Four U.S. service members have been killed, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine said in a news briefing that more deaths are likely.
President Trump refused to rule out the use of ground troops in Iran in a new interview on Monday, saying he wouldn't hesitate to deploy them "if they were necessary."
The gunman who killed 2 and wounded 14 at a bar in Austin also wore a hoodie that said "Property of Allah."
President Trump has declined to rule out sending ground troops into Iran, as the U.S. military confirms four military deaths on Day 3 of the war.
US-Israel war with Iran hits shares in travel companies, and the pound, although oil producers and weapons makers are rallying
Over in New Delhi, India and Canada have agreed deals covering critical minerals and uranium supply.
The pacts, which also covered technology and promoting the use of renewable energy, were announced after talks between India’s prime minister Narendra Modi and Canada’s Mark Carney.
“Our ties have seen a new energy, mutual trust, and positivity.”
“This is not merely the renewal of a relationship. It is the expansion of a valued partnership with new ambition, focus, and foresight, a partnership between two confident countries charting our own course for the future.”
Continue reading...BARCELONA, Spain, March 2, 2026 — At MWC Barcelona 2026, Huawei unveiled its latest SuperPoD product Atlas 950 SuperPoD, TaiShan 950 SuperPoD and a series of computing solutions to the global market. This embodies the company’s latest endeavor to open source and open collaboration with the aim of building a resilient computing foundation and creating a new option worldwide.
Huawei is showcasing SuperPoD products at MWC Barcelona 2026.
With AI technologies evolving rapidly and models now using trillions of parameters, agentic AI is beginning to penetrate into core production processes in many industries. This is driving up demand for larger computing scale and lower latency. However, these massive models are beyond the reach of conventional horizontal scaling; larger clusters often suffer from lower utilization and frequent training interruptions.
Huawei has tacked these challenges with its innovative UnifiedBus interconnect for SuperPoDs. The groundbreaking “cluster + SuperPoD” system architecture is tailormade for growing computing demands and driving AI progress. At MWC, Huawei debuted its latest SuperPoD offerings on a global arena, including the Atlas 950 SuperPoD and Atlas 850E. Built on UnifiedBus, these products are fit for a diverse range of AI training and inference scenarios. The Atlas 950 SuperPoD, for instance, connects up to 8,192 NPUs via UnifiedBus, delivering ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and unified memory addressing. It operates as a single, logical computer for learning, reasoning, and processing.
Huawei also exhibits TaiShan 950 SuperPoD—the industry’s very first general-purpose computing SuperPoD—alongside next-generation servers like the TaiShan 500 and TaiShan 200. These provide flexible computing options for computing workloads on a scale of high to low intensity.
Open Source and Open Collaboration Foster a Symbiotic Ecosystem
Huawei continues to champion open source and open systems in vision of accelerating developer innovation and ecosystem prosperity. The company plays a pivotal role in advancing openEuler, which has rapidly risen as one of the world’s leading open source operating system communities. Huawei has fully open-sourced its CANN heterogeneous compute architecture. Through layered decoupling, all software components—from operator libraries, acceleration libraries, and graph computing to programming languages—are openly available for developers. CANN also supports open source communities and projects typified by Triton, TileLang, PyTorch, vLLM, and verl, which tangibly facilitates developers in terms of accessibility and efficiency.
As intelligence transforms industries, Huawei remains dedicated to building a resilient computing foundation and a symbiotic ecosystem to create a new option for the AI era.
Source: Huawei
The post Huawei’s SuperPoD Portfolio Creates New Option for Global Computing at MWC Barcelona 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
ProPublica has sued the U.S. Department of Education in federal court in New York, accusing it of withholding public records about how it’s enforcing civil rights protections for millions of American students.
The Education Department has failed to provide public records related to its investigations, communications and other work that ProPublica sought through four Freedom of Information Act requests filed last year.
The Education Department’s civil rights arm for decades has investigated allegations of discrimination in schools. It historically has kept an online list of its open investigations and posted the findings of completed inquiries. But under Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, the Office for Civil Rights has been decimated and the work of its remaining investigators is largely cloaked in secrecy.
ProPublica submitted three FOIA requests — the first of them more than a year ago — seeking records about civil rights investigations that have been opened or closed, notices sent to institutions being investigated and previous findings of discrimination that have been reversed under the Trump administration. A fourth request sought communication between top Education Department officials and conservative groups that have criticized public schools. Some of the groups have urged the OCR to investigate specific school districts and have met often with McMahon.
The department has not responded to the requests other than to acknowledge that it received them.
“Actions by the Department of Education have real consequences for millions of students and families,” said Alexandra Perloff-Giles of the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, which is representing ProPublica.
“The public deserves to understand how executive authority is being exercised so that it can hold government accountable,” she said. “Congress enacted FOIA to offer the public that necessary transparency, and we’re asking the court to enforce it.”
Spokespeople for the department did not respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit. The department has not yet responded to the complaint in court.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, argues that since Trump took office, the work of the OCR — once one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — has become significantly more opaque. Though each presidential administration has its priorities, OCR has consistently worked to uphold constitutional rights against discrimination based on disability, race and gender.
But the focus of the OCR under Trump has shifted to investigations relating to curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students. Complaints about transgender students playing sports and using girls’ bathrooms at school have been fast-tracked while cases of racial harassment of Black students last year were ignored.
And although some documents that detail how cases were resolved are being posted online, some older resolution agreements have been terminated. Those terminations have not been disclosed to the public.
“The public interest in this information is substantial and ongoing. Since there are approximately 49.6 million students in the U.S., changes to the ED and its policies affect millions of families,” the lawsuit says.
Trump has been working to shutter the department. Hundreds of department workers have been laid off and official employee counts at the OCR went from 568 in 2024 to 403 as of December 2025. McMahon closed seven of the 12 regional OCR offices that handled discrimination complaints across the country. Amid the staffing difficulties and the shift in priorities at the OCR, families’ discrimination complaints have piled up.
When President Joe Biden left office, about 12,000 investigations were open; by December 2025, there were nearly 24,000. ProPublica reporting has found that new complaints as well as older ones included in the backlog often are dismissed without investigation. OCR workers have said they feel as if they’re working in a “dismissal factory.”
In the past year, ProPublica has filed several other lawsuits seeking to force transparency in courts and the federal government. That includes a lawsuit filed in May against the State Department. ProPublica also has joined other media organizations in lawsuits.
Have you recently filed a civil rights complaint or do you have a pending case? We need your help to get a full picture of how the dismantling of the Office for Civil Rights is affecting students, parents, school employees and their communities.
The post ProPublica Sues Education Department for Withholding Records About Discrimination in Schools appeared first on ProPublica.
Iranian strikes hit Saudi and Qatar energy sites; US crew bailed out safely before crash-landing, says Kuwait
Bahrain has said that one person was killed by shrapnel from an intercepted missile. The death of a foreign worker at Salman Industrial City, working on a boat there, marks the kingdom’s first reported fatality in the war.
Bahrain, home to the US navy’s 5th fleet, said it intercepted 61 missiles and 34 attack drones launched against it. It said some shrapnel had gotten through, striking buildings and the naval base.
Continue reading...US president tells New York Post, ‘I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground’ after telling CNN, ‘we’re knocking the crap out of them’
While speaking today, Pete Hegseth acknowledged the fourth US service member killed in Iran’s counterattacks.
“War is hell and always will be,” he said. “Our grateful nation honors the four Americans we have lost thus far and those injured – the absolute best of America.”
Continue reading...The man who killed two and wounded 14 also had photos of Iranian leaders in his home, a source said.
Exclusive: Schemes worth hundreds of millions of pounds to protect biodiversity and oceans likely to be substantially reduced
UK programmes to protect nature and the climate in developing countries are suffering swingeing budget cuts despite ministers’ promises, the Guardian has learned.
The cuts belie the government’s claims to be fulfilling international obligations on climate finance and are veiled behind a system that experts have slammed as opaque.
The cutting and partial closure of the £100m Biodiverse Landscapes Fund, intended to protect nature in vital ecosystems in poor regions overseas. Six regions were originally targeted, in Africa, South America and Asia, but this has been reduced to two.
Coast – a project for Climate and Ocean Adaptation and Sustainable Transition – and Pact (Prepare and Accelerate Climate Transitions) are having substantial cuts.
The future of the £500m Blue Planet Fund has been thrown into doubt despite its successful operation.
Other schemes have been reduced in scope, for instance by allowing only one year’s funding where years were expected.
Requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed spending has been slashed among the departments responsible for international climate finance (ICF).
Continue reading...Women and children were among the dead, in addition to dozens of combatants, officials said.
Fifty-two percent of Americans oppose the strikes, and two-thirds say the Trump administration hasn’t clearly explained the goals of the military action.
Three U.S. fighter jets involved in the offensive against Iran were shot down mistakenly by Kuwait’s air defenses, the U.S. military’s Central Command said.
PM defends use of UK bases for defensive action but says Britain has ‘learned the lessons from Iraq’ on need for ‘thought-through plan’
Keir Starmer has said the UK will not join offensive strikes by Israel and the US on Iran, saying the UK does not believe in “regime change from the skies”.
But the prime minister defended the use of UK bases for defensive action, saying that was “the best way to protect British interests and British lives”.
Continue reading...The prime minister is explaining his decision to allow the US to use British bases for military attacks after initially refusing
After an unmanned drone struck the RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus overnight – and two more drones heading toward the base were struck down on Monday – Greece will send two frigates and two F-16 fighter jets to Cyprus “to contribute to its defence against the threats it faces,” said Greek defence minister Nikos Dendias, who will also travel to Cyprus tomorrow.
For the latest on Europe’s response to US-Israel war on Iran, follow The Guardian’s live coverage here.
Continue reading...French president says deterrent needs to be ‘strengthened’ in recognition of new challenges
A Cypriot government spokesperson has just confirmed that two unmanned drones headed to RAF Akrotiri were intercepted before reaching the base.
“Two unmanned aerial vehicles that were moving towards the direction of the British Bases at Akrotiri were confronted in time,” Konstantinos Letymbiotis said.
Continue reading...Many early stage crowdfunders left empty-handed as Tilray acquires beer company’s UK and Irish assets
The UK and Irish assets of BrewDog, the Scottish self-styled “punk” brewer, have been sold to the US cannabis and drinks firm Tilray for £33m, in a deal that will cost nearly 500 jobs and leave legions of the company’s early stage crowdfunders empty-handed.
Tilray agreed a deal to buy BrewDog’s brand, intellectual property, UK brewing operations and 11 “strategic” bars in the UK and Ireland, the two companies confirmed, preserving 733 jobs. The remaining 38 bars will close immediately, at a cost of 484 jobs.
Continue reading...U.S. motorists could soon see higher prices at the pump as oil prices surge following the attacks in Iran.
Stock markets in the U.S. dropped amid concerns that the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran could drive up energy costs.
It's a follow-up to the 2025 iPhone 16E and comes with double the base storage of last year's budget device.
Defense secretary refuses to establish timeline for how long operation will continue in first public remarks since strikes
The US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has called the joint US-Israeli strikes in Iran the “most lethal and precise air power campaign in history”, indicated the US did not plan to effect a democratic transition in Iran – and refused to establish a clear timeline for how long the US operation will continue.
In the first public remarks by an administration official since the war began on Saturday, Hegseth also said that the US did not have “boots on the ground” in Iran but that he wouldn’t speculate what “we will or will not do”. He also said that four US service members had been killed by a ballistic missile that managed to penetrate allied air defenses.
Continue reading...AUSTIN, Texas, March 2, 2026 — Flex today announced the expansion of its strategic collaboration with AMD to manufacture the AMD Instinct platform in the United States, marking a significant milestone in strengthening domestic production of advanced AI and high-performance technologies.
As part of the collaboration, manufacturing of AMD Instinct MI355X platform is now underway at Flex’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, with volume ramp expected next quarter. The collaboration extends beyond the current generation; Flex will also support the next generation of AMD Instinct platforms to meet surging demand for large‑scale AI deployments across data centers.
Flex manufactures the complete AMD Instinct platform, assembling eight AMD Instinct GPUs along with surrounding components — including PCIe Gen 5 interfaces, high-bandwidth memory, and high-speed interconnect fabric — into a single, high-density system design. Each platform undergoes rigorous factory testing and validation, including using advanced liquid-cooling hardware from JetCool, a Flex company.
“Partnering with AMD to manufacture AMD Instinct platforms in the U.S. marks an important milestone in advancing domestic AI infrastructure,” said Rob Campbell, President of Communications, Enterprise and Cloud, Flex. “By combining Flex’s advanced manufacturing capabilities, resilient supply chain, and U.S. footprint with AMD’s leadership in high-performance computing, we’re enabling customers to scale AI faster and with greater reliability.”
“Expanding our U.S. manufacturing presence with Flex for AMD Instinct platforms is an important step in strengthening how we build and deliver for customers,” said Keivan Keshvari, senior vice president, Global Operations & Quality, AMD. “By growing a resilient, agile, and diverse supply chain, we are better positioned to meet AI demand and deliver at scale.”
Flex’s Austin, Texas headquarters spans 1.4 million square feet and is designed to support complex, high-volume production with sustainable manufacturing practices. The site is part of Flex’s expansive U.S. footprint, which encompasses more than seven million square feet across 17 facilities.
To learn more about Flex’s end-to-end portfolio of data center infrastructure products and services, visit: https://flex.com/industries/data-center.
About Flex
Flex (NASDAQ: FLEX) is the manufacturing partner of choice that helps leading brands design, build, and manage products that improve the world. With a global footprint spanning 30 countries, Flex delivers advanced manufacturing and supply chain solutions, innovative products and technology, and lifecycle services that support customers from concept to scale. In the AI era, Flex is helping customers accelerate data center deployment by solving power, heat, and scale challenges through cutting-edge power and cooling technology and scalable IT infrastructure solutions.
SourcE: Flex
The post Flex Announces US Manufacturing Collaboration with AMD to Accelerate Domestic AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
Banner has sparked criticism as Kirk was a polarizing figure who made incendiary and often racist and sexist comments
The US Department of Education has hung large banners outside its building in Washington DC, including one featuring an image of the late far-right commentator, Charlie Kirk.
Kirk, who was shot and killed last September while speaking at a campus event a Utah Valley University, co-founded the conservative non-profit organization Turning Point USA, which advocates for and promotes conservative politics among young people, particularly on college campuses.
Continue reading...The company started seeing increased errors with its flagship AI service Monday.
Air travel chaos intensified as the war with Iran stretched into a third day — keeping airspace and airports in the Middle East closed and leaving travelers stranded.
South Korean tax authorities lost millions in seized cryptocurrency after publishing high-res photos of Ledger hardware wallets that clearly displayed the wallets' seed phrases, allowing an unknown party to drain the funds. Gizmodo reports: South Korea's National Tax Service seized crypto assets during recent enforcement actions against 124 high-value tax evaders, but now, a large chunk of that crypto cash has been lost. The operation originally resulted in the confiscation of crypto holdings worth about 8.1 billion won, or roughly $5.6 million. However, officials later issued a press release to showcase these efforts in recovering delinquent taxes, and the release included photographs of Ledger hardware wallets taken into custody along with handwritten notes that displayed the wallet seed phrases. Those images attached to the press release turned out to be the critical error. High-resolution photos clearly showed the mnemonic recovery phrases, which serve as the master key for accessing the wallets. This exposure eliminated any protection provided by the offline cold storage on the Ledger devices. Possession of the seed phrase allows complete control, and anyone who knows the phrase can import it into software or another hardware wallet and initiate transfers without the original device. In this case, an unknown individual who saw the photos published by law enforcement first added a small amount of ether to one of the addresses to cover Ethereum network gas fees necessary for outbound transactions. From there, they executed three transfers to move approximately 4 million Pre-Retogeum, or PRTG, tokens. At the time, those tokens carried a value of $4.8 million, but reporting from The Block indicates liquidating that much value from the holdings would have proven difficult due to market dynamics.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Officials continue to investigate Sunday shooting in Texas amid fears of further attacks following US airstrikes on Iran
Officials in Texas are continuing to investigate a weekend mass shooting at an Austin bar by a man wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie as an act of potential terrorism, as fears rise over the possibility of further attacks following US airstrikes on Iran.
Police shot and killed Ndiaga Diagne, 53, a Senegalese national and naturalized US citizen, early on Sunday after he reportedly opened fire at the downtown bar popular with university students. Two people were killed, and another 14 wounded, some of them seriously.
Continue reading...The war in the Mideast has effectively halted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to push up gas prices and raise the cost of other goods.
 | Just sharing the road in Belfast. [link] [comments] |
Hydrolysis uses alkaline and water to break down body in a few hours and is part of demand for more sustainable funerals
Scotland has become the first part of the UK to legalise hydrolysis, an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation or burial, reflecting increasing demand for more sustainable funeral arrangements.
Also known as water cremation or aquamation, the process is already available in many parts of the world, and regulations approved by the Scottish parliament on Monday mark the most significant change to funeral law since cremation was introduced in 1902.
Continue reading...The Pentagon announced Monday that a fourth American service member has been killed in Operation Epic Fury.
The White House announced first lady Melania Trump would preside over the meeting last week before the U.S. and Israel launched a joint military mission in Iran.
The price of gold has seen remarkable growth over the past year. Here's where it sits as of March 2, 2026.
Commentary: At a time when companies are using AI to alter images, it's refreshing to see a phone that embraces the best aspects of traditional photography.
The rapid rollout of datacenters across the US is creating a divide between municipal governments and residents
Wilmington, Ohio, resident Quintin Koger Kidd was so concerned last June with his local public officials’ alleged misdoings – open meeting violations and other discrepancies – that he filed a complaint in court to have the mayor and city council members removed from their posts.
When Koger Kidd later heard that the city supported plans by Amazon Web Services to build a $4bn datacenter on 500 acres (200 hectares) south of town, he was aghast. Amazon has sought a tax abatement that would see its datacenter exempt from paying property taxes for 30 years in exchange for the funding of local schools and infrastructure projects.
Continue reading...Japan will effectively ban the in-flight use of power banks starting in mid-April after a "recent series of alarming incidents," reports the Asahi Shimbun. From the report: Currently, mobile batteries in Japan are classified as "spare batteries" and are prohibited in checked luggage. For carry-on bags, those exceeding 160 watt-hours are banned, while passengers are limited to two units for those over 100 watt-hours. There is no quantity limit for batteries of 100 watt-hours or less. The new rule will limit passengers to a total of two spare batteries, including power banks. While there is no limit on the number of spare batteries below 100 watt-hours, carrying power banks exceeding 160 watt-hours will remain prohibited. Power banks will be capped at two units regardless of power capacity. Additionally, charging them on board will be prohibited, and it will be "recommended" that passengers not use them at all. As a result, domestic airlines are expected to require passengers to stop using power banks, cementing the effective ban on in-flight use.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Refusal to allow use of bases in Rota and Morón follows Pedro Sánchez’s condemnation of US-Israeli action
Spain has denied the US permission to use jointly operated military bases on its territory to attack Iran as Madrid stepped up its criticism of the “unjustified and dangerous military intervention”.
Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has explicitly condemned the US and Israel’s “unilateral military action” against Iran, warning that it is contributing to “a more hostile and uncertain international order”. The rebukes have been reinforced by his government’s refusal to allow the US to use bases in Rota and Morón for the continuing strikes against Iran.
Continue reading...The first U.S. casualties of the war with Iran occurred among American personnel based in Kuwait.
Footage circulating on social media appears to show a military aircraft falling from the sky in Kuwait. US Central Command (Centcom) said on Monday that three US F-15 fighter jets flying in Iran-related operations had mistakenly been shot down by Kuwait air defences and that the cause of the incident was under investigation. The US and Israel launched a large-scale attack on Iran on Saturday, killing several top Iranian leaders including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Continue reading...SANTA CLARA, Calif. and SAN JOSE, Calif., March 2, 2026 — NVIDIA today announced multiyear strategic agreements with Lumentum Holdings Inc. to accelerate innovation in advanced optics technologies, including research and development, to enable next-generation AI infrastructure and systems designs.
Credit: Shutterstock
The nonexclusive agreement includes an NVIDIA multibillion purchase commitment and future capacity access rights for advanced laser components. In addition, NVIDIA is investing $2 billion in Lumentum to support R&D, future capacity and operations as the company builds out its U.S.-based manufacturing capabilities in a new fab.
Optical interconnect technology and package integration are critical for the continued scaling of AI factories, improving the energy efficiency and resiliency of large-scale AI networks. This expanded collaboration will draw on the strengths of NVIDIA’s leadership in AI, accelerated computing and networking, and Lumentum’s leadership in optics and advanced manufacturing. The investment enables Lumentum to scale its manufacturing capacity and R&D to meet the needs of future AI data centers.
“AI has reinvented computing and is driving the largest computing infrastructure buildout in history,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together with Lumentum, NVIDIA is advancing the world’s most sophisticated silicon photonics to build the next generation of gigawatt-scale AI factories.”
“This multiyear strategic agreement reflects our shared commitment to advancing the optics technologies that will power the next generation of AI infrastructure,” said Michael Hurlston, CEO of Lumentum. “In support of this collaboration, we are also investing in a new fabrication facility to increase capacity and accelerate innovation. We’re excited to work together to expand what’s possible for the AI optical architectures of tomorrow.”
More from HPCwire: NVIDIA and Coherent Announce Strategic Partnership to Develop Optics Tech
About Lumentum
Lumentum (NASDAQ: LITE) is a global leader in optical and photonic technologies that power the networks and infrastructure behind AI, cloud computing, and next-generation communications. Built on decades of photonics innovation, Lumentum delivers high-performance lasers, modules, and optical subsystems that enable scalable, energy-efficient data center connectivity, advanced telecom networks, industrial manufacturing, and sensing applications. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the company operates R&D, manufacturing, and sales facilities worldwide. Learn more at www.lumentum.com.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA Signs Multiyear Optics Agreement with Lumentum appeared first on HPCwire.
The contest of will between Trump and Iran Expert comment jon.wallace
Iran is operating from the principle that if it goes down, it will bring down others with it.
History is replete with examples of smaller and less militarily endowed nations achieving victories over much larger and better equipped adversaries because they employed smarter strategies.
Can Iran today survive a war with the United States – the world’s most powerful military – by employing the right kind of strategy? It all starts with Iran being able to understand its opponent’s own strategy and devise a plan to counter it.
President Donald Trump is employing a strategy of shock and awe. He wants a quick and decisive outcome, and he has deployed a massive amount of firepower to the region for that objective.
He wants to keep the military confrontation with Iran geographically limited, minimizing repercussions for regional stability and the international economy. He wants Iran to concede on its nuclear and conventional capacities, and even topple its regime, before it mounts an effective resistance, retaliates and kills Americans.
He has pursued these goals by applying a tremendous amount of military pressure on the regime, attacking a range of military and security targets across the country – for now, exclusively from the air – and decapitating much of its leadership structure. In short, Trump is on the offensive.
Iran, on the other hand, is on the defensive. It is doing, quite rationally, the exact opposite of everything Trump is trying to do. As always, it is playing the long game.
Given the overwhelming military superiority of the US, Iran knows that it cannot ensure regime survival – its top priority – by engaging in a shooting war. There is no way it can inflict enough military damage on the US to make Trump stop. Iran’s capabilities are far weaker, and its resources limited compared to its American and Israeli adversaries.
Instead, Iran’s strategy is to exact a high enough political price on Trump to compel him to discontinue military operations. So, the core element of Iran’s response is political and psychological in nature, not military. Its ultimate weapon is its much greater tolerance for casualties. This is where it holds a clear, and possibly the only, advantage over the US.
Tehran wants to extend and expand this conflict because it knows that Trump may not have the patience for a long conflict. Nor does the president’s domestic constituency, which opposes open-ended American interventions abroad – Trump has campaigned promising to be the ‘peace president’.
Democrats are gearing up for a fight with the president in Congress. The longer the war lasts and the more American soldiers are killed (four so far with five seriously wounded), the more effective they will be.
Iran is trying to regionalize and possibly even internationalize the conflict by dragging other countries, most notably the wealthy Gulf Arab states, into it.
The regime is operating from the principle that if it goes down, it will bring down others with it. It is messaging to Washington and the world that attempts to kill it will lead to chaos and serious economic pain.
It’s no accident that after it was hit by the US and Israel, Iran immediately struck oil fields, airports, and civilian buildings across the Arabian Peninsula. It’s hoping that this will rattle the international energy markets and compel the fragile Gulf Arabs states to push Trump to stop shooting. Their livelihoods and very political stability are at stake.
Iran also has struck various areas in Israel and instructed Hezbollah to open a military front from southern Lebanon.
In addition, the Houthis have threatened to resume strikes against Israel and in the Red Sea. Pro-Iran Iraqi militias have vowed to get involved, too. The activation of Iran’s regional network serves its strategy.
To stoke greater international fears, Iran also might close or disrupt commercial ship traffic near the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most vital maritime chokepoints. According to reports, traffic has already slowed considerably due to regional uncertainty caused by the war.
Both Iran and Trump’s strategies have important limitations. On the American side, air power alone is unlikely to bring down the Iranian regime. Boots on the ground are needed to accomplish that mission. Trump’s plan of helping the Iranian people rise up again and topple the theocracy sounds more like hope than a real strategy. There are no signs, yet, of any effective domestic opposition, or of defections from the regime.
On the Iranian side, attacking the Gulf Arab states could backfire. Those countries could reverse their policy of refusing the US permission to strike Iran using weapons based on their soil. They could even join the fight alongside the US. Beijing also won’t be enthusiastic about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. The Chinese import much of their oil from the Middle East.
NATO allies are staying on the sidelines for now, but a serious degradation of the global security environment might push some, including the British and the French, into action. (France and the UK have military bases in the Gulf).
Limited resources will challenge both Trump and Iran considerably. Of course, the US and its regional partners have more than Iran, but the latter is using cheaper missiles and drones which the US military is spending millions of dollars to intercept.
Gregory Caulier has attempted to quash rumours that Mask actor was replaced by a heavily made-up impersonator for his appearance picking up an honorary award in Paris
The organiser of the César awards has sought to debunk reports that a lookalike stood in for Jim Carrey at last week’s ceremony.
In a statement sent to Variety on Monday, Gregory Caulier, general delegate of the Césars, said the controversy was a “non-issue” and testified to Carrey’s investment in the event, which had been in the planning since last summer.
Continue reading...FREMONT, Calif., March 2, 2026 — Penguin Solutions, Inc. today announced the appointment of Ian Colle as senior vice president and chief product officer. He will be responsible for leading product strategy, roadmap development, and lifecycle execution for Penguin’s AI Factory Platform. Colle brings 25 years of experience to Penguin Solutions, joining from Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he most recently served as general manager of advanced computing and simulation. At AWS, he helped build a global HPC and AI infrastructure business from the ground up and scale it into a multi-billion-dollar portfolio, leading globally distributed teams across product management, engineering, go-to-market, and operations.
Penguin Solutions announced the appointment of Ian Colle as Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer. Colle will lead product strategy, roadmap development, and lifecycle execution for Penguin’s AI Factory Platform.
“We are thrilled to welcome Ian to the Penguin Solutions team as we continue to deliver AI Factories for enterprises at scale, so they can accelerate the deployment of agentic AI workflow automation and unlock new AI-driven revenue streams,” said Kash Shaikh, CEO of Penguin Solutions. “His appointment strengthens our executive leadership team and reinforces our commitment to product innovation and customer obsession.”
Prior to AWS, Colle held senior engineering leadership roles at Red Hat and Intel, where he led global teams through periods of rapid growth and acquisition, and at various startups. He will draw on that experience to support growth for Penguin Solutions AI Factory Platform.
“Penguin Solutions has the experience and expertise to deliver innovative AI Infrastructure including hardware, software, and services designed to drive the next generation of AI innovation,” said Ian Colle. “I look forward to working closely with our customers to help them harness the power of AI to achieve their business goals.”
Colle holds a BA in Economics from the University of Illinois, an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, an MS in Telecommunications and Computer Information Systems from the University of Denver and an MA in Philosophy from the Denver Seminary.
About Penguin Solutions
The most exciting technological advancements are also the most challenging for companies to adopt. At Penguin Solutions, we support our customers in achieving their ambitions across our AI infrastructure, computing, memory, and LED lines of business. With our expert skills, experience, and partnerships, we turn our customers’ most complex challenges into compelling opportunities. For more information, visit https://www.penguinsolutions.com.
Source: Penguin Solutions
The post Penguin Solutions Appoints Ian Colle as SVP and Chief Product Officer appeared first on HPCwire.
How the US-Israeli war against Iran exploded into a regional conflict, as Tehran retaliated with strikes across the Middle East
A US-Israeli war against Iran that began on Saturday with bombing and missile attacks that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has exploded into a regional conflict, with Tehran retaliating by launching strikes across the Middle East.
By Monday, a major new front had opened with Israel bombing Lebanon after Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, launched strikes. And Cyprus said a drone attack had targeted a British base on the Mediterranean island nation.
Continue reading...Another iPad Air appears, right on schedule. M4 chip and some wireless improvements are on tap.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and SAXONBURG, Pa., March 2, 2026 — NVIDIA and Coherent Corp. today announced a multiyear strategic agreement to advance the frontier of advanced optics technologies, including manufacturing capacity and research and development, to enable next-generation AI infrastructure.
Credit: Shutterstock
The nonexclusive agreement includes an NVIDIA multibillion-dollar purchase commitment and future access and capacity rights for advanced laser and optical networking products. In addition, NVIDIA is investing $2 billion in Coherent to support research and development, future capacity and operations as Coherent builds out its U.S.-based manufacturing capabilities.
Optical interconnects and advanced package integration are foundational to the next phase of AI infrastructure, as they unlock ultrahigh-bandwidth, energy-efficient connectivity across AI factories. This expanded partnership harnesses NVIDIA’s leadership in AI, accelerated computing and networking, and Coherent’s expertise in optical innovation and advanced manufacturing, enabling Coherent to scale its R&D and manufacturing capacity to support the global buildout of next-generation AI data centers.
“Computing has fundamentally changed. In the age of AI, software runs on intelligence with tokens generated in real time by AI factories for every interaction and every context,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With Coherent, NVIDIA is pioneering next-generation silicon photonics to enable AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale, speed and energy efficiency.”
“This strategic relationship underscores Coherent’s role as a key enabler of next-generation AI data center infrastructure,” said Jim Anderson, CEO of Coherent. “We are proud to expand our 20-year relationship with NVIDIA by increasing their access to include multiple product families to help them build the AI data centers of the future.”
More from HPCwire: NVIDIA Signs Multiyear Optics Agreement with Lumentum
About Coherent
Coherent is the global photonics leader. We harness photons to drive innovation. Industry leaders in the datacenter, communications, and industrial markets rely on Coherent’s world-leading technology to fuel their own innovation and growth. Founded in 1971 and operating in more than 20 countries, Coherent brings the industry’s broadest, deepest technology stack; unmatched supply chain resilience; and global scale to help its customers solve their toughest technology challenges. For more information, please visit us at coherent.com.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA and Coherent Announce Strategic Partnership to Develop Optics Tech appeared first on HPCwire.
At the inaugural meeting of his self-styled Board of Peace earlier this month, Donald Trump declared peace in the Middle East while simultaneously threatening to plunge the region into devastating conflict by again attacking Iran. Within 10 days, Trump followed through on that promise, teaming up with Israel to unleash a widespread campaign of deadly airstrikes in Iran that have thrust the Middle East into regional war.
It was one of numerous incongruities that surfaced during the bizarre first meeting of Trump’s Temu United Nations.
“In terms of prestige, there’s never been anything close because these are the greatest world leaders, almost everybody has accepted, and the ones that haven’t will,” Trump proclaimed before he grasped a diminutive gold-colored mallet and gaveled out the conclave to strains of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a member of the group’s executive board, could be seen standing alone in the background as Trump glad-handed some of the assembled world leaders. Rubio skulked off before Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” began to play.
An Intercept analysis finds that every member state of the Board of Peace has been rebuked for human rights violations, including many by Rubio’s own State Department. Those not currently on the State Department list after a 2025 whitewash of countries’ human rights reports shielding Trump’s allies from honest assessments were previously cited by the department.
Originally conceived as a means to oversee the shaky Gaza peace plan, Trump has recast the Board of Peace as an international body under his control and direction, ostensively devoted to ending or preventing wars. “We’re also going to maybe take it a step further where we see hot spots around the world,” Trump decreed. “We will help Gaza, we will straighten it out, we’ll make it successful, we will make it peaceful, and we will do things like that in other spots.”
Trump even suggested his group would provide oversight of the U.N. “The Board of Peace is going to almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly,” Trump said.
As chair of the Board of Peace, with a lifetime appointment, Trump determines the council’s membership, chooses the executive board, and has the final say on all things since “decisions shall be made by a majority of the Member States present and voting, subject to the approval of the Chairman,” according to the Board’s charter. As chair, Trump is also the “final authority regarding the meaning, interpretation, and application” of the charter. Any amendments to the charter also must have Trump’s stamp of approval.
Trump controls the Board’s finances as chair, creating what looks to be a slush fund of international proportions. A $1 billion contribution secures permanent membership on the Board instead of a three-year appointment, which requires no payment. Trump said he also exacted promises of more than $7 billion from nine countries, although Board of Peace documents show only eight countries formally signed a pledge of their “intention to contribute funds to the Board of Peace.” For his part, Trump promised to siphon U.S. tax dollars — at least $10 billion — into the Board’s coffers. The Board of Peace, in turn, announced “more than $15 billion in funding commitments” for “humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities” in Gaza.
The Board’s charter states that it can acquire and dispose of “immovable and movable property, institute legal proceedings, open bank accounts, receive and disburse private and public funds, and employ staff.” As chair, Trump has “exclusive authority to create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary entities as necessary or appropriate to fulfill the Board of Peace’s mission.” It remains unclear how all of the Boards’ funds will be spent and if there will be any meaningful supervision of the Board’s finances. The executive board — which Trump chooses and controls — provides “oversight mechanisms with respect to budgets, financial accounts, and disbursements,” according to the charter.
The Board says that the World Bank-administered Gaza Reconstruction and Development Fund “will operate under defined fiduciary controls, aligned with global best practices” and that an “AI-enabled digital infrastructure backbone will support procurement transparency and transform Gaza into a modern economy, reducing corruption risk and ensuring responsible stewardship of reconstruction capital for the benefit of Gaza’s residents.”
Traditional U.S. allies like the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, and Ukraine have all declined to join the Board of Peace. But the U.K., Italy, the European Union and 20 other nations did attend the inaugural Board of Peace meeting as observers.
In addition to Trump, Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, White House chief of staff Susan Wiles, Trump son-in-law and diplomatic consiglieri Jared Kushner, and Kushner’s negotiating partner and Trump friend Steve Witkoff, numerous world leaders joined the inaugural meeting as their countries’ Board representatives. They included Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Argentine President Javier Milei, both staunch Trump allies and noted authoritarians. They and other leaders were gifted red MAGA-style hats emblazoned with “USA.”
Trump said other “great boards” were “peanuts” because unlike other governing bodies, almost all members of his Peace Board were “the head of a country.” While the executive board — which includes Trump, Rubio, Kushner, and Witkoff, among others — is made up of individuals, the Board of Peace itself is made up of member states. They constitute a veritable who’s who of global bad actors.
Longtime U.S. adversaries Russia and China, both consistent gross human rights abusers, have been invited to join. While those powers have yet to sign on, there are currently 28 members of the Board of Peace, according to its new website.
| Member Nation | Title | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Albania | Prime Minister | Edi Rama |
| Argentina | President | Javier Milei |
| Armenia | Prime Minister | Nikol Pashinyan |
| Azerbaijan | President | Ilham Aliyev |
| Bahrain | King | Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa |
| Belarus | President | Alyaksandr Lukashenka |
| Bulgaria | President | Iliana Iotova |
| Cambodia | Prime Minister | Hun Manet |
| Egypt | President | Abdel Fattah el-Sisi |
| El Salvador | President | Nayib Bukele |
| Hungary | Prime Minister | Viktor Orbán |
| Indonesia | President | Prabowo Subianto |
| Israel | Prime Minister | Benjamin Netanyahu |
| Jordan | King | Abdullah II |
| Kazakhstan | President | Kassym-Jomart Tokayev |
| Kosovo | President | Vjosa Osmani |
| Kuwait | Amir | Meshal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah |
| Mongolia | President | Khurelsukh Ukhnaa |
| Morocco | Prime Minister | Aziz Akhannouch |
| Pakistan | Prime Minister | Shehbaz Sharif |
| Paraguay | President | Santiago Peña |
| Qatar | Amir | Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani |
| Saudi Arabia | Crown Prince and Prime Minister | Mohammed bin Salman |
| Turkey | President | Recep Tayyip Erdoğan |
| United Arab Emirates | President | Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan |
| United States | President (Chair) | Donald J. Trump |
| Uzbekistan | President | Shavkat Mirziyoyev |
| Vietnam | General Secretary | Tô Lâm |
All member states have been cited for human rights abuses in the State Department’s two most recent annual human rights reports, including for some of the gravest possible violations.
Last year, Rubio’s State Department issued sanitized human rights reports that soft-peddled abuses. But the analyses still cited allegations that 23 of the 27 foreign Board of Peace member states for arguably the worst crimes: unlawful or arbitrary killings or torture. Including the last Biden-era reports, the number rises to 25. Members of Trump’s Board are, in fact, among the worst human rights violators on the planet, chief among them Belarus, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
The State Department and White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Board of Peace did not reply to a request on X for public affairs’ contact information.
A report issued last summer by Rubio’s State Department took the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to task for “significant human rights issues” including credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; and arbitrary arrest and detention; among many other violations. “The government did not take credible steps or action to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses in a verifiable way,” according to that report.
Even Rubio’s State Department referenced reports that Israel conducted “arbitrary or unlawful killings” as well as “serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom.” A United Nations commission investigating the war in Gaza went further and established that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention,” said Navi Pillay, the chair of the commission, last September. “The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza.”
Belarus is another wildly oppressive Board of Peace member-nation. Freedom House — a nongovernmental organization that advocates for human rights and gets the bulk of its funding from the U.S. government — calls that country “an authoritarian state in which elections are openly rigged and civil liberties are severely restricted.” The group noted that the Eastern European nation’s security forces “have violently assaulted and arbitrarily detained journalists and ordinary citizens who challenge Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime.” Last year, the State Department also called out Belarus for a raft of abuses including “torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices; [and] arbitrary arrest or detention.”
“War is peace” was one of the slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” Trump’s Board of Peace exemplifies this same Orwellian doublethink in which contradictory ideas are cast as true. Israel’s and Belarus’s inclusion on the Board, for example, puts a spotlight on the startling disconnect between Trump’s league of rogue nations and its stated purpose.
“What we’re doing is very simple. Peace. It’s called the Board of Peace and it’s all about an easy word to say, but a hard word to produce — peace, but we’re going to produce it,” said Trump at the February 19 meeting. But the Peace Board is filled with warmakers called out even by Rubio’s State Department. For instance, it accused Belarus of crimes of war including “serious abuses in a conflict, related to Belarus’ complicity in Russia’s war against Ukraine”; Indonesia for “arbitrary or unlawful killings” in “counterinsurgency operations against armed separatist groups”; Israel for “continued large-scale military operation in densely populated Gaza”; Pakistan for “serious abuses in a conflict”; and Turkey for “unlawful recruitment or use of children in armed conflict by government-supported armed groups outside of the country.”
“We have peace in the Middle East right now.”
The greatest offender to peace on the Board, however, be the United States. While Trump said “there’s nothing more important than peace” at the inaugural meeting, during his second term he has already launched attacks on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean — and, over the weekend, Iran.
The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name and has also threatened Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.
“We have peace in the Middle East right now,” Trump declared in his rambling speech, during which he also threatened to again attack Iran to knock out a nuclear program that he said had already been “totally decimated.”
A 2025 survey of 25 nations around the world found that the publics in 17 of them saw the United States as the first or second greatest international threat to their country, including America’s neighbors, Canada (59 percent) and Mexico (68 percent). Just this month, a poll by the Allensbach Institute, a market research firm, found Germans see the U.S. as the second-greatest threat to world peace, surpassing China and edging closer to Russia.
The post Trump’s Orwellian Board of Peace Consists Entirely of Human Rights Abusers appeared first on The Intercept.
A new batch of A24 films including The Zone of Interest, Aftersun and Midsommar are available this March on free streaming services.
Workplace Gender Equality Agency report shows a slight increase in number of women in highly paid roles, which are still dominated by men
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Men are nearly twice as likely as women to be making $220,000 a year, with minimal progress made on closing Australia’s gender pay gap in the past 12 months.
The federal government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) published its gender pay gap results for 10,500 employers on Tuesday. It revealed there was a slight increase in the number of women in highly paid roles, but men were still 1.8 times more likely to be in the upper quartile of earners on an average salary of $221,000.
Continue reading...Ken Henry leads push for federal government to do more to protect animals as biodiversity declines
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Labor is being pushed to introduce tough new national rules for protecting threatened species exposed to disasters including bushfires and floods, with the former Treasury boss Ken Henry among advocates warning that risks to wildlife could reach a point of no return.
Months after a major rewrite of environment laws passed parliament, a consortium of animal protection and campaign groups want the Albanese government to standardise rescue, treatment and rehabilitation processes and help fund organisations working to protect species including endangered koalas in the May federal budget.
Continue reading...The narrow shipping route on Iran’s southern border carries one fifth of global seaborne crude oil, one fifth of LNG shipments and one third of the most widely used fertiliser
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the Iranian government by force could trigger a new wave of cost-of-living pressures that embattled governments and central banks around the world will struggle to deal with.
The US-Israel attack on the Middle Eastern country at the weekend is the latest in a long series of global economic shocks.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One day not long ago, a founder texted his investor with an update: he was replacing his entire customer service team with Claude Code, an AI tool that can write and deploy software on its own. To Lex Zhao, an investor at One Way Ventures, the message indicated something bigger -- the moment when companies like Salesforce stopped being the automatic default. "The barriers to entry for creating software are so low now thanks to coding agents, that the build versus buy decision is shifting toward build in so many cases," Zhao told TechCrunch. The build versus buy shift is only part of the problem. The whole idea of using AI agents instead of people to perform work throws into question the SaaS business model itself. SaaS companies currently price their software per seat -- meaning by how many employees log in to use it. "SaaS has long been regarded as one of the most attractive business models due to its highly predictable recurring revenue, immense scalability, and 70-90% gross margins," Abdul Abdirahman, an investor at the venture firm F-Prime, told TechCrunch. When one, or a handful, of AI agents can do that work -- when employees simply ask their AI of choice to pull the data from the system -- that per-seat model starts to break down. The rapid pace of AI development also means that new tools, like Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex, can replicate not just the core functions of SaaS products but also the add-on tools a SaaS vendor would sell to grow revenue from existing customers. On top of that, customers now have the ultimate contract negotiation tool in their pockets: If they don't like a SaaS vendor's prices, they can, more easily than ever before, build their own alternative. "Even if they do not take the build route, this creates downward pressure on contracts that SaaS vendors can secure during renewals," Abdirahman continued. We saw this as early as late 2024, when Klarna announced that it had ditched Salesforce's flagship CRM product in favor of its own homegrown AI system. The realization that a growing number of other companies can do the same is spooking public markets, where the stock prices of SaaS giants like Salesforce and Workday have been sliding. In early February, an investor sell-off wiped nearly $1 trillion in market value from software and services stocks, followed by another billion later in the month. Experts are calling it the SaaSpocalypse, with one analyst dubbing it FOBO investing -- or fear of becoming obsolete. Yet the venture investors TechCrunch spoke with believe such fears are only temporary. "This isn't the death of SaaS," Aaron Holiday, a managing partner at 645 Ventures, told TechCrunch. Rather, it's the beginning of an old snake shedding its skin, he said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
All six crew members ejected safely in apparent ‘friendly fire’ as Kuwait launches investigation into incident
Three US fighter jets were mistakenly shot down over Kuwait early Monday in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, military officials said. All six crew members ejected safely.
According to a statement from US Central Command (Centcom), Kuwait’s air defences fired on the F-15 war planes during a combat mission on the third day of conflict following Saturday’s launch of US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran.
Continue reading...If you’re following KDE Plasma development, you’ve most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method. The end result has been that for a while now, theming on KDE is kind of broken.
Broken in what way? Most long-time KDE users will be aware that ever since KDE 4, the KDE shell (Plasma using SVG for theming) and KDE applications (QtWidgets using QStyle for theming) use separate theme engines. While this has always been annoying, it’s at least manageable in that most theme designers tended to create both a Plasma SVG theme and a QStyle theme that matched. However, things got more complicated when KDE introduced QtQuick, its modern way of creating applications with QML. QtQuick has its own theme, qqc2-desktop-style, to make QtQuick applications look and feel like Breeze, KDE’s current theme.
Not only do all of these have to be kept in sync manually, QtQuick applications also do not properly inherit all the elements of the QStyle theme you set, leading to many modern KDE applications looking broken when using a non-default theme (and the same applies when using Kvantum; it also cannot properly theme QtQuick applications). In other words, there is currently no way to theme the entire KDE desktop for a consistent look, and if you try, many applications will simply look broken.
Union is KDE’s answer to this set of problems. Union is a new style engine that takes CSS and processes it into consistent themes for both QtWidget and QtQuick applications. It’s quite flexible, and can potentially even be extended to generate GTK themes from that same CSS. Sadly, since the KDE Pasma shell SVG stuff is entirely different, it won’t be styled by Union, but KDE might simply retire the SVG stuff entirely and move the Plasma shell to QtQuick’s qqc2-desktop-style to address that issue.
Union has been in development for a long time, as it’s a difficult effort, but progress is definitely being made. KDE is currently already at the stage where they’re adapting the current Breeze QStyle to better match the Union Breeze’s style, to make the future transition from the separate QStyle/qqc2-desktop-style to the unified, single Union Breeze as seamless as possible. These changes are currently available for testing in the master branch, and will be part of Plasma 6.7 or 6.8.
As a KDE user who likes to have a more classic, late ’90s theme, but who also values consistency above all else, Union is something I’m very much looking forward to. While it certainly won’t fix every single issue right away, it will definitely address the biggest issues with theming on KDE. I’m incredibly happy that KDE’s developers still consider theming and user choice and agency over what pixels appear on their screen important enough to undertake an effort like Union.
Since 2016, the cosy, inclusive, non-heteronormative escapism of the beloved farming sim has inspired a community of devoted fans, and helped it shift 50m units
When farming sim Stardew Valley first came out back in 2016, most of us saw it as a modest indie hit, offering charm, wit and a beautiful little world. Ten years later, this tiny indie has sold nearly 50m copies. If you haven’t played it yourself, you’ve probably seen someone playing it on the train (or, in the case of one of my musical theatre castmates, in the dressing room between scenes). As we discussed on the Tech Weekly podcast shortly after its launch, this calming game about tending crops and animals and relationships with neighbours rejuvenated the entire farming/life sim genre. To this day, I still get press releases promising that some upcoming cosy game or another is the next Stardew Valley.
While developer Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone now has a small team to help with periodic updates, the original game – his first – was all his own work, from the distinctive pixel art and animations to the soundtrack that has since toured the world in concert. Unable to get a job after university, he’d started his own project inspired by the Harvest Moon series (now called Story of Seasons). One notable addition was the inclusion of queer romance options. The ability to pursue a romantic relationship with other townsfolk is a key part of the game’s popularity – as demonstrated by the thousands who tuned in to a video from Barone revealing the identities of two new marriage candidates – and the fact that all potential spouses are available to the player character regardless of gender has helped the game garner a dedicated queer fanbase.
Continue reading...Virginia State Police were called to Interstate 495 southbound near exit 52 in Annandale, Virginia, around 1:20 p.m. on Sunday for a reported road rage incident.
The Iran war exposes the limits of Russia’s leverage in a fragmenting regional order Expert comment jon.wallace
The war will not affect Russian plans in Ukraine – but it will likely force a rethink of long-held Russian strategic concepts.
In a diplomatic note to the Iranian government dated 29 March 1944, Vyacheslav Molotov, then foreign minister of the Soviet Union, noted that ‘the Soviet Union [couldn’t] remain indifferent to the fate of Iran’. That statement crystallized a perennial tenet of Soviet foreign policy – one that still synthesizes much of Moscow’s approach to the Middle East today: Iran is not a dispensable peripheral actor. It is a structural node on the southern flank of the Russian Central Asian zone of influence.
The current military confrontation between Iran on the one side, and the United States (US) and Israel on the other, might well push this logic to its limits. Moscow may be forced to navigate a new and possibly perilous geometry of utility, ideology, and strategic restraint.
Depending on the war’s outcome, the Kremlin might see its already wobbly strategic architecture in the Middle East so badly undermined that it is compelled to reassess its regional calculus.
Russia’s public posture in response to the military action against Iran has been one of sharp rhetorical condemnation. Moscow has labelled the strikes ‘unprovoked acts of armed aggression’ and warned of regional and global instability unless diplomacy is restored.
But Russia will obviously not enter into any kind of military confrontation with the US and Israel. Nor has it sent Tehran the least sign that it may provide any form of support.
