “much more powerful and obnoxious way”, as the UK and the EU said they were seeking urgent clarity on the US trade deals they struck last summer.
Trump threatened to escalate his global tariff war on Monday, after a supreme court ruling last week that he had overstepped his legal authority to impose his “liberation day” measures last year.
Continue reading...Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be "a top three global provider of the Android TV platform." In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands by sales revenue in Q1 2025; however, Skyworth hasn't been able to maintain that position regularly. Panasonic made its announcement at a "launch event," FlatpanelsHD reported today. During the event, a Panasonic representative reportedly said: "Under the agreement the new partner will lead sales, marketing, and logistics across the region, while Panasonic provide expertise and quality assurance to uphold its renowned audiovisual standards with full joint development on top-end OLED models." Panasonic also said that it will provide support "for all Panasonic TVs sold up to March 2026 and all those available from April." Skyworth-made Panasonic TVs will be sold in the US and Europe. In the latter geography, the companies are aiming for double-digit market share. [...] The news means there's virtually no TV production happening in Japan anymore, as other Japanese companies, like Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Pioneer, have already exited TV production. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it was ceding control of its TV hardware business to TCL.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Blizzard warnings issued as some areas receive two feet of snow, creating whiteout conditions
Millions of people in the north-eastern US were stuck at home on Monday as heavy snow and strong winds created whiteout conditions, grounding flights in the area and leaving hundreds of thousands without power.
Snowfall totals in 21 cities and towns across New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts had reached at least 2ft, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). In some areas, that snow has been accompanied by strong wind gusts of over 30mph (48km/h) and low visibility.
Continue reading...The British company gives a sneak preview of its new phone ahead of its March 5 launch.
The researchers say the data could be retrieved from the glass in 10,000 years.
Designer Daniel Lee’s trenchcoats and bomber jackets fizz with urban energy in collection that embraces bad weather
In a winter of record-breaking rain, Burberry – purveyor of the stalwart British coat – is back in the zeitgeist. A season of downpours has provided an apt backdrop for a return to form, as the brand re-entered the FTSE 100 last autumn after an ignominious year out of the charts.
The classic check scarf was ranked the fourth hottest fashion item in the last quarter of 2025 on the search, sales and social media metrics of the Lyst index, with overall demand for the brand up 239% year on year.
Continue reading...Stocks slumped amid investor fear of AI disruption and uncertainty surrounding President Trump's new tariffs.
We’ve seen a significant metamorphosis occur in AI in the past year, thanks to the emergence of large, capable Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, such as DeepSeek-R1 (which is also a reasoning model). With momentum behind MoEs and reasoning models building, Nvidia is looking to boost their performance on scale-up systems connected with NVLink.
The core architectural concept behind MoE is not new. Indeed, Geoffrey Hinton was describing MoEs four decades ago. But it wasn’t until DeepSeek-R1 landed on the scene in early 2025 that the world was exposed to an MoE model that really worked. The timing couldn’t have been better, as large language models (LLMs) were pressing up against scaling laws that blocked progress.
The problem is, as AI models got bigger and smarter, they also got slower. Instead of trying to cram more parameters into a neural network, AI researchers decided to mimic the human brain (again) and create partitions of the neural network that were dedicated to certain topics.
“They realized, just like a human brain, we probably don’t need all of these neurons to ask every question,” Ian Buck, VP and general manager of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia, said in a recent podcast. “Simple questions, probably just a few neurons [are needed]. Different parts of the brain may encode different information. Let’s just activate those.”
This partitioning functions as a compression mechanism for AI models. While an entire model may be composed of 100 billion parameters, with any given question posed to an MoE model, only about 10 billion parameters will be used, which translates to a 10 to one compression. That means fewer tokens and lower cost to the user, Buck said.
“That’s a way of making AI cheaper but still being able to encode all the possible information and answer all the questions,” Buck said. “So [MoE] are allowing models to get bigger, smarter, it’s going to get cheaper and as a result advancing AI.”
According to Buck, the approach that DeepSeek took with R1 couldn’t have been done without a breakthrough at the network level via NVLink, Nvidia’s proprietary scale-up interconnect, which allows up to 72 Nvidia GPUs to function as a single GPU.
“The [DeepSeek] model was so large it couldn’t really fit on a single GPU. It had to use multi-GPUs,” Buck said in the podcast. “Before we had NVlink, you would have to send things over a PCIe bus and only one could talk at a time. And it was much slower. Because we have NVLink, all those GPUs can talk to every other GPU at full speed. It’s a totally unblocked, literally at gigabytes and terabytes per second of bandwidth without any concern for collision.”
DeepSeek was trained on Hopper GPUs, and cost about $1 for a million tokens, Buck said. Now the cost is down to about $.10 for a million tokens. The cost per token continues to go down as Nvidia innovates at the processor and network level, and AI software developers take advantage of the new hardware capabilities.
Ian Buck, VP and general manager of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia
“Being able to further parallelize and run all those experts across, it could actually increase the performance so much that we actually got a 15x improvement on running DeepSeek-R1 versus only adding about 50% more total cost of on a per GPU basis,” Buck said. “That actually generated a 10x reduction in the cost per token.”
Buck recalled when Nvidia was building “little basic graphics cards” that plugged into the PCIe bus and delivered a boost in floating point calculation. Over time, Nvidia built bigger GPUs, added high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and then created NVLink when it exceeded the capabilities of PCIe. With today’s advances in AI, researchers needed not just incremental improvements, but 10x improvements. Nvidia is giving AI reseaerchers what they need with massive NVL72 systems, fast NVLink interconnects, heaps of on-chip HBM, and Blackwell and (soon) Rubin GPUs that deliver exaflops of AI performance.
“People look at this and say it’s expensive, right?” Buck said. “But the way you do that is actually you put all that investment in NVLink, in all the connectivity and all the next generation software…to make it all work really well. And generation over generation, you get that multiple that 10x multiple production cost.”
MoE models today dominate the AI landscape. The majority of the top models today are MoE models, and that trend doesn’t appear to be likely to change any time soon. The U.S. DOE Genesis Mission is looking to MoE powered by HPC to help drive innovation in science and engineering, and other governments are doing the same. As the hardware limits are reached and progress slows, human innovation helps to find ways over, under, or around it to keep the innovation moving.
Nvidia certainly is a sync for much of this innovation. “We’re looking to figure out what technologies can we incorporate, expand, double down on, invest in, pull from the community or pull from our partners in order to deliver X factors of performance improvement,” Buck said.
Nvidia formally announced NVLInk 6 and Rubin GPUs earlier this year. Next month at the GTC 2026 conference, we’re likely to hear more how Nvidia intends to lean on “extreme co-design” to keep innovation moving forward for MoE, reasoning models, and the future of AI for science.
“There’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship that happens in the market between the AI hardware and the models that are being created to serve AI,” Buck said. “We’re starting to see some models come out that are trained on Blackwell and you’re going to see that now raise the bar and go even further. So this is the virtuous cycle that we’ve been working so fervently to help make happen.”
You can watch all of Nvidia’s podcasts here.
The post Why NVLink Is Nvidia’s Secret Sauce Driving a 10x Performance Boost in MoEs appeared first on HPCwire.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips. "It's not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," Michael Purvis, ASML's lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview. "It's a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer," he added, speaking at the company's California facilities near San Diego. [...] With the technological advance revealed on Monday, which is being reported here for the first time, ASML aims to outdistance any would-be rivals by improving the most technologically challenging aspect of the machines. This is the quest to generate EUV light with the right power and properties to turn out chips at high volume. The company's researchers have found a way to boost the power of the EUV light source to 1,000 watts from 600 watts now. The chief advantage is that greater power translates into the ability to make more chips every hour, helping to lower the cost of each. Chips are printed similar to a photograph, where the EUV light is shone on a silicon wafer coated with special chemicals called a photoresist. With a more powerful EUV light source, chip factories need shorter exposure times. "We'd like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost," Teun van Gogh, executive vice president for the NXE line of EUV machines at ASML, told Reuters. Van Gogh said customers should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour on each machine by the end of the decade, up from 220 now. Depending on the size of a chip, each wafer can hold anywhere from scores to thousands of the devices. ASML got the power boost by doubling down on an approach that already places its machines among the most complex inventions of humans. To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light, to be collected by precision optic equipment supplied by Germany's Carl Zeiss AG and fed into the machine to print chips. The key advancements in Monday's disclosure involved doubling the number of tin drops to about 100,000 every second, and shaping them into plasma using two smaller laser bursts, as opposed to today's machines that use a single shaping burst. [...] ASML believes the techniques it used to hit 1,000 watts will unlock continued advances in the future, Purvis said, adding, "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The incident follows a controversy last year when officials temporarily downgraded the hate symbol to “potentially divisive” in the service’s workplace harassment manual.
Every OpenBSD admin has booted
bsd.rdat least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns outbsd.rdis a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything.That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll go from the raw gzip file all the way down to the miniroot filesystem, exploring each layer with standard tools. Everything is documented in the man pages — we’re just following the trail.
↫ Wesley Mouedine Assaby
What am I supposed to add here?
Newarkers awoke to a winter wonderland Monday morning, but the snowstorm fell well short of what forecasters had predicted.
Court turns aside GOP request to block new map, second setback in recent days for state’s Republicans
New Utah voting districts that give Democrats an improved shot at winning a US House seat can be used in this year’s election, a federal court ruled Monday while turning aside a Republican request to block the new map.
The ruling marked the second setback in recent days for Republicans, who also lost an appeal at Utah’s state supreme court.
Continue reading...40-something fighters will meet in Las Vegas
Mayweather won previous encounter in 2015
Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao will face each other on 19 September in Las Vegas in a rematch of one of the biggest fights in boxing history.
Their first fight, in 2015, was generally seen as a tame affair with both fighters past their peaks. September’s bout, which will be streamed live on Netflix, is likely to be of an even lower quality. Mayweather and Pacquiao will be 49 and 47 respectively when they fight. Mayweather’s last professional fight, which preserved his unbeaten record, came in 2017, although that was a glorified exhibition against UFC star Conor McGregor. Pacquiao fought for the WBC welterweight championship last year, but is far from the force he was in his prime.
Continue reading...Two skiers died Friday in separate incidents at Lake Tahoe's Heavenly Mountain Resort, marking the latest in a series of ski-related deaths in the region this month.
President Donald Trump has cited dramatic results from U.S. strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, saying they’ve nearly stopped the flow of drugs trafficked to the U.S. by water.
Since September 2025, the U.S. has struck at least 40 alleged drug vessels, killing 149 people.
"With our action in the Gulf of America, that sounds so nice when I hear the Gulf of America, drugs entering our country by sea are down 97%," Trump said at a Jan. 29 White House event. "So when you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat." We’ve rated the statement about 25,000 deaths Pants on Fire.
Even though Trump mentioned the Gulf of America, his comments appeared to reference the Caribbean and Pacific strikes.
When asked for evidence about the 97% claim, the White House pointed us to Customs and Border Protection statistics from July 2025 to November 2025. Those numbers show a 98% drop in the pounds of drugs seized by CBP air and marine operations.
But drug seizures tell us only how many drugs are stopped from entering the U.S. There isn’t data to show how many drugs are being sent to the U.S. or how many are making it in. Drug experts also say changes in drug seizure data aren’t sufficient to make definitive statements about policy outcomes.
"No one knows how much doesn't get caught, so no one can cite a precise percentage change," Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher, said. "Trump is making a claim about something that is unknowable."
The White House didn’t explain why it chose those months. There has been a drop in CBP drug seizures since September 2025 when the vessel strikes began, but the percentage drop fluctuates depending on the months compared.
Additionally, the Coast Guard — not CBP — oversees most drug seizures on water, especially in international waters, an agency spokesperson told PolitiFact. Its data shows a spike in annual cocaine seizures — 200% in fiscal year 2025 compared with its yearly average. (The Coast Guard generally focuses on cocaine seizures, while CBP’s 98% decline is mainly related to marijuana.)
While the White House cites a drop in CBP drug seizures as a success, the Coast Guard cites an increase in seizures as a sign of strong enforcement.
This image from video provided by U.S. South Command, shows a vessel accused of trafficking drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean shortly before it was destroyed by the U.S. military, killing two and injuring one, Jan. 23, 2026. (U.S. Southern Command via AP)
The White House’s calculation starts in July 2025, which was an outlier with an uncharacteristically high number of marijuana seizures. In July, CBP seized 224,000 pounds of drugs, including 203,000 pounds of marijuana. CBP seizes about 20,000 pounds of all types of drugs in a month.
From August 2025, the last month before the vessel strikes began, to January, the latest available data, CBP drug seizures dropped 79%.
For the Coast Guard, drug seizures are up.
In the 2025 fiscal year which ended in September, the Coast Guard seized 510,000 pounds of cocaine, a 200% increase from a typical fiscal year when the Coast Guard seizes about 167,000 pounds of cocaine.
In August 2025, the Coast Guard launched an operation to target cartels and criminal organizations. From August 2025 to February 2026, the Coast Guard seized 200,000 pounds of cocaine more than it seizes in a typical year, according to agency press releases.
The Coast Guard has hailed the increase in seizures as a success in "preventing the flow of dangerous drugs into American communities."
Regardless of the data point, it’s unknown how many drugs enter the U.S. each year. Drug seizures show only how many pounds of a drug were stopped from getting into the U.S.
"It's a black market. And so by definition, we do not have good market data," Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy program director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit that researches global crises.
The decrease in CBP seizures could point to less enforcement or fewer drugs moving on a specific route, Dickinson said. "There's really not a good way to understand that data," she said.
Dickinson said the Trump administration’s drug enforcement efforts, such as the vessel strikes, have "scared some traffickers away from using specific routes."
Rather than stop trafficking, they might have rerouted.
"Drug trafficking is a very old and mature business, in many ways, these organizations have been in a cat and mouse game with law enforcement, not just for years, but really for decades," Dickinson said. They "are expert at reconfiguring routes, finding new ways to ship things, and innovating in a way to avoid enforcement."
Trump said, after U.S. vessel strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, "drugs entering our country by sea are down 97%."
The administration hasn’t provided any evidence that the vessels it has struck were carrying drugs.
There has been a drop in CBP drug seizures since the strikes began. But the Coast Guard — not CBP — oversees most drug seizures on water, especially in international waters. And that agency has seen a steep increase in drug seizures.
The White House cites a drop in CBP drug seizures as a success at the same time the Coast Guard cites an increase in drug interdictions as a success, too.
However, neither an increase nor a decrease in drug seizures shows how many drugs are entering the U.S. That number is unknowable, according to drug experts. Drug seizures tell us only how many drugs are stopped from entering the U.S.
Trump’s statement is unsubstantiated. We rate it False.
Controversial doctor steps down as contributor after Epstein files reveal communication between the two men
Controversial longevity expert Dr Peter Attia has resigned from his post as a CBS News contributor after correspondence between Attia and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was made public.
The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news of Attia’s departure.
Continue reading...IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and runs on the kind of mainframe systems IBM has sold for generations. Anthropic said the shrinking pool of developers who understand COBOL had long made modernization cost-prohibitive, and that AI could now flip that equation by mapping dependencies and documenting workflows across thousands of lines of legacy code. The sell-off deepened a rough 2026 for IBM, whose shares are now down more than 22% year to date.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exclusive: Trump’s decision will be driven by envoys’ judgment on whether Iran is stalling on a nuclear deal
Donald Trump’s decision to order airstrikes against Iran will hinge in part on the judgment of Trump’s special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, about whether Tehran is stalling over a deal to relinquish its capacity to produce nuclear weapons, according to people familiar with the matter.
The president has not made a final determination on any strikes, as the administration prepares for Iran to send its latest proposal this week, ahead of what officials have described as a last-ditch round of negotiations scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.
Continue reading...The University’s Newark campus will return to standard operations and in-person instruction for Tuesday
Killing of Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader sparks wave of violence across western Mexico
Mexican authorities tracked down and killed “El Mencho”, one of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, by following a romantic partner to his safe house near a picturesque mountain town, the country’s defence secretary has revealed.
In a press conference, officials provided the first details about the operation that led to the death of the leader of Mexico’s most powerful organised crime group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).
Continue reading...More than 40 million people were under blizzard warnings along 700 miles of the East Coast from Maryland to Maine.
Documents given to Congress appear to show courses involving use-of-force were eliminated from ICE officer training.
Nick Reiner, 32, was charged with two counts of murder in the killing of his parents, Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has said that a lack of munitions and allied support could mean greater danger for U.S. troops, people familiar with the talks say.
British police arrested Peter Mandelson on suspicion of misconduct in office, just days after the detention of former prince Andrew.
As the drama shows, private firms no longer able to pollute the coast of England of Wales just switched to rivers instead
There is a moment in Channel 4’s drama Dirty Business when Julie Maughan holds the body of her dead child and lets out an anguished cry. It is as brutal as it is compelling.
Her eight-year-old daughter Heather had just died in hospital, two weeks after playing in the sea on the beach at Dawlish Warren in Devon, where she contracted E coli O157, a bug which comes from raw sewage. She became ill with diarrhoea and blood loss. Transferred to Bristol children’s hospital, her parents agreed to switch off her life-support machine after she suffered kidney failure and brain damage.
Continue reading...See if you qualify for one of these student-focused discounts.
The Mexican military killed Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, Mexico’s most wanted cartel boss, during an operation aided by U.S. intelligence information in Tapalpa, a town within the Mexican state of Jalisco.
Violence spread after Oseguera Cervantes’ Feb. 22 killing, with suspected gang members torching buses and businesses while clashing with the authorities in multiple Mexican cities, including Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco.
Images of Puerto Vallarta in flames have been widely reported, but one photo shared online is not real.
A Feb. 22 TikTok post said it shows an image of Puerto Vallarta with scattered buildings on fire.
"This is not a scene from a movie, this is the city of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco in Mexico. Look at all these fires going around the city," says the man in the TikTok video. "Well, what’s happening is they’re saying that they took down the leader of El Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, AKA El Mencho… and all his people are going around all the city and just burning cars, shooting random people, fighting against the police."
Instagram and X users also shared the same image with English and Spanish captions claiming to show the unrest in Puerto Vallarta.
(Screenshot of the Instagram post.)
But that was generated with artificial intelligence.
The image shows the logo of Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, at the bottom right corner.
PolitiFact uploaded the image to Gemini and it confirmed the image was generated using its generative AI program.
Visual inconsistencies signal the image is fake. Some of the cars on the streets are indistinguishable, while others look on top of each other. Some of the buildings look distorted and the smoke and the fire have unusual patterns. For example, the fire is bright orange and it sits on top of the buildings without consuming the structure, and the smoke seems to be going up in the same direction without being disrupted by the wind.
