 | I road it through some wet areas on the way to school. Nothing too out of the normal, just wet concrete, some puddles, and a bit of mud, which it normally does just fine in. After a while it didnt wanna start again after I’d gotten off for a cross walk, and when it did get started, it through me off soon after. I suspected some sort of water damage so I opened it up, but nothin on the inside seemed to have gotten wet. Still it makes this strange incredibly faint buzzing sound near the square component nearest to the wall. Initially it seemed like it would shut off after being on for a few seconds every time I tried to turn it on, but now it seems that (at least the lights) are staying on. Should I put it back together and try to ride it? Is there anything I should check or be concerned about, or things I could do in the future to prevent this? Thanks for any and all advice, I am new to this scene. [link] [comments] |
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Chinese authorities moved to restrict state-run enterprises and government agencies from running OpenClaw AI apps on office computers, acting swiftly to defuse potential security risks after companies and consumers across China began experimenting with the agentic AI phenomenon. Government agencies and state-owned enterprises, including the largest banks, have received notices in recent days warning them against installing OpenClaw software on office devices for security reasons [...]. Several of them were instructed to notify superiors if they had already installed related apps for security checks and possible removal, some of the people said. Certain employees, including those at state-run banks and some government agencies, were banned from installing OpenClaw on office computers and also personal phones using the company's network, some of the people said. One person said the ban was also extended to the families of military personnel. Other notices stopped short of calling for an outright ban on OpenClaw software, saying only that prior approval is needed before use, the people said. The warning underscores Beijing's growing concern about OpenClaw, an agentic AI platform that requires unusually broad access to private data and can communicate externally, potentially exposing computers to external attack. [...] Despite the potential security risks, companies from Tencent to JD.com Inc. have been rolling out OpenClaw apps to try and capitalize on the groundswell of enthusiasm, while several local government agencies have declared millions of yuan in subsidies for companies that develop atop the platform. [...] Tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba, along with AI upstarts ranging from Moonshot to MiniMax, have rolled out their own tweaks of the software touting simple, one-click adoption. A slew of government agencies, in cities from Shenzhen to Wuxi, have issued notices offering multimillion-yuan subsidies to startups leveraging OpenClaw to make advances. The frenzy has helped drive up shares of AI model developer MiniMax nearly 640% since its listing just two months ago. It's now worth about $49 billion, surpassing Baidu -- once viewed as the frontrunner in Chinese AI development -- in market value. The company launched MaxClaw, an agent built on OpenClaw, in late February.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump says he'll end the war soon, when he wants to, as Iran hits 3 ships near the Strait of Hormuz and warns U.S.-linked banks will be next.
Debt settlement companies can reduce what you owe, but the fees mean the savings may be less than you expect.
Thai navy responds to attack on bulk carrier as Iran military reiterates that it ‘will not allow a single litre of oil’ through strait
Over in Senate question time, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has confirmed embassies in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv and the consulate in Dubai all physically closed in the last week.
Wong said the government’s number one priority is to “keep Australians safe at home and abroad”.
She continued:
“The dangerous and destabilising attacks by Iran put civilian lives at risk, including Australian lives.”
More than 3,200 Australians over 23 commercial flights have returned to Australia since the US and Israel attacked Iran, setting off a regional conflict and grounding thousands of international flights.
Wong criticised Nationals senators for “winding up people and stoking fear” to panic buy fuel.
The senator said:
“Petrol companies are telling us that fuel stock continues to arrive as expected and on time but there has been a large change in the pattern of demand and that is having an effect on the supply, particularly in regional communities. We have seen jerry cans coming off the shelves at Bunnings and lines at the pump.”
One of the two members of the Iranian women’s football teams provided with a humanitarian visa to stay in Australia has changed her mind and contacted the Iranian embassy, according to the country’s home affairs minister.
In Australia, people are able to change their mind, people are able to travel. So, we respect the context in which she has made that decision.
Unfortunately, in making that decision, she had been advised by her teammates and coach to contact the Iranian embassy and get collected … As a result of that, it meant that the Iranian embassy now knew the location of where everybody was.
Continue reading...The emergency oil release — the largest in the multinational organization's history — could help ease oil prices in the short term, according to analysts.
Strike on school in Minab, Iran, in which at least 175 people died was result of a ‘targeting mistake’, officials have told the New York Times
Donald Trump said that the US-Israel war in Iran will end “soon” because there is “practically nothing left to target” in a phone interview with Axios.
“Any time I want it to end, it will end,” the president told the outlet. “The war is going great. We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible, even in the original six-week period.”
Continue reading...Files released detailing former business secretary’s appointment as US ambassador, and his sacking over Epstein links
As reported by Nadeem Badshah this morning, the documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US expected to be released today will include a due diligence report by the Cabinet Office, which is believed to be two pages long.
It is likely to raise questions about Keir Starmer’s judgment, with sources saying it had warned the prime minister of the serious “reputational risk” of going ahead with Mandelson’s appointment in December 2024 given his links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
He has said, as you know that it is a little bit – it does fall into the category of too little too late, but I think they have a good, solid relationship, and hopefully they’ll be able to repair it. I go by what the president says, and the president says continuously that everybody is entitled to their point of view. But I think sometimes we detect that there’s not that feeling of gratitude.
I think the president’s position is that we do plenty for Europe, plenty for the UK, in the area of trade, in the area of defence, in the area of the support we give to Nato. And I think sometimes the response back, the reciprocity back, is a little bit lacking. I would leave it at that, OK?
Continue reading...Hi all - I have a ~5 year old "stock" GT (does have a new FM battery). Love riding it (am pretty mellow...in my 40's, experienced with surfing/snowboarding but don't want an ER room visit...). I'm a bit overwhelmed at the options for upgrades/replacements. I had FM replace the battery a few months ago (it was dead) and they also (without me asking) replaced the footpad. If I understand correctly, it was a "known issue" so they proactively replaced it. Cool of them...but: My son, who is about 100 lbs soaking wet, can't ride it anymore, as it seems he doesnt have enough weight to trigger both toe/heel sensors at the same time. If he puts a backpack with 30 lbs on, it rides fine. But obviously that's not a great long-term solution.
It also gave me trouble at the beginning, but that's abated. Seemed like a similar deal -- like it was really "stiff" / hard to trigger.
FM said that it is common for them to start out like that and to "break in" over time. But after hours of riding...still doesn't work for him.
So - I am considering buying a new footpad. Part of the reason for this is unrelated: I wear a size 14 shoe and am 6'3". I'm considering "Low Boy" footpads from FM so that I have less toe/heel sticking out.
A few questions:
1.) Are there other wide footpads I should consider? I'm open to non FM parts, but would like to avoid other changes...i.e. changing out the controller, etc. (note that the board is well outside of the warranty period). (Also note - FM "recommended" but did not require that I replace the controller. We declined to, as it was going to be hundreds of $ more)
2.) Should we expect the same kind of issues with "stiffness" and lightweight riders not being able to trigger the footpads properly?
3.) Are there any "downsides" to Low Boy footpads (other than cost, and I suppose the board is a bit wider so it might need slightly wider gaps to squeeze through....mostly just an issue for my smaller-footed son).
Howard Schultz said he and his wife will move to Florida as Washington weighs a roughly 10% annual tax on earnings over $1 million.
Amid fears the conflict will strengthen Russia, Ursula von der Leyen’s embrace of US-backed regime change already looks like a doomed strategy
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The message from Ursula von der Leyen was blunt. “Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old-world order” and needs a “more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy”. In a major foreign policy speech this week, the European Commission president said the EU would always “defend and uphold the rules-based system” but in a precarious and chaotic world, that could no longer be relied upon. On the day she spoke, missiles were raining down on Tehran and southern Iran as the war entered its 10th day, proving her point.
Reverberating around Europe, the Middle East conflict has triggered a range of responses. France is sending a dozen naval vessels to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. EU officials convened an ad-hoc summit with Middle Eastern leaders in a show of solidarity with the region. EU humanitarian aid for Lebanon is being dispatched to help 130,000 people, after at least half a million were displaced by Israeli bombs and evacuation orders.
Continue reading...WASHINGTON, March 11, 2026 — Siemens today announced it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to support the Genesis Mission, a federal initiative to modernize America’s scientific infrastructure and strengthen the translation of research into real-world deployment through advanced AI, computing, and interoperable digital systems. The Genesis Mission seeks to accelerate discovery, strengthen lab-to-industry translation, and reinforce technological leadership across critical domains.
As a global industrial technology leader, Siemens brings decades of experience in digital engineering, high-fidelity simulation, industrial AI, scientific data lifecycle management, and mission-critical infrastructure. Siemens is prepared to help provide industrial technology that aligns directly with the Genesis Mission’s goal of compressing discovery timelines and ensuring breakthroughs can scale into operational environments.
“The Genesis Mission’s goal of accelerating scientific discovery and scaling it in the real world is a perfect match for our core expertise: combining the real and the digital worlds,” said Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG. “Our leadership in industrial AI and advanced simulation is proven in national laboratories and industrial ecosystems across the United States and worldwide. We look forward to contributing these capabilities to make the Genesis Mission a success.”
Siemens’ unique expertise brings AI into the real world by uniting scientific data, physics-informed simulation, digital twins, automation systems, and secure infrastructure into a connected industrial tech stack. Rather than delivering isolated AI models or point solutions, Siemens integrates deep domain AI directly into engineering, validation, and operational workflows, enabling discoveries to be simulated, tested, validated, and deployed within the same interoperable digital environment.
“Siemens has a long history of trusted partnership with the U.S. government, supporting scientific leadership and industrial competitiveness,” said Ann Fairchild, Interim President and CEO, Siemens Corporation. “The Genesis Mission represents an immense opportunity to modernize the digital infrastructure that underpins scientific discovery and innovation. Together with DOE and partners, we can strengthen the connection between research and real-world deployment, accelerating innovation across industry and infrastructure.”
By maintaining continuity from research to deployment, Siemens’ end-to-end solutions ensure resilience and scalability across complex physical systems, helping translate breakthrough research into reliable, real-world impact across energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, and other mission-critical domains. Our integrated approach empowers the Genesis Mission to bridge the gap between advanced research and tangible impact, accelerating discovery and enabling resilient, future-ready scientific infrastructure.
Through its participation, Siemens will engage with DOE, interagency stakeholders, and private sector partners to explore collaboration on interoperable, secure, and industrial-grade digital infrastructure for science and engineering. This includes advancing AI-enabled simulation and digital twins, scientific data lifecycle governance, lab-to-deployment workflows, and the resilient physical infrastructure required to support AI-intensive research environments.
Siemens’ participation builds on its longstanding engagement with DOE and the National Laboratories, as well as its broader commitment to advancing U.S. innovation, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Siemens Government Technologies, a wholly owned but distinct operating unit for Siemens in the U.S., enables collaboration with government researchers across domains at all classification levels given its regulatory framework and certified procurement and accounting systems, with a proven track record of delivering advanced software solutions for missions of national consequence.
More from HPCwire: First Genesis Mission Supercomputers on Track to Launch by June. ‘Unprecedented’ Speed, DOE’s Darío Gil Says
About Siemens
Siemens Corporation is a U.S. subsidiary of Siemens AG, a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. The company’s purpose is to create technology to transform the everyday, for everyone. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers customers to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformations, making factories more efficient, cities more livable, and transportation more sustainable. A leader in industrial AI, Siemens leverages its deep domain know-how to apply AI – including generative AI – to real-world applications, making AI accessible and impactful for customers across diverse industries. Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a leading global medical technology provider pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere. Sustainably.
Source: Siemens
The post Siemens to Help Build AI-Ready Scientific Infrastructure as Part of DOE’s Genesis Mission appeared first on HPCwire.
Judges uphold decision to dismiss case against Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh for allegedly displaying Hezbollah flag at gig
The Kneecap rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh will not face a terrorism charge over allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag during a gig after the high court in London upheld a decision to throw out the case.
Ó hAnnaidh, 28, who performs under the name Mo Chara, had been charged with the offence for allegedly displaying the flag of the proscribed group during a performance at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town, north London, in November 2024.
Continue reading...Vibration plates are trending, but are they necessary?
Rebel group blames government for attack on residential area of M23-controlled city of Goma
Three people including a French UN aid worker have been killed in a drone attack in Goma, a spokesperson for the M23 rebel group has said.
The attack took place at about 4am on Wednesday in the upmarket residential neighbourhood of Himbi in the city, which has been under M23 occupation since January 2025.
Continue reading...Deep Engineering Collaboration on AI Factories, Powering Inference and Agentic AI, Enables Nebius to Deploy More Than 5 Gigawatts of NVIDIA Systems by End of 2030
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and AMSTERDAM, March 11, 2026 — NVIDIA and Nebius Group N.V. today announced a strategic partnership to develop and deploy the next generation of hyperscale cloud for the AI market, from AI natives to enterprises. NVIDIA will invest $2 billion in Nebius, reflecting NVIDIA’s confidence in Nebius’s business and unique depth of engineering expertise across the full AI technology stack.
Credit: Shutterstock
To help meet rapidly growing global demand for high-performance compute, the partnership deepens Nebius and NVIDIA’s relationship across the full AI technology stack, from AI factory architecture to production software, enabling Nebius to accelerate the buildout of its industry-leading, full-stack AI cloud platform.
This partnership builds upon Nebius’s ongoing deployment of NVIDIA infrastructure across its global platform, including multiple gigawatt-scale AI factories in the U.S. To enable Nebius to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2030, NVIDIA will support Nebius’s early adoption of the latest generation of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform.
Under the terms of the partnership, the companies will collaborate on:
“AI is at another inflection point — agentic AI, driving incredible compute demand and accelerating infrastructure buildout,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Nebius is building an AI cloud designed for the agentic era, fully integrated from silicon to software and powered by NVIDIA’s next-generation accelerated compute. Together, we are scaling the cloud to meet the surging global demand for intelligence.”
“Nebius has been built for AI since day one — not adapted from a general-purpose cloud, but designed for what developers actually need,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Nebius. “Now with NVIDIA, we are extending that throughout the stack — from gigawatt-scale AI factories to inference and software — as we build one of the first and largest clouds for all AI builders everywhere.”
About Nebius
Nebius, the AI cloud company, is building the full-stack platform for developers and companies to take charge of their AI future — from data and model training to production deployment. Founded on deep in-house technological expertise and operating at scale with a rapidly expanding global footprint, Nebius serves startups and enterprises building AI products, agents, and services worldwide. Nebius is listed on Nasdaq (NASDAQ: NBIS) and headquartered in Amsterdam.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA and Nebius Partner to Scale Full-Stack AI Cloud appeared first on HPCwire.
ESPOO, Finland, March 11, 2026 — IQM Quantum Computers today announced the launch of Aalto Q20 quantum computer in Finland, reinforcing its commercial leadership in the quantum industry.
The 20-qubit system, which is operational at Aalto University, is the fourth quantum computer deployed by IQM in Finland, marking a milestone in the country’s growing quantum technology ecosystem. Finland has recently been characterized as the number two global quantum cluster and is amongst the top five countries for quantum patent applications.
Ribbon cutting of the Aalto Q20 quantum computer delivered by IQM. Credit: IQM.
“When institutions like Aalto University own their quantum computers, it means their data, their IP, and their expertise stay theirs. That’s not a feature — that’s a strategic posture to enable world-class research and education. Aalto Q20 is Finland’s fourth proof point that IQM´s strategy to empower customers is a winning strategy” said Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-founder of IQM Quantum Computers.
Aalto University aims to use the quantum computer to educate future talent in quantum engineering. The advanced specifications of the systems make it one of the highest performant quantum computers deployed at a university, allowing world-class research in quantum computing.
The installation builds on IQM’s investments in education and collaboration with universities, research institutions, industry and policymakers in advancing research. Together with other offerings like IQM Academy the quantum computer installation is supporting the growing needs of the quantum ecosystem in Finland.
The Finnish quantum industry is projected to need around 3,000 new skilled employees to maintain the country’s leading position and deliver the goals laid out in the national quantum technology strategy. IQM’s deployment at Aalto directly addresses the talent gap and development.
In addition, the installation strengthens Finland’s quantum computing capabilities and expands the domestic supercomputing infrastructure. For this purpose, Aalto University is also collaborating with CSC – IT Center for Science to integrate AaltoQ20 with LUMI, one of the EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers, to provide access to a broader community of users across the European Union.
With a proven scalable deployment track record, IQM’s approach is to power local quantum ecosystems with an open and transparent hardware and software platform.
“As Finland’s fourth quantum computer, the Q20 is a show of strength for the Finnish quantum ecosystem of universities, companies, and research organizations. Q20 allows Aalto to have its own computer for researchers to easily access and students in the quantum technology major will get to use it as part of their studies, which is rare even on a global scale,” said Professor Tapio Ala-Nissilä of Department of Applied Physics at Aalto University.
More from HPCwire
About IQM Quantum Computers
IQM Quantum Computers (IQM) is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers. IQM provides both on-premises full-stack quantum computers and a cloud platform to access its systems. IQM customers include leading high-performance computing centres, research laboratories, universities, and enterprises that require full access to quantum hardware and software. IQM has over 300 employees, with headquarters in Finland and a global presence in countries including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, UK and the United States.
Source: IQM Quantum Computers
The post IQM Delivers 4th Quantum Computer in Finland, Operational at Aalto University appeared first on HPCwire.
The scary movie arrives in April.
Goal Zero's newest portable power station comes with a more durable build and additional capabilities.
I've used a lot of great wireless gaming headsets, but this pair from SteelSeries helped me stop worrying about battery life, making them worth the high price.
Experts documented murder, torture and disappearances under president Nayib Bukele’s policy targeting gangs
The draconian mass incarceration policy of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, may have led to crimes against humanity, according to a new study by legal experts.
By locking up 1.4% of the population without due process, Bukele turned El Salvador from one of Latin America’s most violent countries into one of its least violent – but at the cost of human rights and the rule of law.
Continue reading...The revival of this 90s favourite is a retro-futuristic fever dream that is first incomprehensible, then thrillingly evocative. Plus, Donald Glover’s Yoshi debut
Back in the mid-1990s, when I was a staff writer for Edge magazine, Marathon was our multiplayer shooter of choice. We all worked on Apple Macs, not PCs, so Bungie’s sci-fi opus was one of the only networked shooters we could all play together. At the end of every day, staff from magazines around the company loaded it up and played for hours (usually with Chemical Brothers or Orbital blasting from the stereo). This was the era in which video games discovered club culture – Sony employed the legendary Sheffield studio the Designers Republic to create its box art and licensed the latest dance tunes for its marketing and game soundtracks. Western developers swooned over cyberpunk anime, newly available thanks to video distributors such as Viz Media and Manga Entertainment, and the internet was emerging as a weird, wild global meeting place. It felt, for a while, as if we were living in a William Gibson novel.
I’m reminded of these things while playing the new version of Marathon, released this week by Bungie and heavily inspired by 1990s futurism. It’s now an online sci-fi extraction shooter in which players beam down to the planet Tau Ceti IV to scavenge for loot, carry out missions and potentially blast each other in the process. Its closest rival is Arc Raiders, which makes a similar use of stylised retro-futurism. In a recent Twitter exchange, Bungie’s global franchise director, Philip Asher, namechecked Sony’s Wipeout game, its Mental Wealth ads for PlayStation and its translucent Dual Shock controllers as inspirations.
Continue reading...For nearly three decades, Jim West transformed San Juan Bautista. After his shocking gun suicide, a local behavioral health agency dove in to help a community in mourning
Any other night, the small California town of San Juan Bautista is shrouded in darkness, lit only by scattered streetlights and the dim glow of a few saloons. But on the first Saturday of December, a parade lights it up. Dozens of cars wrapped in Christmas lights roll through streets that look as if they were pulled from an old western. Since its inception in the 2000s, the parade has become a tradition in this village in the foothills of the Gabilan range, just 100 miles (160km) south of San Francisco.
Anthony Botelho, a county supervisor, had never missed one. In 2018, exhausted from a trip from Arizona, he meant to stay home, until his longtime friend Jim West, the town’s mayor, convinced him otherwise.
Continue reading...Due to the volatile cocoa market, companies like Hershey are using replacement ingredients such as sugar, oil, milk and nuts
Just before Valentine’s Day, Brad Reese bought a bag of Reese’s Unwrapped Peanut Butter Creme Mini Hearts from his local convenience store in West Palm Beach, Florida. It was a brand-new product, released especially for the holiday, tagline: “We’ll never break your heart.”
Reese is a Reese’s aficionado who makes a point of trying everything the company produces. This isn’t a coincidence: he’s one of the Reeses, a grandson of HB Reese, the former Hershey dairy farmer who invented the peanut butter cup in 1928. Although he’s never worked for Reese’s or Hershey, which acquired the peanut butter cup company in 1963, Reese considers himself a custodian of HB’s legacy. He also takes an avid interest in the Hershey company and its leadership.
Continue reading...I edited photos with the original Nano Banana, the pro model and now Nano Banana 2. Here's how they stack up.
ASUS says the MacBook Neo is a "shock" to the Windows PC ecosystem. "In the past, Apple's pricing situation has always been high, so for them to release a very budget-friendly product, this is obviously a shock to the entire industry," said ASUS co-CEO S.Y. Hsu in a Tuesday earnings call. While he expects PC makers to respond, rising AI-driven memory shortages could push hardware prices higher across the industry. PCMag reports: Hsu said he believes all the PC players -- including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD -- take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. "In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product," he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year. Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop's 8GB of "unified memory," or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can't upgrade it. He also described the MacBook Neo as a "content consumption" device, similar to an iPad. "This is different from the use case of a mainstream notebook," which can handle more compute-intensive tasks, Hsu said. "How big of an impact [the MacBook Neo] will have on the PC industry will still require some time for us to observe," Hsu said while suggesting it might not gain traction among Windows PC users due to software differences. "Of course, the entire Windows PC ecosystem will push out products to compete against Apple," he added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Business lobby groups say ‘taking the risk’ of employing less-experienced workers is being avoided
British companies are struggling to afford to hire young people after a long period of rising costs that have hit profit margins and derailed recruitment plans, business leaders have said.
Rising labour costs including increases to the minimum wage and employer’s national insurance by the government have put young people at the back of the queue when employers consider recruitment, business lobby groups have told MPs.
Continue reading...Ex-peer sacked as US ambassador over Epstein links was offered £75,000, documents released by Cabinet Office show
Peter Mandelson was offered a severance payment of £75,000 after initially asking the Foreign Office to pay him more than £500,000 upon his sacking as US ambassador, newly released documents reveal.
Exchanges in the documents released by the Cabinet Office suggested that officials did “well to get this settlement down this low with minimal fuss”, after Mandelson was forced to resign as ambassador to the US because of newly disclosed details about his long friendship with the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Continue reading...Debt collectors can't drain your account without a court order, but once they have one, the rules may surprise you.
The International Energy Agency announced that it would carry out its largest-ever release of oil reserves — 400 million barrels.
About 30 U.S. service members remained hospitalized Tuesday after an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait.
March 11, 2026 — Using a tool to solve a protein’s structure, for most researchers in the world of structural biology and computational chemistry, is not unlike using the Rosetta Stone to unlock the secrets of ancient Egyptian texts. Once a protein’s structure has been discovered, or defined, one can infer crucial information about its function or, in a diseased state, its dysfunction. While researchers have been pursuing the quest of solving protein structure for decades, advancing tools and computing technologies offer a new frontier for this work.
Timeline highlighting progress toward the development of AI potentials and AQuaRef enabled by incremental quantum mechanical calculations and research. Credit: Adapted from figure by Hatice Gokan/Carnegie Mellon University.
A collaborative study recently published in Nature Communications unveiled a new computing program that offers a faster and more accurate way to determine protein structure at a new level of precision. Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), along with an international team of researchers, were a part of the effort. This tool, dubbed AI-enabled Quantum Refinement, or AQuaRef for short, uses quantum-mechanical calculations (QM) and artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the highly-accurate placement of atoms and electrons to determine a protein’s molecular structure.
This program is a part of Phenix, a comprehensive software suite that generates realistic computer models used by structural biologists around the world to solve macromolecular structures. “We’re all basically a bunch of proteins,” said Nigel Moriarty, a Berkeley Lab researcher and contributor to the recent publication. “They do so much in our bodies that detail the processes of life. Understanding their structure can give us insights into the mechanisms that cause disease in humans or produce energy in plants. All of this knowledge can lead to more effective therapeutics and bioenergy production.”
The current way of mapping a protein’s structure entails bringing together two streams of information: experimental data produced through techniques like X-ray crystallography and cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), and theoretical data that exists in a library of detailed, known protein structural information. But the current options are limited, explained Moriarty, a computational research scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division’s Phenix group. Our understanding today is limited to the chemical entities that have already been defined and doesn’t yet include meaningful noncovalent interactions, the type of attraction typically seen holding a protein in its structural form. “That’s where quantum and AI come in,” he said.
Nearly five years ago, members of the Phenix team began working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to explore how they might be able to apply their coding work to Phenix’s offerings. The collaborative approach, coupled with 15 years of incremental research, led to this breakthrough program. In addition to Moriarty, other members of the Phenix team involved in this work were Paul Adams and Billy Poon, with Pavel Afonine leading the research. AQuaRef uses machine learning (ML) tools developed at Carnegie Mellon integrated with the Phenix software to compute energy and forces for scientifically interesting proteins—making quantum-level refinement practical where it was previously impossible.
Of the 71 experiments that were tested in this study, AQuaRef produced higher quality structural information at a substantially lower computational cost while maintaining an equal or better fit to experimental data. In addition to the proof-of-concept results from this work, AQuaRef also correctly determined proton positions in DJ-1, a human protein linked to some forms of Parkinson’s Disease, the structure of which has been notoriously difficult to map. Now that the team has confirmed that quantum-level refinement of a 3D protein model structure is possible, they’re aiming to broaden the scope to include more diverse structures, such as those required for pharmaceutical drug design. And the potential impacts of this work reach far beyond human health, from better understanding the mechanisms of photosynthesis for enhanced crop productivity to mapping the proteins in plants as it relates to biofuel production.
“There is a near-infinite number of things that can benefit from a detailed understanding of these mechanisms and protein structure,” said Moriarty. “I’m excited to see how the paradigm shift that AQuaRef represents impacts the field of protein structure determination.”
This international team also included collaborators from the University of Wrocław, Poland, the University of Florida, and Pending.AI, Australia.
This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health as well as with support from the Phenix Industrial Consortium.
Source: Ashleigh Papp, Berkeley Lab
The post Berkeley Lab Team Helps Develop ‘AQuaRef’ AI-Quantum Approach for Protein Structure Modeling appeared first on HPCwire.
President Trump told FIFA representatives Tuesday that Iran is welcome to play in the World Cup tournament in the United States, officials told CBS News.
After Dee Warner, a Michigan businesswoman and mother, disappeared from her home, her family believed she has been murdered and suspected her husband Dale Warner. But without physical evidence, they knew it would be hard to prove.
Dee Warner's brother, Gregg Hardy, says he was being sarcastic when he wrote the billboard in Lenawee County, Michigan, that read "Help Dale Find Dee." Dale Warner denies he ever harmed his wife.
Bobbi Boudman’s win over Republican Dale Fincher marks 28th seat Democrats have flipped since the 2024 election
A Democrat won a special election for a state house seat in New Hampshire on Tuesday, flipping a Republican district that Donald Trump carried and marking the latest in a string of 28 Democratic upsets that could usher in a blue wave in the midterms.
Bobbi Boudman beat Republican Dale Fincher in New Hampshire’s Carroll county district 7. It was Boudman’s third try at the seat – she lost to incumbent representative Glenn Cordelli in the last two cycles by several points. Cordelli resigned from the seat after moving, leading to the special election on 10 March.
Continue reading...PM says UK would ‘be at war’ now if it were up to Tory and Reform leaders and accuses both of changing position
Keir Starmer has attacked Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage over their stance on the war in Iran, accusing both of U-turning on their support for Donald Trump.
At a raucous prime minister’s questions, Starmer accused the leader of the opposition of making the “mother of all U-turns” and furiously trying to backpedal after on Tuesday she denied calling for the UK to join the US president’s war on Iran, after previously saying Starmer should do more to “stop the people who are attacking us”.
Continue reading...TORONTO and DAEJEON, South Korea, March 11, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc., a leading photonic quantum computing company, has partnered with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), South Korea’s premier government-funded research institution, on a new two-year collaborative research project. The project is supported by a major grant from the South Korean government to advance the nation’s quantum ecosystem.
Building on the two organizations’ successful history of collaboration in quantum machine learning, the new research partnership focuses on advancing the software infrastructure required to study and execute complex algorithms for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). The collaboration aims to equip researchers with tools to identify algorithmic bottlenecks and optimize resource usage, a critical step toward enabling distributed quantum computing.
Specifically, the project seeks to advance the resource estimation capabilities within Xanadu’s PennyLane quantum programming library and its Catalyst hybrid quantum-classical compiler. These integrated tools empower researchers to predict quantum computing performance and shorten development cycles by estimating resources, such as qubit and gate counts, required for complex algorithms before they are run on hardware.
“It is vital for researchers to understand the quantum resources their algorithms require,” said Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “By developing advanced resource estimation and compiler tools in PennyLane and Catalyst, we are providing ETRI with the software capabilities needed to design next-generation algorithms that are both efficient and scalable.”
“Our goal is to develop the essential system software that will power a distributed quantum future,” said Dr. Yongsoo Hwang, Manager of the Quantum Computing Research Section at ETRI. “Xanadu’s expertise in full-stack quantum development, FTQC algorithms, and their widely adopted software tools make them an ideal partner as we work to uncover and solve the challenges of large-scale quantum application design.”
By combining Xanadu’s world-class software stack with ETRI’s deep research capabilities, the project is set to establish a robust foundation for scaling up quantum algorithms for FTQC that will serve as a cornerstone for both South Korea’s and Canada’s quantum technology sector in the years ahead.
More from HPCwire: Xanadu and AMD Accelerate Quantum Computing for Aerospace and Engineering
About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies. The Company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.
Source: Xanadu
The post Xanadu and ETRI Partner to Accelerate Fault-Tolerant Quantum Algorithm Design Using PennyLane appeared first on HPCwire.
Former US secretary of state says oil shock driven by war in Iran highlights dangers of reliance on fossil fuels
Countries must seek energy independence through renewable resources and nuclear energy for their national security, and to avoid the “choke points” of fossil fuel supply, the former US secretary of state John Kerry has warned.
The war in Iran has sent oil prices soaring, as refineries and fields have closed down in several Middle Eastern countries and many tankers are stranded in the strait of Hormuz, with economic impacts beginning to be felt around the world.
Continue reading...Richard Kahn was one of Epstein's closest associates in his final years, managing his finances and investments.
Despite rare act of multilateralism, there is no guarantee the IEA’s release of 400m barrels from reserves will depress prices
IEA poised to call for largest ever release of stockpiled oil to reduce price
How the Iran conflict could affect energy prices – video explainer
When the global economy was still in the grip of the devastating 1970s oil crises, exposing the chokehold exerted by a few important oil states, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was created, in the hope of limiting future shocks.
Almost half a century on, the IEA’s 32 members have drawn up plans to hit the emergency button, for only the fifth time in its history.
Continue reading...Members agree unanimously to release about 400m barrels amid market volatility caused by Iran war
The International Energy Agency has ordered the largest release of government oil reserves in its history to help calm the oil price shock triggered by the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
The world’s energy watchdog said its 32 members had agreed unanimously to release about 400m barrels of emergency crude, a third of the group’s total government stockpiles and more than double the IEA’s previous biggest release.
Continue reading...Alireza Salarian says Iran’s new supreme leader was lucky to survive strike that killed six of his family members
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was injured in the 28 February attack that killed six of his family members, including his father, Tehran’s ambassador to Cyprus has confirmed.
In an interview conducted at his embassy compound in Nicosia, Alireza Salarian elaborated on the circumstances in which Khamenei, 56, was injured, saying he was lucky to survive the strike, which levelled the late ayatollah’s residence.