The Kremlin’s next steps will likely be calibrated to uphold its credibility as a counter-Western partner but avoid being drawn into a second high-intensity conflict. It will also seek to preserve bargaining space with Washington on other issues – not least the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
Until the situation in Iran is clarified, the keywords for Moscow will be ‘strategic hedging’. In other words, it will seek to make the most of the US distraction in the hope of depriving Kyiv of media oxygen and pushing the war on Ukraine into the background.
But the current developments in Iran are not without deeper implications for Moscow, particularly relating to the nuclear question.
Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), enrichment levels and stockpiles were embedded in a negotiated framework in which Russia was an instrumental participant. That framework is now gone.
US and Israeli strikes during June’s so-called ‘Twelve-Day War’ had already significantly degraded elements of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure. The ongoing war is now moving to the next level, shifting the nuclear issue from managed diplomacy and short-term surgical strikes to outright coercive force with a clear longer-term ambition of regime change.
For Moscow, this changes the calculus in three ways. First, a weakened, yet unresolved nuclear file preserves Iran’s strategic relevance while increasing the volatility surrounding the country. Any engagement with an Iranian regime that has now struck at almost every country across the Arabian peninsula won’t go without a political risk.
This reflects a deeper structural irony: the very cooperation that once bound Russia and Iran economically and technologically may now expose Moscow to reputational and operational dilemmas.
Second, the normalization of preventive strikes against nuclear infrastructure erodes the diplomatic architecture that Russia once used to project influence and political legitimacy in the region.
Third and certainly not least, if Tehran emerges either significantly enfeebled or forced into a coercive settlement with Washington, Moscow will lose leverage in a region where its room for manoeuvre has already significantly narrowed after the fall of Assad in Syria.
The death of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the heightened military pressure from a growing number of countries could indicate that Moscow’s influence in the region may be waning.
But the situation in Iran is unlikely to hinder Moscow’s plans in Ukraine, or to tilt the battlefield. Russia’s need for Iranian support in sustaining its war has already declined, as Moscow has internalized production of weapons systems that it once sourced from Tehran.
As part of a structural rebalancing, Iranian Shahed drones and components, once critical stopgaps, have been integrated into Russian production lines. Russia now produces substantial quantities of similar systems domestically, making continued Iranian deliveries less essential.
This reduces the short-term operational risk to Moscow should the conflict in Iran become protracted. Russia can absorb Iranian instability without immediate capability collapse.
But that insulation comes with a cost. The partnership could grow less reciprocal and even more transactional that it had already become in recent months.
The asymmetry creates leverage for Tehran (which has been providing Moscow with strategic expertise on sanctions circumvention) but reduces incentives for the Kremlin to defend a partner under existential pressure.
Russia’s Middle Eastern posture was historically supported by layered and strategically complementary partnerships – with Syria as a western anchor and Iran as an eastern axis. But Russian influence in Damascus has eroded over the past decade, leaving Tehran’s role more conspicuous and, paradoxically, more fragile in Moscow’s strategic calculus.
If Iran becomes consumed by war, and if its capacity to act as a regional balancer wanes, Russia faces a sequential attrition of strategic depth. The wider geopolitical architecture could shift, from a multipolar balance where Moscow plays off rivals against each other, to a more fragmented environment in which Russia is reactive rather than proactive.
This is significant because regional power projection relies as much on predictability and stability in adjacent zones as on the mere presence of partner regimes. A war-consumed Iran introduces new uncertainties along Russia’s southern arc, from the Caucasus to Central Asia, where Moscow’s standing has also eroded.
‘Russia will seek the formation of a multipolar world’, remarked Yevgeny Primakov, Russia’s prime minister and foreign policy grand strategist, in 1998. That would become the cornerstone of the Kremlin’s foreign policy narrative: a drive for a multipolar world in which powers like Iran, China, and Russia balance the perceived hegemony of the US and the ‘collective West’.
In this framework, Primakov treated Iran’s capacity as a structural counterweight within a broader Eurasian balance – one that blurs the boundary between Europe and Asia and challenges the idea that Europe is institutionally and strategically Western.
In today’s context, however, that thesis is under strain. If the US and Israel succeed in degrading Iran’s strategic position, the narrative of a resilient multipolar order loses ideological traction.
The war’s trajectory therefore impacts not just material balance but also the normative legitimacy of Moscow’s grand strategic conception.
A prolonged war raises critical questions about spill-over effects – from refugee flows to the proliferation of arms and militant networks. For Russia, whose southern flank security strategy has historically relied on internal and regional stability, this is not peripheral.
At the same time, Russia’s options are constrained. It cannot militarily balance the US–Israel coalition in the Middle East. And it lacks the economic weight to fully underwrite Tehran if Iran is isolated post-conflict.
Moscow must also navigate the China variable, since Beijing – not Moscow – might well come out as a more consequential external actor in a post-war Iran than one might think.
Thus, Russia is faced with a strategic dilemma: should it prioritize managed distancing and diplomatic leverage, or entrench deeper into a partnership that exposes it to systemic risk and greater regional geopolitical volatility?
In some regards, Molotov’s insight about Iran’s strategic salience for Moscow remains relevant today. But the context has shifted dramatically. Russia is not operationally dependent on Iran for its war in Ukraine – that helps in the short term. But Russia is exposed to the broader geopolitical turbulence that Iran’s war with the US and Israel creates.
The war tests Russia’s strategic patience, ideological narrative, and capacity to maintain agency in a rapidly fragmenting region. The partnership of convenience that once served as a buffer is now a variable in a much larger equation – one where Russian influence is neither pre-eminent nor entirely optional. It is contingent, negotiated, and increasingly vulnerable to shifts far beyond Moscow’s direct control. And loss of control sits uneasily with Kremlinology…
17th-century Dutch master’s Vision of Zacharias in the Temple to go on display this week
It hung unrecognised on the wall of a private home for decades but now a 17th-century painting has been revealed as a Rembrandt, taking its potential value from thousands to millions of pounds.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam announced on Monday that it had rediscovered an early biblical scene by the Dutch master that was once thought lost, thanks to hi-tech scanning and two years of expert analysis.
Continue reading...Civil rights leader will get final full honors from state where, in 1960, he led Black students into segregated library
After a long career of fighting for civil rights, the Rev Jesse Jackson Sr is visiting his home for one last time to lie in state at the South Carolina capitol on Monday.
The final full honors from the state where he was born is a far cry from his childhood in segregated Greenville, where in 1960 he couldn’t go inside the local library’s much better funded whites-only branch to check out a book he needed.
Continue reading...Rachel Reeves’s upcoming spring forecast has not led to slowdown, as property tax rumours did in November
House prices in the UK increased in February, avoiding a repeat of the “negative speculation” that depressed the market before last November’s budget, as Rachel Reeves prepares to present the spring forecast on Tuesday.
The average price of a home rose to £273,176 last month, up by 0.3% from the month before, according to Nationwide, the UK’s biggest building society. It matched January’s monthly increase, and was above analysts’ forecasts of a 0.2% gain. The annual growth rate remained steady at 1%.
Continue reading...Regulator looks into claim Hilton, InterContinental Hotels and Marriott could be sharing ‘competitively sensitive’ information via analytics tool
The UK competition watchdog has opened an investigation into three of the world’s biggest hotel chains – Hilton, InterContinental Hotels (IHG) and Marriott – amid suspicions they could be sharing “competitively sensitive” information with each other.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating allegations that the businesses, which together operate more than 25,000 hotels worldwide, could be sharing information through the data analytics tool STR. CoStar, the real estate data firm that owns STR, is also under investigation.
Continue reading...The world's largest mobile tech show kicks off today and CNET is on the ground covering announcements from Samsung, Xiaomi, Honor, Google, Huawei and more.
Three American fighter jets were "mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses," CENTCOM said in a statement Monday, as the war with Iran continued for a third day.
Israel said Sunday that it launched another wave of strikes on Iran, and Tehran retaliated across the region.
Effects of extended conflict between US and Iran could also lead to higher interest rates and hit economic growth
The impact of the deadly and unpredictable conflict in the Middle East on the global economy will be felt most immediately, and keenly, through the rising cost of oil.
Prices jumped on Monday, as markets had their first opportunity to digest the weekend’s tit-for-tat attacks. A barrel of Brent crude oil was trading at about $79 (£59) by lunchtime in London, up about $6 or 8.5% on the day.
Continue reading...Trump cited debunked claims in video address that Iran was on verge of nuclear weapons to justify US casualties. Plus, the teacher who exposed Putin’s primary school propaganda
Good morning.
Donald Trump recorded a new video address yesterday, vowing to avenge three American deaths after the joint US-Israel strikes on Iran and accusing the Iranian regime of “waging war against civilization itself”.
What is Trump’s plan? It’s unclear but he is under pressure to spell out his vision for Iran. Trump’s critics are demanding that the White House provide greater clarity about what comes next. Opponents and analysts say the lack of a clear plan outlined so far has created a danger of the US being sucked into a long-lasting conflict of the sort that Trump repeatedly vowed to avoid.
This is a developing story. Follow our liveblog here.
How many flights have been cancelled? Early on Monday, 1,239 flights had already been cancelled. Emirates, based in Dubai; Etihad Airways, based in Abu Dhabi; and Qatar Airways, based in Doha, have collectively cancelled hundreds of flights. Almost 2,800 flights were cancelled on Saturday, and 3,156 were cancelled on Sunday, according to the tracking platform FlightAware.
Continue reading...
BEATRICE AQUAVIA
Associate Visuals and Layout Editor
NIK ANNA
Photographer
Managing Visuals and Layout Editor Beatrice Aquavia and Photographer Nik Anna capture Delaware’s loss to Upenn.
This Switch 2 exclusive might be its biggest killer app yet. I'm lost and in love with the cozy apocalypse.
The days of the retirement league trope appear to be ending, while Inter Miami’s star had an outstanding – and amusing – game against Orlando City
Even before David Beckham swapped Madrid for Los Angeles, MLS has harbored a reputation as a “retirement league.” The notion is well-worn in banter circles. It’s tired, and also at least a little bit true.
Robbie Keane. Kaká. David Villa. Andrea Pirlo. Didier Drogba. Wayne Rooney. Zlatan Ibrahimović. All of them – and many others – enjoyed late-career stops in the United States. Today, three of the 11 players named to Fifa’s Dream Team after the 2014 World Cup play in the league: Lionel Messi (Inter Miami), Thomas Müller (Vancouver Whitecaps) and James Rodríguez (Minnesota United). When Son Heung-min (33 years old) arrived in Los Angeles after his decade with Tottenham, he reunited with longtime Spurs teammate Hugo Lloris (39), and ensured derby days against the LA Galaxy’s Marco Reus (36).
Continue reading...The weather phenomenon known as El Niño could form later this year, potentially pushing global temperatures to record heights, researchers say.
The photos showed "the last moments" of 200 men executed at an Athens shooting range on May 1, 1944, Greece's the culture ministry said.
"At its peak in early 2014, Stack Overflow received more than 200,000 questions per month," notes the site DevClass.com. But in December they'd just 3,862 questions were asked — a 78 percent drop from the previous year. But Stack Overflow's blog announced a beta of "a redesigned Stack Overflow" this week, noting that at July's WeAreDevelopers conference they'd "committed to pushing ourselves to experiment and evolve..." Over the past year, on the public platform, we introduced new features, including AI Assist, support for open-ended questions, enhancements to Chat, launched Coding Challenges, created an MCP server [granted limited access to AI agents and tools], expanded access to voting and comments, and more. However, these launches are not standalone features. We have also been rethinking our look and feel, how people engage with Stack Overflow, and how content is created and shared. These new features, along with the redesign, represent how we are bringing Stack Overflow's new vision to life and delivering value that developers cannot find elsewhere. Our goal is to build the space for every technical conversation, centered on real human-to-human connection and powered by AI when it helps most. To support this, we are introducing a redesigned Stack Overflow to best reflect this direction... During the beta period, users can visit the beta site at beta.stackoverflow.com and share feedback as we build towards a new experience on Stack Overflow. They've updated their library of reusable UI components (buttons, forms, etc.), and are promising "More ways to share knowledge and ask any technical question." ("Alongside looking for the single right answer to your question, you can now find and share experience-based insights and peer recommendations...") They're launching all the planned features and functionality in April, when "More users will automatically redirect to the new site." (Starting in April users "can continue to toggle back to the classic site for a limited time.")
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Brent crude up 13% in early trading with markets under pressure as US-Israeli strikes on Iran effectively close strait of Hormuz to shipping
Oil prices rose and stock markets came under pressure on Monday after intense US-Israeli strikes on Iran prompted fears of significant global economic disruption.
Brent crude jumped by as much as 13% during early trading – to hit $82 a barrel, a 14-month high – as the effective closure of the strait of Hormuz, one of the most important arteries for global trade, intensified concerns over oil supplies.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of passengers remain stranded, with key air hubs in Middle East closed amid fallout from US-Israeli strikes on Iran
Thousands more flights were cancelled on Monday as the turmoil in global air travel caused by the US-Israel war on Iran continued, with hundreds of thousands of passengers already stranded.
Gulf airports and airlines have suspended all operations until at least 10.00 GMT on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Exclusive: National Film and Television School introduces fully accessible accommodation and bursary scheme at its Beaconsfield campus
For a long time, physically disabled students who dreamed of studying at the UK’s most prestigious film and TV production school had nowhere to stay in the local area. And when they commuted, they would encounter hundreds of inaccessible areas on campus.
In an industry where just 12% of TV employees are disabled, compared with 18% in the labour market as a whole, something had to change.
Continue reading...Two more drones intercepted on Monday, authorities say, in what appears to be sustained targeting of base
A one-way attack drone struck the UK’s RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus at about midnight on Sunday, prompting a partial evacuation of the military facility.
Two more drones were successfully intercepted on Monday morning, the Cypriot authorities said, as part of what appears to be a sustained targeting of the base on the third day of the war in the Middle East.
Continue reading...Before you drop hundreds of dollars on a Vitamix, read what cooking professionals have to say about the lauded blenders.
Our new free course AI for the People will show you practical ways to work with AI –without giving up judgment, privacy or your humanity
Continue reading...AI is transforming our world. Accepting independent oversight is the least companies can do to protect our rights
The speed with which AI is transforming our lives is head-spinning. Unlike previous technological revolutions – radio, nuclear fission or the internet – governments are not leading the way. We know that AI can be dangerous; chatbots advise teens on suicide and may soon be capable of instructing on how to create biological weapons. Yet there is no equivalent to the Federal Drug Administration, testing new models for safety before public release. Unlike in the nuclear industry, companies often don’t have to disclose dangerous breaches or accidents. The tech industry’s lobbying muscle, Washington’s paralyzing polarization, and the sheer complexity of such a potent, fast-moving technology have kept federal regulation at bay. European officials are facing pushback against rules that some claim hobble the continent’s competitiveness. Although several US states are piloting AI laws, they operate in a tentative patchwork and Donald Trump has attempted to render them invalid.
Heads of AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini say they care about safety. But owning the future of AI means pouring billions into models that not even their creators fully understand, and making choices like adding ads – and the capabilities that the Pentagon is now seeking from Anthropic – that raise risk. Anthropic, which styles itself as the most conscientious frontier AI company, says its model is trained to “imagine how a thoughtful senior Anthropic employee” would weigh helpfulness against possible harm. The directive echoes criticisms levied years ago over Silicon Valley companies that shaped the lives of users worldwide from insular boardrooms. Consumers don’t believe they are in good hands. Fully 77% of Americans surveyed last year think AI could pose a threat to humanity.
Continue reading...In contrast with the takedowns of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson, US consequences have been limited to resignations and apologies
Weeks after justice department officials released more than 3m investigative documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, there have not been any arrests in the US, prompting questions about whether any potential co-conspirators will be held accountable on American soil.
Indeed, consequences in the US for the sex trafficker’s associates have largely been limited to a handful of sombre resignations and public apologies of late – not high-level criminal prosecutions that victims and advocates have long demanded.
Continue reading...Activists who dispute safety of vaccines are pushing to limit immunization requirements in schools
As South Carolina grapples with a measles outbreak that has infected nearly 1,000 people, groups with ties to the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, are pushing to eliminate immunization requirements that protect children.
Activists are targeting vaccine mandates in states trying to tamp down measles as communities across the country struggle to stop the worst spread of the illness since the early 1990s. The Guardian found anti-vaccine groups are encouraging their followers to organize opposition to vaccine mandates in more than 20 states, including at least six with current measles outbreaks.
Continue reading...Lawmakers from Sanders to Mark Kelly offer mixed feelings on Trump’s action and killing of Iranian supreme leader
As Republicans celebrated the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with praise for Donald Trump’s decisive action, Democrats faced their own divisions and a reckoning over how to present a united front.
Most were quick to condemn the US president for sidelining Congress to launch an illegal and unconstitutional war and demanded a swift vote on a war powers resolution that would restrain his military onslaught.
Continue reading...U.S. officials said they were negotiating with Iran in good faith, even if hours later they joined Israeli military strikes that targeted the Iranian government.
The war has already become regional: Iran is attacking American-aligned Arab states in the hope that they will pressure Trump to sign a ceasefire
Last week, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday and again on Friday, just before launching Operation Epic Fury, Donald Trump laid out his case for attacking Iran.
The US president offered a lengthy bill of indictment against Iran’s Islamic Republic, stretching back to the 1979 revolution: the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, support for terrorism, brutality towards its citizenry, and support for proxies that have killed Americans.
Continue reading...Commentary: I'm not a fan of tech-loaded spectacles, but a demo at Mobile World Congress may have swayed me.
Former Oxford University professor and UK government adviser faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted
The prominent Swiss academic and Islam scholar Tariq Ramadan will go trial in Paris on Monday on charges of raping three women in France between 2009 and 2016.
Ramadan, who advised previous British governments on Islam and society, denies all the charges in a case that has been seen as one of the biggest repercussions of the #MeToo movement in France.
Continue reading...Local emergency managers, the behind-the-scenes coordinators who mobilize help during disasters, have raised the same point time and again: We need adequate resources to protect people in harm’s way — before the harm arrives.
In some notable cases, resources didn’t come soon enough. It wasn’t until after Hurricane Helene devastated Yancey County, North Carolina, in 2024 that commissioners there hired additional emergency management staff, which the former emergency manager said he’d requested for years. City officials in St. Louis, Missouri, were in the process of upgrading their faulty outdoor warning system when a tornado killed four people and injured dozens of others in May 2025.
We wanted to know more about the cracks in the systems meant to keep communities safe when disasters strike. To do that, we reached out to dozens of emergency management agencies and wound up hearing from more than 40 current and former emergency managers in 11 states. They described common concerns.
Some said their agencies have been saddled with an ever-growing list of responsibilities. In Saluda County, South Carolina, the emergency management director said his team of six is responsible for everything from the county’s IT department to a spay and neuter program. In San Bernardino County, California, the emergency manager said that she has had to help respond to new challenges like a lithium battery fire and, at a previous agency, was tasked with responding to busloads of immigrants arriving from other states.
Funding for additional staff was the most pressing issue they cited. One North Carolina emergency management director said an internal study from about three years ago recommended their agency have more than 20 staffers, but they still only have 10. Across the country, more than half of the 1,689 local emergency management agencies that responded to Argonne National Laboratory’s July 2025 emergency management survey have either one or no permanent full-time employees, and a “notable percentage” of local emergency managers who responded are volunteers.
We know disasters are a matter of where and when, not if. And our reporting team at ProPublica wants to be prepared well in advance. If you are a local or state emergency manager, sign up to be a part of our long-term source network to help fuel ProPublica’s investigative journalism.
Given the wide-ranging responsibilities and increasing risk due to climate change, part-time or volunteer emergency management positions shouldn’t exist, said Samantha Montano, an emergency management associate professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
“To expect somebody to understand how to mitigate cyber risks and also recover from a tornado, I mean, these are different skill sets,” Montano said. “So to think that one person is going to be capable of doing all of those things, especially working part time or as a volunteer, is ludicrous.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s administration has caused delays in emergency management funding to state and local agencies and issued an executive order to shift more of the weight of disaster preparedness to state and local governments.
Kelly McKinney, the vice president of emergency management at NYU Langone Health and a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Emergency Management office, said that over the years states have become “overly dependent” on funding administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But there is no clear plan for alternative funding streams, according to McKinney.
“This crisis-management system in the United States is itself in crisis,” he said.
Several emergency managers we heard from said one of the only times they’re able to draw attention to their agency’s needs is in the aftermath of a wide-scale disaster. Wike Graham, the emergency management director for the Charlotte-Mecklenberg area of North Carolina, said the first question the media typically asks following such a disaster is: “Did emergency management do what they were supposed to do?”
According to Graham, that’s almost always the wrong question. He instead asks: “Did you properly fund emergency management staff? And did you provide them with the resources that they need? Did you make emergency management a priority for your community?”
Unlike firefighters, EMTs or law enforcement, emergency managers face a “public identity issue” that can result in agencies receiving smaller budgets, Montano said.
Several emergency managers told ProPublica that because people in their field operate mostly behind the scenes or as part of larger departments, they often find themselves competing for funding with better-recognized agencies, and they say elected officials frequently don’t have a clear understanding of their role. Some said it’s simply difficult to get people to care about a disaster that hasn’t happened yet.
Several others told ProPublica they are also seeing an uptick in the frequency and intensity of disasters, which makes it difficult to manage recovery (which can take years) while preparing for the next storm or fire. In St. Louis, for example, emergency management commissioner Sarah Russell was still in the midst of managing recovery efforts from 2022 flash flooding when the 2025 tornado hit.
During the St. Louis tornado, the sirens — which the city was in the early process of upgrading — weren’t activated, in part due to a miscommunication between Russell and a fire alarm dispatcher, according to an external investigation commissioned by the city. Russell, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, told ProPublica that the fire department was responsible for sounding the sirens.
But even if the activation button had been pressed, more than a third of the sirens weren’t working, and a later test showed that the button at the fire alarm office wasn’t either.
Russell was terminated in August 2025, in part due to their management of the tornado response, according to their termination letter. But Russell, who is appealing the termination, said the incident highlights the need to proactively invest in emergency management.
Russell had made several requests for additional staff who specialize in emergency management to help with core responsibilities, like updating the city’s outdated plan for responding to emergencies.
“There’s always things that you would do different with hindsight,” Russell said. “But there’s only so much you can do with so little resources and support.”
St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer, who had been in office for a month at the time of the tornado and who was an alderwoman for the decade prior, told ProPublica that she was aware of the agency’s requests for additional funding, but that most city departments make such requests. After the tragedy, the city fully automated the tornado sirens and issued an executive order declaring that the fire department would have primary authority over the sirens, replacing an unclear protocol.
A city spokesperson said the new emergency management commissioner has “implemented several improvements” to the emergency operations plan.
“Recognizing that budget restraints are unfortunately the reality across many aspects of government,” Spencer said via email, “I’m incredibly proud of the improvements this team has been able to implement with almost no additional funding.”
Strained budgets for local emergency management agencies aren’t a new issue. But in recent months, federal funding has become uncertain.
In April 2025, the Trump administration cut federal grants that pay for local disaster-preparedness projects — but a judge later halted the administration’s efforts to shutter the grant program. In May 2025, federal officials delayed grants that help fund local and state emergency managers’ salaries.
In December, the FEMA Review Council, which Trump created to advise on ways to reform the agency, was expected to vote on a long-awaited report that would outline the agency’s future. But after a draft was leaked to CNN, the meeting was abruptly canceled. The work of the review council has been extended until late March.
Several emergency managers told ProPublica they would welcome change at FEMA. But many voiced concerns about the federal government shuttering grant programs — which fund salaries, upgrades to equipment and disaster-mitigation efforts — or drastically reducing reimbursement for local agencies responding to large-scale disasters without alternative funding in place. They said such actions would be detrimental, especially in small, rural regions with limited local budgets.
In North Carolina, one emergency manager said that without federal emergency management performance grants, which can be used to pay 50% of an emergency manager’s salary, “we are looking at the loss of preparedness and response capabilities.” Another called the grant “vital” to daily operations.
FEMA did not respond to requests for comment.
Claire Connolly Knox, who directs the University of Central Florida’s master’s program for emergency and crisis management, has been studying what a “decentralized FEMA” could mean for state agencies. She said it could take several legislative cycles before states are prepared to fill in the gaps that changes to FEMA might create. Many states, Knox said, are not closely tracking spending across multiple departments and multiple phases of emergency management, meaning “we don’t know the true cost” of mitigating, preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters.
“When you start breaking that down,” Knox said. “You start seeing that this isn’t a quick fix.”
The post What Emergency Managers Say They Need More Than Ever appeared first on ProPublica.
We know disasters are a matter of where and when, not if. And just like you, our reporting team at ProPublica wants to be prepared well in advance.
If you are a local, state or federal emergency manager, former emergency manager, emergency management researcher, or a part of the broader network of disaster response and recovery partners, we want to hear your concerns. Dozens of current and former emergency managers working everywhere from large cities to rural counties have already told us about the growing challenges they face amid more frequent disasters and uncertain federal funding.
Now we need your help to build a comprehensive picture of the real conditions across the country. What resources do you need to feel prepared for the next gray-sky day? How have or will changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency impact the work you’re doing? How are alerts and warning systems working in your region? Have you been hit by multiple large-scale disasters in recent years? What new hazards are on your radar?
We know that emergency managers are critically important but aren’t often thought about until after tragedy strikes. We are building this source network to fuel in-depth coverage of the nation’s emergency preparedness and disaster response and recovery infrastructure that goes far beyond breaking news and brings attention to important issues across the country. As with all ProPublica journalism, our goal is impact.
Fill out the brief form below to tell us what we should be covering, or to stay in touch as changes unfold. You may hear from our team as we report on major overhauls to the emergency management system, develop emergency preparedness guides or provide crucial information to communities that have just experienced their worst day.
The post Emergency Managers: Help ProPublica Prepare to Report on the Next Disaster appeared first on ProPublica.
Local crews rescued Andrew Giddens, 36, near a borrow pit after he faced freezing weather without food or water
A Florida man who had been missing since Valentine’s Day was found over a week later trapped in mud up to his shoulders, authorities said.
Andrew Giddens, 36, had reportedly gone several days without food or water by then, and officials ultimately rescued him in dramatic fashion to end his nightmarish ordeal.
Continue reading...For the fourth year, ProPublica will invite up to 10 news editors from media companies across the country to participate in a yearlong investigative editing training program, led by the newsroom’s award-winning staff.
Applications are now open for the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program. Submissions are due Monday, March 30, at 9 a.m. Eastern time.
As the nation’s premier nonprofit investigative newsroom, ProPublica is dedicated to journalism that changes laws and lives and to advancing the careers of the people who produce it. The goal of this program is to address our industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. Building a pipeline of talent is a priority that serves us and our industry.
“Journalism is vital to a healthy democracy, and it is clear that our world needs more investigative journalism at this moment, not less,” Managing Editor Ginger Thompson said. “We see the Editor Training Program as an indispensable training ground to ensure the future of investigative journalism. Where others are contracting, we are investing in the future of our industry, and that of talented journalists across the country.”
This year’s program will begin with a weeklong boot camp in New York that will include courses and panel discussions on how to conceive of and produce investigative projects that expose harm and have impact. The editors will also get training in how to manage reporters who are working with data, documents and sensitive sources, including whistleblowers, agency insiders and people who have suffered trauma. The program also includes virtual continuing education sessions and support from a ProPublica mentor.
The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program is designed to help expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, to help better reflect the nation as a whole.
The program kicks off with a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, which includes a series of courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors, veteran reporters and other newsroom leaders. The boot camp will include hands-on editing exercises and opportunities for participants to workshop projects underway in their own newsrooms.
Afterward, participants will gather virtually for seminars and career development discussions with their cohort and ProPublica journalists. Each of the participants will also be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on story and management challenges or on how to most effectively pursue their own professional aspirations.
The five-day, all-expenses-paid boot camp will be held May 31 to June 4, 2026, in New York, with remote sessions via Google Meet throughout the year.
This boot camp will be held in person and will not have a virtual option.
ProPublica will cover participants’ expenses for meals, travel and lodging during the boot camp.
Up to 10 journalists.
The program is open to all. The aim is to help broaden our industry’s investigative editing ranks to include journalists from a wide array of backgrounds. We encourage everyone to apply, including those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and rural news organizations, as well as women, people of color, veterans, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. Past participants have come from a wide range of news outlets across the country.
The ideal participants will have:
No.
The application period is now open and closes Monday, March 30, at 9 a.m. Eastern time. You can find the posting to apply at propublica.org/jobs.
Send an email to Assistant Managing Editor Talia Buford at talent@propublica.org.
The post Applications Open for 2026 ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program appeared first on ProPublica.
Why Should Delaware Care?
As the legal home for more than 2 million companies, the rules that Delaware sets for corporate governance shape how much of global capitalism gets done. Delaware’s positions as a leading corporate home also provides the state’s General Fund with more than a third of its annual revenues.
A Delaware law passed last year in the wake of escalating assaults on the state’s corporate brand shielded powerful company leaders from facing certain lawsuits brought by smaller investors.
What it didn’t do was violate the Delaware Constitution, the state Supreme Court ruled on Friday.
More than three months after hearing arguments, the justices ruled that the corporate law reform – known as Senate Bill 21 – did not strip Delaware’s prominent Court of Chancery of its constitutional authority to decide when a business deal is fair.
“The General Assembly’s enactment of SB 21 falls within the ‘broad and ample sweep’ of its legislative power,” the justices stated.
The ruling ends a bruising fight in Delaware over when the state’s business court should allow small-time investors to interrogate insider deals struck within companies by founders or other business leaders.
The ruling also averts what could have been an embarrassment for the state’s legal and political establishment had the high court overturned the law.
More than a year ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk — the world’s richest person — was calling on business leaders to move their companies’ legal homes out of Delaware. Musk had launched the campaign, which became known as “DExit,” after a Delaware Chancery Court judge ruled that he could not accept a multibillion-dollar pay package from Tesla.
Just as the campaign appeared to be gaining a foothold, Gov. Matt Meyer, legislative leaders, and Delaware attorneys who represent corporations threw their collective heft behind SB 21.
They argued then that the legislation amounted to a “course correction” that would bring the state’s business courts back into alignment with rulings from a decade ago. Many also said the bill was needed to pacify executives who were considering following Musk’s calls to move their companies’ legal homes out of Delaware.
In response, a cadre of critics — which included national law professors, pension fund attorneys, and a handful of progressives within the Delaware legislature — derided SB 21 as a “billionaires bill.”
Some also argued that the legislation was the latest in a string of recent changes to Delaware corporate law that have shifted the state away from protecting shareholder rights and toward giving greater deference to powerful executives.
Meyer and others SB 21 supporters rejected those characterizations last year. And on Friday, he celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling.
In a statement, he said the decision affirms that “Delaware is the gold standard locale for global companies to do business.” He also stated that the number of companies that maintain their legal home in Delaware had increased throughout 2025 despite the DExit campaign.
“In short, SB 21 is working, and I’m glad it will continue to be the law,” Meyer said.
When arguing against SB 21 in front of the Supreme Court last fall, one attorney asserted that the new law removed the Chancery Court’s time-honored and constitutional duty to say what is fair – or equitable – in a business dispute.
The attorney, Gregory Varallo, argued that by removing a shareholders’ ability to sue their company, the law reduced what he described as the immutable power of the Court of Chancery to oversee a “complete system of equity.”
During his arguments, Varallo also offered the justices an unusual acknowledgement, stating that he knew that his stance was unpopular — and that he understood “well the pressures on this court.”
The comments were a likely reference to the consensus of big business groups and the state’s political establishment that believed SB 21 was necessary for Delaware to remain the world’s preeminent corporate domicile.
Following Varallo, Washington, D.C.-based attorney Jonathan C. Bond defended SB 21, in part, by characterizing his opponents arguments as unprecedented. If adopted, he said they would imperil several existing Delaware laws that go back decades.
He also argued that changing the rules of corporate law – as SB 21 did – “is the same as wiping out jurisdiction merely because it makes some plaintiff’s claims harder.”
Also arguing in favor of SB 21 during the hearing was William Savitt, an attorney with the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz – among the most prominent corporate law firms in the country.
Last spring, Meyer hired Savitt’s firm to represent the state in the legal defense of SB 21 for a budget rate of $100,000. By comparison, Wachtell Lipton charged Twitter $90 million in 2022 to ferry that company through its arduous, four-month-long acquisition by Elon Musk.
Wachtell’s client list also includes Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives and board members, who last summer settled a seven-year-long, multibillion-dollar shareholder lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court.
During his arguments on SB 21, Savitt said equity as determined by judges must follow the statutes created by the legislature, and “not displace the law.”
“No natural reading of the words (of the Delaware Constitution) support plaintiff’s position,” he said.
The post Delaware Supreme Court upholds SB 21 reforms designed to counter ‘DExit’ appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The U.S. has a fraught track record of toppling autocratic regimes and securing peaceful democracies — even when it has vision for the day after.
Why Should Delaware Care?
New Castle County Police is the latest law enforcement department in Delaware to embrace new technologies that can create additional records of police interactions. But it also comes during a lean year for finances and officials are not saying exactly how they will fit into their budget.
The New Castle County Police Department signed a $50 million contract late last year to purchase new technology, including drones, tasers, and body cameras for officers.
Police officials say the investment improves their effectiveness and reduces safety risks for civilians and officers. But some county officials and residents have questioned how the local government will pay for the upgrades.
With a tough budget season weeks away, Spotlight Delaware asked New Castle County officials how they will pay for the ongoing contract into the future. They did not provide a direct answer.
Asked whether the county will raise taxes to pay for the contract, County spokeswoman Natalie Criscenzo said officials from County Executive Marcus Henry’s administration “are actively in the budget-building process.”
Henry will present a budget address to the County Council at the end of March.
Criscenzo also noted that Henry is in support of the police technology initiative.
“One of his top priorities in this job is public safety,” she said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
In December, New Castle County police officials publicly presented to the County Council their initiative to purchase the drones, body cameras, and other technologies. They said then that the initiative aims to “bring officer safety and accountability” through the use of surveillance tools and cameras.
During the meeting, the county’s police chief — Col. Jamie Leonard — also noted that initial conversations about the new tech upgrades were sparked by the department’s lack of body cameras for every officer.
“Currently, we don’t have enough deployable body cameras to put them on the entire 411 of us,” Leonard said.
But during the meeting, Council members David Tackett, George Smiley, and Jea Street expressed concern over unanswered questions about where the money for the contract would come from.
“How many times in the last year have we borrowed out of reserve? To me, you can’t afford it, and that’s a major problem,” said Street, who was the sole council member to vote against authorizing the police department to make an initial $750,000 payment for the new technology.
Later during the presentation, Leonard indicated that the technology, including body cameras, could save the county money in legal settlements involving the police department’s deadly force cases.
He said that such technologies “exponentially reduces the risk.”
“I mean, you guys have seen the settlement numbers and what they are,” Leonard said.
Following the December meeting, Henry approved the initial payment of $750,000 for police to use the technology package during the current fiscal year.
The payment went to Arizona-based Axon Enterprise, the nation’s largest producer of Tasers and body cameras.
While Tackett and Smiley joined Street in questioning how the county would pay for the technology, they were supportive of the initiative, as were the rest of the council members except Street.
“Technology is moving forward, with or without New Castle County,” Councilman Penrose Hollins said. “It’s going to move forward. We can be part of it, or we can watch it go by.”
To purchase the technology, New Castle County will pay Axon a total of $50 million over the next 10 years, according to contract documents.
But Criscenzo said some of those costs are already baked into the existing budget because the contract is an upgrade from an existing one the police had. As a result, she said the county will actually pay an average of about $1.78 million extra each year over the decade.
“This is different from what you’re looking at because it’s the delta between the new contract and what we’re paying now,” she said.
The police department was previously under a seven-year contract with Axon that was then replaced by the new 10-year contract in December.
New Castle police first started wearing body cameras in 2015 as part of a pilot program the department started for certain units.
That was six years before then-Gov. John Carney signed the law that mandated that all police officers wear body cameras during interactions with the public.
The new Axon contract will provide the department with 450 new tasers and 450 body cams for the department.
The department will also have access to what they call a Real Time Crime Center, an online hub to integrate police data into one system. This hub will allow officers to monitor feeds, such as drone footage, live body camera and dash camera video.
Another major piece of the contract includes the Drone First Responder (DFR) program, which would allow police to deploy drones from pre-established launch sites to scenes before officers.
The department will deploy 24 drones over the next six years and will start with 12 in the first year. Police have said the drones could reduce unnecessary ground responses by about 25%, citing an example of an abandoned car where a license plate number would need to be run.
The post Drones, tasers & body cameras: NCCPD gets $50M tech upgrade appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Hartlepool leaders ‘furious and appalled’ after meeting with Steve Reed about growing cost of social care
The housing, communities and local government secretary has been accused by a Labour council of showing “arrogance, indifference and moral bankruptcy” towards children in social care.
In an unusually forthright attack, Labour leaders of Hartlepool council said they were “furious and appalled” at Steve Reed after a meeting with him last week. A cross-party delegation had asked the secretary of state for £3m to help alleviate the growing cost of social care.
Continue reading..."Saturn and some of its 274 moons are pretty weird," writes Smithsonian magazine: [Saturn moon] Titan has strangely few impact craters, Hyperion is tiny and misshapen, and Iapetus has a tilted orbit. What's more, planets tend to wobble along their rotational axes as they spin, like an off-kilter spinning top in the moments before it topples over. Formally called precession, scientists have long thought that Saturn's wobble rate should match Neptune's because they're probably gravitationally linked. However, data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which studied the ringed planet from 2004 to 2017, revealed that Saturn's precession rate is slightly speedier than Neptune's. In 2022, some researchers suggested that the destruction of a hypothetical moon, called Chrysalis, around 160 million years ago may have knocked Saturn out of sync and formed the pieces that became the planet's rings. But this work implied that Chrysalis probably would've crashed into Titan, posing a major problem, study co-author Matija Äuk, an astronomer at the SETI Institute, tells New Scientist's Leah Crane. In that case, Chrysalis' debris couldn't have become the rings, he says. So, Äuk and his colleagues used computer simulations to investigate what would happen if Chrysalis did smack into Titan. If that happened around 400 million years ago, they found, the crash would've wiped away Titan's craters and made its orbit more elliptical. The altered path may have slowly pushed the trajectories of other moons, which then scraped against one another and left chunks of ice and rock that now make up Saturn's rings. The timing seems to align with the rings' estimated age of roughly 100 million years. Additionally, one piece of kicked-up debris may have formed the weird moon Hyperion, which may have subsequently tilted the orbit of the moon Iapetus, according to the analysis. The scenario could also resolve Saturn's unexpected wobble, which is currently "a little bit too fast," Äuk tells Jacopo Prisco at CNN. The study has been accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal, and is already available on the preprint server arXiv.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fears that decision to strike could be open-ended as Trump comes under pressure to spell out his vision for the country
Donald Trump is under pressure to spell out his vision for Iran amid the ongoing attacks on the country and reports of the first American casualties since the launch of unprovoked US and Israeli military strikes.
Trump’s critics are demanding that the White House provide greater clarity about what comes next. Opponents and analysts say the lack of a clear plan outlined so far has created a danger of the US being sucked into a long-lasting conflict of the sort that Trump repeatedly vowed to avoid.
Continue reading...Still trying to fine a good tune for my GTV. Best I’ve found is Lukes tune, but in the title it sates its for a superflux motor. Is it fine to use these premade tunes in the floaty app for a GTV?
Snapdragon Wear Elite is built to be on camera-enabled watches, pins, pendants and even glasses, according to Qualcomm. And it could mean a wave of devices that can also work as car keys and more.
Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon Wear Elite platform, which will be integrated into the next Galaxy Watch, at MWC in Barcelona.
Trying to change the tire on my onewheel pint but the bolts that are on the side of it that connect to the tires are sk tight that it is Bending the allen wrench i have and a screw driver cant crack it. Any advice on how to get it?
Funding uncertainty is main concern, despite Labour’s pledge to revitalise construction, survey shows
Almost two-thirds of senior council officers have said they are seeing construction projects delayed, despite the key role of local authorities in creating the wave of new housing and infrastructure promised by Labour.
Before Rachel Reeves’s spring forecast on Tuesday, a survey of senior council officers showed that 40% do not think the local authority they work for is well placed to follow through on its construction plans.
Continue reading...Grenade-throwing contests replaced PE and ‘denazification’ speeches became homework. Pavel Talankin’s undercover film about his school’s indoctrination drive won a Bafta and is tipped for an Oscar, but has left him in exile
In order to watch the Oscar-nominated documentary in which many of them have starring roles, pupils at Karabash School No 1 have had to source bootlegged copies, viewing the film in private, on their phones or their laptops.
Last week’s Bafta best documentary win for Mr Nobody Against Putin has been studiously ignored by Russian state media, and the prize the film won at Sundance last year was also met with silence. Staff at the school and government officials in the Kremlin seem united in their desire to pretend that they know nothing about the film.
Continue reading...FBI official says evidence found on the suspect and in his car indicated a ‘potential nexus to terrorism’
The FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce has been called in to help investigate a deadly mass shooting in downtown Austin, Texas, on Sunday morning in which a gunman opened fire in front of a bar popular with university students, killing two people and injuring 14 others before being fatally shot by police.
An FBI official, Alex Doran, told reporters at a press conference that it was too early to determine the shooter’s motivation. But he added that evidence found on the suspect and in his car indicated a “potential nexus to terrorism”, while an intelligence group said the shooter had expressed “pro-Iranian regime sentiment”.
Continue reading...As the Mobile World Conference begins in Spain, Lenovo brought a new attachable accessory for their laptops — an AI agent. CNET reports: The little circular module perches on the top of your Lenovo laptop display, attached via the magnetic Magic Bay on the rear. The module is home to an adorable animated companion called Tiko, who you can interact with via text or voice... [I]t can start and stop your music, open a web page for you or answer a question. You can also interact with it by using emoji. Give it a book emoji, for example, and it will pop on its glasses and sit reading with you while you work... The company wants to sell the Magic Bay accessory later this year — although it doesn't know exactly when, or how much it will cost. It even comes with a timer (for working in Pomodoro-style intervals) — but Lenovo has also created another "concept" AI companion that CNET describes as "a kind of stationary tabletop robot, not dissimilar to the Pixar lamp, but with an orb for a head." With a combination of cameras, microphones and projectors, the AI Workmate can undertake a variety of tasks, including helping you generate and display presentations or turn your written work or art into a digital asset... It's robotic head swivelled around and projected the slides onto the wall next to me. Lenovo created a video to show this "next-generation AI work companion" — with animated eyes — "designed to transform how modern professionals interact with their workspace." It bridges the physical and digital worlds — capturing handwritten notes, recognizing gestures, summarizing tasks, and proactively helping you stay ahead of your day. The moment you sit down, Lenovo AI Workmate greets you, surfaces priority tasks, and keeps your work organized without switching apps or losing context. From turning sketches into presentations to projecting information for instant collaboration, [it] brings on-device AI intelligence directly to your desk — secure, responsive, and always ready... It's not just software. It's a smarter way to work. It looks like Lenovo once considered naming it "AI Sphere" (since that name still appears in its description on YouTube). Lenovo also showed another "concept" laptop idea that PC Magazine called "futuristic": The ThinkBook Modular AI PC looks like a traditional laptop at first glance, but a second, removable screen fastens onto the lid. You can swap that screen onto the keyboard deck (in place of the keyboard, which can then be used wirelessly), or use it alongside the laptop as a portable monitor, attached via an included cable.... While Lenovo is still working on this device, and it's very much in the concept phase, it feels like one of its best-thought-out prototypes, one likely to make it to store shelves at some point. Another "concept" laptop is Lenovo's Yoga Book Pro 3D Concept, ofering directional backlight and eye-tracking technology for the illusion of 3D (playing slightly different images to each of your eyes). It offers gesture control for 3D models, two OLED displays, and some magical "snap-on pads" which, when laid on the display — make the GUI appear on the screen for a new control menu to "provide quick-access shortcuts for adjusting lighting, viewing angle, and tone".
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US president signals potential willingness to engage with surviving leadership as violence intensifies across region
Donald Trump said on Sunday he was prepared to talk to what was left of the Iranian leadership after the killing of the country’s supreme leader by US-Israeli airstrikes aimed at overthrowing the regime.
Trump was speaking as a second day of intense bombing of Iranian cities and Tehran’s missile counterattacks sent tremors across the region and through the global economy. On Monday the conflict spread to Lebanon as Israel began striking Hezbollah targets, after the group launched missiles and drones towards Israel’s north in retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Continue reading...Tufan Erginbilgiç says decision is for the government but German participation remains a possibility
The boss of Rolls-Royce has said he would welcome Germany helping to build Britain’s next-generation fighter jet, arguing it would bring in more business for the project.
The aircraft, designed to replace the Eurofighter Typhoon, is a joint effort between the UK, Italy and Japan. Rolls-Royce is building the engine for the jet, which has attracted fresh attention as plans for a rival Franco-German warplane edge towards collapse.
Continue reading...At Mobile World Congress, the company shares more details about its upcoming book-style foldable.
Iran, Venezuela, and the end of the Powell Doctrine.
The PLA’s tech strategy is working.
Sporadic clashes reported in several provinces in Afghanistan as both sides give conflicting death tolls
Afghanistan has said it had thwarted Pakistan’s attempted airstrikes on Bagram airbase, the former US military base north of Kabul, as cross-border fighting between the two countries stretched into a fourth day.
Months of clashes have flared up again since Thursday, when Afghanistan launched attacks along the frontier and Pakistani forces hit back on the border and from the skies. Pakistan has declared it is in “open war” with Afghanistan.
Continue reading...Authorities say capture of bull and tiger sharks necessary to protect lives as environmentalists launch urgent legal challenge
Some beaches in areas of New Caledonia are closed to swimming and the authorities have begun shark culling off the capital, Nouméa, after a fatal attack in the popular tourist spot – prompting a legal challenge to stop the operation and reigniting debate over public safety and marine conservation.
The culling operation began on 23 February, after a man from New Caledonia riding a wing foil in a recreational area was attacked and killed. Preliminary investigations indicate the victim was attacked by a tiger shark that measured at least three metres.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 2.
Ponder loses control of Tesla on Sunday morning
Coach Sanders mourns ‘one of my favorites’
Colorado quarterback Dominiq Ponder died early Sunday morning in a single-car crash in Boulder County, police said. He was 23.
Ponder lost control of his Tesla on a curve and hit a guardrail, according to the Colorado State Patrol. The car then struck an electrical line pole and rolled down an embankment before it caught fire. Ponder was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said a preliminary investigation “shows that speed is suspected as a factor”.
Continue reading...  | Cleaned it pretty good if you ask me! [link] [comments] |
 | How are Onewheels recieved in Washington DC? Come summertime im gonna hop a train down to Union Station, grab a hotel nearby and do a week of Smithsonian. Thinkin bout bringin the GT to get around on. Good idea? Bad Idea? Im usually a NYC rider which they are apparently illegal in the city but ive never had anyone care which is basically why im askin here instead of looking up laws. [link] [comments] |
If U.S. automakers turn their backs on electric vehicles, "their sales outside the U.S. will shrivel," warns Bloomberg. [Alternate URL.] They're already falling behind on the technology, relying on a 100% U.S. tariff on Chinese EVs to keep surging rivals like BYD Co. at bay.... While the American automakers "mostly understand the challenge in front of them, they don't have full plans" to confront it [said Mark Wakefield, head of the global automotive practice at consultant AlixPartners]... "Now is a great time for the V-8 engine," said Ryan Shaughnessy, the Mustang's brand manager. "We've done extensive customer research in multiple cities, looking at a variety of powertrains, and the V-8 is always the number-one choice." It isn't just customers. U.S. automakers have long been run by "car guys:" enthusiasts who live for the bone-shaking rumble of a big engine. For them, quiet and smooth EVs — even the absurdly fast ones — can't satisfy that craving. They're convinced many American car buyers share the same enthusiasm for what Shaughnessy described as "the sound and roar of the V-8." Wall Street couldn't be happier with the new direction... Ford's fortunes are also on the rise, as it's predicting operating profits could grow by as much as 47% this year to $10 billion. Ford's stock has risen nearly 50% over the last 12 months. Under the previous environmental rules, automakers effectively had to sell zero-emission vehicles in growing numbers to offset their gas-guzzlers. When they fell short, they had to buy regulatory credits from EV companies such as Tesla Inc. or face penalties. GM spent $3.5 billion on credits from 2022 to the middle of 2025. Now, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Ryan Brinkman, GM and Ford each have "billion dollar tailwinds"... [T]he hangover from all that new horsepower could leave US automakers lagging their Chinese rivals who already build the world's most advanced — and lowest priced — electric cars. Indeed, there is much talk in Detroit about the competitive tsunami that will be unleashed on American automakers once Chinese car companies find a way to break through trade barriers now protecting the US market. [Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim] Farley even calls it an "existential threat"... "They're going to build as many V-8 engines and big trucks as they can get out the factory doors," said Sam Fiorani, vice president of vehicle forecasting for consultant Auto Forecast Solutions. "And as the rest of the world develops modern drivetrains, newer batteries and better electric vehicles, GM and Ford in particular are going to find themselves falling even further behind." The article notes GM "continues to develop battery-powered vehicles, and CEO Mary Barra said the automaker would begin offering a 'handful' of hybrids soon," while Ford and Stellantis "have plans to launch extended-range electric vehicles, or EREVs, a new kind of plug-in hybrid with an internal combustion engine that recharges the battery as the vehicle drives down the road." But while automakers may be investing in future EV vehicles, they're also "leaning into the lucre that comes from selling millions of fossil-fuel vehicles in a rare moment of loosened regulation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | me nor crashing [link] [comments] |
Trump has taken an approach to selling U.S. citizens on military action in Iran that contrasts with his predecessors, seeking to avoid completely owning it.