(Screenshot of AI-generated image highlighting with red circles visual inconsistencies. At the bottom right is the Google Gemini logo.)
This image doesn’t show Puerto Vallarta after the killing of Oseguera Cervantes. We rate this claim False.
The Trump administration is unlikely to back down from pursuing additional tariffs following the Supreme Court decision, according to trade experts.
Epstein links have taken political operator from a vaunted position in British diplomacy to arrest in under six months
Just six months ago Peter Mandelson seemed unassailable as the UK’s ambassador to the US, one of the most vaunted positions in British diplomacy. As our man in Washington, Mandelson appeared to have used his skill for schmoozing, learned over years as a cabinet minister and a European commissioner, to secure a good relationship with the tricky Trump administration. He was considered instrumental in securing a relatively favourable US trade deal for the UK.
He was also an influential voice in Labour politics with the ear of the prime minister and his inner circle, notably his friend and protege Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s then chief of staff.
Continue reading...Round 1 stage 2 of the Critical Technologies Challenge Program will fund cutting-edge projects including mine site sensors, data center cooling and optical imaging projects.
Feb. 23, 2026 — The Australian Government has announced it will fund 8 projects through round 1 stage 2 of the Critical Technologies Challenge Program (CTCP).
Credit: Shutterstock
CTCP provides up to $36 million in grant funding to test and demonstrate solutions to market-led challenges of national significance using quantum technologies.
It works in 2 stages:
Eight of the round 1 stage 1 projects are progressing for stage 2 funding. They include:
The CTCP aligns with Australia’s National Quantum Strategy. The strategy aims to foster a vibrant and resilient innovation ecosystem that can harness emerging technologies for the benefit of all Australians.
The CTCP also aligns with the Future Made in Australia plan by backing Australian-led projects that deliver innovations in science and digital capability. By nurturing quantum capabilities, the program strengthens Australia’s high‑tech manufacturing base.
Read more details about the CTCP round 1 projects here. View the full funding details on business.gov.au.
Source: Australian Government, Department of Industry, Science and Resources
The post Australian Government to Support Quantum Tech Projects with $12.7M appeared first on HPCwire.
ExpressVPN is also expanding its reach to virtual reality through support for the Meta Quest platform.
 | Badgering(waterproofing) my board does not work great for me as I like to swap parts between all my boards and occasionally take them apart for cleaning. I also do not want to worry about my board breaking on me just because I rode through some wet conditions or puddles. Ive had my fair share of water related issues on my boards. So I wanted a middle ground of water proofing my boards enough to still take them apart with ease and waterproof them again. For my connectors this self bonding waterproof tape does the trick. Easy to wrap around your connectors when assembling, soft enough to cut off when disassembling, and keeps my connectors dry! Just stretch and wrap around 2/3 times and you’re set. If you guys have any other easy preventative maintenance tips please share! [link] [comments] |
Sinners film-maker’s much-anticipated relaunch of the paranormal hit show finally receives official green light
Ryan Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files has received the official green light with Danielle Deadwyler set as the first co-lead.
The film-maker behind Black Panther and Sinners has long talked about his love for the hit paranormal drama series and how he wants to make some new episodes that are “really fucking scary”.
Continue reading...Study released a day before State of the Union address shows president has lost support among Republicans
Most US adults think Donald Trump is moving the country in the wrong direction during his second presidency, according to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released the day before his State of the Union speech.
Fifty-five percent of adults feel that Trump is changing the country for the worse, a 13-point increase from around the same time of his first presidency, the survey conducted from 27 to 30 January found.
Continue reading...Other nations are catching up with the US in its traditional strengths such as snowboarding. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Americans
In 2002, on home ice and snow in Utah, the USA obliterated its records for most gold medals (10, beating the previous high of six) and most overall medals (34, more than two times the previous high of 13) by the country in a single Winter Olympics.
In 2026, the USA broke that national record for gold medals with 12, and broke the 30-medal mark for the first time outside North America (Norway broke the overall record with 18 golds).
Continue reading...It is the third such attack in a week, and is part of increased US forces in the Caribbean
The US military launched a strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean, which killed three men – its third such attack over the course of a week.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” US Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, said on X.
Continue reading...NotebookLM can transform information in surprising ways, and that's why we love it.
Trump tells Mexico to ‘step up’ effort to combat cartels even after military operation kills drug lord known as ‘El Mencho’
With schools still closed, flights cancelled and the charred carcasses of buses smouldering on streets across the country, Mexico was still reeling from the cartel backlash prompted by the killing of cartel kingpin Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, also known as “El Mencho”.
Defense minister, Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, was moved almost to tears on Monday as he offered his condolences to the families of soldiers felled in the operation to kill the country’s most-wanted drug lord. Mexican military personnel, he said, “fulfilled their mission”.
Continue reading...These are the best soundbars to upgrade your TV audio for better intelligibility.
 | I’ve put 2,966 miles on my XR Classic over the past few years — street riding, trails, drops, curb nudges, pretty much everything — and I finally made a long-term review about what actually happens after that much mileage. Not a hype video. Just real ownership experience. Some honest takeaways: I know a lot of people are still picking these up used, so I figured real high-mileage feedback might help someone. Curious — anyone else here over 2k miles on an XRC? What started wearing out first for you? [link] [comments] |
I’ve been interested in a one wheel for a long time and lately have seen many crash results on this sub full of comments about spin injuries, broken bones, and other rough injuries.
I began wondering, are there riders that don’t crash?
Can you just float and keep the wheel in its happy place? Are there rules to follow like:
Never ride below 30%
Never go above 60% of max capable speed
No riding past X mileage
Anything someone does to avoid the cut outs, crashes, broken bones, injuries, while still riding often and for a long time, like years with success in staying on the wheel?
Feb. 23, 2026 — This month, 13 early-career researchers from Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Area (CSA) presented their work at the 2026 Postdoc Symposium, an event focused on articulating the real-world impact of their discoveries.
Credit: Berkeley Lab
More than just a showcase, the annual symposium is a launchpad for the next generation of scientific leaders. Through weeks of intensive coaching from CSA staff, participants hone their presentation skills and leave equipped with a professional recording of their talk to share with future employers. Since its inception in 2020, the program has helped shape 134 presentations, solidifying its role as a vital training ground for early-career researchers.
“Our postdoctoral researchers represent the future of scientific innovation, and the CSA Postdoc Symposium is one of our most direct and impactful investments in their success. This program provides a unique platform not only to share their work but also to receive expert coaching and feedback that cultivates the essential communication skills they need to become leaders in their fields. These are the skills that will help them secure funding, build collaborations, and translate discovery into real-world solutions,” said Stefan Wild, Director of Berkeley Lab’s Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division and a key champion of the program.
Many of this year’s participants echoed the value of the program:
Alec Decktor
“Having participated before, I knew the Postdoc Symposium was a fantastic event and the perfect venue to communicate my research progress to a broad Berkeley Lab audience. It’s excellent practice for giving a non-technical talk—an invaluable skill for any scientist—and a great networking event. The connections I’ve made have led to exciting new research opportunities.
“What makes the symposium unique is the opportunity to receive extremely valuable feedback on your presentation from senior scientists across different fields. This has directly helped me develop my ability to prepare talks for other conferences. To anyone who might be hesitant, I’d say the environment is incredibly supportive. The work you put in pays off directly; I’ve reused slides I created for the symposium in several other presentations. It’s well worth the time and a great opportunity to develop yourself as an early-career scientist,” said Alec Dektor, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Scalable Solvers Group.
Durga Mandarapu
“The symposium process fundamentally changed how I approach presentations. The feedback from Lab leadership and communication experts was invaluable, and it helped me rethink how to design slides—for instance, learning to use the title to state the key takeaway instead of just a topic. That kind of clarity has a direct impact. When I later reached out to a Division Deputy who had provided feedback, he already had a clear understanding of my skills and research from the symposium. That familiarity made it much easier to identify opportunities for collaboration. It showed me that our work has more impact when people truly understand it, and this is the perfect place to learn that skill,” said Durga Mandarapu, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR.
Navjot Singh
“What sets this symposium apart is that you’re presenting to experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines, not just specialists in your own field. The feedback I received on how people outside my immediate area perceive certain concepts was invaluable—that’s a perspective you don’t easily get within your own research group. Learning to adjust my slides and delivery for that audience is a critical skill. It’s an investment in one of the most important qualities of a successful scientist: the ability to communicate your work effectively across disciplinary boundaries,” said Navjot Sing, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR.
Alex Morehead
“After seeing recordings of past events, I was convinced of the value of sharing my research at the Postdoc Symposium. The process of revising and presenting my research presentation has given me more confidence and knowledge for future presentations. The tight-knit community here at Berkeley Lab makes it an incredible place to connect with researchers interested in similar topics and gather relevant, valuable feedback. I’d encourage everyone to seriously consider it—practicing your presentation skills is a great long-term investment for any career,” said Alex Morehead, 2025 Hopper Postdoctoral Fellow at NERSC.
Shubhabrata Mukherjee
“What makes the Postdoc Symposium so unique is how supportive and well-structured the entire experience is. The focus isn’t just on presenting results; it’s on helping you translate technically deep work for a broad audience in a collaborative environment. Condensing my research in AI and scientific data analysis clarified my thinking and built new collaborations across the Lab. It’s a fantastic opportunity to gain confidence and practice a skill essential for any interdisciplinary career,” said Shubhabrata Mukherjee, a Machine Learning Postdoctoral Fellow in AMCR.
Nabin Giri
“The symposium is an excellent experiential learning opportunity. The feedback from organizers and peers was incredibly helpful, teaching me to communicate my work with clarity and impact. It’s the perfect preparation for job interviews and conferences because it gives you a safe space to practice the kind of communication that is essential for your career. The networking was terrific, and I made great connections and friends across the Lab,” said Nabin Giri, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division (SciData), who is working on applying AI to structural biology.
About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab
High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.
Source: Linda Vu, Berkeley Lab
The post Berkeley Lab: 2026 CSA Symposium Helps Researchers Amplify Their Scientific Impact appeared first on HPCwire.
Singer criticizes Trump administration’s ‘violent theater’ as she supports people caught up in Minneapolis crackdown
Brandi Carlile’s weekend concert in Minneapolis, Minnesota, raised more than half a million dollars for families affected by the disruptive presence of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol agents in the city.
Carlile, a Grammy-winning Americana artist from Washington state, livestreamed her show Be Human: A Concert for Minneapolis from the Target Center on 21 February. The show, played for over 12,000 people, raised more than $600,000 for the Minnesota-based Advocates for Human Rights organization, “so that they can help and represent thousands of families who desperately need it”, the singer announced on Instagram.
Continue reading...Education secretary and her team have won over some critics but obstacles remain in their attempt to overhaul system
In her first week as a cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson held a meeting for new Labour MPs with one subject – special educational needs. Almost 100 MPs came to that first meeting.
There were new MPs for whom the issue was personal to their own families – Jen Craft, Daniel Francis, Steve Race, as well as the then business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds. Dozens more knew the system was at breaking point because of their previous work in the charity sector, for unions and in the disability sector.
Continue reading...Britain's film academy and the BBC apologized after a broadcast of the BAFTA awards ceremony that included an offensive outburst by an audience member with Tourette's syndrome.
Since the administration began targeting those it calls "narcoterrorists" in small vessels last year, at least 148 people have been killed in the strikes.
Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed," he wrote in the post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1. "We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers." Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are essentially meaningless. "We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual "solid progress" marker, nothing more.â He then reiterated his plan to end each series of kernels to end at x.19, before the next release becomes y.0 -- a process that takes about 3.5 years -- and then pondered what happens when the next version of Linux reaches a number he finds uncomfortable. "I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big," he admitted, "by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The arrest followed search warrants at two addresses in the Wiltshire and Camden areas, police said
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has been speaking about the Send reforms at an event in Peterborough.
This is what she said about the need for inclusion.
Inclusion is a choice. It is an educational choice, and it is also a political choice because we could duck this challenge, ignore the injustice of a postcode lottery in life chances putting off fixing the Send system yet again.
The system works well for some at least.
We welcome the scale of vision contained in the white paper which has the potential to create an education system that fully values children and young people with additional needs and their families.
We also welcome the commitment to retain statutory education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for children and young people whose needs cannot be met through this new model. We know that many parents will welcome the legal requirement for schools to create individual support plans (ISPs) for all children with Send.
Continue reading...SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 23, 2026 — Pure Storage today announced its new name: Everpure. This change reflects the company’s greater impact from reshaping storage to defining the future of data management. The company also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 1touch, an innovator in data intelligence and orchestration that provides a comprehensive, unified view of an enterprise’s information. With 1touch, Everpure furthers its commitment to data management innovation, making data secure, accessible, intelligent, and ready to perform.
“Everpure reflects the company we have become as we help enterprises unleash the full power of their data. It captures the power of our Enterprise Data Cloud architecture and adaptability of Evergreen, reinforcing what has always set us apart as we redefine important markets,” said Charles Giancarlo, CEO of Everpure. “With 1touch, we are taking the next step in helping organizations not only gain control of their most valuable asset—data—but also understand, enhance, and contextualize that data for actionable intelligence.”
Accelerating Data Management Innovation in the AI Era
As AI becomes central to business operations, the modern enterprise has reached an inflection point. AI has exposed the weaknesses of current infrastructure, where siloed data, manual processes, and inflexible architectures cannot support the scale, speed, and intelligence demands of enterprise AI.
Data is an organization’s most valuable asset, but it is trapped by these inefficiencies. Its full value can only be derived if it is effortless to manage, continuously protected, instantly available, and infused with context. Everpure is breaking these barriers with its Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) architecture. Powered by the Everpure Platform (formerly the Pure Storage Platform), Everpure’s EDC architecture transforms storage into a unified, virtualized cloud of data, governed by an intelligent control plane. It manages datasets globally, through policy, eliminating the friction of manual configurations, which brings unprecedented simplicity, agility, and efficiency to data management.
Extending Everpure’s Data Management Roadmap with 1touch
The acquisition of 1touch will extend Everpure’s data management capabilities by adding data discovery and semantic context to the Everpure Platform. By integrating storage with 1touch’s ability to discover, classify, contextualize, and enrich data across all datasets and any environment—from SaaS to the edge—Everpure will ensure enterprise data is inherently AI-ready at the source. This will allow organizations to transform raw data into actionable insights faster than ever.
“Data is the lifeblood of the AI era, but without the proper controls and semantic context, it remains an untapped resource,” said Ashish Gupta, CEO and president, 1touch. “By joining forces with Everpure, we can eliminate the barriers that have kept enterprises from realizing the true ROI of their data. Together, we will further expand the Everpure platform to provide a level of contextual intelligence that is unmatched in the industry—giving customers the foundation they need to move AI projects from pilot to production at record speed and trust.”
Pure Storage will begin trading as Everpure on the New York Stock Exchange as of March 5, 2026. The ticker symbol (NYSE: PSTG) will remain unchanged.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in Q2 FY27. The terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.
About Everpure
Everpure (NYSE: PSTG) allows organizations to take control of their data with an industry-leading, ever-evolving storage and data management platform. We help companies unleash the power of their data by ensuring it is secure, accessible, intelligent, and ready to perform in the AI era. We make data management effortless while simultaneously scaling performance and significantly reducing energy consumption. With one of the highest Net Promoter Scores for over a decade, Everpure is the choice of the world’s most innovative organizations. For more information, visit Everpuredata.com.
Source: Everpure
The post Pure Storage Becomes Everpure, Announces Intent to Acquire 1touch appeared first on HPCwire.
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23, 2026 — Skorppio, a new self-serve platform for on-premise high-performance computer rentals, has launched with a fleet of workload-qualified, enterprise-grade systems available for delivery nationwide. The platform serves AI startups, ML developers, VFX studios, simulation teams, and research organizations that need bare-metal compute on-premise, without ownership costs, cloud lock-in, or long-term contracts.
Temporary access to high-performance, on-premise hardware has traditionally offered limited options: purchasing infrastructure requires extended lead times and significant capital investment, while public cloud solutions often reduce margins, predictability, and control. Skorppio addresses this gap with an on-demand, flexible rental model for enterprise-grade compute, broadening how organizations secure critical infrastructure.
Skorppio’s rental fleet spans performance laptops, multi-GPU professional workstations, NVIDIA DGX-class enterprise AI systems, and GPU servers. A PNY Pro partnership enables Skorppio to provide NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs (including the RTX 6000 PRO) and AMD processors (EPYC, Threadripper PRO, and Ryzen). Unique to Skorppio, its flagship workstation delivers up to 786 GB of VRAM and is engineered to run on standard electrical circuits, with no specialized power infrastructure required, bringing enterprise-grade AI compute into conventional office environments. Both current- and previous-generation systems are available to match a range of performance requirements and budgets.
Founder and CEO Jonathan Goldstein began his career as a Network Systems Administrator at a global bank before founding a creative technology agency that built large-scale installations for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies including General Motors, YouTube, and Amazon Studios, as well as global music artists including Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Alicia Keys.
“Access to performance compute has gotten expensive enough that teams end up buying what they can afford or what’s available quickly, instead of what the work demands,” said Founder and CEO Jonathan Goldstein. “Skorppio delivers dedicated, workflow-built systems with bare-metal performance, on ultra-flexible terms, without the cost of ownership.”
Through a digital-first experience on web and mobile, users can access real-time pricing and curated KIT Collections. Pre-built assemblies, such as AI Startup Dev Kits, Simulation Packs, and VFX Render Farm configurations, are validated against real-world workloads by domain experts, including PhD-level AI researchers and VFX technical directors. KITs ship with the necessary infrastructure components, such as high-speed interconnects, fiber optics, and network switches, to speed deployment.
The launch follows a successful pre-seed investment. Later this year, Skorppio plans to introduce a program that provides compute resources to early-stage AI startups in exchange for equity, bringing an incubator model to high-performance infrastructure.
For more information and to reserve early access, visit skorppio.com.
About Skorppio
Founded in 2024 in Los Angeles, Skorppio is a self-serve rental platform for on-premise high-performance computing with nationwide delivery. The company delivers servers, enterprise AI systems, GPU workstations, and performance laptops to AI startups, ML developers, VFX studios, and innovators across industries. Every configuration is curated and validated with leading domain experts. Skorppio provides an alternative to cloud computing with transparent pricing, no lock-in, and compute that scales on customers’ terms.
Source: Skorppio
The post Skorppio Launches On-Premise HPC Rental Platform for AI and HPC Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 23, 2026 — Backblaze, Inc. today announced B2 Neo, a purpose-built offering for neocloud platforms. B2 Neo provides these platforms with enterprise-grade cloud object storage their customers require for data-heavy AI and machine learning workloads, allowing platforms to offer a full-stack experience without the massive capital costs or time and resource investment required to build a storage backend from scratch.