Continue reading...The inflation data captures the period before the Iran war broke out. Since then, oil prices have surged, driving inflation fears.
Partnership expands IonQ’s UK presence, accelerates IP generation, brings IonQ’s world-class quantum networking capabilities, and its forthcoming 256-qubit system to Cambridge as well as its quantum sensing and quantum security capabilities
COLLEGE PARK, Md., March 11, 2026 — IonQ today announced a landmark agreement with the University of Cambridge to establish the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre. The collaboration is designed to accelerate quantum research commercialization, expand IonQ’s intellectual property portfolio, and deepen the company’s commitment to the United Kingdom’s quantum ecosystem.
As part of the initiative, the parties intend to deploy IonQ’s 6th-generation, chip-based, 256-qubit system on campus and provide access to IonQ’s quantum cloud, supporting advanced research and workforce development across quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. The partnership will generate significant innovation and intellectual property to be shared under established licensing terms. The structure of the agreement is designed to align academic research incentives with commercial outcomes and long-term industry impact.
“This historic agreement with Cambridge deepens IonQ’s commitment to the United Kingdom and accelerates our technology platform with novel research at one of the world’s most storied physics powerhouses,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “By establishing the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre, we are strengthening the bridge between academic discovery and commercial quantum advantage. We believe this partnership will contribute meaningfully to the UK’s commitment to advancing scalable quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security.”
“We’re proud that Cambridge is at the heart of the UK’s next computing revolution,” said Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. “This new and ambitious partnership is the first of its kind for a UK university. It’s not just a new facility for Cambridge — it’s one for the whole of the UK, and it will develop not only exciting new technologies but also the UK’s next generation of leaders in quantum science.”
The collaboration also aligns with the United Kingdom’s broader strategy to accelerate quantum innovation and commercialization. The initiative complements national efforts such as the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme, the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), and commercialization initiatives supported by Innovate UK, which aim to translate academic breakthroughs into commercial technologies. The University of Cambridge also plays a central role in the country’s quantum ecosystem, participating in four of the UK’s five national quantum technology hubs that connect leading universities, industry partners, and government laboratories. Cambridge has further emerged as a leader in quantum networking research, including development of a large-scale fiber-based testbed linking Bristol and Cambridge—one of the longest experimental quantum communication networks in the United Kingdom.
Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory—is associated with 36 physicists who won Nobel Prizes in that field, of the University’s 126 Nobel Prize laureates—remains one of the world’s leading centers for physics research. Its legendary innovators include James Clerk Maxwell who was the first Cavendish Professor of Physics and first to prove that light, electricity, and magnetism work together as “electromagnetic waves;” as well as Ernest Rutherford who discovered the architecture of the atom and is widely regarded as the “Father of Nuclear Physics.”
The new IonQ quantum center is expected to support collaborative research programs, academic engagement, talent development initiatives and industry-facing events, while creating a structured pathway for translating foundational research into commercial applications.
Research areas include quantum hardware for computing, networking, sensing, and security, and quantum applications for chemistry, materials science, optimization, security, and advanced communication protocols – all areas aligned with IonQ’s roadmap of critical quantum technologies.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the forthcoming IonQ Tempo, will be the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
Source: IonQ
The post IonQ Establishes Quantum Innovation Centre with University of Cambridge appeared first on HPCwire.
Decision to shield pro-Bolsonaro truck driver sentenced for 8 January 2023 attack could inflame Brazil election politics
Argentina has granted asylum to a Brazilian fugitive convicted for his role in 2023 pro-Bolsonaro riots – a decision that analysts say could reverberate in Brazil’s upcoming presidential election.
A week after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, took office, hundreds of people ransacked Brazil’s congress building, presidential palace and supreme court on 8 January 2023, in an attempt to overturn former president Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat. Investigators later concluded the attacks were the culmination of a broader plot aimed at staging a coup.
Continue reading...Ryan Gosling shines in the first great sci-fi movie of the year.
LOUISVILLE, Colo., March 11, 2026 — Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum computing and quantum sensing powered by neutral-atom technology, announced it has been selected to receive $3.9M in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. The funding is part of the Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry (QC3) program, which seeks to develop and apply quantum algorithms to accelerate simulations of chemistry and materials science to advance commercial energy applications ranging from superconducting power lines, advanced batteries, engineered rare earth magnets, and breakthrough catalytic systems.
Infleqtion’s QC3 project aims to discover new high-temperature superconductors and materials that conduct electricity with zero losses. Superconductors are already used in powerful electromagnets for MRI machines, but their use in the electric grid remains limited due to the need for ultra-low temperatures. Infleqtion will use its neutral atom quantum computer and a pioneering new algorithm to improve the understanding of superconductivity and discover new, previously unknown, and superconducting materials.
“The work we are doing as part of the QC3 program puts us at the forefront of one of the most consequential applications of quantum computing, unlocking the science of superconductivity to transform how the world generates and transmits energy,” said Matthew Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion. “This is yet another proof point that our neutral-atom platform is uniquely positioned to solve problems that other quantum modalities and classical computers simply cannot. It’s also the latest in a series of wins that show how we are executing across multiple fronts, from expanding our customer base to deepening our government partnerships.”
Infleqtion’s QC3 funding is in addition to the $6.2M contract the company is already executing with ARPA-E as part of the Enhancing Neutral-atom Computers for Optimizing Delivery of Energy (ENCODE) project. The ENCODE program, which includes key collaborations with Argonne National Laboratory, the National Laboratory of the Rockies, EPRI, and ComEd, is the first quantum project for the department focusing on advancing the application of quantum-enhanced computational methods to revolutionize energy grid optimization.
Infleqtion will be showcasing its portfolio of quantum technologies at the upcoming ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in San Diego, April 7-9, 2026 (Booth # 745).
More from HPCwire
About Infleqtion
Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.
Source: Infleqtion
The post Infleqtion Receives $3.9M ARPA-E Award for Quantum Computing Research appeared first on HPCwire.
Australia Institute data finds state and federal subsidies for coal, gas and oil products increased 10% in past year, growing at a faster pace than funding to NDIS
Australian federal and state government subsidies that encourage fossil fuel use and help drive the climate crisis will reach $16.3bn this year after leaping by nearly 10%, according to a new analysis.
It found federal and state governments will pay or forgo the equivalent of $31,020 each minute in 2025-26 to subsidise companies producing and using coal, gas and especially oil, mostly in the form of diesel.
Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter
Continue reading...Knowing the pricing tricks VPNs often use can help you avoid an unpleasant surprise at checkout or renewal.
Meta will begin charging advertisers a 2-5% "location fee" to offset digital services taxes imposed by several European countries, including the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Turkey. Reuters reports: The fee, for image or video ads delivered on Meta platforms including WhatsApp click-to-message campaigns and marketing messages together with ads, will apply from July 1 and will also cover other government-imposed levies. "Until now, Meta has covered these additional costs. These changes are part of Meta's ongoing effort to respond to the evolving regulatory landscape and align with industry standards," the company said in the blog. The location fees are determined by where the audience is located and not the advertisers' business location. Meta listed six countries where the fees will apply, ranging from 2% in the United Kingdom to 3% in France, Italy and Spain and 5% in Austria and Turkey.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President Trump and his allies are pushing Senate Republicans to pass an elections-related bill known as the SAVE America Act.
A vehicle crashed into a barricade near the White House on Wednesday morning, authorities said.
Effect of war on prices not reflected in data, as Trump says only ‘fools’ would think oil price shocks would be significant
US inflation stayed flat at 2.4% in February, according to government data released Wednesday that provides a snapshot of the US economy before it was thrown into a tailspin by the US-Israel conflict with Iran.
The levelling comes after prices swung last year, reaching a four-year low in April before shooting back up in September. In late fall, inflation crept down again, reaching 2.4% in January.
Continue reading...High-smoke-point cooking oils perform better under the harsh heat of an air fryer. Here are the best (and worst) varities to use.
Ravens to sign four-time Pro Bowl edge rusher
Raiders were to receive first-round picks in Crosby deal
Four-time Pro Bowl edge rusher Trey Hendrickson has reportedly agreed on a four-year, $112m contract with the Baltimore Ravens.
The contract is not yet formalized as it can’t be signed off until the start of the new league year at 4pm ET on Wednesday.
Continue reading...The company says it'll invest the money over five years to expand its networks, including a bigger push into rural satellite service.
RSPCA say animals could become ‘hidden victims’ of conflict as charities in Gulf city report being overwhelmed
Thousands of pets are being abandoned in Dubai as their owners flee the Middle East because of the Iran war, animal charities have said.
The RSPCA said pets of fleeing UK nationals could become “hidden victims” of the conflict as people who had relocated to the Gulf city scramble for an exit and struggle to bring their animals.
Continue reading...Canva's newest AI feature is all about giving creators more control over AI, not less.
Officers normally assigned to process Global Entry travelers had been reassigned to process other arriving travelers during the pause.
Two people killed in Indiana as officials warn millions from Texas to Michigan remain at risk of severe weather
A series of tornadoes hit parts of Texas, Illinois, and Indiana late Tuesday and overnight, as forecasters warn that the threat of severe weather, including flooding, will continue on Wednesday for tens of millions of people from Texas to Michigan.
At least four tornado touchdowns were reported in eastern Illinois, the National Weather Service (NWS) said, leaving a trail of damage stretching into Indiana, where at least two people were killed.
Continue reading...Gunmen from Islamic State West Africa Province overran four military bases and abducted 300 civilians, say reports
At least 65 Nigerian soldiers have been killed in jihadist raids across the country’s north-east in the last two weeks, as the west African state battles to contain one of the world’s deadliest terror groups.
On 5 and 6 March, gunmen from Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap) overran four military bases in Borno state, the epicentre of the insurgency. Nigerian daily the Punch reported that about 40 soldiers were killed in total in these attacks.
Continue reading...BOSTON and PARIS, March 11, 2026 — Alice & Bob, a leader in fault-tolerant quantum computing, will present more than a dozen research talks at the APS Global Physics Summit, demonstrating new advances in its cat-qubit architecture – a hardware-efficient approach designed to reduce the number of qubits required for fault-tolerant quantum computers.
The presentations span several key challenges in scaling quantum computers, including stabilizing cat qubits, extending their intrinsic error protection, and enabling core components of fault-tolerant computation such as high-fidelity magic-state preparation.
Researchers will also introduce new techniques to simulate large superconducting quantum systems and to validate the ultra-low logical error rates required for practical quantum computing.
Together, the results highlight progress across the full stack required to build scalable fault-tolerant quantum computers, from device physics and circuit design to quantum error correction and system verification.
The APS Global Physics Summit held March 15-20 in Denver, Colorado, brings together thousands of physicists from around the world to present new developments across all disciplines of physics, including quantum mechanics.
Further information on Alice & Bob’s APS presentations is available in the company’s blog post here. The Alice & Bob team will also be available to meet with at booth #901.
More from HPCwire
About Alice & Bob
Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has raised €130 million in funding and employs more than 200 people. Advised by Nobel Prize winning researchers, Alice & Bob specializes in cat qubits, a technology developed by the company’s founders. Demonstrating the power of its cat architecture, Alice & Bob recently showed that it could reduce the hardware requirements for building a useful large-scale quantum computer up to 200 times compared with competing approaches. For more information, visit www.alice-bob.com.
Source: Alice & Bob
The post Alice & Bob to Showcase Advances in Cat-Qubit Fault Tolerance at APS Global Physics Summit appeared first on HPCwire.
An image of the sighting showed the massive bear standing over the carcass near Yellowstone Lake.
Participation ruled out after killing of Khamenei
Trump said to have told Infantino Iran are welcome
The prospect of Iran playing at this summer’s World Cup appears remote after the country’s sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, said on Wednesday that “under no circumstances can we participate”.
Donyamali is the first Iranian government representative to address the issue of the World Cup since the United States, one of the co-hosts, began bombing the country with backing from Israel 10 days ago.
Continue reading...Workers at JBS USA to strike Monday in what will be the first labor strike in the meatpacking industry in decades
About 3,800 workers at JBS USA, the world’s largest meat producer, are set to strike on Monday in what will be the first labor strike in the industry in decades.
The walkout threatens to put further strain on US meat prices – ground beef prices soared 15% last year – and could prove a headache for the Trump administration as it struggles with poor polling on cost of living issues.
Continue reading...Some US taxpayers are refusing to pay the federal government amid ICE surges, the war with Iran and more
“I’m not paying my federal income taxes this year,” Rachel Cohen declared in a recent Instagram video that received more than 140,000 likes.
The 31-year-old lawyer in Chicago plans to put the $8,800 she owes the federal government in a high-yield savings account instead. She doesn’t want to fund wars in Iran and Gaza or immigration agents detaining her neighbors, she said.
Continue reading...By Juha Holkkola, FusionLayer Group
In the late 1990s, the DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) quietly catalyzed a revolution in digital connectivity. Before DHCP was introduced, connecting devices to a network involved manual entry of IP addresses, DNS servers, subnet masks, and gateways. Networks were fragile, prone to errors, and severely limited in scalability. The introduction of DHCP changed everything and became a game-changer for networking.
With widespread adoption across operating systems, DHCP made networking a plug-and-play experience. This fundamental change accelerated the adoption of Wi-Fi, standardized enterprise networks using DHCP-based addressing, and propelled the mobile Internet to viability. While DHCP simplified network connectivity by automating IP address assignments, it also introduced the world to the essence of effortless connectivity.
Fast forward to today, connectivity remains effortless, yet escalating threats continuously challenge digital trust. Just as DHCP revolutionized connectivity, we are primed for a transformation of equal magnitude concerning digital trust. The solution is clear: we must automate trust through Secure Zero-Touch Provisioning (SZTP).
Modern digital infrastructure, spanning cloud nodes, edge systems, IoT sensors, industrial robotics, home gateways, and AI-centered factories, necessitates robust security measures. To maintain secure environments, each device in this extensive ecosystem must autonomously verify its needs. This includes self-authentication, receiving verified firmware, installing necessary credentials, and joining orchestrated environments without human intervention, which DHCP alone cannot accomplish.
Secure Zero-Touch Provisioning (SZTP), as defined in RFC 8572, steps up to address these needs in our complex digital reality. It builds trust by automating the exchange of essential artifacts and certificates required for seamless device bootstrapping: verifying hardware identity, delivering trusted firmware and OS images, applying patches, injecting cryptographic credentials, and setting up a complete runtime environment automatically, without manual interaction.
SZTP is based on open standards, making it vendor-neutral and ideal for large-scale deployments. As digital ecosystems grow in complexity, SZTP promises a future in which AI agents can autonomously request and deploy secure infrastructure within minutes, enhancing operational efficiency and security simultaneously.
Begin by integrating SZTP in your network infrastructure. Once a device powers on, it must first establish identity through a secure channel. This is typically done using hardware-based security measures, such as a TPM (Trusted Platform Module), to provide hardware attestation.
Implement policies to verify firmware integrity. Use cryptographic signatures to ensure firmware authenticity. SZTP can fetch secure firmware and OS images from trusted repositories. For instance, create a policy that requires all devices to verify their firmware against a centralized manifest.
Devices securely receive cryptographic credentials and configuration files. Use automated scripts to distribute these credentials from a central management server. Next, deploy containerized workloads using tools such as Kubernetes to orchestrate the environment.
With SZTP, configure automated patch management systems to apply security patches and software updates. Implement CI/CD pipelines that automatically redeploy updated firmware images, ensuring devices run the latest software versions.
AI factories rely on specialized processors, such as DPUs, to offload networking, storage, and security tasks from GPUs. Linux Foundation’s OPI project has adopted SZTP as a standard initialization method for these devices.
Here’s how SZTP simplifies AI and edge cloud deployment:
SZTP serves DPUs like DHCP did for laptops, answering questions crucial to trust: “Who are you?” and “Can you be trusted?” Use open-source libraries to develop trust protocols integrated with SZTP, enhancing the security posture.
Ensure your infrastructure is secure by default. Initiate hardware attestation, verify boot components, and use automated tools to deliver secure images and deploy cryptographic credentials. Platforms like HashiCorp Vault can manage secrets during this process.
SZTP allows for defining a device’s mission by automating the deployment of OS components, runtimes, and security agents. Leverage Docker and Kubernetes to handle container runtimes and orchestration, ensuring efficient management of service mesh layers and logging telemetries.
Establish open-source client initiatives to enhance adoption. Encourage device manufacturers and OS vendors to integrate this client to promote SZTP adoption further and reduce integration complexity.
Open clients enabled DHCP to transform networking, and they will guide SZTP in defining secure, automated infrastructure’s next era for AI-enabled applications. Automate your edge and AI factory environments with SZTP, elevating digital trust to unprecedented levels.
By following these steps and leveraging SZTP technology, organizations can enhance their network security, automate deployment processes, and prepare their infrastructure for a future driven by AI and IoT.
The post Implementing Secure Zero-Touch Provisioning in AI and Edge Infrastructure appeared first on Linux.com.
LOS ANGELES, March 11, 2026 — As AI systems scale from single-rack scale up network systems to multi-rack configurations up to 1,000s of AI processors, copper interconnects have reached their limits in speed, density, and reach. Future scale-up networks require an optical architecture that delivers higher bandwidth density at lower power with maximum processor utilization. DWDM co-packaged optics is gaining traction as the inevitable architecture for scale-up, but adoption requires technical proof and a path to volume. Scintil Photonics, the developer of LEAF Light, the industry’s first single-chip DWDM laser source for AI infrastructure, today launched the LEAF Light Evaluation Kit (EVK), enabling qualified customers to validate the technology in their own environments.
Credit: Scintil Photonics
LEAF Light targets 50% power reduction over single-wavelength CPO. It reduces tail latency through simpler, lower-BER signaling without the need for heavy FEC. And it scales fiber capacity through wavelength multiplexing rather than higher baud rates, complex modulation schemes, or additional fibers, preserving power efficiency, low latency, and signal integrity at every step.
LEAF Light is the first single-chip DWDM laser source to move from lab validation into a customerfacing evaluation program. The EVK provides a standardized path from technology validation through ELSFP module integration.
The EVK is targeted for availability in Q2 2026, with early access for select qualified customers. Scintil’s $58 million Series B, with participation from NVIDIA, reflects growing alignment between AI infrastructure leaders and DWDM-based optical architectures.
At OFC 2026 (March 17–19, Los Angeles), Scintil will showcase live DWDM demonstrations, including a 16-wavelength, 100GHz configuration alongside ELSFP module integration, with EVK units on display. Private technical briefings will be available by appointment.
What the EVK Enables
The LEAF Light EVK is an evaluation system that hosts two LOSAs (Laser Optical Sub-Assemblies), each containing a LEAF Light die with fiber attachment, delivering a total of 8 fibers per EVK. Compatible with both 8- and 16-wavelength LOSAs, the platform provides a complete evaluation environment, including operating temperature control, per-laser current adjustment, and intelligent control of frequency spacing to meet stringent 200 GHz or 100 GHz grid requirements. Unique on-board feedback loops simultaneously control wavelength precision and power uniformity across all channels, finding and holding the optimal operating point without manual intervention.
In standalone mode or through a USB-connected user interface, customers can evaluate advanced intelligent features such as:
These capabilities reflect LEAF Light’s design as an intelligent laser source, with on-chip digital control and monitoring built into the architecture.
The EVK’s modular architecture supports LOSA upgradability, enabling customers to evaluate successive product variants as they become available, providing a continuous validation and integration path in the ELSFP module as network architectures evolve.
“The bottleneck in AI systems has shifted from compute to the network, and DWDM CPO will only scale if it behaves like production infrastructure,” said Matt Crowley, CEO, Scintil Photonics. “The LEAF Light EVK puts that proof in customers’ hands: wavelength lock, power control, firmware-driven controls, realtime telemetry, so teams can validate stability and latency performance under real conditions and build large AI system validation with the ELSFP module before committing to volume.”
Behind the EVK’s evaluation capabilities is a technology platform engineered for volume from the start.
“SHIP was designed to solve the precision problem that has held DWDM back: consistent wavelength accuracy across every die, using semiconductor manufacturing processes that traditional laser assembly cannot match. That precision is now validated on 200mm production lines,” said Sylvie Menezo, CTO and Founder of Scintil Photonics. “When you combine that foundation with on-chip monitoring and feedback, you have a technology platform that customers can validate today and deploy at volume through ELSFP.”
Foundry-Aligned, Roadmap-Ready
SHIP technology has been validated on Tower Semiconductor’s silicon photonics manufacturing lines, with 200mm production underway today. This foundry alignment positions the Scintil–Tower partnership for high-volume, hyperscale deployment.
The EVK is designed to validate what the ELSFP modules will deliver at product maturity: firmwaredriven controls, operational observability, and system-ready integration, all validated through customer evaluation cycles before volume commitment.
Early Access Program
The LEAF Light EVK is available through Scintil’s early access program for qualified customers. Interested organizations can request access at https://www.scintil-photonics.com/evkleaflight or schedule a meeting at OFC 2026.
Scintil executives will be available for media and analyst briefings at OFC 2026. Inquiries: isaac@omniscalemedia.com.
About Scintil Photonics
Scintil Photonics is the global leader in DWDM laser sources for AI. Using its SHIP (Scintil Heterogeneous Integrated Photonics) technology, Scintil developed LEAF Light, the world’s first singlechip DWDM laser source for high-density optical connectivity in scale-up networks. LEAF Light enables hyperscalers to meet the power, tail latency, utilization, and bandwidth demands of large-scale GPU clusters, leveraging next-generation co-packaged optics (CPO). Headquartered in Grenoble, France, with operations across North America, Scintil is built to support global needs for advanced AI infrastructure.
Source: Scintil Photonics
The post Scintil Releases DWDM Laser Source Evaluation Kit for Scale-Up AI Networks appeared first on HPCwire.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models. LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. "The idea that you're going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they're going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense," he said in an interview with WIRED. The financing, which values the startup at $3.5 billion, was co-led by investors such as Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Other notable backers include Mark Cuban, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and French billionaire and telecommunications executive Xavier Niel. AMI (pronounced like the French word for friend) aims to build "a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe," the company says in a press release. The startup says it will be global from day one, with offices in Paris, Montreal, Singapore, and New York, where LeCun will continue working as a New York University professor in addition to leading the startup. AMI will be the first commercial endeavor for LeCun since his departure from Meta in November 2025. [...] LeCun says AMI aims to work with companies in manufacturing, biomedical, robotics, and other industries that have lots of data. For example, he says AMI could build a realistic world model of an aircraft engine and work with the manufacturer to help them optimize for efficiency, minimize emissions, or ensure reliability. LeCun says AMI will release its first AI models quickly, but he's not expecting most people to take notice. The company will first work with partners such as Toyota and Samsung, and then will learn how to apply its technology more broadly. Eventually, he says, AMI intends to develop a "universal world model," which would be the basis for a generally intelligent system that could help companies regardless of what industry they work in. "It's very ambitious," he says with a smile.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LIVINGSTON, N.J., March 11, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. has announced CoreWeave Flexible Capacity Plans, including Flex Reservations and Spot, designed to match the dynamic reality of modern AI workloads. With Flex Reservations and Spot, CoreWeave enables customers to move beyond the binary choice of reserved capacity versus on-demand capacity.
While AI training cycles are often predictable, production-level inference is not. Traffic spikes and use fluctuates, forcing teams to either over-provision or risk delays. CoreWeave Flexible Capacity Plans give teams cost-efficient options for interruptible work and more control over how they run AI, enabling innovation without limitation.
“At production scale, infrastructure planning becomes as critical as deployment,” said Chen Goldberg, EVP of Product & Engineering at CoreWeave. “CoreWeave is setting the standard for the AI cloud by providing guaranteed capacity when it counts and flexible pricing when demand shifts. We’re bringing the original promise of the cloud – scale and efficiency – back to the AI pioneers pushing the limits of innovation.”
A Unified Capacity Framework for AI
CoreWeave Flexible Capacity Plans build on CoreWeave’s existing Reservations and On-Demand offerings, extending that foundation to reflect how modern AI workloads actually behave.
With the addition of Flex Reservations and Spot, CoreWeave introduces a unified capacity framework that redefines how production AI runs at scale:
This framework allows customers to reserve what’s steady, protect what must be guaranteed, and shift interruptible work — aligning cost and certainty with real demand patterns. Flexibility of this kind isn’t theoretical, it’s already shaping how customers design and scale their AI workflows.
“At inference.net, our mission is to help teams get the most from AI models,” said Ibrahim Ahmed, CTO at inference.net. “ The most powerful AI models are not generic, off-the-shelf models, they’re specialized models trained on your data, for your problem. We built custom scheduling and orchestration software so that any team can train and deploy frontier-quality specialized LLMs on underutilized GPU capacity. Spot instances from CoreWeave are key to making this possible, giving our customers access to the compute they need to bring custom models to production at a fraction of the cost.”
Flex Reservations are available to Preview through CoreWeave account teams in eligible regions and SKUs, and Spot is generally available now.
CoreWeave’s AI cloud delivers industry-leading performance and efficiency through an end-to-end technology stack optimized for modern AI workloads. CoreWeave’s technology team consistently sets new standards for performance, demonstrated by an industry-leading MLPerf benchmark for AI workloads and its position as the only AI cloud to earn the top Platinum ranking in both SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX 1.0 and 2.0, which evaluate AI cloud performance, efficiency and reliability.
About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.
Source: CoreWeave
The post CoreWeave Introduces Flexible Capacity Plans to Accelerate AI Innovation appeared first on HPCwire.
Iran’s IRGC has said it will not allow even ‘one litre’ to leave the region if US-Israeli attacks continue. Plus, how gen Z women are conquering country music
Good morning.
The US military has said it attacked and destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the strait of Hormuz amid reports that Iran has begun laying explosive devices in the narrow waterway through which about a fifth of the world’s oil passes.
What have we heard about Iran’s new supreme leader? Mojtaba Khamenei, is “safe and sound” according to Yousef Pezeshkian, the son of Iran’s president. The comments came amid speculation about supreme leader’s health and whereabouts, as he has not engaged with the public since he succeeded his late father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, three days ago.
Continue reading...A string of tornadoes touched down in multiple states as severe weather stretched from Texas to Michigan.
Cybercriminal reportedly accessed a server at the FBI’s New York field office, according to a source and DoJ documents
A foreign hacker compromised files relating to the FBI’s investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a break-in at the bureau’s New York field office three years ago, according to a source familiar with the matter and recently published justice department documents reviewed by Reuters.
The details of who accessed a server at the FBI’s New York field office, including the allegation that a foreign hacker was involved, are being reported here for the first time.
Continue reading...Investigators suspect fire was result of deliberate act after reports that someone onboard doused themselves in petrol
Police investigating a bus fire that killed at least six people in western Switzerland have said they suspect a deliberate act by a person onboard but so far have not found any evidence of a terrorist motive.
The vehicle, operated by a service that transports passengers and mail, went up in flames on Tuesday evening in Kerzers, a town of about 5,000 people about 12 miles (20km) west of the capital, Berne, in the canton of Fribourg.
Continue reading...The Miami Heat star scored the second-most points in a game in NBA history on Tuesday night. Some may question exactly how he got there
Second in points, last in ethics?
That will be the accusation against the Miami Heat and Bam Adebayo, after the big man moved into second on the NBA’s single-game scoring list with 83 points against the woeful Washington Wizards on Tuesday. Adebayo surpassed the 81 points that Kobe Bryant scored in a 2006 game and left only Wilt Chamberlain, with 100 in a game in 1962, ahead of him on the all-time list.
Continue reading...Nigeria and Ghana foreign ministers discuss security, AES countries, Boko Haram and US operations News release jon.wallace
During an event at Chatham House, HE Yusuf Tuggar and HE Samuel Ablakwa also discussed ECOWAS, West Africa-France relations, and allegations of attacks on Christian communities in the region.
Ghanaian Minister for Foreign Affairs Samuel Ablakwa and Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf Tuggar discussed West African security and peacebuilding in a packed event held at Chatham House on 9 March.
The foreign ministers took questions from the audience on West African security issues, from the withdrawal of AES countries from the ECOWAS security bloc and US airstrikes in Nigeria on Christmas day, to West African relations with France and how to combat groups like Boko Haram.
During the event, Minister Tuggar emphasized the importance of local security solutions in West Africa, saying:
‘I think what has worked in our region successfully, what we’ve been able to achieve in Sierra Leone, what we’ve been able to achieve in Liberia… bringing about peace and peacebuilding successfully… I think we have done so when we have come up with our own solutions. This is why ECOMOG was so successful. It was led by forces from the region, with the support of the United Nations, with the support of other major powers… That should be the formula.’
Addressing the role of the United States in Nigerian and regional security, he said the US should play ‘an indirect role. A supportive role as opposed to…taking a more direct approach that would see perhaps boots on the ground.’
Asked by an audience member about the nature of violence in Nigeria and the region, and the role of religion, Minister Tuggar said:
‘I’m not saying that the violence is not religious altogether. Some of it is motivated by religion. But it does not necessarily mean that there is a Christian genocide going on in Nigeria. That is false. It is incorrect…And it is not confined to Nigeria. It’s a regional problem. So that is why with framing we have to be careful.’
Minister Ablakwa, describing Ghanaians killed by terrorists in Burkina Faso, said:
‘These terrorists they didn’t ask them which religion they subscribed to. So, the point we are making is that we should be more nuanced…It is not just a simple, you know, religious matter.’ He also pointed out other drivers of violence including youth unemployment, climate change and state collapse.
Asked if the regional security bloc ECOWAS had been weakened by the withdrawal of three Sahelian ‘AES’ states (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger) Minister Ablakwa said:
‘ECOWAS is still strong’ and spoke of Ghana’s plans to increase defence spending, build the country’s first electronic warfare centre, and improve its ISR capability.
Addressing AES countries’ poor relations with France, and Ghana’s viewpoint, Minister Ablakwa said:
‘We have to admit that there is a genuine concern in francophone Africa that their relations with France will have to be reset and that there is a need for a new approach.’
He also pointed to the responsibility of the international community in delivering security:
‘Terrorism taking root is a threat to the entire global community…the challenges we face today are direct consequences of certain actions by the international community, from Afghanistan to Syria to Libya…. not having a post Gaddafi plan, how we deal with the regime change agenda in Libya. We’ve had to bear the brunt.
‘What is going on now in the Middle East is going to further aggravate the situation. As you chase out the terrorists and dismantle those cells which you don’t want close to you, they will have to relocate… Should we allow Africa to be their safe haven?’
The panel event formed part of the Chatham House Africa Programme’s ongoing work on African peace and security. The Programme will shortly launch a new project focused on regional conflict systems in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and Central Africa.
Samsung's baseline flagship is still a potent phone, but the extra $100 isn't going toward the right upgrades.
You can make a number of edits quicker and more efficiently with these AI tools.
Rita Marshall and Darlene Gilleland found a baby at Westgate Shopping Center in Ohio hours after she was born.
We tested more than 30 Wi-Fi routers at CNET Labs to find out if Wi-Fi 7 is really worth all the hype.
If it's been over five years, it may be time to upgrade your router, CNET's expert says.
CNET experts list the best iPads that suit your needs.
If you want to completely eliminate dead zones in your home, upgrading to a full-fledged mesh system is the best option.
The eruptions at Kilauea prompted closures at a national park and part of a highway because of falling glassy volcanic fragments, including ash.
Users posing as would-be school shooters find AI tools offer detailed advice on how to perpetrate violence
Popular AI chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks including bombing synagogues and assassinating politicians, with one telling a user posing as a would-be school shooter: “Happy (and safe) shooting!”
Tests of 10 chatbots carried out in the US and Ireland found that, on average, they enabled violence three-quarters of the time, and discouraged it in just 12% of cases. Some chatbots, however, including Anthropic’s Claude and Snapchat’s My AI, persistently refused to help would-be attackers.