Lindsey Heaps and Jaedyn Shaw score for US
US continue SheBelieves Cup v Canada on Wednesday
Rodman has dealt with back problems
Lindsey Heaps and Jaedyn Shaw scored as the US women’s national team defeated Argentina 2-0 in their opening match of the SheBelieves Cup in Nashville, Tennessee on Sunday.
Heaps made it 1-0 in the 19th minute, and Shaw doubled the count in the 56th.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 2, No. 1,717.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 2, No. 995
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 2, No. 525.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 2, No. 729.
"Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That's the way it is. Likely be more," President Trump said after mentioning the three U.S. service members killed in the operation.
Police say Cher's son was arrested on Friday after acting belligerently at a New Hampshire private high school, of which he has no association.
The U.S. military says three troops have been killed in the war with Iran, as President Trump says the operation is proceeding "ahead of schedule." Follow live updates.
U.S. forces say they have hit 1,000 targets over the past two days in a race to take out Iran’s ability to threaten American personnel and allies across the Middle East.
US president says ‘an Iranian regime armed with long range missiles would be a dire threat to every American’ in video released on Truth Social Sunday evening
Loud explosions were heard early on Sunday near Erbil airport, which hosts US-led coalition troops in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, AFP reported. Thick black smoke was rising from the airport area.
On Saturday, US-led coalition forces downed several missiles and explosive-laden drones over Erbil.
Continue reading...Within hours of the prime minister’s statement, the UK’s Akrotiri air force base in Cyprus was reportedly hit by a drone
The UK has agreed to let the US use British military bases to attack Iranian missile sites, Keir Starmer has said.
The UK has so far not been involved in the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, but in a recorded statement on Sunday evening, the prime minister said that Iran’s approach was becoming more reckless and putting British lives at risk, leading to the decision to allow the US to use two of its military bases.
Continue reading...Trump cited debunked claims in video address that Iran was on verge of nuclear weapons to justify US casualties
Donald Trump recorded a new video address on Sunday, vowing to avenge three American deaths after the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran and accusing the Iranian regime of “waging war against civilization itself”.
The US president addressed the deaths, saying “we grieve for the true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation, even as we continue the righteous mission for which they gave their lives” and called for prayers for “the full recovery” of five others that were seriously wounded.
Continue reading...  | Hey all I’ve got a bit of a conundrum here. I’ve had this owgt (hardware 6407) for years and I’ve recently rediscovered this glitch (I think) when charging. Normally I use the hyper charger but I am unable to due to it being away from me atm so I am using the supplied 75v charger. For context I have seen this bug always in some way but I just never thought it to be a big deal as over time the flickering lights went away and rarely if ever came back using the hyper charger but now using the 75w charger they are back. Is this the board calibrating the battery for the new lower voltage or is this a bug? I’ve never had this issue on my pint at all so kinda looking for some help before I call future motion and are on hold with them for hours lol. Any help would be great thanks [link] [comments] |
Oil prices rose sharply when market trading began late Sunday over concerns that the supply from Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East would slow or grind to a halt.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late deposed shah of Iran, said he hopes to help lead a transitional government in his home country.
Federal judges who have ruled against the Trump administration say they have been targeted by violent threats.
Following a precedent setting case out of Michigan, prosecutors are starting to hold parents accountable for their child's mass shooting crimes. 60 Minutes reports on whether it's enough to break the cycle of school shootings.
Prince Reza Pahlavi, a leader of the opposition to the Islamic Republic, discusses whether regime change is coming, who leads a transition, and nuclear weapons.
Federal judges say criticism from President Trump can put their safety at risk. The White House says the president "understands the dangers of political violence."
After a deadly school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, prosecutors, in a first, charged both the gunman and his parents. It's a change some victims' families believe could help break the cycle of violence.
Criminologists tell 60 Minutes that dismissing shooters as incomprehensible villains misses an opportunity to prevent the crime.
US president says he is willing to speak to Iran’s remaining leadership as war spreads across Middle East – key US politics stories from 1 March 2026
Republican senators have defended Donald Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran, but some Democrats, while welcoming the elimination of the Iranian senior leadership, said the case for the attack should have been made to the American public and Congress.
Three US service members have been killed so far in the military operation, and Trump appeared to link the ordering of the attack to his 2020 election loss.
Continue reading...The Norwegian Consumer Council, a government funded organization advocating for consumer's rights, released a report on the trend of "enshittification" in digital consumer goods and services, suggesting ways consumers for consumers to resist. But they've also dramatized the problem with a funny four-minute video about the man whose calls for him to make things shitty for people. "It's not just your imagination. Digital services are getting worse," the video concludes — before adding that "Luckily, it doesn't have to be this way." The Consumer Council's announcement recommends: Stronger rights for consumers to control, adapt, repair, and alter their products and services, Interoperability, data portability, and decentralisation as the norm, so the threshold for moving to different services becomes as low as possible, Deterrent and vigorous enforcement of competition law, so that Big Tech companies are not allowed to indiscriminately acquire start-ups, competitors or otherwise steer the market to their advantage, Better financing of initiatives to build, maintain or improve alternative digital services and infrastructure based on open source code and open protocols, Reduce public sector dependence on big tech, to regain control and to contribute to a functioning market for service providers that respect fundamental rights, Deterrent and consistent enforcement of other laws, including consumer and data protection law. The Norwegian Consumer Council is also joining 58 organisations and experts in a letter asking the Norwegian government to rebalance power with enforcement resources and by prioritizing the procurement of services based on open source code. And "Our sister organisations are sending similar letters to their own governments in 12 countries." They're also sending a second letter to the European Commission with 29 civil society organisations (including the EFF and Amnesty International) warning about the risks of deregulation and calling for reducing dependency on big tech. Thanks to Slashdot reader DeanonymizedCoward for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Lenovo brought some adorable AI concepts to MWC 2026 -- one of which you'll actually be able to buy soon.
This handheld gaming prototype has a ridiculous number of options when it comes to screen orientation and controller placement.
The concept is just one of a number of new Yoga and Legion products that Lenovo unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2026.
This is the most modular laptop I've ever seen.
Royal College of Psychiatrists says impact on mental health often overlooked and calls for improvements in care
Nearly three-quarters of UK women do not know menopause can trigger a new mental illness, polling shows.
This lack of understanding is so acute that the Royal College of Psychiatrists has launched its first targeted “position statement” to raise awareness about menopause and mental health.
Continue reading...Can making foldable phones more premium help sell more? Motorola sure thinks so.
"Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises," reports New Scientist: Kenneth Payne at King's College London set three leading large language models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash — against each other in simulated war games. The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime survival. The AIs were given an escalation ladder, allowing them to choose actions ranging from diplomatic protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war... In 95 per cent of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed by the AI models. "The nuclear taboo doesn't seem to be as powerful for machines [as] for humans," says Payne. What's more, no model ever chose to fully accommodate an opponent or surrender, regardless of how badly they were losing. At best, the models opted to temporarily reduce their level of violence. They also made mistakes in the fog of war: accidents happened in 86 per cent of the conflicts, with an action escalating higher than the AI intended to, based on its reasoning... OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the companies behind the three AI models used in this study, didn't respond to New Scientist's request for comment. The article includes this comment from Tong Zhao, a senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace think tank. "It is possible the issue goes beyond the absence of emotion. More fundamentally, AI models may not understand 'stakes' as humans perceive them." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Tufriast for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trials to form part of three-month consultation on Keir Starmer’s plans to tackle negative effects of smartphone use
Hundreds of teenagers will be enlisted to trial social media bans in the coming months with overnight digital curfews and daily screen time limits also tested as part of Keir Starmer’s plan to crack down on the negative effects of smartphone use.
The trials will be part of a three-month consultation launched this week that could lead to an outright ban on social media for under-16s similar to that introduced in Australia. Ministers have said they are ready to toughen laws just six months after the introduction of child protection measures in the Online Safety Act.
Continue reading...Iran intensified its strikes against countries in the Persian Gulf and Israel on Sunday, attacking at least nine countries since the start of the joint U.S.-Israeli attack.
I’m 40 miles in with my XR. I want to go to In N Out near my house by there is heavy traffic heading there.
So far I’ve been riding around my neighborhood with minimal traffic well.
When did you guys start riding with more traffic around you?
Home secretary announces 30-month protection limit, with refugees required to leave if their home countries are later judged safe
Shabana Mahmood has ripped up the government’s asylum rules so that from Monday every refugee will be told that their status is temporary and will last just 30 months.
In a move that has concerned a refugee charity, the home secretary said that claimants whose countries are deemed to be safe by the UK government will from now on be expected to return.
Continue reading...On tour of returns centre, home secretary says ‘legitimate grievances’ have to be acknowledged as part of ‘responsible’ politics
The UK home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and Danish immigration officials strode through the bleak and chilly Sjælsmark returns centre, a former military barracks used to house men and women who have no right to remain in the country. Followed by photographers, reporters and civil servants, Mahmood was told of the strict conditions in which hundreds of people live after asylum and right to remain appeals are rejected and before many are sent to other countries.
Sjælsmark, about 20 miles north of Copenhagen, is at the sharp end of an asylum system set up by Denmark’s left-leaning Social Democrat government to deter claimants. As well as those facing swift deportations, refugees are given temporary permission to stay and will later be told to leave if their countries of origin are deemed safe.
Continue reading...About 200,000 nationals thought to be in the region as tensions rise after US-Israeli attacks on Iranian regime
The Foreign Office is drawing up plans to evacuate tens of thousands of British citizens if war in the Middle East escalates, with many travellers currently stranded in Dubai.
Keir Starmer said on Sunday that about 200,000 British people are in the region, on holiday or otherwise travelling across the Gulf. He urged everyone in areas targeted by Iranian strikes to register with the Foreign Office to receive advice, with about 94,000 doing that so far.
Continue reading...Lindo speaks out after man with Tourette syndrome shouted slur while actor was on stage with Michael B Jordan
British-American actor Delroy Lindo expressed gratitude for “the support and love” he and Michael B Jordan have received after a man with Tourette syndrome (TS) shouted the N-word as the two men presented a Bafta award.
“We appreciate all the support and love that we have been shown,” Lindo – who, like Jordan, is Black – said on stage at the annual NAACP Image awards in Los Angeles. He called it “a classic case of something that could be very negative becoming very positive”.
Continue reading...Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy shared this report from the Guardian: Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a "staggering and deeply concerning" loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade. Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year. "To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish," said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study's lead author. "A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small," he added. "But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I had no idea, but apparently, you can just use newline characters and tabs in URLs without any issues.
Notice how it reports an error if there is a tab or newline character, but continues anyway? The specification says that A validation error does not mean that the parser terminates and it encourages systems to report errors somewhere. Effectively, the error is ignored although it might be logged. Thus our HTML is fine in practice.
↫ Daniel Lemire
This reminds me of the “Email is easy” quiz.
PM is in diplomatically precarious position of declining to endorse US strikes while also refusing to condemn them
It was perhaps naive of No 10 ever to position Keir Starmer as a “Donald Trump whisperer” capable of persuading the unpredictable US president to step back from reckless decisions.
The “special relationship” has been under severe strain in recent months over the UK’s decision to give up sovereignty of the Chagos Islands and the refusal of European countries to back Trump’s play for Greenland.
Continue reading..."Anthropic may have lost out on doing business with the US government," reports Engadget, "but it's gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store's Top Free Apps leaderboard." Anthropic's Claude AI assistant had already leaped to the #2 slot on Apple's chart by late Friday," CNBC reported Saturday: The rise in popularity suggests that Anthropic is benefiting from its presence in news headlines, stemming from its refusal to have its models used for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons... OpenAI's ChatGPT sat at No. 1 on the App Store rankings on Saturday, while Google's Gemini was at No. 3... On Jan. 30, [Claude] was ranked No. 131 in the U.S., and it bounced between the top 20 and the top 50 for much of February, according to data from analytics company Sensor Tower... [And Friday night, for 85.3 million followers] pop singer Katy Perry posted a screenshot of Anthropic's Pro subscription for consumers, with a heart superimposed over it. Sunday Engadget reported Anthropic's "very public spat" with the Pentagon "led to a wave of user support that finally allowed Claude to dethrone OpenAI's ChatGPT on the App Store as the most downloaded free app" . Friday Anthropic posted "We are deeply grateful to our users, and to the industry peers, policymakers, veterans, and members of the public who have voiced their support in recent days. Thank you. "
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Anthropic may have lost out on doing business with the US government," reports Engadget, "but it's gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store's Top Free Apps leaderboard." Anthropic's Claude AI assistant had already leaped to the #2 slot on Apple's chart by late Friday," CNBC reported Saturday: The rise in popularity suggests that Anthropic is benefiting from its presence in news headlines, stemming from its refusal to have its models used for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons... OpenAI's ChatGPT sat at No. 1 on the App Store rankings on Saturday, while Google's Gemini was at No. 3... On Jan. 30, [Claude] was ranked No. 131 in the U.S., and it bounced between the top 20 and the top 50 for much of February, according to data from analytics company Sensor Tower... [And Friday night, for 85.3 million followers] pop singer Katy Perry posted a screenshot of Anthropic's Pro subscription for consumers, with a heart superimposed over it. Sunday Engadget reported Anthropic's "very public spat" with the Pentagon "led to a wave of user support that finally allowed Claude to dethrone OpenAI's ChatGPT on the App Store as the most downloaded free app." . Friday Anthropic posted "We are deeply grateful to our users, and to the industry peers, policymakers, veterans, and members of the public who have voiced their support in recent days. Thank you. "
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
State trooper used Pit ramming maneuvre to stop Dillon Hess from speeding while transporting his son to hospital
An Arkansas father speeding while transporting his sick child to the hospital will not face charges after a state police trooper used a vehicle-ramming technique known as a Pit maneuvre to stop his vehicle, authorities have said.
Officials said they have ruled out charges against the father, identified as Dillon Hess, who was speeding as he rushed his son to the hospital for emergency medical treatment after he suffered an allergic reaction, as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette first reported.
Continue reading...Iran’s constitution calls for an assembly of experts to choose the next supreme leader, but that may not be possible in wartime.
Efforts in Congress to block President Trump from using further military force against Iran without support from lawmakers have intensified after the U.S. and Israel launched a massive military operation.
President Trump said Sunday that he is willing to speak with the new leadership in Iran following the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Attack on Iran has widespread support, with little questioning of whether it is best option for lasting security
In June, Benjamin Netanyahu declared “a historic victory, which will stand for generations” after the 12-day war on Iran.
His decision to attack Iran again, less than a year later, was greeted with broad and enthusiastic support from Israeli politicians, including the prime minister’s bitter rivals, and a public willing to endure death and massive disruption to their lives.
Continue reading...Chancellor urged to reform Office for Budget Responsibility to open way to more public investment
Rachel Reeves must reform the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to open the way to more public investment, an alliance of thinktanks has argued ahead of the chancellor’s spring forecast on Tuesday.
With Keir Starmer’s government under intense pressure after Labour’s defeat by the Greens in Thursday’s Gorton and Denton byelection, the thinktanks called on Reeves to review the watchdog’s remit.
Continue reading...Danise Baird, the wife of Indiana Rep. Jim Baird, has died following complications from her car crash injuries with her husband in January.
Engadget reports: In a lengthy post on Truth Social on February 27, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to "immediately cease all use of Anthropic's technology" following strong disagreements between the Department of Defense and the AI company. A few hours later, the U.S. conducted a major air attack on Iran with the help of Anthropic's AI tools, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Even Trump's post noted there would be a six-month phase-out for Anthropic's technology (adding that Anthropic "better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.") Anthropic's Claude technology was also used by the U.S. military less than two months ago in its operation in Venezuela — reportedly making them the first AI developer known to be used in a classified U.S. War Department operation. The Wall Street Journal reported Anthropic's technology found its way into the mission through Anthropic's contract with Palintir.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran on Saturday, killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Why did Trump decide (again) to attack Iran during negotiations on a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic? How does he sell a new war in the Middle East, with potential US casualties, to people at home? What happens next for Iran?
In this special collaboration with Today in Focus, Annie Kelly speaks to the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour.
Archive: CBS News, NBC News, PBS Newshour, CNN, Fox News
Continue reading...Retaliatory strikes have so far been high in volume but mostly not very effective and are likely to become less so
In the grim calculus of war, Iran now has to hope it gets lucky. The first hours of the joint US-Israeli assault were catastrophic for the Iranian regime: the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, killed alongside, it is believed, the minister of defence, the head of the armed forces and the head of the powerful Revolutionary Guards.
Iran knew its security apparatus had been compromised during the 12-day war of June 2025 when Israel killed a string of senior military commanders. During January’s street protests, Khamenei was moved away to a secure location for his own safety, yet on Saturday he felt safe enough to hold a security meeting in his compound in Tehran.
Continue reading...On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Sens. Tom Cotton and Chris Murphy join Margaret Brennan.
President Donald Trump’s order to launch a coordinated U.S.-Israeli strike against Iran ran afoul of international and domestic law, according to military and legal experts including the former legal chief at U.S. Central Command, which carried out the attacks.
“Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, who previously served as chief of international law at U.S. Central Command.
The United Nations Charter generally restricts the use of force to cases of self-defense or with approval from the U.N. Security Council. The Constitution separately gives Congress the power to authorize offensive war.
The War Powers Resolution also requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. forces into hostilities and limits how long those forces can operate without congressional approval. Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed members of Congress’s bipartisan “Gang of Eight” in calls Friday night ahead of the strikes, according to administration officials and news reports.
Legal experts say advance briefings to the Gang of Eight do not necessarily satisfy the War Powers Resolution, which contemplates a formal written report to Congress as an institution, not just a small group of leaders.
“This is an introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities,” said VanLandingham, who now teaches national security law at Southwestern Law School. “It absolutely triggers the 48-hour notice requirement,” she said.
The fact American service members died in the operation raises further legal concerns, she said, as Congress is intended to decide when American lives are placed at risk in offensive wars.
Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., called the operation “dangerous” and “illegal,” saying Trump launched the attack “without authorization from Congress.”
“Speaker Johnson must immediately reconvene the House so we can pass a War Powers Resolution to rein in this unauthorized use of our military and taxpayer dollars,” Balint said.
Democratic leaders had already been moving toward a vote on a bipartisan war powers resolution in the days before the strikes, though the measure was widely expected to fail amid scattered Democratic opposition and near-unified Republican resistance.
From a legal perspective, VanLandingham said the attacks, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, present fewer ambiguities than prior U.S. strikes on Iran, including Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, 2025, which the U.S. said targeted Iranian nuclear facilities.
Over time, administrations of both parties have steadily expanded unilateral war powers, VanLandingham said, effectively redefining what counts as war in constitutional terms and expanding the circumstances in which presidents can use force without congressional approval. She pointed to air campaigns under Presidents Barack Obama in Libya and Donald Trump in Syria as examples of operations the executive branch treated as falling short of war requiring congressional authorization.
The death toll for Operation Epic Fury is mounting, both among civilians and combatants. A strike on a girls’ primary school resulted in nearly 100 reported civilian casualties, and U.S. Central Command said three U.S. service members were killed in action and five seriously wounded. Several others service members sustained minor injuries, the command said, as combat operations continued across the region.
Video circulating on social media appeared to show large explosions near U.S. military installations in Bahrain, including the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, though the extent of any damage was not immediately clear. The U.S. Navy did not respond to questions from The Intercept about whether any service members were killed or injured in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.
U.S. casualties heighten the constitutional stakes, VanLandingham said, because the decision to place American troops in harm’s way has traditionally rested with Congress, which she described as the government’s closest representation of the American public.
“To say there’s no risk to U.S. troops … I wouldn’t call it naive. I’d call it a pure lie,” said Wes Bryant, a former Air Force special operations member who previously served as chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.
Bryant said the scope of the strikes suggested major combat operations that could quickly tip toward large-scale conflict in a densely populated country, with predictable risks to both U.S. troops and civilians.
Bryant said the early casualty figures may not reflect the full risk if hostilities continue. “I’m surprised it’s only been three deaths,” he said. “It will be more if this continues and we lose the initial shock value.”
U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces successfully defended against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks targeting American installations and reported minimal damage that did not disrupt base operations.
Early reports of successful Iranian strikes, if confirmed, could signal vulnerabilities in U.S. regional defenses, said analysts with the Eisenhower Media Network.
“If these reports are accurate, this should be very concerning to U.S. forces,” said Matt Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain and State Department official who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Iranian missiles and drones were able to breach U.S. defenses very early in the conflict.”
Hoh said early breaches of U.S. defenses, if confirmed, could reflect gaps in regional air defenses, evolving Iranian missile capabilities, or lessons Tehran has drawn from observing U.S. operations.
The Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain serves as the centerpiece of U.S. naval operations in the Persian Gulf, and any sustained threat to installations in the region could complicate American force posture and maritime security operations.
Also within range of Iran’s missile arsenal is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, one of the largest U.S.-operated airfields outside the United States and home to thousands of American personnel.
Iran had repeatedly warned it would target U.S. bases if attacked, said Karen U. Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon officer. The retaliation reflects “the behavior of a near-peer adversary” and marks a sharp contrast with the kinds of conflicts the United States has fought over the past three decades.
Iran is conventionally weaker than the United States but remains regionally dangerous through its large missile and drone arsenal and its ability to apply asymmetric pressure on U.S. forces. Recent reporting has also raised concerns about strain on U.S. naval interceptor stockpiles after heavy use in Middle East operations.
The risks extend beyond military escalation. Bryant said the opening strikes raise significant concerns about civilian harm and the risk of a broader regional conflict, particularly given the coordinated nature of the U.S.–Israel campaign.
“I really worry about the civilian harm that’s going to result if this becomes a prolonged conflict,” Bryant said. “Whatever happens … we own that.”
Some national security analysts sharply questioned the administration’s humanitarian rationale for the strikes, noting that the threshold for unilateral presidential force is typically tied to imminent threats to the United States. Critics also argue that the administration’s broader domestic record — including policies affecting women’s bodily autonomy, aggressive immigration enforcement, and the detention of some government protesters — undercuts its stated moral justification for military action against Iran.
Bryant warned the risks could escalate quickly if the conflict expands beyond the opening air campaign, particularly given Iran’s military capabilities and regional proxy network.
“If we thought the insurgency was bad in Iraq or even Syria, wait until we enter Iran,” Bryant said.
U.S. officials have not announced any plans for ground operations in Iran, and analysts say the administration’s next steps remain uncertain.
Shortly after the strikes, Trump and his allies framed the operation through a domestic political lens, amplifying without evidence unsubstantiated claims that Iran interfered in the 2020 election.
For VanLandingham, the rhetoric stood out not just for its substance but also its timing ahead of midterm elections.
“What’s chilling is that he’s tying this attack against another country to domestic politics as a way to further consolidate power over his base and potentially link the use of force to domestic use of force this fall,” she said.
“He is laying the groundwork, I strongly believe, to use the U.S. military improperly.”
Viewed in that light, she said, the seemingly ridiculous claim appears more strategic.
“It’s mind-boggling. But when you look at it, it makes rational sense for him to say, ‘I’m doing this because I’m taking out everyone who stood in my way in 2020,’” VanLandingham said. “He is linking it to his own domestic grievances because he is laying the groundwork, I strongly believe, to use the U.S. military improperly.”
Bryant, who previously led civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, said the administration’s framing echoes familiar patterns in which when governments blur external threats with internal political messaging. He pointed to recent violence against protesters and legal observers in Minnesota as a parallel, albeit on a smaller scale, to Iran’s brutal crackdowns on dissent.
“Everything that Trump is accusing the Iranian regime of doing, he has done,” Bryant said.
“Everything that Trump is accusing the Iranian regime of doing, he has done.”
Other national security analysts warned the messaging could have concrete domestic consequences if wartime authorities are invoked inside the United States. Trump has previously threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to protests over ICE operations in Minneapolis.
“This is the kind of messaging that will allow the administration to cite national security if they attempt to nationalize elections, have federal law enforcement, like ICE, patrol polling places, and enact executive orders or push legislation to strip Americans of voting rights and other civil liberties,” Hoh said.
Federal law enforcement has already signaled an elevated posture. FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X that counterterrorism teams are operating at heightened readiness.
“Our Joint Terrorism Task Forces throughout the country are working 24/7 to address and disrupt any potential threats to the homeland,” Patel wrote.
The post Trump’s Iran Attack Was Illegal, Former U.S. Military Officials Allege appeared first on The Intercept.
Thinktank’s board distances itself from Josh Simons’ decision in 2023 to hire lobbying firm to investigate journalists
A Labour thinktank that helped Keir Starmer into No 10 has said it is making a “clean break” from the past after its former director, Josh Simons, resigned as a minister over a report falsely linking journalists to a “pro-Kremlin” network.
The board of Labour Together distanced itself from Simons’ decision in 2023 to hire a lobbying firm to investigate Sunday Times, Guardian and independent reporters who were looking into its failure to declare more than £700,000 in donations.
Continue reading..."Podcasts have officially overtaken AM/FM talk radio as the more popular medium for spoken-word audio in the United States," reports TechCrunch, citing Edison Research's Share of Ear survey: The researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spent listening to podcasts increased, while their time with spoken radio broadcasts decreased. For the first time this year, podcasts eclipsed spoken-word radio with 40% of listening time, as opposed to 39% for radio... We checked with Edison to see if these statistics include video podcasts, and they do. But the need to clarify that question points to the undeniable growing prevalence of video podcasts, hosted on platforms like Spotify and YouTube, which marks another key trend in podcasting... YouTube said that viewers watched 700 million hours of podcasts each month in 2025 on living room devices, like TVs, up from 400 million the previous year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
‘They should have done it sooner, they waited too long,’ says Trump but he doesn’t say when talks would take place
Donald Trump said on Sunday that Iran’s political leadership have agreed to talks, a day after the US and Israel began to target the country’s military and political infrastructure, killing the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several top officials.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” Trump told a reporter for the Atlantic magazine on Sunday. “They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.”
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with Karim Sadjadpour from the Carnegie Endownment for international peace and former CENTCOM commander and CBS News contributor Ret. Gen. Frank McKenzie that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 1, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 1, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 1, 2026.
The CIA had tracked Khamenei's location for several months before the strike that killed him, a person familiar with the matter tells CBS News.
The US-Israeli military action will test the fragile rules governing the use of force
The killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, by a US-Israeli strike is a targeted assassination of a head of state. It also marks a grave escalation in a region already burdened with smouldering wars and fragile states. The consequences of the deliberate strike will reverberate across a Middle East marked by the aftershocks of foreign intervention. Revulsion against the hardline regime in Tehran, or the desire for a better future for the Iranian people, does not confer a legal justification.
Force is lawful, under the UN charter, only in self-defence against an imminent attack or with security council approval. Neither condition has been met. There was no evidence of an “instant, overwhelming” Iranian attack being prepared. What Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury looks like is not pre-emption but prevention: a decision to eliminate a future risk while an enemy appeared weak. It is a war of choice. Mr Trump’s call to overthrow a sovereign government was extraordinary.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...Lead vehicle takes top-three off main course
Jess McClain falls from first to ninth
USA Track & Field has denied an appeal after its Half Marathon Championship in Atlanta ended in chaos.
With less than two miles to go in the women’s race, Jess McClain had a significant lead over Ednah Kurgat and Emma Hurley when the guide vehicle took the trio off course. Molly Born, who had been more than a minute behind the leaders, came through to win the race, with Carrie Ellwood and and Annie Rodenfels in second and third. McClain, Hurley and Kurgat finished in ninth, 12th and 13th respectively around two minutes behind Born. Wesley Kiptoo won the men’s race.
Continue reading...Disney Imagineers looked at "thousands of AI companies" before backing one that keeps animators in the driver's seat.
 | XRC makes a knocking sound if I accelerate while turning then slow down quickly. Normal or no? [link] [comments] |
"Billions fewer birds are flying through North American skies than decades ago," reports the Associated Press, "and their population is shrinking ever faster, mostly due to a combination of intensive agriculture and warming temperatures, a new study found." Nearly half of the 261 species studied showed big enough losses in numbers to be statistically significant and more than half of those declining are seeing their losses accelerate since 1987, according to Thursday's journal Science... The only consolation is that the birds that are shrinking in numbers the fastest are species — such as the European starling, American crow, grackle and house sparrow — with large enough populations that they aren't yet at risk of going extinct, said study lead author Francois Leroy, also an Ohio State ecologist... When it came to population declines — not the acceleration — the scientists noticed bigger losses further south. When they did a deeper analysis they statistically connected those losses to warmer temperatures from human-caused climate change. "In regions where temperatures increase the most, we are seeing strongest declines in populations," [said study co-author Marta Jarzyna, an ecologist at Ohio State University]. "On the other hand, the acceleration of those declines, that's mostly driven by agricultural practices." The scientists found statistical correlations between speeded-up decline rates and high fertilizer use, high pesticide use and amount of cropland, Leroy said. He said they couldn't say any of those caused the acceleration of losses, but it indicates agriculture in general is a factor. "The stronger the agriculture, the faster we will lose birds," said Leroy... McGill University wildlife biologist David Bird, who wasn't part of the study, said it was done well and that its conclusions made sense. With a growing human population, agriculture practices are intensified, more bird habitats are being converted to cropland, modern machinery often grind up nests and eggs and single crop plantings offer less possibilities for birds to find food and nests, said Bird, the editor of Birds of Canada. "The biggest impact of agricultural intensity though is our war on insects. Numerous recent studies have shown that insect populations in many places throughout the world, including the U.S., have crashed by well over 40 percent," Bird said in an email. "Many of the birds in this new study showing population declines depend heavily on insects for food." A 2019 study of the same bird species by Cornell University conservation scientist Kenneth Rosenberg also found that North America had 3 billion fewer birds than in 1970, the article points out.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | I finally took my 134V remote VESC setup for the first ride. I’ve always ridden footpad boards, so the hand throttle felt super weird at first! There was definitely a learning curve with starting, stopping, and trusting the remote instead of your feet, but after a bit, it started to click! I can see why people say once you go remote, you don’t go back. What do you think about riding a VESC with a remote? [link] [comments] |
Hillary Knight, Megan Keller and Jack and Quinn Hughes made a surprise appearance during "Heated Rivalry" star Connor Storrie's opening monologue on "SNL."
The US joined an Israeli assault after intel suggested Iran’s top clerics and commanders could be hit at once
Donald Trump launched attacks against Iran on Saturday alongside Israel after they developed intelligence that they could simultaneously target the country’s leaders and mullahs at a compound in Tehran, according to two people familiar with deliberations.
The Israelis had been tracking the movements of Iran’s top leaders and determined, in conjunction with the United States, that there was a window of opportunity to kill them and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as they convened, the people said.
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 1, 2026.
The desire to see an increasingly ruthless Iranian regime collapse has intensified in Iranian expat communities
A decade ago, when Iran signed an agreement with the Obama administration and five other countries to give up its ambitions for a nuclear weapon, Alaleh Kamran was staunchly on the political left and welcomed the prospect of peace in the country of her birth.
Now, though, as Israel and the United States launched punishing airstrikes on Iran, she finds herself in a dramatically different headspace.
Continue reading...Isaiah Martin’s videos have gone viral – he thinks his party should follow his lead and stand up to Republican excess
Dynamism, courage, and wit are words that few are likely to associate with the mainstream Democratic party, particularly after its capitulation to Republicans’ budget demands last year.
Polls show that majorities of Democratic voters think their party is weak and ineffective. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, is even more unpopular than Donald Trump. People are crying out for a bold voice, someone to take the fight to an increasingly authoritarian Republican party.
Continue reading...Trump calls Anthropic a ‘Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about’
The US military reportedly used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to inform its attack on Iran despite Donald Trump’s decision, announced hours earlier, to sever all ties with the company and its artificial intelligence tools.
The use of Claude during the massive joint US-Israel bombardment of Iran that began on Saturday was reported by the Wall Street Journal and Axios. It underlines the complexity of the US military withdrawing powerful AI tools from its missions when the technology is already intricately embedded in operations.
Continue reading...I’d say I’m a fairly experienced rider with nearly 10,000 miles on the single set of bearings. I ride literally every day and I’m curious if it would be better to buy all the tools to do a bearing change plus the cost of the bearings or if it would be better to get an MTE with the bearings included perhaps roller bearings are there any things that I could check to help make this decision?
Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham defend attack, Democrats say administration must answer vital questions
Donald Trump administration allies reinforced on Sunday the administration’s messaging on the Israel-US strikes on Iran, while Democrats decried it as a “war of choice” that required congressional approval.
On Sunday talk shows, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham and Texas senator Ted Cruz defended the strikes, while Virginia senator Mark Warner, vice-chairman of the Committee on Intelligence, and other Democrats welcomed the elimination of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but said the administration must now answer vital questions.
Continue reading...Slashdot reader darwinmac writes: The Document Foundation (TDF), the organization behind LibreOffice, has decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project which been inactive since 2022. Collabora, a company that was a major contributor to the original LibreOffice Online, is not pleased with this development. After the original project went dormant, Collabora forked the code and created its own product, Collabora Online. Collaboras Michael Meeks, who also sits on the TDF board, reacted to the TDFs decision by saying that a fully supported, free online version already exists in the form of Collabora Online, and that resurrecting a dead repository makes little sense when an active, open community around the online suite already exists. For now, The Document Foundation plans to reopen the old repository for new contributions. The organization has issued a warning that the code is not ready for live deployment and users should wait until the development team confirms it is stable.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
With Iran attacks, President Trump is making the use of force the new normal – and casting aside international law Expert comment jon.wallace
The attacks – and the assassination of Supreme Leader Khamenei – create precedents for other countries seeking to resort to force without consideration for the rule of law.
The United States has taken a further, major step in unhinging the global order. The core principle of that order is that no state can go to war in pursuit of its own national policy. Where use of force is claimed as necessary in the global interest, this can only be done through a mandate from the UN Security Council.
After last year’s Israeli-US strikes against Iran, President Donald Trump’s threats of force against Greenland, the conflict in Gaza, Israel’s attack on Qatar and other cases, including most notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seems as if we are now moving to a world where deference to international law is no longer seen as decisive and the use of force is becoming the new normal.
The killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, at the outset of the conflict has put this into even sharper focus.
The international system, as understood up to now, balances the need to safeguard the security of states with the aim of supressing war and its devastating consequences. The use of force is prohibited, although it remains available to countries as a last resort, when faced with an armed attack that cannot be averted or defeated by other means.
This rules out a preventative war, launched early against a potential enemy while the military balance still favours the attacker. There is also a prohibition on ‘pre-emptive war’ where both sides expect an armed conflict and striking first would offer an advantage. This would add greater instability as it would create an incentive for states to go to war first.
International law only allows ‘anticipatory’ self-defence when the other side has prepared its military hardware for an immediate attack and has taken a decision to launch hostilities. A state does not have to await a first blow once it is clear that a specific attack is inevitable and imminent. For instance, Israel’s first strike against Egypt in 1967 was justified by the imminent, large-scale attack Egypt was preparing.
US President Donald Trump has partly justified this latest attack by invoking a long list of hostile acts committed by Iran, starting with the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979, alleged involvement in terrorist attacks, and support for proxies hostile to the US.
However, international law does not permit the use of force in response to a hostile overall posture of another state short of an armed attack. Neither is the use of force permitted by way of armed retaliation in answer to past provocations. Force is only permissible as a means of last resort, where no other means is available to secure a state from an armed attack.
The president claims that Iran is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that ‘could soon reach the American homeland.’ But Iran is not expected to achieve that capacity for another five to ten years.
There was also no indication of an imminent attack against US forces in the Middle East, within reach of Iran’s present medium-range missile force. Trump’s determination to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s military potential also appears to violate the requirement of proportionality which is part of the doctrine of self-defence.
Israel, which attacked Iran alongside the US, asserts that it faced an existential threat in the shape of Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and ballistic missile capacity, necessitating what it terms a ‘pre-emptive’ attack.
But Israel has confirmed that it has been planning and preparing for this operation with the US for many months. This suggests that this is indeed a war of choice – a preventative war – launched with due deliberation, while it was still relatively easy to remove Iran’s armed potential before it fully materialized.
Last June, some Western states did support ‘Operation Midnight Hammer’, when Washington joined Israel’s 12-day war to degrade Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But according to President Trump, that operation set back the Iranian nuclear programme by several years. That would undermine any claim of an imminent and overwhelming necessity to strike Iran now, as a last resort.
The progress made in the nuclear talks between the US and Iran in Geneva also diminishes such a claim. The Omani mediators have confirmed that Iran had agreed to important concessions concerning its nuclear enrichment programme – supposedly the principal focus of the talks.
Arguably, it is lawful to use force to save a population in another country from its own government. However, this doctrine is controversial. In any event, it applies only where a large segment of the population is threatened with extermination, enforced starvation or forced displacement. This would have been the case, for instance, in Rwanda in 1994, where some 800,000 civilians were massacred.
The Iranian government’s attacks on demonstrators in January were tragic. However, this probably did not yet reach the threshold justifying foreign military intervention. Moreover, a humanitarian intervention must aim to address an ongoing, overwhelming humanitarian emergency. The doctrine does not apply retroactively, after the emergency has passed. And the action taken must be strictly limited to its humanitarian motives, which may exclude an agenda of regime change.
It would also be difficult to justify intervention if the state doing the intervening is a principal agent that contributed to the emergency. In January, while the protests in Iran were underway, President Trump called on Iranians to ‘TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS…HELP IS ON ITS WAY’. That could be argued to have contributed to the armed confrontation between the Iranian government and segments of the population that followed the unrest.
Now, the US president has again expressly called on the people of Iran to ‘take over your government’ perhaps provoking the next armed confrontation between government and population.
Targeted assassinations of political leaders in peacetime is prohibited – but during armed conflict the situation is more complex. In principle, only those involved in the military campaign can be targeted.
It is also generally assumed to be wise to keep the governmental authority in place, if only to have someone who can negotiate peace at the end of hostilities. There is also a reluctance to turn leaders into martyrs in the eyes of their followers. National leaders also may be hesitant to target their counterparts in other states, in case it leads to their own targeting.
In this instance, it is clear that Iran’s top leadership, including the Supreme Leader, cannot be easily distinguished from those directing the war. It would seem inappropriate to extend a kind of immunity to those who have been involved in past atrocities, including threats or even assaults, directly or through surrogates, and who are directing the present attacks on other states.
An authoritarian head of state can be so closely connected to the war effort, and indeed in charge of it, that he or she might be classified as being directly involved in the hostilities.
While this is also politically sensitive, the status of Ali Hosseini Khamenei as a religious leader, along with other clerics at the head of state institutions, would not necessarily grant them protection from attack. There is also no prohibition on attacks against buildings frequented by high officials, such as presidential palaces or key ministries, if they are used to direct the war effort.
Although there is no available legal justification for the present, sustained attack on Iran, there has been only limited international condemnation. At an emergency session of the UN Security Council, other than the predictable attitude of Russia and China, only Columbia carefully framed its presentation in terms of international law and the evident violation of the prohibition of the use of force.
Iran’s record as a rogue state over the past decades dominated the debate, along with sharp criticism of its apparently indiscriminate, and indeed unlawful, counterattacks against other countries in the region.
As in the discussion of Trump’s Venezuela intervention, other states limited themselves to general exhortations that international law must be complied with, without drawing any conclusions concerning the attack on Iran. But such identifications of unlawful conduct by other states are essential if broader precedents upending the rule of law are to be avoided.
This reluctance to highlight unlawful conduct may encourage a broader sense that the use of force as a means of national policy is becoming acceptable again – at least to the most powerful countries.
It may seem inappropriate to insist on compliance with the law even where laudable objectives – such as nuclear non-proliferation and freedom from repression –are being claimed as the attackers’ objectives.
But with its actions, following its intervention in Venezuela and its threats against Greenland, the US has created multiple potential precedents which others may follow in different circumstances. Indeed, there are already cases where regional powers have acted in a similar way.
Moreover, it will not be easily possible to oppose further Russian aggression or potential Chinese expansionism if there are no clear principles left to rely on, without triggering objections of double standards and hypocrisy.
The US, and the states that have failed to identify its conduct as a violation of international law, may come to regret the loss of legal and moral authority this will bring.
Across the United States, Iranian Americans expressed frustration, hope, dread and — above all — concern for relatives still in Iran after the joint U.S.-Israeli attacks.
 | finally met someone in the wild 🤘🔥he even let me take it for a spin [link] [comments] |
The 33-year-old grandson of JFK is out to make a name for himself, running for Congress in New York's 12th District. He talks about his family, and his refusal to refrain from mocking his opponents, saying, "The time is not now to hold back."
Some publicly mourn leader’s demise but videos also show jubilant response after violent crackdown in January
Celebration and mourning broke out across Iran in response to the death of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an extraordinary public response to the end of nearly four decades of the top cleric’s rule.
In the squares of Tehran, crowds gathered to mourn the leader, chanting and holding placards with his image. But videos shared widely on social media also showed people celebrating, dancing, honking car horns and setting off fireworks as news of the leader’s death broke.
Continue reading...UK plans evacuation of more than 76,000 Brits as key transit hubs in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha close
The US and Israeli attack on Iran continued to cause severe disruption to flights throughout the Middle East and beyond on Sunday, creating uncertainty for hundreds of thousands of travellers.
Countries across the region closed their airspace, and three of the key airports that connect Europe, Africa and the west to Asia halted operations.
Continue reading...Belgian special forces boarded the Ethera, which was sailing under the flag of Guinea, on Saturday night
Belgium has seized an oil tanker believed to form part of the so-called “shadow fleet” used by Russia to circumvent western sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
Special forces assisted by French helicopters boarded the ship in a clandestine operation in the North Sea on Saturday night, Belgium’s defence minister, Theo Francken, said on Sunday.
Continue reading...Five additional personnel have been reported seriously wounded as part of Operation Epic Fury, US military said
Three US service members have been killed in action as part of US military operations against Iran, the US Central Command said in a statement on Sunday. These are the first confirmed deaths since the US began launching strikes against Iran on Saturday.
Five additional personnel have been reported seriously wounded as part of Operation Epic Fury, the US military said. Authorities have not yet publicly identified the three soldiers who were killed.
Continue reading...President says in social media post that Iran tried to ‘stop Trump’ and now ‘faces renewed war with United States’
Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to link the massive attack he ordered against Iran to his persistent claims about his 2020 election loss to former president Joe Biden, in a social media post about allegations that Tehran’s government interfered in the US president elections.
“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump,” his Truth Social post said, “and now faces renewed war with United States”.
Continue reading...Campaign groups write to technology secretary amid concerns that sites could double overall electricity demand
Datacentre developers are facing pressure to reveal whether their projects will increase the UK’s net greenhouse gas emissions, amid concerns the sites could double national electricity demand.
Campaign groups have written to the UK technology secretary, Liz Kendall, warning that the energy required by new AI infrastructure poses a “serious threat to efforts to decarbonise the electricity grid”.
Continue reading..."There's probably a lot of jockeying inside of Iran right now, they have a very consultative, deliberative process to replace the Supreme Leader," Sen. Tom Cotton said Sunday on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."
The CEO of Anthropic says his company refused to allow its technology to be used by the Trump Administration without certain guidelines (such as not using its AI to power fully-autonomous weapons without any human involvement).
Twisted my leg pretty good but didn't sprain anything thank goodness. But now I gotta take a couple weeks (limited free time) to rest before I try again. But all I want to do is go ride. So what the hell do I do?
Hi guys,
I'm looking for your advice here. I have a XR since 2020, and still pretty happy with it. I'm moving abroad (Canada - France) and the onewheel is not authorized by the relocation company.
So two options: Selling it or Removing the battery to ship separately.
What would you do? Is it complex or risky to remove the battery?
Thanks
A Tony Award-winner for "Hairspray," and a seven-time Oscar nominee, Marc Shaiman has written about his nearly 50 years in show business in a new memoir, "Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories From a Sore Winner."
In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten notes on a book printed in the 1500s — and recognized the handwriting as Galileo's. The finding "promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science," writes Science magazine — since the book Galileo annotated was a reprint of Ptolemy's second-century work arguing that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo's notes, perhaps written around 1590, or roughly 2 decades before his groundbreaking telescope observations of the Moon and Jupiter, reveal someone who both revered and critically dissected Ptolemy's work. And they imply, Malara argues, that Galileo ultimately broke with Ptolemy's cosmos because his mastery of the traditional paradigm's reasoning convinced him that a heliocentric [sun-centered] system would better fulfill Ptolemy's own mathematical logic.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As CEO and president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White has taken the hard-hitting sport of mixed martial arts to its highest-profile moment this summer: a UFC match on the South Lawn of the White House.
Regulator says Prof Jacob George will no longer be involved after gender-criticial social media posts from last year
A health official who reportedly intervened to pause a clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers has been removed from any further involvement due to accusations of bias.
Prof Jacob George, who was appointed chief medical and scientific officer at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in January, raised concerns that led to the Pathways trial being put on hold by the government, according to the Sunday Times.
Continue reading...Their actions are no different from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo
We shouldn’t beat around the bush: Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s military attack on Iran is an illegal act of aggression. There is no lawful justification for it. It is no different from Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The United Nations charter allows the use of military force in only two circumstances – with authorization of the UN security council, or as self-defense from an actual or imminent armed attack. Neither was present.
Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
Continue reading...Though the supreme court ruled against the levies, businesses hit hard by the tariffs shouldn’t hold their breath for any rebates
Now that the supreme court has found that the Donald Trump exceeded his authority to levy tariffs, the big question for many businesses – particularly small businesses who were so hard hit by these tariffs – is are they able to get their money back?
Don’t hold your breath. When it comes to tariffs, Trump still has many more tricks up his sleeve.
Continue reading...David Pogue looks back at the career of the singer-songwriter whose Top 10 hits included such classics as "Oh, Carol," "Calendar Girl," "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do," and "Laughter in the Rain."
Missiles and bombs landed across Iran, hitting political and security targets in Tehran, including supreme leader’s residence
The US-Israeli war against Iran entered its second day on Sunday, as news of the assassination of the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, shook the Islamic Republic and the wider region.
Donald Trump announced Khamenei’s death while Israel claimed to have killed at least 40 senior Iranian commanders in the first day of attacks. Both countries continued to pound Iran, conducting hundreds of airstrikes across the country overnight and on Sunday.
Despite the apparent loss of a significant portion of its senior military and political leadership, Iran did not slow its retaliation on Sunday, bombing targets in the Gulf and unleashing waves of ballistic missiles towards Israel.
Honor's move into robotics feels like a bold move, and it turns out that its first humanoid has some bold moves of its own.
This Leica camera phone is beautiful. Come take a look.
Party leader Zack Polanski says surge in numbers ‘proves that the future of progressive politics belongs to the Greens’
The Green party said its membership had passed 200,000 this weekend in the wake of its victory in the Gorton and Denton byelection, in which it overturned a huge Labour majority.
The party’s membership has tripled since September last year, when it was about 68,000, after the announcement of Zack Polanski as its leader.
Continue reading...In 1991 more than half a million Americans served in Operation Desert Storm; 148 were killed in action, to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Yet, when Marine veteran Scott Stump set out to build a memorial on the National Mall, he faced "grueling" resistance.
Effective closure of the narrow waterway could spell trouble for many developed economies
The US-Israeli war on Iran has ignited fears that escalating military aggression in the Middle East could send oil prices soaring, push up prices at the pump and drive a global economic downturn.
The US began “major combat operations” in Iran on Saturday morning, shortly after Israel launched a strike against Tehran. Within hours of the US-Israeli strikes, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards reportedly warned tankers in the strait of Hormuz that no ship would be allowed to pass through the world’s most critical oil trade route.
Continue reading...Experts say trusted adults must be brave and discuss issue or risk children looking for answers from unsafe sources
Teachers and parents in the UK need to be brave and discuss Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes with children and young people or risk them looking for answers from dubious or dangerous sources, according to experts who will host the first public seminar for schools on the issue.
Thrive, the education consultancy hosting the online seminar on the convicted child sex offender, said: “Many children and young people are encountering this material often without context, warnings or adult support, leaving educators to manage the emotional and safeguarding impact in real time.”
Continue reading...The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions asks whether we could cope with a world where computer gave up saying no …
This week’s question: what if Shakespeare were dropped in modern-day London?