B2 Neo launches based on nearly 20 years of cloud storage expertise and over five exabytes of storage under management, with the ability to provide throughput speeds up to 1 terabit per second (1Tbps). Built in collaboration with leading neocloud platforms already running production workloads with Backblaze, B2 Neo gives neoclouds a storage layer they can integrate into their existing platforms and seamlessly offer to customers. These partnerships include the company’s largest total contract value (TCV) and commitment to date and conversations with multiple emerging neoclouds—underscoring the strategic value neoclouds place on having a reliable, high-performance storage partner.
With B2 Neo, neocloud customers experience storage as a native service via branded endpoints and partner-controlled pricing. The offering allows neoclouds to provision accounts, manage permissions, and handle billing through existing platform tools without a separate console or manual setup.
The neocloud market is projected to grow from $35.22 billion in 2026 to $236.53 billion by 2031 at a 46.37% CAGR. As these platforms scale to meet explosive demand for AI compute, storage has become a critical bottleneck—one that diverts capital and engineering resources away from the GPU infrastructure that defines their competitive advantage.
Neocloud customers running AI training, inference pipelines, and media workflows need somewhere to store datasets, model checkpoints, and output artifacts. Without integrated object storage, they’re forced to move massive datasets in and out of the cloud, creating latency and delays that stall GPU utilization and drive up costs.
“Neoclouds are under pressure to scale GPU capacity as fast as possible. Building and operating high-performance scalable object storage competes directly with that mission,” said Gleb Budman, Co-Founder and CEO of Backblaze. “B2 Neo lets them launch a storage offering in weeks, not years, so they can stay focused on what makes them different.”
One global edge services platform selected Backblaze after a rigorous technical and business evaluation, and now leverages B2 Neo as a core component of its AI, high performance compute (HPC), and media storage strategies.
“As our AI business scales, our customers increasingly demand cost-effective storage. Backblaze gave us the ability to deliver object storage as a first-class tier of our own platform, without taking focus away from our GPU roadmap,” said the company’s Director of Product Management.
By powering their back-end object storage with B2 Neo, cloud providers can accelerate time-to-market, control infrastructure costs, and meet rising customer demand for efficient, high-performance data pipelines.
“With B2 Neo as a first-party service offering to neoclouds, I see the advantage for those organizations of being able to turn on cloud storage without the toil and expense of building it themselves. It is a near-instant value-add offering, helping their customers control costs and achieve the ROI of AI faster,” said Rob Strechay, Principal Analyst, Smuget & theCUBE research.
About Backblaze
Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) gives businesses the freedom to innovate without limits by removing the barriers of lock-in, complexity, and cost. Our high-performance cloud object storage accelerates AI workflows, powers data-heavy applications, streamlines media management, and protects critical data. As an award-winning independent cloud, we provide unparalleled levels of interoperability that enable over 500,000 of our customers to reach and serve hundreds of millions of end users in 175 countries around the world. For more information, please go to www.backblaze.com.
Source: Backblaze
The post Backblaze Launches B2 Neo to Power Surging Neocloud Market appeared first on HPCwire.
The son of Rob and Michele Reiner has struggled with mental health and drug issues, but there was no indication in court whether those would factor into his defense.
Officials at California Democratic convention celebrated the former House speaker’s advocacy as she prepares to retire
It was a “Nancy Pelosi-palooza” in San Francisco over the weekend, as thousands of California Democrats gathered in her beloved city by the bay, a place the former speaker of the House has represented in Congress for nearly four decades. They were there to attend the state party’s annual convention – but with Pelosi retiring at the end of her term, it was also a days-long celebration of a woman many Democrats regard as a living legend.
A video salute during the general session charted her rise from a stay-at-home mom to the US House of Representatives, where she shattered the marble ceiling and became the first – and to this day only – woman to wield the speaker’s gavel. Tote bags were emblazoned with her silhouette in every color of the rainbow – a nod to her trailblazing advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community. It also included one of her favorite aphorisms: “We don’t agonize, we organize.”
Continue reading...Feb. 23, 2026 — From space exploration to artificial intelligence, modern scientific breakthroughs depend on moving large amounts of data quickly. At Kennesaw State University, Associate Professor of Information Technology Xuechen Zhang is developing new methods to help supercomputers process information faster.
Zhang’s work aims to deliver scientific insights in a fraction of the time. Instead of constantly moving data to a processor for computation, his project moves the computation closer to where the data already lives. This approach, known as computational storage, allows portions of data processing to happen directly on storage devices before information ever reaches the main processor.
“When we train scientific machine-learning models, we need a lot of data,” Zhang said. “Moving that data from storage to processors takes time, and preprocessing can become a major hurdle.”
By shifting where work is completed, researchers can reduce delays that often slow artificial intelligence training and large-scale scientific simulations, especially when datasets grow into the terabyte and petabyte range. The long-term impact of Zhang’s project extends beyond computer science. Faster data processing can shorten the time it takes scientists to reach conclusions in fields ranging from climate modeling to medical research. A simulation that once required hours or even days could potentially be completed in significantly less time, allowing researchers to test more scenarios and refine their findings more quickly.
“In the future, supercomputers will be more heterogeneous and specialized,” Zhang said. “Different components will handle different tasks, and that flexibility will open the door to faster and more scalable scientific applications.”
Zhang’s project received a $479,358 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the research over the next three years. The funding supports doctoral students at KSU, provides access to high-performance computing resources, and enables the team to present findings at national conferences while strengthening curriculum offerings for students.
The investment also helps create opportunities for undergraduate researchers to gain early exposure to advanced computing systems and real-world problem-solving, Zhang said.
“This funding allows us to build a pipeline for our students and give them hands-on experience with state-of-the-art systems,” Zhang said. “It is not only about research results, but also about preparing students for careers in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.”
The research is a collaboration with Xiaokun Yang of the University of Houston–Clear Lake. The partnership blends hardware and software expertise, which Zhang said is essential for building efficient systems.
Leaders in the College of Computing and Software Engineering say Zhang’s work highlights the growing impact of faculty research on both student learning and technological innovation.
“Dr. Zhang’s work reflects the type of forward-thinking research we strive to cultivate in the College of Computing and Software Engineering,” CCSE Interim Dean Yiming Ji said. “His efforts advance scientific discovery while creating meaningful learning opportunities for our students.”
After joining KSU, Zhang began building the AI Systems and Storage Lab on the Marietta Campus, where he is assembling servers and recruiting doctoral students. Early testing has reinforced the team’s belief that data preprocessing can become a barrier in large-scale computing workflows. He expects the lab to expand in the coming semesters as additional graduate researchers join the project.
Source: Raynard Churchwell, KSU
The post Kennesaw State Research Explores Computational Storage to Speed Scientific Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
There's no official word on a sale yet, but another one this spring is likely to happen soon.
Former U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson has been arrested weeks after a series of emails between him and the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released.
Exclusive: Former health secretary throws weight behind campaign to boost diagnosis of placenta accreta spectrum
Jeremy Hunt has urged leading doctors to do more to help maternity specialists detect a rare complication of childbirth that can lead to a women bleeding to death within minutes.
The former health secretary has thrown his weight behind a new campaign, aimed at improving the NHS’s identification of placenta accreta spectrum. The Action for Accreta campaign was set up by Amisha Adhia and her husband, Nik, after five hospitals failed to spot that she had PAS.
Continue reading...Money market account interest rates are still competitive. Here's how much savers can earn with an account by 2027.
Kouri Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of fentanyl into a cocktail that her husband drank, prosecutors say.
The Wall Street Journal reports the graphics and AI chip giant will soon take on Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Apple for consumer laptop chip supremacy.
Deadliest start to a year in more than a decade, according to the International Organization for Migration
A least 606 people trying to reach Europe in search of refugee have been reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean since the beginning of 2026, marking the “deadliest start to a year” in more than a decade, the UN’s migration agency said on Monday.
The figure includes at least 30 people who are feared dead or missing after their boat capsized in severe weather off the coast of Greece on Saturday. Authorities rescued 20 people, including four minors, and recovered the bodies of three men and one woman, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said.
Continue reading...Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria actor died on Thursday less than a year after he publicly revealed ALS diagnosis
A GoFundMe campaign meant to provide financial support for the widow and daughters of Eric Dane after the actor’s recent death had raised more than $415,000 as of Monday.
The fundraising platform over the weekend had temporarily paused the “In Honor of Eric Dane” campaign while it underwent a standard review. But by Monday, GoFundMe said it had verified the effort and listed the Grey’s Anatomy star’s family as the beneficiary.
Continue reading...Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writes. Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that PDFs could provide trillions of novel, high-quality training tokens from government reports, textbooks, and academic papers -- the kind of data AI developers are increasingly desperate for.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kouri Richins, the Utah mother accused of killing her husband and then publishing a children's book about grief, is now on trial for his murder.
Apple's March 4 event might be presented in an entirely new format. Here are the new products we expect to see during the lead-up to the big day.
Despite relentless attrition at appalling human cost, the Kremlin has not achieved its goals. Maximum economic pressure can undermine its war aims
Four years after Vladimir Putin launched the biggest conflict on European soil since the second world war, the human cost of his revanchist ambition mounts ever higher. Across a 750-mile frontline in the east of Ukraine, Russian forces make minimal progress despite relentless attrition, advancing more slowly than troops during the battle of the Somme. In 2025, the estimated number of Russian casualties in “the meat grinder” was 415,000.
For Ukraine, the suffering will scar generations to come. Battlefield casualties are estimated to be about 600,000. Since the invasion, as many as 6 million people have been displaced inside the country and 4 million, mainly women and children, have left. Civilian deaths soared last year as Russia stepped up its bombing campaign of cities and infrastructure in an effort to break Ukrainians’ will.
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Continue reading...  | Headed to Smashville for 24hours. Who’s up for a cold ride ? [link] [comments] |
Law enforcement is monitoring potential increases in violence, coercion or debt-collection activity in domestic trafficking corridors after cartel head "El Mencho" was killed Sunday.
Ofgem says about 140 proposed projects, driven by AI use, could require more power than current peak demand
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog.
Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity – 5GW more than the country’s current peak demand.
Continue reading...U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday. Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using the same tactic, called distillation, to mimic OpenAI's products. Anthropic said distillation had legitimate uses -- companies use it to build smaller versions of their own products, for example -- but it could also be used to build competitive products "in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost." The scale of the different companies' distillation activity varied. DeepSeek engaged in 150,000 interactions with Claude, whereas Moonshot and MiniMax had more than 3.4 million and 13 million, respectively, Anthropic said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ralph Abraham, who started CDC role in January, is second top official to step down from agency this month
Ralph Abraham, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s principal deputy director, has stepped down, the agency said on Monday, announcing the exit of a top official for the second time in February.
The agency known as the CDC – which is temporarily being run by Dr Jay Bhattacharya – said the departure was effective immediately and attributed it to unforeseen family obligations. It did not comment on who would replace Abraham.
Continue reading...Workers who claim the new deduction will see an average tax cut of around $1,400, although some could realize larger savings.
Stock your pantry like a pro with these eight undercelebrated ingredients.
US president’s international trade war spooks investors, with drops in US share prices after European losses
Stock markets stumbled on Monday as Donald Trump pushed ahead with fresh tariffs on the US’s trading partners despite a supreme court strike-down and growing opposition from domestic voters.
Uncertainty over the status of global trade deals spooked investors, triggering a drop in US shares prices including on the Dow Jones industrial average, which tumbled 1.6% by Monday’s closing. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 fell 1.4% and 1.1%, after losses for European stock markets.
Continue reading...The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa. Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August. TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene -- all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ron Wyden, Ed Markey and Jeanne Shaheen unveiling bill requiring CBP to issue refunds and pay interest
A trio of Senate Democrats is calling for the government to start refunding roughly $175bn in tariff revenues that the supreme court ruled were collected because of an illegal set of orders by Donald Trump.
Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire are unveiling a bill on Monday that would require US Customs and Border Protection to issue refunds over the course of 180 days and pay interest on the refunded amount.
Continue reading...Repeat of BBC series gave clue to Paul Gostelow about 19th-century altar cards taken from crypt in Hampshire
Two priceless artefacts stolen more than a decade ago from the crypt of Napoleon III in England have been recovered after an antiques dealer realised he had them while watching a repeat of the comedy drama Lovejoy.
The wooden 19th-century altar cards were taken in a burglary at St Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough, Hampshire in February 2014 and were feared lost for ever.
Continue reading...A Bloomberg report suggests a potential one-two-three punch of product launches over consecutive days from Apple, including three new MacBooks and an iPad with an M4 chip.
SOLLEFTEÅ, Sweden, Feb. 23, 2026 — atNorth today confirmed plans to develop a 300MW data center in Sollefteå Municipality, Sweden. Located at Hamre Industrial Park in Långsele, the new site will be developed on a 50-hectare plot (Hamre 1) and is expected to be operational in H1 2028.
The Hamre Industrial Park supports an accelerated construction timeline, as the site is fully zoned and prepared for development. This speed to market is essential, as demand for AI-driven, high-performance computing infrastructure continues to surge, requiring scalable capacity delivered quickly.
“We are very pleased that atNorth has chosen Hamre Industrial Park for this significant investment,” says Emelie Wrede, Mayor and Chair, Sollefteå Municipality. “This establishment confirms that Sollefteå offers the right conditions for large-scale, future-oriented industry. The development will strengthen the local economy, create skilled employment opportunities, and further position our municipality as an attractive destination for sustainable digital infrastructure.”
Hamre Industrial Park was selected for its strategic location, strong grid capacity, and access to renewable energy resources. The campus will be designed in line with atNorth’s modular architecture to cater for data intensive workloads and colocation needs, whether that be for built-to-suit projects or tailor-made data center space at large scale.
As with all new atNorth developments, the company will actively pursue heat reuse partnerships to ensure excess heat generated by the facility can be captured and redirected for local benefit.
“We face a critical point in time right now, where we must balance unprecedented growth in high density workloads with an increasingly urgent need for sustainable, scalable digital infrastructure,” said Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO at atNorth. “Our Sollefteå campus represents a significant milestone for the company and demonstrates our commitment to building data center ecosystems that deliver both technical excellence and long-term value for local communities.”
The news follows atNorth’s recent announcements with the expansion of two new data center sites in Iceland and its plans for an additional data center in Stockholm. atNorth has also recently formed new colocation partnerships with Nokia, Crusoe and 6G AI Sweden AB as well as signed a heat reuse agreement with Vesforbrænding, Denmark’s largest waste-to-energy company, to repurpose excess heat from its DEN01 data center campus.
About atNorth
atNorth is a leading Nordic data center company that offers cost-effective, scalable high-density colocation and built-to-suit services trusted by industry-leading organizations. With sustainability at its core, atNorth’s data centers run on renewable energy resources and support circular economy principles. All atNorth sites leverage innovative design, power efficiency, and intelligent operations to provide long-term infrastructure and flexible colocation deployments. atNorth is headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland and operates eight data centers in strategic locations across the Nordics, as well as a ninth under construction in Kouvola, Finland, a tenth site in Ølgod, Denmark and an eleventh campus in Stockholm, Sweden. The business has also secured land for a future mega site in the Sollefteå Municipality in Sweden.
Source: atNorth
The post atNorth Plans 300MW High-Density Data Center in Northern Sweden appeared first on HPCwire.
Last Week Tonight host delved into the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in relation to the Epstein files and Musk’s poisonous ownership of X
On his new episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver wasted no time digging into the files related to late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, which have once again ensnared former prince Andrew.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known after being stripped of his royal titles for his connection to Epstein, was arrested last week – the first arrest of a senior member of the royal family in modern history – on allegations that that he had shared confidential material with Epstein while serving as a UK trade envoy.
Continue reading...As multiple investigations unfold back at home footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with team in locker room
The FBI director, Kash Patel, has a lot on his plate just now. There’s the shooting death of the armed man who entered Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home; the weeks-old search for missing Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie; not to mention the ongoing furor around the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.
So eyebrows were raised on Sunday when phone footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with the men’s USA hockey team in Milan after their gold medal victory against Canada at the Winter Olympics.
Continue reading...Seventeen nonprofit organizations, led by The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief today urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to prevent the Federal Trade Commission from conducting a retaliatory investigation into Media Matters for America, brought after Media Matters published critical reporting about allies of the Trump administration.
The brief, authored by Albert Sellars LLP, notes that this sort of coercive tactic — where a federal agency will launch a pretextual investigation, keep it open as a way to coerce compliance, and resist any effort to have a court review the lawfulness of the agency’s actions — has become a troublingly common form of government intimidation under the current administration. From the Justice Department to the Federal Communications Commission, court intervention has been one of the few tools that organizations have to prevent federal overreach. The amicus brief asks the appellate court to uphold a preliminary injunction. Without judicial remedy, such investigations are an acute danger to the nonprofit organizations that Americans rely on for information on matters of public concern. The brief argues that courts must intervene to prevent such investigations from chilling coverage of issues that might be adverse to those currently in power.
“Nonprofit organizations must be aggressively vigilant to protect First Amendment rights in the face of a federal government’s onslaught,” said David Bralow, legal director of the Press Freedom Defense Fund. “The chilling investigation into Media Matters is one of many affronts to free speech. These unabridged regulatory invasions, combined with such other attacks like the arrest of journalists in Minnesota and the invasive seizure of confidential communications in Washington, D.C., demonstrate the perilous state of our democracy.”
The coalition includes a mix of nonprofit research, advocacy, and media organizations, including CalMatters, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, the Dangerous Speech Project, Defending Rights & Dissent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment Coalition, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Lion Publishers, MuckRock Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Open Vallejo, the Project on Government Oversight, Public Knowledge, and Reporters Without Borders USA.
“The Press Freedom Defense Fund exists to confront exactly this kind of abuse. When the government uses open-ended investigations to drain resources, intimidate funders, and silence critics, the damage goes far beyond one organization — it sends a warning to every journalist and researcher in the country. We’re standing with Media Matters because the First Amendment is not negotiable,” said Annie Chabel, CEO of The Intercept.
For more information, please contact The Intercept’s Miroslav Macala at miroslav.macala@theintercept.com.
The post Nonprofit Coalition Asks Courts to Prevent Coercive Federal Investigation Tactics appeared first on The Intercept.
Ex-president, accused of crimes against humanity, selected targets and promised immunity for death squad members, prosecutor says
Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was “at the very heart” of brutal anti-drugs campaigns that led to the killing of thousands of people, prosecutors at the international criminal court (ICC) have argued, as they called for charges against him to proceed to trial.
Duterte, 80, who was arrested in Manila last year and flown to The Hague, is facing three counts of crimes against humanity over campaigns against drug users and dealers during his presidency, and his earlier tenure as mayor of the city of Davao.