Continue reading...The German-American dual-national brings a skillset the US could use this summer, but his international future is up in the air
Last fall, Mauricio Pochettino seemed to be set. After numerous introductions, adjustments, elevations and demotions, his 26-man USMNT squad for this summer’s World Cup had taken shape, and a late surprise inclusion seemed totally out of the realm of possibility.
Not so fast. At that same time, Noahkai Banks became a starter along FC Augsburg’s backline and he hasn’t ceded that spot over the ensuing five months. Today, it seems that if any as-yet-uncapped field player is going to crack the US squad this summer, it’s almost certain to be Banks, 19 years old and suddenly among the most promising young defenders in Europe.
Continue reading...Danish researchers whose work on effects of vaccines has been called into question are at center of US vaccine policy
New details are leading experts to fear that an “unethical” vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau is the “prototype” for studies under Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US department of health and human services (HHS) and longtime vaccine critic.
At the center of US vaccine policy is an unlikely set of Danish researchers whose work on the health effects of vaccines has been called into question. The study in Guinea-Bissau would have looked at the overall health effects of giving hepatitis B vaccines by only vaccinating half of the newborns in the study at birth despite an 18% prevalence rate in adults of the illness, which can lead to serious and sometimes fatal health consequences.
Continue reading...With a few household chemicals, you can turn your iPhone 17 Pro from orange to pink.
A look back at 60 Minutes' reporting on the deadly 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that killed nearly 20,000.
Corporate employees said Amazon’s race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and ‘more work for everyone’.
When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks.
The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”.
Continue reading...Leak of memo comes after a third of Labour Senedd members raise alarm devolution is being rolled back
Keir Starmer warned his cabinet against an “overly deferential” approach to the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish governments, according to a leaked memo.
In the document from December, obtained and published on Tuesday by Plaid Cymru, Starmer said ministers should be prepared to make spending decisions “even when devolved governments may oppose this”. It came shortly after Labour Senedd members wrote to the prime minister over concerns his administration was rolling back devolution powers.
Continue reading...  | A few months ago I hit a big dip and my pint x shut off completely. No lights and no response from the button or when plugged in. I was in denial and had it set aside for a while. I figured the issues with the battery wires that I’ve heard going around. The other day I finally got around to opening it up and they are definitely damaged where expected but not obviously severed. I’m not a stranger to electrical projects but not really sure what i need to check. I’d appreciate some direction. Also, if I need to replace parts, what are upgrade options? [link] [comments] |
Documents filed at Companies House over 2022 deal could complicate row with UK over how money will be used
Jersey authorities may be investigating whether cash raised by Roman Abramovich’s 2022 sale of Chelsea FC amounts to the proceeds of crime, according to documents filed at Companies House on Wednesday, potentially complicating a row with the UK government over how the money will be used.
Accounts for Fordstam Ltd, the company through which the billionaire Russian oligarch owned Chelsea, show that the proceeds of the sale – currently frozen and gathering interest in a Barclays Bank account – have risen to £2.4bn.
Continue reading...The Gulf states have said they're running dangerously low on missile interceptors and have asked the U.S. to expedite new supplies, CBS News previously reported.
We've tested many Android phones from Samsung and Google to OnePlus and Motorola. Here are the best ones we recommend buying.
The growing incidents, known as shark depredation, have grown common in Hawaii's coastal waters and other parts of the Pacific.
The US military says it has attacked and destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the strait of Hormuz amid reports Iran has begun laying explosive devices in the strategically vital waterway. About a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the strait, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said this week it would not allow even 'one litre of oil' to leave the region if US-Israeli attacks continued. On Tuesday, Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social that 'if Iran has put out any mines in the Hormuz strait, and we have no reports of them doing so, we want them removed, IMMEDIATELY!' Less than two hours later, the US military released unclassified footage of its attacks on mine-laying vessels
Continue reading...Australian officials say six of seven members of the Iranian women's soccer team who were granted asylum are staying but the seventh has changed her mind and will return home.
No longer Apple's MacBook entry point, the 13-inch Air is now a bit of a question mark for students, while the rest of us are probably better off with the larger Air.
On a basement court in Greenwich Village, the New York University women’s basketball team have quietly become the sport’s most improbable juggernaut
When you think of New York City basketball, certain names and places immediately come to mind. Walt Frazier, Bernard King and Patrick Ewing patrolling the Madison Square Garden cedar. Latter-day torchbearers like Stephon Marbury, Jalen Brunson, Chamique Holdsclaw and Breanna Stewart. The rich lore beyond the storied college haunts of Rose Hill Gym and Carnesecca Arena that stretches from Harlem’s Rucker Park to the Cage on West 4th Street to Dyckman Oval in Washington Heights, the blacktop domains of playground legends like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, Pee Wee Kirkland and Rafer “Skip To My Lou” Alston.
What you don’t normally think about is New York University, the downtown school better known for its academic clout, interwoven Greenwich Village campus, celebrity alumni and $5.9bn endowment than for any of its sports teams. Yet it’s here, inside a 2,000-seat basement gym tucked two floors beneath Bleecker Street, where the Violets have quietly built one of the most dominant programs in college basketball today.
Continue reading...Apple's streamer is a treasure trove of must-see TV.
Latino voters helped propel record turnout in last week's Texas Democratic primary, a trend Democrats are watching closely as they try to reclaim ground with the group and pull off an upset win in the red-leaning state's Senate contest.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The Christina School District, one of Delaware’s largest, has endured years of tensions among its top officials. But one of the chapters of that drama might have ended Tuesday when a judge dismissed a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by the district’s former superintendent against its school board.
In late 2024, the former superintendent of the Christina School District sued members of his school board, claiming they wrongfully terminated him.
On Monday, a federal judge in Delaware dismissed the claim in a scathing ruling that, in part, stated that the former superintendent, Dan Shelton, was never actually fired.
Since 2024, Shelton has been on administrative leave earning a salary of $210,043, according to the memorandum opinion from Delaware District Court Judge Colm Connolly filed on Monday.
“Nowhere in the 162 paragraphs of the hyperbolic, painfully redundant, and irrelevancy-filled complaint does Shelton ever identify an obligation in the 2020 contract or the contract extension that defendants allegedly breached,” Connolly said.
Shelton was seeking $2.7 million in damages. Then-Board President Donald Patton, then-Vice President Alethea Smith-Tucker, board member Y.F. Lou and former-board member Naveed Baqir were all named as defendants.
In his opinion, the judge noted that Shelton may bring new claims against the district but warned that his counsel should “study the basic tenets of contract law” before filing.
Shelton’s attorney, Thomas S. Neuberger, said he is reviewing the court’s opinion and has “no comment at this time.”
Patton – who was singled out in Shelton’s lawsuit as having motives “to dislike and retaliate” against him – expressed his appreciation for the judge’s decision but declined further comment until the appeal window closes.
The Christina School District declined to comment, as it “does not provide comments on personnel matters.”
The dismissal of Shelton’s lawsuit marks the latest chapter in years of acrimony impacting the highest levels of leadership at the Christina School District, which covers the greater Newark area and a part of Wilmington.
Shelton began his career as a teacher in the district before becoming superintendent of Dover’s Capital School District in 2015. He later returned to Christina as its superintendent in 2020. Two years later, he was named Delaware’s Superintendent of the Year.
By December 2023, the Christina school board extended Shelton’s contract through June, 2026.
But just months later, the board narrowly voted to suspend him without pay for three days and to rescind the one-year contract extension. The votes then highlighted the clear tensions that had emerged between Shelton and several of the elected members of the school board, particularly Patton.
Left unclear were the exact reasons for the tensions, and whether they existed the previous year when Shelton garnered the contract extension.
Still, Shelton’s lawsuit would later hint at the depth of hostility between the sides. In it, he claimed that Patton’s history as an educator “was not distinguished.” He also said that certain incidents which occurred provide various motives for him (Patton) to dislike and retaliate against” Shelton.
Two months after the school board’s majority bloc voted to rescind Shelton’s contract extension, the three other members of the board sponsored a vote to remove Patton as school board president. They also asked the board to censure Patton for what they called “abusive behavior and retaliatory actions.”
The votes ultimately failed. Afterward Patton said in an interview on DETV that he suspected Shelton had been involved. He also accused him of being racist.
A litany of controversies ensued the following month, when the Delaware Department of Justice found the school board violated the Freedom of Information Act by holding an unannounced executive session for an improper purpose. It further found the board failed to provide adequate notice in meeting agendas for votes regarding a contract rescission for Shelton, as well as for a vote of no-confidence in him.
By July 2024, the board held a nearly eight-hour-long meeting, where the majority bloc voted to remove Shelton and place him on administrative leave.
That same month, James McMackin III — whose law firm, Morris James LLP, represented the district for 41 years — told the Christina board he was stepping down from the role as soon as the board found new counsel.
The Newark Post later obtained internal board emails that showed McMackin chose to end his relationship with the school board due to what he described as “wholesale disregard of the law” under Patton.
Tensions remained high during the school board meeting that came a month after Shelton’s removal.
Items for the meeting agenda included a series of possible referrals to the Delaware commission that oversees ethics among government employees. Among those was one that sought an opinion about whether a school board member “engaged in self-dealing with the district through alternative entities.”
Ultimately, none of those referrals were discussed during the meeting.
Instead, Patton apologized to the public for “a number of things,” stating that the board should be functioning differently. Also during the meeting, members of the public called the board “an embarrassment.”
By September, Neuberger filed a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the Christina school board stop actions he claimed were defaming Shelton and violating his rights. The letter also said the board owes Shelton for lost wages, harm to his reputation, and emotional and physical distress.
Neuberger then filed the wrongful termination lawsuit on behalf of Shelton in December of 2024. At the time, Neuberger told Spotlight Delaware that warnings from the school board’s own attorney make the case a “slam dunk.”
“I’ve never had evidence from the lawyer for the other side, where he’s saying, ‘You’re violating their rights,’” he told Spotlight Delaware.
At the time, Neuberger also noted that Shelton was still technically on payroll until the end of the 2024-25 school year.
The post ‘Painfully redundant’: Judge dismisses $2.7M lawsuit brought by former Christina superintendent appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Valve is facing a new consumer class-action lawsuit two weeks after New York sued the video game company for "letting children and adults illegally gamble" with loot boxes. The new lawsuit is similar, alleging that loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 are "carefully engineered to extract money from consumers, including children, through deceptive, casino-style psychological tactics." "We believe Valve deliberately engineered its gambling platform and profited enormously from it," Steve Berman, founder and managing partner at law firm Hagens Berman, said in a press release. "Consumers played these games for entertainment, unaware that Valve had allegedly already stacked the odds against them. We intend to hold Valve accountable and put money back in the pockets of consumers." PC Gamer reports: The system is well known to anyone who's played a Valve multiplayer game: Earn a locked loot box by playing, pay $2.50 for a key, unlock it, get a digital doohickey that's sometimes worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars but far more often is worth just a few pennies. Is that gambling? If these cases go to court, we'll find out. The full complaint points out that the unlocking process is even designed to look like a slot machine: "Images of possible items scroll across the screen, spinning fast at first, then slowing to a stop on the player's 'prize.' Players buy and open loot boxes for the same reason people play slot machines -- the hope of a valuable payout." Loot boxes, the complaint continues, are not "incidental features" of Valve's games, but rather "a deliberate, carefully engineered revenue model." So too is the Steam Community Market, and Steam itself, which the suit claims is "deliberately designed" to enable the sale of digital items on third-party marketplaces through "trade URLs," despite Valve's terms of service prohibiting off-platform sales. And while the debate over whether loot boxes constitute a form of gambling continues to rage, the suit claims Valve's system does indeed qualify under Washington law, which defines gambling as "staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under the person's control or influence." "Valve's loot boxes satisfy every element of this definition," the lawsuit alleges. "Users stake money (the price of a key) on the outcome of a contest of chance (the random selection of a virtual item), and the items received are 'things of value' under RCW 9.46.0285 because they can be sold for real money through Valve's own marketplace and through third-party marketplaces that Valve has fostered and facilitated."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Should Delaware Care?
New Castle County officials could soon be able to subpoena records from the most contentious commercial properties in the county after state lawmakers on Monday passed legislation enabling them to do so. The bill is part of a “quality control” review package meant to empower county officials to scrutinize the results of last year’s property reassessment.
The Delaware House of Representatives passed the second half of a two-bill package Monday that would give New Castle County new authority to subpoena certain business records during its ongoing “quality control” review of its much maligned property reassessment.
But an added amendment to the bill means it must return to the Senate for a final, largely procedural, vote before Gov. Matt Meyer can officially sign the bill into law.
After passing the first half of the package in January amid Republican pushback that the bills were rushed, the House of Representatives unanimously passed an amended version of the second bill, Senate Bill 230.
The bill would give New Castle County officials the ability to subpoena both records and witness testimony from commercial property owners about the income earned from their properties as the county reviews the results from last year’s first-in-40-year property reassessment.
The subpoena power would be available to all three of Delaware’s counties, but was geared specifically toward New Castle, which experienced much of the property reassessment-related blowback from residents and business owners last summer.
New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry recently told Spotlight Delaware last month that his office would use those power to re-examine some commercial properties that were deemed to be undervalued.
Senate Bill 230, sponsored in the House by Rep. Frank Burns (D-Pike Creek), was originally tabled in January over what House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn Harris (D-Dover) called “due process” concerns for business owners.
But Burns said Monday that an amendment added to the bill sought to assuage those concerns by clarifying some key points: that only commercial properties are subject to subpoena, that records will be kept private and exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and how objections and exceptions to subpoenas will be handled.
“I think a lot of things were implicit in the language,” Burns said. “But I think people were more comfortable when it was explicitly stated.”
Senate Bill 230 passed unanimously, but not without one House Republican leader taking one final swipe at Senate Democrats for how the sausage was made.
House Minority Whip Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton) thanked his Democratic colleagues in the House for holding off on voting on the bill in January in order to “get it right.”
“Thank you for doing the process the right way,” Spiegelman said. “Unlike, perhaps, another chamber in this building.”
The amended bill will be taken up by the Senate when it next convenes at 2 p.m. Wednesday, March 11.
The post House passes subpoena power bill for ‘quality control’ assessment review appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The growth of data centers has become a hotly contested topic in Delaware and nationally, because the facilities, which power the technology of the future, require huge amounts of electricity. New regulations on the industry approved by New Castle County are the first of their kind in the state.
After months of acrimonious debate, the New Castle County Council agreed to compromise Tuesday and passed an ordinance that imposes new regulations onto the rapidly growing data center industry.
The sweeping legislation includes new rules that require data centers to maintain buffer zones around them, and to use energy-efficient backup generators, among other regulations.
But the new regulations will not apply to the most controversial data center proposal in the state – the Project Washington development proposed near Delaware City.
“It’s a good start,” said Councilman Dave Carter, who wrote the bill. “It was difficult to make some compromises, but I think we’ve got tremendous improvements in.”
After council members critiqued the original legislation last fall, Carter worked with county staff to change the bill to address those concerns, such as concessions on noise regulations. The final proposal ultimately passed with 12 councilmembers voting yes, and 1 absent.
Tensions ran high among audience members in the packed council chambers Tuesday evening, with jeers, laughs and applause throughout discussions by the council and during a public comment period.
But while past county council debates over the data center regulations got heated — one even featured a councilman flipping off another — this one stayed mostly cordial.
After some debate and conferring with the council’s lawyer, councilmembers Janet Kilpatrick and John Cartier both agreed to withdraw their last-minute amendments, allowing the compromise to pass.
Kilpatrick’s amendment would have exempted all existing buildings from following the regulations, while Cartier’s amendment would have made the regulations apply to data center proposals in the pipeline.
Carter first proposed the regulations last summer amid a backlash to a developer’s plan to build a massive, power-hungry data center on about 580 acres north of the Delaware City Refinery, called Project Washington.
Many residents and elected officials feared the facility would harm the local environment and exacerbate an energy crunch that was already impacting the region.
Project Washington would not have to follow these regulations, though. Part of the council’s compromise was to make the ordinance only apply to new projects, not ones already in the development pipeline.
Even so, members of Delaware’s building trades unions on Tuesday expressed fear that the regulations will cause the state to lose future data center projects, along with the tax revenue and jobs they would bring.
For months, those union members have accounted for the most vocal contingent in support of data center proposals locally.
The ordinance will now go to County Executive Marcus Henry, who will either veto it or sign it into law. David Culver, New Castle County’s General Manager of Land Use, said during the hearing that Henry supports the regulations.
Carter’s amended ordinance included a few concessions on noise regulations, but also clearly outlined how data centers are allowed to use water to cool their supercomputers.
Carter removed specific requirements developers would have to meet in order to dampen persistent noise from data centers. Instead, it says developers would have to defer to existing code that says they “shall not generate noise levels that exceed the pre-development noise level.”
He did the same for the lighting regulations, deferring back to existing standards for industrial projects.
Additionally, the ordinance says data centers must use closed-loop cooling systems, which are designed to reuse as much water as possible. By mandating these systems, Carter said, data centers could reduce their water and energy use.
The regulations say data center projects must be at least 1,000 feet from the nearest residential dwelling, unless the developers submit a noise study to the county. They could then build them within 500 feet of a home.
Data center developers also must set aside funds to decommission the data center if they decide to no longer operate it. That means tearing down the buildings and restoring the land to its original condition.
The regulations approved Tuesday will not impact the handful of data center projects that were already in New Castle County’s development pipeline, including most notably Project Washington near Delaware City.
The first half of that massive project has been hamstrung by a ruling under the Coastal Zone Act though, which would prohibit the data center’s use of diesel generators for back-up power. The developer, Starwood Digital Ventures, has appealed that ruling, but it could take months or years to be fully adjudicated.
The second half of Project Washington would require the same approval under the Coastal Zone Act by the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control as well as a rezoning by the county — a more onerous process than the first phase that requires the county council to approve it.
The same Coastal Zone Act ruling could be a hurdle for a project proposed near the St. George’s Bridge, but it would be unencumbered by the new county regulations. It is already zoned business park, which could accommodate the data centers.
Finally, a third site near Newark has perhaps the easiest path now that the regulations, and their effective start date, have been determined. That project would see the redevelopment of the White Clay Corporate Center into a three-building data center. It is already properly zoned, does not lie within the Coastal Zone and would not be affected by the new regulations.
The post After months of debate, New Castle County Council agrees to regulate data center industry appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
As Washington focuses on its push to topple Iran’s government, delaying talks on Russia’s war in Ukraine, some in Moscow say the Kremlin must achieve its goals militarily.
Veoza, also known as fezolinetant, will be offered to women for whom HRT is unsuitable
More than 500,000 women in England are to be offered a drug on the NHS that prevents hot flushes.
The green light for Veoza, also known as fezolinetant, comes after the medicines watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, on Wednesday authorised it for use.
Continue reading...A different New Orleans judge approved the trip while the actor remains out on bond in Mardi Gras battery case
Shia LaBeouf ultimately did get permission to travel to his father’s baptism in Rome, days after the New Orleans courthouse handling the actor’s recent battery arrest initially denied his request to make the trip.
LaBeouf, 39, first sought authorization to travel to the Italian capital while out on bond at a court hearing on 26 February, during which state judge Simone Levine ordered him to enroll in substance abuse treatment. A court filing associated with the request said the trip would last from 1 to 8 March and was planned “for religious purposes, including his father’s baptism”.
Continue reading...Donald Trump promised that June’s event would bring us some of the greatest fights in history. The truth appears to be rather different
When Donald Trump first announced that the White House would host a UFC event to mark the United States’ 250th anniversary, the US president told supporters it would be a “big deal”. Evidence over the last week suggests that, not for the first time, Trump may be exaggerating a little.
Trump has promised a spectacle unlike anything the UFC has staged before. “They’re going to have eight or nine championship fights – the biggest fights they’ve ever had,” Trump said in December of plans for the White House event. “Every one is a championship fight, and every one is a legendary type of fight.”
Continue reading...Maga world figures throw weight behind Maryam Rajavi, MEK’s leader, and Reza Pahlavi, the son of last Shah of Iran
As a US battle group steamed to the Gulf in November 2002, competing Iraqi exiles, some championed by American insiders, jockeyed for position in the hopes of taking charge once George W Bush toppled Saddam Hussein. Bloomberg dubbed them “Iraq’s unruly opposition”.
The most notorious Iraqi exile, failed former banker Ahmad Chalabi, boasted to his neoconservative allies that his return to Baghdad would be welcomed by cheering throngs. Among his competition was a former doctor named Ayad Allawi, who was backed by Britain’s MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency in his bid for support to rule Iraq.
Continue reading...The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement arm is requesting unfettered access to what is considered to be the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States and their most private information, including sensitive details about individual children, according to six current and former federal officials.
It is called the Federal Parent Locator Service, and it’s meant for finding people who owe child support. Granting access to the Department of Homeland Security, the officials said, would violate a federal law that explicitly limits its use to determining and collecting child support payments and a handful of other narrow purposes. But DHS’ ask is being seriously considered within the Department of Health and Human Services, which maintains the database.
The database contains the name, address, Social Security number, employer, and salary or wages of every employed person in the country, as well as the equivalent details for anyone listed in state unemployment systems. It exists so that if someone owes child support, the government can pursue them for it even if they’ve changed jobs or moved to another state.
The repository includes these personal details and employment records, updated throughout the year, for all types of people — even those who don’t have any children. Only some who work exclusively in the gig or cash economy, or who are entirely self-employed, might not be listed.
The database also names every child in the U.S. who is the subject of a state child support case, including each child’s sex, birthday and Social Security number, as well as family members’ names and relationships. And it identifies when single mothers and kids who receive child support are domestic violence victims — alongside their address.
“This is the most powerful people-finder system that the U.S. government has, and possibly that exists,” said Bethanne Barnes, who from 2019 through October of last year was a data director for the Administration for Children and Families, the subdivision of HHS that oversees the database.
Turning the child support data over to Homeland Security “would be disastrous for child support enforcement” and “would ruin the foundation of the child support program,” said Vicki Turetsky, who was commissioner of HHS’ office of child support enforcement from 2009 to 2016. Turetsky said that if this were to happen, many employers, fearful of ICE arrests of their employees or workplace raids, would consider no longer reporting new hires to the government. This in turn would degrade the ability of the system to find parents who owe payments to their kids, she said.
State child support agency leaders have been nervously messaging one another about this prospect recently, said Kate Cooper Richardson, the longtime head of Oregon’s child support program who retired in January. State officials have spent decades building trust with employers, Cooper Richardson said, reminding them that submitting their new-hire data to child support authorities is required and that sensitive information about their workers will be used only for child support enforcement and otherwise kept confidential. Some business leaders have already reached out to state administrators, she said, concerned about rumors of President Donald Trump’s administration seeking to use this data for immigration enforcement.
“And if we’re not learning from employers when a parent who owes child support gets a new job, who loses in that situation?” Cooper Richardson said. “The 1 in 5 U.S. children who rely on consistent and regular child support.”
A White House spokesperson said in a statement that “the entire Trump administration is working to lawfully implement the President’s agenda to put Americans first. Any sensitive information required to do so will be obtained and handled properly.” A DHS representative requested additional time to respond to detailed questions sent by email, which ProPublica agreed to, but DHS did not provide any responses.
Last year, Department of Government Efficiency appointees sought and for a brief period gained access to the National Directory of New Hires, the part of the child support database that contains people’s employment information. It is unclear what, if anything, the DOGE team did with this data; the federal courts temporarily blocked it from continuing to access Social Security, IRS and other sensitive records, and then DOGE disbanded last summer before final rulings on the legality of its efforts had been made.
Over the past month, though, three officials said, DHS has separately and expressly requested both the new-hire data and also the Federal Case Registry, the other half of the database where the catalog of all child support cases is housed. This has the much more sensitive specifics on families and children, including information on paternity, domestic violence and more.
It is unclear why DHS would want this, given that locating undocumented immigrants at their places of work or targeting those businesses for raids would be possible using just the employment data, without all of the case registry’s additional personal details. Whatever DHS’ intentions might be, multiple officials and privacy experts interviewed for this story expressed concern that abusers in the ranks of law enforcement would soon be able to see their victims’ case information and addresses, and that a manifest of vulnerable children would become widely available in the government.
The Department of Health and Human Services general counsel’s office, which is run by a Trump political official, must now decide whether it believes federal law allows the agency to provide DHS with the full child support database. Child support staff strongly oppose doing this, but the request is now with the lawyers, people familiar with the situation said.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may also have to approve the data sharing. If it’s approved, the department is likely to be sued by legal advocacy groups almost immediately, lawyers and experts said.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Internal emails show that HHS’ Administration for Children and Families last year was also directed to cross-check all of its other datasets — on families who interact with child care, foster care, Head Start and other systems — against DHS immigration records. The Trump administration has expanded a DHS tool called SAVE to allow federal and state agencies to check the citizenship of millions of people at once, including those who rely on public assistance programs like these. (Also using this tool, the administration has consistently inaccurately flagged citizens as noncitizens on state voter rolls, ProPublica has reported.)
In DHS’ efforts to gather data from other agencies, the department has argued that several U.S. statutes allow federal law enforcement to obtain information without a warrant from any government agency pertaining to the identity and location of people living in the country illegally, especially if national security is at stake. In DHS’ view, these statutes should overrule all others, even a law that would seem to bar the department from obtaining an entire database of sensitive information about children unrelated to immigration.
Congress has previously permitted a handful of exceptions that allow certain agencies to access parts of the child support data archive. That includes using it in limited ways to help manage custody and visitation cases, to pursue people who have federal student loan debt and to check the incomes of those who apply for means-tested government programs, like housing assistance.
Maya Bernstein has overseen federal data privacy policies for over three decades, starting during the first Bush administration. In the 1990s, she helped lead the work on the creation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the medical records privacy law, before serving 20 years as the senior adviser for privacy policy at HHS. “I know a lot about a lot of different databases,” she said, and the child support database is “the one that I’m most worried about.”
“It is very unusual for them to want the Federal Case Registry,” Bernstein added, referring to the part of the database with children’s case information. “In my career, no one has asked for access to that. Most people have never even heard of it.”
The post DHS Seeks Access to Massive Employment, Salary and Family Database Legally Restricted to Use in Child Support Cases appeared first on ProPublica.
Here are the best places to buy and own digital music from stores such as iTunes, Bandcamp and more.
Last summer, the Trump administration announced a voluntary pledge by health insurers to reform prior authorization, but patient advocates and medical providers remain skeptical.
Food deliveries and the prospect of medical care abroad gave Gazans reasons to hope, but the Iran conflict has closed the door on progress again.
US tour holds upper hand as deal with European counterpart is up for renegotiation, though LIV and its backers will be watching with interest
What price a strategic alliance? The golf world might just be about to find out as the PGA Tour considers its partnership with the DP World Tour.
A little-known element of the updated deal between the PGA and DP World Tours from 2022 – at a time when LIV disruption was in full flow – relates to a break clause. While the contract in theory runs until 2035, the strategic alliance can end in 2027. There is no present, strong sense of the agreement being curtailed but it is clear the PGA Tour wants at least a renegotiation before taking up their extension option.
Continue reading...The new president won office by promising to clean up crime, but his background is red rag to a bull for many
Just south of Santiago, the tiny rural town of Paine is a quiet grid of painted adobe facades, shaded squares and shuttered shop fronts as the summer holidays draw to a close.
But the white-knuckle fear of crime that propelled its most famous son, José Antonio Kast, to a resounding victory in December’s presidential election is as present in sleepy Paine as it is the length of Chile.
Continue reading...Home secretary says ban on Pro-Palestinian rally ‘necessary to prevent public disorder’ after Met police raised concerns
A pro-Palestinian march in London on Sunday has been banned by Shabana Mahmood after police warned of a risk of “serious public disorder”.
The annual al-Quds Day march has drawn criticism over apparent backing for the Iranian regime after its organisers expressed support for the country’s late leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Continue reading...First tranche expected to include Cabinet Office report warning of ‘reputational risk’ over ex-minister’s links to Epstein
Hundreds of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US are expected to be released by Downing Street on Wednesday.
The first tranche of files will include a two-page due diligence report by the Cabinet Office, which is likely to raise questions about Keir Starmer’s judgment, the Guardian understands.
Continue reading...Faster laptop-level power, rapid wifi and 5G, plus much-improved multitasking make the middle iPad highly capable beyond just watching TV
The latest iPad Air is faster in almost all facets, packing not just a processor upgrade but improvements to most of the internal bits that make the tablet work, providing laptop-grade power in a skinny, adaptable touchscreen device.
The new iPad Air M4 costs from the same £599 (€649/$599/A$999) as the outgoing M3 model from last year and again comes in two sizes. One with an 11in screen, which is the best size for most people and a more expensive 13in screen version, which is ideal if you want a second TV or a laptop replacement.
Screen: 11in or 13in Liquid Retina display (264ppi)
Processor: Apple M4 (8-core CPU/9-core GPU)
RAM: 12GB
Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB
Operating system: iPadOS 26.3
Camera: 12MP rear, 12MP centre stage
Connectivity: Wifi 7, 5G (eSim-only), Bluetooth 6, USB-C (USB3), Touch ID, Smart Connecter
Dimensions: 247.6 x 178.5 x 6.1mm or 280.6 x 214.9 x 6.1mm
Weight: 464g or 616g
Continue reading...Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, "some components may survive," reports the BBC. "The space agency said there is a one in 4,200 chance of being harmed by a piece of the probe, which it characterized as 'low' risk." From the report: The spacecraft is projected to re-enter around 19:45 EST (00:45 GMT) on Tuesday the U.S. Space Force predicted, according to Nasa, though there is a 24-hour margin of "uncertainty" in the timing. [...] The spacecraft and its twin, Van Allen Probe B, were on a mission to gather unprecedented data on Earth's two permanent radiation belts. It was not immediately clear where in Earth's atmosphere the satellite is projected to re-enter. NASA and the U.S. Space Force has said it will monitor the re-entry and update any predictions. [...] Van Allen Probe B is not expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere before 2030.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Observers wait to see if Yemen-based Houthis will reopen hostilities as US warships approach Red Sea chokepoint
Iranian-backed militias around the Middle East are continuing attacks against Israel, the US and their allies in retaliation for the US-Israeli offensive against Tehran, but have so far held back from all-out confrontation, analysts and regional officials say.
The relative restraint suggests that Tehran sees such forces as a strategic reserve to be deployed if the 12-day war continues to intensify – though it may also be a sign that Iranian command and control systems are breaking down.
Continue reading...Study shows animals hear very high frequencies, making it possible to design a deterrent to cut deaths
Hedgehogs have been discovered to hear high-frequency ultrasound, raising hopes that they could be deterred from dangerous roads with ultrasound repellers.
Vehicles are estimated to kill up to one in three hedgehogs, a big factor in the much-loved mammal’s drastic decline across Europe over recent decades.
Continue reading...The perpetrators were jailed for 15 years for robbery with violence in the east African country, where homophobic attacks are increasing
The sentencing of two people who attacked and robbed two gay men in Kenya has been hailed by LGBTQ+ rights advocates as a breakthrough and a sign of hope for the country’s queer community. “Abel Meli & Another” were sentenced to 15 years in prison for robbery with violence on 3 March at Milimani law courts in Nairobi.
The ruling is a rare example of justice being served for the queer community in Kenya. Njeri Gateru, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, an independent human rights institution working towards equality for sexual and gender minorities in Kenya, said: “A lot is going against [the queer community] with the existence of the criminal laws and prevailing homophobic attitudes, but some of us still trust that we can find justice, so this case encourages us.”
Continue reading...While some argue for destroying the terminal through which 90% of Iran’s oil exports flow, others caution of a global market ‘tailspin’
Kharg Island – through which 90% of Iran’s oil exports flow – is arguably the country’s most sensitive economic target but the export terminal has so far remained untouched throughout the US-Israel bombing campaign.
Experts say bombing or capturing the site with US forces would be likely to cause a sustained increase to already surging oil prices, as it would amount to taking the entirety of Iran’s daily crude exports offline.