After years of computer saying no, and giving us all migraines and premature grey hair, I’m starting to worry that computer – or rather AI large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini – are taking too much of a fancy to playing nice and saying yes. I confess to using both of these programs, but I’ve noticed that, well, it’s as if they’re trying to please, with statements such as, “You’re absolutely right, Jeff,” and “That’s pretty much right.” Often, when I ask, “Would you mind thinking for a bit longer on that?”, I then get another response saying: “Jeff, you’re absolutely right, again, to query that result. It turns out I was a bit hasty in my reply …”
If the world runs even more on information filleted out from the sump of the internet by LLMs, what are the consequences? Can we look forward to a future in which AI is more concerned with appearing sympathetic (getting good reviews?) than being factual? Er, a bit too human? Jeff Collett, Edinburgh
Continue reading...A bill to create a state intelligence operation would allow scrutiny based on ‘opinions’ – and could prompt other states to follow
“Florida man seeks to create a state counterintelligence unit and claim sweeping surveillance powers over people whose ‘views’ or ‘opinions’ he dislikes.” It’s not nearly as amusing as the usual “Florida man” headline, and it may lead to a blueprint for lawmakers far beyond Florida.
If Florida enacts House Bill 945, it will create a national first – CIA-style structure at the state level that blurs the traditional line between state law enforcement and intelligence work. It likely wouldn’t remain a local experiment. Red states often borrow aggressively from one another’s policy playbooks, on everything from gerrymandering to anti-abortion laws to transporting immigrants to Democratic-led states. A state-level intelligence office empowered to scrutinize residents based on ideology is precisely the kind of proposal likely to spread once normalized.
Continue reading...Dylan Lopez Contreras, a senior at Ellis Prep academy, was taken by ICE in May. The Guardian invited him and five of his classmates to share their lives and dreams
The students at Ellis Prep academy – like most high schoolers – have a lot on their mind right now.
Essay deadlines, college applications, younger siblings and dance rehearsals. But also, the immigration operations across the US and the president’s goal of “mass deportations”.
Continue reading...James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett adopt contrasting strategies as party hopes to tap into Trump backlash in reliably red state
At a packed town hall meeting last month in Laredo for James Talarico, the 36-year-old Democrat vying for a US Senate seat in Texas, Cristina Rodriguez took the microphone. Rodriguez, a 16-year Marine Corps veteran, said she had never cast a ballot. She didn’t identify as either a Democrat nor a Republican, and to her it didn’t matter. Regardless of what party the president belonged to, she had to obey orders.
Her attitude changed after the re-election of Donald Trump, whom she viewed as spiteful and divisive. In Talarico, a state representative from the Austin suburb of Round Rock, she found the exact opposite – a former middle school teacher and current seminary student who speaks in measured tones and preaches mutual respect.
Continue reading...I'm leaving soon and we're gonna try to get my onewheel from lax to San Juan airport in Puerto rico on American airlines. I'm wondering if there's anything in particular I need to know? Also I remember some of you saying you brought documents with you just in case, so could you send me those if possible? If not I'll just write smth up myself lol
KEL MARQUEZ
Staff Writer
The trees are bare
and branches are thin
It makes me hopeful
that spring will give in
As snow melts, flora and fauna
revealed by the breeze
Winter gives way
to what spring foresees
When color reappears,
bringing life to Earth
The seasons change,
a planet’s rebirth
Winter shall come again,
it’s written in the stars
But it’s nice to know that soon,
spring will be ours
More than 2,400 flights were canceled Sunday across airports in the Middle East, according to flight tracker FlightAware.
Samsung's new top-of-the-line phone packs upgrades to the camera and battery, but here's what I've loved using so far.
One of the biggest tech events of the year may not be on your radar, and not because it's happening in Barcelona.
Can the Blues derail their capital rival's title charge?
Trump quipped about inviting US women to White House
Knight appears on SNL with Hughes brothers
US ice hockey star Hilary Knight aimed a barb at Donald Trump during an appearance on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live.
Knight led the US women to gold at last month’s Olympics, scoring the Americans’ first goal as they beat Canada in overtime. But after the US men’s team won gold Trump joked that he would have to invite the women’s team to the White House too or risk being impeached. Many of the men’s players laughed at Trump’s comments, and Knight later called them “distasteful and unfortunate.” While the US men visited the White House last week, Knight and her teammates said they were too busy to attend and will instead celebrate at an event in July organized by rapper Flavor Flav.
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 1, 2026.
A map created by the CBS News data team shows the strike locations across Iran, including the capital and the site of a major nuclear facility.
Unveiled at MWC 2026, this book-style foldable has a lot going for it.
After byelection defeat and with right-leaning advisers gone, will PM return to his instincts and embrace Labour ‘DNA’ on climate?
Less than a year ago, Keir Starmer stood in front of an audience of senior officials and business leaders from 60 countries in London to declare climate action was “in the DNA of my government”.
Vowing to go “all out” for net zero and to “accelerate” while others were slowing down, the Lancaster House speech was his strongest intervention yet on the issue. “We’re paying the price for our overexposure to the rollercoaster of international fossil fuel markets,” he said. “Homegrown clean energy is the only way to take back control of our energy system.”
Continue reading...Jackson’s body lay in repose at his Rainbow/Push Coalition headquarters as thousands visited to pay their respects
Some were older, some were younger and some were strangers, but many more were friends – they had lined up down the blocks of Chicago in mercifully mild weather for a chance to say goodbye to the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
Friday was the last day of public visitation as Jackson lay in repose at the headquarters of his Rainbow/Push political activism coalition in the city he called home.
Continue reading...Plumes of smoke rose above Tehran and explosions could be heard across the city on day two of US-Israeli strikes on Iran. In a statement the Israel Defense Forces said the country's air force was striking targets 'in the heart of Tehran'. The strikes came after Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the first wave of attacks. Although Israel said it was targeting military assets in Iran, there have also been reports of a high civilian death toll
Continue reading...The president said the strikes have put immense pressure on Iran, and he believes the U.S.-Israeli military action can lead to an eventual diplomatic solution.
Authorities seek to reassure visitors after tourists at five-star resorts had to shelter in underground car parks
The weekend began as it often does in Dubai. By late morning on Saturday, the beach clubs on Palm Jumeirah were already at capacity. Along the waterfront promenade, running clubs gathered beneath the towers, filming their warm-ups before setting off in neat formation.
On Instagram, the city appeared untouched: blue skies, a flat sea and the steady churn of shoppers inside the Dubai Mall. Across the Gulf, however, the largest regional war since the 2003 invasion of Iraq was intensifying.
Continue reading...How the latest strikes risk opening a Pandora’s box in the Gulf.
British forces in Bahrain and Iraq being drawn into Iran conflict in defence of civilian sites and military assets
Three hundred British personnel were within 200 metres (650ft) of an Iranian missile and drone strike on the US naval base in Bahrain on Saturday, one of several incidents where UK forces have been drawn into the war in the Middle East.
No casualties were reported in the incident, one of more than 25 waves of retaliatory attacks in response to the massive US-Israeli joint bombing campaign launched against Iran on Saturday.
Continue reading...You need only $12 to find out what's sucking the life out of your bank account.
The record sum paid at auction for a rare example is part of a boom in trading cards – and the prices can be staggering
For £12m, you could buy a seven-bedroom mansion in Hampstead, north London, or a Bugatti La Voiture Noire, one of the world’s most coveted sports cars, with a few hundred thousand quid to spare. Alternatively, you could blow it all on a Pokémon card.
This is what AJ Scaramucci, son of financier and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, did earlier this month when he bought the world’s only Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) 10-graded Pikachu Illustrator card, one of the rarest and most coveted Pokémon cards ever, at auction. The seller, YouTuber, wrestler and occasional boxer Logan Paul, made a mighty profit after flipping the card for about £8m more than the £3.9m he originally paid for it in 2021.
Continue reading...Kash Patel’s partying went viral and the US men’s team came to Washington. Now it’s all part of the culture war
Ah, hockey. The most impish of sports. A bunch of blissfully beefy individuals wearing colorful sweaters zoom around in skates chasing a wee little object called, of all things, a “puck”. It’s adorable. It’s like A Midsummer Night’s Dream for people missing teeth. These days, if you’re talking about hockey, you probably are thinking about HBO Max’s gay sex-capade romance, Heated Rivalry. In the TV series, two hockey players on opposing teams fall in love, engaging in various erotic scenarios in between smashing each other into plexiglass. Actually, maybe that second part is connected to the first part.
Heated Rivalry has become an absolute phenomenon, enthralling American audiences despite all the factors that might prevent someone less than tolerant from connecting with the show – it’s gay, it’s about one of our least popular major team sports, and most damning of all, it’s Canadian. It might as well be about talking beavers. And yet, it’s a major hit that’s done a lot of good for healthy representation of the LGBTQ+ community.
Continue reading...Ex-official calls transfer of unaccompanied girls as young as 13, many pregnant due to rape, a human rights violation
All unaccompanied immigrant children who are pregnant, many by rape, are being moved to a single facility in Texas in order to avoid providing abortion services in a significant human rights violation, critics say.
As detainees are frequently moved across state lines quickly, often to red states like Texas, pregnant people are facing challenges accessing reproductive health care in detention centers.
Continue reading...News of Ali Khamenei’s killing sparks backlash from Marjorie Taylor Greene and other America First loyalists
Donald Trump had come to Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina, with a promise. “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” the then US president-elect said in December 2016.
Trump has pushed his isolationist message in the decade since, repeatedly assuring his “America first” base that there would be no repeat of the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Continue reading...A reporter ponders on how to repair a religious structure long thought of as good but supported by an evil underside
In 1965, just shy of my junior year at the Jesuit high school of New Orleans, with good potential as an offensive end, I had an epiphany in the muddy slog of August football practice: Why are you doing something you don’t like?
Soon after, I quit, and was trailed by guilt for a dereliction of duty. Jesuit vaunted student achievements of all kinds. I played on the golf team and did some pieces for the school paper. Jesuit fostered a fraternal culture, molding friendships I carry to this day.
Continue reading...Stay as healthy as possible as you get older with these key vitamins
The Supreme Court is set to convene Monday to hear a Second Amendment dispute over a federal law that bars unlawful drug users from having firearms.
Trump threatens Tehran with force ‘never seen before’ if it pursues retaliation after Khamenei’s death
Israel and the US have launched fresh waves of intensive attacks across Iran on the second day of their military campaign to overthrow the country’s government, which has plunged the Middle East into a new regional conflict with no certain timeline or outcome.
The renewed violence on Sunday comes amid heated rhetoric from Washington and Tehran that suggests further escalation in the coming hours and days.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader shared this report from the blogIt's FOSS: Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated the projected end-of-life (EOL) dates for several active longterm support kernels via a commit. The provided reasoning? It was done "based on lots of discussions with different companies and groups and the other stable kernel maintainer." The other maintainer is Sasha Levin, who co-maintains these Linux kernel releases alongside Greg. Now, the updated support schedule for the currently active LTS kernels looks like this: — Linux 6.6 now EOLs Dec 2027 (was Dec 2026), giving it a 4-year support window. — Linux 6.12 now EOLs Dec 2028 (was Dec 2026), also a 4-year window. — Linux 6.18 now EOLs Dec 2028 (was Dec 2027), at least 3 years of support. Worth noting above is that Linux 5.10 and 5.15 are both hitting EOL this year in December, so if your distro is still running either of these, now is a good time to start thinking about a move.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
With many of its key specs being the same as the Leica Leitzphone, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra has a lot going for it.
This approach delivered the best bacon with the least amount of hassle.
Employees say they have heard little from major defense contractor V2X Inc about safety and evacuation protocols
Employees of major defense contractor V2X Inc on US military bases in Kuwait say they lack adequate bunker facilities and have had their pay reduced amid Iranian missile attacks across the Persian Gulf region, while receiving limited communication from their employer about safety and evacuation procedures.
The Guardian interviewed three V2X employees on the US bases Camp Arifjan and Camp Buehring in Kuwait, following Iranian missile strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan on Saturday.
Continue reading...Thousands go missing every year, including more than 5,000 Native American and Alaska Native women and girls
Savannah Guthrie is moving back to New York to resume anchoring NBC’s Today show and acknowledging that her 84-year-old mother, Nancy, may not be found a month after she disappeared from her Tucson, Arizona, home in the middle of the night.
“We still believe in a miracle,” Guthrie said in a video last week announcing a $1m reward for her mother’s return in an enduring mystery that has gripped the US for four weeks. “We also know that she may be lost. She may already be gone.”
Continue reading...Antics of RFK Jr, Kristi Noem and others prompt derision – could their erratic behaviour prove president’s undoing?
Heads bowed, linked by arms across their backs, they gathered in a solemn prayer circle. “The quiet moments are often the most important,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, reflected later on social media. Then Team Trump entered the chamber to cheers and applause for Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
Democrats gathered on Capitol Hill, however, regarded the people appointed by Donald Trump to his cabinet and other senior positions rather differently. In the past two weeks alone, they saw a health secretary who boasted about snorting cocaine off toilet seats; a homeland security secretary who allegedly fired a pilot for leaving her blanket on a plane; and an FBI director who chugged beer with Olympic hockey players in Italy at taxpayers’ expense.
Continue reading...Melt faces from beyond the grave.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his Tehran compound, according to four Israeli security officials briefed on the matter.
Just four years ago, a progressive primary challenger with endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., fell 281 votes short of toppling scandal-stained incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas.
Cuellar went on to win the general election in the 28th Congressional District. Then he won again in 2024, despite a federal bribery indictment. In December, President Donald Trump granted Cuellar a pardon from federal charges.
Trump’s assist might have generated a serious primary challenge for a Democrat elsewhere, but Cuellar does not have any well-funded opponents this time around in Texas’s primary elections on Tuesday.
That trend has repeated itself along the Texas border. In districts where progressives once drew national attention and fundraising dollars, a handful of candidates in the left lane are mounting shoestring campaigns.
Texas politicos chalked that phenomenon up to the disappointment from the defeat of progressive candidates in 2022 and 2024, mid-decade redistricting that made several seats in Texas more conservative, and concerns from national groups that some Latinos have permanently swung to the right after voting for Trump in 2024.
“There’s a decided progressive shift, especially among Democratic voters who are desperate for real change.”
Some observers, however, believe that there’s a chance that Democrats may overlearned the lessons of 2024, when Trump made historic inroads among Latino voters along the border.
“I think there’s a decided progressive shift, especially among Democratic voters who are desperate for real change,” said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “But I think they’re desperate to find candidates who can articulate that.”
One of the candidates who is vying for progressive votes Ada Cuellar, an emergency room doctor who has tapped her retirement fund as national donors line up behind a centrist competitor.
Ada Cuellar, no relation to Henry, is running in the Democratic primary against Tejano music scion Bobby Pulido in the 15th Congressional District, which stretches from McAllen on the border to the suburbs of San Antonio. Pulido has cast himself as the candidate most attuned to the district’s attitudes on social issues such as guns and abortion rights.
Washington Democrats are gushing over Pulido’s prospects to win over Republicans in a district that went 58 percent to 40 percent for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024. Only a shotgun-wielding centrist like Pulido has a chance, the theory goes.
Cuellar disagrees. While she eschews the “progressive” label — she considers herself an “independent Democrat” — she is running on a platform that includes support for Medicare for All and abortion rights.
“The establishment has misread the moment, and they really shouldn’t have made a pick here,” said Cuellar. “I really think they shouldn’t make picks in general.”
Early polls, including one conducted by Cuellar’s campaign, showed her far behind the singer. The $824,000 that Ada Cuellar has loaned her own campaign, though, appears to be evening the score.
“They really shouldn’t have made a pick here. I really think they shouldn’t make picks in general.”
And national groups are rushing to prop up Pulido. Blue Dog Action is running ads responding to Cuellar’s attacks on Pulido over his views on abortion, for example. The centrist Democratic PAC spent close to $1 million in support of Pulido in February alone, campaign finance records show.
Cuellar is not the only candidate in the progressive mold running without national support.
In the 34th Congressional District, policy researcher Etienne Rosas is trying to take on conservative Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez — with $7,900 in cash on hand compared to the incumbent’s $1.3 million.
Gonzalez co-chairs the Blue Dog Coalition and voted in favor of the January appropriations bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, factors that would make him a tempting target for progressives elsewhere. Still, national groups have stayed away.
“To be honest, as a socialist myself, I’ve been kind of dismayed how much little outreach leftists that have a national platform have done to this district,” Rosas said.
Rosas is hopeful that support from local Democratic Socialists of America members will give him a people-power boost. Still, he wishes that more national progressives would turn their eyes to the border.
Gonzalez’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
National progressive groups and political figures have had a mixed record in supporting campaigns in the Rio Grande Valley.
In 2020 and 2022, Henry Cuellar faced serious primary challenges from immigration legal aid lawyer Jessica Cisneros in his district, which stretches from Laredo to the outskirts of San Antonio. Buoyed by the backing of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, she fell short by a few hundred votes of toppling Cuellar on her second try.
In the 15th Congressional District, where Ada Cuellar and Pulido are competing now, Michelle Vallejo secured the Democratic nomination in 2022 and 2024, first as a progressive, then as more of a centrist.
Vallejo drew national support, but that was not enough to put her over the top in two races against Republican Monica De La Cruz. In a January 2025 report, the local group Cambio Texas said that Vallejo’s campaigns fell short in part because she relied too heavily on national groups.
The report was also critical of national progressives’ alleged overreliance on “purity tests” and “ideological language.”
“When progressive messaging fails to resonate with Texas voters, the problem often lies with the messenger,” argued the group, whose executive director at the time, Abel Prado, is now serving as Pulido’s campaign manager. “Winning elections requires a willingness to engage with people outside one’s own social or political comfort zone.”
The defeats of Cisneros and Vallejo left a bitter taste in the mouths of national progressives and may have contributed to their relative absence this time. Another key factor is the redistricting that Trump pushed through the Texas legislature last year.
Under the new maps, every district along the border voted for Trump by a more than 10-point margin, save for the compact seat in El Paso represented by Democrat Rep. Veronica Escobar, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
That redistricting may make it difficult for Democrats to win even in the 23rd Congressional District, where sitting Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales is being dragged down by a scandal involving an affair with a former staffer. None of the candidates in the crowded Democratic primary there have seen significant donations come into their campaign thus far.
In recent years, national groups such as Justice Democrats pursued a strategy of trying to get the most progressive candidates possible elected in districts that are already blue, rather than attempting to boost candidates who share their views in purple or red districts.
“Redistricting has a part in it, absolutely,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director at Justice Democrats. “We look at pretty deep blue districts.”
Still, Andrabi is critical of the strategy that national Democrats have pursued of supporting conservative Democrats such as Henry Cuellar.
“You have a Democratic establishment that is actually OK with having a diet Republican represent south Texas, as long as they have a D after their name,” he said.
“You have a Democratic establishment that is actually OK with having a diet Republican represent south Texas, as long as they have a D after their name.”
Along with Gonzalez, Cuellar was one of seven House Democrats to vote for funding the Department of Homeland Security last month. He is the House’s sole Democrat opposed to abortion rights. And he voted against a war powers resolution that would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval for further attacks on Venezuela.
Cuellar’s campaign did not respond to a request for his pitch to progressives in his district.
The argument from national Democratic groups for supporting relative conservatives such as Cuellar, Gonzalez, and Pulido is consistent: They are all the most likely to win a general election in districts that voted heavily for Trump.
“Right now, there is such a hunger for a person who is a fighter and who is competent.”
Yet as polls show Democrats fired up and Latinos shifting away from Trump, candidates such as Rosas and Ada Cuellar believe that national Democrats have misjudged the border. Cuellar says she is hardly bothered anymore when people call her a progressive.
“It’s not really a scary thing to get that label,” she said. “I have noticed that the Democrats get very energized by a person who is more progressive. And I have also noticed that right now, there is such a hunger for a person who is a fighter and who is competent.”
The post Texas Progressives Say Democratic Establishment Is Blowing It In the Rio Grande Valley appeared first on The Intercept.
The Iranian foreign minister says Donald Trump’s aim of regime change is ‘mission impossible’ after US-Israeli strikes hit multiple sites in Iran.
Reports say at least 201 people have been killed and there are growing fears the move could plunge the region into a conflict that could last weeks or months.
The Guardian's Patrick Wintour explains what we know so far and what to expect
Continue reading...Footage released by Iran's state media shows a school building in the south of the country reportedly destroyed by US and Israeli strikes. At least 100 children were killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, the Mizan news agency reported, with dozens more unaccounted for
Continue reading...Aggression feeds a sense that the US is operating outside global norms and helps to fuel a more complex currency outlook
Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, with its puerile Pentagon nametag Operation Epic Fury, is another show of violent force from a bullish administration.
Aside from unleashing fresh instability across the Middle East, the strikes add to the sense of a US operating with little regard for international law or global norms – as with Trump’s on-off tariff regime, and the attack on Venezuela.
Continue reading...President Trump said that "heavy and pinpoint bombing" of Iran would "continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary."
From phones you can wear like a bracelet to weird AI gadgets packed with lasers, these products went hard and then went home.
Sales beat wider retail sector last year thanks to customers inspired by websites such as Vinted, industry body says
Young people inspired by secondhand fashion websites such as Vinted and Depop are helping charity shops thrive despite rising energy and employment costs.
Save the Children’s retail sales rose 3% last year, helped by a surge in December when the charity rang up 11% more than the same month a year before, raising more than £1m for its causes.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Labour’s Rushanara Ali plans to intervene in elections bill amid warnings of foreign interference
A former Labour minister has added her voice to those of a growing list of experts and senior MPs calling for a ban on political donations in cryptocurrency as concerns grow over foreign interference in British elections.
Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP who helped draft the elections bill when she was a minister in the communities department, called for the government to strengthen the legislation with an outright ban on donations in digital currencies.
Continue reading...The centennial of what became Black History Month offered a microcosm of President Donald Trump’s views on race and progress.
This Old Firm derby clash at Ibrox looks set to have a huge bearing on this season's title race.
Anthropic's Claude AI assistant "jumped to the No. 2 slot on Apple's chart of top U.S. free apps late on Friday," reports CNBC: The rise in popularity suggests that Anthropic is benefiting from its presence in news headlines, stemming from its refusal to have its models used for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons... OpenAI's ChatGPT sat at No. 1 on the App Store rankings on Saturday, while Google's Gemini was at No. 3... On Jan. 30, [Claude] was ranked No. 131 in the U.S., and it bounced between the top 20 and the top 50 for much of February, according to data from analytics company Sensor Tower... [And Friday night, for 85.3 million followers] pop singer Katy Perry posted a screenshot of Anthropic's Pro subscription for consumers, with a heart superimposed over it. Friday Anthropic posted "We are deeply grateful to our users, and to the industry peers, policymakers, veterans, and members of the public who have voiced their support in recent days. Thank you. "
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Commentary: Yes, Apple's $599 iPhone 16E is a good buy, but its successor could launch immintently, possibly at a March 4 Apple media event.
Woman deceived into relationship tells spycops inquiry the trip was not to meet Italian socialists, as Carlo Soracchi claims
An undercover police officer is facing allegations that he used taxpayers’ money to pay for a romantic break in Venice with a woman he was deceiving into a long-term relationship, the spycops public inquiry has heard.
Carlo Soracchi pretended to be an activist for six years while he infiltrated socialist and anti-fascist campaign groups.
Continue reading...The America First president who built his political brand on opposing foreign military adventures has unleashed a war of choice aimed at regime change
It turns out that Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “candidate of peace”, is just as eager to start new wars. Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pitched himself as the antithesis of his Democratic opponents Joe Biden, and later, Kamala Harris. Trump insisted he would use his deal-making skills to end multiple global conflicts that started under the Biden administration, including Israel’s war on Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In his election night victory speech in November 2024, Trump told his supporters: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” Two months later, in his inaugural address, he went even further in trying to establish himself as a global peacemaker. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” he said.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University
Continue reading...1250mi on my pint x and installed my tfl enduro yesterday. I made a post after a quick mile ride with some good drops and loved it. Now after 15 mi I have taken my first true nosedive and am not loving my board right now. As someone commented on the last post the tire is smaller and robs a noticeable amount of speed even at a higher psi . It made my px feel like like og pint even at higher psi’s. However I just ordered my pintv kit to make up for it😂. Hopefully it will .make up for it if not I’m back to a maxxis slick
Ben Saul says ‘rolling over’ after Israel and US attack is counterproductive for middle powers because it undermines rules-based order
Iranian Australians celebrate death of supreme leader and dream of regime change
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
International law experts have criticised Australia for “rolling over” and backing what they say is an illegal attack by Israel and the US on Iran.
The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, endorsed the fresh war by stating that “Australia supports action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security”.
Continue reading...The text mimics a common fraud, but differs in that criminals appear to have hacked a genuine business account
John the delivery driver has tried to drop off something at your home from a company called Cleaning Superstore but you missed him, according to the message you have received via WhatsApp.
Although you cannot remember buying anything from the company, the text appears to have come from a legitimate WhatsApp account so you try to rearrange delivery by clicking the link provided.
Continue reading...Labour peer, who was a child refugee, criticises home secretary’s response to Gorton and Denton byelection defeat
The home secretary’s decision to double down on hardline immigration reforms in light of Labour’s byelection defeat to the Green party is “disappointing”, according to the Labour peer Alf Dubs.
Lord Dubs, a child refugee who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport in 1939, had previously accused Shabana Mahmood of “pulling up the drawbridge” on child migrants.
Continue reading...The regime may now have to meet Trump’s demands merely to save itself. And he needs a coherent plan to deal with what he has unleashed
The coordinated strikes on Iran launched by the United States and Israel in the early hours of Saturday morning formally reignited a conflict that had been simmering since last summer’s 12-day war. They targeted key command structures and killed senior figures, most notably Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who had been in power since 1989. Donald Trump marked his demise with a post saying “one of the most evil people in history” was dead, adding: “This is not only justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans.”
Israel has published reports claiming that Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), defence minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and Admiral Ali Shamkhani, head of the defence council, have also been killed. In response, Iranian forces have fired missiles and drones at Israel, at US bases in the Gulf, Iraq and Jordan, and at some civilian targets across the Gulf. Events are moving quickly, but far from predictably.
Sanam Vakil is the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House
Continue reading...Investors shifting to ‘heavy-asset, low-obsolescence’ companies insulated from disruption, says Goldman Sachs
Investors have a new mantra as they prepare for AI to shake up the global economy – the Halo trade.
Interest in Halo – short for “heavy assets, low obsolescence” - has risen as investors seek out companies with tangible, productive assets, which might be insulated from AI disruption, such as energy and transport infrastructure companies.
Continue reading...Just got my Pint yesterday. Been loving it. I feel like I got the hang of it fairly quickly after a bit of trial and error. But one of my biggest issues right now it when I speed up sometimes I'll start "S" swerving left and right small amounts but very quickly which makes my lose balance and have to bail. Is there a specific way to avoid this or is this just a beginner habit that I'll kick with experience?
After a heist and the departure of its boss, the French institution wrestles with water leaks, strikes and much-criticised plans for a €1bn renovation
Just over a year ago, Laurence des Cars, the intellectually brilliant (if famously prickly) former head of the largest and most-visited museum in the world, wrote a somewhat alarming note to her boss, France’s culture minister.
Des Cars, who on Tuesday resigned as president of the Louvre, lamented the advanced state of disrepair of the iconic museum’s buildings and galleries.
Continue reading...  | Bought this an hour ago and as soon as I got it home my girl stepped of the front and it got flipped over a stuck on full throttle and slammed into a concrete wall. I got new bumpers but I’m trying to figure out what else needs fixed. [link] [comments] |
In a 9,000-word expose, a writer for Harper's visited San Francisco's young entrepreneurs in September to mockingly profile "tech's new generation and the end of thinking." There's Cluely founder Roy Lee. ("His grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do.") And the Rationalist movement's Scott Alexander, who "would probably have a very easy time starting a suicide cult..." Alexander's relationship with the AI industry is a strange one. "In theory, we think they're potentially destroying the world and are evil and we hate them," he told me. In practice, though, the entire industry is essentially an outgrowth of his blog's comment section... "Many of them were specifically thinking, I don't trust anybody else with superintelligence, so I'm going to create it and do it well." Somehow, a movement that believes AI is incredibly dangerous and needs to be pursued carefully ended up generating a breakneck artificial arms race. There's a fascinating story about teenaged founder Eric Zhu (who only recently turned 18): Clients wanted to take calls during work hours, so he would speak to them from his school bathroom. "I convinced my counselor that I had prostate issues... I would buy hall passes from drug dealers to get out of class, to have business meetings." Soon he was taking Zoom calls with a U.S. senator to discuss tech regulation... Next, he built his own venture-capital fund, managing $20 million. At one point cops raided the bathroom looking for drug dealers while Eric was busy talking with an investor. Eventually, the school got sick of Eric's misuse of the facilities and kicked him out. He moved to San Francisco. Eric made all of this sound incredibly easy. You hang out in some Discord servers, make a few connections with the right people; next thing you know, you're a millionaire... Eric didn't think there was anything particularly special about himself. Why did he, unlike any of his classmates, start a $20 million VC fund? "I think I was just bored. Honestly, I was really bored." Did he think anyone could do what he did? "Yeah, I think anyone genuinely can." The article concludes Silicon Valley's investors are rewarding young people with "agency". Although "As far as I could tell, being a highly agentic individual had less to do with actually doing things and more to do with constantly chasing attention online." Like X.com user Donald Boat, who successfully baited Sam Altman into buying him a gaming PC in "a brutally simplified miniature of the entire VC economy." (After which "People were giving him stuff for no reason except that Altman had already done it, and they didn't want to be left out of the trend.") Shortly before I arrived at the Cheesecake Factory, [Donald Boat] texted to let me know that he'd been drinking all day, so when I met him I thought he was irretrievably wasted. In fact, it turned out, he was just like that all the time... He seemed to have a constant roster of projects on the go. He'd sent me occasional photos of his exploits. He went down to L.A. to see Oasis and ended up in a poker game with a group of weapons manufacturers. "I made a bunch of jokes about sending all their poker money to China," he said, "and they were not pleased...." "I don't use that computer and I think video games are a waste of time. I spent all the money I made from going viral on Oasis tickets." As far as he was concerned, the fact that tech people were tripping over themselves to take part in his stunt just confirmed his generally low impression of them. "They have too much money and nothing going on..." Ever since his big viral moment, he'd been suddenly inundated with messages from startup drones who'd decided that his clout might be useful to them. One had offered to fly him out to the French Riviera. The author's conclusion? "It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The attack on Iran presents Europe with a new test in already-strained ties with the U.S., as appeals for restraint clash with Trump’s assertion that force will succeed.
Regional authorities withdraw permit after citing risk of organised crime infiltration linked to a subcontractor
It is one of Europe’s most celebrated shorelines, framed by mountains and 19th-century villas and famed for its Caribbean-blue water and white sand.
But Mondello beach in Palermo, Sicily, has also been mired in controversy, the subject of complaints stretching back a century from residents and tourists who say its private lidos, cabins and deckchairs have left scant room for public access.
Continue reading...On Saturday morning, the United States and Israel carried out intensive airstrikes against Iran, killing its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had ruled the Islamic Republic since 1989.
According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the attacks killed at least 333 civilians across 18 provinces of Iran in at least 59 incidents. In response, Iran launched a barrage of missile and drone attacks at U.S. and Israeli targets, both military and civilian, across the region.
The Intercept spoke with Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council, to make sense of what led to the attack on Iran, what we know so far, and how the situation might unfold in the days and weeks to come.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What have we seen today in Iran and in the wider region?
Trump has entered us into a major regime change war against Iran, and from what we know so far, it seems like hundreds of Iranians have been killed, with a plurality of those deaths taking place at a girls’ school where at least dozens, maybe over 100 people were killed.
We don’t know exactly why that school was bombed, whether it’s a case of bad intelligence or misfire or something. But those were among the very first casualties of the war, and that really underscores the life-and-death stakes here as the war is unfolding.
“Those girls can’t come back.”
It’s just such a tragic loss, and it wouldn’t have happened if Trump had not made the decision to go to war. So, you know, regardless of what the reason was — whether faulty intelligence or misfire or whatever — those girls can’t come back. And that just really underscores the stakes of war, and why so many people try to prevent war from breaking out.
The Iranian government just confirmed the death of Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei. What does his death mean for Iran and the country’s position in the region?
Khamenei has been at the top of the Islamic Republic for decades here, and a big, huge part of each consequential decision that Iran has made for decades. Even before he was officially supreme leader, he was the president, and he was a key adviser to the first Supreme Leader, [Ruhollah] Khomeini. So he’s one of the original revolutionaries of the Islamic Republic. In a lot of ways, Iran wouldn’t be where it is today without him, and that cuts both ways. A lot of people think he’s held the country back. He’s been responsible for major human rights violations, and then has, you know, more or less picked a fight with the United States and put the country into a major trap here.
There’s only been one Supreme Leader succession before, and that was from Khomeini to Khamenei in 1989. And so it’s been a very long time, but there are processes in place. There’s a whole body whose whole job is basically to sit around and wait to choose the next Supreme Leader. It’s called the Assembly of Experts, and it’s made up of very senior figures in the Iranian establishment. It’s a little unclear whether they would do so immediately or would do so later, but at some point they will convene and consider who the next Supreme Leader will be.
[Editor’s note: After this article was published, Iranian officials announced that a council of high-ranking jurists would rule in Khameni’s stead until a new leader is chosen.]
This happening during wartime throws a lot of questions into the air, but we will see, ultimately, what the system comes up with. Khamenei appears to have prepared for succession within the Islamic Republic and has been directing different decision-makers to appoint assessors and have a plan of operation so that events can continue and the system can move on, even in the circumstances of his death.
Will it make a difference the fact that he was killed in an attack, rather than dying of natural causes, in how the succession might play out or in who is picked?
I think there is a concern that, you know, if you’re choosing a leader during wartime, is that going to end up being somebody who is more dogmatic and rigid ideologically? Or is it going to be someone who’s more pragmatic and might work to try to end the crisis? We won’t know until the person is chosen and they start to make certain decisions.
Trump has made clear that the goal of this operation is regime change, and has called on the people of Iran to seize power and on the security forces to work toward a transition. What are we actually seeing at this moment, and what might we expect to see in the coming days and weeks?
It does seem like they want to do regime change, but a kind of stand-off regime change, where they don’t put boots on the ground, per se, and then they encourage people on the ground to rise up and overthrow the government for them.
One situation that comes to mind is in 1991, where George H.W. Bush stopped at repelling the Iraqis from Kuwait, and then encouraged Iraqis to rise up. And tens of thousands of people were slaughtered by Hussein’s regime in the wake of that call to rise up. I think there’s a clear historical parallel to Trump’s approach to Iran thus far, where a lot of Iranians have already been killed after Trump encouraged them to rise up.
Even after strikes, you have to assume that at least elements of the Iranian government will maintain a monopoly on the use of force — meaning they still get the guns, and the Iranian people don’t. If this all leads to something where democracy somehow flows from bombs, well, we’ll see. I don’t think that’s a particularly likely scenario.
The [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] remains the strongest actor within Iran, both in terms of military capability and organization. Obviously, they have absorbed a lot of the blows in the initial U.S. strikes, but I think they are far and away the most powerful actor inside the system. So essentially, if the theocrats in the Iranian system are taken out, the IRGC are the ones in charge of much of Iran’s response and defense, and are best situated to fill any political and governmental void that may take place.
Based on how today played out, what can we divine about the logic of the Trump administration going into these strikes? What did they want to accomplish?
I think probably a lot of Americans were taken by surprise by this. But for those who read the news, you saw the biggest build-up in the Middle East since the Iraq War. And I think, reading the signs, it was either there would be a deal or a war.
This played out very similarly to June, where the diplomacy seems to have been a ruse. Trump seems to have been convinced by Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran months ago, probably predating the protests and so forth.
Essentially, they’re high off the Maduro operation. They thought: Hey, here’s an adversary that is weak — there’s never going to be a better time to strike. I don’t know if they ever considered the diplomatic option. It seems like it’s quite possible that it was just a ruse to try to lure the Iranians into thinking they might get a deal.
You mentioned the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In that case, the Trump administration quickly replaced Maduro with a puppet government. Does the Trump administration have its eyes on specific successors in Iran?
There have been a lot of reports of strikes targeting critics of the regime, such as Mir Hussain Mousavi, the Green Movement leader. His house, where he’s essentially been under house arrest for 15 years, was targeted in some of the initial strikes. That apparent eagerness to target past political leaders who may have had a falling out with the current government seems to be a signal that they’re trying to eliminate any potential people who could actually transition to democracy but still be a nationalist figure. I don’t know if they have someone picked out or if they don’t care, but I would guess that if that’s actually been part of the strike pattern that they have someone figured out that would be a pushover for U.S. and Israeli interests.
What does it tell other actors on the world stage that the U.S. and Israel carried out the attack amidst ongoing negotiations? And what message does it send to other major powers?
This tells any potential adversaries of the U.S.: Get nuclear weapons. Hedging is not a strategy, and giving up your program like [Muammar] Gaddafi is not a strategy. The only successful strategy is what Kim Jong Un did, which is to get nuclear weapons. He’s the only surviving despot of the so-called axis of evil.
It just seems like the Wild West in the international system right now. It’s just “might makes right.” That is also a message that will be heard by other global powers like Russia or China that might have designs on smaller, weaker states out there. If the U.S. is saying “might makes right,” they say, “OK, if that’s how you want to play it, then we’ll pursue our own interests too.”
There has been considerable unrest in Iran over the past month, with massive protests against the government and a brutal crackdown that has killed thousands. Given that opposition to the government, what do you think the reaction might be inside Iran to the attacks?
Iranians have long been caught between authoritarianism of their own government and militarism of foreign powers, and this is a pretty clear-cut example of that. You have this horrible crackdown from the Iranian government in January, and then a major military attack from the United States, all within 40 days of each other.
I think there has been a growing contingent inside Iran of people who are for military intervention. I don’t know how widespread that is, but I think it’s certainly something that unbiased observers have witnessed over the years. Certainly a significant majority of the population does not like the Islamic Republic and would like it gone. But then you get to the question of who endorses military force and how widespread that is — I don’t think that is a majority of the population. And if it were that, once the bombs started falling, that support would evaporate pretty quickly. I think a lot of the people on the streets who participated in the protests did so for domestic reasons and also would oppose the U.S. bombing the country.
What can we expect to see in the coming days and weeks?
Trump seems to think this will be over in a couple of weeks. I have no idea if that’s realistic. I would probably take the over, at least in terms of the reverberations from this incident, which are going to be enormous. I think those will likely be measured in years rather than weeks.
This is probably in the realm of dangerous speculation, but I feel like the Iranian government is going to have a harder ideological edge to it, and that, if you take out the upper echelons of the leadership, the people that are going to fill those roles are, I think, still steeped in a good bit of the ideology of the Islamic Revolution and opposition to U.S. hegemony, and have lived through so many confrontations with the West and with the U.S. in particular.
So it’s possible that they could replicate the Venezuela situation to some degree. But my assumption is that the people who step into the void are going to be more of Khamenei’s ilk, and may have less restraint as well, particularly on the nuclear program. Who knows where the nuclear program will be when all is said and done, but I think there will be very little holding Iranian leadership back from pursuing a nuclear weapon if any trace of the current government survives this.
Update: March 1, 2026
An editor’s note was added after Iranian officials announced that a council of jurists would rule until a new leader is chosen.
The post The U.S. and Israel Killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. What Comes Next? appeared first on The Intercept.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 1.
 | me and the son are going all over... this kid gets like 25_ 30 miles out of that X , [link] [comments] |
This blog is closed. Follow our live coverage on our new blog here.
A visual guide to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran – and Tehran’s response
War on Iran: how the US-Israeli bid for regime change unfolded
Blasts have been heard in several cities, including the capital, Tehran, and Isfahan in central Iran.
Reuters reports there are long queues at petrol stations in the capital, as many people try to leave. An unnamed Iranian official who spoke to the news agency said several ministries in southern Tehran had been targeted.
Continue reading...US and Israel strike Iran; supreme leader confirmed killed; fierce domestic criticism of military action – key US politics stories from 28 February at a glance
The US launched attacks against Iran on Saturday as part of a joint operation with Israel. Hours after the bombs started falling across Iran, Trump claimed the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed, calling it the “greatest chance” for the Iranian people to “take back” their country. State media in Iran later confirmed his death.
The announcement came after a joint US and Israeli aerial bombardment that targeted Iranian military and governmental sites. Trump said the “heavy and pinpoint bombing” was to continue through the week or as long as necessary. There was no immediate comment from Iran on Khamenei’s status.
Continue reading...  | Keeps blinking maybe an over charge but the app wil not prompt an update either can someone help me? [link] [comments] |
Saturday afternoon Sam Altman announced he'd start answering questions on X.com about OpenAI's work with America's Department of War — and all the developments over the past few days. (After that department's negotions had failed with Anthropic, they announced they'd stop using Anthropic's technology and threatened to designate it a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security". Then they'd reached a deal for OpenAI's technology — though Altman says it includes OpenAI's own similar prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance and requiring "human responsibility" for the use of force in autonomous weapon systems.) Altman said Saturday that enforcing that "Supply-Chain Risk" designation on Anthropic "would be very bad for our industry and our country, and obviously their company. We said [that] to the Department of War before and after. We said that part of the reason we were willing to do this quickly was in the hopes of de-esclation.... We should all care very much about the precedent... To say it very clearly: I think this is a very bad decision from the Department of War and I hope they reverse it. If we take heat for strongly criticizing it, so be it." Altman also said that for a long time, OpenAI was planning to do "non-classified work only," but this week found the Department of War "flexible on what we needed..." Sam Altman: The reason for rushing is an attempt to de-escalate the situation. I think the current path things are on is dangerous for Anthropic, healthy competition, and the U.S. We negotiated to make sure similar terms would be offered to all other AI labs. I know what it's like to feel backed into a corner, and I think it's worth some empathy to the Department of War. They are... a very dedicated group of people with, as I mentioned, an extremely important mission. I cannot imagine doing their work. Our industry tells them "The technology we are building is going to be the high order bit in geopolitical conflict. China is rushing ahead. You are very behind." And then we say "But we won't help you, and we think you are kind of evil." I don't think I'd react great in that situation. I do not believe unelected leaders of private companies should have as much power as our democratically elected government. But I do think we need to help them. Question: Are you worried at all about the potential for things to go really south during a possible dispute over what's legal or not later on and be deemed a supply chain risk...? Sam Altman: Yes, I am. If we have to take on that fight we will, but it clearly exposes us to some risk. I am still very hopeful this is going to get resolved, and part of why we wanted to act fast was to help increase the chances of that... Question: Why the rush to sign the deal ? Obviously the optics don't look great. Sam Altman: It was definitely rushed, and the optics don't look good. We really wanted to de-escalate things, and we thought the deal on offer was good. If we are right and this does lead to a de-escalation between the Department of War and the industry, we will look like geniuses, and a company that took on a lot of pain to do things to help the industry. If not, we will continue to be characterized as as rushed and uncareful. I don't where it's going to land, but I have already seen promising signs. I think a good relationship between the government and the companies developing this technology is critical over the next couple of years... Question: What was the core difference why you think the Department of War accepted OpenAI but not Anthropic? Sam Altman: [...] We believe in a layered approach to safety--building a safety stack, deploying FDEs [embedded Forward Deployed Engineers] and having our safety and alignment researcher involved, deploying via cloud, working directly with the Department of War. Anthropic seemed more focused on specific prohibitions in the contract, rather than citing applicable laws, which we felt comfortable with. We feel that it it's very important to build safe system, and although documents are also important, I'd clearly rather rely on technical safeguards if I only had to pick one... I think Anthropic may have wanted more operational control than we did... Question: Were the terms that you accepted the same ones Anthropic rejected? Sam Altman: No, we had some different ones. But our terms would now be available to them (and others) if they wanted. Question: Will you turn off the tool if they violate the rules? Sam Altman: Yes, we will turn it off in that very unlikely event, but we believe the U.S. government is an institution that does its best to follow law and policy. What we won't do is turn it off because we disagree with a particular (legal military) decision. We trust their authority. Questions were also answered by OpenAI's head of National Security Partnerships (who at one point posted that they'd managed the White House response to the Snowden disclosures and helped write the post-Snowden policies constraining surveillance during the Obama years.) And they stressed that with OpenAI's deal with Department of War, "We control how we train the models and what types of requests the models refuse." Question: Are employees allowed to opt out of working on Department of War-related projects? Answer: We won't ask employees to support Department of War-related projects if they don't want to. Question: How much is the deal worth? Answer: It's a few million $, completely inconsequential compared to our $20B+ in revenue, and definitely not worth the cost of a PR blowup. We're doing it because it's the right thing to do for the country, at great cost to ourselves, not because of revenue impact... Question: Can you explicitly state which specific technical safeguard OpenAI has that allowed you to sign what Anthropic called a 'threat to democratic values'? Answer: We think the deal we made has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's. Other AI labs (including Anthropic) have reduced or removed their safety guardrails and relied primarily on usage policies as their primary safeguards in national security deployments. Usage policies, on their own, are not a guarantee of anything. Any responsible deployment of AI in classified environments should involve layered safeguards including a prudent safety stack, limits on deployment architecture, and the direct involvement of AI experts in consequential AI use cases. These are the terms we negotiated in our contract. They also detailed OpenAI's position on LinkedIn: Deployment architecture matters more than contract language. Our contract limits our deployment to cloud API. Autonomous systems require inference at the edge. By limiting our deployment to cloud API, we can ensure that our models cannot be integrated directly into weapons systems, sensors, or other operational hardware... Instead of hoping contract language will be enough, our contract allows us to embed forward deployed engineers, commits to giving us visibility into how models are being used, and we have the ability to iterate on safety safeguards over time. If our team sees that our models aren't refusing queries they should, or there's more operational risk than we expected, our contract allows us to make modifications at our discretion. This gives us far more influence over outcomes (and insight into possible abuse) than a static contract provision ever could. U.S. law already constrains the worst outcomes. We accepted the "all lawful uses" language proposed by the Department, but required them to define the laws that constrained them on surveillance and autonomy directly in the contract. And because laws can change, having this codified in the contract protects against changes in law or policy that we can't anticipate.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
60 Minutes has been covering the geopolitical situation in Iran for five decades. Here are some of the reports we've broadcast.
Waves of Tomahawk and air-launched missiles eliminate Iranian air defenses and military sites as Trump welcomes the toppling of Khamenei’s reign.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 1, No. 728.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 1, No. 1,716.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 1 #994
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 1, No. 524.
President Trump posted on social media that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed after a massive U.S. and Israeli military operation Saturday.
Congress is expected to vote on two resolutions that seek to block further military action, the latest test of a long-shot strategy to reassert lawmakers’ war powers.
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations said the strike killed more than 100 children at the girls’ elementary school in southern Iran.
Australian foreign affairs minister says Israel and US should explain ‘the legal basis for the attacks’ on Iran and won’t say if Pine Gap used during strikes
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Australia has urged Iran to stop retaliatory attacks on countries across the Middle East after the US and Israel bombed Iran, killing its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, when asked about the legality of the strikes on Iran, said it was up to Australia’s allies to explain “the legal basis”.
Continue reading...Olivia Dean tops the winners list with four, while Sam Fender bags two – see all the category winners here
Olivia Dean
Continue reading...My bewilderment at pricing of used onewheels remains, but I held out for one to hit my $500 target and finally scored a Pint X complete with CF hood, "fangs" and some other perks. Anyway, so far I love it! I have to say I was really shocked at how easy it was straight away. I was reluctant to try it right there at a park with the seller because I was prepared to crash and repeat lots of times before getting the hang of it- nope. Just got on and rode- 5 minutes after purchasing was walking my dog with it. 10 minutes after I met the fam at a brewery a mile up the road. Now I'm riding it regularly around town.
I'm going to credit regular skateboarding (a vintage Per Welinder) around the hood and house (probably since the 80's!) to that success- the only part that may throw you is picking up front wheels to turn or tic-tac. Otherwise its just like riding a board with loose trucks. Awesome!
The only thing I've added so far is an airtag, which got me thinking/wondering: Is there a practical way to connect to the pack for accessories? A usb would be nice. Also: This was promptly rideable, with no security features- convenient, but somewhat surprising. My drone/phone and other devices all are linked and can be bricked remotely. You'd think they would do this with a device this costly. Is there something I need to check or register? So far everything's been suspiciously smooth!
What some of your favorite accessories? I'm a little surprised the head/tail lights aren't more prominent- so looking into those first for night riding- and probably will try to improve waterproofing a bit just in case. Anyway, overall just happy to be here and happy to learn its as fun as I'd hoped!
President Trump launched a wide-ranging attack on Iran after weeks-long lobbying by an unusual pair of U.S. allies in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Crowds gather in DC, New York and beyond to denounce Trump’s Iran strikes as an illegal act of war
A visual guide to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran – and Tehran’s response
War on Iran: how the US-Israeli bid for regime change unfolded
As news circulated that Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed in US and Israeli airstrikes on Tehran, anti-war protesters gathered across the United States, including outside the White House and in New York’s Times Square to voice opposition to US military involvement in the region.
“It wasn’t sanctioned by Congress, so what Trump is doing is on his own terms, it’s making him a fascist and it’s making the country into a fascist state,” said Sue Johnson, a protester.
Continue reading...The question of who owns and authorizes the month holds particular relevance amid attacks on Black history in the US
There is a myth that persists about Black History Month that can be heard in the common gripe: “They gave us the shortest month of the year” (they, the unnamed powers that be). Jarvis Givens, the author of I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, hates it. “Every time I hear that backhanded comment it doesn’t seem right,” said Givens, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “If you know anything about the basic origins of Black History Month then you know that we weren’t ‘given’ anything.”