Continue reading...CALGARY, Alberta, Feb. 23, 2026 — SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc. today announced a strategic partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM (Fraunhofer ITWM), a member of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The collaboration is governed by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) focused on joint technical evaluation and research-oriented cooperation in the area of quantum and hybrid optimization.
This partnership marks SuperQ’s official entry into the European quantum ecosystem. By aligning with Fraunhofer, the MoU represents a de-risking of SuperQ’s commercial roadmap and opens new market opportunities with Europe’s industrial “Mittelstand” and Fortune 500 giants. SuperQ transitions from a North American innovator to a global peer.
Under the MoU, the collaboration will focus on technical exchange and exploratory activities, including:
“This is not just a geographic expansion; it is a validation of our ‘One-Click’ philosophy by the most respected names in industrial mathematics,” said Dr. Muhammad Khan, CEO and Board Chair of SuperQ. “Investors should recognize that we are moving beyond the ‘quantum lab’ phase. Working with Fraunhofer ITWM allows us to engage with one of Europe’s leading applied mathematics institutes in a rigorous and practice-oriented setting turning complex math into executive-ready ROI.”
Within this collaboration, Fraunhofer ITWM will evaluate the Super platform in terms of performance, scalability, and potential integration into its HPC infrastructure for industry-scale simulation and algorithm acceleration. This ensures that as quantum hardware matures, SuperQ’s software remains the indispensable “operating system” for industrial-scale simulation. Together, they aim to develop and evaluate hybrid quantum-classical computing workflows that combine gate-based quantum computing, quantum annealing, and classical high-performance computing to enhance modelling, simulation, and optimization, while jointly identifying application areas – such as logistics, energy, manufacturing, finance, defense-related optimization, or resource exploration.
“Fraunhofer ITWM is dedicated to bringing cutting-edge innovation into industrial practice,” said Dr. Pascal Halffmann, Research Coordinator Quantum Computing at Fraunhofer ITWM. “By coupling our expertise in quantum algorithms and HPC with SuperQ’s orchestration technologies, we aim to advance next-generation computing for industrial use cases.”
More from HPCwire: SuperQ Expands into Quantum Hardware
About the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM
The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern is one of the largest research institutes for industrial mathematics worldwide. Fraunhofer ITWM sees its task in further developing mathematics as a key technology and providing innovative impetus. Its focus is on the implementation of mathematical methods and technology in application projects and their further development in research projects. Fraunhofer ITWM’s integral components are consulting, implementation and support in the application of high-performance computer technology and the provision of tailor-made software solutions. Its various competencies address a wide range of customers: automotive industry, mechanical engineering, chemical industry, energy and finance. This also benefits from Fraunhofer ITWM’s network such as the Fraunhofer Competence Network Quantum Computing and the “Simulation- and software-based innovation” high-performance center.
About SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc.
SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc. (CSE: QBTQ) (FSE: 25X) (OTCQB: QBTQF) is reducing the technical and financial barriers to quantum and supercomputing commercialization. It is defining the next era of enterprise transformation, emerging as a partner for global organizations seeking direct quantum and supercomputing ROI. SuperQ’s flagship Super platform strives to make the most advanced computational power intuitive and accessible. This will empower executives, leading research institutions, and critical government agencies to unlock immediate business impact across finance, healthcare, logistics, defense, and beyond, leveraging SuperQ’s proprietary AI Autopilots to turn complex challenges into executive-ready results with one-click productization and deployment. SuperQ Quantum is headquartered in Canada with a growing international presence, particularly in the US, Middle East and Asia.
Source: SuperQ
The post SuperQ Enters European Quantum Ecosystem Through Fraunhofer ITWM Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.
41-year-old developed compartment syndrome
Skier credits Team USA surgeon with saving leg
Lindsey Vonn says she came close to having her leg amputated in the aftermath of her crash during the Olympic downhill earlier this month.
The 41-year-old sustained a complex tibia fracture to her left leg in the crash and underwent multiple surgeries in Italy before being flown back to the US for further treatment last week. But in an Instagram post on Monday, the American said the crash also led to compartment syndrome in her leg. The condition occurs after traumatic injuries such as falls from heights and car crashes. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “compartment syndrome happens when there’s too much pressure around your muscles. The pressure restricts the flow of blood, fresh oxygen and nutrients to your muscles and nerves. Compartment syndrome is extremely painful.” The lack of blood flow can lead to permanent damage to patients.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 23, 2026 — Cadence today announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Hexagon AB’s Design and Engineering (“D&E”) business, significantly expanding its System Design and Analysis (SDA) portfolio and strategically positioning the company to capitalize on the Physical AI opportunity.
The acquisition accelerates Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy by combining its compelling multiphysics portfolio with Hexagon D&E’s leadership in structural analysis, acoustics and multibody dynamics. The integration of Hexagon D&E’s flagship MSC Software solutions—including MSC Nastran and Adams—with Cadence’s leading multiphysics portfolio spanning electronics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and BETA CAE’s structural pre and post processing technologies, will enable Cadence to deliver a comprehensive end-to-end multiphysics simulation platform —elevating the industry standard for integrated design and analysis solutions and enabling more seamless system level innovation.
“This acquisition marks a major milestone in advancing our vision for intelligent system design,” said Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence. “By combining our industry-leading computational software and AI-driven design expertise with MSC Software’s world-class structural and physics-based analysis technologies, we’re empowering customers to push the boundaries of what’s possible—from autonomous systems and advanced robotics to the future of transportation.”
The combined portfolio further positions Cadence at the forefront of the emerging Physical AI era by tightly coupling high-fidelity, physics-based simulation with AI-driven design exploration. This will enable customers to create virtual representations of real-world systems that accurately predict system behavior under complex operating conditions. With advanced capabilities spanning motion, vibration, structural response and fluid-structure interactions, engineers can generate richer, physically grounded data to train and validate AI models, improving the performance and reliability of intelligent vehicles and industrial systems.
The purchase price of approximately €2.7 billion, which includes an estimated €150 million of transaction-related taxes owed by the acquired entities, is structured as 70% in cash and 30% in Cadence common stock.
Under its financial model, Cadence expects the incoming business to add an incremental $160 million to its 2026 revenue. On a non-GAAP basis, Cadence expects the transaction to be approximately 28 cents dilutive to its 2026 earnings per share, becoming accretive in 2027.
About Cadence
Cadence is a market leader in AI and digital twins, pioneering the application of computational software to accelerate innovation in the engineering design of silicon to systems. Our design solutions, based on Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, are essential for the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies to build their next-generation products from chips to full electromechanical systems that serve a wide range of markets, including hyperscale computing, mobile communications, automotive, aerospace, industrial, life sciences and robotics. In 2024, Cadence was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s top 100 best-managed companies. Cadence solutions offer limitless opportunities—learn more at www.cadence.com.
Source: Cadence
The post Cadence Completes Acquisition of Hexagon’s Design and Engineering Business appeared first on HPCwire.
Health secretary probably referred to Harvard psychiatrist who says he’s ‘never used the word “cure” in my work’
Psychiatric researchers are pushing back against the claims by the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, that a doctor at Harvard “cured schizophrenia using keto diets”, while also acknowledging that a carefully supervised ketogenic diet shows promise for a variety of mental health conditions.
Kennedy Jr’s statement probably referred to the Harvard psychiatrist Dr Christopher Palmer, who said he has “never once used the word ‘cure’ in my work. I have never claimed to have cured any mental illness, including schizophrenia,” but added: “I have talked about ketogenic diet being a very powerful treatment, even to the point of inducing remission of symptoms of schizophrenia.”
Continue reading...Trump invites Olympic champions to State of the Union
FBI director Kash Patel joins locker-room revelry in Milan
USA women turn down invite over previous commitments
Donald Trump made a congratulatory phone call to the United States men’s hockey team after their dramatic win over Canada in the Olympic gold medal game on Sunday afternoon, praising what he called an “unbelievable” performance and inviting the players to Washington DC this week.
The US president addressed the team by speakerphone shortly after their 2-1 overtime victory, telling them they had delivered a moment the country would remember for decades.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. It also has suffered a string of financial blows over a dramatic six-year-period. How the state responds to the setbacks may determine the shape of Delaware’s workforce into the future.
A buildup of sediment around the confluence of the Christina and Delaware rivers is blocking fully loaded fruit ships from docking at the Port of Wilmington – a facility long known as the top banana port in North America.
In conversations with port workers as well as with state and federal officials, Spotlight Delaware has learned that over the previous month cargo ships bound for Delaware and carrying Chiquita Brands fruit have been sailing past the Port of Wilmington because the waterway leading to the Christina River facility has become too shallow.
The ships have been docking instead at ports in Chester and Philadelphia, where workers at those facilities have unloaded as much as a third of the vessels’ cargo, according to Port of Wilmington workers.
Then, with lighter loads and sitting higher in the water, the ships return to Port of Wilmington where they can navigate through the shallow Christina River to unload the rest of their cargo.
While the workaround has kept fruit moving, the situation could amount to a reputational setback for Delaware’s port. It comes at a time when the facility’s operator, Enstructure Inc., has been seeking out new lines of business amid an increasingly intense competition between regional ports.
The situation also means that the hours worked at the publicly owned, privately run Port of Wilmington are lower than what they would have been otherwise. And in some cases, those hours have been filled by non-union labor at upstream ports, sparking outcry from Delaware workers.
“Normally, we’ll work the ship around-the-clock for two days, or at least a day and a half. Now we’re lucky to get one around-the-clock,” Port of Wilmington union leader William Ashe Jr. said, referencing time spent unloading the Chiquita ships recently.
Ashe noted that the only ships impacted so far have been those carrying fruit from Chiquita, and not those bringing in perishables from Dole.
“They tell me that the draft is deeper on Chiquita than it is on Dole” ships, he said.
Spokespersons for Enstructure and for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – which is in charge of maintaining the navigable waters in the United States – each blamed the sediment buildup on delays in dredging that began last fall.
In an email, Army Corps spokesman Stephen Rochette said a dispute over an awarded dredging contract initially pushed back the start of the project.
“We awarded this contract in the fall and experienced a delay due to a contractual protest from another bidder. Additionally, the selected contractor had other project commitments as well that impacted their start time,” Rochette said.
The project was then hit by more delays last month when the United States Coast Guard prohibited dredging during a cold snap that caused ice flows to form along the Delaware River, Rochette said.
He said an expedited dredging operation is scheduled to begin imminently.
“Our contractor is mobilizing equipment and setting up the pipeline,” Rochette said in the email.
The Army Corps’ website lists the dredging contract for Wilmington Harbor as having been initially scheduled to begin last October. It was supposed to be complete next month.
It is one of 33 “maintenance dredging” projects within the Philadelphia region that are either proposed or ongoing.
The dredging delays at the Port of Wilmington have occurred just as the Army Corps has been suffering through a period of uncertainty. Similar delays in dredging have also recently been reported for projects in New York and in Michigan.
Also last fall, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget announced that the Army Corps would pause over $11 billion in low-priority projects within Democratic-leaning states, in response to the government shutdown at the time.
A subsequent Congressional statement indicated that one of those projects is in Delaware.
It is not immediately clear which Delaware project the statement was referencing as the complete list of paused contracts does not appear to be publicly available.
Former-New Castle County Council President Karen Hartly-Nagle was first to report on the Port of Wilmington dredging issues in an article published last week.
The head of the Delaware office that oversees operations of the Port of Wilmington said tests of water depths conducted late last fall indicated that the channel leading to the Port of Wilmington “remained operational.”
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Brian Devine, the new interim executive director at the Diamond State Port Corporation, asserted that a rapid accumulation of sediment would have built up around Wilmington’s harbor near the end of last year
“While sediment accumulates in Wilmington Harbor throughout the year, significant weather events can result in periods of quicker accumulations,” Devine said.
Despite the explanation, Ashe insisted that dredging along the Christina River should have been complete long before the depth became an obstacle for ships — and before the rush of the winter fruit season. And while the Army Corps manages dredging, Ashe directed his criticism at state officials for what he said was their failure to press the issue.
“It should have been done in July,” he said. “Why would you wait until the winter months, knowing that you haven’t done any maintenance dredging in a year.”
Prior to the Port of Wilmington’s most recent dredging contract award, the Army Corps lists on its website a massive project posted in 2024 to dredge the Delaware River’s main navigation channel from Philadelphia to the sea.
That project’s documents also list dredging along the parallel “Wilmington Harbor, Christina River,” but it appears that the Army Corps separated that portion of the project, and re-awarded it last fall on its own.
Beyond Delaware port officials, Ashe has also criticized Chiquita’s actions in recent weeks.
When Chiquita diverted its first ship away from Delaware a month ago, he said the company violated a union agreement when its ship docked at a non-union Penn Terminals, near Chester.
In response, Ashe said attorneys from the his union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, successfully pushed Chiquita to move their next ship to docks at the Port of Philadelphia, which uses union labor.
“We raised so much stink, and we got lawyers involved,” he said.
Nevertheless, subsequent Chiquita ships have returned to Penn Terminals, according to Ashe and three other port workers.
Chiquita did not immediately respond to a request to comment on this story.
The post Dredging delays divert ships past the Port of Wilmington appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
In 2020, officials across the United States removed dozens of statues of historical figures from public property following protests over racial injustice. In Wilmington, those included the statues of Caesar Rodney and Christopher Columbus. Recent advocacy from Italian American residents for the famed explorer has since revived the debate, leading the Wilmington City Council to consider its stance on the statue’s potential return.
Six years after Wilmington took down a statue of Christopher Columbus, the sculpture is again exposing tensions in the city over who gets to determine which symbols to publicly embrace.
During a city council meeting last week, members of Wilmington’s large Italian-American community stated that the Columbus statue should return to public display – either at the city’s Father Tucker Park or at its previous location along Pennsylvania Avenue. They argued that Columbus was a historical figure who, while flawed, sparked pride within their community.
But, in response, a mixture of older Black residents, younger white residents and Black city council members stated that Columbus should not be publicly celebrated, citing his role in slavery and in the colonization of the Americas.
During the meeting, Albert Greto – an attorney who is leading a broader Italian-American community coalition – said he wants Wilmington to turn over the statue to his coalition. Then, if the city determines the statue will not be placed at a public site, he said his group will restore it to private property.
During his public comment, Greto also acknowledged that Columbus had enslaved people.
“I think there’s no dispute in that,” he said. “Be that as it may, there’s good and bad in everyone.”
After nearly an hour of public comments and council debate, the Wilmington City Council voted down 6-3 a resolution that would have formally opposed the statue being placed on public land, including city parks.
The resolution had been introduced by City Councilwoman Shané Darby.
The council members opposed to the resolution, such as Councilwoman Christian Willauer, said they wanted to allow different communities to be able to celebrate their cultural symbols.
“I believe our communities are better when we give each other space to express ourselves according to our own traditions, as long as those traditions are not about taking something away from someone else or putting someone else down,” Willauer said.
For months, multiple Italian American community groups have been organizing to push the city to return and re-erect the Columbus statue, which once stood on a strip of land at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Franklin and 13th streets.
Many have said that Father Tucker Park, which sits across the street from the St. Anthony’s Lodge No. 3012 in the Little Italy neighborhood, would be an ideal location.
The recent advocacy comes amid an ongoing national conversation about the kind of monuments that should be displayed in public. On the other side of the ideological spectrum from Darby, the Trump administration last month removed over two dozen panels at the President’s House site in Philadelphia that exhibited stories of people enslaved by President George Washington.
The city and others sued the Trump administration, and last week a federal judge ordered the exhibits to be temporarily restored until the pending case is resolved.
The removal of the panels were part of broader efforts by the Trump administration to examine monuments and other historical markers to ensure they are not displaying content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living.”
The Christopher Columbus statue was originally erected on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1957.
The Christopher Columbus Monument Committee, a group composed of Italian Americans in the community, had raised $40,000 to commission the statue. Committee members also maintained it over the subsequent decades.
Then, in 2020, the administration of then-Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki contacted Mike Panfile, the head of the Columbus Monument Committee, asking for permission to take down the statue amid protests against racial injustice that occurred following the police murder of George Floyd.
The committee agreed and the city then took down the statue. At the same time, Purzycki also had taken down a statue in the city central square of Delaware Founding Father Caesar Rodney.
Following the removals, Purzycki said he wanted to hold more discussions with the community about the public display of historical figures and events.
“We cannot erase history, as painful as it may be, but we can certainly discuss history with each other and determine together what we value and what we feel is appropriate to memorialize,” Purzycki said in a public statement in 2020.
More than five years later, Darby introduced her resolution, opposing the effort to restore the statue to a public place. She said she supports the statue being returned to private property, but believes that the statue shouldn’t be placed on land that taxpayers are funding.
“Globally, he just represents something so terrible and bad. In a predominantly Black and brown city, we shouldn’t have to pay to maintain him at a city park,” she told Spotlight Delaware.
The council heard about 40 minutes of public comments before discussing the measure.
More than a dozen residents, many of them older, came in opposition to the resolution. Several referenced the discrimination that Italian Americans faced after immigrating to the United States. Some described Columbus as a “sign of hope” for their community. Others characterized him as someone who “connected two great continents and paved the way for others to follow.”
“Ask yourself, how would you feel if a council member presented false toxic narratives designed to malign MLK’s character and campaigned against the legacy,” city resident Rob Savarese said to the 13-member city council, which is made up of nine Black members.
Like Savarese, most of the city residents who spoke during the public comment period opposed Darby’s resolutions.
Those who supported it emphasized Columbus’ role in colonization and slavery. Some even urged their Italian-American neighbors to choose another historical figure to honor.
“Every kind of disgusting thing that could happen happened on his watch,” city resident Baba Hamine said. “Christopher Columbus did that to my ancestors.”
Wilmington’s Columbus statue is currently being stored in a facility that “specializes in high-dollar art and sculptures,” according to Daniel Walker, deputy chief of staff for Mayor John Carney.
Walker declined to disclose the exact location, but he emphasized that the mayor’s office has made multiple offers for the community to see and pick up the statue.
Carney’s office had not been involved in conversations involving the statue, according to Walker. Asked whether Carney was in support of re-erecting the statue, Walker said the community needs to have that discussion with the City Council.
In a more recent interview after the city council vote, Walker said that Carney’s office will be in discussions with the city council and members of the community to find a path forward.
Walker noted that placing the Columbus statue in a public park would not require City Council approval through an ordinance. Still, he said ordinances have been used in the past to take similar actions.
The resolution voted down by the City Council last week was only a declaration emphasizing the position of the public body.
Councilmembers Willauer, Chris Johnson, Alex Hackett, James Spadola, Nathan Field, and Zanthia Oliver voted against it.