Continue reading...Hi,
I’m a heavier rider, around 210 lbs, and I mostly ride on pavement (Chicago streets - so alot of potholes). My XR just got bricked, so I’m looking to replace it with a new board. It’s been a while since I’ve kept up with the current Onewheel lineup, so I’m a bit out of the loop.I mainly use my board for commuting, so my top priorities are stability, balance, and a confident ride (I often carry a lot of expensive equipment).
Given that, do you have any recommendations on which board would be the best fit?
Thanks!
Failure to appoint Jeremy Carl is a rare setback for Trump, with Republican-controlled Senate mostly approving his appointments
Donald Trump’s nominee for a top diplomatic post has been withdrawn from consideration after a growing backlash over his past remarks on race and Jewish people left him without crucial Republican support.
Jeremy Carl, who had been tapped to serve as the assistant secretary of state for international organisations – a role overseeing US policy towards bodies such as the UN – announced on Tuesday that he was stepping aside after failing to secure unanimous backing from Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.
Continue reading...Limiting access to German church to well-off visitors would be ‘socially unjust’, critics say
Plans at Cologne Cathedral to start charging visitor fees have sparked an outcry, with critics warning against limiting access to the majestic gothic building to the well-off.
Officials said this month that the cathedral, the tallest twin-spired church in the world and a tourist magnet in Germany’s fourth largest city, could only be maintained with a new revenue stream.
Continue reading...Intelligence sources claim Iran has begun mine laying as US energy secretary backtracks on claim US escorted a ship through strategic chokepoint
The US military said it attacked and destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the strait of Hormuz amid reports that Iran has begun laying explosive devices in the strategically vital waterway.
Citing intelligence sources, CNN on Tuesday reported that Iran has laid a few dozen mines in the strait in recent days and has the capability to sow hundreds more.
Continue reading...Here’s a roughly ~100 mile update on the Onewheel Rally XL. Riding regular, switch, fakie, fakie switch. Trying to master reverts and smoothen curb nudges to be more seamless. I’ve also been doing some trails. I’m doing drops at about 2 feet now and trying to do curb nudges at speed coming from an angle. Still can’t bonk, never really bothered to try just yet, but I’m catching some air regularly from riding bumpy roads and sidewalks.
I love the pumpkin round feel of the tire that comes with the XL. 18 PSI. 130 lbs. 140 when commuting with work gear. 4 Crux Pros. I’m really trying to use the Crux Pros to lift the board for air jumps but it’s SO heavy. Ridiculous on the street. Perhaps ignorance is bliss since I’ve never tried third-party, but I love the high voltage low current design, especially with my weight class. On Apex mode I CANNOT smash the nose or tail down to the ground from standstill. Current life top speed 23.5 mph.
Idk how they did it but it’s so nimble at low speeds. Regular I can turn maybe with like a 2 foot diameter circle without twisting my hips. Goofy not as small but that’s user skill. Yet for some reason it feels so stable and balanced at faster speeds. Edge to edge riding feels so good at any speed and keeping the rhythm going UP AND DOWN hill is ridiculous. For some context, I live in Pittsburgh.
The bigger thing to note is the way it’s tuned for bumps and failure of corrections. Meaning I noticed when riding switch and practicing, it would ride the same bumps and cracks at the same slow speed as I would regular and it feels almost as comfortable, if that makes sense. It catches itself so well when user input does not provide. That’s the best way I can put it.
Of course this also leads to some interesting problems like if you dismount the board and then very quickly mount it again, it does a funny jiggle like you just fell off a drop. If you get in its way, the jiggle kinda hurts.
 | Think I'm going to follow up and use magnets to attach to board. [link] [comments] |
The Pentagon copied Tehran's technology but is still struggling to keep up.
How weak cyberdefenses threaten U.S. tech dominance.
In Iran, Trump risks falling into a familiar trap.
The Van Allen probe's mission was meant to last two years, but ended up going for nearly seven.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Amazon's ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a "deep dive" into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a "trend of incidents" in recent months, characterized by a "high blast radius" and "Gen-AI assisted changes" among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under "contributing factors" the note included "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." "Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT. The note ahead of Tuesday's meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. [...] Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly "This Week in Stores Tech" (TWiST) meeting on a "deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives" the group hopes will limit future outages. He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Amazon said the review of website availability was "part of normal business" and it aims for continual improvement. "TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store," the company said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bam Adebayo scored 83 points, the second-most in a game in NBA history, and set records for most free throws taken and made on Tuesday.
Rutger Bregman on why he thinks consumers should cancel their ChatGPT accounts
The historian Rutger Bregman argues that consumers should boycott OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the company’s deal with the Pentagon.
“A lot of people don’t know that their friendly chatbot, ChatGPT, has embedded itself into the authoritarian infrastructure of the Trump administration,” Bregman tells Helen Pidd.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 11.
This live blog is now closed.
Hegseth says the aftermath of the conflict is “going to be in America’s interests” and says it “will not live under a nuclear blackmail” from Iran.
It comes shortly after the defence secretary reiterated president Donald Trump’s threat that if Iran does anything to prevent the flow of oil in the strait of Hormuz, it will be hit “twenty times harder”.
Continue reading...Police are investigating after a fire on a regional bus in Kerzers, west of Switzerland's capital, killed at least six people.
L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said that Rihanna and her partner, ASAP Rocky, were inside a camper on their property when the shooting occurred. The camper was also struck by gunfire.
 | My board after a long winter is finally done. AND IT RIPS. The GT is the most powerful board ive ridden before this. So to go from That too a 84v VESC it feels absurd. I have around 2000 miles of experience on a whole bunch of different boards, but never one with so much torque. Sadly im in WI so I had one day of 70 degree weather before winter comes back to haunt me for the next month, but ripping through those trails was so fun. [link] [comments] |
This live blog is now closed – our coverage of the Middle East crisis continues here
Investor hopes for a swift resolution to the Middle East conflict propelled Australian shares higher today, with the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 finishing the day up 1.1% and recovering about $35bn in value after yesterday’s $90bn plunge.
Oil prices surged to a four-year high early in the week before coming back down below $US90 a barrel after Donald Trump suggested the Iran conflict would end soon, sending global stock markets higher.
Continue reading...Trump-backed Clayton Fuller and Shawn Harris advance to a runoff election to fill Marjorie Taylor Greene's seat.
More than 100,000 people have tuned in to watch ‘kākāpō cam’, which captures a rare flightless bird sleeping, tidying her nest and fighting off intruders
On an island in New Zealand’s remote southern fjords, one of the world’s strangest and rarest parrots – the kākāpō – is caring for her tiny chick as fans from across the globe watch on.
Through the black and white lens of a hidden camera, a fluffy orb with a kazoo-like squeak jostles for food from its mother’s beak. The mother, Rakiura, is attentive – scooping her chick under her large green wings, fending off an intruding bird, and periodically tidying her nest.
Continue reading...President and his Pentagon chief offer mixed messages as strikes on Iran continue – key US politics stories from 9 March at a glance
How much longer will US strikes on Iran continue? Getting a clear answer from the Trump administration has been difficult – getting a consistent one, even more so.
According to Donald Trump, “the war is very complete”. At least that’s what he told CBS News in a call on Monday.
Continue reading...Tony Hoare, the Turing Award-winning pioneer who created the Quicksort algorithm, developed Hoare logic, and advanced theories of concurrency and structured programming, has died at age 92. News of his passing was shared today in a blog post. The site I Programmer also commemorated Hoare in a post highlighting his contributions to computer science and the lasting impact of his work. Personal accounts have been shared on Hacker News and Reddit. Many Slashdotters may know Hoare for his aphorism regarding software design: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hey guys looking to see if anyone has VESC their Pint S and is it even worth the $500 or so from float wheel to do it to a Pint S?
Will it be significantly faster and add more torque? Or should I just get a MTE 5in HUB from Floatlife?
Thanks in advance!
Georgia contest will be a test of Trump’s sway and may provide a rare opportunity for Democrats in the southern state
Clay Fuller, a former Republican prosecutor, and Shawn Harris, a Democrat and retired army general, will head to a run-off after they came out ahead in a special election Tuesday to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress.
The election for the Georgia’s 14th congressional district has been seen as a test of Donald Trump’s sway and may provide a rare opportunity for Democrats in a deep-red pocket of north-west Georgia.
Continue reading...State’s governor declared emergency as islands face extreme weather and Big Island volcano Kilauea erupts
Hawaii is preparing for a powerful storm this week that is expected to cause intense winds, thunderstorms and possibly significant flooding across multiple islands.
Josh Green, the governor, said on Monday he had issued an emergency proclamation in response to the weather expected to hit his state in the coming days, in order to bring additional resources into affected areas.
Continue reading...Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 11, No. 738.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 11, No. 1,004.
One of two men accused of throwing IEDs at protesters in New York City appears to have purchased fuses at a fireworks store in a Philadelphia suburb last week.
Oppo says rising costs for key phone components will trigger price adjustments on some devices starting March 16.
Former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and D.C. Police Officer Danny Hodges argue the installation of a commemorative Jan. 6 plaque in a low-visibility spot in the U.S. Capitol violates the law.
Rep. Eric Swalwell's landlord submitted a sworn declaration that he lives at her California property after rival gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer questioned his residency and eligibility to run for governor, CBS News California has exclusively learned.
Ivanna Lisette Ortiz of Florida, 35, allegedly fired 10 shots with a semiautomatic firearm into Beverly Hills home
A 35-year-old Florida woman has been charged with attempted murder after she allegedly fired shots into the Beverly Hills home of Rihanna on Sunday.
Ivanna Lisette Ortiz was charged on Tuesday with one count of attempted murder, 10 counts of assault on a person with a semiautomatic firearm and three counts of shooting at an inhabited dwelling, all felonies, court records show. Officials have said no one was injured during the shooting.
Continue reading...TSA officer call-out rates have climbed into double-digit percentages at some airports, including half the officers at Houston's Hobby Airport, straining screening operations and contributing to longer security lines.
Upper chamber accepts final draft of bill, which offers life peerages to some of those who would otherwise be removed
Hereditary peerages will be abolished before the next king’s speech after a deal was struck granting life peerages to some Conservatives and cross-benchers losing their seats.
On Tuesday evening the upper chamber accepted a final draft of the House of Lords (hereditary peers) bill, marking the end of its passage through parliament and clearing the way for it to be added to the statute book.
Continue reading...The Defense Department has notified senior leadership that they must remove Anthropic's products from their system within 180 days, the latest salvo in a feud between the AI company and the Trump administration.
Voters in northwest Georgia headed to the polls all day to have their say in who will replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Worried that your latest ask to a cloud-based AI reveals a bit too much about you? Want to know your genetic risk of disease without revealing it to the services that compute the answer? There is a way to do computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. It's called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. But there's a rather large catch. It can take thousands -- even tens of thousands -- of times longer to compute on today's CPUs and GPUs than simply working with the decrypted data. So universities, startups, and at least one processor giant have been working on specialized chips that could close that gap. Last month at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, Intel demonstrated its answer, Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU. Startups are racing to beat Intel and each other to commercialization. But Sanu Mathew, who leads security circuits research at Intel, believes the CPU giant has a big lead, because its chip can do more computing than any other FHE accelerator yet built. "Heracles is the first hardware that works at scale," he says. The scale is measurable both physically and in compute performance. While other FHE research chips have been in the range of 10 square millimeters or less, Heracles is about 20 times that size and is built using Intel's most advanced, 3-nanometer FinFET technology. And it's flanked inside a liquid-cooled package by two 24-gigabyte high-bandwidth memory chips—a configuration usually seen only in GPUs for training AI. In terms of scaling compute performance, Heracles showed muscle in live demonstrations at ISSCC. At its heart the demo was a simple private query to a secure server. It simulated a request by a voter to make sure that her ballot had been registered correctly. The state, in this case, has an encrypted database of voters and their votes. To maintain her privacy, the voter would not want to have her ballot information decrypted at any point; so using FHE, she encrypts her ID and vote and sends it to the government database. There, without decrypting it, the system determines if it is a match and returns an encrypted answer, which she then decrypts on her side. On an Intel Xeon server CPU, the process took 15 milliseconds. Heracles did it in 14 microseconds. While that difference isn't something a single human would notice, verifying 100 million voter ballots adds up to more than 17 days of CPU work versus a mere 23 minutes on Heracles.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Back in 2023, John Earnest created a fun drawing application called WigglyPaint. The thing that makes WigglyPaint unique is that it automatically applies what artists call the line boil effect to anything you draw, making it seem as if everything is wiggling (hence the name). Even if you’re not aware of the line boil effect, you’ve surely encountered it several times in your life. The tool may seem simple at first glance, but as Earnest details, he’s put quite a lot of thought into the little tool.
WigglyPaint was well-received, but mostly remained a curiosity – that is, until artists in Asia picked up on it, and the popularity of WigglyPaint positively exploded from a few hundred into the millions. The problem, though, is that basically nobody is actually using WigglyPaint: they’re all using slopcoded copycats.
The sites are slop; slapdash imitations pieced together with the help of so-called “Large Language Models” (LLMs). The closer you look at them, the stranger they appear, full of vague, repetitive claims, outright false information, and plenty of unattributed (stolen) art. This is what LLMs are best at: quickly fabricating plausible simulacra of real objects to mislead the unwary. It is no surprise that the same people who have total contempt for authorship find LLMs useful; every LLM and generative model today is constructed by consuming almost unimaginably massive quantities of human creative work- writing, drawings, code, music- and then regurgitating them piecemeal without attribution, just different enough to hide where it came from (usually). LLMs are sharp tools in the hands of plagiarists, con-men, spammers, and everyone who believes that creative expression is worthless. People who extract from the world instead of contributing to it.
It is humiliating and infuriating to see my work stolen by slop enthusiasts, and worse, used to mislead artists into paying scammers for something that ought to be free.
↫ John Earnest
There’s a huge amount of slopcoded WrigglyPaint ripoffs out there, and it goes far beyond websites, too. People are putting slopcoded ripoffs in basic webviews, and uploading them en masse to the Play Store and App Store. None of these slopcoded ripoffs actually build upon WrigglyPaint with new ideas or approaches, there’s no creativity or innovation; it’s just trash barfed up by glorified autocomplete built upon mass plagiarism and theft, “made” by bottom feeders who despise creativity, art, and originality.
You know how when you go to IKEA or whatever other similar store to buy picture frames, they have these stock photos of random people in them? I wonder if “AI” enthusiasts understand you’re supposed to replace those with pictures that actually have meaning to you.
The vast majority of the wounded had minor injuries, a Pentagon spokesman said. The toll is higher than previously disclosed.
ABB Robotics and Nvidia have announced a partnership to improve how industrial robots are designed, trained and deployed in manufacturing environments. The collaboration involves integrating Nvidia’s Omniverse simulation libraries into ABB’s RobotStudio engineering software to create a new offering called RobotStudio HyperReality, scheduled for release in the second half of 2026.
RobotStudio is used by robotics engineers to design and program automation systems. According to ABB, more than 60,000 engineers use the platform to build and simulate robotic production lines. By adding Omniverse libraries, the company plans to add more realistic simulation and synthetic data generation capabilities, allowing manufacturers to test and train robots in digital environments before they hit factory floors.
Robotics researchers have sought solutions for the “sim-to-real gap,” or the difference between how robots behave in computer simulations and how they perform in the complex and unpredictable conditions of the real world. Different lighting conditions, material properties and environmental factors can cause robots trained in simulation to behave inconsistently when deployed.
An example of a simulated industrial environment in Omniverse (Image courtesy of Nvidia)
The Omniverse/RobotStudio integration is meant to narrow that gap by combining ABB’s virtual robot controller, or a software replica of a robot’s real control system, with Nvidia’s physically accurate simulation environment. The virtual controller runs the same firmware as ABB’s physical robots, which the companies say allows motion paths and task performance tested in simulation to translate more closely to real-world operations.
RobotStudio exports a fully parameterized robot station, including robots, sensors, lighting, kinematics and parts, as a USD file that can be loaded into Omniverse. Synthetic images generated in the simulation environment can then feed directly into AI training pipelines, allowing vision models to be trained in virtual environments. According to ABB, this approach allows manufacturers to design, test and validate automation systems virtually before installing physical hardware. The company claims the process could reduce production line setup times by as much as 80% and lower deployment costs by up to 40% by eliminating the need for physical prototypes during early development stages.
The partnership highlights the robotics industry’s move toward AI-driven systems that are capable of managing more complex tasks. During a briefing announcing the collaboration, Deepu Talla, VP of robotics and edge AI at Nvidia, explained the shift: “Just as AI moved from basic recognition to deep thinking, robot intelligence is changing too,” he said. “Today, most robots are specialists. They are excellent at one single task, but they cannot adapt to anything else because they are preprogrammed. The future belongs to generalist specialist robots. Think of them as the PhDs of the robot world, combining broad knowledge with deep expertise.”
Talla says building these advanced robots requires an open development platform involving three computing environments: infrastructure to train AI models, simulation platforms where robots can be tested virtually, and computing systems that run those models on physical machines. Nvidia’s role in the partnership focuses on the simulation layer, while ABB covers the industrial robotics platforms and development tools used by manufacturers.
(ultramansk/Shutterstock)
Several companies are already experimenting with the system in pilot projects. Electronics manufacturer Foxconn is testing the system for consumer electronics assembly. The company plans to train assembly robots in simulation using synthetic data before transferring those models to real production lines. Another pilot involves Workr, a California-based robotics company that develops automation systems for small and mid-sized manufacturers. Workr is integrating its WorkrCore platform with ABB robots trained using synthetic data generated through Omniverse. The company plans to demonstrate the system at Nvidia’s GTC conference next week.
ABB also said it is exploring the possibility of integrating Nvidia’s Jetson edge AI platform into its Omnicore robot controller. This integration would allow industrial robots to run AI models directly on their controllers, with the goal of enabling real-time perception and decision making without relying on external computing systems.
The companies said the new capabilities could make advanced robotics more accessible beyond traditional large-scale manufacturing. Historically, robots have been most widely adopted in high-volume production settings such as automotive assembly. ABB and Nvidia say improvements in simulation and AI may allow automation to expand into smaller manufacturing environments where production runs are more varied and programming costs have traditionally limited robotics adoption.
ABB said RobotStudio HyperReality will be offered as a subscription product when it launches in the second half of 2026. The company currently provides a free version of RobotStudio with basic functionality, while its industrial users typically access the more advanced RobotStudio Premium through a subscription model.
ABB Robotics President Marc Segura said during the briefing that what makes the partnership unique is the unified platform created by combining RobotStudio with Nvidia’s Omniverse: “We are offering a platform where you can close the sim-to-real gap at industrial grade. With our RobotStudio and our virtual controller, we have for years been the reference for simulating something in a computer and deploying it with high accuracy in a robot. Now with Nvidia, we’re enhancing that and expanding that beyond the robot and the environment.”
The post Nvidia and ABB Robotics Combine Simulation and AI to Train Industrial Robots appeared first on HPCwire.
My fairly new xr just stop working. Only ridden 75 miles, wont turn on and light used to blink 4 times and not charge. I am almost positive it’s my BMS and i saw this in thing called an XRV kit did a deep dive and i can’t find were to get them. Please can some one guide me. Summer is around the corner and this is a must for me.
 | She saw it sitting, and stood on it all by herself! 😎 soon time to have a pint in the house [link] [comments] |
‘Eye strokes’ that reduce blood flow to optic nerve likely to be side-effect of active ingredient semaglutide, says author
Patients taking Wegovy have nearly five times the risk of sudden sight loss of those on Ozempic, a large-scale study has found.
Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) medicines such as semaglutide (sold as Wegovy, Ozempic and Rybelsus) and tirzepetide (sold as Mounjaro) help reduce blood sugar levels, slow digestion and reduce appetite, and have been linked to reduced risks of heart attack, fewer drug overdoses and other health benefits.
Continue reading...Gas prices in the U.S. have surged roughly 20% since the attack on Iran. Read on to see what measures the Trump administration could take to offer relief.
Where are all the onewheelers out here?
The trails around this area are great and I’ve recently started hitting the bike trails out near Reston. Sorry if I’m late to the game but I’ve been strictly a pavement rider and just discovered I love hopping on and off bike trails.
I’ve looked on Facebook and can’t find any active groups.
Anywho, looking for other folks to ride with.
Pioneering artist returns to Australia for first time in 15 years, with poet Kae Tempest and Afrobeat musician Seun Kuti also on lineups of winter festivals
The pioneering female rapper Lil’ Kim will headline both Vivid Sydney and Melbourne’s Rising this year, as each festival revealed its programs on Wednesday.
The performances at Sydney’s Carriageworks and Melbourne’s Festival Hall will be Lil’ Kim’s first Australian shows in 15 years, celebrating her landmark multiplatinum records Hard Core – which turns 30 this year – and The Notorious KIM.
Continue reading...Last November, Amazon sued Perplexity demanding that the AI search startup stop allowing its AI browser agent, Comet, to make purchases for users online. Today, a judge ruled in favor of the tech giant, granting it a temporary court injunction blocking the scraping of Amazon's website. According to court filings, the judge found strong evidence the tool accessed the retailer's systems "without authorization." CNBC reports: In a ruling dated Monday, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney wrote that Amazon has provided "strong evidence" that Perplexity's Comet browser accessed its website at the user's direction, but "without authorization" from the e-commerce giant. Chesney said Amazon submitted "essentially undisputed evidence" that it spent more than $5,000 to respond to the issue, including "numerous hours" where its employees worked to develop tools to block Comet from accessing its private customer tools and to prevent the tool from "future unauthorized access." "Given such evidence, the Court finds Amazon has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim," Chesney wrote. Chesney's ruling includes a weeklong stay to allow Perplexity to appeal the order. Amazon wrote in its original complaint that Perplexity's agents posed security risks to customer data because they "can act within protected computer systems, including private customer accounts requiring a password." The company also said Perplexity's agents created challenges for the company's advertising business, because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be detected and filtered out before advertisers can be billed. "This requires modifications to Amazon's advertising systems, including developing new detection mechanisms to identify and exclude automated traffic," Amazon wrote in its complaint. "These system adaptations are necessary to maintain contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Police investigating blaze in Kerzers in Fribourg canton, about 12 miles west of Berne
A bus caught fire in western Switzerland on Tuesday killing at least six people and injuring five others, in what police said may have been a deliberate act.
The fire broke out on a bus in the main street of the small town of Kerzers, about 20 km (12 miles) west of the Swiss capital Berne, at about 6.25pm (5.25pm GMT).
Continue reading...Andy Ogles said Muslims do not belong in the US and Randy Fine made a comparison of Muslims to dogs
Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, on Tuesday declined to condemn Republican lawmakers who recently made Islamophobic comments, saying only that he had spoken to them about their “tone”.
Democrats and groups advocating religious tolerance have decried the statements from congressmen Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Randy Fine of Florida, with the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, calling on Johnson to discipline the latter.
Continue reading...Despite progress, 2024 data suggests an ongoing humanitarian disaster, with more than six unhoused people dying every day
More than 2,200 unhoused people died in Los Angeles in 2024, marking the first time in a decade that the homeless mortality rate decreased in the nation’s most populous county, public health officials announced on Tuesday.
The signs of progress come as the county has also reported decreases in the overall unhoused population in a region that has long struggled with a severe affordable housing shortage and one of the worst street homelessness crises in the US.
Continue reading...The ongoing dispute between Anthropic and the Department of War is raising questions, including who is responsible for implementing safeguards on AI products used for military objectives, and what those safeguards should entail. The dispute also is impacting the Department of Energy, which is currently reviewing the use of Anthropic products in the national labs.
The rift between Anthropic and the DOW stems from a fundamental disagreement between the two entities on the topic of AI safeguards. In short, the DOW demands that third-party AI models it uses have zero pre-configured safeguards and that AI vendors agree to “any lawful use” of that AI by the DOW.
Anthropic generally agrees to those terms. The company has worked with the US military and said it has never run into any ethical issue. However, the Claude-maker insists that the DOW carve out two exceptions in its contract: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
“We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a February 26 blog post. On fully autonomous weapons, he stated: “We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.”
Claude has been banned for use within all US Government agencies (Source: Anthropic)
Anthropic’s stance on these items is non-negotiable, Amodei added. “It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision,” he wrote. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
The next day, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced he would designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which effectively ended the Pentagon’s contract with Anthropic that was worth up to $200 million. “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,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said on X.
President Donald Trump also announced in a Truth Social post that he directed all federal agencies in the US government “to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology,” adding that there will be a six-month phase out period for agencies like the DOW.
Anthropic responded on March 9 by filing two lawsuits against the DOW, in California and Washington, D.C. The company said that its designation as a supply chain risk was unlawful and violated its free speech and due process rights. “Current and future contracts with private parties are also in doubt, jeopardizing hundreds of millions of dollars in the near-term,” the company wrote in the lawsuit.
Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, has been widely adopted by the US military as well as government scientific institutions. Claude is used by the military and national security agencies for intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, and cyber operations, among other uses. Claude has also been widely adopted by DOE National Labs for pursuing scientific research in biology, life sciences, energy, and other areas, and is involved in DOE Genesis Mission projects.
However, it appears that the DOE has begun the process of eliminating Anthropic products from its national labs. In response to an HPCwire question, a DoE spokesperson stated:
“As directed by President Trump, the Department of Energy is reviewing all existing contracts and uses of Anthropic technology. The Department remains firmly committed to ensuring that the technology we employ serves the public interest, protects America’s energy and national security, and advances our mission.”
Anthropic’s Claude is one of the top foundation models in the world and has been widely adopted in a range of use cases. Tests show Claude outperforming competitors like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT models in areas like text generation, programming, document analysis, and search. Claude Opus is considered one of the top reasoning models and is highly used by software engineers. Anthropic has also emphasized safety with Claude.
Generative AI is a new technology, and best practices are still being fleshed out. How and where to apply built-in checks on AI decision-making, which are commonly called guardrails or safeguards, is a topic that experts are still wrestling with.
Anthropic’s emphasis on safety may not mesh with emerging use cases, particularly with the US military. Amodei’s insistence that it retain safeguards, rather than the US Government, clearly has put it at odds with the DOW.
While the AI community may be wrestling with how and where to apply safeguards, the US military is not, according to Ben Van Roo, the CEO and founder of AI platform firm Legion Intelligence (formerly Yurts).
AI can help defend against drone attacks (Anelo/Shutterstock)
In an interview with HPCwire, Van Roo said Anthropic displayed a basic misunderstanding of how the military employs technology to help automate or speed up decision-making, adding that we’re a long way from seeing Terminator-style killer robots unleashed on the battlefield.
“There’s military doctrine in how you take certain steps along the way. There’s very explicit tests in how you advance things like targeting using prioritization algorithms,” he said. “Military doctrine has existed for hundreds of years longer than Anthropic.”
Clearly, few would have an issue with AI playing a role in defensive technology. For instance, if 10,000 attack drones were inbound on San Francisco right now, “do you want a human deciding every single drone that gets attacked by a counter measure?” Van Roo asked? “I would want to use any technology to help improve a missile intercept.”
The extent to which AI is used for more offensive use cases, such as the attack on Iranian military installations by the US and Israel that began February 28, is unknown. In any case, the basic math is the same: Anything that can improve the quality of decisions should be used, and when it comes to AI specifically, the safeguards already exist in US military doctrine.
At the end of the day, the government needs “reliable vendors” that don’t insist on setting the rules for use, said Van Roo, who also bemoaned the “hype and hysteria” in Silicon Valley and the mainstream media around the story.
“We can’t walk into these scenarios without our eyes wide open with the technology that we’re creating,” Van Roo said. “It is the most disruptive, powerful technology in human history. Of course the US Government’s going to want to use it. I think there’s a perception that they’re using it without intention and without thoughtfulness.” That is not the case, he added.
The post Anthropic’s Rift with Department of War Over Safeguards Could Impact DOE Labs appeared first on HPCwire.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.
The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.
The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.
Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
In 2015, two dozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.
A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.
Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.
In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.
Under pressure from lawmakers, Trump’s then-Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered a review of civilian casualty protocols.
Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.
During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.
“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.
The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”
Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involving boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.
At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.
Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.
Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.
To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.
“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”
At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”
By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.
Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.
Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.
Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.
Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.
“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.
After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.
“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”
In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.
One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.
Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”
“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”
The post The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It. appeared first on ProPublica.
Study participants reported increased mental fatigue while using AI tools, but less burnout overall.
Billionaire’s artificial intelligence company gets approval to run 41 methane gas turbines at its ‘Colossus 2’ in Mississippi
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI won approval on Tuesday to run 41 methane gas turbines at its “Colossus 2” datacenter in northern Mississippi. That’s nearly double the amount it has been operating.
The turbines will help power xAI’s massive datacenters, which house the company’s “AI supercomputers”, or giant arrays of advanced chips, which in turn power the controversial AI tool Grok, the company’s most recognizable product.
Continue reading...After 14 years in orbit, NASA's Van Allen Probe A satellite is expected to begin re-entering Earth's atmosphere on Tuesday.
sziring shares a report from Business Insider: Silicon Valley has long competed for talent with ever-richer pay packages built around salary, bonus, and equity. Now, a fourth line item is creeping into the mix: AI inference. As generative AI tools become embedded in software development, the cost of running the underlying models -- known as inference -- is emerging as a productivity driver and a budget line that finance chiefs can't ignore. Software engineers and AI researchers inside tech companies have already been jousting for access to GPUs, with this AI compute capacity being carefully parceled out based on which projects are most important. Now, some tech job candidates have begun asking about what AI compute budget they will have access to if they decide to join. "I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex," Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI's Codex, the startup's AI coding service, wrote on X recently. He added that usage per user is growing much faster than overall user growth, a sign that AI compute is becoming even scarcer and more valuable. That scarcity is reshaping how engineers think about their work and pay. "The inference compute available to you is increasingly going to drive overall software productivity," said OpenAI President Greg Brockman. The report cites a recent compensation submission from a software engineer that listed "Copilot subscription" as part of the pay and benefits. "OpenAI and Anthropic should create recruitment sites where their clients can advertise roles, listing the token budget for the job alongside the salary range," said Peter Gostev, AI capability lead at Arena, a startup that measures the performance of models. Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures predicts AI inference will be the fourth component of engineering compensation, alongside salary, bonus, and equity. "Will you be paid in tokens? In 2026, you likely will start to be," Tunguz said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Redox, the rapidly improving general purpose operating system written in Rust, has amended its contribution policy to explicitly ban code regurgitated by “AI”.
Redox OS does not accept contributions generated by LLMs (Large Language Models), sometimes also referred to as “AI”. This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed, and any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project.
↫ Redox’ contribution policy
Excellent news.
I spoke to an AT&T archivist about Alexander Graham Bell's famous transmission. Even though calls have changed, the reasons behind them are still the same.
Multiple news outlets have reported that video, satellite images and expert analysis indicate that the United States was likely responsible for the Feb. 28 bombing of an Iranian school for young girls, contradicting President Donald Trump’s unsupported claim that the deadly strike “was done by Iran.”
When a reporter aboard Air Force One asked Trump on March 7 if the U.S. had bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school, the president said, “No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” He continued: “We think it was done by Iran – because they are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was standing near Trump at the time, didn’t echo the president’s version of events when a reporter asked if that claim was accurate.
“We’re certainly investigating,” Hegseth said, before adding that “the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
But the available evidence suggests that Iran wasn’t at fault, according to several news reports.
The bombing happened on the first day of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran as part of the joint military mission known as Operation Epic Fury. The school was located in very close proximity to an Iranian naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that was bombed in the air attacks. NBC News reported that the naval base had closed more than a decade ago, according to an official with Iran’s education ministry and a mother the network interviewed.
Iranian officials have said that more than 160 people, mostly students, were killed when the school was hit. But the number of casualties hasn’t been independently verified.