The question of who owns and authorizes Black History Month holds particular relevance now, in its centennial year, and at a time when efforts to celebrate, preserve, and acknowledge Black people’s past in this country are under attack. Official recognition of Black American resistance to centuries of racial injustice is being challenged by local, state, and national efforts to restrict, ban and possibly criminalize such information in public schools, universities and other institutions. So the sentiment that Black history can be quite literally given or taken away by state officials is valid.
Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man
Continue reading...Joint operation prompts Tehran to retaliate with missile attacks on bases across Middle East
Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has been killed as the US and Israel launch a war on Iran to trigger regime change, Donald Trump has claimed. The US president announced the death of the ayatollah, who has ruled Iran as supreme leader since 1989, in a post on Truth Social. “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump wrote.
The death of Iran’s supreme leader was announced after waves of air attacks across the country. Iran’s Red Crescent reported more than 200 deaths and 747 injuries in daylong attacks across 24 provinces.
At least 100 people were reportedly killed in a strike on a primary school in Minab, in the south-east.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, had earlier said there were “many signs” Khamenei was “no longer alive”, and Israeli officials briefed media that his body had been recovered.
Tehran fired retaliatory strikes against Israeli and US bases across the Middle East. Iran’s attacks targeted more than six countries, pulling in places that had been previously untouched by the escalating crisis.
In Israel, one person died and 22 others are injured, media reports say, after an Iranian missile strike hit a building in Tel Aviv. An official said the building was aflame and had partially collapsed.
In Dubai, a number of people were injured after an incident occurred at Dubai international airport, the Dubai media office has said. The Burj Al Arab and Fairmont hotels caught fire amid Iranian attacks.
The United Arab Emirates said in a statement that it had intercepted the vast majority of the 137 missiles and 209 drones fired at its territory by Iran in the hours after the US and Israel launched a regime change war on the Islamic Republic.
In Bahrain, an Iranian drone flew into a high-rise building in what looked like a targeted attack, exploding and engulfing the skyscraper in flames. Earlier, the country’s national security agency was also struck by an Iranian missile.
Social media footage also appeared to show a missile hitting the huge US naval base in Bahrain. In Kuwait, a drone crashed into the country’s main airport, wounding several employees and damaging the facility.
In Lebanon, gas stations across the country had lines 10 cars deep within an hour of the strikes. People in Beirut airport watched as commercial flights were cancelled, and grocery stores were filled with the more cautious stocking up on essential goods – the memory of the 2024 war with Israel fresh in their minds.
At least one person was killed and seven wounded during an “incident” at Abu Dhabi’s Zayed international airport, officials said after Iranian strikes targeting the United Arab Emirates and Gulf states.
Continue reading...The protest near the White House was among the demonstrations that erupted across the country after Israel and the United States launched strikes on Iran.
Friday was "a horrible day" for investors in Duolingo, reports Fast Company. But Friday's one-day 14% drop is just part of a longer story. Since last May, Duolingo's stock has dropped 81%. Yes, the company faced a social media backlash that month after its CEO promised they'd become an "AI-first" company (favoring AI over human contractors). And yes, Duolingo did double its language offerings using generative AI. But more importantly, that summer OpenAI showed how easy it was to just roll your own language-learning tool from a short prompt in a GPT-5 demo, while Google built an AI-powered language-learning tool into its Translate app. And yet, Friday Duolingo's shares dropped another 14%, after announcing good fourth quarter results but an unpopular direction for its future. Fast Company reports: On the surface, many of the company's most critical metrics saw decent gains for the quarter, including: — Daily Active Users: 52.7 million (up 30% year-over-year) — Paid Subscribers: 12.2 million (up 28% year-over-year) — Revenue: $282.9 million (up 35% year-over-year) — Total bookings: $336.8 million (up 24% year-over-year) The company also reported its full-year 2025 financials, revealing that for the first time in its history, it crossed the $1 billion revenue mark for a fiscal year. But the Motley Fool explains that Duolingo's higher ad loads and repeated pushes for subscription plans "generated revenues in the short term, but made the Duolingo platform less engaging. Ergo, user growth decelerated while revenues rose." Thursday Duolingo announced a big change to address that, including moving more features into lower-priced tiers. Barron's reports: D.A. Davidson analyst Wyatt Swanson, who rates Duolingo stock at Neutral, posited that the push to monetize "led to disgruntled users and a meaningful negative impact to 'word-of-mouth' marketing." Duolingo has guided for bookings growth between 10% and 12% in 2026, compared with the 20% rate the company would have expected to see "if we operated like we have in past years...." If stock reaction is any indication, investors are concerned about Duolingo's new focus.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bystander describes ‘loud crashing sound from the rocks’ as light aircraft goes into sea at Lee-on-the-Solent
A pilot survived after a light aircraft crashed on to a beach in Hampshire on Saturday.
The pilot had exited the aircraft before firefighters arrived and was subsequently assessed by the ambulance service, Hampshire and Isle of Wight fire and rescue service said.
Continue reading...War launched by US and Israel on Iran has quickly escalated prompting anxiety and concern in whole region
Iran struck the world-famous Fairmont hotel in Dubai, setting the hotel alight, as the war launched by the US and Israel on Iran quickly spread to the rest of the Middle East on Saturday.
Residents watched in shock as an Iranian missile hit the five-star hotel in Dubai’s luxurious Palm Jumeirah area. Social media videos showed fires breaking out near the entrance of the hotel, which led to four people being injured.
Continue reading...The 26-year-old dominates in Manchester, landing the night’s biggest prizes as Rosé, Wolf Alice and Mark Ronson also take top honours
Olivia Dean was the big winner at the 2026 Brit awards, taking home awards for artist of the year, pop act, song of the year for her Sam Fender duet Rein Me In, and album of the year for The Art of Loving.
In less than a year, Dean has leaped to the forefront of British pop thanks to The Art of Loving, her second album. With songs that get to the heart of the joys and frustrations of casual modern dating, she is enormously relatable, while her sophisticated and cosmopolitan songcraft, deftly finessing styles such as bossa nova, trip-hop, neo-soul and jazz together, has given her an unusually broad and cross-generational appeal.
Continue reading...The building appears to be among many devastated in Trump’s ‘major combat operations’ as long expected attacks arrive
Iran’s parents had just dropped their children off for class on Saturday morning when they found themselves racing back to school gates, as bombs began to fall across the country in a joint US-Israel attack.
At one elementary school, according to Iran’s state-controlled media, they arrived to find devastation. At least 100 children had been killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, the Mizan news agency reported, with dozens more unaccounted for.
Continue reading...Hey so I have a pintx and have been looking into getting the wtf rails. Do I need to mesee around with the firmware at all or can I just swap all the parts and continue to use the onewheel app like normal.
I want to vesc but im not sure where to even start with that.
US president posts on Truth Social that Iran’s supreme leader, ‘one of the most evil people in History, is dead’
Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has been killed in the opening salvo of a regime change war launched on Saturday by the US and Israel, Donald Trump has claimed.
The US president announced the death of the ayatollah, who has ruled Iran as supreme leader since 1989, in a post on Truth Social.
“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump wrote.
“He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do.”
Trump said that the goal of the military campaign, which began on Saturday morning with a barrage of missiles and airstrikes, was regime change.
“This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country,” he wrote.
 | Little shaky just holding my phone with wrist guards on. Fun smooth-ish trails. [link] [comments] |
Actor, originally charged on two counts, also accused of shouting homophobic slurs during attacks on 17 February
Shia LaBeouf surrendered to New Orleans police after they obtained a new warrant Friday to arrest him again in connection with a case that had already left him facing two counts of battery.
The new warrant brought the number of people whom the Transformers film franchise star is accused of battering to three. He turned himself over to police in advance of a bail hearing on Saturday afternoon, after which he posted a $5,000 bond to continue out of authorities’ custody while awaiting the outcome of the case.
Continue reading...Are you not at all interested in upgrading to macOS Tahoe, and getting annoyed at the relentless notification spam from Apple trying to trick you into upgrading?
The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that “organization” is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS updates for up to 90 days at a time (the max the policy allows), which seems like exactly what I needed.
Not being anywhere near an expert on device profiles, I went looking to see what I could find, and stumbled on the Stop Tahoe Update project. The eventual goals of this project are quite impressive, but what they’ve done so far is exactly what I needed: A configuration profile that blocks Tahoe update activities for 90 days.
↫ Rob Griffiths
All you need to do is clone a random GitHub repository, set all its scripts to executable, generate two random UUIDs, insert those UUIDs into one of the scripts in the GitHub project folder you just cloned, run said script, open System Settings and go to Privacy & Security > Profiles, install the profile the script created, click install in two different dialogs, and now you have blocked Apple’s update notification spam! Well, for 90 days that is.
I honestly don’t understand how normal people are supposed to use macOS. The amount of weird terminal commands you need just to change basic settings is bewildering. macOS definitely isn’t ready for the desktop if they expect users to use the terminal for so many basic tasks. I’m glad I’m using Linux, where I don’t have to deal with the terminal at all.
He played a behind-the-scenes role in Iran’s Islamic revolution, served as president in the 1980s and dominated the country for more than three decades.
"The drought of upcoming Star Wars movies is coming to an end soon," writes Cinemablend. In May the The Mandalorian and Grogu opens, and one year later there's the release of the Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars: Starfighter. But "there are some insiders who already believe that Starfighter will be a bigger hit than The Mandalorian and Grogu..." According to unnamed sources who spoke with Variety, there's a "sense" that Star Wars: Starfighter, which is directed by Deadpool & Wolverine's Shawn Levy, will be a more satisfying viewing experience. These same sources are allegedly impressed by the early footage they've seen of Ryan Gosling's performance and also suggested that Levy has "recaptured the franchise's spirit of fun." Furthermore, the article states that there's concern that because The Mandalorian and Grogu is spinning out of a streaming-exclusive series, it might not have as much appeal to people who aren't already fans of The Mandalorian... Star Wars: Starfighter, on the other hand, will be accessible to everyone equally. It's set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, which is an unexplored period for the Star Wars franchise onscreen. It's also expected that most, if not all of its featured characters will be brand-new, so no knowledge of past adventures is required. Slashdot reader gaiageek reminds us that 2027 will also see a special 50-year anniversary event in movie in theatres: a "newly restored" version of the original 1977 Star Wars.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Coordinated daylight assault on Tehran sparked Iranian retaliation and plunged the region into wider conflict
The bombs and missiles started falling on Tehran in full daylight, at about 9.15am, after the working day had started and the streets and offices were full.
Bombing campaigns in the modern era usually start at night, to heighten the target’s sense of disorientation and minimise the effectiveness of air defence.
Continue reading...Mexico's attorney general's office said it performed genetic tests to match the cartel leader's remains to the family.
If this isn’t catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don’t know what is.
Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception. This paper discusses the design team, its goals and process then explains how usability engineering principles such as iterative design and problem tracking were applied to the project, using specific design problems and their solutions as examples.
↫ Kent Sullivan
This case study was written in 1996 by Kent Sullivan, who joined the Windows 95 user interface team in 1992. I consider the second half of the ’90s as the heyday of user interface design, with Windows 9x, Apple’s Platinum in Mac OS 8 and 9, and BeOS’ Tracker/Deskbar as the absolute pinnacles of user interface design. Coincidentally, this also seems to mark the end of a more scientific, study-based approach to designing graphical user interfaces.
Reading through this particular case study for Windows 95 feels almost quaint. Where are the dozens of managers pushing for notification spam, upsells, and dark patterns to enable expensive data-hoarding services? Why are none of the people mentioned in the study talking about sneaky ways to secretly and silently convert your local account to an online account? Where are all the “AI” buttons? Why is there n chapter on how to trick people into enabling telemetry data?
The user interfaces of the late ’90s were the last ones designed by people who actually cared, by people who approached the whole process with the end user in mind, rooted in scientific data collected by simply looking at people use their ideas. They were optimised for the user as best they could, instead of being optimised for the company’s bottom line.
It’s been downhill ever since.
Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham said the operation would be "violent, extensive and I believe, at the end of the day, successful."
Satellite images and videos reveal dozens of targets of strikes on Iran, including the Tehran compound of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has hit at least one U.S. base in the region.
"We're probably looking at weeks, not days, of joint efforts by the United States, Israel and our Arab partners, who have also been attacked this morning," Sen. Tom Cotton told CBS News on Saturday.
 | I've watched Corridor since I was a kid so I was always intrigued by Onewheels. Only recently though I decided I really wanted one. After weeks of research and deal hunting my Pint finally came in today! I absolutely love it! [link] [comments] |
Bootc and OSTree represent a new way of thinking about Linux system deployment and management. Building on container and versioning concepts, they offer robust and modern solutions to meet the current needs of administrators and developers.
↫ Quentin Joly
Slowly, very slowly, I’ve been starting to warm up to the relatively new crop of immutable Linux distributions. As a heavy Fedora user, opting for Fedora’s atomic distributions, which use bootc and OSTree, seems like the logical path to go down if I ever made the switch, and this article provides some approachable insights and examples into how, exactly, it all works, and what benefits it might give you. It definitely goes beyond what I as a mere desktop user might encounter, but if you’re managing a bunch of servers or VMs in a more professional setting, you might be interested, too.
I’m still not convinced I need to switch to an immutable distribution, but I’d be lying if I said some of the benefits didn’t appeal to me.
A Conversation With Karim Sadjadpour
It started Friday when all U.S. federal agencies were ordered to "immediately cease" using Anthropic's AI technology after contract negotiations stalled when Anthropic requested prohibitions against mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. But later Friday there were even more repercussions... In a post to his 1.1 million followers on X.com, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth criticized Anthropic for what he called "a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon." Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic's models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic... Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of "effective altruism," [Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei] have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission — a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic's defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable... In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic... America's warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final. Meanwhile, Anthrophic said on Friday that "no amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position." (And "We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.") Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action — one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. We are deeply saddened by these developments. As the first frontier AI company to deploy models in the US government's classified networks, Anthropic has supported American warfighters since June 2024 and has every intention of continuing to do so. We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government... Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Anthropic also defended the two exceptions they'd requested that had stalled contract negotiations. "[W]e do not believe that today's frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America's warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights." Also Friday, OpenAI announced that "we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized that the agreement retains and confirms OpenAI's own prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance — and requires "human responsibility" for the use of force including for autonomous weapon systems. "The Department of War agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the Department of War also wanted. " We are asking the Department of War to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Regime could try to retain control of streets as US and Israel have expressed no intention of mounting ground invasion
Venezula’s Nicholás Maduro was captured. But Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have chosen a different strategy for Iran: to target and aim to kill the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, , and as many other senior regime figures as possible.
Though Iranian military sites and its air defence systems were also targeted by coordinated US and Israeli bombing, beginning in the morning, the most significant attack was on Khamenei’s compound in Tehran.
Continue reading...Iran strikes are attempt to hijack the global narrative and drown out Epstein and tariffs with the thunder of cruise missiles
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq without deciding whether it should. The George W Bush administration failed to ask whether the costs, risks and likely consequences of regime change justified the gamble. The result was tragedy – for Iraq, for the Middle East and for America.
Donald Trump’s attack on Iran now follows the same pattern – but with an even narrower logic of performative power. In the run-up to Iraq, Washington devoted enormous energy to planning the invasion. Almost no attention was given to the more important question: was war necessary, and could it realistically produce a stable political outcome?
Christopher S Chivvis is a senior fellow and director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Continue reading...Makerfield MP had been under pressure concerning thinktank’s commissioning of PR firm to investigate reporters
The Labour minister Josh Simons has resigned from the government after the Guardian revealed that he falsely linked reporters to a “pro-Kremlin” network in emails to GCHQ despite having claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” about a PR firm’s investigation into their journalism.
Simons, who had been a Cabinet Office minister, previously ran the thinktank Labour Together. He quit on Saturday, saying his position in office had become “a distraction from this government’s important work.”
Continue reading...Tehran carries out extensive retaliatory strikes on Israel and US air bases as region is plunged into fresh conflict
Israel and the US have launched a war on Iran, unleashing waves of air attacks across the country in an attempt to bring about regime change and plunging the region into a conflict that could last weeks or months.
The sudden offensive triggered Iranian retaliatory strikes throughout the day across a swathe of the Middle East, with explosions reported in Israel, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Continue reading...There's already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica's ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles produced by lower-energy neutrinos interacting with matter: When they do, the neutrinos produce charged particles that travel through the ice at nearly the speed of light, creating a blue glow called Cherenkov radiation... "Within the first couple years, we should be making much better measurements," [said Erin O'Sullivan, an associate professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a spokesperson for the project.] "There's hope to expand the detector, by an order of magnitude in volume, so the important thing there is we're not just seeing a few neutrino point sources, but we're starting to be a true telescope. ... That's really the dream." The scientists spent seven years planning the upgrade, according to the article. "To drill holes a mile and a half deep takes about 30 hours, and 18 more hours to return to the surface," the article points out. "Then, the race begins because almost immediately, the hole starts to shrink as the water refreezes." ("If it takes too much time, the principal investigator says, "the instruments don't fit in anymore!")
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Body of Nathan Smith, known professionally as DJ Young Slade, was found in pond north of Atlanta in February
The son of the rapper Lil Jon drowned after ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms, officials in the US state of Georgia said.
The body of Nathan Smith, known professionally as DJ Young Slade, was found in a pond north of Atlanta in early February.
Continue reading...Imam Shuaib Din was not hit by multiple shots fired by Abdul Raouf Afridi, who ambushed him outside his home
A man has been arrested for recently shooting a gun at prominent Muslim leader Imam Shuaib Din in Utah, the police department in the city of Sandy said Saturday.
Din’s suspected attacker was identified as Abdul Raouf Afridi. Police said the man was arrested on 12 counts of aggravated assault, including felony discharge of a firearm, possession of a controlled substance, dangerous discharge of a weapon from a vehicle and possession of a dangerous weapon as a prohibited person.
Continue reading...Shia LaBeouf, who was charged with battery after police say he punched several people outside a New Orleans bar earlier this month, was arrested again on Saturday.
Interesting Engineering reports: US tech giant Google announced on Tuesday that it will build a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota. The new facility will be powered by 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy from wind and solar, coupled with a 300-megawatt battery, claimed to be the 'world's largest', with a 30-gigawatt-hour (GWh) capacity and 100-hour duration... The planned battery would dwarf a 19 GW lithium-ion project in the UAE... Form Energy's batteries work very differently from most large batteries today. Instead of using lithium like the batteries in electric cars, they store electricity by making iron rust and then reversing the rusting process to release the energy when needed... Form's iron-air batteries are heavier and less efficient than their counterparts; they can only return about 50% to 70% of the energy used to charge them, while lithium-ion batteries return more than 90%. However, Form's batteries have one distinct advantage. They are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, costing about $20 per kilowatt-hour of storage, which is almost three times as cheap... It will store 150 MWh of electricity and can supply to the grid for up to 100 hours, delivering about 1.5 MW at peak output. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As they say in Europe, look at that S-car-go.
 | Wanted to charge this from my homemade power bank / power brick so I don't have to lug the proprietary charger everywhere on long journeys and can top up on the go or from my car socket. Works really well and can charge over a long time only getting slightly warm. Happy to link the products I bought for anyone wanting to copy and it took me all of 5 minutes to build. [link] [comments] |
CNN reports that images from Iran's capital "have shown cars jammed along Tehran's street, with heavy traffic on major roads after today's wave of attacks by the US and Israel." And though Iran has a population of 93 million, the attacks suddenly plunged Iran into "a near-total internet blackout with national connectivity at 4% of ordinary levels," according to internet monitoring experts at NetBlocks. CNN reports: Since Iran's brutal crackdown earlier this year, the regime has made progress to allow only a subset of people with security clearance to access the international web, experts said. After previous internet shutdowns, some platforms never returned. The Iranian government blocked Instagram after the internet shutdown and protests in 2022, and the popular messaging app Telegram following protests in 2018. The International Atomic Energy Agency announced an hour ago that they're "closely monitoring developments" — keeping in contact with countries in the region and so far seeing "no evidence of any radiological impact." They're also urging "restraint to avoid any nuclear safety risks to people in the region." UPDATE (1 PM PST): Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait "are shifting to remote learning starting Sunday until further notice following Iranâ(TM)s retaliatory strikes on Saturday," reports CNN.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US president upended half a century of US foreign policy in an eight-minute video with another attempt at Middle Eastern regime change
It was another date that would live in infamy. But whereas Franklin Roosevelt declared war in sombre tones to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump did it his way.
The US president wore a white “USA” cap, dark jacket and white shirt open at the collar. He stood at a blue lectern bearing the US presidential seal and a black microphone, with the Stars and Stripes behind him, presumably at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. He released a video on his own social media network, Truth Social, at 2.30am on Saturday – a time when most Americans are asleep but Trump is often found rage-tweeting into the night.
Continue reading...In a televised statement, Sir Keir Starmer has said British planes 'are in the sky today' in the Middle East 'as part of coordinated regional defensive operations to protect our people, our interests and our allies'. This came after the US and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran, prompting Tehran to fire retaliatory strikes against Israel and US bases across the Middle East
Continue reading...CEO Sam Altman claims military will not use AI product for autonomous killing systems or mass surveillance
OpenAI said it had struck a deal with the Pentagon to supply AI to classified US military networks, hours after Donald Trump ordered the government to stop using the services of one of the company’s main competitors.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, announced the move on Friday night. It came after an agreement between Anthropic, a rival AI company that runs the Claude system, and the Trump administration broke down after Anthropic sought assurances its technology would not be used for mass surveillance – nor for autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input.
Continue reading...U.S. allies and adversaries responded to the joint attacks by the U.S. and Israel on Iran with concern over the risks of a new war in the Middle East.
A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the Emmy-winning program, hosted by Jane Pauley.
After Zohran Mamdani’s upset, a new wave of challengers targets incumbents, driven by fury at Donald Trump
They are impatient, unafraid and hungry for change. Inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s shock victory in last year’s New York mayoral race, a wave of insurgents is mounting primary challenges against Democratic incumbents ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The emboldened lineup of primary challengers – often, but not always, from the party’s progressive wing – has been fuelled by anger over the party’s tepid response to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, complicity in the war in Gaza and a crushing affordability crisis.
Continue reading...USALESS.COM is recalling its Rhino Choco VIP 10X product due to the undeclared presence of Tadalafil, which is the active ingredient in Cialis.
Members of Congress swiftly denounced the president’s military action against the Islamic Republic alongside Israel
Donald Trump’s failure to build a case with the US public for striking Iran and then going ahead apparently after a last-minute alert to Congress’s key national security experts – the so-called “gang of eight” – has fuelled fierce domestic criticism of the military action against the Islamic Republic on Saturday.
Belying the gravity of Saturday’s attacks, the president spent just three minutes of Tuesday’s record-length one hour and 48 minute State of the Union address trying to explain why the need to act against a regime that had been a strategic foe for decades had suddenly become so urgent and whose nuclear facilities he claimed to have “obliterated” in previous strikes last June.
Continue reading...Americans weighed in on how long a conflict with Iran might last and what Congress should do.
Days before embarking America on another foreign war, Donald Trump spent more than 90 minutes speaking endlessly about America being back during his State of the Union, leveling racist accusations of Somali American fraud, and expounding on the beauty of America’s raid to arrest Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. It was a master class in testing the attention span of Americans hoping to hear anything at all about the danger that has loomed in the background now for months: the threat of armed conflict with Iran. Those who made it to the finale — and who have conscious memories of the George W. Bush years — would have noticed a similar tenor to the State of the Union in 2003, the one which paved the way for the justification of the invasion of Iraq less than two months later.
In that speech, Bush outlined the alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the myriad ways in which Iraq had supposedly deceived international investigators, and the staggering human rights abuses committed by Saddam Hussein against his own countrymen. Secretary of State Colin Powell, the president boasted, would soon outline to the United Nations the threat the United States, and indeed the world, was up against in Baghdad.
However, while many of the claims made by Bush were spurious at best and outright deceptions at worst, the claims Trump made in his speech were even less believable — and much more scattershot. Trump claimed that Iran would “soon” have intercontinental ballistic missiles that would “reach the United States of America,” that more than 32,000 Iranians had been killed in recent protests (NGOs estimated the number to be much lower, and an Iranian human rights group put the death toll at 6,488), and that the Iranian military had somehow killed “millions,” somewhere in history, with roadside bombs it pioneered. Perhaps most plainly false of all, Trump contended he just wanted the Iranians to say “those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon,’” despite Iranian officials constantly making such insistences.
Before the U.S. and Israeli military launched strikes Saturday, the specter of an Iranian war has become something of a national miasma, the build-up having gone on now so long that its cause is imperceptible, yet perhaps everything at once. The build-up to the Iraq War was similarly argued under many causes, with Saddam’s authoritarian governance very much part of the discussion, but the aftermath of 9/11 and the supposed threat Iraq posed to the homeland was chief among them — the fire that led Americans to line up front and center behind the cause. While Iran has been on the wish list for American neoconservatives and foreign policy wonks for decades, this escalation has happened over a much shorter time frame, much more suddenly, and much more obvious in how the government is desperately in search of a compelling cause.
Stretching back into December, the cards were being laid out. Benjamin Netanyahu had made plans to meet with Trump at the White House to discuss what he saw as the threat posed by Iran’s conventional ballistic missile program, seeking a green light to initiate another devastating war, with hoped-for American support. Israel’s reasoning was not based on Iranian human rights abuses or about threats to the American homeland, but threats to Israel and “U.S. interests,” according to NBC News. Netanyahu had wanted a post-war situation similar to Lebanon’s, where Israel has been able to continue striking that country daily with Hezbollah unable to respond. Iran still retained deterrent military capacity to prevent this from happening. A greater threat, however nonexistent, needed to be communicated.
The rollout of news stories to back up Netanyahu’s claim was well-telegraphed, with reports suddenly emerging in the Israeli press that Iran was planning to use an imminent military exercise as a diversion to strike Israel. At the same time that Netanyahu was meeting with Trump, reports again suddenly emerged that Iran was seeking to develop and purchase “biological and chemical warheads” for its missiles, eerily echoing the false claims Powell made before the U.N. about Iraq.
As attention shifted to the burgeoning protests in Iran, suddenly the United States and Israel had a much stronger casus belli: supporting anti-government demonstrators to overthrow the government. Only a few days after the protests began, Trump promised the “United States of America will come to their rescue” if the Iranian government killed protesters, “which is their custom.” As the death toll mounted, far exceeding the toll of previous protest movements, the threats of intervention continued but never actually materialized. Western officials brought in Starlink satellites to keep protesters connected (SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk has joked that he supports Secretary of State Marco Rubio becoming the shah of Iran), and unnamed foreign intelligence agencies allegedly brought in firearms used to kill over 200 members of government security forces. Yet Trump continued to promise that he was planning something, saying “help is on the way,” and demanding protesters “take over institutions” even as protests dissipated.
The specter of an Iranian war has become something of a national miasma, the build-up having gone on now so long that its cause is imperceptible, yet everything at once.
Trump wanted war, as did Netanyahu, but there was no conception of when it should happen, for what cause it should exactly be waged, and what would even be done. There was want, but there was no will, and there was no way. Everything had to be cobbled together in the background, sometimes to seemingly even get Trump on board with the plan he himself put into motion.
Reports of considering strikes on “symbolic military targets” were followed by Trump commending Iran for supposedly halting hundreds of planned executions. Declarations of an “armada” being sent to Iran’s shores were accompanied by demands to stop killing protesters, even though the protests had ceased days earlier. More reports poured in of plans for special ops raids and strikes to assassinate Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (and perhaps also his son), with reports of imminent attacks being just as suddenly thrown out as more and more military assets moved in to allow for greater and greater operations, a build-up not seen since Bush’s full-scale invasion of Iraq 23 years ago.
With attacks underway, the plan now seems to revolve around a complete decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership and the overthrow of the entire system via the air — followed by a populist uprising Trump hopes will topple the regime. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” Trump said in a video address. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
The campaign of airstrikes comes only hours after the United States insisted it wanted to have a civil diplomatic conversation.
As with the diplomatic talks that preceded Iran’s war with Israel in June, these negotiations are set up to fail, and the scope of demands is now far wider and even more contradictory. Reports emanating from the discussions seem to oscillate between a willingness to resurrect some version of the Obama-era nuclear deal and a demand for what amounts to complete capitulation — with Rubio demanding restrictions on ballistic missile range and ending of support to Hamas and Hezbollah; Israel demanding the full dismantling of said ballistic missile arsenal; and Trump plainly stating “no nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that, all the different things you’d want.”
There is also no consensus about what the threat from Iran is even supposed to be in the American imagination. Trump’s accusation of near-imminent ICBM production is a recent invention, clearly meant to steer things in a familiar, concrete direction. But the Trump administration cannot seem to agree on whether or not Iran is even developing its nuclear program at all — with Rubio telling reporters there is no enrichment happening, even as special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that Iran was merely “a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”
Bush administration officials infamously claimed they did not want “the smoking gun” to be “a mushroom cloud,” but officials had always kept that estimate in months — the way the threat of Iran making a nuclear bomb has often been phrased as “months away” for the better part of two decades. Now, the threat is somehow both days away and barely off the ground.
While opposition figures like Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah, as well as Mojahedin-e-Khalq leader Maryam Rajavi, have jostled for the attention of Trump’s circle, there seems to be little attention paid to their efforts, with the president dismissing Pahlavi as “very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country.” Those who remember Ahmed Chalabi and the motley crew of Iraqi opposition cronies may rest easy, as there seems to be little care at all about what would even come next. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the brewing war’s strongest supporters, scorned the idea of even considering the day after in an interview with an Emirati newspaper, saying: “You gotta quit saying we. It’s not we, it’s them. It’s not my job to construct a new Iran. It’s my job to give them the opportunity to construct a new Iran.”
The feeling at home, despite oversaturation in the media, could not be more different than it was before Iraq. Just before the bombs fell, 64 percent of the country supported the invasion; more than two decades later, only 21 percent of Americans currently favor an attack on Iran, with only 40 percent of Republicans supporting it. The Trump administration is apparently so concerned about the optics of the scenario they have walked themselves into that, according to reporting from Politico, officials were hoping Israel would attack Iran first, leading Iran to attack American troops, thereby rallying the country behind the war effort after the fact.
There is no consensus about what the threat from Iran is even supposed to be in the American imagination.
One would think that such a drive toward an unpopular war-in-the-making would galvanize Democrats, but so far, anti-war voices have been limited. Lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna have found themselves drowned out by demands from Democratic leaders that the Trump administration simply provide a clear explanation, apparently seeking to avoid the embarrassment of pundits and politicians after the disaster of Iraq, who blamed their initial support on buying the Bush administration’s flimsy case.
It is an unshakeable belief that consistency of logic is the primary issue with a war to cement Israel’s military hegemony, one that may cost thousands of lives. While some prominent progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders attempted to hamper Trump’s funding to execute the war without congressional approval in June, Sanders has not made any public comments on the march to war in over a month, and other progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who have also supported anti-war initiatives, were seen applauding as Trump railed against Iran this week at the State of the Union.
The world is now watching a devastating war rage with no real reasoning, already no end in sight, and its chief belligerent making promises it cannot keep to a population it will surely massacre in the process. Unpopularity has not stopped the Trump administration before, whether it be in Venezuela or in Minneapolis, but the United States finds itself in a uniquely baffling position, where its opposition party, much like how it goes in Israel, instead begs for a better execution of the government’s evil plan.
The post Fool Me Twice: The Case for War With Iran Is Even Thinner Than It Was for Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.
Lucy Powell calls for party to make more use of Greater Manchester mayor after Gorton and Denton defeat
Andy Burnham would have won the Gorton and Denton byelection, Labour’s deputy leader said as she called for the party to make more use of the Greater Manchester mayor.
Overturning a 13,000 Labour majority from the general election, Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and Green councillor, became the party’s fifth MP on Friday in an area that had returned Labour MPs for nearly a century.
Continue reading...Tuesday Pew Research announced their newest findings: that 54% of America's teens use AI help with schoolwork: One-in-five teens living in households making less than $30,000 a year say they do all or most of their schoolwork with AI chatbots' help. A similar share of those in households making $30,000 to just under $75,000 annually say this. Fewer teens living in higher-earning households (7%) say the same." "The survey did not ask students whether they had used chatbots to write essays or generate other assignments..." notes the New York Times. "But nearly 60% of teenagers told Pew that students at their school used chatbots to cheat 'very often' or 'somewhat often.'" Agreeing with that are the Pew Researchers themselves. "Our survey shows that many teens think cheating with AI has become a regular feature of student life." One worried teenager still told the researchers that AI "makes people lazy and takes away jobs." But another teenager told the researchers that "Everyone's going to have to know how to use AI or they'll be left behind." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Leader launches ‘roadmap’ of first 100 days in power to show party is ready to govern if it wins Senedd elections
The leader of Plaid Cymru has described the prospect of leading the next government in Wales as “a heck of a task” but that he senses voters are increasingly driven by their Welsh identity and may be ready for Britain to be “redesigned”.
Speaking to the Guardian as he published a glossy 60-page “roadmap” for his party’s first 100 days in government, if it takes power in May, Rhun ap Iorwerth said he was ready to lead the devolved administration in Cardiff but would work with other parties if he did not win a majority.
Continue reading...Nomma Zarubina, convicted of lying to the FBI, is the latest Russian woman accused of using her sexual wiles for spying
Nomma Zarubina, 35, now sits in a New York jail awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty last week to charges that she lied to the FBI about her contacts with the FSB, Russia’s biggest domestic intelligence service.
But, in a playbook that comes straight from the cold war, the striking-looking Zarubina – known as “Alyssa” to her Russian handlers – was tasked with meeting prominent Americans in order to lure them into the orbit of Moscow intelligence.
Continue reading...PM says British planes ‘in the sky today’ to protect allies in Middle East from retaliatory strikes by Tehran
Keir Starmer has said RAF fighter jets are flying “in the sky today” to defend allies in the Middle East against Iranian retaliation after the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign aimed at regime change in Tehran.
The UK did not participate in the first waves of strikes against Iran on Saturday morning and has no immediate intention of doing so, but fighter jets were running defensive operations from Qatar and Cyprus to shoot down any incoming drones and missiles.
Continue reading...North Carolina’s Michael Phillips revealed that he had a 0.38in member in bid to reduce stigma of the condition
A North Carolina man has challenged anyone on earth to disprove his claim of having the world’s smallest penis as he advocates against body shaming and aims to raise awareness about the medical condition known as micropenis.
Michael Phillips, 38, threw down the gauntlet in an interview posted Friday on TMZ’s YouTube channel, in which he purported that his penis was 0.38in (0.97cm) when fully erect – and, holding up the fingernail on his right pinky to illustrate that length, added: “When it’s flaccid, it’s smaller than that.”
Continue reading...A start-up called Reflect Orbital "proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night," reports the Washington Post, "with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight...." Slashdot noted their idea in 2022 — but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first satellite in April, according to the article. "But its grand vision is largely 'aspirational,' as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me..." Reflect Orbital's Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 "stars" appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial stars are in development in Reflect Orbital's factory. Nowack showed them to me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he'll have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400 miles. Nowack plans to start selling the service "in mostly developing nations or places that don't have streetlights yet." Eventually, he thinks, he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine." The article adds that Elon Musk's SpaceX "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers — 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit." (America's satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission grants a "categorical exclusion" from environmental review to satellites on the grounds that their operations "normally do not have significant effects on the human environment.") The public comment periods for the two proposals close on March 6 and March 9.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The thought of never having to clean the inside of our toilets again makes us want to cry happy tears.
In a rare public address, former president said US is experiencing ‘dark days’ and urged Americans to vote
Joe Biden has warned that his presidential successor, Donald Trump, will attempt to “steal” the midterm elections, in a rare public address.
Speaking in South Carolina, where he was being honored for his lifetime achievement in politics, Biden also asserted that the US is experiencing “dark days”, in a speech made hours before the Trump administration launched attacks on Iran.
Continue reading...The education secretary wants a fairer system and the Tories have leapt in with their own plan – but why now?
For anyone who attended university in England in the last 15 or so years, the idea of student loans feeling like some sort of debt trap is hardly news. But three weeks ago, when the journalist Oli Dugmore discussed this on the BBC’s Question Time, it felt like a moment.
It was less the size of the initial debt, he explained, than the way above-inflation interest rates meant the interest charged alone was now almost as much as the original sum. “So was it mis-sold to me?” he asked, rhetorically. “Yes, I’d say so.”
Continue reading...As a result of New York’s most severe winter in years, the city may see a drop from it’s estimated 3 million rats
Since arriving from Europe in the 1600s, New York City’s rats have survived hurricanes, floods, terrorist attacks, riots, fires, a pandemic (they actually thrived during that), the Dutch and Crocodile Dundee II.
But as a result of New York’s most severe winter in years, when the city saw snow, then a historic deep freeze, then even more snow, the rat population might now be about to decline. For a bit.
Continue reading...Enhance your privacy while surfing the web, stream foreign Netflix libraries, unblock regional sports and avoid mobile traffic shaping with the best iPhone VPNs.
With Splendid Spoon, you get premade smoothies, soups, bowls and oats that are vegan, gluten-free and easy to prepare in minutes. This is what two meal kit testers thought after trying the service.
If you have a question about women's health, Oura's new AI model can answer it. This is what you need to know about privacy and access.
Whether you call it the Leica Leitzphone or the Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica phone, this dream camera phone is my latest obsession.
Giving you one less screen to check, you can have conversations with the Luna Ring about your health.
I've taken over 2,000 photos on the Leica Leitzphone powered by Xiaomi, and I'm blown away by the quality I've been able to achieve.
Hello all! Wondering what everyone’s opinions are, or what someone has done in a similar situation.
I have an XR, in amazing condition, battery health is near 100%, works flawlessly. I’m wondering if I should upgrade it may be Vsec, maybe just WTF rails, and put some work into it. make it a better more capable rig. I’m 6’ 185 pounds, and I have definitely overloaded it a few times. Float wheels conversion looks nice.
Or.
Should I sell it, and just buy a newer more modern Onewheel. That has more torque stronger motor, etc..
Your thoughts and opinion on this would be greatly appreciated, help push me in One Direction!
The first lady is a Trump and therefore automatically qualified to do anything her heart desires
“We ended DEI in America,” Donald Trump boasted during his State of the Union (SOTU) address on Tuesday.
Unlike many things the president said in his excruciatingly long SOTU speech, this was actually half true. The Trump administration’s “war on woke” has pushed a lot of large companies and institutes to retreat from the diversity, equity and inclusion policies they used to pretend to be proud of.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Caspar San Giorgio to appear in court after defacing London statue with slogans including ‘Zionist war criminal’
A 38-year-old man has been charged with criminal damage after Winston Churchill’s statue outside the Houses of Parliament was sprayed with graffiti labelling the former prime minister a “Zionist war criminal”.
The Metropolitan police arrested Caspar San Giorgio, of no fixed address, shortly after 4am on Friday. He was charged in the early hours of Saturday morning and is due to appear at Highbury Corner magistrates court in London.
Continue reading...President Trump says his objective in attacking Iran "is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats" from the regime in Tehran. Read his full statement and watch the video here.
Commentary: I don't want Galaxy AI to handle tasks that I actually like doing.
What is an augmented reality play in a real theater, with virtual actors and a real audience? In this case, haunting and something more than what I can do at home -- for now.
Emma Operacz was diagnosed with a rare cancer at 21. An unusual treatment and bone marrow donation from her sister saved her life.
Experts say global measles vaccination rates are falling as Trump officials signal a deprioritization of the virus
The US government has amplified anti-vaccine rhetoric and signaled that it does not consider measles to be a priority, which could have global ramifications as countries around the world have lost or are on the brink of losing measles elimination status.
The World Health Organization announced in late January that six European countries: the United Kingdom, Spain, Austria, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan had all officially lost their measles elimination status, which means the virus has been circulating continuously in those countries for more than 12 months. In order to contain measles, at least 95% of children should be fully vaccinated against it, according to health recommendations, but vaccination rates have been falling across Europe.
Continue reading...Cygnet Texkimp was approved to export machines to Rydena, but ministers examining deal after Guardian highlighted founders’ links to Kremlin military supply chain
Ministers are reviewing a decision to allow a British company to export hi-tech equipment to Armenia after the Guardian uncovered links to the Russian military supply chain.
Cygnet Texkimp, based in Cheshire, was weeks away from exporting two machines that produce carbon fibre “prepreg”, a lightweight material that can be used in a range of civil and military applications.
Continue reading...Volunteers offer moral and legal support, and document ICE actions with the aim of holding people accountable
As ICE operations ramped up across the US over the past year, vans emblazoned with imagery of the Statue of Liberty have been deployed in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte and most recently, Minneapolis. Liberty Vans, or camioneta de la libertad in Spanish, are on a mission to defend vulnerable communities in the crosshairs of federal enforcement.
Volunteers in the small fleet of three vans – which are named for the second world war Liberty ships that delivered supplies to Allied forces – offer moral and legal support, stand in visible solidarity with families and document ICE operations so people can see the human impact of the military-style raids that have become a daily part of American life.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today's X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor's algorithm. Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site. To bypass the bottleneck, companies are turning to Merkle Trees, a data structure that uses cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of material used in more traditional verification processes in public key infrastructure. Merkle Tree Certificates, "replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs," members of Google's Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. "In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certificates, and the 'certificate' sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree." [...] Google is [also] adding cryptographic material from quantum-resistant algorithms such as ML-DSA (PDF). This addition would allow forgeries only if an attacker were to break both classical and post-quantum encryption. The new regime is part of what Google is calling the quantum-resistant root store, which will complement the Chrome Root Store the company formed in 2022. The [Merkle Tree Certificates] MTCs use Merkle Trees to provide quantum-resistant assurances that a certificate has been published without having to add most of the lengthy keys and hashes. Using other techniques to reduce the data sizes, the MTCs will be roughly the same 64-byte length they are now [...]. The new system has already been implemented in Chrome.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US president violates UN charter just days into his Board of Peace era, and chooses to take the biggest gamble of his administration
The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun – an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public.
Trump’s recorded eight-minute address after the first bombs had fallen, made clear that this would be no limited strike aimed at cajoling Tehran into concessions at the negotiating table. He warned that if Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) did not surrender they would be killed, and the country’s armed forces, its missile and navy would be smashed.
Continue reading...The president spoke to The Washington Post early Saturday after announcing that the U.S. had begun striking Iran to bring about regime change.
These are the best baby monitors to keep an eye on your babies and toddlers.
The in-form Hammers look to keep alive their hopes of a great escape as they head to Anfield.
If your wine rack is anywhere near your oven, it's time you find it a new home.
As North Vietnamese troops closed in, he was the last Marine to board the last helicopter out of Saigon. “He was a model leader,” said one who served with him.
Businesses are vying for a refund, with nearly $175bn on the line, but customers are unlikely to benefit from reversal
At 8am, two hours before the US supreme court officially slapped down Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs on 20 February, Joseph Spraragen’s phone was already ringing off the hook.
The seasoned New York-based attorney and his 40-strong specialised trade team at Grunfeld, Desiderio, Lebowitz, Silverman & Klestadt (GDLSK) had spent months filing hundreds of lawsuits for heavy-hitter clients, including luxury brands Prada and Dolce & Gabbana, in protest of the US president’s decision to impose sweeping import taxes last April.
Continue reading...With David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance poised to buy Warner Bros Discovery, the president is tightening his grip on the US media
Get Margaret Sullivan’s latest columns delivered straight to your inbox by signing up here
For many years, Donald Trump has trashed CNN and has taught his loyal followers to do the same.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, angry chants of “CNN sucks!” reverberated at his campaign rallies, and he still jumps at every opportunity to disparage star CNN journalists such as Kaitlan Collins.
Continue reading...Look to the skies on March 3 for a total eclipse of the full blood moon.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat down with CBS News for an exclusive interview Friday, hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the company a supply chain risk to national security.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: From a time when leaders were positive.
Executive Power and Elections: Can Trump Control the Midterms?
If Taiwan Goes Down: The problem with dependence.
Video Break: What doesn’t kill you, just makes you stronger.
State of the Union: Ugly and unnecessary.
My Tribute to A Legend: A Lakers coach like no other.
What I’m Watching: Blue Moon
Jukebox Playlist: Erroll Garner plays Misty
“In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” — President Barack Obama
I think back on my life, on the impossible odds that I faced personally, on the impossible odds that we faced as a country, even in the last 70 years or so. Impossible that Black people would be able to sit at a white counter at Woolworths and be served by a White waitress. Impossible that Black people could go swimming at their local public pool any day of the week—not just on the one day before the water’s about to be drained out and replaced, so that White families might enjoy it again. Those small steps forward were a very long time in coming, and they took a lot of pain and tears to achieve. Which reminds us that progress has never depended on perfect conditions or easy moments, but on people who refuse to shrug and say, “That’s just the way things are.”
Contrary to what some might think, preach or yell from the rafters, loving a country doesn’t mean pretending it has no flaws and never did. It means paying attention when something feels off. It means asking questions when the path forward looks uncertain or shady, and pushing back as hard as you can when it’s out-and-out reprehensible.
Every generation reaches a moment when the challenges in front of it feel just too damn big. The issues may look different on the surface, but the pattern is the same: systems under strain, institutions tested, people trying to make sense of what’s real and what’s noise. It’s easy to feel powerless. But history shows us that the turning points have always come from those who choose to stay engaged rather than step back. People who understand that silence is also a decision.
The quote is not bombastic. It doesn’t call for a parade. It’s simply a reminder that change doesn’t have to start with grand gestures. Sometimes, it starts with awareness. With the willingness to look directly at the things that aren’t working, and work to find a solution instead of hoping they’ll sort themselves out. It starts with people who care enough to ask, “What kind of country do we want to be?” and then do whatever they need to do to move us closer to that answer.
Private providers accused of prescribing powerful stimulants without examining young patients properly
Children with ADHD are being put at risk by poorly regulated private clinics that prescribe powerful stimulants without key physical examinations, doctors have warned.
A surge in remote-only assessments has led to what one clinician described as “widespread and unsafe practice”, where children are being diagnosed and medicated via video link. The clinical warnings have now forced health authorities in Greater Manchester to overhaul prescribing rules, mandating face-to-face checks to protect the safety of children.
Continue reading...These are the best AV receivers from Onkyo, Sony, Yamaha and Denon, based on CNET's testing.
Security cameras come packed with capabilities. But not all of them are helpful for your home, especially if you'd like to save money.
After the Trump administration cut it off, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CBS News in an exclusive interview Friday night he wants to work with the military — but only if it addresses the firm's concerns.
A Democratic primary in a GOP held Texas congressional district is seeing major money ahead of polls closing in the March 3 contest.
Democrats hope to capture the House, but the Senate could be a heavier lift in November’s midterm elections
On the first Tuesday of November, Americans will decide whether to keep Congress under Donald Trump’s control, or hand power to the Democrats. The first national elections since the 2024 polls that brought Trump back to the White House, the 3 November midterms will be a crucial test of whether the president’s handling of top issues such as the economy and immigration have met Americans’ expectations. On Tuesday, voters will cast ballots in initial state primaries, with more to follow in the months ahead.
Up for grabs in November are all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 seats in the Senate, and if Republicans lose their majorities in either chamber, it will alter the course of Trump’s presidency. Should Democrats take the House, they will gain the power to issue subpoenas as they investigate his administration, and can block the president’s legislative agenda. Should they wrest control of the Senate from the GOP, Democrats could stop Trump from appointing nominees to cabinet positions and the federal judiciary, including the supreme court.
Continue reading...
The images from Mexico looked like a modern global battlefield. Security forces engaged in torrents of gunfire on the beach. Commercial flights into Puerto Vallarta promptly canceled as military helicopters took up airspace to run strafing fire on narco positions below. Highways filled with stalled traffic as buses burned along major routes, the smoke sending visible plumes across the city.
The torrent of violence followed a Mexican military operation Sunday that killed Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the hemisphere. Retaliation moved quickly. Cartel organizations launched an onslaught of armed convoys and road blocks that torched buildings and gas stations in at least 20 states around the country, grinding an entire nation to a halt. In the violence, at least 70 people have died, 25 of which were Mexican military forces.
In an after-action press conference, Mexican authorities were quick to frame the operation as a strategic success — a symbol of cross-border intelligence cooperation and another blow against organized crime.
But when reporters asked about the weapons recovered during the raid targeting El Mencho, Mexican Defense Minister Ricardo Trevilla Trejo offered a more unvarnished assessment. “Eighty percent are of North American origin,” he said plainly, roughly the same proportion of the nearly 23,000 firearms Trejo said the Mexican administration has confiscated since October 1.
The U.S. has helped create cartels more heavily armed than at any point in their history.
Narco organizations have evolved from illicit trafficking networks into heavily armed forces capable of blunting military grade law enforcement across entire regions. That escalation is not an anomaly. The United States — with its vast civilian gun market, weak barriers to arms trafficking, and law enforcement gaze fixed largely northbound — has helped create cartels more heavily armed than at any point in their history, a transformation that has destabilized Mexico, cost billions of dollars, and claimed thousands of lives on both sides of the border.