Councilmembers Darby, Coby Owens, and Council President Trippi Congo voted for it.
Councilmembers Michelle Harlee and Latisha Bracy voted present.
Later, Johnson, who represents Little Italy and stood as the main opponent to Darby’s ordinance, told Spotlight Delaware that if an ordinance were required to put the statue back up, he would be willing to propose it.
He said it could also include a broader monument to highlight the history and achievements of indigenous communities.
Amid protests by organizations like Black Lives Matter amid the George Floyd killing in 2020, Wilmington’s Columbus statue was one of at least 33 statues around the nation that were taken down, as well as other confederate monuments, as reported by CBS News.
Individuals throughout Delaware and other states have spoken out about Columbus’s efforts to colonize land occupied by Indigenous people, which some say led to his role in a “genocide” of the native population.
The first contact between Europeans and the indigenous civilizations that occupied the Americas occurred after Columbus arrived in 1492 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is currently Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
A report from the College of Charleston’s Lowcountry Digital History Initiative asserts that Columbus directly captured about 500 Taino slaves to be sold in Spain. About 200 of them did not survive the voyage, according to the report.
By the year 1600, the arrival of Europeans led to the deaths of roughly 55 million indigenous people, according to a 2019 study published by the Quaternary Science Reviews Journal.
During a community meeting at the St. Anthony’s Lodge No. 3012 in Little Italy last week, residents pushed back against criticism of Columbus, with some saying claims of genocide were myths.
Greto’s coalition gave a presentation discussing the history of Columbus, the oppression faced by Italian Americans, and how the celebration of Columbus Day, which was made a national holiday in 1937, gave his community hope and pride.
About 70 residents were present, including Johnson, the councilmember who represents the area. Darby did not attend the meeting.
During the presentation, Peter Frattarelli, cultural director of Societa da Vinci, argued that Columbus’s actions did not fit the definition of genocide.
Frattarelli also argued that most scholars agree the decline of the Taino people was primarily due to European diseases, not systematic extermination. He also framed Columbus’s violence as retaliatory warfare.
Finally, Frattarelli also strongly pushed back against claims that Columbus was a sex trafficker of young girls.
“Was he a saint? Was he a sinner? I’m going to tell you he was closer to a saint than a sinner,” he said.
The post Which monuments should Wilmington celebrate? Columbus statue sparks renewed debate appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Ukrainian ambassador Valerii Zaluzhnyi says future wars will require ‘technological alliances, not treaty articles’ News release thilton.drupal
The Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK addressed the evolution of the war in the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, and the future ‘robotization’ of war.
At Chatham House, the Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK said future conflicts will be fought by ‘autonomous and semi-autonomous robotic systems’.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UK and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, delivered a speech at the London-based international affairs think-tank on Monday 23 February, presenting his insights on the transformation of battlefield war and marking four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion against Ukraine.
Zaluzhnyi said technological advancements will transform the future of war, stating that modern conflicts have gone beyond conventional weapons and tactics.
Zaluzhnyi added that the ‘robotization’ of warfare will ensure military effectiveness without the need for human involvement, and that, as a result, there will be fewer casualties.
Ambassador Zaluzhnyi at Chatham House
But he warned that while states could develop and control specific technologies, no one country would be capable of dominating all vital military technologies needed in future conflicts.
Nations would also need to combine their efforts, otherwise Russia will remain a threat to Europe and beyond. ‘We will need technological alliances, not treaty articles,’ he said.
Zaluzhnyi also called for sanctions against Russia to be maintained, and argued that Russia’s economy should be pushed to breaking point: ‘…it is necessary to move away from the classic strategy of inflicting maximum damage and consistently defeating the enemy… We need to make the war more costly for Russia, and as a result, lead to its inevitable defeat.’
During the question and answer session after his keynote speech Zaluzhnyi was asked by a member of the press whether he hoped to be president of Ukraine, following speculation in recent news media coverage.
He replied that he could not consider his political future until after the war, ‘When it is over, when martial law is lifted in Ukraine…only then will we be able to discuss my personal future,’ he said, adding that such speculation was a distraction from Ukraine’s war efforts.
‘We Ukrainians no longer have a choice. We will either perish or survive. The formula for survival is simple: continue to fight, strengthen the economy and maintain unity,’ he said.
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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.
Editor’s Note: Monday morning’s State Employee Benefits Committee was canceled due to inclement weather. Tuesday and Wednesday’s Joint Finance Committee hearings also were rescheduled for Thursday, Feb. 25, and Monday, March 2.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
The State Employee Benefits Committee (SEBC), a board responsible for managing Delaware’s state employee health insurance plans, was scheduled to meet on Monday to finalize coverage changes for employees currently using weight-loss drugs.
That meeting was canceled due to inclement weather, and a reschedule date has not yet been shared.
Those changes could mean employees covered under the state’s health plan could soon pay much more out-of-pocket to get their weight-loss prescriptions or be uncovered altogether.
The SEBC previously met on Friday, Feb. 13, to introduce the potential coverage changes.
At that meeting, the committee heard multiple different options that could save the state money, but they would pass costs onto consumers using the drugs in the form of higher co-pays, almost four or five times higher than the current rate.
According to a presentation at the meeting, members pay $32 for a 30-day supply of the drug or $64 for a 90-day supply. If new copays are added to the state plan, those numbers would jump to $120 and $200, respectively.
Another option would be to completely eliminate coverage of the drugs for state employees who use them for weight loss, which officials suspect would save the state $179 million over the next three years.
If the state continues its coverage as is, the SEBC estimates it would cost nearly $211 million by 2029.
📍 The State Employee Benefits Committee meeting was canceled due to inclement weather.
The Public Service Commission, the state body charged with regulating utility services, will hear public comment on Wednesday about Delmarva Power’s proposed “large-load tariff” for energy-hungry facilities like data centers to ensure they do not shift energy infrastructure costs onto other ratepayers.
The tariff, if approved by the PSC, would set a new electricity rate for data centers and require them to pay deposits to cover the engineering and equipment cost of electrical infrastructure improvements.
The proposal comes months after Delmarva revealed it is working with five data center developers whose projects would demand a combined 2 gigawatts (GW) of energy.
The peak load, or demand for electricity, of the entire state is 2.3 GW in the winter and 2.7 GW in the summer, according to PJM.
That means the proposed data centers would together almost double the power demand for all businesses and homes in the First State.
📍 The Public Service Commission will hear comments at 6 p.m. Wednesday inside the PSC Hearing Room, located at 841 Silver Lake Blvd. in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Editor’s Note: Tuesday and Wednesday’s Joint Finance Committee hearings were rescheduled for Thursday, Feb. 25, and Monday, March 2. See below for the updated JFC hearing schedule.
State lawmakers’ budget hearings will continue this week with testimony from the Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Transportation, two of the largest state departments by budget size.
Lawmakers will also review the Fire Prevention Commission’s budget proposal.
The Joint Finance Committee’s budget review for DHSS will span the entirety of both Tuesday and Wednesday’s hearings, as the department oversees a swath of large-scale programs used by many Delawareans, including Medicaid and SNAP benefits.
📍 The Joint Finance Committee will meet from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover.
Tuesday’s hearing was canceled. Wednesday’s hearing also was canceled.
Thursday’s hearing will feature orientation for the Department of Health and Social Services and testimony from the Fire Prevention Commission in the morning, and testimony from the Department of Transportation in the afternoon.
Beginning at 9 a.m. on Monday, March 2, the JFC will hear from Department of Health and Social Services Secretary Christen Linke Young, as well as department-wide presentations.
For information about virtual attendance for the Tuesday meeting, click here. For the Wednesday meeting, click here. And for the Thursday meeting, click here.
The Public Education Funding Commission, created by the General Assembly to recommend how dollars should be distributed to Delaware schools, will meet on Monday to discuss the “legislative timeline” of its proposed hybrid funding formula.
The hybrid proposal incorporates the state’s traditional framework of distributing money on a per-student basis with one that allocates dollars based on student needs.
The commission will also discuss local education funding models, comparing Delaware’s referendum model to that of other states.
The commission’s work to reform public education spending comes after Gov. Matt Meyer made the issue a pillar of his gubernatorial campaign.
📍 The Public Education Funding Commission will meet virtually at 4 p.m. Monday. For more details, click here.
Nick Stonesifer and Olivia Marble contributed to this report.
The post Get Involved: GLP-1 coverage, data center regulations, budget review, and more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
US Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs: Early analysis from Chatham House experts Expert comment thilton.drupal
Chatham House analysts give their initial reactions to the Supreme Court’s tariffs ruling, its likely impact on President Donald Trump’s economic agenda, and his angry response to the ruling.
The US Supreme Court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs in a long-awaited ruling that will be seen as a blow for the president’s economic agenda.
By 6-3 the court found that President Trump exceeded his authority by using a law reserved for national emergencies.
Trump called the ruling ‘deeply disappointing’ and said he will impose global tariffs of 15 per cent. Here is early analysis from Chatham House experts, who are are monitoring developments.
The head-spinning changes in US tariff policy in the last few days – first the Supreme Court decision invalidating the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), then President Donald Trump’s imposition of a 10 per cent across the board tariff under Section 122 of US trade law, followed just a day later with the president upping that duty to 15 per cent – have left the American and foreign business communities, US consumers, and foreign governments with more questions than answers.
Any sighs of relief in the wake of the Court’s decision should be tempered by a new reality.
The effective global U.S. tariff rate was 13.7 per cent before the Court decision, according to the Yale Budget Lab. With Trump’s new Section 122 action duties will now be 8 per cent. But in January 2025, before the Trump administration came to power, the effective US tariff rate was roughly 3 per cent. More than a doubling of American protectionism is better than a quadrupling, but it is still higher than at any time in more than 60 years.
It is highly likely some affected party will challenge the use of Section 122, which has never been invoked by any president in its half century on the books.
The law stipulates this power is to be used for a balance of payments problem. But the Department of Justice lawyers claimed in the IEEPA case that: ‘Nor does [122] have any obvious application here, where the concerns the President identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.’ This awkward statement may come back to haunt the Trump Administration.
For those outside the United States, a major question is how the many trade and investment deals Washington has imposed on countries around the world will be affected by the scrambling of US tariff policy.
The Financial Times was quick to opine that: ‘Analysts say the risk of retaliation is likely to deter countries from seeking to backtrack on already agreed deals.’
But the Japan Times saw it differently: ‘Trump’s treasured negotiating edge dulled by tariff defeat…With a stroke of a pen, the U.S. Supreme Court wreaked havoc on President Donald Trump’s favorite method of wielding leverage over other countries.’
At the very least, the uncertainty created by the Court’s decision may lead to more foot dragging by other nations as Washington attempts to finalize the details of its framework trade and investment deals with the EU, Japan, India and others. If they do, who knows what America’s hair-triggered President may do.
It is a fallacy to assume that Trump will play by the rules. The 122 tariffs expire in 150 days. To be extended, Congress must vote to do so. Congress has shown no appetite for tariffs, especially with Congressional mid-term elections in November.
The Administration claims they can use other trade powers – Section 301 that deals with ‘unfair’ trade practices and Section 232 that allows duties for ‘national security’ purposes – to replace the 122 tariffs.
But the scope of these sections is not as broad as an across the board 15 per cent tariff. Once this becomes apparent to the president, his past behavior suggests he may simply extend the 122 tariffs or use his 301 and 232 authority in unprecedented and arguably illegal ways, challenging importers to ‘sue me’. As the IEEPA suit showed, this could take months.
Finally, it is not clear that the invocation of Section 122 and its 15 per cent tariffs will help the president politically. Just before the Court ruled, the Washington Post and ABC News conducted a public opinion survey showing that 64 per cent of Americans disapproved of how Trump was handling tariffs on imported goods.
And in the wake of the Court decision a snap YouGov poll found that 60 per cent of Americans strongly approve of striking down the IEEPA tariffs.
So the bottom line is that US protectionism will continue, and it may be even more chaotic, unpredictable and disruptive.
Bruce Stokes is a US-based non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Read his full biography here.
At first glance, this is a more comprehensive repudiation of the Trump administration’s tariff policies than many (including me) expected.
The language of the majority opinion appears to include an attempt to close off some of the other unilateral options that President Trump had said he had at his disposal.
I do wonder if the more recent rounds of purely geopolitical tariff threats influenced the decision. It may reflect both the breadth of corporate support for the lawsuit and concern with Trump’s recent rounds of tariff threats, including against Europe over Greenland.
The SCOTUS ruling covers President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ baseline 10 per cent tariff that he announced on 2 April 2025, higher tariffs on many countries, and fentanyl and other ‘national security’ tariffs.
However it does NOT cover steel/aluminum and many other product-specific tariffs issued as a result of a “232” or “301” investigation. (‘232’ and ‘301’ refer to specific sections of decades-old trade laws passed by Congress, which authorize the executive branch to impose tariffs in specific circumstances, after an investigation. 232 tariffs may include national security as a justification.)
President Trump still has lots of ways to impose tariffs. He’s not going to back down.
I’m very struck by this phrase from Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent: ‘So the Court’s decision is not likely to greatly restrict presidential tariff authority going forward.’
The court also did not mandate refunds of the tariffs collected to date, either to consumers or to manufacturers reliant on tariffed imports.
Does that suggest that Chief Justice Roberts identified an approach to the law that feels like a momentous defense of the Constitution but has relatively little practical effect?
Or will this ruling presage a vibe shift that gets the administration to change course?
Senator Bernie Moreno, the senior Republican senator from Ohio, has called on Congress to use reconciliation to enact the president’s tariffs.
This would presumably be challenging given that Republicans in both houses have joined Democrats in opposing President Trump’s tariffs.
Heather Hurlburt served as Chief of Staff to US Trade Representative Katherine Tai from 2022 to 2024. Read her full Chatham House biography here.
The 20 February US Supreme Court 6-3 decision on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is a significant fork in the tariff-driven trade policy road taken exactly 13 months ago by President Donald Trump when he announced his America First Trade Policy.
It does not, however, mark an end to his expansive use of Executive authority to shape his engagement with global trading partners.
In his combative reaction to the ruling, the president previewed alternative legal authorities that his administration will use as a basis for continued tariff action, including a new 10 per cent global tariff under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows for temporary import surcharges or import quotas to address balance-of-payments issues.
With details on scope, applicability and implementation of additional actions still unclear, US trade partners around the world will scramble in the coming days to determine the potential impact on their respective deals or framework agreements reached with Washington. Uncertainty will continue to be the name of the game.
The ruling comes on the heels of the release of the US Census Bureau’s 2025 international trade data confirming Mexico and Canada’s place as the first and second US trading partners, export markets and sources of imports, and as the three countries undertake the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)’s first joint review.
In North America, with intraregional annual trade at almost 2 trillion dollars and millions of jobs and investment decisions linked to the continuity of the agreement, a great deal is at stake.
In its initial reaction to the ruling, the government of Canada stated that it reinforces its view that the IEEPA tariffs ‘are unjustified’. Mexico’s Secretary of the Economy said he would be reaching out to his US counterparts and await more details on the announced 10 per cent global tariff. Both countries were subject to IEEPA tariffs (35 per cent on Canada and 25 per cent on Mexico) on non-USMCA compliant exports, in addition to various Section 232 sectorial tariffs which continue to apply.
It’s important to keep in mind that roughly 85 per cent of massive Canadian and Mexican USMCA-compliant exports – totalling approximately 780 billion dollars – maintains tariff-free access to the US market.
Beyond specific negotiating strategies with Washington, Ottawa and Mexico City will continue to focus on reducing uncertainty and preserving their current relative competitive advantages in a rapidly changing tariff environment.
Ambassador Julián Ventura is a career diplomat, currently on leave from the Mexican Foreign Service, with over 33 years in public service. Read his full Chatham House biography here.
The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs may have removed one instrument from his tariff toolkit, but it has done nothing to make US trade policy more predictable. If anything, it may herald even greater volatility.
Trump retains several alternative instruments now that tariffs imposed under the IEEPA have been ruled unlawful. Each entails procedural hurdles, evidentiary thresholds, time limits and litigation risks. Yet, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed in his dissenting opinion, ‘the Court’s decision might not prevent Presidents from imposing most, if not all, of these same sorts of tariffs under other statutory authorities.’
That Trump, visibly angered by the ruling, quoted Kavanaugh’s statement not just once but twice suggests that he is not reconsidering his long-held belief in the benefits of tariffs. He has already pledged to introduce a new global tariff of 15 per cent, while signalling that further measures may follow.
For US trade partners – including several that negotiated agreements intended to reduce IEEPA tariffs on their exports – the outlook is unclear. The uncertain status of those arrangements, together with the prospect of new tariffs, now adds an additional layer of unpredictability to an already unstable picture.
Canada, for its part, gains little from the removal of the IEEPA tariffs, since goods compliant with the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement were already exempt. Meanwhile, the tariffs inflicting real pain on key Canadian sectors – including autos, steel, aluminium and lumber – remain in place because they rest on different statutory authorities. And any new US global tariffs may prove more damaging than the IEEPA measures if they eliminate existing exemptions.
The logic of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, in other words, remains unchanged: the US is no longer a predictable or reliable partner, leaving its jilted allies with little choice but to diversify their trade partnerships and invest in their own resilience.
Canada-based Roland Paris is director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and former foreign policy adviser to the prime minister of Canada. Read his full Chatham House biography here.
Chatham House Prize 2025: A humanitarian lifeline in Sudan 26 March 2026 — 6:00PM TO 7:00PM Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
Please join us as Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups, the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), accept the Chatham House Prize.
Join us to celebrate Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups – the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) – the 2025 winners of the Chatham House Prize.
Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups–the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs)–have been awarded the 2025 Chatham House Prize, in recognition of their crucial role in delivering humanitarian assistance during the ongoing war in Sudan.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed by a devastating war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), triggering one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. Over thirteen million people have been displaced from their homes, with more than thirty-three million–around two‑thirds of the population–needing humanitarian assistance. The conflict has devastated infrastructure and left vast areas without functioning state institutions, or reliable access to basic services, with women and children most impacted by the lack of security, healthcare and livelihoods.
In this context, the ERRs have proven indispensable. These community networks are said to have been the difference between life and death for millions–saving lives in areas often inaccessible to international organizations. They provide essentials like food, water and medical supplies, and maintain or repair infrastructure such as power and water systems–all while under risk of attack and obstruction by the warring parties. Their work has been praised and recognized by several international bodies, including the Norwegian Nobel Committee, particularly for their impartial nature and attempts to provide aid to all those caught up in the conflict.
About the Chatham House Prize
The Chatham House Prize is voted for by Chatham House members, following nominations from the institute’s staff. The award is presented on behalf of the institute’s patron, His Majesty the King, representing the non-partisan and authoritative character of the Prize.