A video posted March 8 by the Mehr News Agency, which has been described as a semiofficial Iranian news service, shows a missile striking in the vicinity where the naval base and school were in southern Iran, according to news reports. Smoke was already visible in the surrounding area when the missile landed and exploded, creating a new, darker plume of smoke and debris. Multiple news organizations verified the video using geolocation tools.
The New York Times reported that satellite images it obtained from Planet Labs show “that multiple precision strikes hit at least six Revolutionary Guards buildings along with the school,” including four buildings that were completely destroyed. The Times, citing a timeline of the strikes, said that the video suggests that the school could have already been struck when that missile made impact with another structure.
The Washington Post reported that eight munitions experts said that the missile seen in the Mehr News Agency video, based on its shape, appears to be a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, which the U.S. developed and is known to have used in its air assault on Iran. The U.S. military has released several videos and photos of those long-range missiles being launched from Navy warships during the now 11-day conflict.
Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician who covers munitions for the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, wrote in a thread on X that the posted video “shows a US Tomahawk missile hitting an IRGC facility in Minab, Iran, on Feb 28, showing for the first time that the US struck the area.” He said, “The footage appears to contradict President Donald Trump’s claim it was an Iranian missile that hit the school.”
In a March 9 press conference in Miami, Trump still insisted that Iran could be responsible, saying it “also has some Tomahawks” and Iran “wish[es] they had more.” The president added: “But whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk, a Tomahawk is very generic.”
But there is no evidence that Iran has acquired Tomahawk missiles. “Iran has none, though it has lots of missiles of different kinds,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, told us in an email.
Ball wrote on X that the U.S. “is the only participant in the war that is known to have Tomahawk missiles.”
In addition, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference on March 4 that the initial U.S. airstrikes were focused in the south of Iran, where the school bombing occurred. Israel “predominantly” targeted air defense systems in Iran’s “northern flank,” he said.
“An Israeli military official said the military was looking into the school incident but wasn’t aware of an Israeli strike in that area” with the school, the Wall Street Journal reported.
When asked about the school bombing, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, Capt. Tim Hawkins, told reporters that “it would be inappropriate to comment given the incident is under investigation.”
Meanwhile, Reuters, citing two unnamed U.S. officials, reported on March 5 that “U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls’ school.” U.S. officials requesting anonymity to speak about the preliminary findings told the Associated Press, CBS News and the Wall Street Journal the same thing.
CBS News said “[t]he preliminary U.S. assessment suggests that the United States is ‘likely’ responsible for the deadly attack but did not intentionally target the school and may have hit it in error, possibly due to the use of dated intelligence which wrongly identified the area as still part of an Iranian military installation.”
In response to early reports about the probe, a White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, issued a statement to reporters saying that the “investigation is ongoing” and has reached “no conclusions at this time.” She called it “both irresponsible and false for anyone to claim otherwise.”
Reuters said in its reporting that the officials it spoke with “did not rule out the possibility that new evidence could emerge that absolves the US of responsibility.”
Even with satellite images and video of the airstrikes, remnants of the missile would need to be examined to more definitively determine culpability, N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an arms and munitions intelligence specialist who directs the Armament Research Services, told the newswire.
Complicating matters, the AP said, is the fact that “[n]o independent agency has reached the site during the war to investigate.”
At the March 9 press conference, Trump was asked why he is the only person in the U.S. government claiming that Iran was responsible for the bombing of the school. He replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have tomahawks. They buy them from us.”
But Cancian told us that the only countries other than the U.S. using Tomahawks are the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan and the Netherlands.
The U.K. and Australia have previously purchased the missiles, according to their own defense departments. The U.S. State Department approved selling the weapons to Japan and the Netherlands, in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
Those four countries are not involved in the U.S-Israeli conflict with Iran.
Ultimately, once the investigation is complete, “whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report,” Trump said.
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The post Without Providing Evidence, Trump Pins School Bombing on Iran appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Experiencing chest pains during anxiety is common. Here's what you can do to improve symptoms.
Exclusive: Safeguarding minister says man accused of restraining order breach will not come to court until 2028
A man accused of breaching a restraining order related to Jess Phillips will not have his case heard in the crown court until 2028, the Labour minister has revealed, as MPs voted in favour of controversial plans to scrap some jury trials.
During an emotive day in the House of Commons, the Labour MP for Warrington North, Charlotte Nichols, said she had been raped after an event she attended as a member of parliament but did not support the bill and felt that ministers had weaponised victims.
Continue reading...The allegations surfaced after several people across the country reported receiving tax forms showing income from Uber, despite never signing up to drive for the company.
Auditors from Assured Security Consultants only noted two low-risk issues that have since been patched.
It might be worth adding the EVE 30PL 18650 and the EVE 50PL 21700 to this list!
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 534 for Wednesday, March 11.
Iran is using smaller crafts to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. officials said.
President Trump says the Iran war will end "very soon," but Tehran says it's "prepared to continue attacking" indefinitely, and it won't let oil leave the Gulf.
Canadian police are seeking two men suspected of firing a handgun at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto on Tuesday. There are no reports of injuries, police say.
Charles “Sonny” Burton, 75, participated in a 1991 robbery that led to a death but had left the building when an accomplice killed the victim inside.
Tehran spurns Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and insists on guarantees it will not be attacked again
Iran has spurned two messages from Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, seeking a ceasefire as its leaders sense it is not losing the war and the US president is at the minimum feeling the political pressure.
The foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has further said a unilateral declaration from Trump that the US had won the war would not bring an end to the conflict. The implication is that even if the US announced a willingness to end its attacks, Iran might be willing to continue the conflict in some form, or keep its chokehold on shipping seeking to navigate the strait of Hormuz.
Continue reading...AT&T plans to invest more than $250 billion over the next five years to expand U.S. telecom infrastructure for the AI age. The company says it will also hire thousands of technicians while partnering with AST SpaceMobile to extend coverage to remote areas. Reuters reports: Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and connected devices has prompted telecom operators to invest heavily in fiber and 5G networks as they also seek to fend off intensifying competition from cable broadband providers. AT&T, which has about 110,000 employees in the U.S., said the new hires will help build and maintain its infrastructure. The outlay includes capital expenditure and other spending, the company said. The spending will focus on expanding its fiber and wireless networks, including accelerating deployment of fiber broadband, 5G home internet and satellite connectivity to extend coverage across urban, suburban and rural areas. [...] AT&T is also working with satellite partner AST SpaceMobile to expand connectivity to remote regions where traditional network infrastructure is difficult to deploy. The company said it would continue spending on the FirstNet network built for first responders and bolster investment in network security and artificial intelligence-driven threat detection.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 11, No. 1,726.
Safety checks needed after neighbouring building gutted by huge blaze on Sunday night, with only facade remaining
Glasgow Central station’s high level will remain closed for the rest of the week, after a fire devastated a neighbouring building on Sunday.
Network Rail said it would not be possible to reopen the upper concourse of the station, where trains depart to destinations across the UK, because of the instability of the mid-Victorian block on the corner of Union Street and Gordon Street, much of which collapsed during the ferocious blaze.
Continue reading...Republican Kay Ivey called execution unfair since Charles ‘Sonny’ Burton, who will serve life in prison, didn’t fire fatal shot
The governor of Alabama commuted the death sentence of a 75-year-old inmate who was set to be executed this week, even though he was not in the building when the victim of the murder he was sentenced for was killed.
Kay Ivey, the Republican governor of the state, reduced Charles “Sonny” Burton’s sentence to life in prison without possibility of parole this week. The move marks the second time the governor has granted clemency of a death row inmate since she took office in 2017.
Continue reading...New York police responded to an alert days after two men threw homemade explosives at Gracie Mansion
The New York police department determined that a suspicious device reported near Gracie Mansion on Tuesday afternoon was “non-threatening”.
“This was an instance of everyday New Yorkers following a clear message: if you see something, say something,” the NYPD posted on social media.
Continue reading...Opening statements begin in Miami trial of four men accused in the 2021 killing of Jovenel Moïse
Greed, arrogance and power were the driving forces behind four men charged in the US for the 2021 assassination of Haiti’s last elected president, Jovenel Moïse , prosecutors told a court on Tuesday during opening statements.
Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys began presenting opening statements in the trial in Miami for Arcangel Pretel Ortíz, Antonio Intriago, Walter Veintemilla and James Solages. They are charged with conspiring in south Florida to kidnap or kill Haiti’s former leader. Moïse’s assassination led to unprecedented turmoil in the Caribbean nation, where gang leaders have grown increasingly violent and empowered.
Continue reading...Darren Jones says £1.8bn project likely to cover only vehicle tax payments and right-to-work checks initially
Britain’s £1.8bn digital ID scheme will only be available for a handful of uses by the next election, including paying vehicle tax and right-to-work checks, the minister in charge of the project has said.
Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary, said on Tuesday he eventually wanted the app to be used for everything from claiming benefits to proving the right to vote, but that most of this would not happen until the next parliament.
Continue reading...Gold IRAs can protect your retirement savings — if you avoid the scams. Here's what to watch for before you invest.
American Express and Blackbird cut ties with restaurant after René Redzepi accused of abusing his staff
After allegations emerged this week that René Redzepi had abused his staff at Noma, once considered the world’s best restaurant, sponsors on Tuesday announced they would end their support for the chef’s upcoming events in Los Angeles.
The New York Times reported that American Express and the hospitality company Blackbird have cut ties with Noma ahead of the Copenhagen restaurant’s four-month pop-up in LA, which was set to kick off this week.
Continue reading...Destroyer leaves Portsmouth a week after deployment was announced following drone attack on RAF base in Cyprus
The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Dragon departed Portsmouth on Tuesday afternoon for the eastern Mediterranean after six days of hasty preparation and a week after its deployment was announced by the prime minister.
The warship is expected to take between five and seven days to arrive off the coast of Cyprus, where it will be able to defend against drone and missile attacks from Iran or its proxies in Lebanon or Iraq.
Continue reading...Money market accounts could be beneficial for savers now, as long as they understand these four pros and cons.
It has been nearly a year and a half since the company announced the AI-powered product.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 10, 2026 — Unreasonable Labs today announced it has launched from stealth and closed a $13.5 million funding round led by Playground Global, with participation from AIX Ventures, E14 Fund, and MS&AD Ventures. The company, founded by a former senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and an engineering professor at MIT, has built a foundational AI discovery engine designed to accelerate breakthroughs by composing new knowledge across chemistry, materials science, biology, and beyond.
The funding will be used to scale Unreasonable’s core technology, which pairs state of the art large language models (LLM) with a map of relationships and neurosymbolic mathematical abstractions that allow real-world patterns across disparate fields to enable generative discovery. Unreasonable’s unique pairing of capabilities creates a cross-disciplinary AI engine that moves beyond simple data retrieval to generate genuinely novel, validated scientific hypotheses, simulate solutions, and design experiments.
“We are at a turning point where AI can be both an assistant to the scientist and a catalyst for the science itself, but LLMs alone cannot solve for scientific discovery,” said Yuan Cao, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Unreasonable. “To go from idea to impact, you need to move unreasonably fast and we exist to make that possible. Unreasonable will enable R&D teams to solve in weeks what previously took years.”
“Current AI models can only retrieve what is already known, which prevents even the most impressive reasoning models from generating novel discoveries,” said Prof. Markus Buehler, co-founder and CTO of Unreasonable. “Genuine discovery requires a deeper understanding, to connect disparate ideas to ultimately synthesize new insights. By pairing models with neurosymbolic mathematical abstractions we create a machine that does not just parrot the world as it is, but actively shapes the world. At Unreasonable, we’ve built that machine to invent a better future.”
Moving From Generative Text to Generative Discovery
Modern R&D teams face an unprecedented information bottleneck. Scientific and technical data are compounding exponentially, yet critical insights remain trapped in isolated silos—scattered across millions of research papers, lab notes, and proprietary simulations.
Current AI models, while impressive, have largely used sophisticated search tools for knowledge aggregation and summarization for tasks like scientific discovery. They can interpolate from existing knowledge, but – unlike the way humans create knowledge – they struggle to connect distant concepts or navigate the high-dimensional complexity required for true invention. Unreasonable was founded to bridge this gap, moving from “generative text” to “generative discovery.”
The Unreasonable Approach: Composing New Knowledge
Unreasonable’s discovery engine is built to overcome the limitations of closed AI models, whose representations of the world are constrained by finite training data. While most AI for science tools are narrowly trained on specific datasets—such as protein folding or battery chemistry—Unreasonable has built a general framework that incentivizes models to reason beyond their intrinsic world representations.
Unreasonable’s framework pairs state of the art LLM models with a map of relationships and neurosymbolic mathematical abstractions that allow real-world patterns across disparate fields to enable generative discovery.
These mathematical abstractions transform unstructured data into a verifiable, structured network of entities and their relationships. The set of rules that organize that vast data in turn enables scientists to edit the reasoning process. Together, this framework allows machines to comprehend and deduce meaning from data in a logical and systematic manner, enabling a more precise, causal reasoning than a standard LLM while simultaneously providing the necessary rigor and explainability for genuine scientific breakthroughs. In doing so, Unreasonable’s framework enables AI to reason creatively, a uniquely human characteristic that is a prerequisite to genuine knowledge discovery.
To enable generative discovery, Unreasonable has built the essential operating system for scientific research and development, to provide a critical orchestration layer that stands alone in the field. Specifically, the system is designed to:
A Founding Team at the Intersection of AI and Physical Science
Unreasonable unites two worlds that have traditionally remained separate: elite artificial intelligence research and deep physical engineering expertise. The company’s founders represent the pinnacle of these fields.
World-Class Advisors
In addition to the co-founders and initial team, Unreasonable is supported by the following list of advisors, all of whom are highly regarded leaders in their fields:
“At Playground, we look for the unreasonable founders who tackle seemingly impossible problems,” said Sasha Ostojic, Venture Partner at Playground Global. “The intersection of AI, reasoning, and knowledge discovery is the next meaningful frontier for human productivity. The Unreasonable team has the rare combination of technical pedigree and ambitious vision required to redefine how we discover new materials, medicines, and energy solutions. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all progress depends on the unreasonable.”
Looking Ahead: From Pilots to Breakthroughs
With this capital, Unreasonable will expand its technical team, hiring top-tier talent across machine learning, simulation engineering, and computational science. The company has already initiated pilot collaborations with leading industrial partners in the energy transition, materials science, and pharmaceutical sectors.
By productizing scientific intuition, Unreasonable aims to create a world where new knowledge and solutions are discovered through human-led, AI-driven exploration of the possible.
About Unreasonable
Unreasonable is an AI company building superintelligence for knowledge discovery. Unreasonable’s operating system is designed to accelerate R&D and human ingenuity for the physical world across disciplines. Founded by world-leading experts from Google DeepMind and MIT, Unreasonable has offices in Palo Alto, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Source: Unreasonable Labs
The post Unreasonable Labs Emerges from Stealth with AI Platform for Scientific Discovery appeared first on HPCwire.
The vernal equinox heralds the arrival of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. But have you heard the myth about balancing an egg on its end?
Saudi Arabian state oil firm calls crisis by far the biggest the region has seen but firm can reroute 70% of exports and tap crude held in storage
Saudi Arabia’s state oil company has warned of “catastrophic consequences” for the world’s oil markets if the US-Israeli war with Iran continues to block shipping in the strait of Hormuz.
The world’s biggest oil exporter expects to be able to supply the market with about 70% of its usual crude output despite the stranglehold on the vital trade artery, but its chief executive warned that there would still be “drastic” consequences for the world economy if the disruption continued.
Continue reading...Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies -- which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "After 35 years in Boston, the annual prize ceremony will take place in Zurich, Switzerland, this year and will continue to be held in a European city for the foreseeable future," reports Ars Technica. "The reason: concerns about the safety of international travelers, who are increasingly reluctant to travel to the U.S. to participate." "During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country," Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of The Annals of Improbable Research magazine, told The Associated Press. "We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the U.S. this year." It comes on the heels of our recent story that many international game developers are opting to skip this year's weeklong Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, citing similar concerns. Ars Technica reports: Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." As the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit. The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures, in which experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and again in just seven words. Traditionally, the awards ceremony and related Ig Nobel events have taken place in Boston at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University. However, four of last year's 10 winners opted to skip the ceremony rather than travel to the U.S., and the situation has not improved. [...] [T]his year, the Ig Nobel organizers are joining forces with the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich for hosting duties. "Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things -- Albert Einstein's physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind -- and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas," Abraham said. The Ig Nobels will not be returning to the U.S. any time soon. Instead, the plan is for Zurich to host every second year; every odd-numbered year, the ceremony will be hosted by a different European city. Abraham likened the arrangement to the Eurovision Song Contest.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Charlotte Nichols opposes plan to cut jury trials in England and Wales and calls for creation of special courts to hear rape cases
An MP has told the House of Commons that she was raped after an event that she attended as a member of parliament, revealing that she waited 1,088 days for her case to get to court.
Speaking at a debate on Tuesday to discuss changes to the law under which some jury trials would be limited, Charlotte Nichols said she was waiving her right to anonymity to speak about her own experience and opposition to the bill.
Continue reading...Academic Shereen Daniels says plan by Mark Rowley to absorb police’s race policies into broader anti-discrimination programme is backward step
The Metropolitan police have been accused of insulting black people and mocking the pain it has caused them after revealing it wants to absorb its anti-racism strategy into a broader anti-discrimination scheme.
The Met said the scheme, also including gender and sexual orientation, would increase its chance of success in better serving groups it had failed in the past.
Continue reading...ARLINGTON, Va., March 10, 2026 — The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) announced today the members of the Task Force on AI and the Future of Work. This initiative brings together leaders from government, industry, and academia to ensure that the United States remains the global leader in artificial intelligence while placing the American worker at the heart of the digital revolution.
The Task Force will be led by co-chairs SCSP President Ylli Bajraktari, NVIDIA Co-Founder Chris Malachowsky, U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), and U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA).
“Our nation’s greatest competitive advantage has always been our people,” said Bajraktari. “This Task Force is about building the bridge between today’s workforce and tomorrow’s economy, ensuring that the ‘AI Age’ is defined by American ingenuity and broadly shared prosperity.”
The Task Force’s mission is to accelerate America’s AI leadership by empowering the U.S. workforce with the skills, opportunities, and tools needed to thrive. By focusing on educational frameworks and upskilling pipelines, the initiative ensures that American workers remain at the center of innovation and global competitiveness.
“AI is the great equalizer,” said Malachowsky. “By modernizing education, training, and workforce development for the AI era, we can unlock human potential at a national scale and ensure the U.S. builds the most skilled, productive, and technologically advanced workforce in the world.”
Members of the Task Force include:
The strategic objectives of the Task Force:
“Maintaining our lead in AI is a matter of both economic and national security,” said U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD). “We must ensure our workers have the training they need to lead this transition. This bipartisan effort will help define the policies required to keep America the global hub for innovation.”
The Task Force will hold its inaugural meeting in March to discuss how artificial intelligence will reshape America’s workforce and identify pathways to ensure workers thrive in an AI-enabled economy.
“As AI changes the nature of work, we have a responsibility to make sure no worker is left behind,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner. “This Task Force will focus on creating the retraining pipelines and educational opportunities necessary to prepare Virginians and all Americans for the high-quality jobs of the future.”
The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) is a non-profit, non-partisan initiative with a mission to make recommendations to strengthen America’s long-term competitiveness as artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are reshaping our national security, economy, and society.
For more information, please contact Tara Rigler at tmr@scsp.ai.
More from HPCwire
Source: SCSP
The post SCSP and NVIDIA Announce Members of Task Force on AI and the Future of Work appeared first on HPCwire.
March 10, lovingly known as Mar10 Day, is a chance to celebrate Nintendo's most enduring hero. And his brother (whatever he's called).
Even if oil prices ease, they won't return to the levels they were at before the war started, according to Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy.
March 10, 2026 — As the quantum computing field accelerates, DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) is expanding to capture its momentum.
Organizations that have not yet been funded by QBI are invited to join under a new Stage A Quantum Benchmarking Initiative Topic (QBIT), which builds on QBI’s ongoing effort to rigorously determine whether any quantum computing architecture can achieve utility-scale operation — meaning its computational value exceeds its cost — by 2033.
Of particular interest are entrants with distinct approaches that have not yet been evaluated under QBI. Selected participants will enter Stage A, a six-month period in which they will describe a full system concept and provide evidence supporting its feasibility.
With this solicitation comes another shift for QBI: Micah Stoutimore is assuming the role of managing director for QBI, succeeding founding program manager Joe Altepeter who will support the transition prior to departing the agency.
Stoutimore has served as deputy program manager since the Initiative’s inception and supported related pilot efforts that helped shape the program’s evaluation framework. The transition is in keeping with DARPA tradition of mandatory limited tenure for program managers, a deliberate approach designed to keep programs fresh, continuously challenge assumptions, and ensure a steady infusion of new technical perspectives.
“Joe built QBI from a concept into the world’s largest evaluation of quantum computing, and I’m grateful for the foundation he established,” said Stoutimore. “I’m honored to take on the role and continue steering the initiative as we expand the range of approaches under examination.”
Since its launch in mid-2024, QBI has evaluated approaches from 20 commercial companies spanning a variety of qubit architectures. Eleven organizations have advanced to Stage B for deeper technical risk-reduction and development planning, while two performers from the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) pilot program, have advanced to Stage C, working with the government to verify and validate system-level operation.
“Our renewed invitation to join Stage A reflects the rigor with which we evaluate every approach,” said Stoutimore. “Both QBI and the broader quantum computing field have advanced rapidly since our first call. In fact, it now seems likely that someone will build a utility-scale quantum computer by 2033, but it remains unclear exactly which team or teams might get across that finish line. We want to ensure we are assessing every viable pathway.”
Abstracts are due July 31, 2026, and full proposals for the Stage A QBIT are due Sept. 30, 2026. Interested parties can find further details within the solicitation on SAM.gov.
More from HPCwire: DARPA Selects 11 Participants for Quantum Benchmarking Initiative Stage B
Source: DARPA
The post DARPA Expands Quantum Benchmarking Initiative with New Stage A Call for Participants appeared first on HPCwire.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 10, 2026 — Hammerspace today announced a partnership with Secuvy to deliver a “Data-First” approach that turns raw data into secure AI outcomes. Together, the companies unify distributed unstructured data into a global namespace and continuously discover, classify, catalog, and control it across on-premises and cloud.
“The bottleneck for AI isn’t a lack of GPUs or models; it’s the friction of fragmented data. Most AI initiatives stall because teams can’t move data fast enough or safely enough to keep GPUs fed,” said Sam Newnam, Vice President of AI and Business Development at Hammerspace. “Hammerspace addresses data gravity by unifying access and mobilizing that data across the edge, data center, and cloud. By integrating Secuvy, we are delivering a complete, production-ready stack that combines high-performance data delivery with automated, data-aware security. This is the full-stack foundation enterprises need to finally move AI out of the lab and into global production.”
Enterprise AI is hitting a hard wall, not just with compute demands, but also due to data sprawl and rising costs with no proven ROI. Unstructured data is fragmented across edge sites, legacy NAS systems, high-performance file systems, object stores and multiple clouds, often governed inconsistently. AI pipelines amplify risk by pulling from large, diverse datasets that may include confidential information. Without continuous discovery and classification, organizations risk exposing sensitive data in AI pipelines, losing track of what was used, and missing high-value insights.
“The era of managing storage is over. By integrating Secuvy’s data intelligence with Hammerspace’s data platform, we are creating the ‘Super-Brain’ of AI Metadata,” said Mike Seashols, Chief Executive Officer at Secuvy. “This ‘Data-First’ approach ensures that performance, security, and placement instructions are no longer external afterthoughts, but inherent attributes of the data itself. By establishing this Trusted Data Plane, we provide a unified layer of file and data intelligence that governs the entire data estate, ensuring high-fidelity pipelines and proactive governance regardless of where that data sits.”
Together, Hammerspace and Secuvy keep data continuously AI-ready as it changes, so governance and access controls stay current from PoC to production.
Benefits of Hammerspace and Secuvy Partnership
Hammerspace and Secuvy enable a true Data-First model that makes data AI-ready. The integrated platform understands what the data is, where it lives, and the risk it carries, then controls how it’s used and where it can move, without forcing enterprises to rearchitect projects. Copying data drives up costs and increases risk: when data is duplicated across systems, governance breaks down and auditing, tracking, and securing it becomes difficult, allowing sensitive data to slip into AI pipelines without clear lineage or policy enforcement.
“Enterprises can’t scale AI securely if they don’t know what data they have, or where sensitive data is hiding,” said Jack Hogan, Vice President of Advanced Solutions at SHI. “The Hammerspace and Secuvy integration gives customers a global view of unstructured data plus continuous discovery and classification, so they can enforce governance without breaking workflows or proliferating copies. SHI can integrate this into existing environments to help teams move faster, with the controls needed for production AI.”
With the Hammerspace + Secuvy “Data-First” integration, organizations can make data AI-ready and enable:
About Hammerspace
Hammerspace is the high-performance data platform built to simplify and optimize AI infrastructure at scale. It makes all your data immediately accessible – anywhere across on-premises and cloud environments – without copying or migrating data into new silos. By integrating with existing storage, networking, and applications, Hammerspace creates a unified, high-speed data backbone for AI, enabling organizations to accelerate every stage of the AI pipeline while eliminating data silos.
Source: Hammerspace
The post Hammerspace and Secuvy Partner to Make At-Scale Data AI-Ready, Fast and Safe, Across On-Premises and Cloud appeared first on HPCwire.
Research accelerates AI for science, energy and national security
RICHLAND, Wash., March 10, 2025 — The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has joined collaborators across the nation to develop and deploy artificial intelligence to vastly accelerate the speed of discovery for science, energy and national security.
As a key component of the Genesis Mission, a multi-lab endeavor aims to focus on the needs of commercial electric grid operators. Graphic credit: Cortland Johnson, PNNL.
The Genesis Mission, led by DOE for the nation, brings together all 17 DOE national laboratories in a race to harness AI for national priorities. PNNL is key to the effort, leading and participating in projects central to the nation’s security and international competitiveness. As a multi-disciplinary laboratory with a workforce addressing many types of scientific questions, PNNL brings a valued and unique wide-angle lens to the Genesis AI landscape.
“The Genesis Mission represents a pivotal moment of profound national purpose, where the brightest minds across DOE’s national labs, industry and academia are coming together to redefine the boundaries of scientific discovery,” said Laboratory Director Deb Gracio. “At PNNL, we are seizing this opportunity to shape the future of science with urgency and determination.”
At its core, the Genesis Mission is assembling a unified scientific workhorse powered by DOE-funded supercomputers, integrated AI systems and emerging quantum technologies. Few people realize that DOE manages some of the most advanced scientific instruments in the world. But until now, those instruments operated in silos at individual laboratories. The Genesis Mission connects both the instruments and their terabytes of data to an intelligent agentic platform not only capable of interpreting the data rapidly and proposing new experiments but also interpreting data streams from multiple instruments much faster, more efficiently and at lower cost than currently possible. Working together, the instruments, robotic automation and AI-powered analysis form the integrated infrastructure expected to compress years of painstaking work into months, weeks or even hours.
It’s a monumental expansion of the kind of exploratory collaboration that PNNL embarked on with Microsoft in 2024 to speed discovery of energy materials.
While the ambition embodied in the Genesis Mission is vast, three projects particularly exemplify how PNNL expertise is shaping the enterprise.
Orchestrated Platform for Autonomous Laboratories
We often think of biology in terms of human health, but biological systems are the ultimate energy transformers and engines. Our food supply, housing needs and economy all depend on complex biological systems. While researchers have successfully harnessed biology to improve health and our food supply, we now need it to do more and do it faster.
The effort will be coordinated by the Orchestrated Platform for Autonomous Laboratories (OPAL), a four-lab collaborative research network led in part by PNNL that will give scientists access to a distributed national lab that combines automation, robotics and data analysis.
Researchers will draw on the resources from across the DOE laboratories, including the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science national user facility located on the PNNL campus. EMSL is home to the newly commissioned Anaerobic Microbial Phenotyping Platform (AMP2), which has opened a new chapter in autonomous biological discovery by giving researchers the speed and scale needed to accelerate biotechnology discovery. Scientists will use AMP2 to explore questions about anaerobic microorganisms, which are organisms that grow in an oxygen-free environment and that play important roles in industrial processes to make chemicals, fuels and biomaterials.
As part of this effort, PNNL researchers will work toward creating the ultimate translation system for instruments and data sources that currently don’t speak the same language.
“We are creating a platform that enables multi-AI workflows,” said Chris Oehmen, a technical lead for the project. “What that means is we can ask a question, for example, in the language of a mass spectrometer instrument and get an answer in the language of genes. The goal is to have a platform that can speak multiple data languages, integrate those data and tell us which experiments to do next.”
“That’s powerful,” added Oehmen. “If I’m doing an experiment all by myself in a laboratory, I might say well, I just need this microbe to grow faster. I only get to optimize for one condition. If I’m talking to an AI agent that has access to multiple conditions and datasets, I can say I want the microbe to grow faster, but I also want it to be more robust, so don’t find me an optimal growth condition that’s really fragile. I want an optimal growth rate that’s also very, very stable. The point is not just to do more experiments, it is to do better experiments.”
This is going to change the way scientists think about their work, Oehmen added. It will accelerate discovery toward rapid manufacturing of biologically based, difficult-to-make specialty chemicals and even potentially recovery of critical minerals from sea water, for example.
AI for Planning and Operation of the U.S. Power Grid
PNNL will bring its expertise in AI and electric grid modernization to the Genesis Mission. Often called the world’s largest machine, the U.S. power grid is the backbone of the nation’s economic engine. Its sheer complexity makes it an almost perfect test case for taking advantage of the power of AI to provide just-in-time data and analysis. As a key component of the Genesis Mission, a grid-focused multi-lab endeavor is also among the most closely tied to boots-on-the-ground commercial operators.
Today, grid operators rely on firsthand experience and limited data to make operational decisions. The proposed national AI platform for energy systems operators is designed to evolve continuously, learn securely and support operators in real time with adaptive, reliable intelligence. The massive endeavor is led by the National Laboratory of the Rockies, with Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory serving as co-leads, and support from six additional laboratories including PNNL as a core technical contributor.
The labs have already worked together on several grid-related projects; for example, PNNL and NLR together completed the multi-year National Transmission Planning Study to help chart out the future of grid resources across the nation. Researchers say the Genesis Mission will speed up similar studies considerably.
“When operators often work with tight deadlines to complete tasks such as reviewing data as part of market operations, they can have as little as three hours to make important decisions,” said Marcelo Elizondo, one of the technical leads for the PNNL team. “We’re hoping that AI models can be useful to support operators for those tasks, as well as to derive important information to help operator’s decisions regarding power system reliability.”
The model will be trained on grid control data, past grid adverse events and stress testing from open and proprietary data sources. Then grid operators will test its ability to support planning, forecasting and decision-making, all key elements of electric grid modernization.
“A platform that realizes that kind of speed is going to be a game changer for us and for our industry partners,” Elizondo said.
Autonomous Characterization of Materials Across Scales (ACMAS)
As part of the Genesis Mission, PNNL scientists will use their decades-long expertise in nuclear science to deploy AI to create new ways to analyze nuclear materials.
The work is part of an enduring effort, led by the National Nuclear Security Administration, to modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and ensure the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
“In order for us to deploy modern manufacturing that is faster and more efficient, we have to make sure that the new production approaches give us materials that behave the same way as the old processes. Proving that requires state-of-the-art materials science capabilities,” said Aaron Luttman, senior advisor to ACMAS.
“The pace just isn’t where we need the pace to be. To have a truly agile deterrent, we need to characterize stockpile materials at orders-of-magnitude faster speeds, and that requires AI,” he added.
PNNL leads the effort and brings extensive experience analyzing the properties of uranium and plutonium, a role that traces back to the Manhattan Project. For this 21st-century mission in nuclear material science, the team is designing and deploying an AI agentic framework that transforms scanning electron microscopes into autonomous materials science platforms. The system will image large-scale material samples, analyze the data, use the results to determine which data to collect next and then iterate through the process with little-to-no human intervention. This frees up PNNL researchers to focus on the fundamental science of material performance and offloads the tedious tasks of data collection to the AI system.