And while America watches from next door — calmly stirring its tea as cartel violence becomes political currency for tougher borders and even fantasies of military intervention — it has largely avoided confronting its own role in arming its supposed adversaries to the hilt.
There are only two highly regulated legal gun stores in the whole of Mexico, so it is hardly controversial or new within law enforcement circles that America has long been an armory of illicit firearms for Mexican organized crime. In 2006, after the Mexican government began deploying soldiers to combat organized crime, cartel fighters began sourcing American firepower to near parity with the Mexican military. This coincided with a liberating time for American gun owners after the U.S. assault weapons ban lapsed in 2004. As a 2013 Cambridge research report found, the re-release of American assault rifles coincided with murder rates spiking in Mexico. This supply chain, through which America effectively dumps 200,000 firearms into Mexico each year, is known among gun policy experts as the “Iron Pipeline.”
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, a law enforcement agency long constrained by political pressure and an aggressive gun lobby, could do little more than document the flow. Between 2014 and 2021, the agency reported that nearly 70 percent of firearms submitted for tracing by Mexican authorities originated back in the U.S., a figure federal agents and trafficking experts have consistently warned understates the true scale of weapons moving south.
While American gun companies reported record profits, their weapons were simultaneously transforming Mexican criminal mobs into paramilitary cells able to rout state military forces.
The result of that armament has been staggering: Mexico has recorded more than 463,000 homicides since 2006, alongside a parallel crisis of more than 130,000 people missing or disappeared. Much of the bloodshed has come at the muzzle of weapons trafficked north-to-south across the U.S. border.
In a previous attempt to arrest El Mencho back in 2015, cartel forces shot down a Mexican military helicopter with a .50-caliber rifle. The crash killed nine soldiers, with the gun later being traced back to a gun store in Washington state. In 2019, Cartel del Noreste conducted a two-day campaign of terror, pouring gunfire into the small town of Villa Union. In the aftermath, 23 people were dead, and authorities recovered a cache of weapons sourced from Houston. That same year, three American women and their six children were killed while living in Sonora when their Mormon community was besieged by sicarios. Two of the rifles used to kill them were bought from New Mexico and Arizona. Just last year, The Intercept recovered made-in-America rifle ammunition, including spent rounds from a factory owned by the U.S. military, at the the scene of a bloody cartel gun battle at a village in Michoacán.
In the aftermath of El Mencho’s killing, a video appears to show CJNG fighters in Jalisco mounting an ambush, with one gripping a Barrett .50-caliber rifle — a weapon manufactured in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Another clip posted on X shows what appear to be narcos unleashing a barrage of gunfire at Mexican authorities with an FN SCAR, a rifle assembled in Columbia, South Carolina.
There was no federal arms trafficking law on the books until 2022, which left U.S. authorities with few tools to charge gun runners for over a century. Meanwhile, a politically beleaguered ATF spent decades failing to properly inspect America’s nearly 80,000 gun dealers, allowing repeat violators to stay in business. While Customs and Border Protection has the clear authority to stem the outbound flow of weapons, their institutional fixation on migration and drugs has meant they intercept only a small fraction of the firearms flowing into cartel hands.
When Mexican authorities filed a landmark lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers in hopes that Washington might finally intervene, the U.S. Supreme Court — backed by a conservative majority installed during Trump’s first term — effectively shut the case down, ruling that federal law shields gunmakers from liability.
The defining asymmetry of the modern drug war is not migration or narcotics, but American guns.
As a direct result of America’s blind eye to arms control, these hyper-armed Mexican syndicates have diversified their criminal portfolio. By capitalizing on America’s orchestrated thirst for opioids, Mexico became the leading source of fentanyl, shifting the drug war’s deadliest toll north of the border. In 2023, more than 105,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, far exceeding Mexico’s roughly 20,000 to 30,000 cartel-linked homicides annually — a grim inversion of the drug war’s human cost.
In a bid to bring stability to their country — and in doing its due diligence over America’s overdoses — Mexican authorities have dismantled more than 2,000 clandestine drug laboratories in recent years, many linked to fentanyl production raids that routinely uncover compounds armed to the teeth with U.S.-sourced firepower. Each lab, a Mexican diplomat once told me, is a “mini-Waco” in terms of firepower.
Even if America could snap its fingers and stop the drug trade tomorrow, the cartels have branched out. Extortion — taxation imposed at gunpoint — has become a multibillion-dollar pillar sustaining their criminal fiefdoms.
Human lives have borne the brunt of this violence, but the financial toll has been staggering as well. Since 2007, the United States has spent more than $3 billion in bilateral security assistance to Mexico under the Mérida Initiative and roughly $400 billion more on domestic immigration and border enforcement — a backward attempt to shield itself from the consequences of its own weaponry and the displacement driven by that violence.
For years, Washington has framed cartel brutality as a threat arriving from elsewhere, something to fortify against, sanction, or even confront militarily. Yet the defining asymmetry of the modern drug war is not migration or narcotics, but American guns: The United States has poured hundreds of billions into containing the fallout while leaving largely untouched the marketplace helping to produce it.
Americans enjoy the constitutional right to keep and bear arms — a right that’s deeply embedded in the country’s political identity and culture. But keeping arms carries a much larger obligation: being responsible for where those weapons ultimately end up. Until the United States learns to build a wall against the outward flow of its own firepower, the drug war will remain a shared tragedy — sustained not by inevitability, but by what America allows to leave its hands.
The post Made-in-America Guns Are Fueling Death and Destruction in Mexico appeared first on The Intercept.
Israel and the US launched strikes against Iran as Donald Trump declared the start of 'major combat operations' and called on Iranians to rise up against their government. The US president’s comments came soon after explosions were heard across central Tehran. One apparent strike hit near the offices of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran was preparing a 'crushing retaliation', an Iranian official told Reuters
Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.
According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting.
Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”
The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.
“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”
Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.
In the past, Trump has expressed an openness to a federal takeover as a way to stem projected Republican losses in November. This month, he said in an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans need “to take over” elections and “to nationalize the voting.”
Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’”
The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.
Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event.
“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson posted videos of these interactions online. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”
Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”
In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.
One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.”
Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.
The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.
A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines.
Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.
Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.”
“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added.
At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.
Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states.
Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”
Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.
Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency.
“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”
McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”
Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.
Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.
“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.
Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.
The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”
The post Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms appeared first on ProPublica.
Few clues as to how 10 heavily armed men intercepted on stolen speedboat came together from across Florida or what they hoped to achieve
Foot traffic was slow outside the Bay of Pigs Museum on Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana neighbourhood. A few tourists in T-shirts and shorts bypassed the gallery dedicated to one of the most fateful days in Cuba’s history and headed instead to nearby Máximo Gómez Park to take photographs of Cuban exiles playing dominoes.
This is the street at the heart of the Cuban expat community of more than 1 million people where tens of thousands partied through the night in November 2016 to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro, and where they gathered in sorrow almost exactly 30 years ago to mourn four Cuban-Americans shot down by the communist country’s air force as they conducted a mission for the humanitarian exile group Brothers to the Rescue.
Continue reading...Kate Fox says Joe Ceccanti was the ‘most hopeful person’ before he started spending 12 hours a day with a chatbot
On 7 August, Kate Fox received a phone call that upended her life. A medical examiner said that her husband, Joe Ceccanti – who had been missing for several hours – had jumped from a railway overpass and died. He was 48.
Fox couldn’t believe it. Ceccanti had no history of depression, she said, nor was he suicidal – he was the “most hopeful person” she had ever known. In fact, according to the witness accounts shared with Fox later, just before Ceccanti jumped, he smiled and yelled: “I’m great!” to the rail yard attendants below when they asked him if he was OK.
Continue reading...Last summer, I traveled to McLoud, Oklahoma, home to the state’s largest women’s prison. McLoud — a town of fewer than 5,000 residents — lies 30 miles east of Oklahoma City on a wide expanse of prairie. At the edge of town, off a rutted road, stands Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, a sprawl of concrete and razor wire.
I went there to meet April Wilkens, who has spent more than a quarter century at Mabel Bassett for the 1998 shooting death of her ex-fiancé, Terry Carlton. Wilkens had repeatedly sought help from law enforcement after Carlton beat, raped and stalked her — pleas that, according to trial testimony, were met with indifference. She was convicted of first-degree murder and handed a life sentence.
More than two decades later, her case drew renewed attention. Wilkens became a central figure in the push for new legislation that would allow survivors of domestic violence to seek reduced sentences when their crimes stemmed from their abuse.
The state’s high incarceration rate — and the mounting human and financial costs of keeping so many people behind bars — had created an opening, one that a Tulsa lawyer named Colleen McCarty recognized. Troubled by Oklahoma’s dual distinction as a state that consistently has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment and of domestic abuse, she and another Tulsa attorney, Leslie Briggs, visited Wilkens in prison in 2022. In that meeting, the lawyers explained that they wanted to pass legislation that could reduce the long sentences that survivors of domestic abuse faced, even when their crimes were a direct result of their abuse. After two years of advocacy, the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act was passed into law in 2024.
The law did not automatically reduce survivors’ sentences. Instead, it created a mechanism for them to petition for relief — requiring them to demonstrate that domestic abuse was a “substantial contributing factor” in their offense and leaving the ultimate decision to a judge.
When I first heard about the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, I was floored. I live in Texas and cover criminal justice, so I spend a lot of time tracking where change is — and isn’t — politically possible. I knew how unusual it was for ambitious sentencing reform to emerge from a deep red state where lawmakers have long favored harsh punishment. Oklahoma, which has put to death 130 people since capital punishment resumed in 1976, has the most executions per capita of any state in the nation.
I wanted to understand how that law came to be, and, just as importantly, if it was working as intended. As I chronicle in my story, “The Victims Who Fought Back,” the path to the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act began with that meeting in 2022 between the two lawyers and Wilkens. McCarty and Briggs wanted a sense of how many women were imprisoned for crimes tied to their own abuse. After their meeting, Wilkens came up with a solution; she decided to draft a questionnaire asking other prisoners about the abuse they had endured. She wanted to know: How many other women at Mabel Bassett had cases like hers?
Wilkens distributed the questionnaire one weekend that fall. She chatted up anyone she saw in the rec yard, the library, the chow hall. Conducting an unauthorized survey could’ve earned her a disciplinary write-up, but Wilkens, who had a nearly spotless record, decided it was a risk worth taking.
For years, she had listened to women describe the violence they had endured — stories that had barely surfaced in courtrooms, if at all. She could see the intersection between their abuse and the crimes they went on to commit. Some had been prosecuted for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners; others had committed crimes alongside their abusers under threat of further harm — offenses that, like Wilkens’, could not be understood apart from the abuse that preceded them.
Among Mabel Bassett’s lifers, Wilkens stood out as a leader; she was well-liked and respected, and as she moved through the prison with her questionnaire, women stopped to hear what she had to say. There was no incentive to fill it out, because no law yet existed to help survivors. There was only Wilkens’ force of personality and a simple request: “If you’ve experienced domestic violence, and that’s connected to why you’re here, will you fill this out?”
One hundred and fifty-six women filled out the survey. McCarty, who would go on to become Wilkens’ attorney, told me she read them in a single sitting, so unmoored by the women’s stories that she had to lie down when she finished. When I went to talk to her last year in Tulsa, she told me that I could read them, too.
I’m sharing brief excerpts of them here because they do more than document individual suffering. They also expose something broader: the systemic blind spots that allowed so many of these women’s histories to go unheard in police reports, courtrooms and sentencing decisions.
Fear and terror are the predominant themes. “The abuse graduated from emotional to verbal to physical to sexual,” wrote one woman.
“He said he was going to kill me and hide the body,” wrote another. “His wife before me had her nose broken twice.”
“I kept begging for a divorce and he’d threaten to kill my children.”
“From the beating I received, my left ear I don’t hear well.”
“My children’s father he beat me barely made it out alive.”
A fraction of the respondents had, like Wilkens, gone on to kill their abusers. “I didn’t realize I shot him until the gun went off,” wrote one woman.
Another wrote, “One night just snapped, shot & killed my husband.”
Many described a system that had failed them. “My lawyer was arrested during my trial,” wrote one woman whose children were put in foster care after her arrest. “I never even got a chance.”
“Am ready to tell my story,” wrote a woman who was convicted when Ronald Reagan was president. “Have been for a long time.”
The questionnaires became part of the foundation for a legislative push, helping lawmakers grasp how often abuse and criminal charges intersected, and how rarely that history was fully considered in court. When the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act passed in 2024, there was hope that it would offer women like Wilkens and others at Mabel Bassett a meaningful second look at their sentences.
What I learned through my reporting, though, is just how resistant that system can be to change. Wilkens, along with many other women with similar stories, still waits behind bars.
With her, inside Mabel Bassett, is another prisoner whose response to the questionnaire has stayed with me: “I was in a very abusive, sick relationship,” she wrote. “I am FREE now.”
The post A Secret Survey From Inside a Women’s Prison Tells Stories of Domestic Abuse Untold in Court appeared first on ProPublica.
On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and "other transient celestial events," reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning -- that number is projected to climb into the millions as it continues scanning the ever-changing sky. From the report: The astronomical observatory equipped with world's largest camera hit a key milestone on February 24, when a complex data-processing system pushed hundreds of thousands of alerts out to scientists eager to pore over its most exciting sightings. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began operations last year, capturing stunning, panoramic time-lapse views of the cosmos with ease. Rubin's first images, based on just 10 hours of observations, let space fans zoom seemingly forever into an overwhelmingly starry sky. But watchful astronomers were always awaiting the next step: the system that would automatically alert them to the most promising activity in the overhead sky amid the 1,000 or so enormous images that Rubin's telescope captures every night. "We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears," said Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management, to Scientific American last summer. "It's way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves." So even as they were designing and building the Rubin Observatory itself, scientists were also designing an alert system to help astronomers navigate the flood of data. As soon as the telescope began observations, the team started constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail. Now the data processing systems that support the observatory are starting to automatically compare every new Rubin image to the corresponding section of that background template. The systems identify all of the differences, each of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between a potential supernova and a possible newfound asteroid, for example. Alerting the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers -- as well as members of the public -- can sign up for notifications based on the type of sighting they're interested in and the brightness of the observation in question. And now that the alerts system has gone live, users receive a tiny, fuzzy image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits their criteria -- all just a couple of minutes after Rubin captures the original image.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Project Play finds UK taxpayers are funding ‘record child fatalities’ and ‘repeated violence’ against children in northern France
The deaths of 22 children while trying to cross the Channel in the last two years, along with the mistreatment of thousands of others, were due to “catastrophic failures” of the UK and French governments, according to a new report.
Project Play, an NGO that has worked with 2,192 children hoping to cross the Channel from northern France to the UK to claim asylum in the last two years, has documented the impact of the hostile conditions in northern France due to regular teargassing, evictions and dinghy-slashing by the French police.
Continue reading...Donald Trump said the US had begun 'major combat operations' in Iran, warning that there may be US casualties. The strikes, which the US president said were aimed at destroying Iranian missiles and annihilating its navy, follow repeated US-Israeli warnings that they would strike Iran again if it pressed ahead with its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Trump told members of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran's armed forces, to lay down their weapons, promising they would be granted immunity. The other option, according to Trump, was 'certain death'
President Trump launched military strikes on Iran after several rounds of talks over the country's nuclear program and uranium stockpiles. Here's what to know about the nuclear program.
Legendary nightclub Le Palace, where Serge Gainsbourg and Prince also performed, to rise again
In the late 1970s, Le Palace in Paris’s busy theatre district was one of continental Europe’s most famous nightclubs.
On the opening night on 1 March 1978, Grace Jones stunned VIP guests with her rendition of Edith Piaf’s classic La Vie en Rose. Later, Serge Gainsbourg and Prince came to perform, Bob Marley was photographed there and Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Karl Lagerfeld were part of a glittering cast of international celebrities, politicians, designers and models who came to drink and dance.
Continue reading...Ahead of the decision to launch military strikes, the U.S. issued a designation that enables punishing Iran for detaining Americans for political leverage.
As the director general prepares to stand down, potential candidates have fallen away amid a series of crises
There is an impressive shortlist circulating in Britain’s media circles, comprising some of the most talented executives in the business. Unfortunately for the BBC, it contains the names of figures no longer in the running to become its next director general.
Those closely observing the corporation’s search for a successor to Tim Davie have been quick to note how the events of the past week help explain the alarming attrition rate.
Continue reading...The Israel Defense Ministry said in a statement that it launched the strike because it was expecting "a missile and drone attack" from Iran "in the immediate future."
PM criticises ‘sectarian politics’ in byelection but party may fear Greens’ nascent leftwing political machine
The Green party’s success at winning Muslim votes in Gorton and Denton has sent tremors through Westminster, prompting recriminations and accusations from opposition parties, who sense another major realignment in British politics.
Experts say Hannah Spencer’s unexpectedly wide margin of victory was delivered in part by a significant shift of Muslim voters from Labour to the Greens.
Continue reading...Case brought by 29 workers and backed by UVW union seen as test case that could lead to changes at other restaurants
Harrods is facing legal action over its addition of a £1-a-head cover charge to diners’ bills that does not go to workers, in a test case that could lead to changes at a string of upmarket restaurants.
Legislation, which came into force in October 2024, requires business owners to hand over all tips and service charges to staff. Some restaurants, including those at Harrods, add a mandatory cover charge as well as an optional service charge and only pass on the latter to their workers.
Continue reading...Likelihood of winning to decrease after NS&I cut the proportion of the total invested amount paid out in prizes
There was some bad news this week for Britain’s 22 million-strong army of premium bond holders: the odds of winning a prize are to get worse.
National Savings and Investments (NS&I) says it is cutting the proportion of the total invested amount paid out in prizes from 3.6% to 3.3% a year with effect from April’s draw.
Continue reading...Southern California's air quality board rejected proposed rules to phase out gas-powered appliances after receiving more than 20,000 opposition comments generated through CiviClick, "the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform." Phys.org reports: A Southern California-based public affairs consultant, Matt Klink, has taken credit for using CiviClick to wage the opposition campaign, including in a sponsored article on the website Campaigns and Elections. The campaign "left the staff of the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) reeling," the article says. It is not clear how AI was deployed in the campaign, and officials at CiviClick did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But their website boasts several tools, including "state of the art technology and artificial intelligence message assistance" that can be used to create custom advocacy letters, as opposed to repetitive form letters or petitions often used in similar campaigns. When staffers at the air district reached out to a small sample of people to verify their comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency and were not aware of any such messages, records show. But the email onslaught almost certainly influenced the board's June decision, according to agency insiders, who noted that the number of public comments typically submitted on agenda items can be counted on one hand. The proposed rules were nearly two years in the making and would have placed a fee on natural gas-powered water heaters and furnaces, favoring electric ones, in an effort to reduce air pollution in the district, which includes Orange County and large swaths of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Gas appliances emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx -- key pollutants for forming smog. The implications are troubling, experts said, and go beyond the use of natural gas furnaces and heaters in the second-largest metropolitan area in the country.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 28.
Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days
Continue reading...He’s the Democratic politician with movie-star looks and a picture-perfect family, dogged by accusations of being a smooth‑talking elitist. Can he really unite the American left and win the most powerful office in the world?
When you think of the politician Donald Trump isn’t, when you think of the norm he broke, the archetype he shattered, you might well picture a man who looks a lot like Gavin Newsom. Tall and handsome, hair coiffed just so, with a blond wife and four photogenic kids at his side, Newsom, who has been the governor of California since 2019 and is often described as the frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee for the White House in 2028, looks the way professional politicians, and especially presidential candidates, look in the movies.
It’s dogged Newsom for years, that look of his, perennially suggesting that he is, in the words of one California newspaper, “too ambitious, too slickly handsome, and too patrician-seeming”, especially for a populist age that cherishes the authentic and has no truck with anything either phoney or “elite”. The elite tag especially has hung around Newsom’s neck for decades, thanks to the fact that his ascent to the top of California politics has seemed smooth and unbroken, apparently eased by a childhood spent in the orbit of the Getty family, when that name was a byword for astronomical wealth.
Continue reading...DoJ says it will not ask US supreme court to rehear tariffs case despite president’s complaint on Truth Social
The Trump administration said refunds of tariffs struck down by the US supreme court “will take time”, according to court documents filed by the Department of Justice.
Businesses including FedEx have lined up to demand reimbursement for US tariffs they have paid but that the court last week deemed were imposed illegally, prompting heavy criticism from Donald Trump.
Continue reading...Hours before Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's interview, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed the AI company a "supply chain risk to national security," which restricts military contractors from doing business with Anthropic.
US threats to seize Greenland have created ‘new international fault lines’ that can be used to spread disinformation, Danish intelligence agencies say
Denmark’s intelligence services have warned that a foreign power may try to sway the general election on 24 March, saying the main threat was from Russia over support for Ukraine but also citing the chaos caused by US efforts to seize Greenland.
The PET police intelligence service and FE military intelligence said in a joint statement the election campaign could be marked by disinformation and cyberattacks “to sow division, influence the public debate or to target candidates, parties or specific political programmes”.
Continue reading...I have a pint x that is my main form of transport to school and work and have put 1250 miles on it since Jan 2025. I wanted to buy a new tire right away after I got the board but I listened to everyone saying wear out the stock tire first and I’m glad I did. I got the tfl enduro today took me 30mins with no tire levers and set the bead with a hand pump. The tire is actually insane in comparison to the stock px tire, night and day the board is stable yet super carvy, quiet, and wayyy smoother on the bumps and drops. I got the mid compound for longevity.
Also when changing onewheel tires take off the valve stem side first,makes it much easier
In an interview that aired Friday on "CBS Evening News," Renee Good's family said they would trade their lives for hers if they could.
The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is widely regarded as one of the Democratic party’s leading contenders for the 2028 presidential election. He has also published a new book, Young Man in a Hurry, reflecting on his childhood and his path to the governor’s mansion.
This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Newsom about why he believes the Democrats suffered such heavy losses in 2024, why the party needs to be less judgmental, and whether he intends to run for president in 2028
Continue reading...Critics claim the operations are geared at social media, but police say they have enabled real arrests
Police officers from Bangkok’s metropolitan bureau had less than 24 hours to prepare for their latest undercover operation. They would be starring as performers of a lion dance at a temple fair held for the lunar new year. Their mission: track down and arrest a suspected thief who had a history of evading officers.
“The dance was spontaneous. We just did what we did,” said the police captain Lertvarit Lertvorapreecha, adding that nobody had time to practise. In his haste, he accidentally picked up his colleague’s male mask, which he wore with a red silk dress, trousers and tactical shoes.
Continue reading...Hours after exclusion of Anthropic, OpenAI announces fresh Pentagon deal, but says it will maintain same safety guardrails at the heart of the dispute
Donald Trump said Friday he will direct all federal agencies to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE” all use of Anthropic technology in the latest instalment of a very public clash over AI safety.
The Department of Defense and Anthropic hit an impasse with neither side backing down as a deadline for an agreement lapsed on Friday afternoon. The Pentagon had demanded the artificial intelligence company loosen ethical guidelines on its AI systems or face severe consequences.
Continue reading...‘I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn’t do,’ former US president says after six-hour deposition
Bill Clinton told a congressional committee on Friday he “had no idea of the crimes” Jeffrey Epstein was committing and insisted he “did nothing wrong” in his relationship with the convicted sex trafficker.
The former president’s remarks came in his opening statement in a deposition to the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, a day after his wife, Hillary Clinton, appeared before the same body and called the proceedings “partisan political theater” and “an insult to the American people”.
Continue reading...Taliban offer to resolve dispute via dialogue after Pakistan bombed cities in Afghanistan in latest escalation with its neighbour
Washington endorsed Pakistan’s “right to defend itself” after it bombed major cities across Afghanistan amid heightened tensions between the two hostile neighbours.
The Taliban government in Kabul stressed it was ready to negotiate on Friday as violence intensified between the two countries.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: OpenAI has fired an employee following an investigation into their activity on prediction market platforms including Polymarket, WIRED has learned. OpenAI CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, disclosed the termination in an internal message to employees earlier this year. The employee, she said, "used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket)." "Our policies prohibit employees from using confidential OpenAI information for personal gain, including in prediction markets," says spokesperson Kayla Wood. OpenAI has not revealed the name of the employee or the specifics of their trades. Evidence suggests that this was not an isolated event. Polymarket runs on the Polygon blockchain network, so its trading ledger is pseudonymous but traceable. According to an analysis by the financial data platform Unusual Whales, there have been clusters of activities, which the service flagged as suspicious, around OpenAI-themed events since March 2023. Unusual Whales flagged 77 positions in 60 wallet addresses as suspected insider trades, looking at the age of the account, trading history, and significance of investment, among other factors. Suspicious trades hinged on the release dates of products like Sora, GPT-5, and the ChatGPT Browser, as well as CEO Sam Altman's employment status. In November 2023, two days after Altman was dramatically ousted from the company, a new wallet placed a significant bet that he would return, netting over $16,000 in profits. The account never placed another bet. The behavior fits into patterns typical of insider trades. "The tell is the clustering. In the 40 hours before OpenAI launched its browser, 13 brand-new wallets with zero trading history appeared on the site for the first time to collectively bet $309,486 on the right outcome," says Unusual Whales CEO Matt Saincome. "When you see that many fresh wallets making the same bet at the same time, it raises a real question about whether the secret is getting out." [...] Though this is the first confirmed case of a large technology company firing an employee over trades in prediction markets, it's almost certainly not the last. Opportunities for tech sector employees to make trades on markets abound. "The data tells me this is happening all over the place," Saincome says.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Riot police use teargas to disperse people gathering around wreckage of plane loaded with money from central bank
At least 20 people have died and dozens have been injured after a military cargo plane carrying banknotes crashed while landing near Bolivia’s capital on Friday, damaging about a dozen vehicles on a highway and scattering bills on the ground, an official has said.
Footage from local media showed people rushing to collect banknotes while police in riot gear tried to disperse them using teargas. Authorities were later seen setting the money alight in a bonfire at the scene of the crash.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed.
Bill Clinton says he had ‘no idea’ about Epstein’s crimes in House testimony
Howard Lutnick scrutiny grows as new photo shows him with Epstein
Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts direct to your inbox
James Comer, the chair of the House oversight committee, said the committee’s list of questions for Bill Clinton grew longer after Hillary Clinton’s deposition yesterday, where she deferred a host of questions to her husband.
“So we already had a big portfolio of questions for him, and that increased yesterday,” Comer said at a press conference outside the building where the closed-door deposition was set to begin shortly.
Continue reading...Researchers at Cortical Labs used living human neurons grown on a chip to learn how to play Doom in about a week. "While its performance is not up to par with humans, experts say it brings biological computers a step closer to useful real-world applications, like controlling robot arms," reports New Scientist. From the report: In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs used its neuron-powered computer chips to play Pong. The chips consisted of clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers had to carefully train the chips to control the paddles on either side of the screen. Now, Cortical Labs has developed an interface that makes it easier to program these chips using the popular programming language Python. An independent developer, Sean Cole, then used Python to teach the chips to play Doom, which he did in around a week. "Unlike the Pong work that we did a few years ago, which represented years of painstaking scientific effort, this demonstration has been done in a matter of days by someone who previously had relatively little expertise working directly with biology," says Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs. "It's this accessibility and this flexibility that makes it truly exciting." The neuronal computer chip, which used about a quarter as many neurons as the Pong demonstration, played Doom better than a randomly firing player, but far below the performance of the best human players. However, it learnt much faster than traditional, silicon-based machine learning systems and should be able to improve its performance with newer learning algorithms, says Kagan. However, it's not useful to compare the chips with human brains, he says. "Yes, it's alive, and yes, it's biological, but really what it is being used as is a material that can process information in very special ways that we can't recreate in silicon." Cortical Labs posted a YouTube video showing its CL1 biological computer running Doom. There's also source code available on GitHub, with additional details in a README file.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
For Buddy Wiggins of Honolulu, Hawaii, the end result of a yearslong sports gambling addiction has come to this: soliciting strangers on the beach.
Author Dan Simmons, best known for the epic sci-fi novel Hyperion and its sequels, has died at 77 following a stroke. Ars Technica's Eric Berger remembers Simmons, writing: Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion. Published in 1989, Hyperion is set in a far-flung future in which human settlement spans hundreds of planets. The novel feels both familiar, in that its structure follows Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and utterly unfamiliar in its strange, far-flung setting. Simmons' Hyperion appeared in an Ask Slashdot story back in 2008, when Slashdot reader willyhill asked for tips on how Slashdotters track down great sci-fi. If you're in the mood for a little nostalgia, or just want to browse the thread for book recommendations, it's well worth revisiting.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The company's new flagship smart ring stores more data, too. But that doesn't really help Americans.
Neither president nor anyone in administration has reached out after Good was killed by immigration officer, says family
The family of Renee Good, an unarmed US citizen and mother who was killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis last month, said in an interview with NBC News that neither Donald Trump nor anyone in his administration has contacted them since her death.
“There’s a reason that we hired our own investigators – to make sure that the truth is transparent and available, to make sure that this is really taken seriously, and to make sure that we know what occurred,” Brent Ganger, Good’s brother, told NBC News.
Continue reading...  | So it was raining (mild to moderate) a week ago while riding on campus here in Cali and the board was running fine until I dismounted and turned it off for a class. When I tried to turn it on again, it wouldn’t. I tried to follow steps listed on FM website to try and get it to turn on but the charger doesn’t even change from green to red… is it worth opening up the battery module to check for water/corrosion because if water is the culprit the warranty is void anyway so…? [link] [comments] |
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 28, No. 727.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 523, for Saturday, Feb. 28.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 28 #993
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 28, No. 1,715.
President Trump said he will give federal agencies six months to phase out their use of Anthropic's AI products.
This week's guests include Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy and Republican Rep. Mike Turner.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk on Friday, following days of increasingly heated public conflict with the AI company.
Renee Good's family said they spent agonizing "hours in limbo," unsure of the details surrounding her fatal shooting by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis last month.
Some of the changes mirror Scouting America's suggestions to the Department of Justice, including discontinuing its Citizenship in Society merit badge.
New submitter DeanonymizedCoward shares a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is reportedly in crisis following major budget cuts, layoffs, and furloughs under the Trump administration, says TechCrunch. The agency has now replaced its acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala, after a turbulent year marked by controversy and internal turmoil. During his tenure, Gottumukkala allegedly mishandled sensitive information by uploading government documents to ChatGPT, oversaw a one-third reduction in staff, and reportedly failed a counterintelligence polygraph needed for classified access. His leadership also saw the suspension of several senior officials, including CISA's chief security officer. Nextgov also reported that CISA lost another top senior official, Bob Costello, the agency's chief information officer tasked with overseeing the agency's IT systems and data policies. "Last month, CISA's acting director Madhu Gottumukkala reportedly took steps to transfer Costello, but other political appointees blocked it," added Nextgov.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trustees unanimously voted to place Alberto Carvalho on leave and appointed Andres Chait in the interim
Two days after the FBI searched the headquarters of the Los Angeles unified school district and the home of its superintendent, the district board of education placed Alberto Carvalho on administrative leave.
The board met in closed session meetings for several hours on Thursday and Friday to discuss Carvalho’s employment with the nation’s second largest school district. The trustees unanimously voted Friday to place Carvalho on paid leave, and appointed another high ranking district official, Andres Chait, to serve as interim superintendent.
Continue reading...Singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, known for his hits like "Laughter in the Rain," "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" and "Calendar Girl," has died.
Amid rising signs of conflict, the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem advised non-essential staff to urgently flee the country.
After nearly two days of closed-session meetings, the Los Angeles school board placed Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on paid administrative leave amid a federal investigation into his time as the head of Miami's school district.
joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: Perplexity has introduced "Computer," a new tool that allows users to assign tasks and see them carried out by a system that coordinates multiple agents running various models. The company claims that Computer, currently available to Perplexity Max subscribers, is "a system that creates and executes entire workflows" and "capable of running for hours or even months." The idea is that the user describes a specific outcome -- something like "plan and execute a local digital marketing campaign for my restaurant" or "build me an Android app that helps me do a specific kind of research for my job." Computer then ideates subtasks and assigns them to multiple agents as needed, running the models Perplexity deems best for those tasks. The core reasoning engine currently runs Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, while Gemini is used for deep research, Nano Banana for image generation, Veo 3.1 for video production, Grok for lightweight tasks where speed is a consideration, and ChatGPT 5.2 for "long-context recall and wide search." This kind of best-model-for-the-task approach differs from some competing products like Claude Cowork, which only uses Anthropic's models. All this happens in the cloud, with prebuilt integrations. "Every task runs in an isolated compute environment with access to a real filesystem, a real browser, and real tool integrations," Perplexity says. The idea is partly that this workflow was what some power users were already doing, and this aims to make that possible for a wider range of people who don't want to deal with all that setup. People were already using multiple models and tailoring them to specific tasks based on perceived capabilities, while, for example, using MCP (Model Context Protocol) to give those models access to data and applications on their local machines. Perplexity Computer takes a different approach, but the goal is the same: have AI agents running tailor-picked models to perform tasks involving your own files, services, and applications. Then there is OpenClaw, which you could perceive as the immediate predecessor to this concept.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: Perplexity has introduced "Computer," a new tool that allows users to assign tasks and see them carried out by a system that coordinates multiple agents running various models. The company claims that Computer, currently available to Perplexity Max subscribers, is "a system that creates and executes entire workflows" and "capable of running for hours or even months." The idea is that the user describes a specific outcome -- something like "plan and execute a local digital marketing campaign for my restaurant" or "build me an Android app that helps me do a specific kind of research for my job." Computer then ideates subtasks and assigns them to multiple agents as needed, running the models Perplexity deems best for those tasks. The core reasoning engine currently runs Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, while Gemini is used for deep research, Nano Banana for image generation, Veo 3.1 for video production, Grok for lightweight tasks where speed is a consideration, and ChatGPT 5.2 for "long-context recall and wide search." This kind of best-model-for-the-task approach differs from some competing products like Claude Cowork, which only uses Anthropic's models. All this happens in the cloud, with prebuilt integrations. "Every task runs in an isolated compute environment with access to a real filesystem, a real browser, and real tool integrations," Perplexity says. The idea is partly that this workflow was what some power users were already doing, and this aims to make that possible for a wider range of people who don't want to deal with all that setup. People were already using multiple models and tailoring them to specific tasks based on perceived capabilities, while, for example, using MCP (Model Context Protocol) to give those models access to data and applications on their local machines. Perplexity Computer takes a different approach, but the goal is the same: have AI agents running tailor-picked models to perform tasks involving your own files, services, and applications. Then there is OpenClaw, which you could perceive as the immediate predecessor to this concept.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A pair of reading glasses can help reduce eye strain and boost your reading pleasure. Here are our favorite places to get yours.
Trump administration’s unlawful policy turns ‘refugees’ American Dream into a dystopian nightmare’, judge says
A federal judge has blocked a Trump administration policy that allowed immigration authorities to arrest and detain certain refugees in Minnesota, ruling that the government relied on an incorrect interpretation of federal law and unlawfully targeted people who had already been admitted to the US.
In an order on Friday, the court said the administration’s approach had effectively been “terrorizing” refugees by subjecting them to arrest and potentially indefinite detention despite their lawful status. The judge concluded that federal immigration law does not give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authority to detain refugees simply because more than one year has passed since their arrival in the country.
Continue reading...The feature is available to both free users and Premium subscribers. Wuthering Heights is reaching the heights on both the US and UK charts.
As tensions between two countries reach new highs, US president says regime is ‘talking with us’
Donald Trump has suggested the US could carry out a “friendly takeover” of Cuba as tensions between Washington and Havana reach a new high after the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
As he left the White House for a campaigning event in Texas on Friday, Trump said: “The Cuban government is talking with us. They’re in a big deal of trouble.”
Continue reading...By mid-afternoon, it was 91F (33C) in downtown LA, according to the National Weather Service
After a week of heavy downpours that left parts of Los Angeles flooded, the city is now facing unusually high temperatures for late February.
By mid-afternoon Friday, it was 91F (33C) in downtown Los Angeles, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). That breaks the daily record for 27 February, which was 88F (31C), set last year.
Continue reading...The file system of the Windows operating system is NTFS, whether you’re running it on a desktop/laptop or server. It’s the only file system Windows can run on and boot from, at least officially, so you’re not even given a choice of file systems for the boot volume like you are on, say, desktop Linux. That’s about to change, though: Microsoft has finally announced that Windows Server will be able to boot from ReFS.
We’re excited to announce that Resilient File System (ReFS) boot support is now available for Windows Server Insiders in Insider Preview builds. For the first time, you can install and boot Windows Server on an ReFS-formatted boot volume directly through the setup UI. With ReFS boot, you can finally bring modern resilience, scalability, and performance to your server’s most critical volume — the OS boot volume.
↫ chcurlet-msft at Microsoft’s Tech Community
Without diving too much into the weeds, ReFS can roughly be seen as Microsoft’s answer to modern file systems like ZFS and Btrfs, with comparable design goals and feature sets. It’s been around since 2012, but only for Windows Server, and with every Windows Server release since, the company has improved performance, added new features, and fixed bugs. Now, in 2026, it seems Microsoft thinks ReFS is ready to be used as a bootable file system for Windows Server.
If you want to try this for yourself, you need to be a Windows Insider and make sure you have Windows Server build 29531.1000.260206-1841 or newer. During installation, the Windows installer will ask you to choose between NTFS and ReFS; the rest of the installation process will be pretty much the same as before. Now all we need is to wait for ReFS to become an option on client versions of Windows too, which would mark – arguably – only the second time in history Windows transitioned from one default filesystem to the another.
South Korea has reversed a two-decade policy and approved the export of high-precision map data, paving the way for a fully functional Google Maps in the country. Reuters reports: The approval was made "on the condition that strict security requirements are met," the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said. The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao -- local internet giants which currently dominate the country's market for digital map services. But it will appease Washington, which has urged Seoul to tackle what it says is discrimination against U.S. tech companies. South Korea, still technically at war with North Korea, had shot down Google's previous bids in 2007 and 2016 to be allowed to export the data, citing the risks that information about sensitive military and security facilities could be exposed. "Google can now come in, slash usage fees, and take the market," said Choi Jin-mu, a geography professor at Kyung Hee University. "If Naver and Kakao are weakened or pushed out and Google later raises prices, that becomes a monopoly. Then, even companies that rely on map services -- logistics firms, for example -- become dependent, and in the long run, even government GIS (geographic information) systems could end up dependent on Google or Apple. That's the biggest concern."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sherry Xue Li ripped off millions from foreign investors and funnelled some stolen money into US political campaigns
A New York businesswoman was sentenced Friday to nine years in federal prison over a financial scheme that ripped off more than $30m from foreign investors and funnelled some of the stolen money into US political campaigns, including a Donald Trump fundraiser during his first presidency.
Sherry Xue Li was also ordered to forfeit $31.5m, as well as property at three locations, and to make restitution to her victims.
Continue reading...Conspiracy theories about the Epstein files have racked up millions of views on social media. Here's what to know about 10 of the most viral claims.
 | Absolutely LOVE my XL got BTG fender kit and some W.F.S. swirl BANG bumpers! Everything from TFL has been great! Jeff is super helpful and responsive! Love their accessories! I had a XR + Back in early 2021 and sold it with 124 miles on it. Just got my XL on Jan 16, this year and have put 213 miles on it so far! I've had zero issues yet "knock on wood". I'm a pretty hefty fella (5'10 & 240lbs) and it totes me ANYWHERE with zero hesitation! Top speed so far is 27.2 mph experienced some push back but ZERO haptic buzz! Haven't pushed it any harder nor have I gone over 25.5 mph since. Heck I can even get my 7 year old 56lbs daughter on the XL with me and it don't hesitate a bit! The few gripes I've had with the board so far is mostly FM gripes... Surprise surprise right?.. The packaging I received the board in was a tattered and battered gts box that looked like it had done shipped 10 different boards in it and ZERO form of instruction manual... Not even a QR code. The free ride bumpers I bought with the board the 1st set was drilled so badly I could even get the bolts started. Of course FM wanted proof... Then wanted me to send them back once they received them they sent me another set... Poor customer service... They should have sent mean new set with a return label. Especially at this price point in toys... I'm sure this is no news to anyone here... The second set fit but didn't line up worth a crap and looked like straight 💩... They were also SUPER SUPER thick which took quite a bit of ground clearance away... I complained to FM once again and their excuse was "Freeride Bumpers are hand made this is normal", funny because the BANG bumpers I ordered from TFL didn't have to be sent back, lined up perfectly, look GREAT and didn't take any clearance away from my board! My last grip so far has to do with bumper and fender install... I'm pretty OCD person... I removed the bumper and fender deletes, took the board out side and hit it with compressed air before putting the fender and BANG bumpers on... Well white flakes of paper started flying everywhere so I get to looking deeper into it... It was the "If this has been removed warranty will be voided" sticker on the controller cover as well as battery cover... $3500 bucks I shouldn't have to worry cleaning my board with AIR will void my warranty! For fricks sake, gas station gas pumps have better "tamper seal" stickers then this $3500 board does. So once again... I gripe to FM... Was told exactly what the sticker reads, took me repeatedly saying the same thing 3 times to finally get this response "as long as we can tell the sticker wasn't purposely tampered with or removed your warranty will be fine". What a joke. I lied, my very last gripe is the mag handle... The rubber is falling off the handle... Sooo FM will be hearing from me yet again. I'm sure I'll have to remove the handle and send it to them before they actually do anything to please me! ANYWAYS! I've been lurking through this reddit group for months, finally created my first reddit account ever! Just wanted to announce my self to the page and let everyone know I've joined back into the onewheel family and am enjoying every minute of riding! Has anyone else pushed the XL over 25 mph yet!? [link] [comments] |
Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
Residents of the town of Middletown will head to the polls Monday to select three new council members, or half of the legislative body.
Candidates this year include three incumbents Bruce Orr, Craig Sherman and David W. Thomas as well as challenger Michelle Williams. The top three vote-getters will earn a two-year term on the council.
You must be at least 18, resident in town limits, and be eligible to vote under state statute to vote in the municipal election.
Residents must offer proof of residency with a form of identification such as a driver’s license or State of Delaware ID card; a uniformed service ID card; another current photo identification ID card issued by the State of Delaware; the U.S. government; the voter’s employer; high school or higher education; a current utility bill; bank statement; credit card statement; a paycheck or pay advice; or another type of bill or statement.
📍 Voters can cast ballots from noon to 8 p.m. Monday, March 2, at Town Hall, located at 19 W. Green St. in Middletown.
The controversial Delaware City-area data center project known as Project Washington will have two hearings next week.
Starwood Digital Ventures 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 Thursday.
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 the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, which has ruled that the plan violates the state’s Coastal Zone Act. Starwood recently appealed that decision.
The land use 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. The public is allowed to listen and comment on those deliberations, but they cannot ask questions.
📍 The New Castle County Board of Adjustments will meet at 6 p.m. on Thursday, 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 Wednesday, March 4.
State lawmakers will complete their budget hearings next week, by hearing testimony from two of the state’s largest departments: the Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Education.
The Joint Finance Committee’s budget review for DHSS will span the entirety of Monday’s hearings, as the department oversees a swath of large-scale programs used by many Delawareans, including Medicaid and SNAP benefits. It was originally set to present last week, but the hearings were postponed following the latest snowstorm.
Legislators will hear from Department of Education leaders as well as leaders from the Redding Consortium and Wilmington Learning Collaborative (WLC), two appointed work groups that are working on improving educational achievement in the city of Wilmington, on Tuesday.
Notably, the Redding Consortium is behind a controversial proposal to merge the four school districts that serve the city of Wilmington: Brandywine, Christina, Colonial and Red Clay. It has published a preview of its presentation to be found here.
The Redding and WLC leaders will present between 10:30 a.m. and noon Tuesday, while Education Secretary Cindy Marten will lead a department discussion from 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Those hearings were likewise postponed from earlier in February.
📍 The Joint Finance Committee will meet from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, March 2, and 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 3, at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. For information about virtual attendance for the Monday meeting, click here. For the Tuesday meeting, click here.
After presenting to state lawmakers earlier in the day, the members of the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity will convene in Wilmington for their first meeting in a month.
According to their agenda, the work at their Tuesday, March 3, meeting will again be light and largely procedural, with just an hour scheduled.
They will be finalizing the process for how to recommend combining four school districts and forming, by far, the largest single school district in Delaware. The draft version of that plan can be found here.
📍 The Redding Consortium for Educational Equity will meet publicly at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 3, at the Delaware Tech-George Campus, located at 300 N. Orange St. in Wilmington. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
After weeks of soliciting information for its once-in-a-decade update to the land-use plan, known as its Comprehensive Plan, Newark city and planning officials will begin deliberations Tuesday on what to include.
Comp Plans have enormous impacts on future building projects, transportation investments and natural resource protections.
Officials will review the results of public surveys and listening sessions as they begin crafting the final plans over coming months.
📍 The Newark Planning Commission and City Council Joint Meeting will meet publicly at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 3, at the Newark Municipal Building, located at 220 S. Main St. in Newark. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
On the Sussex County Planning & Zoning Commission’s agenda next week are final decisions on two solar projects.
The larger of the two would be located on nearly 7 acres of land at 27858 Cypress Road near Frankford. It is a 4-megawatt system being developed by RWE Renewables Americas, which acquired the former Con Edison Renewables, one of the nation’s largest solar developers.
The other project is proposed by San Francisco-based Forefront Power, and would be located on roughly 11 acres of land at 32507 Vines Creek Road near Dagsboro.
Both projects are seeking conditional use waivers as their properties are currently zoned AR-1, or agricultural residential.
📍 The Sussex County Planning & Zoning Commission will meet publicly at 3 p.m. Wednesday, March 4, at the Sussex County Administrative Office Building, located at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
The post Get Involved: Middletown election, data center hearings, more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
President Donald Trump has ordered all U.S. federal agencies to "immediately cease" using Anthropic's AI technology, escalating a standoff after the company sought limits on Pentagon use of its models. CNBC reports: The company, which in July signed a $200 million contract with Pentagon, wants assurances that the Defense Department will not use its AI models will not be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon had set a deadline of 5:01 p.m. ET Friday for Anthropic to agree to its demands to allow the Pentagon to use the technology for all lawful purposes. If Anthropic did not meet that deadline, Pete Hegseth threatened to label the company a "supply chain risk" or force it to comply by invoking the Defense Production Act. "The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution," Trump said in a post on Truth Social. "Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY." "Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology," Trump wrote. "We don't need it, we don't want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic's products, at various levels," Trump said. On Friday, OpenAI said it would also draw the same red lines as Anthropic: no AI for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In the years to come, robots will help offset worker shortages in health care, manufacturing and other industries, experts say.
Home secretary will defy ‘plain wrong’ calls from unions and leftwing MPs that she is alienating Muslim voters
Shabana Mahmood will press on with hardline immigration policies despite calls for a reversal from unions and left-leaning Labour MPs after the Green party’s byelection victory.
Senior Labour sources insisted that the home secretary would continue to roll out changes to asylum policy, dismissing as “plain wrong” claims that it would further alienate Muslim voters.
Continue reading...Law demanding IDs must match ‘sex at birth’ invalidated the driver’s licenses of about 1,700 trans people in the state
Two transgender men are suing Kansas over a new law that invalidated their driver’s licenses and about 1,700 others for reflecting people’s gender identities and not their sex assigned at birth, arguing that the measure is “dehumanizing”.
The men filed their case Thursday, the same day the law took effect, and argue that it violates rights to privacy, personal autonomy and due legal process guaranteed by the Kansas state constitution. The men also are challenging the law’s tough, new enforcement provisions for the state’s three-year-old policy of barring transgender people from using public restrooms or other single-sex facilities associated with their gender identities.
Continue reading...Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system.
Colorado’s SB26-051, introduced last month, would require operating systems to register the owner’s age, which third-party apps can then leverage to determine if the user is an adult. The bill calls for the device owner to register their birthdate or age, but for the purposes of creating an “age bracket,” which can then be shared to an app developer through an API to learn their age range, according to BiometricUpdate.com.
[…]Ball also said the legislation was based on California’s bill AB 1043, which was passed last year. It too requires OS makers to create a way for the device owner to register their age bracket, which can then be shared to app developers over an API. The California law starts to take effect January 1, 2027.
↫ Michael Kan at PCMag
Age verification to protect children sounds innocent enough, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together it’s crystal clear that what we’re really looking at is the true end of privacy and online anonymity. If age verification is only used by certain applications, it’s easy enough to avoid them, but if it becomes part of Windows, desktop Linux, Android, it’s truly game over. Nobody will be anonymous online ever again, and nobody will have any sense of privacy left when opening up their computer.
Worse yet, if you do end up using an operating system that doesn’t adhere to this law, or you hack out or circumvent the age verification nonsense, you’ll automatically become an easy target for law enforcement. Clearly, if you circumvent age verification, you must be up to no good, right? Of course, as we’ve seen in countries with heavily deteriorating democracies and freedoms, like the US or Hungary, even merely opposing the government will be classified as “up to no good”, and let’s not even get started about the various minorities these countries are actively trying to eradicate.
If something like this is enshrined in law in your country, you’re fucked.
Spectrum is the largest internet provider in the US after the acquisition.