The Chatham House Prize was launched in 2005. Previous recipients of the Prize include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Sir David Attenborough, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Médecins Sans Frontières.
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has made a series of claims about the economy, a topic that should feature prominently in his State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 24.
“We have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said at a White House press briefing on Jan. 20, adding later that “America is booming.” He made similar comments the following day, asserting that “we were a dead country” a year ago.
But his economic boasts include false or misleading claims, and he sometimes pushes an incorrect narrative of an abrupt change in some economic indicators since he came back to the White House.
As preparation for what we might hear in Tuesday night’s speech, we offer a guide to a dozen of Trump’s recent claims about the economy, most of which we’ve written about before. They touch on inflation, economic growth, manufacturing, wages, jobs, the deficit, stock market and more.
Proud of federal data showing that economic growth in the second and third quarters of 2025 exceeded expectations, Trump in Iowa on Jan. 27 falsely claimed that “under my leadership, economic growth is exploding to numbers unheard of. They’ve never had them before.”
After declining by an annualized rate of 0.6% in the first quarter of 2025, which covers the three months from January to March, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation) grew at a rate of 3.8% in the second quarter of 2025 and at a rate of 4.4% in the third quarter, according to estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
But those were not record-setting numbers. They were the largest quarterly increases since the economy expanded at a rate of 4.7% in the third quarter of 2023, under President Joe Biden.
As we wrote this month, the quarterly growth record is 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020, which was at the beginning of the economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, according to BEA estimates back to 1947, the record was 16.7% growth in the first quarter of 1950. Yearly growth in GDP has averaged about 2.75% over the last 50 years.
Trump told NBC News in a Feb. 4 interview: “We have, it was just announced, more jobs right now occupied in the United States of America than at any time during its existence, 250 years. There are more people working today than at any time in the history of our country. Pretty good stat.”
While accurate, the statistic loses some luster when factoring in steady U.S. population growth. In fact, job growth slowed and the employment-to-population ratio declined a bit in the first year of Trump’s second term.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,627,000 people employed in the U.S. in January, and that’s the highest number on record. But by and large, as the population of the U.S. has grown over the years, so too has the number of people employed in the U.S., with notable exceptions during recessions. This graph from BLS gives the long-term picture:
Since employment recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2022, jobs have reached new highs nearly every single month. Trump’s claim also overlooks that job growth was lower between January 2025 and January 2026 under Trump — a gain of 359,000 jobs or 0.2% — than it was for Biden’s final year — a gain of 1.2 million jobs or 0.8.%.
There are other, more relevant statistics, on employment growth that factor in population growth. BLS’ employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population that is working, declined from 60.1% in January 2025 to 59.8% in January 2026. Another measure is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work. That rate has stayed relatively the same, going from 62.6% in January 2025 to 62.5% in January 2026. The so-called “prime age” labor force participation rate, focusing just on those ages 25 to 54, rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026.
Trump has frequently cited this hollow statistic about more people being employed than ever before during both his first and second terms, including during his State of the Union address in 2019.
In the NBC News interview, Trump repeated his false claim that he “inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country,” and added that “now we have almost no inflation.”
When Trump took office in January 2025, the annualized rate of inflation was 3%, based on the Consumer Price Index. That was far from the 9.1% rate in June 2022, under Biden, which was the highest 12-month increase since November 1981, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worst inflation in U.S. history was not long after World War I, when the Consumer Price Index was up 23.7% for the 12 months ending in June 1920.
Trump has repeatedly mocked Democrats for raising the issue of “affordability,” which Trump says he has since solved.
“Prices are way down. You don’t hear the Democrats talking about affordability anymore, which they caused the affordability problem, very badly,” Trump said on Feb. 6. “But you don’t hear that word. I haven’t heard that word spoken in a week and a half because they can’t speak because the prices are down.”
But overall prices are not down. As of January, one year into Trump’s second term, the annual inflation rate was down to 2.4%. However, that’s above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. So, prices are still increasing, but at a slower pace than when Trump took office.
In the Jan. 20 press briefing at the White House, Trump falsely claimed to have “ended Biden stagflation,” which he said is “far worse than inflation.” The U.S. was “plagued by the nightmare of stagflation” under Biden, and now “we are witnessing the exact opposite,” Trump said at a World Economic Forum meeting on Jan. 21.
But, as we’ve written, economists told us that the U.S. economy under Biden did not experience stagflation, which Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us “refers to a sustained period of high inflation combined with weak or stagnant real economic growth, typically alongside rising unemployment.” He said that definition did not apply to the Biden economy.
Inflation was high during Biden’s first two years in office, then declined sharply in the last half of his presidency. “However, real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Handley said.
In addition, Aeimit Lakdawala, an associate professor of economics at Wake Forest University, told us that there has not been a complete economic turnaround under Trump.
“What we’re really seeing is a continuation of trends that were already well underway before Trump took office in January 2025,” Lakdawala said. He noted that the annual inflation rate is “modestly lower” under Trump, while the average annualized increase in real GDP under Trump is “a touch lower” than in Biden’s last two years. The unemployment rate, at 4.3% as of January, is also slightly higher than it was when Trump took office.
Trump has repeatedly boasted that the stock market has outperformed expectations. “Your 401(k)s are doing very well,” Trump said in a speech to military families in North Carolina on Feb. 13.
A Feb. 16 press release from the White House put some additional spin on the claim, saying the stock market has “rebounded strongly under President Trump’s leadership.” The release notes that the S&P 500 “surg[ed] nearly 40% from its early-year low.” That’s true. But the low in 2025 came just a few days after Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on April 2 that sent stock prices tumbling. Since then, stocks have rebounded and achieved new highs.
Since Trump took office, the S&P 500 has risen 14.5% (that’s for the period between the close of the market on Jan. 17, 2025, the last business day before the inauguration, and the close of the market on Feb. 18, 2026). Although Trump has said stocks far outperformed Wall Street expectations, that’s only a little better than many financial analysts forecast for 2025 just before Trump took office.
As Yahoo! Finance wrote on Jan. 2, 2025, “The median year-end target for the S&P 500 among strategists tracked by Yahoo Finance sits at 6,600. This would represent about a 12% increase from the index’s current level.”
“And if you remember when I was first elected, everybody said, if I got it to 50,000, the Dow, or 7,000 with the S&P, if I got it to 50,000 with a Dow, that would be an amazing — that would be in four years from then, from the election,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 13.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, reached 50,000 in early February, but has since dropped a bit, and was at 49,576 at the open of the market on Feb. 19.
But it’s misleading to suggest the stock market “rebounded strongly” under Trump. The stock market performed well in Biden’s final two years in office — with the S&P 500 rising over 20% each of those years — better than the 13% gain Trump saw in his first year. As we wrote in our story, “Biden’s Final Numbers,” the S&P 500 grew by nearly 58% over the entirety of Biden’s four years. The stock market has been on a good long-term run, with the S&P rising nearly 68% during Trump’s first four years in office and by 166% during the eight years under President Barack Obama before that.
We also note that while Trump often boasts that everyone’s 401(k) retirement account has risen, only about 62% of Americans own any stock, according to a Gallup poll in 2025. Ownership of stock skews heavily to the wealthy — 87% among those in households earning at least $100,000. It was 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.
In a Feb. 6 gaggle with reporters, in which he claimed that “we’ve had massive price reductions,” Trump misleadingly said that “if you look at gasoline, $1.99 a gallon.” That was far from the national average price.
Gasoline prices are about 19 cents (or 6%) lower than they were when Trump took office, but, as of the week ending Feb. 9, the average price in the U.S. for a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.90, nearly $1 more than Trump said, according to the Energy Information Administration. One week later, the average price was $2.92, as of the week ending Feb. 16.
There also were no states in which the average price was below $2 at the time of Trump’s claim. Oklahoma had the lowest average price at $2.36 per gallon on Feb. 6, according to AAA data. That state, at $2.29, also had the lowest average price on Feb. 18.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us in an email that, as of Feb. 14, there were “about 40 stations in the nation with gasoline below $2/gal, which is what we’ve generally seen on a daily basis for February thus far.” In a Feb. 16 post on Substack, he wrote that, as of that date, $2.79 was the “most common U.S. gas price encountered by motorists.”
In a Jan. 27 press gaggle, Trump also claimed to have “made a lot of progress” on the “very, very high prices” that he inherited. “So, we have the groceries going down. We have the energy going down,” he said. That’s misleading.
While the average price of some grocery items, such as eggs and bread, has decreased since the start of Trump’s second term, average food prices overall are up — not down. As of January, the Consumer Price Index for at-home food products purchased at a grocery store or supermarket had increased about 2.2%, year over year, according to the most recent BLS data.
As for energy prices, it’s not clear what Trump is referring to. The CPI for energy overall was down 0.3% for the 12 months ending in January, while the index for household energy specifically rose 6.6% in that period, according to BLS data. Also, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour has risen about 7.3% in the last year.
In his Jan. 30 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Trump exaggerated when he wrote that “with the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27% in a single year.”
Budget deficits occur when federal spending exceeds revenue. The White House has said that Trump’s figure was calculated by comparing the cumulative budget deficit from February to November in 2025 with the combined deficit for the same 10 months in 2024.
But organizations that track the budget deficit typically compare deficits based on months in fiscal years, not calendar years. The $1.78 trillion budget deficit for fiscal year 2025, which began on Oct. 1, 2024, and ended on Sept. 30, decreased about 2.3% from the $1.82 trillion budget gap in fiscal year 2024. (Trump alone was president for a full eight out of the 12 months in FY 2025.)
As of January, the budget deficit was down about 17% through the first four months of FY 2026 when compared with the same period in FY 2025. An increase in federal revenue, including from tariffs, contributed to the decline. On Feb. 9, the Congressional Budget Office said, “Customs duties, including tariff revenues, collected this year were more than four times the amount recorded in the first four months of last year, an increase of $90 billion.”
However, in its most recent long-term budget outlook, the CBO projected that the final FY 2026 budget deficit will end up being close to $1.9 trillion, higher than the deficit in FY 2025. That would be about $140 billion higher than the deficit that CBO projected for FY 2026 in January 2025, before any of Trump’s policies had been implemented.
Trump’s claim that he has “slashed our gaping trade deficit by a staggering 77%,” as he said Jan. 27 in Iowa, is misleading. In 2025, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services decreased by 0.2%, or about $2.1 billion, from 2024, according to data the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Feb. 19. The 2025 goods-and-services trade deficit of roughly $901.5 billion was the third largest going back to 1960.
Instead, as we wrote on Feb. 3, Trump’s claim appears to compare the monthly trade deficit in January 2025 to the deficit nine months later in October, a 16-year low. That’s a decrease of 77.6%, according to BEA figures revised this month. (The decrease from January to December was 45.2%.) But economic experts told us that comparing the trade deficit in one month to another is not preferable because monthly trade figures can be volatile.
For instance, in the first three months of 2025, the trade imbalance surged to between roughly $120 billion and $136 billion, as U.S. importers loaded up on foreign goods to get ahead of tariffs on imported products that Trump had proposed. Imports went back down after the tariffs went into effect, producing smaller trade deficits in the months later in the year.
“Large month-to-month swings are common, even in periods with no underlying structural change in trade policy or economic conditions,” Handley, at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email for our story. “For that reason, economists almost never evaluate claims about the ‘trade deficit’ based on comparisons between two individual months.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that “factory construction is up by 41%” under his second term. That’s misleading. The Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data, which the White House referred us to, shows that spending has declined since Trump took office.
The quarterly data show a 6.7% decline, while the drop was 7.3% on a monthly basis, from January 2025 to October, the latest data available.
As we’ve explained, the White House gets a 41% increase by comparing the monthly average from January to August 2025 with the yearly average for 2021 to 2024. But that methodology fails to take into account the 212% increase in factory construction spending over Biden’s four years, partly fueled by the 2022 CHIPS Act, which helped fund semiconductor manufacturing facilities and continues to affect construction spending. Anirban Basu, chief economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry trade association, told us that the manufacturing construction spending in 2025 is “largely due” to the CHIPS Act.
It’s worth noting that the economy lost 83,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first 12 months. In the year before he took office, the decline was 202,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump has repeatedly mentioned the decline in real wages, meaning they are adjusted for inflation, over the four years of Biden’s presidency and the increase in real wages so far under his second term. It’s true that real average weekly earnings fell 4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, during Biden’s term, and they’ve gone up 1.9% in the year since January 2025. But Trump at times has left the misleading impression that this has been an abrupt turnaround. Over Biden’s last year, real wages went up 0.7%
On Jan. 13, Trump said: “After real wages plummeted by $3,000 under sleepy Joe Biden, real wages are up by $1,300 in less than one year under President Trump.” Later that month, he said that “wages have gone up … much faster” than inflation. With Biden, he said, “it was just the opposite. Wages in the United States in the last year have gone up.”
Wages rose faster than inflation over the last year-and-a-half of Biden’s presidency. They’ve outpaced inflation since June 2023, and they’ve continued to do so since Trump took office.
“It remains the case that both at the tail end of the Biden administration and the beginning of this Trump administration, real wages have been rising. That is to say, inflation has been rising more slowly than wages have been,” Gary Burtless, a senior fellow emeritus in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told us in a phone interview when we wrote about this topic in December.
As for the specific dollar amounts Trump has mentioned — a $3,000 decline in real wages under Biden and a $1,300 increase under his term — the White House told us that’s based on weekly wage data from BLS that’s adjusted for inflation using the CPI-W, which is the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers. It measures the change in prices for a basket of goods purchased by such workers, and it’s the index Social Security uses to calculate cost-of-living adjustments. Using that method, we got a decline of nearly $2,900 over Biden’s four years and an increase of about $1,400 for Trump’s first year ($1,363 to be exact), a figure that includes January data released this month.
Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, cautioned against looking at wage growth only over presidential terms, calling it “deeply misleading” because “macroeconomic cycles occasionally have huge effects that have nothing to do with presidential performance.”
Bivens noted that average wages jumped up during the COVID-19 pandemic when the unemployment rate also spiked as mainly low-wage workers lost their jobs. As those low-wage workers regained employment, “it had the effect of artificially lowering measured wages in the aggregate.” (Burtless also said the pandemic had this impact on wage data.)
“The lesson is that the proper way to measure macroeconomic variables like average wages is from business cycle peak to business cycle peak, not from the trough to a peak. That’s why, for example, we measure from 2019-2024 or 2025,” Bivens said.
But presidents of both parties are apt to take credit or cast blame for increases or declines in real wage growth.
The president continues to make the exaggerated boast that “we secured commitments for a record breaking plus $18 trillion” in “new investments,” as he said in Iowa in late January. In his pre-Super Bowl NBC News interview, Trump also made the claim, saying “$18 trillion is being invested in our country as we speak.” At times, he has attributed this to his policies on tariffs.
A White House website tallying such promises puts the total at $9.6 trillion for “U.S. and Foreign Investments,” providing very few details on these agreements. But as we’ve written before, even that number is shaky because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not happen.
“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April 2025 analysis when Trump began making such claims.
In looking at the White House list in May, we found that some investments may not be due to Trump. A $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, for example, was reportedly in the planning stages in March 2024, well before the election. And both a labor union and a Democratic governor took credit for the announced reopening of an auto assembly plant that also was on the Trump administration’s list.
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Why are Middle Eastern governments lobbying against a US attack on Iran? Expert comment jon.wallace
Threat perceptions have changed. Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt all wish to avoid a war that would bring even more upheaval to the region.
Not long ago, most leaders in the Middle East were frustrated with the US for not taking a firmer stance towards Iran. Many regional elites were furious with the Obama administration for pursuing diplomacy with Tehran, adopting an accommodating stance, and prioritizing a nuclear deal, which culminated in the short-lived JCPOA.
The reason was clear: Iran was widely viewed as a major threat to regional stability.
Between 2003 and 2023 its influence had grown across the region. In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, Iraq came increasingly under Tehran’s influence, alongside Iran’s long-standing alliance with Syria (under the now deposed Assad regime), and its considerable clout in Lebanon wielded through Hezbollah. Conflict in Yemen saw Iran’s influence in the country deepening through its alliance with the Houthis. Iran, therefore, had created a powerful network of state and non-state allies across the region, commonly referred to as the ‘Axis of Resistance’.
This Iran-centric network was previously a highly potent way for Tehran to capitalize on conflicts and instabilities and deepen its influence. Arab leaders feared this network: King Abdullah of Jordan portrayed it as an emerging ‘Shia Crescent’, following the Iraq invasion.
Yet today, with a real prospect of US military action against Iran, regional states are pursuing energetic diplomacy to dissuade the US from attacking. Oman, Qatar, and Turkey have all ramped up their efforts to mediate. Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also advocated for de-escalation and diplomacy. What explains this striking reversal?
Iran’s power and ambition across the region is diminished, and the prospect of an Iran-centric order has receded. For Middle Eastern leaders, the threats have changed: the greatest risks are now an expansionist and aggressive Israel, and the chaos of a potentially collapsed Iranian state.
The Axis of Resistance, once a powerful network, is increasingly transforming into a resistance without an axis. It has been severely damaged since Hamas’s cross-border attacks of 7 October 2023, the war in Gaza, and a sequence of Israeli military campaigns.
Hezbollah has been degraded in Lebanon by relentless Israeli attacks. Assad has been toppled in Syria. The Iraqi Shia militias and Houthis in Yemen are under increasing pressure. Iran itself has been weakened by the damage to its network, the 12-day war with Israel, and the US strike on its nuclear facility. That, in turn has diminished the Iranian threat to regional states.
Conversely, Israel’s expansionism and unpredictability have grown, and increasingly alarm countries in its near neighbourhood.
Its September 2025 attack on Doha in particular indicated a willingness by Israel to breach commonly held understandings about regional security and the US security umbrella, amplifying the Gulf’s threat perception emanating from Israel.
The prevailing view across the region is that they have overestimated the Iranian threat, and underestimated the Israeli one. The less the region’s leaders perceive a threat from Iran, the more they will feel threatened by Israel and seek to counterbalance its power.
The changing nature of regional states’ threat perceptions informs their strategy towards Iran. Broadly speaking, there are three main policy approaches: regime change, containment, and policy-based pushback.
The US and Israel remain wedded to the first two approaches. There were indeed times when some regional states favoured elements of these approaches too. As late as 2018, during Trump’s first term, the US tried to midwife the stillborn Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA), commonly known as the Arab NATO, composed of the six Gulf states plus Egypt and Jordan as a bulwark against Iran.
But in the post-7 October context, the regime change and containment policies hardly find any receptive ears amongst the Arab states.
Regime change, through a war, is viewed as highly dangerous. There is no organized, nation-wide, popular and credible opposition in Iran, and the regime and state are so intertwined, any regime collapse raises the prospect of a state collapse – or a regime that metamorphizes into something even more militarized.