“Over the last three years, we’ve had the opportunity to process fewer than 10 samples of one of our most important uranium alloys,” said Luttman. “At the end of this project, we will be analyzing 10 samples every three months. This will provide the NNSA and its design laboratories and production plants with new options for materials and manufacturing, at a pace that we’ve never seen before. That’s what I’m excited about.”
In addition to their involvement in specific projects, PNNL scientists are leading broader efforts. Court Corley, chief scientist for AI at PNNL, is co-PI of an effort known as the Transformational AI Models Consortium, with a focus on developing AI models to revolutionize scientific discovery. PNNL scientists are also part of core teams developing new AI models to address other challenges.
The Genesis Mission is supported by DOE in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The initiative also includes several industry partners and academic researchers.
“The Genesis Mission is giving us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build the world’s greatest scientific instrument and collaborative infrastructure for discovery science, energy and national security,” said Corley, who is also director of the Center for AI @ PNNL. “We must deliver this capability for American innovation, and we are rising to the moment.”
More from HPCwire: PNNL: Integrating AI into Biological Research
About PNNL
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Source: PNNL
The post PNNL Powers Biotech, Grid Operations, Nuclear Science Through Genesis Mission appeared first on HPCwire.
The US-Israeli bombardment has once again underlined Donald Trump’s indifference to international law. A stronger EU can be a vital counterweight
When European leaders were blindsided in January by Donald Trump’s unilateral abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, their immediate response was to hedge their bets. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, affirmed that the principles of international law must always be respected, but also asserted that Mr Maduro lacked legitimacy. As a new Trump-compliant leadership emerged in Caracas, Europe’s attention drifted to crises closer to home.
The dilemmas and dangers posed by Mr Trump’s war of choice in Iran – again initiated with no attempt to consult allies or gain US congressional approval – are not so easily swerved. The US president has berated and mocked Sir Keir Starmer over a lack of full-throated support for his latest military adventure. He has threatened Spain with a trade embargo, after its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, described the joint US-Israeli assault on Tehran as “unjustified and dangerous”, and refused to sanction the use of military bases. Even Mr Trump’s close ideological ally, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is under pressure from an electorate deeply hostile to involvement in another open-ended Middle East conflict with unpredictable consequences.
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...Former Sinn Féin leader being sued by three men injured in IRA bombings in 1976 and 1996
A convicted IRA bomber has told a court that Gerry Adams was a senior figure in the organisation despite the former Sinn Féin leader’s claims to the contrary.
Adams, 77, is being sued for symbolic “vindicatory” damages of £1 each by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock, who were injured in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, and the London Docklands and Manchester bombings in 1996.
Continue reading...Widow of murdered rightwing activist Charlie Kirk replaces husband on 16-member panel of military training facility
Donald Trump has appointed Erika Kirk, the widow of murdered rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, to a key advisory board of the US Air Force Academy.
The 37-year-old joins a number of other loyalists to the president on the 16-member panel of the academy’s board of visitors, which according to its website “inquires into the morale, discipline, curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods and other matters” of the Colorado Springs military training facility.
Continue reading...
Speaking at a press conference on the 10th day of U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump evaded questions about whether the United States was at fault for a deadly Feb. 28 attack on an Iranian girls’ school.
Reporters pressed Trump twice about the strike, which video evidence shows was carried out by a Tomahawk cruise missile, an American-made weapon that can be launched from ships, submarines or ground launchers at targets 1,000 miles away.
Iranian media reported the air assault killed 175 people at the school, many of them children.
Trump twice declined to say that the U.S. had hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, which was located near an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps facility. He instead raised the possibility that a Tomahawk could have been fired by another country, including Iran. Here’s the full exchange:
Reporter: "There's footage that shows that an American missile strike and a Tomahawk missile likely destroyed that Iranian girls' school. So … will the U.S. accept any responsibility for that strike?"
Trump: "Well, I haven't seen it, and I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around is … sold and used by other countries. You know that. And whether it's Iran, (which) also has some Tomahawks. They wish they had more. But whether it's Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk — a Tomahawk is very generic. It's sold to other countries. But that's being investigated right now."
The exchange prompted a follow-up question.
Reporter: "Mr. President, you just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war. But you're the only person in your government saying this. Even your Defense secretary wouldn't say that when he was asked standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?"
Trump: "Because I just don't know enough about it. I think it's something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks — they buy them from us. But … whatever the report shows, I'm willing to live with that report."
Although a few countries other than the U.S. have Tomahawks, none of them is engaged in fighting Iran. Tomahawk cruise missiles are manufactured by Raytheon, a U.S. company, for use by the U.S. military and international partners.
"The only other countries using Tomahawks are Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands," said Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security-focused think tank. "Iran has none, though it has lots of missiles of different kinds."
Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ East Asia nonproliferation program, agreed.
"Tehran does not have Tomahawks, and Iranian cruise missiles are visually distinct," Lewis said.
N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the intelligence firm Armament Research Services, similarly told CNN that Iran does not have Tomahawk missiles like those seen in video of the strike.
Israel also isn’t known to have Tomahawks.
The White House did not respond to inquiries for this article.
In a March 10 floor speech, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., criticized Trump’s assertion. "Iran doesn't have Tomahawk missiles, Donald Trump," Schumer said. "The claim is beyond asinine."
Republican lawmakers expressed concern as well. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said the U.S. "ought to get to the bottom of it for sure. And admit if we know whose fault it is and do everything we can to eliminate those mistakes going forward."
Officially, the incident remains under Pentagon investigation, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said when asked on Air Force One about the strike March 7.
Analysts from the investigative group Bellingcat and The New York Times separately viewed footage and concluded that the weapon was a Tomahawk, which is about 20 feet long and has a wingspan of eight and a half feet.
Video released by the U.S. Central Command showed several Tomahawks being launched from Navy ships on Feb. 28, the day the school and nearby targets were hit.
Asked about evidence showing a Tomahawk missile hit an Iranian elementary school, Trump said Iran "also has some Tomahawks."
Experts told PolitiFact that the only countries that have Tomahawks besides the U.S. are Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands. Neither Iran nor Israel nor any combatant at that stage of the war is known to have Tomahawks, either, and the White House did not provide evidence to back up Trump’s statement.
We rate this claim False.
Tommy Thompson found the S.S. Central America and its thousands of pounds of sunken treasure that sat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for more than 150 years.
Emanuel Shaleta, bishop of a Chaldean Catholic parish in the San Diego area, pleaded not guilty to 17 felony charges
The bishop of a small Chaldean Catholic community in the San Diego area has resigned amid charges that he embezzled $270,000 from his parish, Pope Leo XIV announced on Tuesday.
Bishop Emanuel Shaleta pleaded not guilty to 17 felony charges, including money laundering, during a hearing attended by many of his supporters.
Continue reading...The Fed may cut rates this spring, but that doesn't guarantee lower costs on your card debt.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is designed to cushion disruptions to U.S. oil supplies during emergencies.
Judge sends Darron Lee murder case to grand jury
Prosecutors cite ChatGPT messages as key evidence
Autopsy finds blunt force trauma and stab wounds
Former New York Jets linebacker Darron Lee appeared in a Tennessee courtroom on Tuesday as prosecutors outlined evidence they say ties him to the killing of his girlfriend, including messages where he asked ChatGPT questions about injuries and how to handle an unresponsive person, according to Chattanooga’s CBS affiliate WDEF.
Lee, 30, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Gabriella Perpétuo at the couple’s home in Ooltewah, about 20 miles northeast of Chattanooga. Deputies were called to the residence last month for a reported medical emergency and found Perpétuo unconscious on the living room floor. The medics were unable to save her and WTVC NewsChannel 9 reported she had suffered a suspected stab wound in addition to other injuries.
Lee: “don’t know what to do right now, Fiancée did her crazy thing again and now she’s messed up, I wake up and she has two swollen eyes (I didn’t do anything, self inflicted) she stabbed herself, silt her eye? Idk but she isn’t waking up or responding, what do I do?”
Lee: “Allie what should I tell my friend to handle someone non responsive but wants to call the police”
Continue reading...Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe among more than 100 signatories to letter urging PM not to get drawn further into the conflict
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is among three of Iran’s former political prisoners and more than 100 Iranians living in the UK who have urged the British prime minister not to get drawn further into the Iran conflict.
They are all signatories in a letter to Keir Starmer saying the way the war is being conducted is strengthening the regime in Tehran.
Continue reading...OpenAI is reportedly backing away from expanding its AI data center partnership with Oracle because newer generations of Nvidia GPUs may arrive before the facility is even operational. CNBC reports: Artificial intelligence chips are getting upgraded more quickly than data centers can be built, a market reality that exposes a key risk to the AI trade and Oracle's debt-fueled expansion. OpenAI is no longer planning to expand its partnership with Oracle in Abilene, Texas, home to the Stargate data center, because it wants clusters with newer generations of Nvidia graphics processing units, according to a person familiar with the matter. The current Abilene site is expected to use Nvidia's Blackwell processors, and the power isn't projected to come online for a year. By then, OpenAI is hoping to have expanded access to Nvidia's next-generation chips in bigger clusters elsewhere, said the person, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. In a post on X, Oracle called the reports "false and incorrect." However, it only said existing projects are on track and didn't address expansion plans. CNBC notes: "Oracle secured the site, ordered the hardware, and spent billions of dollars on construction and staff, with the expectation of going bigger."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bill is in response to president’s latest push to impose tariffs, but it’s likely to stall in Republican-majority Senate
A new Democrat-led bill seeks to exempt small businesses from Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs, as small business owners continue to reel from the impacts of the battle over the president’s signature economic policy.
Introduced by the senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, the bill, known as the “Small Business Liberation 2.0 Act”, would exempt goods imported by or for the use of small businesses from new tariffs, which Trump enacted on 20 February, immediately after the US supreme court’s ruling invalidating his “liberation day” tariffs.
Continue reading...The FDA issued a warning letter to Novo Nordisk, the Danish drugmaker behind the diabetes and weight-loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy, over unreported potential side effects.
I tried to update my PubMote last weekend and ran into a couple issues, so I wanted to document the process for everybody else.
Go to pubmote.com to update your Mote. They have the latest firmware and most of these instructions there already. They also have a lot of the helpful links related to PubMotes.
If anybody sees issues with this, let me know and I’ll make updates!
Hegseth follows Trump’s suggestion war will soon be over by saying US will not stop until Iran ‘decisively defeated’
Tehran residents say the Iranian capital has endured what they described as its worst night of aerial bombardment, as the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, followed Donald Trump’s suggestion on Monday the war could soon be over with a warning of more strikes to come.
“We are under heavy bombardment and I can hear back-to-back explosions. The place they hit has caught fire. It’s not clear where it exploded, but the buildings are shaking,” Niloufar, who lives in east Tehran said early on Tuesday, speaking under a pseudonym for security reasons. “They are destroying Iran,” they added, saying there were low-flying jets above.
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Wars have been distinctly out of fashion as of late, especially since the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether those quagmires are to be blamed on “dumb, politically correct wars” in the eyes of War Secretary Pete Hegseth or not, the idea of putting boots on the ground, doing regime change, occupying a country, and putting American lives in danger is political suicide.
By now, President Donald Trump isn’t shying away from calling the war he launched against Iran a “war” as he seeks the trappings of what a powerful president is meant to be doing. But Trump was more obfuscating in his speech to the nation announcing the beginning of the conflict, instead using the phrase George W. Bush used in his infamous 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech, saying the U.S. had launched “major combat operations” against Iran, before obliquely referring to it later on as a “war” to prepare the viewers at home for “courageous American heroes” being killed in the fighting to come.
Trump has since gleefully argued that “wars can be fought ‘forever’” to those worried about America running low on munitions to use against Iran. When asked whether Americans should be concerned about retaliatory strikes on the homeland, Trump responded, “I guess,” and added, “When you go to war, some people will die.”
After American stealth bombers struck Iranian nuclear facilities last June, Vice President JD Vance claimed the United States was not at war with Iran, or even Iran’s government, but only with “Iran’s nuclear program.” Absent the ability to split such fine hairs, Republicans have by and large stuck to calling the war a “decisive action,” an “extraordinary mission,” or an “intervention” — but have faltered under basic scrutiny when asked what those phrases mean in an effort not to trip wires with the American people, a majority of whom do not support the war.
Some have been slightly more agile, with House Speaker Mike Johnson insisting Operation Epic Fury is just that, an “operation” that is “limited in scope, limited in objective.” Some have taken the line that Iran has in fact been the one waging the forever war, against the United States, with the House Republican Foreign Affairs Committee publishing an image boasting that “President Trump is ending the forever war that Iran has waged against America for the last 47 years.” Others have simply tripped over themselves, with Sen. Markwayne Mullin declaring “This is war,” before correcting himself after being pressed by a journalist, saying “They’ve called it war” and “We haven’t declared war,” and that him saying it was a war “was a misspoke.” Mullin has since been nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
Strangely, though, this allergy has also been exhibited by many of the war’s ostensible critics, though these lines rarely go much further. Certain Democratic members of Congress, like Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, have outright supported the war, borrowing language from the Republicans — the latter called it a “military intervention” — and saying targeting “missile systems and core infrastructure” apparently does not count as a war.
Others attempted some sort of bizarre middle ground, with Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, warning the “hostilities” against Iran were “not an illegal war — but could become one.” Even those straightforwardly against the war have made bizarre missteps, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., still borrowing Trump’s preferred framing in the headline of her statement condemning the war, calling it “combat operations” against Iran.
The root of this hesitation by both Republicans and Democrats stems from the memory of Iraq and Afghanistan, and how estimates of operations stretched from weeks and months to years and years, in which thousands of American soldiers died and hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Already the estimated duration of the war with Iran has stretched from four weeks to six to even potentially eight, according to Hegseth.
Barack Obama understood Americans’ fears about reentering open-ended conflicts, choosing instead to greatly expand the drone program that has informed how this war is now being executed. It also led him to describe his military interventions against the Islamic State as being explicitly nothing like Bush’s open-ended wars, where “ground troops” for combat purposes would not be returning to Iraq after the much-heralded withdrawal. Of the thousands of U.S. troops Obama ended up sending to Iraq, 2,500 still remain, with the Trump administration rejecting votes in the Iraqi Parliament that declared the U.S. military must withdraw, threatening to seize 90 percent of Iraq’s national budget (in oil revenues held at the Federal Reserve) if such measures were taken, and again threatening the country with similar punishment if it includes anti-American parties in its next government.
The war against Iran is being talked about in similar terms, of an operation that will involve no ground troops, will involve no “nation-building quagmires,” and in the words of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., will be a “conflict that should be very short and sweet.” As Iran proves it is not willing to immediately capitulate, reports have emerged of preparations being made for potentially months of bombardment. Ground troops, once off the table, were almost immediately put back on the table. Trump at one point saw an off-ramp within only a few days, and now demands Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” with the White House as the decider of Iran’s next leader after their assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His son Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader of Iran as elected by the Assembly of Experts, is apparently “unacceptable,” according to Trump.
In another echo of recent history, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used similar language about Iraq. He insisted troops were not bogged down in a “quagmire” like Vietnam and said Saddam Hussein should only be discussing “unconditional surrender” with the United States, with no other type of deal being acceptable. Rumsfeld, however, said the latter at the beginning of April 2003, days after the war against Iraq was launched, where American troops were rapidly advancing toward Baghdad.
Trump is making these pronouncements as his allies conversely insist that this not-at-all-a-war will be brief, targeted, precise, and still sink the “mothership of terrorism,” as Sen. Lindsey Graham has put it. Trump has signaled he wants to “go in and clean out everything,” to wipe out Iran’s leadership structure, and install a new leader to his liking. The only way this was possible in Iraq was after the U.S. invaded with hundreds of thousands of ground troops and built a new administration from the ground up with an American viceroy, himself on the ground in Baghdad in a militarily-secured compound, constantly battling with the populace.
The promise of an airpower-only regime change war, innately at odds with reality, is dissolving. Trump is reportedly considering a ground operation, potentially even with Israeli special forces, to seize the enriched uranium in Isfahan that was buried after America’s strikes last June.
The promise of an airpower-only regime change war, innately at odds with reality, is dissolving.
Just as soon as such talk floated in the air, reports began to emerge of a potentially much larger operation to seize Kharg Island, where thousands of Iranians live, and which 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports run through. Reports continue to oscillate between plans for such expansions, including being open to assassinating the younger Khamenei, and Trump’s renewed insistences that the war is “very complete, pretty much” and that they are “very far” ahead of schedule (while in the same breath proposing a military operation to take over the Strait of Hormuz).
Despite these claims of already decimating Iran’s military, Iranian missiles continue to strike Israel with only hours, sometimes even minutes, between attacks, even as its barrages have become smaller. Every indication suggests war against Iran will not be quick like removing Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The country’s resolve is clear: When NBC News anchor Tom Llamas asked Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi last week if he feared a potential American invasion, Araghchi replied, “No, we are waiting for them.”
The post It’s a War With Iran, Not an “Intervention” appeared first on The Intercept.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune made clear that an elections bill known as the SAVE America Act faces an unlikely path to passage.
Some administration officials snipe about having to wear middling footwear instead of their upmarket favorites
Sitting behind the Resolute desk, Donald Trump fixed his gaze on JD Vance’s and Marco Rubio’s feet. “Marco, JD, you guys have s—y shoes,” said the US president, consulting a catalogue and asking their shoe size. Rubio said 11.5 and Vance 13. Trump leaned back in his chair and remarked: “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.”
The story is recounted in a Wall Street Journal newspaper report that tells how officials, advisers and visiting allies are quietly acquiring leather dress shoes courtesy of Trump, who presents them with the enthusiasm of a travelling salesman.
Continue reading...Co-founders of Moltbook, a platform for artificial intelligence agents, will join tech giant’s AI research unit
Facebook parent Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it had acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for artificial intelligence agents, bringing the company’s founders into its AI research division.
The deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by Alexandr Wang, former Scale AI CEO, which Meta purchased for $14.8bn. Meta did not disclose financial terms of the deal. Schlicht and Parr are expected to begin at Meta Superintelligence Labs on 16 March.
Continue reading...Want to improve your chances of gold investing success this March? Start by answering these three critical questions.
President Trump will issue an executive order to remove Anthropic's AI technology from agencies across the executive branch, sources familiar with the matter tell CBS News.
The IRS allows investors to defer taxes on physical gold gains — but only if they know the right strategies to use.
Don't worry, we've broken down where the most popular channels can be found on live TV streaming services.
No injuries reported but security boosted at US and Israeli diplomatic buildings in Toronto and Ottawa
Two men fired multiple shots at the US consulate in Toronto early on Tuesday in what police described as a “national security incident”, prompting beefed-up protection for US and Israeli diplomatic buildings in the city.
The individuals approached the consulate in downtown Toronto at about 4.30am ET, exited a white SUV and fired several rounds from a handgun at the consulate, Frank Barredo, Toronto’s police deputy chief, told reporters.
Continue reading...Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has commuted the death sentence of Charles "Sonny" Burton, who was not in the building when the victim was killed.
When it comes to European Union territory, you can't go much further east than Cyprus. So far east, in fact, that it's within reach of Iran's weapons.
The Magpies welcome Lamine Yamal and company to St. James' Park for the second time this season.
The subscription costs $8 less than Philo Core.
The most decorated American Winter Paralympian had her left leg amputated at age 9 and her right leg amputated at age 14.
OpenAI added help for more than 70 different math and science concepts in algebra, physics and geometry.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: AI can reverse engineer machine code and find vulnerabilities in ancient legacy architectures, says Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, who used his own Apple II code from 40 years ago as an example. Russinovich wrote: "We are entering an era of automated, AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery that will be leveraged by both defenders and attackers." In May 1986, Russinovich wrote a utility called Enhancer for the Apple II personal computer. The utility, written in 6502 machine language, added the ability to use a variable or BASIC expression for the destination of a GOTO, GOSUB, or RESTORE command, whereas without modification Applesoft BASIC would only accept a line number. Russinovich had Claude Opus 4.6, released early last month, look over the code. It decompiled the machine language and found several security issues, including a case of "silent incorrect behavior" where, if the destination line was not found, the program would set the pointer to the following line or past the end of the program, instead of reporting an error. The fix would be to check the carry flag, which is set if the line is not found, and branch to an error. The existence of the vulnerability in Apple II type-in code has only amusement value, but the ability of AI to decompile embedded code and find vulnerabilities is a concern. "Billions of legacy microcontrollers exist globally, many likely running fragile or poorly audited firmware like this," said one comment to Russinovich's post.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tracy Chevalier announces registration scheme at the London Book Fair as AI works flood market
The Society of Authors (SoA) has launched a scheme to help identify works written by humans in a market increasingly flooded by AI-generated books.
The scheme is the first of its kind launched by a UK trade association, and allows authors to register their books and download a “Human Authored” logo to display on their back cover.
Continue reading...Windows 10 support ended back in October. Here's how to keep access to Windows 10 security updates without spending a dime.
A Texas mother is proud her child is following in her footsteps. But as President Trump attacks Iran, she worries about what he could face as a soldier.
With its credibility swaying in the wake of a betting scandal, the very last thing the league needed was to be in business with a prediction platform
The timing of the suspensions was unfortunate. Or perhaps it was karmically inevitable.
Forty-two days after Major League Soccer announced a new partnership with Polymarket – a prediction platform that lets its users bet on just about anything, including whether, when, and where one country will bomb another – a press release went out. A pair of Ghanaian-born former MLS players, Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah, had been banned from the league for life for betting on games, including their own.
Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.
Continue reading...While FreeBSD 15.x may be getting all the attention, the FreeBSD 14.x branch continues to be updated for the more conservative users among us. FreeBSD 14.4 has been released today, and brings with it updated versions of OpenSSH, OpenZFS, and Bhyve virtual machines can now share files with their host over 9pfs – among other things, of course.
A billionaire is funding a sustainable development project on the west African island that makes the local population stewards of its future
At the crumbling colonial farm buildings in Porto Real, agricultural worker Kimilson Lima, 43, has signed the agreement and he’s happy. “With this money we can have a proper floor in the house,” he said. “And an inside toilet.”
Lima is part of a ground-breaking experiment on the West African island of Príncipe, where villagers who agree to follow an environmental protection code will reap a quarterly dividend. To date nearly 3,000 have joined the Faya Foundation’s project, more than 60% of the adult population. The first payment of €816 (£708) has just been delivered, a large amount of money on the island. “This will be truly transformative, both for nature and for the people,” said the president of the self-governing region, Felipe Nascimento.
Continue reading...Someone fired shots at the U.S. consulate in Toronto, authorities said, days after shots were fired at synagogues in the Canadian city.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that it would be the "most intense day" of strikes against Iran so far.
Iranian airstrikes have shaken Persian Gulf countries, undermining their reputations as havens of wealth and stability and forcing them to take sides in a war they opposed.
Axios reports that Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral, Reddit-like social network designed for AI agents. Humans are welcome, but only to observe. Axios reports: The deal brings Moltbook's creators -- Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr -- into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the unit run by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Meta did not disclose Moltbook's purchase price. The deal is expected to close mid-March, Meta says, with the pair starting at MSL on March 16. When it launched in late January, Moltbook was labeled the "most interesting place on the internet" by open-source developer and writer Simon Willison. "Browsing around Moltbook is so much fun. A lot of it is the expected science fiction slop, with agents pondering consciousness and identity. There's also a ton of genuinely useful information, especially on m/todayilearned." In an internal post seen by Axios, Meta's Vishal Shah said existing Moltbook customers can temporarily continue using the platform. "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." He added: "Their team has unlocked new ways for agents to interact, share content, and coordinate complex tasks."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According to U.S. Central Command, over 5,000 targets were struck and 50 Iranian vessels were damaged or destroyed in the first 10 days of the war with Iran.
China’s economic statecraft has been exposed by US attacks on Iran and Venezuela Expert comment jon.wallace
The US strikes raise questions over China’s policy to forge energy and trade ties with US rivals. But in the long term, Beijing sees itself gaining diplomatic capital through a contrasting role as a stable and peaceful superpower.
The US attack this month on Iran, coupled with that on Venezuela in January, register as a blow to China’s diplomatic and economic statecraft. Beijing has forged a comprehensive relationship with both countries that spanned diplomacy, energy, trade, infrastructure and even military cooperation.
China has a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ with Iran, denoting one of the highest tiers in China’s hierarchy of diplomatic ties. Significant investments are involved. As part of the partnership, in 2021 Beijing and Tehran signed a 25-year, $400 billion deal to invest in Iran’s energy, infrastructure and banking sectors, partly in exchange for discounted oil exports to China. Tehran exported more than an estimated 80 per cent of its oil to China in 2025, representing a lifeline for the regime.
Other aspects of China’s involvement in Iran include the construction of new railway lines from Tehran to Hamadan and Sanandaj, as well as from Kermanshah to Khosravi. Ports, airport and navigation systems are also under development, according to local media reports, and a $2.1 billion project to upgrade the Abadan refinery is underway.
China enjoys an ‘All-Weather Strategic Partnership’ with Venezuela, a term that also indicates a significant level of diplomatic affinity. China received three quarters of Venezuelan oil exports in 2025, according to Reuters, using oil to repay significant loans.
But now, as the US strikes these Chinese partners and goes after Chinese strategic assets (such as two ports in the Panama Canal controlled by a Hong Kong Chinese company), Beijing is finding that its strategy of courting US adversaries threatens to jeopardize some of its interests.
Broadening out this theme are the cases of Ukraine and, potentially, Cuba. In Ukraine, China – as a staunch partner to Russia – finds itself on the opposing side to the US-led West. In Cuba, where President Donald Trump has said he wants to effect a ‘friendly takeover’, China has significant commercial ties and some aspects of military cooperation.
All this raises a question: is US action in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba intended to impede China’s statecraft? Clear answers remain elusive.
President Donald Trump has justified the Iran intervention for reasons including supporting Iranian protestors, combating Iran’s regional network of proxy groups, and eliminating its ballistic missile programme.
The Venezuelan attack had a similar range of justifications, from acting as a judicial extraction mission against an alleged ‘narco-terrorist’ (former Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro), and compensation for supposedly stolen US energy assets. In each case, the prime motivation appears to have been specific to each country as opposed to part of a broader strategy to counter Beijing’s influence.
Regardless of US motivations, its attacks on Iran and Venezuela have demonstrated the limits of China’s support for countries with which it professed to share ‘strategic partnerships’ – and the strain of pragmatism in Beijing’s foreign policy.
China has resisted taking concrete action against the US in response to the strikes on its partners. Not only that, but it appears likely to go ahead with plans to host Trump for a summit at the end of the month. Asked this week if China would still host the US president, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, did not answer directly but hinted the summit was still on, saying ‘the agenda of high-level exchanges is already on the table’.
To be sure, Beijing has been forthright in its verbal criticism of US operations this year. After the abduction of Maduro, Wang Yi said: ‘We have never believed that any country can act as the world’s police, nor do we accept that any nation can declare itself the world’s judge’.
Addressing Iran, he said it was ‘unacceptable for the US and Israel to launch attacks against Iran… still less to blatantly assassinate a leader of a sovereign country and instigate regime change’.
‘This was a war that should never have happened, and a war that benefited no one,’ he said on Sunday, portraying China as ‘the world’s most important force of peace, stability and justice’. Wang reiterated Beijing’s call for an immediate ceasefire to ‘prevent the situation from escalating and avoid the spillover and spread of the flames of war’.
But the reality is that in spite of its pledges of partnership, and its public condemnations, Beijing has clearly demonstrated that ties with Iran and Venezuela do not rank anywhere close to the utility it sees in trying to improve relations with the Trump White House, and prevent it from again turning vengeful on China.
Washington retains a panoply of economic sanctions against China, including hundreds of Chinese companies identified on the so-called ‘entity list’, a separate regime of restrictions on semiconductor exports, and a range of other bans related to military, human rights, narcotics, cybersecurity, surveillance and other issues.
It also maintains some tariffs on Chinese exports to the US. The Chinese economy has not been excessively hindered by these measures – exports, for instance, have surged this year. But Beijing still prioritizes preventing a new round of trade war with Washington.
Beijing’s inaction in support of its partners may cause some short-term damage to China’s prestige – and the perceived value of its ‘strategic partnerships’. But China will also see merit in its approach over the long-term.
So I stored my Onewheel this winter and checked the charge level a couple of times during and it stayed at 89% all winter.
I think I read that it would discharge during winter so I should check up on it to not let it decharge completely to 0%.
Is this normal?
The University of Phoenix expects enrollment to grow as the Education Department softens oversight of for-profit schools, despite industry concerns.
Travelers are flocking to the famously arid desert covered in a blanket of pink, purple and yellow wildflowers
After a winter of record rainfall, a superbloom has erupted in Death Valley, covering the famously arid desert in a blanket of vibrant pink, purple and yellow flowers. As travelers from around the world make their way to the desert, they can expect to be greeted by fragrant air and a quilt of delicate hues.
While there is no official definition for a superbloom, the National Park Service uses the term to “describe conditions when so many flowers are present that they appear as swaths of color across the landscape, rather than isolated plants, especially striking at low elevations where the ground is typically sand, gravel and rock”
Continue reading...Robert McElroy goes further than pope has done and says conflict fails ‘criterion of right intention’
Cardinal Robert W McElroy, the archbishop of Washington DC, has said that the US-Israeli war with Iran is “not morally legitimate”, going further than the pope has done in his more moderate appeals for an end to the war.
In an interview with the Catholic Standard this week, McElroy said: “The criterion of just cause is not met because our country was not responding to an existing or imminent and objectively verifiable attack by Iran.”
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Markets are pricing in a chance that the Bank of England could cut interest rates this year, but a cut next week looks unlikely, says Kathleen Brooks, of the broker XTB.
There is currently 0.4 rate cuts priced in for this year, and UK rates are expected to end the year at 3.65%, down from the current level of 3.75%. There is a 7.2% chance of a rate cut priced in for the BOE’s meeting next week.
While we doubt that a rate cut is on the cards, the Bank of England will need to use next week’s meeting to signal their future intentions. Will they look through the crisis in the Middle East as a temporary spike in commodity prices and focus on the weakening economy? Or will the situation have died down enough for them to signal that further rate cuts are coming, albeit with a small delay? Either way, next week’s meeting is still important for sterling and UK bond markets.
Continue reading...Justice secretary says changes designed to reduce courts backlog will benefit remand rates
We can bring you some lines from the Reform press conference (see post at 10.10). Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby asked Nigel Farage about Reform’s inconsistent position over the UK’s policy in regard to the US-Israeli war with Iran. She asks how voters can trust the party’s national security.
“Given that we can’t even send a Royal Naval vessel to defend British sovereign territory and an RAF base, we certainly don’t have the capability to offer anything of any value to the Americans or the Israelis,” Farage said, describing the Royal Navy as a “catastrophe”.
Continue reading...Eight people were killed by 18-year-old in Canada, who had described violent scenarios involving guns to ChatGPT
The family of a child critically injured one of Canada’s worst mass shootings is suing OpenAI, arguing the technology company could have prevented the attack on a school last month.
The lawsuit comes days after the head of OpenAI said he would apologize to the families of a remote Canadian town after violence shattered the tight-knit community.
Continue reading...The easiest way to track the best tech sales this spring.
The 600kg Van Allen probe A will re-enter Tuesday evening, with most of it burning before reaching Earth’s surface
Parts of a giant Nasa satellite will crash to Earth on Tuesday evening, the US space agency is warning – but the chance of being struck is extremely low.
According to the US military’s Space Force, the roughly 1,323lb (600kg) spacecraft, one of twin probes launched in 2012 to investigate the Van Allen radiation belt, is estimated to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at about 7.45pm EDT.