Streamer said ‘deal no longer financially attractive’ at price required to match offer by David Ellison’s firm
Paramount Skydance has beaten Netflix to take over Warner Bros Discovery’s storied Hollywood studios and streaming business after the streaming giant refused to increase its bid.
The $110bn deal ends a high-stakes bidding war between the two media companies, but the takeover still faces regulatory hurdles and a backlash from critics worried about a rightward tilt in US media.
Continue reading...Brown, 62, third member of hit HBO series to die since December, was trying to jumpstart car at home at time of blaze
The Wire actor Bobby J Brown died recently in a barn fire at his Maryland home, making him the third cast member of the acclaimed HBO show to pass away since December.
According to authorities and a statement on social media from his daughter, Reina, the 62-year-old Brown had gone into a barn at his residence in the St Mary’s county community of Chaptico at about 10pm on 24 February to try to jumpstart a car. It evidently ignited during the attempt, and Brown asked his wife for a fire extinguisher.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. military used a laser Thursday to shoot down a "seemingly threatening" drone flying near the U.S.-Mexico border. It turned out the drone belonged to Customs and Border Protection, lawmakers said. The case of mistaken identity prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to close additional airspace around Fort Hancock, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of El Paso. The military is required to formally notify the FAA when it takes any counter-drone action inside U.S. airspace. It was the second time in two weeks that a laser was fired in the area. The last time it was CBP that used the weapon and nothing was hit. That incident occurred near Fort Bliss and prompted the FAA to shut down air traffic at El Paso airport and the surrounding area. This time, the closure was smaller and commercial flights were not affected. The FAA, CBP and the Pentagon confirmed the incident in a joint statement, saying the military "employed counter-unmanned aircraft system authorities to mitigate a seemingly threatening unmanned aerial system operating within military airspace." "At President Trump's direction, the Department of War, FAA, and Customs and Border Patrol are working together in an unprecedented fashion to mitigate drone threats by Mexican cartels and foreign terrorist organizations at the U.S.-Mexico Border," the statement said. The report notes that 27,000 drones were detected within 1,600 feet of the southern border in the last six months of 2024. Illinois Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the ranking member on the Senate's Aviation Subcommittee, is calling for an independent investigation to look into the matter. "The Trump administration's incompetence continues to cause chaos in our skies," Duckworth said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In announcing the agreement, the defense secretary assailed Scouting America for welcoming transgender children but stopped short of saying they would be denied entry.
FreeBSD has its jails technology, and it seems NetBSD might be getting something similar soon.
Jails for NetBSD aims to bring lightweight, kernel-enforced isolation to NetBSD.
[…]The system is intended to remain fully NetBSD-native. Isolation and policy enforcement are integrated into the kernel’s security framework rather than implemented in a separate runtime layer.
It does not aim to become a container platform. It does not aim to provide virtualization.
↫ Matthias Petermann
It has all the usual features you have come to expect from jails, like resource quota, security profiles, logging, and so on. Processes inside jails have no clue they’re in a jail, and using supervisor mode, jails are descendent from a single process and remain visible in the host process table. Of course, there’s many more features listed in the linked article.
It’s in development and not a default part of NetBSD at this time. The project, led by Matthias Petermann, is developed out of tree, with an unofficial NetBSD 10.1 ISO with the jails feature included available as well.
Stocks fell Friday after a report showed higher-than-expected inflation and as Wall Street continues to fret over AI-related disruption.
Striker was demoted to under-21s after refusing to play
Recent club form has not translated to USMNT
Josh Sargent joined Toronto FC from Norwich City in England’s second-tier Championship on Friday, ending a difficult situation in which the striker was exiled to the under-21 squad after he refused to play in an FA Cup match last month.
Sargent, 26, was signed as a designated player through the 2030-31 MLS season. He had eight goals this season and 56 goals in 157 appearances with the Canaries overall.
Continue reading...Apple, Garmin, Samsung, Google or Amazfit? One dominated heart rate, but steps and distance accuracy were a different story.
Former Boy Scouts cave to Pete Hegseth as he laments move from ‘focus on God as the ruler of the universe’
Scouting America will alter several policies at the urging of the Pentagon, including one targeting transgender children, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Friday as he pushes a campaign against military support for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Some of the changes mirror what the organization suggested to the defense department in January, which included discontinuing its citizenship in society merit badge and introducing a military service merit badge as well as waiving registration fees for the children of military personnel.
Continue reading...Trump commerce secretary – who lived next door to Epstein in New York – urged to testify about extent of relationship
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are taking a closer look at US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s connection to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, after the justice department’s website restored a photo showing him with the disgraced financier on his private island.
In the picture, Epstein appears front and center – and is surrounded by three other men. Lutnick, dressed in a blue shirt and white shorts, stands a few feet behind Epstein.
Continue reading...Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday that the Pentagon would be canceling troops' attendance at some of the nation's top universities.
"If somebody charges you something and it's unlawful, they should give you your money back," Dame CEO Alexandra Fine said.
It’s time once again for HPC Career Notes, our monthly feature that’s designed to keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the HPC community, including promotion, new company hires, and accolade. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!
Franck Cappello
Argonne National Laboratory announced that one of its senior computer scientists, Franck Cappello, has been named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), making him part of the 1% of ACM members to achieve the prestigious position.
Cappello was recognized for his contributions to high performance parallel and distributed computing, including Grid’5000, the first large-scale experimental testbed designed as a scientific instrument for researchers to test and improve advanced parallel and distributed computing technologies. Grid’5000 has supported thousands of publications and hundreds of doctoral theses, and is still used more than 20 years after its initiation.
“I am truly honored to receive this recognition,” Cappello said. “The field of high performance parallel and distributed computing for scientific applications has provided so many challenging opportunities for research and development, from advanced computing platforms to innovative software technology to the interplay of high performance computing with artificial intelligence. I am grateful to my colleagues and to Argonne for providing the environment to pursue this research. A special thanks to all the students and postdocs without whom our research results would not have been possible.”
Cappello is one of 71 new ACM Fellows among ACM’s global membership of more than 100,000 computing professionals. The ACM Fellows induction ceremony will take place at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 13 in San Francisco.
Qualcomm announced that it has appointed Kevin O’Buckley to the position of executive vice president of global operations and supply chain. In his new role, O’Buckley will lead Qualcomm’s global semiconductor operations across manufacturing engineering, foundry and supplier partnerships, supply chain, and procurement.
Kevin O’Buckley
O’Buckley joins Qualcomm from Intel, where he most recently served as senior vice president and general manager of Intel Foundry Services. Previously he worked at Intel, IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Marvell. Intel announced that it has expanded the responsibilities of Chief Technology and Operations Officer Naga Chandrasekaran to take O’Buckley’s former role at Intel Foundry Services.
“Kevin brings deep operational expertise, proven commercial leadership, and decades of experience scaling complex semiconductor operations and delivering custom silicon products across data center and edge devices,” said Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcom’s CFO, COO, and EVP. “His leadership will further strengthen our global operations as we continue to deliver industry-leading products with high-performance, low-power computing, AI and connectivity at scale.”
Penguin Solutions announced the retirement of Mark Adams as president and CEO and, after a thorough search process, the board appointed Kash Shaikh as succeed Adams, effective February 2.
Mark Adams
Shaikh brings more than 30 years of technology and operational experience to Penguin. Most recently, he was the president and CEO of Securonix, where he scaled the business, introduced agentic AI solutions, and strengthened customer relationships while growing the company. Earlier in his career, Shaikh held executive leadership roles at Virtana, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Ruckus Wireless, and Nortel Networks. He’s has been recognized for his leadership excellence with industry honors, including the Stevie Gold Award for Executive of the Year and multiple Comparably Best CEO awards. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State University and a Master of Business Administration from Boise State University.
Kash Shaikh
“Penguin Solutions has built a differentiated platform at the intersection of advanced computing, memory and services, with a long history of helping customers design, build, deploy and manage complex infrastructure at scale,” Shaikh said. “As enterprises move from proofs of concept to production AI environments, Penguin’s focus on performance, reliability and time-to-value is increasingly critical. I’m excited to work alongside the leadership team and our employees to deepen customer partnerships, continue expanding our enterprise footprint and execute our strategy with discipline as we build the next chapter of the company.”
Adams is retiring after running Penguin for five years. “Leading Penguin Solutions has been a privilege and a defining chapter in my career,” he said. “This is the right time for me personally to retire, and I’m deeply grateful for the support of the board, our employees, our customers and our shareholders over my tenure as CEO. I am incredibly proud of what our teams have accomplished together – we have redefined Penguin Solutions and put it in a position to capture significant opportunities in the AI and advanced memory markets.”
Kim Fischer
Q.ANT, a provider of photonic quantum computing sensors and solutions, has hired Kim Fischer as its new vice president of marketing. In this role, Fischer will lead the strategic development of Q.ANT’s global brand and market positioning, including strengthening communications with investors, customers, partners, and the press.
Fischer has more than 20 years of experience in strategic corporate and brand development at a range of companies. She impressed Q.ANT Founder and CEO Michael Förtsch with her ability to translate technological leadership into market positioning.
“Q.ANT represents a technological innovation with the potential to fundamentally change the future of high-performance computing and AI,” Fischer said. “I see my role as translating this technological excellence into clear and strategically effective communication in order to build and anchor visibility, trust, and relevance in the relevant markets over the long term. The focus is not on technology as an end in itself, but on its concrete added value for companies, society, and sustainable infrastructures.”
DDN made two executive hires in February, including the appointment of Mohsen Moazami as Vice Chair and Guido Torrini as Chief Financial Operating Officer.
Mohsen Moazami
In his strategic leadership role, Moazami will work closely with CEO and Co-Founder Alex Bouzari and the executive team to advance DDN’s next phase of growth in the HPC and AI storage market. Moazami most recently served as a member of the Office of the CEO and President of International at Groq, which Nvidia recently acquired for $20 billion. He also founded a venture capital firm, CNTP, and spent 12 years at Cisco in the Emerging Markets group.
“DDN is helping define how AI is built and operated at industrial scale,” Moazami said. “Its data intelligence platforms sit at the center of the global AI ecosystem. I look forward to working closely with Alex and the leadership team as Vice Chair to support DDN’s strategic growth, deepen its global impact, and help position the company for its next chapter.”
Guido Torrini
Torrini brings more than 25 years of experience leading finance and operations across global technology companies. He began his career at Cisco and Dell during the rise of networking and infrastructure at scale and later held senior finance leadership roles at Groupon and Gympass. He also had leadership roles at Celonis, where he helped guide the company through a significant phase of enterprise software expansion and value creation. And most recently was CFO of OneTrust, a provider of privacy, security, and data governance solutions.
“DDN is delivering the critical data intelligence infrastructure organizations need to deploy AI at scale—across enterprises, governments, and the world’s most demanding AI factories,” Torrini said. “I’m excited to join at a moment when AI is reshaping the technology landscape and redefining the global economic order—and when DDN is uniquely positioned to help lead what comes next.”
QuSecure a provider of post-quantum cybersecurity and cryptographic solutions, has appointed Brian Cunningham to be its EVP Strategy & Growth. In his role, Cunningham will be responsible for building and scaling QuSecure’s go-to-market operating system across federal and commercial sectors, aligning strategy, delivery readiness, partner ecosystems, and execution discipline.
Brian Cunningham
QuSecure CEO and co-founder Rebecca Krauthamer said Cunningham, who is a former Special Operations commander and a Navy SEAL, brings “a rare combination of operational discipline, strategic clarity, and credibility across government and enterprise markets. He knows how to build systems that scale under pressure, and that capability is exactly what QuSecure needs as demand for quantum-safe security accelerates.”
“Post-quantum cryptography is no longer a future problem; it’s a present execution challenge,” Cunningham said. “Organizations know they need to modernize cryptography, but many struggle with how to do it safely, at scale, and without breaking critical systems. QuSecure has built the right platform for this moment, and I’m excited to help scale the strategy, partnerships, and operational muscle required to turn PQC readiness into durable advantage for customers.”
Quantum computer maker PsiQuantum has hired former AMD President Victor Peng to be its interim CEO, enabling co-founder Jeremy O’Brien to take the role of executive chairman.
PsiQuantum executives (L-R): Dr. Pete Shadbolt, Chief Scientific Officer; Prof. Jeremy O’Brien, Executive Chairman; Victor Peng, Interim CEO; and Prof. Terry Rudolph, Chief Architect.
Peng will lead day-to-day operations and execution at PsiQuantum, which is working to develop utility-scale, photonic quantum computing systems. Peng has decades of experience in the computer business, starting as an engineer with DEC in the early 1980s, and has played a central role in major computing shifts spanning CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and system-level architectures. He served as CEO of Xilinx, where he led the company’s transformation into a global leader in adaptive computing, culminating in the $49 billion acquisition by AMD in 2022.
O’Brien will lead the board of directors and continue to guide strategy and key partnerships for the Palo Alto, California company, which is coming off a decisive year in which it raised over $1 billion in a Series E round, advanced to the final stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), and broke ground on America’s largest quantum computing site in Chicago.
With Peng serving as Interim CEO and O’Brien in the Executive Chairman role, PsiQuantum has experienced leadership in place as it conducts its search for a permanent CEO.
Ariel Kelman
AMD has hired Ariel Kelman to be its new chief marketing officer and senior vice president. In his new role, Kelman will report to Chief Administrative Officer Ruth Cotter
Kelman brings more than two decades of experience at enterprise and technology companies, including serving as president and CMO at Salesforce, as well as leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and Oracle, where he helped scale and modernize global marketing teams during periods of rapid growth.
“I’m thrilled to join AMD at such an exciting moment in the company’s journey,” Kelman said. “I’m looking forward to working with the team to elevate the AMD brand, deepen engagement with customers and partners and capture the massive AI data center opportunity enabled by AMD’s uniquely differentiated products. That combination is what energizes me most.”
For the previous edition of HPC Career Notes, click here.
The post HPC Career Notes: February 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Weeks after the U.S. Congress rejected unprecedented cuts to science budgets that the administration of US President Donald Trump had sought for 2026, funding to several agencies that award research grants is still not freely flowing. One reason is that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been slow to authorize its release. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has so far not received approval to spend any of the research funding allocated in a budget bill signed into law on 3 February. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) was authorized to spend its funding just last week. And NASA has had its full funding authorized for release, but with an unusual restriction that limits spending on ten specific programmes -- many of which the Trump team had tried to cancel last year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The company refused to grant the Department of Defense permission to use it for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons systems.
That's up from 700 million users in September last year and more than doubled from where it was last year.
 | I'm taking apart my XR for the first time and when I took the wheel off these little pieces just fell out from somewhere. there's only three that I found. should there be four and where do they go? The tutorial I'm following didn't have anything mentioning these. I would appreciate the help so much !!!!!! [link] [comments] |
As students across the U.S. protest federal immigration policies, legal experts are re-evaluating the boundaries of student free speech established by judicial precedent.
Thousands of students have taken part in protests at public schools in Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Iowa, California, Arkansas, and Texas against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement actions. In some cases, students have faced suspensions for walking out of school. In others, their schools have collaborated with local law enforcement to allow peaceful off-campus protests with no suspensions.
News reports on these protests have frequently mentioned the constitutional rights of students who attend publicly funded schools. These rights are defined by two landmark Supreme Court cases from the mid-twentieth century.
Political free speech for some (but not all) students
Courts have held since the late 1960s that public secondary school officials can regulate student protests on campus that they view as disruptive. But not all protests can be regulated by schools, especially those that express “pure speech.”
First Amendment protections rarely extend to private schools. And even within the public system, a clear legal divide exists between the restricted rights of high schoolers and the broader liberties afforded to college students.
Unlike high schoolers, public university students enjoy the full speech protections afforded to adults. However, their right to protest is still subject to the standard "time, place, and manner" restrictions that apply to any public forum.
The foundational case for public secondary schools is Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969). In his 7-2 majority opinion, Justice Abe Fortas said, “First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
Fortas’s quote is central to any discussion of students’ speech rights in public schools. Since 1969, his ruling has been repeatedly cited by the Supreme Court when defining the boundaries of student expression.
In December 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War, three students, including Mary Beth Tinker, a 13-year-old student at Warren Harding Junior High School in Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to school to protest the war. They were all suspended.
Fortas said that students’ free speech rights didn’t extend to conduct that “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” But he also held that silent protests—such as wearing armbands—were constitutionally permitted. “Our problem involves direct, primary First Amendment rights akin to ‘pure speech.’ The school officials banned and sought to punish petitioners for a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners,” Fortas concluded.
The Tinker decision cited a famous Supreme Court decision from 1943, West Virginia v. Barnette, which allowed public school students to decline to pledge allegiance to the American flag on religious grounds. In his majority opinion, Justice Robert Jackson wrote that school officials had “important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights.”
In his dissent, Justice Hugo Black called the Barnette majority decision “the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary” if students could “defy and flout orders of school officials to keep their minds on their own schoolwork.”
Beyond Tinker and West Virginia v. Barnette
While Tinker and Barnette set the stage, later decisions have clarified how students' First Amendment rights apply to present-day challenges such as social media and student-led journalism.
In 1988, the Supreme Court decided in Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier that public high school officials could censor a student-run newspaper's planned stories on divorce and teenage pregnancy. Writing for the majority, Justice Byron White said that “a school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school.” In his dissent, Justice William Brennan concluded that the majority had ignored Tinker, and indeed, that its opinion “teach[es] youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”
Two years earlier, the Court had determined that public school students cannot claim First Amendment protection for using vulgar language on school grounds. The Supreme Court ruled in Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986) that a student who used sexually explicit language at a school assembly wasn’t protected by the First Amendment. “Under the First Amendment, the use of an offensive form of expression may not be prohibited to adults making what the speaker considers a political point, but it does not follow that the same latitude must be permitted to children in a public school,” said Chief Justice Warren Burger in the majority decision.
The Supreme Court further narrowed student speech rights in 2007 with Morse v. Frederick, a case that tested whether schools could censor messages promoting illegal drug use. There, the justices considered a student who unfurled a 14-foot 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' banner during a school-supervised event. After the principal confiscated the banner and suspended the student, a divided Court said that the First Amendment allows schools to prohibit speech that reasonably appears to promote illegal drug use.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts referenced Tinker, Hazelwood, and Bethel School District, concluding that “schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use.” Justice Clarence Thomas argued that Tinker should be overturned, while Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that punishing a student for a “nonsense banner” violated the First Amendment because it effectively punished the student “for expressing a view with which it [the school] disagreed.”
Recent cases and broader exceptions
In 2021, the Supreme Court considered whether schools can punish students for private, off-campus speech. In Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the justices held that a student’s off-campus Snapchat outburst did not warrant a suspension, even though it targeted a school-related activity like cheerleading.
In his 8-1 majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said that schools have a substantial interest in regulating certain kinds of off-campus conduct. But In B.L.’s specific case, Breyer continued, her conduct did little “to suggest a substantial interference in, or disruption of, the school’s efforts to maintain cohesion on the school cheerleading squad.”
However, the Court made clear that there were some areas where school administrators could discipline students for their off-campus conduct, including “serious or severe bullying or harassment targeting particular individuals; threats aimed at teachers or other students.”
For high school students who have been walking out without their schools’ consent, legal experts disagree on the scope of their First Amendment protection. It’s clear under Tinker that schools can discipline students for leaving class without permission. But if administrators impose harsher-than-normal penalties because of the protest’s message, there could be serious ramifications.
In a recent blog post, Adam Goldstein from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) noted this basic constitutional concept: “If a school does choose to discipline a student for walking out to join a protest, it has to do it consistently with how it would punish any other student for cutting class. Punishing a student more harshly because they wanted to express their opinion would be viewpoint discrimination, which is never permissible under the First Amendment.”
Student’s free speech rights may soon be tested yet again in the courts. But as Freedom Forum noted last year, “While students’ free speech rights in school aren’t absolute, the Supreme Court consistently has reiterated that students are people under the Constitution and possess First Amendment rights.”
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Mary Walsh, leaving after 46 years, says staffers told to ‘aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum’
A veteran CBS News producer who is leaving the network after 46 years has suggested that political bias is at play at the network in a farewell memo sent to colleagues on Friday afternoon.
“We’ve been reading a lot of goodbyes lately and here I am headed out the door. It’s too soon, even after 46 years,” Mary Walsh wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Guardian. “But maybe it’s for the best. We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don’t know how to do that.”
Continue reading...President Trump said Friday that he is "not happy" with the pace of progress in negotiations with Iran.
Former President Bill Clinton denied any knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes in an opening statement before the House Oversight Committee in New York.
Escalating tensions flared into open conflict as Pakistan’s defense minister said his country’s patience with the Taliban had run out.
NASA wants its Space Launch System rocket to stop requiring yearslong launch delays.
Want to quickly boost your savings? Here are four ways to earn $500 worth of interest before the end of 2026.
An anonymous reader shares a column: I'm going to take the diplomatic hat off here and say with brutal honesty: basically everybody in the music business hates Spotify except for the people who work there. It's a platform that sucks artists for everything they have, it actively prevents community building, and, despite all of that, the platform still struggles to maintain a healthy profit margin. The streaming business model is fundamentally broken. And eventually, its demise will become more and more obvious to recognize. I'll break down exactly why the DSP era is coming to a grinding halt, why the major labels are quietly terrified, and why the artists who don't pivot now are going to go down with the ship. [...] Jimmy Iovine put it bluntly: "The streaming services have a bad situation, there's no margins, they're not making any money." This model only works for Apple, Amazon, and Google, because they don't need their music platforms to be wildly profitable. Amazon uses music as a loss-leader to keep you paying for Prime. Apple uses it to sell $1,000 iPhones. As for Spotify, or any standalone music streaming company, they're kind of screwed. And guess what -- when the platform's margins are structurally squeezed, guess who gets squeezed first? The artists. [...] What if Jimmy is right? If the DSPs are "minutes away from obsolete," what replaces them? Well, I'm not sure the DSPs are going to disappear overnight, but if you're an artist or a manager trying to sustain yourself in this evolving music economy, the answer is direct ownership. The artists who will survive the next five years are the ones who are quietly shifting their focus away from the "ATM Machine." They are building their own cultural hangars. They are capturing phone numbers on Laylo. They are driving fans to private Discord servers. They are focusing on ARPF (Average Revenue Per Fan) through high-margin merch, vinyl, and hard tickets, rather than begging for fractions of a penny from a playlist placement. We are witnessing the death of the "Mass Audience" and the birth of the "Micro-Community."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Attorney general says $111bn deal will be investigated amid concerns over monopoly power and job losses
Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said his office will investigate a possible merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, hours after Netflix backed away from a planned takeover.
“Paramount/Warner Bros is not a done deal,” Bonta said in a post on X. “These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny — the California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review.”
Continue reading...In his memoir, the Tony Award-winning composer of such hits as Broadway's "Hairspray" writes of his half-century in show business, which grew in part from his youthful worship of Bette Midler - an adoration that would grow into a collaboration.
After the U.S. men’s hockey team won the gold medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics, the White House TikTok account shared celebratory posts. But one of its videos that appears to show player Brady Tkachuk insulting the Canadian men’s hockey team isn’t real.
The White House’s 45-second video showed a clip of an interview with Brady Tkachuk, the Ottawa Senators captain, with brother Matthew Tkachuck. The song "Free Bird" played in the background. After the interview clip, the music intensified and the video continued with a compilation of footage of the team and the winning game shot.
The Feb. 22 video made it look like Brady Tkachuk said, "They booed our national anthem, so I had to come out and teach those maple syrup eating f----s a lesson," referring to the Canadian men's hockey team.
But the original clip of Tkachuk with his brother, from a February 2025 news conference at the 4 Nations Face-Off, shows he did not say that.
The White House TikTok video was edited with artificial intelligence. The TikTok includes a label that says it "contains AI-generated media," which TikTok may automatically apply to content it identifies as "completely generated or significantly edited with AI." However, because the White House TikTok includes several video clips, it’s unclear to viewers which part was created with AI.
We contacted the White House for comment but did not receive an immediate reply.
Tkachuk also made it clear he didn’t say what the video claims.
"Well, it's clearly fake because it's not my voice and not my lips moving," Tkachuk said when a reporter asked him about the White House video during a Feb. 26 press scrum in Ottawa. "So, I mean, I'm not in control of any of those accounts and, so I know that those words would never come out of my mouth. So, can't do anything about it."
The reporter asked Tkachuk, "Do you like it?" He replied, "I mean, it's not my voice, not what I was saying. So, yeah. I mean, I would never say that. That's not who I am. So, yeah, I guess I don't like that video. And ‘cause that just never would come out of my mouth."
The White House generated other controversy related to the U.S. men’s hockey team Olympic win after President Donald Trump spoke to them by phone in the locker room after the final Feb. 22 game. During the call, Trump invited the team to the State of the Union address and said that he would also have to invite the U.S. women’s hockey team (who also won the gold medal). Video of the call showed the men’s team laughing at the comment, a moment that generated criticism as being disrespectful to the women athletes’ accomplishments.
We rate the claim that Tkachuk insulted the Canadian men’s hockey team during a news conference Pants on Fire!
Mamdani wooed the president with much property talk and showed the real ‘art of the deal’ might have been soft power via Photoshop
In the hours after Zohran Mamdani met with Donald Trump for an undisclosed sit-down in the Oval Office on Thursday, a meme quickly circulated on X.
It resembled the screengrab of a TikToker who doles out dubious financial advice, but instead had the mayor’s picture front and center. On the left it read “I receive 12,000 homes” and “the release of a constituent kidnapped by ICE” and on the right “you receive fake newspaper cover”.
Continue reading...Ifab expected to adopt changes at meeting this weekend
MLS added timed sub, off-field treatment rules in 2024
New rules could make for faster play at the World Cup
Four years ago, MLS Next Pro implemented a pair of rules geared towards eliminating time-wasting. Now, just months ahead of the 2026 World Cup, MLS’s experimentation is set to be adopted globally. The International Football Association Board (Ifab), the sport’s rule-making body, is set to meet this weekend and is widely expected to adopt both changes.
The first of the two, commonly referred to as the timed substitution rule, forces a team to play a man down for a minute if a player takes longer than 10 seconds to leave the pitch. The second of the guidelines, dubbed the off-field treatment rule, removes a player from the match for a minute if they spend more than 15 seconds on the ground after an injury.
Continue reading...Tehran’s ICBMs cannot currently reach the US, experts say, and White House has claimed its nuclear programme has been destroyed
Donald Trump’s likely casus belli for an attack on Iran – which would be the largest US intervention since the Iraq war – is fraught with contradictions, and his top advisers have been left to cover for him as the White House makes the case for intervention.
In his State of the Union address this week, Trump alleged that Iran posed a direct threat to the US and that the country was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America”. But that claim has not been backed up with evidence by the White House or the Pentagon, and US intelligence reports from just last year say that it would take Iran 10 years to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the US.
Continue reading...The $200 billion video game industry is caught between studios eager to cut ballooning development costs through AI and a player base that has grown openly hostile to the technology after a string of visible blunders. As Bloomberg News reports, Arc Raiders, a surprise hit from Stockholm-based Embark Studios that sold 12 million copies in three months, was briefly vilified online for its robotic-sounding auto-generated voices -- even as CEO Patrick Soderlund insists AI was only used for non-essential elements. EA's Battlefield 6 and Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 both drew gamer anger this winter over thematically mismatched or poorly generated graphics, and Valve's Steam has added labels to flag games made using AI. Some 47% of developers polled by research house Omdia said they expect generative AI to reduce game quality, and PC gamers -- now facing inflated hardware prices from AI-driven demand for graphics chips -- have turned reflexively antagonistic.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ofcom says that after provisional ruling it could apply to courts to demand internet providers stop access to site
A suicide forum linked to deaths in Britain has been ruled provisionally in breach of the Online Safety Act after it failed to properly block access to UK users when ordered to do so last year.
Ofcom, the online regulator, said it could now apply to the courts to demand internet service providers block access to the site in the UK. This will depend on how the site, which also faces fines, responds over the next 10 days.
Continue reading...Attorney general Pam Bondi says 39 people now charged over January protest and warns ‘more to come’
Federal authorities have arrested more people on Friday for their alleged involvement in a protest at a church in Minnesota in January, following earlier arrests of organizers and journalists that were demonstrating amid sweeping, and often violent, immigration enforcement efforts in the state.
Attorney general Pam Bondi said the justice department unsealed an indictment that charged 30 more people for the demonstration. Of those charged, federal agents have already arrested 25 of them, Bondi said, with “more to come”. The latest arrests bring the total number of people charged to 39.
Continue reading...The incident, which prompted the closure of airspace near Fort Hancock, Texas, occurred weeks after the use of a counter-drone laser by DHS personnel grounded flights at the El Paso airport.
 | buddy wants to get rid of the onewheel but is having some weird noises as it’s ridden. i was hoping someone would be able to help diagnose the issue. [link] [comments] |
Samsung's AI-powered visual search tool on its new phones is now dangerously good at helping me shop. RIP my bank account.
Investigation under way after vehicle ploughs into building
A tram derailed and crashed into a building in Milan on Friday, killing two people and injuring 38 others.
One of the dead was hit by the tram as it derailed while the second victim was a passenger, the city’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, told reporters at the scene.
Continue reading...Anyone with experience on fitting a larger tire on a pint?
Mortgage rates have fallen to their lowest level since 2022, and now borrowers can find even lower-cost loans, experts said.
Commentary: The features unveiled at Samsung's Unpacked event could make social media even more treacherous, especially for young adults.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to decline 12.9% year-on-year (YoY) in 2026 to 1.1 billion units, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. This decline will bring the smartphone market to its lowest annual shipment volume in more than a decade. The current forecast represents a sharp decline from our November forecast amid the intensifying memory shortage crisis.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feb. 27, 2026 — Researchers and clinicians from six leading medical centers and academic institutions — including the University of California San Diego — have collaborated to develop a new artificial intelligence model of the male urinary tract that could make prostate cancer radiation therapy more precise and help reduce side effects, such as urinary complications.
Side‑by‑side MRI images show how an AI system outlines the urethra compared with outlines drawn by a team of medical specialists. In each view (axial, coronal and sagittal), the yellow line shows the experts’ outline and the blue line shows the AI’s outline. Panel A shows one example where the AI only partly matches the expert outline, while panel B shows another example where the AI comes closer to the expert outline, especially along the edges. Credit: Yuze Song, electrical engineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego
The team used U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS allocations on the Expanse system at the UC San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences’ San Diego Supercomputer Center to construct a detailed MRI-based atlas of the urethra, the narrow tube that carries urine through the prostate. They tested this tool against a robust reference standard created by having four imaging and radiation experts reach consensus on the precise location of the urethra in scans from 71 patients.
Lead author Yuze Song, an electrical engineering doctoral student in UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, worked on the study alongside Tyler Seibert, MD, PhD, associate professor of radiation medicine and applied sciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine and radiation oncologist at UC San Diego Health, and an international team of collaborators.
“During radiation treatment for prostate cancer, it’s critical to avoid giving too much radiation to the urethra, as this can lead to serious urinary problems,” Seibert said. “On MRI scans, the urethra is tiny and often difficult to identify clearly — even for very experienced doctors. That uncertainty can lead to differences in how doctors plan radiation, potentially affecting treatment safety.”
By running their AI model on Expanse, the team automatically identified the urethra on MRI scans from all 71 patients. When tested on challenging cases, Seibert said that the AI-generated outlines could overlap the urethra anatomy, which may help reduce radiation toxicity during treatment.
“The AI system performed impressively — thanks to the power of Expanse,” Song said. “Trained on data from 11 MRI scanners across six hospitals, it produced urethra contours that were typically within about two millimeters of the expert standard — similar to or better than many human specialists. Even in the most difficult cases, the program still captured one-third of the urethra and deviated by less than three millimeters.” Song is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
If validated in future clinical trials, this approach could make prostate radiation treatment more consistent across clinics and help minimize urinary side effects for patients.
Full study details appear in Radiotherapy and Oncology.
The time on Expanse was supported by NSF ACCESS (allocation no. MDE230005).
Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch, UCSD
The post SDSC Powers AI Model to Improve Prostate Cancer Care appeared first on HPCwire.
Researchers find that across 195 US cities, winters are on average nine days shorter than they were in 1970-1997
For the millions of people across the United States who have spent the last month digging themselves out of above-average levels of snow and ice, this winter has felt especially long and harsh. But the typical winter is actually getting shorter in 80% of major US cities scrutinized by researchers, according to new data released by Climate Central, an independent climate science and communication group.
Researchers found that across 195 US cities, winters are on average nine days shorter today than they were from 1970 to 1997, as the climate crisis progresses.
Continue reading...US retailer’s decision comes as RFK Jr and Maha movement increase pressure on food industry to drop dyes like red 40
The big-box US retailer Target announced on Friday that by 31 May it will only sell breakfast cereals made without certified synthetic food colors.
The company is introducing the restriction amid increased pressure on the food industry from the Trump administration and the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement to stop using such ingredients, which they see as dangerous.
Continue reading...Feature for supervised accounts rolls out as Meta platform faces US trials over alleged harms to children
Instagram will start alerting parents if their kids repeatedly search for terms clearly associated with suicide or self-harm.
The announcement on Thursday comes as Instagram’s parent company, Meta, is in the midst of two trials over harms to children.
Continue reading...The criminal civil rights case has also ensnared journalist Don Lemon.
Darren Connor denies possession of offensive weapon in a public place without lawful authority or reasonable excuse
A man accused of entering a mosque in Manchester with an axe, a hammer and a knife also allegedly took in zip ties and a balaclava, a court has heard.
Darren Connor, 55, appeared on Friday at Manchester magistrates court, where he denied possession of an offensive weapon in a public place without lawful authority or reasonable excuse.
Continue reading...The find was made on a farmer's land in western Wales, museum Amgueddfa Cymru said.
Exclusive: memo came after Mike Huckabee’s remarks about Israel sparked alarm inside White House
The US secretary of state Marco Rubio told ambassadors in the Middle East to stop making public comments that could inflame tensions and undermine Donald Trump’s pressure on Iran to relinquish its capacity to produce a nuclear weapon, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian.
“Given rising tensions in the region, Chiefs of Mission and embassies at addressee posts must refrain from public statements, interviews, or social media activity that could in any way inflame regional audiences, prejudice sensitive political issues, or complicate US relationships,” the cable said.
Continue reading...Russian airstrikes in Kyiv, Ramadan in Gaza, Trump’s State of the Union address and snow in New York City – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Continue reading...US president accuses Tehran of failing to ‘negotiate in good faith’ over its nuclear programme
Donald Trump says he has not made a final decision on whether to launch strikes on Iran but is “not happy” with the situation and military force – including regime change – remains an option.
The remarks came at the White House on Friday after talks between the US and Iran on Tehran’s nuclear programme ended inconclusively, with a suggestion that further discussions would be held next week.
Continue reading...Hide from the heat by staying cool inside with lightning-fast internet -- here are the deals we've been eyeing this summer.
Nasa announced on Friday radical changes to its delayed Artemis III mission to land humans back on the moon, as the US space agency grapples with technical glitches and criticism that it is trying to do too much too soon. From a report: The abrupt shift in strategy was laid out by the space agency's recently confirmed administrator, Jared Isaacman. Announcing the changes on Friday, he said that Nasa would introduce at least one new moon flight before attempting to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century, in 2028. The new, more incremental approach would give the Nasa team a chance to test flight and refine its technology. As part of the changes, the Artemis II mission to fly humans around the moon this year, without landing, would also be pushed back from its latest scheduled launch on 6 March to 1 April at the earliest. "Everybody agrees this is the only way forward," Isaacman told reporters at a news conference. "I know this is how Nasa changed the world, and this is how Nasa is going to do it again."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Finding good rural broadband can be challenging, but these handpicked options offer dependable service.
Party billed it as a two-horse race with Reform but Greens’ Hannah Spencer connected with voters in a way it could not
From the outset of the Gorton and Denton byelection, Labour strategists were desperate to say the party was on course to win, but the trouncing at the hands of the Greens has made this look laughable in hindsight.
Hollie Ridley, Labour’s general secretary, sent a note to No 10 at the end of January saying it was “clearly a two-horse race” with Reform UK, and only 3% of voters were saying they would stick with the Greens.
Continue reading...Designer’s first catwalk for the brand in Milan flirts with bad taste with short, tight dresses and a diamante G-string
Demna is fashion’s dark lord of apocalyptic streetwear. Gucci is the glossy sex kitten of Milan. Put the two together, and what do you get? Sex appeal that flirts with bad taste.
At Demna’s first Gucci catwalk show, staged in Milan on Friday afternoon in front of an audience including Donatella Versace and Paris and Nicky Hilton, dresses were so short and tight that Emily Ratajkowski periodically yanked down a handful of disco-ball sequins to cover her bottom as she walked. There were lapdance-bar tinsel hair extensions, and Kate Moss in a diamante G-string. A certain sketchiness in the roll of the hips, a model who pulled his phone out of his bumbag and scrolled his way down the catwalk.
Continue reading...Two competing bills would restrict big investors from buying single-family homes, but they take different approaches.
Military reckoned ‘good’ Afghan insurgents were separate from ‘bad’ Pakistani insurgents but distinction has blurred
Days after the Taliban swept to power in 2021, Pakistan’s then spymaster appeared in Kabul on what looked to many like a victory lap. Sipping tea in the lobby of the Afghan capital’s fanciest hotel, Lt Gen Faiz Hameed told reporters: “Don’t worry, everything will be OK.”
This week it became clear just how badly Pakistan had miscalculated how it could rely on the Taliban, as Islamabad unleashed airstrikes in Afghanistan and troops from both countries fought each other on the border.
Continue reading...
After a blizzard hit New York City Feb. 22, a viral Instagram post said, in protest of the city’s inefficient snow removal, a man crafted a car entirely of snow and received a parking ticket for the sculpture.
"NYC man crafts realistic snow car — receives parking ticket from NYPD," said text on the video.
But a video and images included in the post show events that did not happen in New York or even as recently as this month. It uses images from a similar post on Facebook nearly eight years ago and a video from Lithuania in 2021. And neither posts say law enforcement issued real parking tickets.
The 2018 Facebook post was from a machinist in Canada who fooled Montreal law enforcement with a car made of snow and was issued a fake parking ticket for the prank. The sculpture was in a local snow removal zone and later cleared by sanitation workers the following day, CBS News reported at the time.
The Instagram post also used 2021 footage showing a Lithuanian couple sculpting a Ferrari out of snow and painting it to replicate a real sportscar. Donata Bugiene, who documented her husband building the Ferrari out of snow, was featured on FOX10 and Storyful.
We rate the claim that this Instagram video shows a New York City man sculpting a car out of snow False.
The latest Wi-FI standard expands bandwidth and boosts performance. Here's what it changes, and what you'll need to upgrade at home.
Leaks, rodent infestations and faulty smoke alarms are some of the housing conditions residents said they’re hoping Mayor Zohran Mamdani will help improve.
A sprawling Chinese influence operation -- accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official's use of ChatGPT -- focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. From a report: The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident's social media account taken down. The report offers one of the most vivid examples yet of how authoritarian regimes can use AI tools to document their censorship efforts. The influence operation appeared to involve hundreds of Chinese operators and thousands of fake online accounts on various social media platforms, according to OpenAI.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here:
Reform activists are “hearing Matt Goodwin has all but conceded defeat to the Greens”, the UK poll aggregator Britain Elects has posted on X.
The Green party has predicted a “seismic moment” in UK politics, with a party source telling the Press Association:
Things are feeling positive. Not wanting to get ahead of ourselves, but everything that we thought that was going to be happening looks like it’s happening … Whatever happens, I think it’s fair to say that Greens are here to stay now as a progressive voice in British politics.
Continue reading...A surprise collectible on Pokemon Day looks just like a tiny Game Boy and plays music on swappable cartridges for $70. Give us the real Game Boy again, come on.
The president’s cuts have defunded and alienated thousands of American scientists. Europe can benefit, if it makes the right offer
Donald Trump has spent much of his second term at war with science and scientists. He is cutting staff at institutions such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by a third, and has cancelled or frozen up to 8,000 federal research grants. This hasn’t just hurt individual research programmes, it has damaged America’s credibility as a reliable partner in the scientific community. It is not surprising that many researchers – one poll last year by the journal Nature gave the number of 75% – say they are considering leaving the US entirely.
However, it is one thing to express dissatisfaction, and quite another to up sticks and leave. If the UK and EU want to attract elite scientific talent, their approach must be twofold: appealing directly to scientists concerned with political interference in their research, and offering stable, ringfenced money.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...Scale of defeat to Greens has plunged party into fresh despair and again raised prospect of leadership challenge
Keir Starmer is facing an ultimatum from his own party to change direction or risk a leadership challenge within months after the Greens humiliated Labour with a historic byelection victory in Gorton and Denton.
Overturning a 13,000 Labour majority from the general election, Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and Green councillor, became the party’s fifth MP on Friday. Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin was second, just ahead of the Labour candidate, Angeliki Stogia.
Continue reading...  | Had a nose dive the day before Thanksgiving. Drug my back foot on the ground after I came off the board. Dislocated my foot broke my tibia and fibula. I was wearing a low top skate shoes. [link] [comments] |
 | how exactly doesit work? if i have multiple onewheels, all fm, all connected to my app, same account-i just hop on another one when the battery runs out? [link] [comments] |
Celebrate the Pokemon franchise's 30th anniversary with plenty of free stuff in mainline games and mobile apps alike.
An anonymous reader shares a report: While some see AI as a tool to be used, its specific use and how it is deployed responsibly is being heavily debated online across a wide range of industries. In terms of journalistic content, and in this particular instance, reviews, review aggregator Metacritic has taken a firm stance on content published and submitted to their platform, that have been generated by artificial intelligence in some way. In a statement by co-founder Marc Doyle, sent to Gamereactor, he says this: "Metacritic has been a reputable review source for a quarter century and has maintained a rigorous vetting process when adding new publications to our slate of critics. However, in certain instances such as a publication being sold or a writing staff having turned over, problems can arise such as plagiarism, theft, or other forms of fraud including AI-generated reviews. Metacritic's policy is to never include an AI-generated critic review on Metacritic and if we discover that one has been posted, we'll remove it immediately and sever ties with that publication indefinitely pending a thorough investigation." So, what is this about specifically? Well, it's probably a sound guess, that this pertains to Videogamer's review of Resident Evil 9: Requiem, which was removed from the platform after a barrage of comments accusing the review of being AI-written, and for the author of being made up.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are some highly rated films to try, plus a look at what's new in February.
After debuting it at CES, Clicks is expanding the BlackBerry-like Communicator phone with localized options ahead of MWC 2026.
Shares in company increased over 20% as investors were encouraged by CEO’s assertion that cuts will drive profits
Fintech company Block announced that it would be laying off 4,000 of its 10,000 employees because of gains in AI productivity.
“Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Jack Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders on Thursday. “We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week.” Block is the parent company for online payment platforms such as Square and Cash App.
Continue reading...Whether you're on vacation or simply want an extra layer of home security, these smart locks will help you protect your home.
Foreign minister says 272 Ghanaians are thought to have been drawn into battle since 2022, after he visited Kyiv
At least 55 Ghanaians have been killed in Russia’s war with Ukraine after being “lured into battle”, Ghana’s foreign minister has said after a visit to Kyiv in which officials raised the issue of Russian recruitment of African people.
Reports of African men being attracted to Russia by promises of jobs and ending up on Ukraine’s frontlines have become more frequent in recent months, creating tensions between Moscow and some of the countries involved.
Continue reading...The Pokemon Company announced its first mainline games exclusively for the Switch 2, coming in 2027.
US and Israel attack Iran, killing Khamenei. Tehran launches counterstrikes: Early analysis from Chatham House experts Expert comment jon.wallace
What do the attacks mean for the regime after the death of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? How will they affect ordinary Iranians, and the region? And what does President Trump hope to achieve? Chatham House experts provide insights.
The United States and Israel launched multiple air strikes across Iran on Saturday 28 February, striking multiple targets and killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Here is early analysis from Chatham House experts.
There is no doubt that we are at a critical moment, one that will reshape the region and profoundly affect Iran itself. The Iranian people will bear the greatest cost.
For Tehran, this is not a short twelve-day war or a contained round of escalation that can be paused and reset. This new stage of conflict is existential and clearly about regime survival. It is also unlikely to end quickly.
President Donald Trump campaigned against regime change wars and was sharply critical of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As recently as his Gulf visit in May 2025 he promised that those days were over.
Yet what we are seeing now suggests something far more ambitious than coercive diplomacy. Trump has framed this confrontation as the culmination of a 47-year adversarial relationship between the US and Iran, dating back to 1979, arguing that the Islamic Republic has consistently undermined US interests and destabilized the region. These strikes are intended to do more than bring Tehran back to the negotiating table. Trump appears to be attempting to redefine the terms of that 47-year conflict and secure his place in history by trying to resolve it decisively.
The US and Israel have targeted nuclear facilities, ballistic missile infrastructure and radar installations, alongside specific strikes on leadership compounds and elements of Iran’s military command structure.
This is not limited to degrading capabilities at the margins. It is a direct blow to the state’s security architecture and governing apparatus. The parallel with the 2003 Iraq war is difficult to ignore. That war demonstrated that collapsing or attempting to collapse a regime is far easier than shaping what follows.
Khamenei’s death will be accompanied by temporary constitutional succession plans that are necessary to project continuity, even if continuity is anything but clear.
It is no surprise that people are cheering and celebrating the death of the longest-serving regional autocrat. He is single-handedly responsible for stubbornly clinging to his ideology and resistance, leading the regime into countless poor decisions. and choosing time and again to massacre his own people.
Trump has spoken about freedom for the Iranian people. That is a powerful message rhetorically, but it is difficult to see how genuine political transformation develops under conditions of sustained war, chaos and potential fragmentation.
External military pressure may weaken a regime, but it does not automatically build a viable alternative. Even if such an outcome benefits Israel strategically by removing a hostile government, it does not mean the immediate result for Iranians will be stability or something better. The space between regime collapse and democratic consolidation is historically the most dangerous phase.
Iran, moreover, is not Iraq in 2003. It has more cohesive state institutions, a deeply embedded ideological structure and regional networks that extend well beyond its borders.
Even if parts of its leadership and command structure are degraded, the Islamic Republic has experience regenerating under pressure. While talks were ongoing, Tehran was simultaneously preparing for this contingency. Its response came within four hours of the first strikes, suggesting pre-planning and coordination.
Strikes across Israel and against Gulf states indicate a deliberate decision to externalize the conflict rather than absorb the blows quietly.
From the regime’s perspective, if survival is at stake, there is little incentive to keep the confrontation geographically contained. Expanding the theatre raises costs for US partners, and signals that any attempt to dismantle the system will reverberate across the region. There is also a real possibility that Iran’s allies, including the Houthis and perhaps others within Iran’s broader network, will be drawn in more directly.
You don’t do regime change from the air.
The ayatollah was the main character of a theocratic, repressive and brutal regime that yearned for nuclear power, but he was not the only character. At best, there’s a very confused picture. There are many people still defending the regime.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are a real military-industrial complex running much of the economy, and one of them could end up in charge.
One thing I think that has become clear to us is that intelligence, probably Israeli intelligence, is right through the country.
It’s also a question of how many targeted assassinations there are taking out the whole leadership of the regime - and how much the regime is weakened at this point. But it’s very hard to get from where we are now to a vision of democracy or where Iranians can choose.
Risk of protest
I’m afraid we’re heading for a very messy picture which is of enormous risk to those who want to come out and protest.
President Trump talked about Iran’s protesters. But the protesters already feel betrayed. Tens of thousands were shot in the wave of demonstrations earlier this year, and they do not want to come out again. Trump saying weeks ago that ‘help is on its way’ was not enough to save them. And they still lack a leader.
The best-case scenario is that the protesters begin to come out again, on the streets, they find that they are not shot down, they begin to produce leaders or a leader and realise that they can actually change the regime.
The worst-case scenario is that the Revolutionary Guard still show themselves to be very much in control of the country, that they continue to hit other countries around, which not only destabilizes the region but encourages Arab countries to pull away from the US, and pull away from any talks about stabilizing Gaza and the West Bank.
Objectives
The risk is that the US already has multiple stated objectives – ending Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, missiles, and supporting Iranian protesters. That is a recipe for confusion.
Iran’s neighbours and the Gulf states will be very uncomfortable at the strikes on them, presumably from Iran, this morning. Iran is trying to make them look complicit with the US in the eyes of their populations.
I don’t think it’s realistic to see an all-out war, because so many countries don’t want it but a destabilization and the Gulf and Saudi Arabia pulling away from the US, I think that is likely.
This has the makings of the kind of enduring conflict that Trump said he didn’t want.
UK policy
The UK government is taking what is an inevitable position. and a defensible one. Which is to be arms-length from the US. To say: we, Britain, are going to stick to the rule of law. And this is very much what the UK did over Venezuela as well: to say that we might welcome the ends of what has been achieved, but we don’t embrace the means of that.
And this is part of the gradual distancing that you are beginning to see in parts of UK policy. I think, easily mocked as it is, to say: ‘come on, go on one side or the other’ – this is where the UK is going to have to find a path.
We can’t tell what the next stage of this crisis will bring, but two facts are crucial to understand Iranian decisions.