The repercussions of a state collapse would far exceed what the Middle East has experienced as a result of conflict in Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, whether in the form of instability, migration, radicalism, the proliferation of armed groups, or regional spillover.
And Iran’s demographic composition, with its sizeable ethnic minorities concentrated in specific areas of the country, heightens fears that the country could become internally fragmented.
Plus, it is widely believed among regional leaders that an Iran knocked out of the equation will embolden Israel to attempt to reshape the region in its image – something that is an anathema to most regional states.
Trump’s lack of clarity regarding the scale and aim of any military option further heightens regional fears about the implications of a potential military strike.
Containment of Iran was one of the central elements of US-backed regional initiatives, such as the Abraham Accords, which were premised on the idea of an order built on Arab-Israeli cooperation within a US-centric framework.
This containment logic was probably more applicable to Israeli policy than to the Arab-Gulf states. But Arab-Gulf countries increasingly dismiss the strategy. In the Middle East, containment-based policies have seldom achieved the intended outcomes. They failed to contain and instead contributed to increased regional polarization and fragmentation.
Given the high cost and danger linked to the first two options, regional states have increasingly adopted the policy-based approach towards Iran. That means opposing and pushing back against certain Iranian policies rather than seeking regime change or a broad containment. In the ongoing US–Iran dispute, Tehran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, and regional network and policy are the core elements.
Regional states oppose a US strike on Iran as a means to resolve these issues – but are concerned by them too. Opposition to Iran’s proxy network is a common policy position that unifies most regional countries. Similarly, these states do not want to see a nuclear Iran, although they do not believe this is likely to happen anytime soon.
Conscious of regional concerns about the core elements of the US-Iranian negotiations, Tehran has a limited appetite for a diplomatic approach that involved not only the US and Iran but also regional states, as proposed by Turkey. Another possible reason for Iran’s opposition to a broader diplomatic track is that, if diplomacy fails in a bilateral negotiation, Iran can blame the US’s bad faith: whereas a wider format might see regional states assign part of the blame to Iranian intransigence.
Saudi–UAE Tensions: Yemen and Regional Implications 5 March 2026 — 1:00PM TO 2:15PM Anonymous (not verified) Online
Panellists examine how tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi reflect broader divergences in regional strategy, security priorities, and approaches to influence.
Panellists examine how tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi reflect broader divergences in regional strategy, security priorities, and approaches to influence.
In the final days of 2025, tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), once key partners in the Yemen coalition, became more visible as differences over the conflict’s endgame resurfaced. A central source of friction was their opposing relationships with local actors, particularly the UAE’s support for the Southern Transitional Council (STC), whose push for southern autonomy conflicted with Saudi Arabia’s backing of Yemen’s internationally recognized government and its preference for preserving territorial unity. As Saudi Arabia intensified efforts to stabilize the front lines and advance a political settlement, the UAE’s announcement of a full withdrawal from Yemen brought these underlying disagreements into sharper focus.
Panellists will discuss how the episode underscores not only differing assessments of Yemen’s political future and security architecture but also broader divergences in regional strategy that had been developing between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in recent years. Speakers will also discuss how the Yemen file became one arena in which evolving economic ambitions, security priorities, and approaches to regional influence have increasingly shaped the relationship between the two Gulf states, with implications likely to extend beyond the conflict itself.
For a month, Michael Rectenwald had been trying to get Nick Fuentes to notice him. Rectenwald had a new political action committee devoted to anti-Zionism, and he hoped the far-right influencer would promote it to his legions of perpetually online, often antisemitic fans. But Rectenwald, a former New York University professor and one-time presidential hopeful, had struggled to stand out to the ascendant Fuentes, who has come to symbolize the formerly fringe extremes of the online right. So in October, Rectenwald posted something sure to catch Fuentes’s eye: “Nick has sold out to the cabal.”
It worked. “Fuck you,” Fuentes wrote back.
This was Rectenwald’s shot. He apologized, calling Fuentes “a brilliant guy.” He reposted an uncannily gorgeous, computer-generated woman in a cross necklace and blazer encouraging the two men to “drop the beef.” She sat in front of an American flag and six light-up letters spelling “AZAPAC,” the acronym for Rectenwald’s new group. If Fuentes would just endorse it, Rectenwald promised, he’d “take it all back.”
Rectenwald launched the Anti-Zionist America Political Action Committee in August, vowing to fight to end U.S. financial and military aid to Israel and root out pro-Israel influence in Congress. AZAPAC aims to raise money to unseat pro-Israel legislators in the coming midterm elections, targeting some of the main recipients of cash from influential groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel.
It’s a goal that might sound appealing for the electoral left, whose members have long struggled to make meaningful progress on Palestinian rights in Washington, D.C., largely because of the strong grip the pro-Israel lobby holds on U.S. politicians. And as Israel’s genocide in Gaza stretches into a third year, AZAPAC’s policy goals may tap into a political energy currently unaddressed by either major party: growing anti-Israel sentiment on the right.
Though the Republican party loudly backs Israel and its war effort, far-right online spaces are growing increasingly critical of Israel. While accusations of antisemitism from the pro-Israel mainstream often dog Israel’s critics on the left, they appear as little cause for concern to far-right figures and their followers. As the nonpartisan AZAPAC works to sway the 2026 midterms, Rectenwald’s group will test whether candidates across the political spectrum will be similarly pressed on the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The AZAPAC founder has attempted to connect with openly antisemitic figures like Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who famously praised Hitler. Rectenwald is a regular on The Stew Peters Show, which streams on the Peter Thiel and JD Vance-funded YouTube alternative Rumble, where the host has used slurs to describe Jewish and Black people — to no objection from Rectenwald. He’s courted support from popular manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who has falsely claimed Jewish people are behind DEI policies, transgender identity, and “open borders.” AZAPAC is helping fund at least one candidate who is a Hitler apologist and another who has participated in white nationalist demonstrations.
In a conversation with The Intercept, Rectenwald made clear he’s aware such affiliations could be detrimental to his cause. He said he is no longer seeking the support of Fuentes, though he remains interested in his fan base — they’re “more sincere than him on some things” — and that he was unaware of “the depth of” Bilzerian’s antisemitic views, which are well–documented online.
Asked about Peters’s language, Rectenwald told The Intercept he would no longer appear on his show, then reversed and said he didn’t want to “throw him under the bus.” Peters, Rectenwald added, has “helped us quite a bit.”
Affiliating with such figures perpetuates harmful and often violent rhetoric toward Jewish people, antisemitism and hate speech experts told The Intercept, and in the most extreme cases, conspiracy theories can motivate violence, as occurred when a white nationalist shooter massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
These antisemitic allyships also risk undermining legitimate criticism of the state of Israel — a heightened liability at a time when the federal government and its pro-Israel allies have launched largely spurious claims of antisemitism against advocates on the left who support Palestine and oppose Israel’s genocide.
“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders,” said Ben Lorber, an author and researcher of antisemitism and white Christian nationalism. “It stands to really harm the movement.”
“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders.”
Rectenwald appears to understand what he’s risking. After The Intercept reached out to AZAPAC-endorsed candidates for this story, two rejected the group’s backing and were scrubbed from the site, and a third threatened to do the same. Rectenwald accused The Intercept of trying to sink his PAC.
Rectenwald himself has used language commonly associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories of global Jewish control, and he argues that other Israel critics embrace similar language. Online, he regularly refers to “the Jewish mafia” and “Jewish elites,” and last April, he self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” as he said on a podcast, but Amazon barred him from using the title.
“We don’t use the same language and talk about the same things with the same terms,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, referring to Peters. And yet, he said, “I do believe he’s doing pretty good work in terms of exposing the Zionist network and what it’s up to.” He said a significant portion of AZAPAC’s early donations arrived after his appearances on Peters’s show, which also runs commercials for the group.
Rectenwald self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” but Amazon barred him from using the title.
During a September episode while introducing Rectenwald, Peters referred to Jewish people using a common antisemitic slur. A month earlier, he used an anti-Black slur to describe Department of Justice attorney Leo Terrell in another episode with Rectenwald. In that episode, Peters said the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad, satanic, Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.”
Rectenwald promised Peters in his August appearance that AZAPAC does not have “infiltrators,” “dual allegiances,” or “sneaky Jews coming in and running the show.” He closed out the episode by offering Peters an invite — which he told The Intercept has since been rescinded — to be a member of AZAPAC’s board.
An AZAPAC ad launched in November and produced by the far-right company Dissident Media shows Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, Palestinian children killed by Israel, re-enactments of the American Revolution — and the red, clawed hands of a puppet master manipulating strings overlaying a mashup of the American and Israeli flags.
Rectenwald told The Intercept that he was not aware “puppet master” was a well-known antisemitic trope and that the strings represented the pro-Israeli donor class’s influence on the Trump administration. Plus, the trailer was a success: Donations poured in as it drew attention online, Rectenwald said.
AZAPAC had raised $111,556 by the end of December, according to recent FEC filings.
Of AZAPAC’s 10 publicly endorsed candidates, six are running as Republicans with three Democrats and a Libertarian on its slate. The group is more focused on Republicans, Rectenwald said, because he aims to put a dent in the GOP’s pro-Israel base. AZAPAC is backing Aaron Baker, for example, an America First conservative who is running to unseat Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a vocal supporter of Israel and Netanyahu.
At least one AZAPAC candidate drew national headlines five years ago. Tyler Dykes, a Republican candidate running for Rep. Nancy Mace’s congressional seat in South Carolina, was famously accused of performing a Nazi salute, which he denies, while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers with a stolen riot shield. (Trump pardoned Dykes on his first day in office.) Dykes also received a felony conviction for his participation in the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where organizers protested the removal of a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and yelled, “Jews will not replace us.”
Reached by The Intercept, Dykes said in an emailed statement he denounces “violence and extremism in all its forms.” He added that “Robert E. Lee was a hero, and deserves to be honored as such.”
Rectenwald told The Intercept that AZAPAC’s board had vetted Dykes and other candidates. He said he was willing to tolerate certain disagreements with the candidates and their views. The endorsements, Rectenwald said, are “a pragmatism of sorts.”
“We don’t agree with all of these candidates,” Rectenwald said. “We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”
AZAPAC’s endorsement process is primarily based on a 19-part questionnaire, which Rectenwald shared with The Intercept. It asks things like whether a candidate would pledge not to receive campaign donations from prominent pro-Israel groups or “any other foreign lobby/PAC”; what they think of laws restricting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or imposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism; and whether they would vote to end military aid to Israel.
“We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”
The group’s contradictions are perhaps best captured by two brief recent endorsements: two former American soldiers, Anthony Aguilar and Greg Stoker, running for Congress as progressive Green Party candidates. As a contractor working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Aguilar, who is running in North Carolina, became a whistleblower alleging that GHF employees were firing into crowds of starving civilians at aid sites. Stoker, running in Texas, took part in last year’s Global Sumud Flotilla, a humanitarian mission meant to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
Their AZAPAC endorsements were short-lived.
After receiving questions from The Intercept about Rectenwald’s language and AZAPAC’s associations with far-right figures, both Aguilar and Stoker rejected the group’s backing. Mentions of them had been erased from AZAPAC’s online presence by Tuesday.
In explaining his withdrawal, Aguilar’s campaign acknowledged that anti-genocide and anti-Zionist activists “are falsely accused on antisemitism on a regular basis” to discredit their work. “For that reason, we want to avoid being associated with any group whose statements or actions raise credible concerns of actual antisemitism,” Aguilar’s campaign manager said in a statement.
Stoker told The Intercept that “I have always used my platform to fight against racial superiority,” adding that AZAPAC’s narrow focus on “old conspiracy theories” and eradicating the pro-Zionist lobby “is not going to fix any of the larger systemic issues facing working class Americans.”
Christine Reyna, a professor at De Paul University who studies the psychology of extremism, questioned why AZAPAC would endorse candidates like Dykes and Casey Putsch, a racecar driver and AZAPAC-backed Republican candidate for Ohio governor. In August, Putsch posted a video asking Grok to list “all the good things Adolf Hitler did or was responsible for creating in his life” and railed against the Jewish right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whom he called “an annoying little rodent.” While there’s a growing number of other candidates who oppose sending military aid to Israel or have sworn off AIPAC donations, backing candidates like Putsch and Dykes could serve as a dog whistle, Reyna said, to some of the most extreme corners of the far right.
“When you package these really frightening and terrible and dangerous ideologies and you hide them behind this front-facing organization that gives them legitimacy,” Reyna said, “That can be extremely dangerous.”
Aligning with such America First nationalists, who tend to ignore the issue of America’s own ambitions of control and profit, can harm other communities, antisemitism researcher Lorber warned, because of their anti-Blackness, xenophobia, or anti-LGBTQ views. In the case of Israel, these far-right alliances can also injure the movement for Palestinian liberation, he said.
“If we get distracted chasing fantasies of Jewish cabals, it harms our analysis, it makes our work less informed and less effective,” Lorber said, “and it also divides our movements.”
“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel. But neo-Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”
Palestinian-American advocate and analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa, whose family is from Gaza, is acutely aware of the ways pro-Israel institutions have attacked anti-Zionist work for being antisemitic. He said those bad-faith attacks were why he was concerned about AZAPAC’s affiliations with the far right, which has long rooted its criticism of Israel in “actually racist and antisemitic” beliefs.
“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel,” Kenney-Shawa said. “But neo Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”
The day after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Putsch, who did not respond to outreach from The Intercept, doubled down on his support for ICE’s mass deportation campaign. On social media, Putsch, who is Christian, often attacks his opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith and Indian ancestry. On his campaign site, his platform includes anti-immigrant calls to “accelerate deportations” and limit the number of H-1B visas offered to immigrant workers.
His platform makes no mention of Israel or foreign policy.
“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, acknowledging that on occasion, he has used the words “Jew” or “Jewish” instead. A search of his X account turned up at least 43 references to the “Jewish mafia,” and he’s repeatedly invoked the “Jewish elite” on his Substack. He claimed to have borrowed the latter term from Norm Finkelstein, a pro-Palestinian author and activist who, unlike Rectenwald, is Jewish himself.
“It’s not just an ‘israeli lobby.’ LOL. It’s a Talmudic Jewish mafia that runs the U.S. and the world,” Rectenwald wrote in one post in March. The same day, he claimed that “the Jewish mafia did 9/11.”
“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist.”
When The Intercept asked about Rectenwald’s use of the term “Zionist Occupation Government,” which has a history of popularity among white supremacists, he brought up AZAPAC-backed candidates like Bernard Taylor, a firefighter and Democrat hoping to unseat Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast, a former IDF volunteer. Rectenwald cited Taylor, who is Black, as proof that “we are not like bigots,” adding that AZAPAC planned to endorse other people of color.
Taylor, who accepted an endorsement from AZAPAC in December, said he also was not aware of Rectenwald’s rhetoric until approached by The Intercept for this story.
“I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s not concerning to me,” Taylor told The Intercept in a phone call, referring to Rectenwald’s language. In an emailed statement, he said his campaign rejects antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy, but would keep the AZAPAC endorsement based on policy. Taylor said that if he feels AZAPAC is “crossing the line” into overt antisemitism, he will reject its endorsement and refund donations from the group.
“If I made, you know, some slips here and there, it isn’t intentional — I’m not trying to dog whistle to anybody,” Rectenwald said. “I’m just trying to be precise, and sometimes, you know, precision is difficult.”
In “The Cabal Question,” Rectenwald’s self-published novel, a former professor finds his worldview transformed when a friend “thrusts him into the JQ,” or Jewish question, as the book’s Amazon summary puts it, working with “a steadfast ex-occultist turned Christian nationalist to trace the strands of the cabal’s reach.” The story mirrors his own evolution of getting “J-pilled,” or “Jew-pilled,” Rectenwald has said, though he insists the novel is not about promoting antisemitism but rather “a Christian redemption story.”
Rectenwald once identified as a leftist. He taught liberal studies as a Marxist at New York University — until a fallout that began in 2016, when it was revealed that he was behind the since-deleted Twitter account @AntiPCNYUProf with the screen name “Deplorable NYU Professor.” Rectenwald used the account to act “in the guise of an alt-righter,” as a way to argue against politically correct use of pronouns, trigger warnings, and safe spaces.
He took a paid leave from NYU and claimed he was a victim of liberal censorship in a splashy op-ed and a sit-down on Fox & Friends. When he came back, Rectenwald invited far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class and later sued NYU for defamation. Court records indicate the case was dropped with prejudice, and Rectenwald said he settled out of court for a cash payment in exchange for his departure from the school in 2019.
NYU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
The experience prompted Rectenwald to denounce the left and his several decades of Marxist scholarship, and in 2024, he launched a failed bid for president as a Libertarian, representing the conservative Mises Caucus.
It’s unclear when his fixation on Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories took hold. But on the right-wing podcast The Backlash in May, Rectenwald used the protagonist of “The Cabal Question” to describe how his views developed.
In the book, Rectenwald said, the main character flees persecution and surveillance from the government controlled by “the Jewish mafia.” The character ends up finding refuge with “radical right wingers,” who help him escape the country. The more closely he affiliates with the right-wing network, however, the more he risks damaging his own reputation.
“Art imitates life, right?” said the host. Rectenwald agreed.
The post A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists. appeared first on The Intercept.
When Benjamin Franklin set out on what he called his “bold and arduous project” of moral perfection, he did not imagine he would arrive at the summit of virtue. He knew better. The point was not arrival but effort. “Though I fell far short of perfection,” he wrote late in life, he became “a better and a happier man” for having tried.
That insight captures a central conviction shared across the founding generation: virtue is a lifelong journey, not a mere destination. And happiness, rightly understood, is not a mood to capture, but a character to cultivate.
Happiness as Self-Government
For the Founders, happiness was inseparable from disciplined self-government.
Franklin operationalized this in his famous list of virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, tranquility, and humility. He built a chart, examined himself nightly. Franklin began each week by focusing on a single virtue, starting with temperance because he believed it produced the clarity necessary for governing the rest.
Thomas Jefferson echoed this same framework. Drawing from Cicero’s reflections on the tranquil soul, he praised a life governed by restraint and consistency rather than ambition or fear. For Jefferson, liberty was not license. It was the power to pause, deliberate, and choose long-term good over short-term impulse.
John Adams made humility his lifelong project. In his diaries, Adams recorded his battle with vanity and resolved that no one is fit for high office who leaves a single passion unsubdued. George Washington practiced resolution by cooling the first heat of emotion and acting only after reflection. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton translated this philosophy into constitutional design, crafting institutions that would check public passion and allow reason to prevail.
To these Founders, the personal and the political were never separate spheres. A constitutional democracy has always required citizens who could do internally what the Constitution required externally: let reason, not rage, rule.