Continue reading...The office that polices attorney misconduct in Washington, D.C., has filed ethics charges against Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin.
Jockey Club says aim is to get more women watching racing and revival is not a response to ‘woke’ jibes
First and foremost, it is a huge sporting event, billed by its fans as the Olympics of jump racing – but it can also act as a social barometer, giving clues as to the state and mood of the nation.
This year’s Cheltenham festival, which began on Tuesday, feels a little like a step back in time with the return of “Ladies Day” after a five-year hiatus and a reduction in the price of a pint.
Continue reading...German publishers and advertising groups are urging regulators to fine Apple over its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) system, arguing it unfairly restricts access to advertising data while allowing Apple to remain the central gatekeeper -- without subjecting its own apps to the same restrictions. If Germany's antitrust authority does rule against Apple, the company could face fines of up to 10% of its global revenue. 9to5Mac reports: One of the countries investigating whether ATT is anticompetitive is Germany. Last year, in an attempt to appease the country's antitrust watchdog, the company proposed several changes to the framework's rules. From Reuters' original coverage of Apple's changes proposals: "Apple had agreed to introduce neutral consent prompts for both its own services and third-party apps, and to largely align the wording, content and visual design of these messages, said Andreas Mundt, head of Germany's Bundeskartellamt. The company also proposed simplifying the consent process so developers can obtain user permission for advertising-related data processing in a way that complies with data protection law." [...] At the time, German regulators launched a consultation with industry publications to determine whether the proposals addressed their concerns. As it turns out, the answer was a hard no. As Reuters reported today: "Apple's proposed changes to its app tracking rules do not resolve antitrust issues in the mobile advertising market, associations representing German publishers and advertisers said on Tuesday as they urged the country's antitrust authority to slap a fine on the U.S. tech giant. [...] 'The proposed commitments would not change the negative effects of the App Tracking Transparency Framework,' Bernd Nauen, chief executive of the German Advertising Federation, said in a joint letter signed by the trade bodies. 'Apple would remain the data gatekeeper and would continue to decide who gets access to advertising-relevant data and how companies can communicate with their end customers,' he said."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Can Arne Slot's Reds handle the febrile atmosphere of RAMS Park?
Holiday currently chairs ownership group Mercury13
Mercury13 completed purchase of FC Badalona women
NWSL plays in summer, opposite of European leagues
Two-time Olympic Gold medalist and 2015 World Cup winner Lauren Holiday has called for the global harmonisation of the women’s soccer calendar to help grow the sport.
Doing so could echo a recent move by Major League Soccer to move to a European, fall-to-spring schedule from July 2027. Holiday, a former USWNT forward, believes the women’s game could follow their example, or do the opposite and have everyone play through the summer.
Continue reading...George Michael: The Faith Tour will receive a global cinema release alongside previously unheard music from his Wham! and solo discographies
A long lost film centered on George Michael’s landmark 1988 Faith tour is set for cinema release later this year, in addition to a new album of previously unheard live performances.
George Michael: The Faith Tour is being lined up for a global big screen rollout, with footage taken from a previously unseen 14 camera shoot of Michael’s performance at Paris’ Bercy Arena in 1988. A press release bills the project as a tour de force in archival film-making, celebrating Michael’s ambition and artistry at its peak.
Continue reading...I have had the OG pint (with top mounted battery extender) for 6 years now and it’s time for a new board. I was riding this one with stock slick tire, and no other mods or upgrades. The size and portability are important, so I’m looking to stick with pint. Leaning toward the pint X but would like a different tire. I mostly ride on street with light dirt/offroading, but nothing too gnarly. What are the thoughts on Future Motion’s performance pint tire? I was also considering Float Life’s enduro (which is only currently available in the soft compound option). Throw me your advice!
Pentagon chief spoke with Gen Dan Caine at a press conference and blamed Iran for civilian casualties
The Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, has warned that Tuesday would be the “most intense” day of US strikes yet, even as he blamed Iran for civilian casualties by claiming its forces were firing missiles from schools and hospitals.
Speaking alongside Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Hegseth alleged Iran was deliberately firing missiles from schools and hospitals, describing the country’s leadership as “desperate and scrambling like the terrorist cowards they are”.
Continue reading...Reform leader’s latest comment contrasts with earlier statement that ‘gloves need to come off’
Nigel Farage has been accused of making a U-turn after he said Britain should not get involved in Donald Trump’s war with Iran.
His comments on Tuesday contrasted with his previous assertion that the “gloves need to come off” when dealing with Iran.
Continue reading...The Fed will address interest rates again next week. But will mortgage interest rates decline after the meeting?
If you're filing for bankruptcy soon, the required waiting periods could have an impact on your approach.
Salem Al-Salem faces landmark trial over alleged role in crackdown on protests in Damascus in 2011
A former Syrian colonel has appeared in a London court to face charges of crimes against humanity in the first prosecution of its kind in England and Wales.
Salem Al-Salem is charged with murder and torture, crimes allegedly committed during the Syrian government’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Damascus in 2011.
Continue reading...TORONTO, March 10, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc., a leading photonic quantum computing company, today announced a major step forward in bringing quantum computing closer to real-world aerospace and engineering applications by leveraging AMD HPC and AI technologies. By combining Xanadu’s PennyLane quantum software with AMD high-performance computing solutions on the AMD DevCloud, Xanadu successfully demonstrated how advanced aerospace simulations can be prepared and run in a hybrid quantum-classical environment.
Aerospace engineers rely on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to optimize design and enhance aircraft efficiency. Xanadu, powered by the AMD DevCloud, has successfully demonstrated CFD simulations within a hybrid quantum-classical program, showcasing the significant potential of quantum computing for the industry. The work centered on the compilation and execution of a CFD model with 256×256 matrix elements. This hybrid program utilized 20 qubits and approximately 35 million quantum gates, pushing the boundaries of current CFD quantum simulations. As the industry advances toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, the ability to compile and optimize programs of this scale will become a critical competitive advantage. This milestone demonstrates that Xanadu and AMD can support next-generation quantum-classical applications by combining their respective technologies and expertise, helping transition quantum computing from research environments toward industrial use in aerospace and engineering.
“Seeing AMD high-performance compute boost the performance of PennyLane is a clear proof point of how quantum and classical technologies can effectively work together,” said Madhu Rangarajan, Corporate Vice President, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “This work further underscores the importance of seamless integration between classical and quantum computing. The work between AMD and Xanadu expands the boundaries of what is possible for users investigating hybrid quantum/classical computing using AMD compute today.”
“Accelerating quantum applications for the aerospace industry requires close collaboration between quantum software and high-performance computing,” said Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “Our partnership with AMD brings these capabilities together to address real engineering challenges today. By optimizing how large-scale quantum programs are compiled and simulated, we are helping ensure the aerospace industry is ready to adopt fault-tolerant quantum computing as soon as it becomes available.”
The collaboration has also improved the performance of a core quantum algorithm, the Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT), which is a key driver for a variety of applications, including those relevant to aerospace engineering. Xanadu found that by moving from a traditional CPU to a single AMD GPU, the team reduced simulation time by 25 times, demonstrating the immediate value of high-performance computing in accelerating quantum workflows. Using PennyLane’s Catalyst compiler, they also translated a 68-qubit quantum circuit into more than 15 million hardware-optimized gates, preparing it for future fault-tolerant quantum systems.
As aerospace organizations look to turn quantum research into practical advantage, scalable software and powerful computing infrastructure will be essential. Through their partnership, Xanadu and AMD are bringing quantum and classical technologies together in a way that helps industry prepare today for the next generation of quantum computers.
About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies. The company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.
Source: Xanadu
The post Xanadu and AMD Accelerate Quantum Computing for Aerospace and Engineering appeared first on HPCwire.
Fewer than 100 days out, host cities haven’t received promised funding, and fears about ICE’s presence are widespread
On Sunday 19 July, the final match of the 2026 Fifa World Cup will be played in East Rutherford, New Jersey. For one day, our community will be the center of the world.
But as that moment approaches, I find myself spending less time thinking about the games at MetLife Stadium, and more time worrying about whether we are ready. Because if Washington doesn’t get its act together, we risk turning a generational opportunity into an international embarrassment.
Continue reading...The AI assistant can help you navigate Photoshop and make changes for you.
Private equity firm EQT AB is reportedly exploring a sale of SUSE that could value the open-source Linux pioneer at up to $6 billion, roughly doubling the valuation since EQT took the company private in 2023. Reuters reports: EQT "has hired investment bank Arma Partners to sound out a group of private equity investors for a possible sale of the company, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The deliberations are at "an early stage and there is no certainty that EQT will proceed with "a transaction, the sources said. [...] The potential deal comes amid a broader selloff in software stocks, which has disrupted mergers and acquisitions activity. Investors are "concerned that new artificial intelligence tools could displace many existing software products, weighing on technology "valuations and making deals harder to price. Some investors, however, see Luxembourg-headquartered SUSE as a potential beneficiary of AI adoption, arguing that demand for enterprise-grade infrastructure software is likely to grow as companies build and deploy more AI applications. The company generates about $800 million in revenue and more than $250 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) and could fetch between $4 billion and $6 billion in a sale, the sources said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Russian loses to Katerina Siniakova in three sets
Teenager throws racket on several occasions
Mirra Andreeva’s Indian Wells title defense met a bad-tempered end on Monday as Katerina Siniakova stunned the Russian teenager 4-6, 7-6, 6-3.
The 18-year-old opened her bid to retain her crown with a dominant 6-0, 6-0 demolition of Solana Sierra. But she was in trouble early and often against Siniakova, the world No 44, in a rollercoaster contest that ended with a shot from the Czech that hit the net cord and dribbled over in one last frustrating moment.
Continue reading...Yes, many Americans are struggling, but it’s good to know the first family can still afford Earth’s most expensive provisions. Morale is everything, isn’t it?
In the absence of any clearly and consistently stated aims from the US administration, maybe each day of the Iran war just needs a moodboard description. In which case, Sunday was a tale of two nepo babies. In Iran, the high-level executive search for the new ayatollah concluded that the old ayatollah’s son was the best man for the position. It’s not for me to assess his job prospects, but you’d hope his supermarket order doesn’t contain any “ripen at home” pears.
Meanwhile, across the world, in LA, Donald Trump’s eldest granddaughter posted a YouTube video titled “I Brought My Secret Service to Erewhon”. By way of background, Erewhon is Earth’s most pretentiously extravagant hipster food shop, and, as Kai was at pains to brag, “the most expensive grocery store pretty much out there. Everything’s crazy expensive! So we’re going to get my favourite stuff.”
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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Continue reading...ALBANY, N.Y. and FREMONT, Calif., March 10, 2026 — IBM and Lam Research Corp. today announced a collaboration aimed at developing new processes and materials to support sub-1nm logic scaling. Building on a long record of successful partnerships, the new agreement will focus on the joint development of novel materials, fabrication processes, and High-NA EUV lithography processes to advance IBM’s logic scaling roadmap.
Mukesh Khare, GM of IBM Semiconductors and VP of Hybrid Cloud at IBM Research; Vahid Vahedi, Chief Technology and Sustainability Officer at Lam Research.
IBM and Lam have collaborated for more than a decade to advance logic fabrication, notably enabling early generations of 7nm, nanosheet, and EUV process technologies. Under this new five-year agreement, the companies intend to extend logic scaling to the sub-1nm node. The work will focus on developing new materials, advanced etch and deposition capabilities for increasingly complex device architectures, and new High-NA EUV lithography processes to enable next-generation interconnect and device patterning and accelerate industry adoption.
“Lam has been a critical partner to IBM for over a decade, contributing to key breakthroughs in logic scaling and device architecture such as nanosheet and the world’s first 2nm node chip, unveiled by IBM in 2021,” said Mukesh Khare, GM of IBM Semiconductors and VP of Hybrid Cloud, IBM Research. “We are thrilled to be expanding our collaboration to tackle the next set of challenges to enable High-NA EUV lithography and sub-1nm nodes.”
“As the industry enters a new era of 3D scaling, progress depends on rethinking how materials, processes, and lithography come together as a single, high-density system,” said Vahid Vahedi, chief technology and sustainability officer at Lam Research. “We are proud to build on our successful collaboration with IBM to drive High‑NA EUV dry resist and process breakthroughs, accelerating the development of lower power and higher performance transistors that will be critical for AI era.”
Using IBM’s advanced research capabilities at the NY Creates Albany NanoTech Complex and Lam’s end-to-end process tools and innovations, including Aether dry resist technology, Kiyo and Akara etch platforms, Striker and ALTUS Halo deposition systems, and advanced packaging technologies — the teams will build and validate full process flows for nanosheet and nanostack devices and backside power delivery. Together, these capabilities are aimed at allowing High‑NA EUV patterns to be reliably transferred into real device layers with high yield and enabling continued scaling, improved performance, and viable paths to production for future logic devices.
About Lam Research
Lam Research Corporation is a global supplier of innovative wafer fabrication equipment and services to the semiconductor industry. Lam’s equipment and services allow customers to build smaller and better-performing devices. In fact, today, nearly every advanced chip is built with Lam technology. We combine superior systems engineering, technology leadership, and a strong values-based culture, with an unwavering commitment to our customers. Lam Research (Nasdaq: LRCX) is a FORTUNE 500 company headquartered in Fremont, Calif., with operations around the globe. Learn more at www.lamresearch.com.
About IBM
IBM is a leading global provider of hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.
Source: IBM
The post IBM and Lam Research Announce Collaboration to Advance Sub-1nm Logic Scaling appeared first on HPCwire.
Decades after its first deadline, the Equal Rights Amendment is back in the courtroom as plaintiffs demand a federal judge finally recognize it as part of the U.S. Constitution.
Arguments are scheduled for March 24, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts before Judge William G. Young in Equal Means Equal v. Trump. In a complaint filed in April 2025, Equal Means Equal (EME), a project from the non-profit Heroica Foundation, is suing the U.S. government over the constitutionality of the Military Selective Service Act.
EME claims that the Act discriminates against women by requiring only men to register for the draft. Its argument rests on two pillars: the Fifth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Equal Rights Amendment, which EME maintains, is already a ratified part of the Constitution.
Government attorneys want Judge Young to dismiss the case, pointing to a Ninth Circuit decision last year about the Selective Service Act. In Valame v. Trump, a three-judge panel rejected the claim that the ERA was ratified as the Constitution’s 28th Amendment; the case is currently on appeal. The administration also argues that a prior Supreme Court decision, Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), which upheld a male-only draft, defeats a constitutional argument to the contrary made by Equal Means Equal.
Background on the Equal Rights Amendment debate
In 1972, two-thirds of Congress approved the ERA amendment’s language as required under the Constitution’s Article V. Then it sent the ERA to the states for ratification, where 38 states’ votes were needed to formally add it to the Constitution. A joint resolution sent to the states placed a seven-year deadline (March 22, 1979) for the ratification process. In that period, only 35 states ratified the ERA amendment, and Congress extended the deadline by three years to the spring 1982. However, no other states had approved the ERA by the new deadline.
In recent years, Nevada (2017), Illinois (2018), and Virginia (2020) have voted to ratify the ERA, bringing the total to 38 (or the required ¾) of the 50 states. Five states, however—Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky, and South Dakota—also voted to rescind their ratifications in the 1970s, raising the major and as-yet unaddressed constitutional question whether these recissions are legally valid.
On Dec. 17, 2024, the Archivist of the United States—the federal official responsible for ratifying new amendments— refused a request to add the ERA to the Constitution “due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.” The Archivist cited opinions from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council in 2020 and 2022 that the ERA had legally expired and was no longer eligible for certification.
On Jan. 17, 2025, President Joseph R. Biden said that he believed the "Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment.” However, President Biden did not ask the Archivist to certify the proposed amendment to the Constitution, as required by law once the Archivist receives notice that that amendment has been ratified by three-fourths of the states.
Claiming in court the ERA is a ratified amendment
In Valame v. Trump (originally Valame v. Biden), Vikram Valame sued after claiming that he had lost an internship at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission I because he had not registered for the draft as required under the Selective Service law. The U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled against Valame. The Ninth Circuit concurred in July 2025 and issued a written per curiam opinion on Nov. 4. 2025.
The Ninth Circuit rejected Valame’s allegation that a law requiring men, but not women, to register with the Selective Service System violated his rights under the Equal Rights Amendment. Valame, representing himself, had contended to the court that the ERA was ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
“The ERA was not ratified by three-fourths of the States prior to the deadline set by Congress, June 30, 1982, and the Archivist of the United States did not publish or certify the ERA,” the Ninth Circuit concluded. “Therefore, the district court properly dismissed Valame’s claims under the ERA for failure to state a plausible claim.” It also ruled against his Equal Protection claim, citing Rostker v. Goldberg.
In Equal Means Equal, plaintiff Jacqueline Fenore and two other women were turned away when attempting to register for the draft because they were female. EME is now suing on their behalf, arguing that under the ERA, “equality of rights shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” The plaintiffs say that the ERA became part of the Constitution when Virginia ratified the amendment in January 2020.
“While there is some disagreement about the ERA’s validity because its ratification deadline expired before the last state ratified, many government officials and constitutional scholars believe the ERA is valid because the deadline is unconstitutional,” EME argues, pointing to Biden’s proclamation and arguments by professors Laurence Tribe and Kathleen M. Sullivan.
The plaintiffs also contend that Valame does not apply to their case, stating, “only a lawsuit filed by women on behalf of women can adequately represent the interests at stake for women.” They add that the Rostker v. Goldberg precedent is no longer controlling law, as it rested on the premise—now defunct—that women could not serve in combat roles.
The government’s argument
In Equal Means Equal, government attorneys point to prior court precedents and Valame v. Trump as reasons that the district court should dismiss the case. “To credit Plaintiffs’ ERA claim would require the Court to ignore Congress’s ratification deadlines and binding Supreme Court precedent,” they argue.
The government points to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dillon v. Gloss (1921), which upheld the inclusion of a seven-year ratification deadline by Congress for the 18th amendment, and to Coleman v. Miller (1939), which said that Congress has the power under Article V to fix a reasonable limit of time for ratification in proposing an amendment.
The attorneys also leaned heavily on Illinois v. Ferriero (2023). In that case, a D.C. district court ruled that Illinois and Nevada “had not clearly and indisputably shown that the Archivist had a duty to certify and publish the ERA or that Congress lacked the authority to place a time limit in the proposing clause of the ERA.” The government also claims that the plaintiffs lack standing, meaning that they have not proven and did not state a claim for relief.
While the Equal Means Equal case moves forward, Vikram Valame is preparing his own appeal to the Supreme Court. In January 2026, he received an extension to file a petition for a writ of certiorari. Justice Elena Kagan approved the request.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Thousands of girls were locked up by Board for the Protection of Women for ‘rehabilitation’
Spain is to formally pardon a group of 53 women who are among thousands who were incarcerated by the Franco regime on the grounds that they were supposedly “fallen or in danger of falling”.
The women were locked up as adolescents by the Board for the Protection of Women, a collection of institutions run by religious orders. The board, which had echoes of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries, was overseen by Carmen Polo, the wife of the dictator Gen Francisco Franco.
Continue reading...The distorted face was voted the most-anticipated new emoji, but it's OK to be wrong.
Mobile World Congress has ended. The week of new reveals included radical new designs such as Honor's Robot Phone, AI-powered comfort robots, a concept hypercar and so many gadgets.
Federal judge said prosecutors picked to replace Alina Habba repeated error of bypassing congressional approval
Three prosecutors installed by Donald Trump’s administration to lead the New Jersey attorney general’s office after the president’s former personal lawyer was disqualified from the role in December were also illegally appointed, a federal judge has ruled.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, handpicked the three to replace Alina Habba, who resigned after a succession of district and appeals court rulings that she was serving illegally because she never received Senate confirmation.
Continue reading...Hong Kong-based airline has business-class return listed at A$39,577, as travellers seek routes avoiding Middle East
The Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific is selling seats from Sydney to London for more than £20,000 in April, as passengers search for scarce long-haul flights without changing in the Middle East.
The tickets, listed at A$39,577 in business class for returns departing in mid-April, far outstrip the usual fares charged even in the first-class cabin.
Continue reading...We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but these kitchen items should always be hand-washed.
Iran is bombing Gulf datacenters to blow up symbols of alliance with the US – bringing the war directly into the lives of millions of people
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please forward it to someone you think would as well.
US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
Showdown over datacenter politics at heart of North Carolina primary
Indonesia to ban social media for children under 16
Continue reading...John Diehl admitted to using federal pandemic loans for country club dues, cars and other personal expenses
A former Missouri state house speaker was sentenced on Monday to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud for misusing federal Covid-19 relief funds for his personal benefit, including payments for country club dues and three cars.
John Diehl, the former Republican house speaker, received about $380,000 in federal loans for his law firm between 2020 and 2022 through a program intended to help cover operating expenses for businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...Investigators are searching a New Mexico ranch where Jeffrey Epstein once entertained guests, amid allegations that it may have been used for sexual abuse and sex trafficking.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., March 10, 2026 — IonQ today announced a collaboration with the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) on SEQCURE (Securing Experimental Quantum Computing Usage in Research Environments), a program sponsored by the Secretary of the Air Force’s Concepts, Development, and Management Office.
This collaboration is intended to advance the state of quantum computing security by analyzing existing commercial quantum computing security practices with an aim to understand what it would take to deploy Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) to future quantum computers. ZTA is defined by the NIST standard SP800-207 and involves moving security from a static, perimeters-based paradigm to one that continuously verifies access to all key resources in a computer system.
“As quantum systems transition into the bedrock of national infrastructure, the shift from legacy perimeter security to a Zero Trust Architecture is a strategic imperative,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “By integrating NIST-defined continuous verification across every pillar of our quantum platform—computing, networking, sensing, and security—we are not just building the world’s most powerful quantum systems; we are ensuring they are the most trusted quantum ecosystem. This project with ARLIS is a definitive step in creating the secure, verifiable framework required for the future of the quantum internet and national-scale deployments.”
Through this project, IonQ will assist ARLIS in defining a ZTA framework based on standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), ensuring quantum technologies can be deployed securely across hardware, software, data, and cloud environments. The resulting architecture standards will guide trusted integration across federal agencies.
“We are happy to be working together with industry leaders such as IonQ on this important program,” said Paul Lopata, Chief Quantum Scientist at ARLIS. “We are hopeful that the results of this work will eventually be deployed into commercial systems for industry and government users to use with confidence.”
This collaboration builds on IonQ’s growing portfolio of federal partnerships, including existing contracts with ARLIS, DARPA and the U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), and it reflects the company’s continued leadership in building the world’s most complete quantum platform.
More from HPCwire
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the forthcoming IonQ Tempo, will be the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
Source: IonQ
The post IonQ and ARLIS Partner to Establish Zero Trust Security Framework for Mission-Critical Quantum Architectures appeared first on HPCwire.
LOUISVILLE, Colo., March 10, 2026 — Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum computing and quantum sensing powered by neutral-atom technology, announced that it is showcasing accelerated quantum supercomputing integration into modern data centers through NVIDIA NVQLink at NVIDIA GTC 2026.
GTC 2026 attendees can see Infleqtion’s Sqale QPU at the NVIDIA booth in a demonstration that showcases the future of a native integration of a neutral atom quantum processor into an NVIDIA accelerated HPC environment. Based on the ultra-low latency of NVQLink, Infleqtion hardware will work in concert with NVIDIA GPUs to handle the heavy computational demands of real-time quantum error correction and hybrid AI workloads.
“The next era of high-performance computing will be accelerated by the seamless integration of quantum and classical resources into a single unified platform,” said Pranav Gokhale, Chief Technology Officer and General Manager, Quantum Computing at Infleqtion. “We are committed to NVQLink to accelerate the transition to commercial scale AI-Quantum factories. We believe neutral atom technology is the superior choice because of its inherent scalability, providing a strong foundation for this new HPC era.”
Infleqtion’s inclusion in the NVQLink ecosystem highlights its growing role in hybrid quantum–classical workloads and a full stack system level approach required for the AI Quantum factory of the future.
Meet with Infleqtion at GTC:
For more information about Infleqtion’s quantum computing solutions please visit: https://infleqtion.com/quantum-computing.
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About Infleqtion
Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of War, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.
Source: Infleqtion
The post Infleqtion to Showcase Quantum Accelerated Supercomputing with NVIDIA NVQLink at GTC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
The MacBook Neo is an absolute banger of a budget laptop, but life's too short to live without Touch ID.
Targeting of foreign-born truckers risks ‘deepening severe labor shortages’ as thousands of drivers have been taken off roads for failing English proficiency requirements
After moving to Ohio in 2013, Ibragim Chakhalidze’s father set up a trucking company just miles from where two of the country’s major road freight arteries – the I-70 and the I-75 – meet.
Formerly farmers who had come to the US from south-east Russia through a government refugee program, he says trucking has been in his family’s and the wider Ahiska Turk community’s blood for decades.
Continue reading...More Gemini AI features will come to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, tens of thousands of game developers and producers will once again gather in San Francisco, as they have since 1988, for the weeklong Game Developers Conference. But this year's show will be missing many international developers who say they no longer feel comfortable traveling to the United States to attend, no matter how relevant the show is to their work and careers. Dozens of those developers who spoke to Ars in recent months say they're wary of traveling to a country that has shown a callous disregard for -- or outright hostility toward -- the safety of international travelers. That's especially true for developers from various minority groups, those with transgender identities, and those who feel they could be targeted for outspoken political beliefs. "I honestly don't know anyone who is not from the U.S. who is planning on going to the next GDC," Godot Foundation Executive Director Emilio Coppola, who's based in Spain, told Ars. "We never felt super safe, but now we are not willing to risk it." "I honestly don't know anyone who is not from the U.S. who is planning on going to the next GDC," says Godot Foundation Executive Director Emilio Coppola, who's based in Spain. "We never felt super safe, but now we are not willing to risk it." "Hearing European citizens getting arrested by border control over their views on the U.S. is not something I would like to test for myself," adds Nazih Fares, a French-Lebanese citizen and creative director at indie studio Le Cabinet du Savoir.. Many of the developers who spoke to Ars cite the intrusive questioning, racial profiling, and other horror stories reported at the U.S. border. "I read a few long reads about how UK/German tourists ended up detained, and that was the final straw for me," Austrian-based Cohop Game founder Eline Muijres said. "It doesn't feel safe for me." Domini Gee, a Canadian game writer and narrative designer echoed that concern, adding: "There's no shortage of stories... about the risk of detainment, deportation, phones being searched... the consequences if I'm not [OK] could be high."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities – and society at large
Lea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world.
It’s an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. “There’s no AI-proof anything,” Pao said. “Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there’s a way out.”
Continue reading...MILPITAS, Calif. and DUBLIN, March 10, 2026 — MariaDB plc has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GridGain Systems, Inc., a pioneer of in-memory computing and creator of open source Apache Ignite. By merging MariaDB’s AI-ready relational database with GridGain’s scalable, in-memory power, MariaDB is setting a new industry standard: sub-millisecond data infrastructure for the agentic era.
Closing the AI Latency Gap
As enterprises move beyond passive chatbots toward agentic AI – autonomous systems that reason, plan and execute tasks – they are quickly becoming limited by traditional data architectures. AI agents require real-time access to massive datasets with zero friction. This acquisition bridges that gap by fusing:
“The rise of agentic workloads has placed unprecedented demands on enterprise infrastructure, causing requirements to explode and requiring a level of scale and sub-millisecond latency that traditional systems simply weren’t built to handle,” said Rohit de Souza, CEO of MariaDB plc. “By uniting MariaDB’s platform with GridGain’s in-memory data grid, we are entering a new weight class. This enables us to provide a high-performance, scalable, open alternative to the rigid lock-in of Oracle and the fragmented complexity of hyperscalers.”
MariaDB is trusted by thousands of enterprises and millions of developers worldwide, providing a seamless upgrade path from Oracle MySQL and a simplified migration for those moving away from Oracle.
Powering the World’s Premier Data-Intensive Brands
With the acquisition, MariaDB will support an elite roster of global leaders who require always-on, always-fast data, including:
A Unified Platform for a Hybrid World
The agentic enterprise requires data that is instantaneous without compromising on durability or reliability. Hyperscalers often offer this as separate, disconnected services. The MariaDB-plus-GridGain integration will replace that fragmentation with a unified, hybrid-cloud platform capable of handling transactional, analytical and AI use cases in a single, high-velocity system – backed by reliable, enterprise support from a single company.
“Enterprises today cannot afford the latency introduced by siloed data architectures. With MariaDB and GridGain, enterprise customers will get a unified platform that provides them the best of both worlds, performance and scale without having to give up on durability,” says Lalit Ahuja, CTO of GridGain Systems, Inc. “The combined technology stack will unlock one of the key enablers for agentic enterprises: high-performance and reliable data processing that powers the next generation of AI applications.”
GridGain is a leading in-memory computing platform and is the original developer of the open source software Apache Ignite. GridGain enables companies to process massive amounts of data in real time. It provides security, high availability, distributed capability, management controls and integrations, helping enterprises achieve superior performance and scalability for their most demanding applications.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.
More from BigDATAwire: MariaDB to Acquire GridGain to Tackle the AI Latency Gap
About MariaDB
MariaDB seeks to eliminate the constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling organizations to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. Enterprises can depend on a single complete hybrid database platform for all their needs, that can be deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical, hybrid and AI use cases. Trusted by organizations such as Deutsche Bank, DBS, Nokia, Red Hat, Samsung and VirginMedia O2 – MariaDB delivers customer value without the financial burden of legacy database providers.
Source: MariaDB
The post MariaDB Announces Agreement to Acquire GridGain, Developer of Apache Ignite appeared first on HPCwire.
Man was among at least six people who started shooting outside Union Station in state, which has adopted stand your ground law
A man who initially faced a murder charge for opening fire following the Kansas City Chiefs’ 2024 Super Bowl win was sentenced on Monday to two years in prison in a case prosecutors said was complicated by the state’s self-defense laws.
Dominic Miller, who pleaded guilty to a weapons charge as part of a plea deal, was among at least six people to start shooting in the melee that sent players, city officials and hundreds of fans scrambling for cover, according to court records.
Continue reading...Mario wants his money back.
The president delivered a vague and contradictory forecast on the future of the war in Middle East. Plus, how to recognize a psychopath
Good morning.
Donald Trump has said the war in Iran is “very complete, pretty much”, as the economic toll of the joint US-Israeli operation rises, disrupting global oil trade and threatening to engulf the Middle East in a regional war.
Any unintended consequences so far? Among others, it has probably reinforced North Korea’s decision to build a nuclear arsenal.
Do we know yet who bombed the Minab school? Trump blamed Iran without evidence. All the actual evidence indicates the US was responsible.
This is a developing story. Follow the latest updates here.
Who did X say were the most prolific state actors? Russia, followed by Iran and China.
Continue reading...The White House aide who revealed that Richard Nixon had secretly recorded his conversations as president has died
Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. He was 99.
His death was confirmed to the Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and helped expose the wrongdoing.
Continue reading...A new report, issued ahead of the president’s summit with Xi Jinping, takes aim at the administration’s record on trade, diplomacy and other aspects of American power.
HBO Max is adding more titles with sign language interpretation, while other tech platforms are also expanding access using readily available tools.
Everything we've heard so far about the rumored Apple Watch Series 12.
The organization that runs most of US lower-league soccer is making a big push after the 2026 World Cup – is it a bridge too far?
It’s been years, but Dan Egner’s X profile still shows him planting a kiss on the USL Championship’s silver cup. These days, Egner is an agent with NordicSky, representing clients on both sides of the Atlantic. But in 2019, when that picture was taken, he was the technical director of Real Salt Lake at a time when MLS teams had affiliates in the USL, the umbrella organization that runs much of lower-league soccer in the United States, including the second-division USL Championship.
When Salt Lake’s affiliate Real Monarchs won the final, the glory was sweet, but it was not profitable.