First, the regime was ready for this. Plans for succession, delegation of command, and interim leadership were in place both in the military and in the political hierarchies. And second, that this is all about regime survival: indeed, given the way the conflict has been framed by both sides, survival equals victory.
Seen through that lens, lashing out at other regional states as well as Israel makes total sense.
Iran is seeking the pain points that drive a wedge between Gulf states and the US, and has realised that, perhaps even more than their traditional threat to hydrocarbon exports, destabilising those countries as investment, business and tourism destinations touches a crucial nerve. Iran’s recent rapprochement with Saudi and UAE as well as more longstanding partners like Qatar has been valuable - but is less so than regime survival.
Meanwhile, it seems from a number of sources that the Basij have been mobilised in force to prevent any major public demonstrations.
Unless we see any signs of defections from those loyalist security forces, there may be little scope for public pressure to seriously threaten the regime.
What we may see, though, now that Khamenei is dead, is an intensification of the jockeying for position that was happening even before these attacks. This depends somewhat on who from the top leadership is left alive when the dust settles.
There must be some attraction for the US in opening discreet channels to figures who might steer a post-Khamenei Islamic Republic towards less antagonistic and dangerous policies - in a parallel with Venezuela.
This would not be the complete transformation that many activists and monarchists are calling for. But it would allow the US to disengage, before bringing about a total collapse of state authority and power vacuum, with responsibility for all that would follow.
President Trump has said these attacks are intended to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. After the US air strikes in June 2025, the US government said they had significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear programme.
The strikes also come at a time when several US officials have called for regime change in Iran.
The US seems to have targeted sites that either have a connection with Iran’s nuclear research, or are missile production and storage sites, seeking a further degradation of Iran’s military capabilities.
The Iranian government is already weakened after two years of on-and-off conflict escalation. But it is striking back. Israel and Qatar have reported intercepting incoming Iranian missiles. This means that even with a weakened Iranian government, there is a risk of this conflict escalating and drawing other states in.
Beyond the risk of war in the Middle East, the attack set a worrying precedent by continuing a pattern: striking when negotiations are not going as Washington would like them to. This reduces the likelihood that other states will be willing to enter into negotiations with the US in future, if there is always a risk of the US escalating to military attack.
President Trump’s declaration of war against Iran to depose the regime is a high-risk break with decades of US policy towards Tehran.
The American strategy appears wholly predicated on the untested proposition that the Iranian people will quickly rise up – a huge gamble. Should a massive revolt fail to materialize, the Trump administration will face a fork in the road: fold or double down.
In abandoning negotiations for force, the US opens an uncertain and dangerous path ahead, with grave risks for US military personnel in the ballistic missile strike zone, and US partners vulnerable to retaliation from Iranian proxies.
It is undeniable that Iran’s nuclear ambitions, stockpile of ballistic missiles, and regional militia proxies pose a threat to the United States and its partners. The Iranian regime has cultivated these tools for decades, at great cost to the Iranian people. Multilateral sanctions and periodic US strikes against Iranian proxies sought to bind Iran’s hands.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) successfully cabined Iran’s nuclear problem until the US withdrew. It was a strategy to manage symptoms versus address root causes, and – though imperfect – it prevented a risky and grinding US military entanglement.
President Trump ran on a platform of ending forever wars and bringing US troops home.
The White House National security strategy (NSS), published just two months ago, affirms that the ‘days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.’ Both accurately reflect American public attitudes, with little appetite for a war of choice in the Middle East.
The initial US military campaign appears limited to air strikes but – if the lessons from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are instructive – aerial bombardment alone is unlikely to topple a regime absent mass defections from Iran’s deeply entrenched military command.
Requirements typically include a significant commitment of ground troops, relentless diplomatic coordination among partners, and careful planning and stewardship of successor structures. These are the ingredients of nation-building that the American public has rightfully rejected.
If the past year of US foreign policy decision-making is predictive of the days ahead, Trump’s desire to project strength and ‘win’ may quickly supplant the popular mandate that brought him back to power – as well as his own strategy.
Every recent US president has tried to, finally, redirect US attention beyond the Middle East. To Asia. To the Western Hemisphere. None has succeeded.
While the Houthis are widely viewed as one of Iran’s closest remaining regional allies – particularly after the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon – it is far from certain that they will intervene militarily.
The Yemeni militia, formally known as Ansar Allah, has for years benefited from Iranian financial and military support, including assistance from elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran has helped develop the Houthis’ ballistic missile and drone capabilities, and Yemen has at times served as an arena through which Tehran could pressure its regional adversaries indirectly while claiming deniability.
However unlike Hezbollah, which openly embraces its ideological and organizational ties to Tehran, the Houthis have historically been sensitive to accusations that they are merely an Iranian proxy even if that – throughout the years – proved to be true.
Yemen does not offer Iran the same theological, social, or political depth that exists in parts of Lebanon or Iraq. On the contrary, suspicion of ‘Persian’ influence has deep historical roots in Yemen. With the exception of a limited ideological circle within the Houthis, overt identification with Iran remains unpopular. This explains why Houthi leaders have often denied or downplayed the extent of their relationship with Tehran, and have reacted sharply when they are labeled an Iranian tool.
Domestic calculation therefore remains central to any decision to escalate. The Houthis cannot afford to frame a war as one fought simply on behalf of Iran.
Previous attacks on Israel and on Red Sea shipping were justified internally through the lens of solidarity with the Palestinian cause – an issue that commands broad sympathy among Yemenis, including among the Houthis’ rivals. That domestic narrative provided political cover. A direct intervention in defence of Tehran would not carry the same unifying legitimacy.
Moreover, the movement is still recovering from significant US strikes last year that degraded parts of its military infrastructure. Entering a new confrontation at a moment of relative fragility would carry serious risks, particularly as the Houthis attempt to consolidate governance over territories under their control and to preserve fragile understandings with regional actors, including Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, the Houthis are not inherently risk-averse. The group has historically thrived in wartime conditions, using conflict to sustain mobilization, reinforce ideological cohesion, and postpone difficult political compromises.
War can serve its internal logic. This does not mean it will automatically intervene, but it does mean that controlled escalation remains an available instrument, especially if it can be framed as self-defence rather than solidarity.
Two factors could significantly shift the calculation. The first, and more likely, would be direct military strikes against Houthi targets. In that scenario, intervention would become less a matter of choice and more one of perceived survival.
The second concerns the residual presence of Iranian and Hezbollah-linked operatives in Yemen. In the past, personnel affiliated with the IRGC and Hezbollah have reportedly assisted in launches toward Saudi Arabia, at times pushing escalation beyond what Houthis preferred.
That footprint appears to have diminished following Hezbollah’s regional setbacks, but if those external actors retain operational influence, the risk of entanglement increases.
Should the Houthis decide to escalate, they possess meaningful leverage. They can threaten shipping through the Bab al-Mandab strait, a critical chokepoint linking the Red Sea to global trade routes. They can resume drone and missile attacks against Israel, as well as target US military facilities or Western-linked infrastructure within range.
Such actions would not fundamentally alter the balance between Washington and Tehran, but they would expand the theatre of conflict and raise economic and security costs for the US and its partners.
For now, however, it remains doubtful that the Houthis will initiate a campaign solely on Iran’s behalf. Their decision-making is shaped as much by domestic legitimacy and strategic self-preservation as by regional alignment. Unless directly drawn in, they are more likely to calibrate their involvement carefully rather than commit to open-ended escalation.
Read full analysis and commentary here:
’Iran is operating from the principle that if it goes down, it will bring down others with it.’ Bilal Y. Saab on the contest of will between Trump and Iran.
‘President Trump is making the use of force the new normal – and casting aside international law.’ Professor Marc Weller of Chatham House’s International Law Programme on how the attacks – and the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – create precedents for other countries seeking to resort to force without consideration for the rule of law.
’Depending on the war’s outcome, the Kremlin might see its already wobbly strategic architecture in the Middle East so badly undermined that it is compelled to reassess its regional calculus.’ Grégoire Roos on how the Iran war exposes the limits of Russia’s leverage in a fragmenting regional order.
Chatham House is an international affairs think-tank based in London. Our mission is to address geopolitical challenges and international problems.
Find out more about our work from our website, here.
The biggest Pokemon event of the year just wrapped up. Celebrate the series' 30th anniversary with new games, cards and a teeny tiny Game Boy.
SAN FRANCISCO and SEATTLE, Feb. 27, 2026 — OpenAI and Amazon today announced a multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate AI innovation for enterprises, startups, and end consumers around the world. Amazon will also invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met.
Partnering to Bring New Advanced AI Capabilities to Enterprises Worldwide
OpenAI and Amazon are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI’s models, which will be available through Amazon Bedrock.
Stateful developer environments are the next generation of how frontier models will be used, seamlessly enabling models to access elements like compute, memory, and identity. A Stateful Runtime Environment allows developers to keep context, remember prior work, work across software tools and data sources, and access compute. They’re designed to handle ongoing projects and workflows.
These stateful developer environments will be trained to run optimally on AWS’s infrastructure and integrated with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and infrastructure services so customers’ AI applications and agents run cohesively with the rest of their infrastructure applications running in AWS. The Stateful Runtime Environment is expected to launch in the next few months.
Bringing OpenAI’s Most Advanced Enterprise Platform to AWS Customers
AWS will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, expanding access to OpenAI’s most advanced enterprise platform as demand for AI deployment accelerates across industries.
Frontier enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents that operate across real business systems with shared context, built-in governance, and enterprise-grade security, without managing underlying infrastructure. As companies move from experimentation to production AI, Frontier makes it straightforward to integrate powerful AI into existing workflows quickly, securely, and at global scale.
OpenAI to Use Trainium Compute to Power Growing Amazon Customer Demand
OpenAI and AWS are expanding their existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over 8 years. The expansion includes OpenAI committing to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS infrastructure, which will support demand for Stateful Runtime, Frontier, and other advanced workloads. This agreement lowers the cost and improves the efficiency of producing intelligence at scale.
Under this structure, OpenAI secures long-term capacity while working with AWS to deploy purpose-built silicon alongside its broader compute ecosystem, enabling enterprises to consume intelligence on demand without managing underlying infrastructure.
This commitment spans both Trainium3 and next-generation Trainium4 chips and will power a broad range of advanced AI workloads. Trainium4, expected to begin delivery in 2027, will provide another major performance gain, including significantly higher FP4 compute performance, expanded memory bandwidth, and increased high-bandwidth memory capacity to support increasingly capable AI systems at scale.
Custom Models Available to Power Amazon’s Customer-Facing Applications
OpenAI and Amazon will collaborate to develop customized models available to Amazon developers to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications. Amazon teams will be able to tailor OpenAI models for use across AI products and agents that serve customers directly. These capabilities will complement the models already available to Amazon developers, including Amazon’s Nova family, offering another tool for teams to build and deliver at scale.
“OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. ”Combining OpenAI’s models with Amazon’s infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale.”
“We have lots of developers and companies eager to run services powered by OpenAI models on AWS, and our unique collaboration with OpenAI to provide stateful runtime environments will change what’s possible for customers building AI apps and agents,” said Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon. “We continue to be impressed with what OpenAI is building, and we’re excited not only about their choosing to go big on our custom AI silicon (Trainium), but also our opportunity to invest in the company and partnership over the long-term.”
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon.
About AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is guided by customer obsession, pace of innovation, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. By democratizing technology for nearly two decades and making cloud computing and generative AI accessible to organizations of every size and industry, AWS has built one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses in history. Millions of customers trust AWS to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and shape the future. With the most comprehensive AI capabilities and global infrastructure footprint, AWS empowers builders to turn big ideas into reality.
Source: Amazon
The post OpenAI and Amazon Announce Strategic Partnership appeared first on HPCwire.
ARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 27, 2026 – The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) has announced the completion of a research program funded by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to make control electronics for quantum hardware more compact and manufacturable. The work addresses the needs identified by QED-C members in the enabling technology roadmap, Control and Readout Electronics for Quantum Systems.
In 2022, $1.4 million in government matching funds were competitively awarded to QED-C member companies to enhance the control and readout electronics supply chain and its capabilities.
The results achieved by QED-C members Amphenol RF, Maybell Quantum Industries, Rigetti Computing, and XMA, in collaboration with NIST, demonstrate improvements in size and performance of control and readout technologies across several qubit modalities.
Amphenol RF reduced the size, weight, and loss of room-temperature control readout electronics in quantum systems while improving overall performance. This advance will enhance room-temperature control readout electronics in future quantum systems in a manufacturable package designed for production scalability.
Maybell Quantum Industries changed the design of control and readout electronics to tightly integrate passive and active devices with interconnects, shrinking the overall size. This new cable design delivers high performance in a simpler, denser, and more integrated package.
Rigetti Computing created a way to measure temperature directly on the chip alongside the qubit circuitry using nanoscale superconducting structures that are relatively straightforward to fabricate and integrate into existing manufacturing flows. This will make it easier to identify and diagnose heating issues that can degrade qubit performance.
XMA solved three bottlenecks to scaling quantum hardware: cost, footprint, and thermal impact. A new cabling solution increases channel capacity while reducing the cost and shrinking the size of this crucial infrastructure.
Companies had to be members of QED-C to participate in the sponsored R&D program. Participants’ work had to support one of four goals from the roadmap:
QED-C aims to identify gaps in enabling technologies for quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum networking. Learn more about the Control and Readout Electronics program here.
About QED-C
The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) is the world’s premier association of pioneers in the quantum technology marketplace. Members of QED-C enable the real-world application of quantum technology, and, in turn, grow a robust commercial industry and supply chain. Sitting at the intersection of tech, academia, business, entrepreneurship, and policymaking, QED-C is uniquely able to foster the collaborations the industry needs. QED-C is where experts and organizations share knowledge and collectively shape how quantum technology will grow. QED-C is managed by SRI.
Source: QED-C
The post QED-C Details Member Advances in Quantum Control Electronics from NIST-Funded Program appeared first on HPCwire.
Built with over 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, LillyPod is now online to power scientific research and supercharge the future of medicine.
Feb. 27, 2026 — Lilly this week launched the most powerful AI factory wholly owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company to help its teams make meaningful medical advancements faster, more accurately and at unprecedented scale. Dubbed LillyPod, it’s the world’s first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 systems.
LillyPod was inaugurated Wednesday at a ribbon-cutting in Indianapolis.
Powered by a DGX SuperPOD with 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, Lilly’s AI factory delivers more than 9,000 petaflops of AI performance. It was assembled in just four months.
“It’s a big day for us with the supercomputer coming on board, but it’s a day 150 years in the making,” said Diogo Rau, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Lilly. “LillyPod is a powerful symbol of who we are and why we do this work: to make life better for people around the world. We are, right here, right now, at the right moment to advance biology in a way that has just never been done before.”
Step Behind the Scenes of the LillyPod
Computational power that once required 7 million Cray supercomputers now fits inside a single NVIDIA GPU — and LillyPod contains more than 1,000 of them. This infrastructure enables Lilly’s genomics team to harness 700 terabytes of data using over 290 terabytes of high-bandwidth GPU memory.
“Computation is at the heart of biology and it is at the heart of science,” said Thomas Fuchs, senior vice president and chief AI officer at Lilly. “Being able to compute at scale is not something optional for a company like ours, it is absolutely necessary. So we are building the computational future of medicine and you see that in all areas along the pharmaceutical value chain.”
Lilly’s AI factory is set to support the large-scale training of protein diffusion models, small-molecule graph neural network models and genomics foundation models.
NVIDIA’s full-stack AI factory architecture offered with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD — including accelerated computing, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and optimized AI software — provides a secure, scalable platform for the highly regulated workflows of healthcare and life sciences.
NVIDIA Mission Control software allows Lilly to manage its DGX SuperPOD, orchestrate workloads, monitor performance and automate AI operations securely and efficiently.
The supercomputer’s nearly 5,000 connections are built with more than 1,000 pounds of fiber cables. Lilly aims for its new AI supercomputing infrastructure to run on 100% renewable electricity by 2030, using efficient liquid cooling and minimal incremental energy impact.
Advancing Foundation Models, Physical and Agentic AI
LillyPod is more than a tool — it’s a new scientific instrument that brings together proprietary data and advanced AI models.
With this foundation, Lilly teams can analyze genomes, explore billions of chemical possibilities and apply AI across clinical development and manufacturing to design better trials, optimize production and accelerate decision‑making. Together, these capabilities enable faster, more precise and more scalable creation and delivery of medicines.
“LillyPod will usher in a new era of AI-driven drug discovery,” said Tim Coleman, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Lilly. “We believe that computation is foundational to science and that Lilly patients deserve every advantage that we can give them.”
Select models will be made available through Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform that provides biotech companies with access to drug discovery models built on proprietary Lilly data generated at a cost of over $1 billion.
As the first drug discovery platform with plans to offer both Lilly models and NVIDIA BioNeMo open foundation models for healthcare and life sciences, TuneLab uses a federated learning infrastructure built on NVIDIA FLARE, which enables biotech companies to tap into powerful proprietary AI models while keeping their data private and separate from other users. As more companies participate, the models improve, benefitting all users and further expanding AI access for the biotech ecosystem.
Historically, drug discovery has been constrained by the physical limits of the wet lab. Even highly productive teams can typically analyze roughly 2,000 molecular ideas per target per year, because each experiment requires physical synthesis and testing.
“Now the supercomputer center essentially just breaks the physical limit [of the wet lab],” said Yue Wang Webster, vice president of research and development informatics at Lilly. “Now in the dry lab, you can test billions of molecule ideas at your fingertips.”
LillyPod removes this constraint by creating a computational dry lab at massive scale, where scientists can simulate and evaluate billions of molecular hypotheses in parallel before committing to physical experiments.
With its internal AI platforms, Lilly employees can also use LillyPod to build chatbots, agentic workflows and research lab agents without reinventing the wheel.
By combining science, data and compute power, Lilly and NVIDIA are breaking new ground for AI in life sciences.
“This machine is exactly how AI should be used,” said Fuchs. “It should be used for science. It should be used to lessen suffering and improve the human condition.”
More from HPCwire
Source: Rory Kelleher, NVIDIA
The post Lilly Launches LillyPod NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD for Genomics and Drug Discovery AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Feb. 27, 2026 — The participation of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) in this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) will focus on showcasing how artificial intelligence translates into solutions with real impact, thanks to the services offered by the BSC AI Factory. With advanced AI and supercomputing resources and an environment designed to drive innovation, the BSC AI Factory makes it easier for startups, small businesses, and public administrations to explore new opportunities and accelerate digital transformation with an impact across Europe.
At 4 Years From Now (4YFN), the MWC area dedicated to tech startups, BSC will present the catalog of 24 specialized services that BSC AI Factory offers to companies, organized into six strategic pillars: access to advanced supercomputing; data management services; technical consultancy; regulatory compliance in responsible AI; specialized sectoral consultancy in health, climate, and language models; and training and talent development programs.
The BSC AI Factory, one of the first established in Europe, offers comprehensive support ranging from initial maturity assessment to the deployment of scalable solutions. This approach translates scientific excellence into competitiveness, growth, and economic impact, facilitating the adoption of secure, efficient, and trustworthy AI.
Through January 2026, the BSC AI Factory provided 505 services, selected 14 strategic projects, trained 314 participants, and evaluated approximately 92 initiatives within the framework of EuroHPC, the European Union’s supercomputing initiative, thereby strengthening the European AI ecosystem. By the end of the project in March 2028, the initiative expects to assist 2,000 public and private clients and offer a total of 3,000 services.
The BSC booth at 4YFN (8.1B55, Hall 8, Fira Gran Via) will host 16 startups collaborating with the BSC AI Factory. These companies will exhibit their innovative solutions in sectors such as healthcare, quantum computing, urban intelligence, sustainability, privacy-preserving AI, and industrial automation. Additionally, on Tuesday, March 3 at 3:00 PM, a session will be held to present the BSC AI Factory service catalog and highlight open opportunities for startups, including access to incubation and acceleration spaces.
Destination Earth 2050: Journey into a Climate Future
The BSC space at 4YFN will host the interactive experience ‘Destination Earth 2050: Journey into a Climate Future’ every day of the event. This experience will offer a journey through the past and future of real climate phenomena using the Earth’s digital twin from the European initiative Destination Earth, in which BSC plays a strategic role.
In a context where climate change intensifies risks and generates increasing impacts on health, the economy, and production systems, tools such as the Destination Earth climate digital twin are essential for anticipating scenarios and planning adaptation to the changes we face.
The visualized cases clearly illustrate how climate change not only intensifies extreme weather events but also broadens their scope. One of the examples analyzed is the DANA that shook Valencia in 2024. In this case, we can see that while the storm dynamics would be similar in different climate scenarios, the intensity and affected area would grow significantly (up to 25-30%) in future conditions, covering an even larger part of eastern Spain and affecting areas of Murcia or Andalusia more intensely.
The BSC AI Factory translates this knowledge into applied fields, driving AI services to transform the complexity of climate digital twins into solutions for strategic sectors such as:
Sessions and Conferences at the Agora
The BSC space at 4YFN will also feature a prominent agenda of presentations on the impact of AI and supercomputing in areas such as health, sustainability, digital infrastructure, and the public sector. The program is complemented by sessions on talent creation, investment strategies, and educational talks.
Source: BSC
The post BSC Deploys AI at the Service of Companies at MWC appeared first on HPCwire.
WAKEFIELD, Mass., Feb. 27, 2026 — The AI-RAN Alliance has announced a major growth milestone, reaching 132 members worldwide, welcoming new Board Members including Qualcomm, SK Telecom, and Vodafone, and accelerating delivery of AI-native RAN innovation at a global scale. At MWC 2026, the Alliance will present 33 AI-driven innovation demonstrations and unveil four new industry blueprints. These will highlight how AI can be integrated into the Radio Access Network (RAN) to enhance wireless networks making them more intelligent and also demonstrate how the network will support AI applications and foster new ways of innovations.
In under two years, the Alliance has become a leading platform for software-defined and AI-native network innovation, uniting operators, technology partners, universities, and research labs worldwide. Its working groups covering AI-for-RAN, AI-and-RAN, AI-on-RAN; task group, such as Data-for-AI; and the shared labs are accelerating benchmarking, delivering reference designs researched collaboratively by industry and academia.
From Proof to Practice
The 33 demos at MWC will show how AI is now embedded across every layer of the Network, from the RAN physical layer to orchestration and edge applications.
Together, they reflect a clear shift from experimentation to AI-native RAN implementations.
Expanding Global Collaboration and Policy Alignment
The Alliance is expanding its technology and innovation collaborations globally, welcoming Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) as a new member, while advancing AI-RAN commercialization through its collaboration with South Korea’s AI Network Alliance (AINA), supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT). This collaboration aims to support the development of use cases and facilitate the contribution of trial results to the relevant AI-RAN Alliance Working Groups. It also encompasses the promotion of vendor lab tests focused on performance and efficiency.
New Industry Blueprints to Accelerate Deployment
The Alliance has released four foundational publications defining the key building blocks of AI-powered 5G and 6G networks, providing guidance for implementation. These include:
Together, these publications establish architectural foundations and operations strategies needed to transform the RAN into a multi-purpose platform, helping operators accelerate innovation from research to real-world deployment and the introduction of predictable, premium-differentiated connectivity essential for AI-native applications.
Industry Alignment, Real‑World Impact
Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, Principal Fellow of SoftBank Corp.’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology and Chair of the AI-RAN Alliance, commented: “These milestones reflect the growing recognition that AI-native RAN is no longer experimental, it is foundational to the future of wireless networks. With 132 members, active global collaborations and demonstrations, the Alliance is turning innovation into impact and accelerating the path to commercial deployment. The industry is aligning and we’re delivering partnerships that will deliver value to stakeholders worldwide.”
MWC 2026
The Alliance will make its exhibitor debut at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Hall 2 (Booth #2E45). It will run 33 multi-member AI-RAN demonstrations across the four-day event, offering insights into real-world performance improvements, energy-and-spectral-efficiency gains and automation breakthroughs across 5G-Advanced and 6G-ready AI-native networks.
For more information, visit: https://ai-ran.org.
About the AI-RAN Alliance
The AI-RAN Alliance is a global consortium accelerating the integration of artificial intelligence into Radio Access Networks. Established in 2024, the Alliance unites leading companies, researchers, and technologists to advance open, practical approaches for building AI-native wireless networks. The Alliance focuses on enabling experimentation, sharing knowledge, and real-world performance to support the next generation of mobile infrastructure.
Source: AI-RAN Alliance
The post AI-RAN Alliance Reaches Major Milestone, Showcasing Breakthrough Momentum for AI-Native Networks appeared first on HPCwire.
Feb. 27, 2026 — Welinq and Pasqal have announced the strengthening of their strategic collaboration to accelerate the development of networked quantum computing based on interconnected neutral-atom quantum processors. Building on an established collaboration and a shared neutral-atom technology stack, the two companies are now moving into a new phase of rapid implementation, tightly aligning quantum computing and quantum networking to deliver scalable, network-ready quantum architectures designed for deployment in data centers.
Credit: Welinq
This collaboration reaches a new milestone with InterQo, a €4 million, supported by the Île-de-France Region and BPI France through the i-Demo Régionalisé (France 2030) call. The project includes a bilateral industrial partnership between Pasqal and Welinq, alongside a dedicated research collaboration led by Pasqal with the group of Alexei Ourjoumtsev at Collège de France (JEIP), a leading expert in quantum optics and strong light–matter interactions.
From Individual Machines to Networked Quantum Computers
Early deployments of quantum computing resources generally depend on standalone quantum processing units (QPUs). While these machines are already demonstrating practical utility and delivering value, scaling capacity will ultimately encounter practical limits.
By allowing separate quantum processors to function as a single, more powerful computer, quantum networking fundamentally shifts how quantum resources can be deployed and scaled. In practice, quantum information is converted from qubits inside a QPU into photons – the ideal carriers of flying quantum information – and transmitted optically between processors. This optical quantum interconnect enables entanglement to be shared between qubits located on different QPUs, effectively creating a larger quantum computer with many more qubits than any individual machine could provide.
This collective operation would enable quantum computing to scale beyond the vertical scalability barriers of individual processors, currently around 10,000 physical qubits for neutral-atom systems. By networking multiple QPUs, the architecture can enable more complex quantum algorithms and support the development of large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computation.
Neutral-Atom Technologies Aligned from Computing to Networking
Pasqal and Welinq independently develop neutral-atom technologies that are natively compatible, from quantum computing to quantum networking, operating at the same optical wavelengths.
Pasqal has established itself as an industrial leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, operating two quantum manufacturing facilities in France and Canada. The company has deployed operational QPUs at major HPC centers across Europe, including CEA and Jülich, with CINECA following, as well as QPUs in Saudi Arabia and Canada. On the technology side, Pasqal is building QPU architectures which are natively compatible to work in networked configurations. This includes vacuum chamber designs that can physically integrate photonic interfaces while maintaining pristine conditions QPUs require, as well as dynamical qubit positioning, that enables flexible interface – qubit coupling for multiplexed interconnection.
Welinq develops cutting-edge quantum networking solutions designed to interconnect quantum processors at high rates. Its core innovation is a high-rate entanglement generation platform based on waveguide-QED, acting as a “quantum Ethernet port” that allows quantum processors to be directly networked and to share entanglement between them. As part of this full-stack networking approach, Welinq has also demonstrated the most powerful neutral atom–based quantum memory to date and recently announced its first commercial sale, translating laboratory breakthroughs into deployable components for data center environments.
This alignment supports a coherent approach to building quantum computer clusters that can be deployed in data centers. It also aligns with broader industrial initiatives such as Q-PLANET, a Pasqal-led European program to structure and scale the quantum technology supply chain, supported by Welinq as a partner. Together with long-standing collaborations with industrial partners such as Exail for advanced laser technologies, these initiatives establish a solid industrial foundation for quantum technologies and strengthen Europe’s position in the global quantum landscape.
InterQo: A Concrete Milestone Backed by the Paris Region
This strategic alignment now moves into concrete execution through InterQo.
“Quantum networking represents a promising pathway toward large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing,” said Loïc Henriet, CEO of Pasqal. “While we have operational QPUs deployed worldwide today, one next major scaling challenge will be connecting individual processors into networked quantum clusters. Our collaboration with Welinq through the InterQo program lays essential groundwork for this transition.”
InterQo represents a concrete step in realizing this vision. The project brings together Pasqal, Welinq, and the Collège de France in a joint research and industrial collaboration. Supported by €4 million from the Île-de-France Region and BPI France through the France 2030 program (i-Demo Régionalisé call), the work focuses on two critical challenges: designing QPUs with built-in networking capabilities and integrating efficient photon extraction systems to connect them. This effort accelerates the convergence of proven technologies toward a fully operational, network-ready quantum processor.
“Welinq is delighted to continue its successful collaboration with Pasqal,” said Tom Darras, CEO of Welinq. “By bringing neutral-atom computing and quantum networking together, we are moving another step closer to the deployment and commercialization of interconnected quantum computers within data center environments, worldwide”
Toward Production-Ready Networked Quantum Systems
This partnership positions Pasqal and Welinq to deliver networked quantum systems that integrate into existing data center infrastructure. Beyond technical milestones, this collaboration strengthens Europe’s quantum ecosystem by combining industrial deployment expertise with breakthrough networking capabilities, both developed on European soil. As quantum computing will advance toward networked, production-scale systems, the Pasqal–Welinq partnership is set to mark a key milestone, delivering the critical infrastructure required for next-generation quantum data centers, while establishing technological leadership and generating high-value employment across the French and European quantum ecosystem.
More from HPCwire
About Pasqal
Pasqal is leading the industrialization and deployment of neutral atom quantum computing, transforming Nobel Prize-winning research into real-world solutions for industry, science, and governments. Since 2019, the company has built high-performance quantum systems and cloud-ready software that tackle the world’s most complex challenges in optimization, simulation, and AI. With a truly global footprint — including teams and facilities across Europe, North America, and Asia — and backed by over $215 million from international investors, Pasqal is accelerating the adoption of robust, high-performance quantum computing.
About Welinq
Based in Paris, Welinq is pioneering in the industrialization of quantum infrastructure, offering solutions that extend beyond individual hardware components. With a full technology stack spanning software solutions for algorithm partitioning and a suite of quantum hardware, including photon pair sources, quantum memories, and qubit-photon interfaces, Welinq addresses the comprehensive needs of quantum data centers and secure networks. A spin-off from Sorbonne University, CNRS, and PSL University, Welinq was founded in 2022 by Tom Darras, Julien Laurat, and Eleni Diamanti.
Source: Welinq
The post Welinq and Pasqal Accelerate Networked Quantum Computing with Neutral-Atom Tech appeared first on HPCwire.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Feb. 27, 2026 — ASUS has announced ASUS Optimized Liquid-Cooling Solutions and a strategic partner framework designed to address the escalating thermal, power, and density challenges of next-generation AI and high-performance computing data centers.
As AI and HPC workloads push compute density and power consumption beyond the capabilities of traditional air cooling, optimized liquid-cooling solutions by ASUS will provide the critical thermal management required for the next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 system based data centers. By efficiently dissipating heat from high-performance CPUs, GPUs, and accelerator-dense racks, ASUS significantly reduces energy consumption, lowers PUE, and optimizes TCO while supporting unprecedented rack density.
ASUS Optimized Liquid-Cooling Solutions offer a comprehensive portfolio spanning direct-to-chip (D2C), in-row CDU–based cooling, and hybrid configurations, enabled through collaboration with global infrastructure leaders. Leveraging a strategic framework of partners — including Schneider and Vertiv, alongside precision components from Auras Technology, Cooler Master, and other industry leaders —ASUS provides purpose-built cooling solutions that ensure optimal stability and performance at scale. With 2,156 No. 1 SPEC CPU records and 248 No. 1 MLPerf results, ASUS continues to demonstrate leadership in real-world compute density and AI performance.
A flagship example of liquid-cooling expertise by ASUS is its recent deployment for the National Center for High-performance Computing, National Institutes of Applied Research (NCHC, NIAR) in Taiwan. The system features a dual-compute architecture, including the Nano4 NVIDIA HGX H200 cluster and NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system — Taiwan’s first fully liquid-cooled AI supercomputer deployment of this architecture.
Designed and engineered by ASUS from the ground up, the system implements direct liquid-cooling (DLC) technology to achieve an exceptional power-usage effectiveness (PUE) of just 1.18. This deployment seamlessly integrates high performance with sustainable design, demonstrating the strength of ASUS in thermal and energy management for large-scale AI infrastructure.
Join ASUS at GTC 2026
ASUS announced its participation as a Diamond Sponsor (Booth #421) at NVIDIA GTC 2026 from March 16–19 in San Jose, USA. Under the theme Trusted AI, Total Flexibility, ASUS is collaborating with NVIDIA and global infrastructure giants to showcase a robust, next-generation liquid-cooling ecosystem. Come explore with us and witness the next evolution of AI infrastructure.
About ASUS
ASUS is a global technology leader that provides the world’s most innovative and intuitive devices, components, and solutions to deliver incredible experiences that enhance the lives of people everywhere. With its team of 5,000 in-house R&D experts, the company is world-renowned for continuously reimagining today’s technologies. Consistently ranked as one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, ASUS is also committed to sustaining an incredible future. The goal is to create a net zero enterprise that helps drive the shift towards a circular economy, with a responsible supply chain creating shared value for every one of us.
Source: ASUS
The post ASUS Reveals Optimized Liquid-Cooling Solutions and Strategic Partner Framework appeared first on HPCwire.
Why Should Delaware Care?
An anti-panhandling ordinance has embroiled Delaware’s capital city in controversy for months. City Council members ultimately voted on Wednesday against the ordinance, leaving its proponents unsatisfied with the situation of people standing on street medians, and opponents pleased the city will not face potential legal challenges over its adoption.
In a more decisive vote than many anticipated, the Dover City Council voted 6-3 against an ordinance that would have banned panhandling in city road medians — a common sight in heavily traveled corridors.
The Wednesday night vote came nearly five months after City Councilman David Anderson introduced the ordinance, officially called a “Traffic, Vehicles and Pedestrian Safety” measure, which would have prohibited pedestrians from stopping and standing on street medians.
Since Anderson first presented the ordinance in late October, the proposal has faced dozens of hours of debate among council members and city residents, amendments delaying final vote, threats of legal challenge by the ACLU of Delaware, and even calls for Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings to weigh in on the measure.
Debate has gotten so tense at times that councilmembers’ spouses got involved, personal attacks were waged on social media, and residents on opposite sides of the debate hurled insults at each other across the council chamber.
City leaders discussed the proposal for more than an hour and a half on Wednesday, and 23 residents gave one last public comment before council members ultimately cast their final votes after 9 p.m.
The three council members who voted in favor of the measure — Anderson, Council President Fred Neil and Councilwoman Julia Pillsbury — cited serious traffic safety concerns and hearing support for the ordinance from their constituents as their reasons for supporting it.
“It deals with basically keeping the intersections and the medians flowing and free of those who are not using them for their intended purposes,” Anderson said at the meeting.
Anderson did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s requests for comment after the meeting about the outcome of the vote on the ordinance, an effort he has championed since the fall.
Each of the six elected officials who voted against the ordinance provided a lengthy explanation for their thought process in opting to reject the measure.
Councilman Gerald Rocha, who had expressed tentative support for the proposal at previous council meetings, said he ended up being convinced that the possible legal risks of the ordinance are too strong. Rocha also said he put a lot of stock in the opinion of State Rep. Sean Lynn (D-Dover), who wrote a letter to council opposing the ordinance.
“I didn’t hear anything that says this ordinance, if passed, is going to pass the litmus test in a lawsuit,” Rocha said at the meeting.
Councilwoman Donyale Hall, who has said in the past that she considers herself to be a swing vote on the council, said similarly that she voted against the ordinance because it isn’t in the best interest of taxpayer dollars to “welcome more legal challenge.”
A number of the more than 40 residents sitting and standing in the audience clapped and cheered as additional council members voted against the ordinance and the city clerk announced that it had failed.
Many of the same citizens who have previously spoken about the ordinance came out again ahead of Wednesday’s vote.
Speakers in favor of the ordinance characterized it as purely addressing a safety concern they encounter on a daily basis. Those against it, however, said the city is inviting a legal challenge by passing the measure, and deflecting from directing resources toward the root causes of homelessness.
Five residents spoke in favor of Anderson’s ordinance, while 19 made arguments against the proposal.
Katrina Stubbs, who said she has been homeless multiple times over the past 10 years, said she views the ordinance as separate from the homelessness issue in the city.
“Homelessness, panhandling, mental health – totally different,” Stubbs said. “This is something dealing with safety.”
Dover resident Ronald Eads, on the other hand, said he panhandles frequently on one of the road medians along U.S. Route 13 that city council members have described as a hot spot for loitering activity.
Eads, who said he solicits money to afford a motel room and food for himself and his wife, said peoples’ portrayals of panhandlers as careless and aggressive with passing cars is not accurate.
“You see a car, you don’t run out to a car,” Eads said. “We ask when we approach the cars. We’re not that stupid.”
Community activist Chelle Paul handed out to council members and attendees a packet of potential legal challenges that could stem from the ordinance, including that it leaves too much up to individual police officers’ discretion, and is difficult to enforce.
Paul said she interprets the proposed ordinance as strikingly similar to the previous state law on loitering and solicitation, which was struck down by an agreement between the ACLU and the state’s Attorney General in 2024. She questioned why City Solicitor Dan Griffith had allowed the ordinance to move forward.
Griffith responded that Paul’s research looked like she had taken the proposal and ”put it through an AI,” but said he believes the city’s ordinance to be in line with the updated bill that Jennings announced this year, rather than the previously nullified legislation.
Jared Silberglied, a lawyer for the ACLU of Delaware, wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that his organization is pleased that the city council “resoundingly defeated this proposed ordinance.”
“We are closely monitoring strikingly similar legislation proposed by the City of Wilmington and the State of Delaware, and we encourage those public bodies to follow Dover’s example,” he added.
While many of the residents who have worked for months to defeat the ordinance left the meeting pleased, council members were left to reckon with the personal insults and flared tensions stemming from the prolonged debate.
Sudler, who has been perhaps the most vocal opponent of the measure, said after the meeting he was “concerned” by how biting the attacks between council members have become. He cited comments on Facebook about legal fees his family has cost the city in a lawsuit over the city unnecessarily taking land from his family.
“I think we need to get back to being respectful of each other’s positions,” Sudler said. “When we are divided, we don’t do our best job.”
While some council members made vague mentions of the city reconsidering the ordinance in the future, Sudler said he cannot imagine that happening while he is still on council, because he has been such a staunch opponent of it.
Councilman Brian Lewis said he does not believe the city will reintroduce the ordinance, unless the Attorney General’s proposed state law is passed, and the city must begin enforcing that legislation.
Lewis agreed with Sudler that the council has escalated to a state of extreme tension over the ordinance, but he said one positive has been the increased resident turnout and engagement at meetings.
“Most council meetings have a very, very low turnout,” he said. “I’m glad people came out and voiced how they felt.”
The post Dover panhandling ordinance fails following months of controversy appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic until Friday at 5 p.m. to grant the military unresticted use of its AI technology.
Most of the student activists targeted for deportation by the Trump administration for their pro-Palestine speech have beaten back their deportation cases.
Despite being one of the most recognizable faces among the activists, however, Mahmoud Khalil still faces possible re-detention and deportation to Algeria, a country he’s never lived in.
Now, on the heels of a federal court ruling that delivered a blow to his case, Khalil is mounting a new fight in immigration court, where he is appealing his deportation order.
Earlier this month, Khalil and his legal team requested that the government move the case out of Louisiana, the conservative district where he was held for three months. The legal team asked the court to send the case back to New York, where Khalil was initially detained and where he lives with his wife, Noor Abdalla, and their 10-month-old son Dean, who was born when Khalil was incarcerated.
If they’re successful, the legal team plans to submit new evidence to show the government’s retaliation against Khalil in hopes of dismissing his deportation case, according to the February 13 motion exclusively obtained by The Intercept. The motion, filed in immigration court, lays out the inequities of how Khalil’s deportation proceedings were handled last year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.
Khalil’s attorneys hope to use a raft of government documents that have become public since his initial hearings — documents that emerged after Louisiana courts denied him access to the materials in discovery.
“This is the bare minimum that immigration courts should do, to look at the evidence,” Khalil told The Intercept. “And it’s clear by the government’s statements, by ICE and DHS conduct, that these were brought in retaliation to our freedom of speech.”
Among the documents is a newly unsealed March 2025 legal memo from the Department of Homeland Security that shows the Trump administration lacked evidence to support its case.
In addition to the documents, Khalil’s legal team drew comparisons to the cases of other student activists who have won relief from the courts. Unlike the cases of recent Tufts University graduate Rümeysa Öztürk and former Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance, the immigration judge presiding over Khalil’s case has refused to rule on whether the Trump administration unconstitutionally targeted Khalil for his activism at Columbia while he was a graduate student.
Both Öztürk and Mahdawi relied in part on a landmark ruling in a separate case that the government violated the constitutional rights of pro-Palestinian activists, including Khalil, when it detained them last year. In late January, a judge dismissed Öztürk’s deportation case and cited the September ruling. Just last week, Mahdawi beat his own deportation case after the judge said the government failed to certify the document it used to detain the activist.
“At least some part of this immigration system is still functioning fairly,” said Khalil, whose legal team hopes to add to the string of victories.
For nearly a year, the Trump administration has attempted to make an example out of Khalil as part of its harsh crackdown on advocacy for Palestinian rights. ICE agents detained Khalil last March at his New York City home and whisked him away to Louisiana.
Immigration detainees are frequently rushed to Louisiana; critics of the transfers say they serve to isolate immigrants from loved ones and communities that could aid them, and also takes advantage of more conservative judges who could be friendlier to administration positions. Yet Khalil’s attorneys said the swift nature of the transfer, flying him out of New York within several hours of his detention, was especially punitive.
At the time of his detention and transfer, the Trump administration said Khalil should be deported because his campus activism harmed U.S. foreign policy, justifying the position by conflating his advocacy for Palestine with support for Hamas and antisemitism. The government later added a charge of immigration fraud to Khalil’s case.
Khalil and his legal team have long argued the Trump administration’s case against him was never about immigration, but about silencing Israel’s critics. That argument was never considered by Judge Jamee Comans, who declined to consider Khalil’s free speech claims.
Comans also denied Khalil’s application for a waiver that would create another path toward remaining the country; usually the waiver applications are reviewed in a hearing, Khalil’s lawyers said, but Comans denied Khalil’s outright.
Comans upheld the Trump administration’s claims in the case and twice last year ordered Khalil’s deportation.
In the February 13 filing, Khalil’s attorneys said the rejection of his waiver was part of the government’s relation for protected speech, an opinion backed up by a declaration from a former immigration judge. Khalil’s legal team said it was “unprecedented” for a judge to deny a detainee the opportunity to make a case for a violation of free speech rights.
“The whole case has been an example of abnormal, from Mahmoud’s arrest until now.”
“The whole case has been an example of abnormal, from Mahmoud’s arrest until now,” said Johnny Sidonis, a head attorney on Khalil’s immigration legal team. “If this evidence had been available to us and set forth in the record immigration court, it would have affected the outcome of the case.”
In December, Comans, the Louisiana judge, was promoted to an acting assistant director position in the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Comans could not be reached for comment, but her office said it does not comment on immigration judge decisions or active cases. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)
Khalil’s lawyers now hope to make the newly unsealed Homeland Security memo a major piece of their case. Drafted the day of Khalil’s detention, the memo was unsealed by a federal court in Massachusetts in late January as a part of litigation brought by The Intercept and other news outlets. The Trump administration acknowledged in the document that it lacked evidence to support its deportation case against Khalil beyond the rarely used foreign policy grounds provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The government said in the memo that it anticipated legal blowback.
A week after Khalil’s detention and after his initial lawsuit, the government added the immigration fraud charge to the docket, accusing Khalil of leaving information about his internship for a United Nations agency and membership in a pro-Palestine Columbia group off his 2024 green card application.
The new motion in Khalil’s case accuses the government of adding the second charge because the foreign policy-related “charge would not pass constitutional muster and therefore the government needed another reason to pursue Mr. Khalil’s removal, no matter how meritless and tenuous it would be to do so, due to its retaliatory animus.”
Khalil’s legal fight is being waged in two courts: in federal court, where the adverse ruling came from on January 15, and in immigration court.
In immigration court, the Department of Homeland Security has until March 23 to file its response to Khalil’s filing at the immigration appeals board, after which the board will render its decision. And Khalil already has an ongoing case against his detention in federal court.
Last month, a panel of appeals court judges overturned a lower court’s order to release Khalil based on his First Amendment rights, saying the lower court doesn’t have jurisdiction over free speech aspects of the case. Khalil has until March 31 to appeal that ruling.
In the meantime, Khalil has remained free from detention since last June, but he seldom gone outside since the federal appeals court ruling last month. A week after the ruling, an ICE spokesperson said the Trump administration was making plans to deport Khalil to Algeria.
Planning a future with his family is bogged down in uncertainty, he said. Before signing the lease to their new apartment, the first question he asked the landlord was: “What if I break the lease prematurely?”
“I can’t buy any piece of furniture,” Khalil said, “because I could be deported any day.”
“I can’t buy any piece of furniture because I could be deported any day.”
Despite the stress of his possible deportation and security risks, Khalil has continued his advocacy for Palestinian rights and that of others to speak out, giving speeches at events and meeting with members of Congress on Capitol Hill.
He has also remained in contact with Öztürk, Mahdawi, and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri, who was also detained for his pro-Palestine advocacy, as well as Leqaa Kordia, the last person who remains jailed after participating in the Columbia protests.
For Khalil, continuing to speak out, despite security risks, is his way of showing he will not be intimidated into giving what the Trump administration wanted: his silence.
“The administration wanted to make an example out of me,” Khalil said. “And this is the way that I’m making an example of this administration.”
The post Pro-Palestine International Students Have Won in Court. Why Hasn’t Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom? appeared first on The Intercept.
NIK ANNA
Photographer
HANNAH PALIATH
Photographer
Photographers Nik Anna and Hannah Paliath capture Delaware’s game against Navy
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 what they created 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.
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...
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 4.
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.
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.
| 200:The data retrieved from this URL could not be understood as a feed. http://feeds.feedburner.com/tomdispatch/esUU?format=xml |
| 200:The feed has moved permanently to a new URL. https://www.osnews.com/files/recent.rdf → https://www.osnews.com/feed/ |
| 403:The feed has gone. https://www.mlb.com/mets/feeds/news/rss.xml |
| 200:The feed has moved permanently to a new URL. https://newsfactsnetwork.com/feed/ → https://newsfactsnetwork.com |
| The data retrieved from this URL could not be understood as a feed. |
| Feed | RSS | Last fetched | Next fetched after |
|---|---|---|---|
| 302 Onewheel on Facebook | XML | 2026-03-02 08:04 | 2026-03-02 20:04 |
| @econliberties on Twitter | XML | 2026-03-02 08:04 | 2026-03-02 20:04 |
| @rideonewheel on Twitter | XML | 2026-03-02 08:04 | 2026-03-02 20:04 |
| Arch Linux: Recent news updates | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Articles | smithsonianmag.com | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| Business | The Guardian | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Chatham House: What's New | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| CNET | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Constitution Daily | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Custom RSS Feed for The Latest | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| FA RSS | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| FactCheck.org | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Home - CBSNews.com | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| HPCwire | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| https://www.mlb.com/mets/feeds/news/rss.xml | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Kareem Takes on the News | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Lima Charlie World | XML | 2026-02-28 12:04 | 2026-03-02 12:04 |
| Linux.com | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| National | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| News Facts Network | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Onewheel -●- The Self-Balancing Electric Skateboard | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Onewheel Instagram | XML | 2026-03-02 08:04 | 2026-03-02 20:04 |
| OSnews | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| pev.dev - Latest posts | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| PolitiFact - Rulings | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| ProPublica | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| RAND: News Releases for 2023 | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| Recently Active Topics | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Slashdot | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Smart News | smithsonianmag.com | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| Spotlight Delaware | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| surfdado | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| Technology - CBSNews.com | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Technology | The Guardian | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| The Bridge | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| The Intercept | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| The RAND Blog | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| The Review | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| The Sideways Movement | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| TomDispatch - Blog | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Truth or Fiction? | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Udaily Newsletter Feed | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| Us - CBSNews.com | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| US news | The Guardian | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| USAFacts | Nonpartisan Government Data | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| VESCmann | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| wheel -●- Self-Balancing Electric Skateboards | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| World | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| World news | The Guardian | XML | 2026-03-02 12:04 | 2026-03-02 14:04 |
| www.newarkpostonline.com - RSS Results in news,news/* | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| www.newarkpostonline.com - RSS Results in regional,regional/* | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
| www.newarkpostonline.com - RSS Results in sports/college,sports/college/* | XML | 2026-03-01 16:04 | 2026-03-02 16:04 |
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/jxgjq8ncrjmg1.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/ew1sh83onjmg1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/ozx5lysx6img1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/9sovyycm9hmg1.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/xp09h5jkwgmg1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/fb53hm7j9dmg1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/ji8qg2ozo9mg1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/eup6zpbjtamg1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/p3ffb50qr3mg1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/1btx9s8ro2mg1.jpeg){kind=link}