The Daily Struggle for Character
Key figures throughout American history understood life as a daily struggle for self-improvement and emotional discipline.
Franklin’s method was practical. “If Passion drives, let Reason hold the reins,” he advised. Imperfectly practiced, these habits nonetheless formed the architecture of his happiness.
John Quincy Adams kept a diary for 70 years as a second conscience, recording his failures, restraining temper, and renewing resolutions. For him, self-rule preceded public rule. You cannot sway a nation if you cannot govern yourself.
Phillis Wheatley drew on the same classical tradition to ground her poetry in virtue. Writing in the shadow of slavery, she asserted the universal capacity for moral excellence and exposed the gap between America’s professed principles and its practices.
Abraham Lincoln, shaped by early reading and lifelong self-education, warned against the “mobocratic spirit” and called for “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” to preserve liberty. Passion may ignite change, he suggested, but only disciplined judgment sustains a constitutional democracy.
Frederick Douglass called education and disciplined labor the path to self-making. Character, he insisted, is built by regular and thoughtful exercise of one’s faculties.
The lesson is constant across generations. Virtue is not an inheritance nor a heroic display; it is the steady discipline of daily practice.
Being Good and Being a Citizen
Being a good person and being a good citizen are inseparable.
George Mason insisted that liberty can be preserved only through justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue. The stability of free government depended on habits formed long before a ballot was cast.
Madison warned that passion can “wrest the scepter from reason” in popular assemblies. Constitutional checks were essential, but they could not succeed unless citizens themselves practiced self-restraint and civic virtue.
Jefferson believed that a free people can govern themselves only if individuals first master their own passions. Liberty without self-discipline gives way to faction and instability. The pursuit of happiness is thus public work: cultivating the character required to sustain freedom.
A Call to Pursue Happiness Together
In an age that often confuses happiness with impulse and success with speed, the Founders and other key figures offer a different path. Happiness means disciplined self-government. It means aligning reason and passion. It means learning, reflecting, correcting, and beginning again.
Temperance, humility, industry, moderation, and sincerity are not relics of the 18th century. They are practices for every generation seeking to strengthen constitutional democracy. The pursuit of happiness is not solitary or self-indulgent. It is the steady work of forming character so that we can contribute to the common good and sustain the freedoms we inherit.
Franklin did not achieve moral perfection. Neither did Jefferson, Adams, nor Washington. That is precisely the point. The work continues, calling each generation and each individual to take it up anew.
If you are ready to engage in that work, we invite you to continue the journey through the National Constitution Center and Arizona State University’s new free online course for adult learners, What the Founders Meant by Happiness: A Journey Through Virtue and Character. Building on NCC CEO Emeritus Jeffrey Rosen’s 2024 book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, this course brings the Founders’ moral world to life through engaging video lectures with Jeff, close study of primary sources, and interactive materials.
At the heart of the course, and at the heart of the American experiment, is a simple but demanding truth: self-government begins with government of the self.
Julie Silverbrook is vice president of civic education at the National Constitution Center.
President Donald Trump has said that Americans are now paying or will pay “the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs,” thanks to the administration’s negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. The administration has announced discounted cash prices for a small number of brand-name drugs. There isn’t evidence Trump’s deals so far have led to broad decreases in drug prices, nor is it certain they will in the future.
Despite these caveats and ambiguities, Trump often has presented lower drug prices as a fait accompli. “We now are paying the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs,” he said in a Jan. 27 speech in Iowa. “Every other president tried for it. They didn’t try very hard. They didn’t get anything. I got it done.”
“The American people were effectively subsidizing the cost of drugs for the entire world, and it’s not going to happen any longer,” he said during the Feb. 5 launch for TrumpRx, the new federal website pointing people toward cash prices negotiated by the administration for brand-name drugs. “We ended it.”
The TrumpRx website makes similarly sweeping statements, claiming that the approach of basing U.S. prices off of prices in other countries — referred to as most favored nation, or MFN, pricing — is “guaranteeing huge savings for Americans.”
Trump’s efforts may have lowered prices for some consumers buying certain drugs. But experts told us there’s no guarantee of substantial savings for Americans in general.
Thus far, the Trump administration’s drug price negotiations have resulted in voluntary agreements with 16 companies, though many of the details remain unclear. Under those agreements, drug manufacturers have promised to offer discounts on select drugs to people who pay cash and are not using insurance. Companies have also agreed to launch new drugs or to offer Medicaid drugs at MFN prices. In exchange, the companies have said, they have been promised exemptions from tariffs and other benefits, such as exemptions from future mandatory MFN pricing.
“With rare exception,” the negotiations with drugmakers “don’t appear to have translated into actual savings for people at the pharmacy counter or for public or commercial payers yet,” Rena Conti, a health economist at Boston University Questrom School of Business, told us. These exceptions include certain weight loss and fertility drugs, which are often not covered by insurance to begin with and are now being offered at reduced cash prices, she said.
There is no single, easily tracked measure of drug prices in the U.S., making it challenging to assess broad claims about whether drug prices are rising or falling. Companies provide list prices, but individuals, health insurers and the government rarely pay these prices, often benefiting from rebates or other discounts.
That said, there are no signs of widespread slashing of list prices in the U.S. “Typically in January, we will see price increases for already-launched brand drugs, and just like we’ve seen in previous years, we saw prices rise,” Conti said. The median list price increase for hundreds of brand-name drugs so far in 2026 was 4%, which is the same median increase as in 2025, according to the research firm 46brooklyn.
When we asked whether Trump is claiming that Americans in general are now paying the lowest prices, a White House spokesperson asserted they would in the future. “We are going to be paying the same if not lower than other wealthy nations,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Either via TrumpRx or once the MFN deals are codified upon passage of Great Healthcare Plan.”
The Great Healthcare Plan is a series of health policy proposals, released Jan. 15, which Trump has called on Congress to pass as legislation. To lower drug prices, the plan calls for “codifying” MFN deals. The Trump administration has also said it will add more drugs to TrumpRx, and in December the administration released proposals to apply MFN pricing to a subset of Medicare beneficiaries.
It is unclear how or whether the MFN deals will be codified, however. Nor is it a given that even a widely applied MFN policy would reduce prices substantially.
Trump’s claim that he is the first president to lower drug prices also ignores past efforts that have had some success.
Separate from the MFN pricing efforts, the Trump administration has continued to negotiate lower Medicare prices for some specific drugs under the Inflation Reduction Act. However, this law was passed in 2022 under the Biden administration.
And rather than promoting these Medicare negotiations, the Trump administration is “talking about this unclear political pressuring that the White House is applying in general in the health industry and specifically on drugs,” Joseph Antos, a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, told us. AEI is a conservative-leaning think tank. “Is there any way to actually objectively measure the impact of any of that? I don’t think there is.”
Below, we explain what we know and don’t know about the impacts of Trump’s MFN negotiations and proposed policies on drug prices.
There is some support for Trump’s claim that he has lowered drug costs, in the case of a few specific drugs being offered at relatively low cash prices.
However, TrumpRx, the website the administration built to promote these cash prices, echoes Trump’s exaggerated claims about the scope of the price reductions.
TrumpRx shows cash prices for 43 drugs from five manufacturers that made deals with the administration. People can either print a coupon to use at pharmacies or, in some cases, go to a manufacturer’s website to make the purchase.
GoodRx, a prescription drug coupon site that launched in 2011, has partnered with the administration to provide many of the TrumpRx-branded coupons, and people can in some cases use GoodRx to access coupons providing the same Trump administration-negotiated prices.
The TrumpRx website advertises the “lowest cash prices” and shows discounts of 50% to 93% off the list price. But most people, particularly those with insurance coverage, don’t pay the list price.
“Manufacturers have agreed to discount prices on some drugs that are not well covered by insurance or already have generic competition, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not necessarily going to help a lot of people, right now anyway,” Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, told us. KFF is a nonpartisan health policy organization. She explained that most people with health insurance will fare better using their insurance than paying in cash.
For example, a person with health insurance who pays a flat copay for medications is unlikely to get a better price by going to TrumpRx, two economists from the University of Washington explained in an opinion piece published in STAT. In fact, the TrumpRx website says: “If you have insurance, check your co-pay first—it may be even lower.”
People with insurance also benefit from caps on their spending in the form of deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, the economists wrote, as well as prices for drugs negotiated by their insurers. But for now, drugs purchased via TrumpRx are not counted toward deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. “A family might hit their out-of-pocket maximum by midyear using insurance, after which their insurer pays 100% of the prescription cost for the rest of the year,” the economists wrote. “Under TrumpRx, the family would pay full freight all year long, with no ceiling on their out-of-pocket spending.”
One group of people who are sometimes asked to pay list prices for drugs are those without insurance or whose insurance does not cover a specific drug, Cubanski explained.
But even for those without insurance or whose insurance doesn’t cover a certain drug, Conti said, there are better deals available on the U.S. market for some drugs featured on TrumpRx. “The majority of drugs that are listed on the TrumpRx website actually have generic competition, and for consumers it pays to shop,” she said. “You can get a better deal by simply buying the generic, even when this coupon is being offered.”
GoodRx or Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, another website that negotiates with drug manufacturers, offer cheaper cash prices for generic versions of at least 18 of the 43 brand-name drugs promoted on TrumpRx, according to a review by STAT. TrumpRx does not notify people that generics may be cheaper than the brand-name drugs.
Conti did highlight some drugs for which cash prices appear to be “good deals.” These include insulin, the fertility drug Gonal-F and the GLP-1 weight loss drug Zepbound. Patients may benefit from low-cost insulin, which is offered at $25 per 10 milliliters, if they have gaps in their insurance coverage or have a health plan requiring high out-of-pocket payments, she said. Fertility and GLP-1 drugs for weight loss cost more but are often not covered by insurance even for those who have it, so patients may benefit from buying them for reduced cash prices.
Gonal-F is now available on TrumpRx at $168 for the lowest strength, compared with its list price of around $966. There were already discounts available for people paying for the drugs without insurance, but “the price that’s listed on the TrumpRx coupon is lower than the price being offered by the specialty pharmacy, even with other special discounts available,” Conti said.
Zepbound is being offered for $299 per month for the lowest dose, reduced from a list price of $1,087. (However, the lowest dose of the drug had previously been available for $349 per month for cash buyers.)
Cubanski said the latest weight loss medication discounts “can be seen as a pretty direct byproduct of negotiations between the manufacturers and the White House,” but said that the makers of these drugs have been “steadily offering increasing discounts” even before the negotiations. This is partly because for a while, there were shortages of the drugs, she explained, and companies have been allowed to market relatively inexpensive compounded versions, even though the drugs are under patent and do not have generics.
“The competitive pressures in the GLP-1 market have likely been responsible to some degree for bringing down cash pay prices,” Pragya Kakani, a health economist and assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, told us. She added that it is “challenging to disentangle the effects from the Trump administration’s MFN initiatives vs. pre-existing competitive pressures.”
As for the claim on the website that TrumpRx is offering the “world’s lowest prices,” or the lowest in the developed world, this is challenging to check.
The Trump administration has provided limited information on how the prices were arrived at during the closed-door negotiations with drug companies. We asked the White House for more detail on what international prices the TrumpRx prices are being compared with, and a spokesperson told us the administration was using prices from other G7 nations but did not provide more details.
Cubanski said it is difficult to check whether prices are the lowest, as “there’s not a lot of transparency in drug pricing internationally.” It’s possible to find prices, but it’s unclear what rebates or discounts countries have negotiated off of these prices.
Conti agreed, adding that in many cases, brand-name drugs may not even be offered in other countries because other countries drop brand-name drugs once a generic is available. Since many of the drugs now promoted on TrumpRx are available as generics, it is challenging to determine international prices.
People can make statements about offering the lowest drug prices internationally “because it’s impossible to check,” Conti said.
The Trump administration has also said that as part of the MFN deals, companies agreed to sell drugs at MFN prices to Medicaid programs. A voluntary initiative invites companies to negotiate prices for certain drugs “aligned with those paid in select other countries,” according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website. The initiative launched in January, a spokesperson for the agency told us.
It remains unclear exactly what drugs are being offered to Medicaid at these prices and what companies and states are participating, Cubanski said. The CMS spokesperson told us that the agency hasn’t yet published a list with these details.
It’s also not clear MFN prices would compare favorably to the prices the programs are already getting. “States pay among the lowest prices through the Medicaid program for prescription drugs of all payers in the U.S.,” Cubanski said. “So whether the so-called most favored nation price that pharmaceutical companies will be offering on specific medications is lower than what states are currently paying isn’t really something that we’re able to rigorously quantify.”
The average net Medicaid prices for top-selling drugs are 65% lower than those in Medicare Part D, according to an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, Kakani said.
Furthermore, Cubanski said, “People on Medicaid pay very little if not nothing for prescriptions, so the savings would be to the state and federal government, not to people with Medicaid directly.”
Conti said that the larger current issue for drug affordability for people on Medicaid is that provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will lead to health care coverage losses. The CBO estimated that the law would increase the number of uninsured people in the U.S. by 10 million over 10 years, with 7.5 million of those due to changes to Medicaid. “The administration is weakening insurance protections at the same time that they are offering out the hope of these potential deals,” she said.
Despite the discounts for a limited group of cash payers, experts said that the Trump administration’s MFN deals do not so far directly affect drug affordability for those with private insurance.
“The biggest affordability challenges are ones that are related to very high-cost brand drugs,” Conti said. “It’s not obvious that much of what the administration is pursuing right now is going to really make a difference for people who are commercially insured and who are using these high-cost brand drugs.”
Kakani said that the MFN deals have only addressed commercial insurance in a limited way, to the degree that the negotiations might indirectly influence negotiations between drugmakers and insurers. However, she added that the TrumpRx prices “are unlikely to be lower than net prices commercial plans were already negotiating,” as many of the drugs “face significant competition.”
Recently, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz has argued that the cash discounts the Trump administration has negotiated will translate into wider price reductions, including for people with private insurance, due to increased transparency.
“Now that everyone knows the true worldwide most favored nation drug prices, it’s going to allow employers, insurers and everyone in between to be able to take out the middlemen and drive those prices down,” Oz said in a Feb. 6 CNN interview. He suggested on CNN two days later that if employers saw a drug price on TrumpRx that was lower than what they were paying, they would ask for that price.
However, Conti disagreed that transparency would uniformly lead to better deals for Americans. She explained that the current opaque system likely allows some Americans to get particularly good deals on drug prices, because plans and pharmacy benefit managers are negotiating and passing on some savings as lower out-of-pocket costs and premiums.
“If we move towards more radical transparency in this system, yes, there are consumers that will benefit, absolutely,” she continued. “But it also might erode the company’s willingness to offer really good deals” to some payers.
Trump has often said that drug prices will dramatically fall due to MFN policies, referring to discounts of as much as 80% or 90%.
As we have said, proposed MFN strategies range from voluntary deals to launch new drugs or offer Medicaid drugs at lower prices to mandatory MFN pricing for some Medicare beneficiaries or a “codified” MFN strategy.
However, experts said that many details are missing regarding these strategies. Drugs are often launched in the U.S. before they are available in other countries, Conti said. It’s unclear how the U.S. will ensure it is getting the lowest prices internationally if there are no prices in other countries yet.
In the case of Medicare, CMS has proposed mandatory pilot programs testing MFN prices for some beneficiaries. But it’s unclear what drugs and companies will participate. Drug companies that voluntarily agreed to Medicaid MFN pricing may be exempted, Cubanski said, which “could potentially undercut savings.” CMS has estimated that its two initiatives — impacting drugs given by physicians or prescription drugs picked up at pharmacies — will generate around $12 billion of savings to Medicare over seven years and $14 billion over six years. “That’s not nothing, but given that Medicare spends roughly $200 billion per year approximately on drugs,” Cubanski said, the programs don’t “really move the needle all that much.”
As for broader, mandatory MFN pricing, it could face political headwinds, Cubanski said. “Historically, Republicans have not been in support of efforts to regulate drug prices,” she said, and pharmaceutical companies would also be expected to push back.
Even if widely implemented, MFN pricing may or may not lead to widespread and substantial reductions in drug prices.
A survey of health policy experts published Feb. 4 in Health Affairs found that around half thought MFN pricing would “substantially reduce” average net prescription drug prices in the U.S. for branded drugs, even if such a policy were broadly implemented.
“The overall takeaway was it’s really hard to predict what the effect of this policy is going to be, and the simplistic idea that this is going to suddenly reduce drug prices by … 80%, 90% are probably just that – overly simplistic,” said Kakani, the study’s lead author.
Companies would likely change their international strategies in response to a broad MFN policy, Kakani said. Companies could make it more difficult for the U.S. government to determine what other countries were paying, by issuing rebates in other countries and not disclosing them; they could delay product launches abroad, particularly in countries with very low prices, to set a higher benchmark; or they could increase international prices to a degree that the U.S. did not pay significantly less than before.
Kakani added that drug prices in the U.S. are not as high as Trump’s 80% or 90% discount claims have implied, when compared with other countries. A RAND report, based on 2022 data, found that on average, U.S. prices are 2.78 times higher than in other developed countries, and 4.22 times higher when looking at brand-name drugs before adjusting for discounts by manufacturers, as we’ve written in the past. Generic drugs had lower prices overall in the U.S. than in most countries.
Antos pointed to practical challenges to setting MFN prices. For example, he said it is unclear how the proposed Medicare programs to try out MFN pricing are supposed to work. “CMS doesn’t have the authority to force Germany to tell them everything about their pricing, and they also don’t have the ability to get Pfizer to open its books,” he said.
“Trying to tie it to some kind of European price is doing it the hard way,” Antos said, suggesting that if the U.S. wants price controls, it could just ask more broadly for the already-good prices it gets for Medicaid. “We have domestic reference pricing right here.”
While Trump claimed that it would be other countries that now pay higher prices, Antos said that “by and large” manufacturers “are not in a position to renegotiate a price” with other countries. (As part of tariff negotiations, the U.K. did agree to increase what it pays for new drugs, although it’s unclear what will happen with drug prices in other countries overall.)
Antos said that regardless, any attempt at price setting is “not going to necessarily translate into lower prices at the drug store for most people.”
And it will be difficult to evaluate whether U.S. policies are making a difference for consumers. If copays or deductibles went down, for example, perhaps insurance companies would make up for this by slightly increasing the growth rate of premiums, Antos said, which would be hard to quantify because premiums go up each year and are driven by hospital and doctor costs.
“In other words, it’s very hard to know what the net impact of any of these policies is,” he said.
Update, Feb. 18: We added that Conti is at the Boston University Questrom School of Business.
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The post Trump Misleads on Drug Pricing Deals appeared first on FactCheck.org.
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