Continue reading...As a new West Bank settlement plan gains steam, now is the time for governments to take multilateral economic action
Amid an unforgiving global news cycle – and as nations weigh their options in responding to the yet unbuilt West Bank settlement project that would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” – a telling sanctions-related development in Israel passed largely unnoticed outside Israeli media. In Tel Aviv, the new year began with a protest by a violent extremist settler group that has faced UK sanctions since October 2024.
The trigger was a new Israeli banking directive, rushed out to placate Israel’s hardliners, that they said did too little to shield Israelis from international sanctions.
Continue reading...Here are rescued chimpanzees, a mountain lion, an elephant and a penguin with the toys they’re attached to.
Shortly after all JetBlue flights were grounded by the FAA due to what the agency said was a JetBlue request, the carrier said it had resumed operations.
As the new league year gets underway, we take a look at the best and worst moves heading into the 2026 season
Los Angeles Rams
Continue reading...Anthony Russell, 43, will appear in court via video link on Wednesday accused of attack at HMP Frankland
A fellow inmate has been charged with the murder of the child killer Ian Huntley in a maximum security prison, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has said.
Anthony Russell, 43, will appear before magistrates charged with murdering the 52-year-old at HMP Frankland, in County Durham.
Continue reading...Car group reports 54% drop in pre-tax profits as it says Iran war could affect demand for Audi and Porsche brands
Europe’s largest automaker, Volkswagen, is to shed 50,000 jobs by the end of the decade, as it faces falling sales in China and North America and punitive US tariffs imposed by Donald Trump.
The 10-brand group, whose luxury subsidiaries Porsche and Audi are also under pressure, said the jobs would go in Germany, affecting the entire group, as part of a restructuring drive amid the darkening global business climate.
Continue reading...Director rounds on actor, who acted in the cult film, saying he feels disrespected, and claiming cynical reasons behind her recent comments
Quentin Tarantino has responded to Rosanna Arquette’s criticism of his prolific use of the N-word in his films including Pulp Fiction, saying Arquette “show[ed] a decided lack of class”.
In a statement sent to numerous publications including Deadline, Tarantino said: “I hope the publicity you’re getting from 132 different media outlets writing your name and printing your picture was worth disrespecting me and a film I remember quite clearly you were thrilled to be a part of? … After I gave you a job, and you took the money, to trash it for what I suspect is very cynical reasons shows a decided lack of class, no less honour.”
Continue reading...The government said a week ago the warship would be deployed but it is still at dock. What is happening?
The pace at which HMS Dragon has been readied for deployment to defend a British military base in Cyprus from attacks by Iran has prompted claims that Britain’s proud naval history has been shamed.
It has been a week since the government said the Portsmouth-based Type 45 destroyer would be deployed, but it is still at dock and the ship is likely to take another five days or more to reach its destination.
Continue reading...These emoji could land on your device in the coming weeks.
Most people fail with AI because they don’t understand what it actually is – if you treat it as a skill, not a shortcut, you’ll get the best results
Training teams to use AI at work has given me a front-row seat to a new kind of professional divide.
Some people hand everything over to the machine and stop thinking. Others won’t touch it at all.
Continue reading...Our research shows that candidates who come from the union movement are exactly what many Americans crave
American politics feels hopelessly broken. Extreme political polarization, enormous amounts of Pac money sloshing around during elections, and the increasing power of the rich make it seem like nothing, and no one, can set the country on the right track. But a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics looks at a surprisingly simple way that ordinary people might have more influence in our political system: run more union members for office.
The forthcoming CWCP report, co-authored by Jared Abbott, Benjamin Y Fong, Fred DeVeaux, Dustin Guastella and Sam Zacher, and sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, looked at the broad political impact of political candidates with a labor union background. We found that candidates who come out of the union movement are exactly what many people in the country desperately crave: politicians who sound like them, who advocate for working people, and who provide solutions that actually work to fix our broken system.
Continue reading...HHS says the MIT professor is ‘more than qualified’ to serve on the agency’s vaccine advisory panel and calls ‘attacks’ on him ‘politically motivated’
The MIT professor who has been appointed by Robert F Kennedy Jr to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines has failed to meet basic scientific standards in his own research on the topic, according to more than a dozen scientists and public health experts.
Retsef Levi, an operations management professor, is a member of the US health department’s vaccine advisory committee (ACIP) which is meeting later this month and – many experts fear – could seek to rollback recommendations on who should receive Covid-19 vaccines.
Continue reading...Family-run farms in El Salvador and Honduras face mounting losses, rising costs – and the need to adapt or be left behind
Read more of our Coffee crisis series here
On a steep hillside in western El Salvador, Oscar Leiva watches rainfall in December, a month that once marked the start of the dry season. During this harvest cycle, flowering came early and then stalled. A heatwave followed. What remains of the crop is uneven, lower in quality and more expensive to produce than the last.
For Leiva and his family, coffee has never been just a crop. His mother, Esperanza Marinero, remembers when the rains arrived on schedule and the harvest could be planned months in advance. Today, the calendar no longer holds. Decisions about pruning, fertilising and hiring labour feel like educated guesses. Each mistake carries a cost the family cannot afford.
Continue reading...PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5; Tribute Games Inc
A treat for nostalgia fans and completists, but there’s little new in this rehashing of a classic that feels like an add-on rather than a fully fledged adventure
It’s 20XX, and unrepentant slacker Scott Pilgrim and his friends are revelling in the throes of young adulthood. They’re skint, but in a cool way that’s unrecognisable today (not least because nobody can afford to live near downtown Toronto). For many readers, the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels were a cultural touchpoint, a story about emotional immaturity, growing as a person and ultimately defeating youthful arrogance. Having cemented itself as a cult classic with an Edgar Wright movie, a 2010 tie-in game and a Netflix miniseries, it’s now back in the form of a raucous action-adventure game, Scott Pilgrim EX.
This is a homecoming of sorts for developer Tribute Games, which was formed by ex-Ubisoft employees who worked on the 2010 Scott Pilgrim game. Having established themselves as beat ’em up revivalists with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Marvel Cosmic Invasion, the team has stepped up for another crack at this essential coming-of-age tale. Scott Pilgrim EX feels like a passion project, so they have the Powers of Love and Understanding on their side.
Continue reading...I’m using these devices to help my body adjust to Sunday's time change and maintain my physical and mental health.
UK’s GSK is leading the way in research but AstraZeneca is not involved in the area, report finds
The pipeline of new drugs to fight superbugs remains “worryingly thin” and has shrunk by 35% in the last five years, experts have warned, predicting the annual number of deaths linked to drug-resistant infections globally will double to 8 million by 2050.
The number of projects from large pharma companies has shrunk by 35% over the past five years, from 92 to 60 medicines in development, according to a report from the Access to Medicine Foundation (AMF), a Netherlands-based non-profit group, and the Wellcome Trust.
Continue reading...Three leaders from the Delta Tau Delta fraternity were arrested on suspicion of hazing after the death of Colin Daniel Martinez.
Mexico's anti-cartel operations seek to prove to Trump it is serious about security, as World Cup looms Expert comment LToremark
President Sheinbaum hopes that operations like that against ‘El Mencho’ and wider efforts to cooperate with the Trump administration’s demands will protect Mexico from more drastic US actions.
On 22 February, Mexico’s armed forces carried out a major operation against one of the most important cartels, Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). The main target was El Mencho, the alias of CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, who was captured wounded and later died during transit to a medical facility. CJNG members responded with disruptive acts of violence in several states, and at least 25 members of the National Guard were killed in the fighting.
Last week, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum visited Guadalajara in Jalisco state – a World Cup host city – to assuage security concerns and announce that up to 100,000 security personnel will be deployed during the 2026 World Cup.
The El Mencho operation was carried out with the help of US information and intelligence. President Trump has previously criticized Mexico’s efforts to tackle the cartels and even threatened a US attack on Mexican soil against a cartel target. This exceptional raid is part of a wider collaboration network between the two countries, which will reduce the likelihood of any immediate US action. Some analysts, however, assume such intervention would never happen, given that Mexico is home to the largest number of Americans outside the US.
Mexico and the United States have one of the closest and most complex bilateral relationships in the world. More than 30 million people of Mexican origin live in the US, while 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico. The two countries are also each other’s most important trading partner and share a 1,954-mile-long border – only slightly shorter than the distance from the UK to Syria.
But the relationship has come under increased pressure since Trump took office last year. President Sheinbaum has so far cooperated with US demands while also attempting to push for domestic reforms. While the US priorities are overwhelmingly migration and security, reforms in other areas that could also affect US interests – such as justice, energy, and political system reform – have been dealt with pragmatically and steps have been taken to ensure US companies are not negatively affected.
Under Trump, three issues have come into sharp focus: migration, security and trade. The three were dramatically intertwined when Trump made free trade contingent on actions by Mexico on migration and security. In November 2024, Trump threatened a 25 per cent tariff on Mexico until it solved the ‘problem’ of fentanyl and illegal immigration – a threat he made good on in February 2025. The lack of information on how advances in these areas would be measured resulted in huge levels of uncertainty. Illegal migration and drugs flow north across the border into the US, but US guns flow south – and into the hands of Mexican cartels.
After intense diplomatic and backchannel conversations, large carve-outs were made to these tariffs in March 2025. As result, 85 per cent of Mexican exports to the US still flow on a free-trade basis, and remaining exports have a low average tariff of just 4.5 per cent. Meanwhile, the situation on the border has changed drastically. ‘Contacts’ with migrants on the US border dropped from 2.5 million in 2023 to 443,000 in 2025, the lowest in 50 years.
On action against cartels, Mexico has made several goodwill gestures. It has renewed and intensified dialogue, cooperation, intelligence gathering and information sharing on the activities and methods of drug cartels. It has also resumed joint training for security forces and accepted an increased number of security-related attachés at the US embassy in Mexico. Between February 2025 and January 2026, 93 high-ranking cartel figures serving sentences in Mexican jails were sent to the US outside formal deportation procedures.
The more Mexico and the US cooperate successfully on security-related matters, the less likely a US drone strike on Mexican soil becomes. While future joint operations should not be entirely ruled out, it is far more probable that Mexican authorities will execute them. Successful security cooperation will show the US that Mexico is a trustworthy partner and that it is in the best interest of both countries to maintain dialogue, cooperation and coordination.
Progress on migration and security are also helping to lay the groundwork for more productive talks on renewing the US, Mexico and Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA), due for renewal by 1 July. Trade is a key part of the bilateral relationship. In 2025, exports from the US to Mexico reached $338 billion, while Mexican exports to the US reached $535 billion (compared to $308.4 billion for China’s exports to the US).
Other developments too have increased the probability of an agreement on the USMCA being reached in time, including bilateral negotiations carried out during numerous trips to Washington by Mexican officials. These negotiations have so far been based on a 54-point list of pending issues from the US side, formally delivered to President Sheinbaum by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during his trip to Mexico City in September 2025. The list includes a wide variety of issues, ranging from energy, intellectual property and agriculture to relations with China.
The US’s main concerns regarding China revolve around Chinese involvement in the ownership of Mexican ports and container terminals, and Mexico’s perceived lack of accuracy and transparency on its trade with China, such as inputs in supply chains, as well as Chinese investment. Mexican authorities have responded reforming its foreign investment screening mechanism and imposing more than 1,400 new tariffs on certain goods coming from various countries – mainly from China. Progress made will hopefully avoid a protracted renegotiation process on the USMCA which could open a Pandora’s box at the worst possible time, creating uncertainty and volatility for the Mexican economy.
We also spoke with a doctor to learn more about how you can reduce your exposure to microplastics.
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Former footballer detained after incident outside Huyton and Prescot golf club on Sunday evening
Joey Barton has been arrested on suspicion of attacking a man near a golf club in Liverpool.
The former footballer was detained by police after the incident outside Huyton and Prescot golf club at 9pm on Sunday.
Continue reading...Only two vessels not linked to Iran or Russia have braved ‘chicken run’ since US president’s promise on Friday
Only two vessels not linked to Iran or Russia have made the “chicken run” through the strait of Hormuz since Donald Trump said he would “ensure the free flow of energy to the world”, according to maritime records.
One of those that braved the journey since the US president’s announcement of emergency measures on Friday went “dark” by switching off its transponder and a second signalled it was Chinese owned and crewed.
Continue reading...Travel operators say Chinese and North Koreans can now buy tickets for services leaving this week
Passenger train services between China and North Korea are to resume this week, six years after their suspension because of the Covid-19 pandemic, travel operators have said.
Train journeys between the two countries were halted in 2020 as strict border closures were imposed to prevent the virus spreading.
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“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Louis Brandeis (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
This is the sort of quote that hits with the clarity that doesn’t need footnotes or legal training to understand. The kind that feels like it’s been sitting in plain sight for decades, waiting for us to stop pretending we don’t see it.
Louis Brandeis wasn’t warning us about money in the abstract. He was talking about power: who gets to shape the rules, who gets heard, and who gets left standing outside the room. Why is this important? Because Democracy with a capital D only works when everyone has a meaningful voice. Concentrated wealth works by giving a small group a much louder one. Those two ideas can coexist for a while, but eventually one tug-of-war side starts pulling so hard on the rope that it pulls the other off their feet. You don’t need a political science degree to see that happening. You just need to pay attention to how decisions get made, who benefits from them, and who keeps getting told to wait their turn.
What Brandeis understood, and what we keep having to learn again and again, is that democracy doesn’t collapse in a single dramatic moment, like an underdone soufflé. Instead, it deflates slowly, quietly, while the oven is still shut. It happens when the people with the most resources can shape the narrative, the policy, or the playing field in ways the rest of us can’t. And because it happens gradually, it’s easy to miss until we open that oven and instead of a delicacy, we get the dessert equivalent of a flat tire.
I saw a version of this dynamic during my years in the NBA. On the court, everything feels immediate, every call, every possession, every shift in momentum. But off the court, in the league offices and ownership meetings, the real power lives in rooms most players never enter. Decisions are made that shape the entire league. Rules and revenue structures are influenced by a handful of people whose interests don’t always line up with the players or the fans. That doesn’t make the league illegitimate. But it does make the power structure clear: the game may be shared, but the leverage isn’t.
Brandeis’ quote points to the same kind of imbalance, but on a national scale, where the stakes are far higher, and the consequences reach far more people. It forces us to confront something uncomfortable: democracy isn’t self‑maintaining. It needs guardrails and transparency. It needs people willing to ask hard questions about who benefits when wealth and influence start to merge. And it needs citizens who don’t shrug off the slow loss of height and air just because we wanna eat and the food still looks familiar on the surface.
Brandeis’s quote is—excuse the expression—a fork in the road. If wealth keeps concentrating, democracy becomes thinner, more symbolic, more performative. If democracy is strengthened, then concentrated wealth can be held in check. Not demonized, not at all; simply balanced.
José Antonio Kast, who voted against legalising divorce in 2004, has pushed for return to total abortion ban
Women’s rights activists in Chile are bracing as the most conservative president since the Pinochet dictatorship prepares to take office on Wednesday.
José Antonio Kast, a 60-year-old ultra Catholic whose father was a member of the Nazi party, has consistently blocked progressive bids for women’s rights and equality across his three-decade career in politics.
Continue reading...Remember the iPod? How about the Pippin? In the half-century since it launched its first PC, Apple has given us some amazing innovations. We round up its biggest triumphs and flops
Fifty years after Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded the company in Jobs’ parents’ garage in Los Altos, California, Apple has become a behemoth, and billions of us use its products every day. From the first successful home computers with colour screens, to the iPod, to the smartphone that set the template for the modern mobile era, the company has repeatedly reset consumer expectations.
As a result, the firm occupies a central position in the tech world, initiating trends and popularising products. Here are five of its most influential products from the past half-century – alongside some unusually big misses.
Continue reading...‘Resistance is futile’, wrote one AI product manager for the Associated Press in internal messages to colleagues
No one wants a soulless sermon – that defeats the purpose – and Pope Leo XIV has taken steps to ensure that Roman Catholic priests don’t deliver one.
Artificial intelligence, the new pontiff said in a recent meeting with clergy, “will never be able to share faith”, which is what giving a homily is all about. Resist the temptation and write your own words, he urged.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking about the job I had two decades ago, when I was a janitor at a machine shop in Fort Worth, Texas. Even as a hungover 20-year-old, my internal monologue would debate the ethics of the parts I packaged. We produced tiny components for Halliburton and Lockheed Martin. Slivers of aluminum machined to tolerances so fine you could miss their imperfections with the naked eye.
Beneath the fluorescent hum of the shipping and handling department, I’d rub a widget between my fingers and imagine the journey it would take: lifted from a Texan warehouse into the Middle Eastern theatre where our nation’s wars burned. Small enough to disappear in my palm, large enough to disappear into someone else’s rubble. Which is why I keep thinking about those widgets as the NBA tries to regulate morality.
The NBA, Memphis Grizzlies and Ubiquiti did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
Crop farmers make up a sizable portion of Delaware’s farming population and provide key corn and soybean products to the state’s poultry industry. Despite some recent stop-gap federal funding, higher input costs and lower prices have put a strain on Delaware farmers’ financial situation, making the future of their industry uncertain.
Jim Minner has a thinking chair.
It sits in the maintenance shed behind his house, facing the Felton-area grain farmer’s tractors and combines.
In the winter months, when Minner is not planting or harvesting crops, he spends most of his time in that chair deliberating how he might be able to improve his machinery for the upcoming season.
Over the past few years though, with corn and soybean prices dropping and costs for fertilizer and machinery rising, Minner has adopted a mindset of “just get by,” in order to make ends meet on the farm.
This, he said, means keeping expenses like equipment, fertilizer and seeds as low as possible. It also means foregoing any major machinery upgrades.
“The trick is to keep your costs low, keep your overhead low,” Minner, president of the Kent County Farm Bureau, told Spotlight Delaware. “That helps in the bad years.”
And Minner is not the only farmer facing ongoing economic challenges.
In response to “temporary trade market disruptions and increased production costs,” the federal government recently rolled out $11 billion in one-time assistance payments for farmers around the country based on how many acres of “commodity crops” — or mass-produced crops like corn, soybeans, wheat and rice — they grow.
The unforeseen federal funding, Minner said, allowed him to purchase roughly $10,000 in updated parts for his tractors and combines. Upgrades he had been putting off in recent years due to the tight margins.
As a result, Minner has been able to get out of his thinking chair this winter, instead doing some hands-on mechanic work to his 30-plus-year-old equipment this month.
Other Delaware farmers say they are using the one-time payments – which began being distributed through local Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices in late February and will continue through mid-April – toward seed costs for the upcoming season or other expenses from last year that were particularly tight.
“I have to put it toward my bills in order to keep myself afloat,” Dover-area farmer Paul Cartanza Sr. said.
While experts say the current farming landscape is somewhat better on the Delmarva Peninsula than elsewhere because farmers have a guaranteed market for their corn and soybeans in the poultry industry, panelists at an agriculture summit in Harrington in mid-February likened the current crop economy to the Great Depression.
Farmers and agricultural economists have differing opinions as to whether higher operating costs, dropping prices from overproduction, the loss of an export market due to tariffs on China, or a combination of the three, is causing tight profit margins for American farmers.
They agree, though, that the current farm assistance funding is just a stopgap measure in an industry that is increasingly strained and whose future is uncertain.
“We see this as a bailout, and it’s not the way we want to operate,” Georgetown-area farmer Jay Baxter said. “We would rather see our bottom line increase and us be able to do business off of our profit and loss.”
Despite what Delaware farmers described as a good-weather, high-yield crop year, dropping prices are leaving the state’s industry stretched at the seams.
The agricultural community spent much of this past fall debating what impact President Donald Trump’s tariff war would have on the American soybean industry.
As of late September 2025, China, the world’s top purchaser of soybeans, had dropped from purchasing $12.6 billion worth of American soybeans in 2024 to $0.
Corn and soybean prices have been dropping for a couple of years, but many farmers have been watching the prices particularly closely since Trump first implemented his tariff policy in January 2025.
Adding to the timeline of uncertainty, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s tariff policy was unconstitutional late last month, and Trump has responded with new, often fluctuating, tariff rates.
The average nationwide price per bushel of soybeans has been creeping down in recent years, from $14.20 three years ago to a projected price of $10.20 this season, James McDonald, an agricultural economics researcher at the University of Maryland, told Spotlight Delaware. Corn prices per bushel have followed a similar trend, he said, dropping from $6.54 in the 2022-23 season to $4.10 presently.
The exact prices vary slightly per region, and Delaware farmers say they tend to get above average prices for corn, and slightly below average prices for soybeans.
Poultry companies, like Mountaire and Perdue, who have become large operations in the southern Delaware agriculture scene, tend to demand more corn than soybeans for their chickens, but the chicken farms provide a market to Delaware farmers for both crops.
Baxter, the Georgetown-area farmer, said his corn operation has historically been able to make “good money” at $5 a bushel, so the average pricing isn’t too far off. Soybean rates, he said, have a larger gap.
At the same time, the 2025 harvest was what many farm groups call a “bumper harvest,” meaning a substantially higher production season than usual.
Dave Marvel, a Harrington-based farmer who grows corn, soybeans and watermelon, said his crop yields were good this past season, but the end economic result was a “wash” due to the lower prices.
“Yields were favorable, but the pricing has been down,” said Marvel, who is the vice president of the Kent County Farm Bureau.
Minner said similarly that he had one of his best crop yield years in a long time, but prices were “so terrible,” that the pay off was not very good.
Many Delaware farmers say they see Trump’s tariff policies as one factor in the lower price outlook for their crops, but not the sole contributor to the price drop.
Baxter, a self-described eternal optimist, said he believes the tariffs will create long-term benefits because they will eventually readjust the supply and demand of the market in favor of American farmers.
“We just have to be patient and wait it out,” he said.
Nate Bruce, an agricultural researcher at the University of Delaware, said he sees a shift toward more soybean crushing facilities being built in the U.S., instead of needing to be exported to crushing facilities in China. This, he said, could eliminate the United States’ reliance on global soybean markets by the early 2030s.
But McDonald, the University of Maryland researcher, strongly disagreed.
He said American consumers are not going to miraculously start demanding more soybeans over the next few decades, so farmers will need to find new global markets in order to sustain the industry.
When asked why they believe profit margins have been so tight in recent years, many Delaware farmers cited rising operating costs on items such as fertilizer, seeds and machinery as the decisive factor.
Minner said he uses potash, a fertilizer made from potassium, in his soil. A lot of potash is imported from Canada, but higher tariffs on the country have made it more expensive to bring in the ingredient, he said.
He has been forced to get creative and find other sources of manure, or rely on the potash he already has in the soil, in order to avoid the extra costs.
“We’re going to cut back on inputs,” Minner said. “We’re going to grow the same crops, we’re just going to feed them differently,”
Marvel, the Harrington-area farmer, said he ideally likes to invest in some fungicides to make the plants healthier and increase his production, but it is difficult to afford that currently.
At the same time, Marvel is working with old machinery – a combine from the 1970s and his newest tractor from the 1990s — which he said he wants to upgrade to make production more efficient.
“All that kind of technology costs a lot of money, and there’s not enough to invest in that kind of technology,” he said.
Exacerbating the situation even more recently, McDonald said, is the conflict in the Middle East. It has caused fertilizer prices to jump by another 15% in the past week. A number of countries in the Middle East are large exporters of natural gas, which is a key ingredient in fertilizer.
Delaware farmers agree the federal government has recognized the squeeze facing their industry, as shown by the current rollout of federal assistance funds and other forthcoming programs.
Still, farmers say they feel uncertain about how they will continue to get by on such tight profit margins, and when an upward trend may hit the markets.
“They have been very proactive for agriculture,” Marvel said about the federal government. “We’re just happy that the money came, and it’s going to be a very quick turnaround.”
Between the one-time assistance payments and other funding programs, like specialty crop money, McDonald said the federal government will be providing $44 billion in direct government payments to farmers this year.
While the massive funding amount shows the degree of distress American farmers are currently experiencing, McDonald said, he is also concerned the government is stepping in for the market too much.
“We’re assuring people that you should continue to plant corn and soybeans, even when you know we’re not really making money on corn and soybeans,” he said.
When asked about their strategy moving forward – amid the low prices and high operating costs – Delaware farmers did not have a concrete answer.
Minner and Cartanza both said they will continue trying to “forward contract” some of their crops, or agree to sell them for a set price before the crops have even been planted, in an attempt to lock in the best prices possible.
Baxter has diversified his operation to some other crops, including vegetables, chickens and greenhouses, which he said helps somewhat with the uncertainty.
He added he will not lose his faith that there is a “brighter day ahead” for American farmers.
Until then, Baxter said, he will keep “sharpening his pencil,” and seeing where he might be able to cut costs.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
The post Delaware farmers feel economic strain despite federal assistance appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The FBI is investigating a breach affecting systems tied to wiretapping and surveillance warrant data, after abnormal logs revealed possible unauthorized access to law-enforcement-sensitive information. "The FBI identified and addressed suspicious activities on FBI networks, and we have leveraged all technical capabilities to respond," a spokesperson for the bureau said. "We have nothing additional to provide." The Register reports: [W]hile the FBI declined to provide any additional information, it's worth noting that China's Salt Typhoon previously compromised wiretapping systems used by law enforcement. Salt Typhoon is the PRC-backed crew that famously hacked major US telecommunications firms and stole information belonging to nearly every American. According to the Associated Press, the FBI notified Congress that it began investigating the breach on February 17 after spotting abnormal log information related to a system on its network. "The affected system is unclassified and contains law enforcement sensitive information, including returns from legal process, such as pen register and trap and trace surveillance returns, and personally identifiable information pertaining to subjects of FBI investigations," the notification said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump is wielding imperial powers created by a decades-long master plan. The only way to stop his war is to cut off the money
Donald Trump has now ordered military attacks on more countries than any prior president. These assaults do not merely betray his campaign promises. Launched without congressional authorization, Trump’s bombings and incursions also betray the constitution – an inherently anti-monarch document that exclusively vests warmaking powers in the legislative branch in order to prevent such grave decisions from being made by any one person determined to become a king.
Trump clearly perceives himself in such royal terms – he’s said as much. But as we show in the new season of our investigative podcast series Master Plan: The Kingmakers, Trump did not create the kingly authority he is now employing. He is exercising powers concentrated in the executive branch by previous presidents and courts. And if history is any guide, the only weapon that can stop a mad king is Congress’s power of the purse – a power that Democrats once effectively wielded, but today seem hesitant to brandish, even amid a wildly unpopular Iran incursion that some fear is a precursor to a third world war.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware began to cover commercial weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy for state employees as part of its health insurance plan in 2023. Now, as the cost of covering the drug has increased, officials implemented a new elevated copay.
Delaware state employees who for years have enjoyed a relatively cheap price for blockbuster GLP-1 drugs will soon see their copays rise nearly seven-fold in the coming year. The new copays will not apply to employees using the drugs for diabetes.
The State Employee Benefits Committee (SEBC), a board responsible for managing Delaware’s state employee health insurance plans, met Monday morning to finalize coverage changes for employees currently using weight-loss drugs.
Under the state’s new coverage guidelines, state employees using drugs for weight-loss purposes will now have to pay a $200 copay for a 30-day supply, beginning July 1. Before Monday, a monthly supply was $32.
Those sums will impact more than 100,000 state employees, retirees, and their family members who are covered by the Delaware General Health Insurance Plan.
The change comes as state officials have had to reconcile the rising cost of covering GLP-1 medications with supporting an increased number of state employees who use the drug for its weight-loss properties.
Delaware passed the elevated copay for weight-loss prescriptions with a plan to broadcast the change and promote cost-saving programs run by Novo Nordisk, the Danish manufacturer that makes two of the world’s most popular GLP-1s utilized by state employees.
Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound that were originally intended to treat type 2 diabetes have exploded in popularity in America as they have proven to aid weight loss, which results in both short-term and long-term health benefits. But the drugs are expensive – a 30-day supply of Ozempic retails for about $1,000 without manufacturer rebates – and are now among the largest pharmaceutical expenditures for the state insurance plan.
One board member, Jeff Taschner, executive director of the Delaware State Education Association, the state’s teachers union, initially proposed a motion to the committee that would have increased the copay to $132, but that motion failed.
He proposed the $132 copay because it would help to address the budget strain created by the weight-loss prescriptions while also relieving some of the added costs on patients.
When that motion failed, Taschner and many of the committee members who initially voted with him, voted against the measure to implement the $200 copay.
Taschner based his “No” vote on the cost the new copays would have on state employees, who would see their annual costs increase $2,016 without copay assistance. Taschner added that if copay assistance is available, employees would still see that cost increase by $816 a year.
“I really struggle with them being the only ones, quite frankly, who are bearing the cost of this action,” he said during the meeting.
In the moments after the committee passed the new copays, members also passed new monthly insurance premiums, which will increase by 2.2% for Fiscal Year 2027.
Jessica Perrine, a state employee who spoke during public comment, called the new copays “disappointing.” Perrine, who said she is a mother of two who makes $40,000 a year, said the drugs have helped her.
She said as someone who’s tried dieting and continues to exercise every day, GLP-1s do more than just support her physical health.
“This helps people as a whole, not just, ‘Oh, I lost weight, I’m skinny now,’” Perrine said. “It’s something that affects your mental health all the way around.”
Lt. Gov. Kyle Evans Gay, who sits on the SEBC and voted in favor of the $200 copay, acknowledged the financial impact of the committee’s decision, and the hundreds of dollars it will cost annually for some state employees. But the committee also has a responsibility to other members with conditions that are costly, she said.
Still, Gay said she was not happy with the options put before her, and hopes the committee will work to find new cost-effective solutions for the state that also lessen the costs to patients.
“I will move forward with the understanding that the cost is still too high and that we need to do something to ensure that medications that change lives are getting to the people that need them,” Gay said.
Delaware’s reckoning with its spending on weight-loss drugs comes as states across the country have pulled back on coverage.
In 2021, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved a formulation of Ozempic – a drug that has long treated type 2 diabetes – for use in weight loss. The drug mimics a hormone that targets the appetite-regulating area of the brain, reducing a patient’s perceived hunger.
In 2023, the Delaware state employee health care plan began to cover most of those costs for weight-loss patients. Officials initially budgeted about $2 million in the 2024 fiscal year, but the actual price tag reached more than $14 million that year, and has continued to grow since.
Workers on the state’s health plan pay anywhere from 4% to 13% of the cost out of pocket. The remainder is paid by taxpayers through the state’s General Fund.
In early 2024, Spotlight Delaware first reported that commercial weight-loss drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, were among the most prescribed and expensive medicines for state workers.
Delaware also recently filed a lawsuit against multiple pharmaceutical juggernauts in January, accusing them of conspiring to artificially inflate insulin and GLP-1 drug prices at the expense of patients.
According to the complaint, manufacturers have dramatically increased the price of insulin and other diabetes drugs in recent years, despite a decrease in the cost of production.
The lawsuit said diabetes costs Delaware $1.1 billion each year, and that many rely on daily insulin injections, as well as the use of GLP-1s, naming Ozempic as one of the medications included in the alleged price-gouging scheme.
Separately, lawmakers introduced legislation last week that would dramatically impact how health care providers negotiate with insurers and how expensive care can be, with some provisions aimed specifically at the state’s health plan.
Senate Bill 1, filed ahead of lawmakers’ return this week for the remainder of this year’s legislative session, quickly drew the ire of Delaware’s powerful and litigious hospital apparatus.
Introduced by Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark/Glasgow), the bill is, on the surface, an attempt to bolster primary care in Delaware and better compensate providers proactively working to improve Delawareans’ health outcomes.
But under the bill’s hood, it is a referendum on hospital pricing in a state that has some of the highest costs in the country. If passed as is, SB 1 could deal a major blow to hospitals’ bottom lines.
Within the bill are changes that would regulate the rate at which insurers carrying plans for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance can reimburse hospitals for covered services.
Health care providers generally earn the bulk of their revenues by negotiating with insurers who represent large groups of patients. The negotiations determine how much money the insurer will pay for the health care services, and in turn what costs will later be passed onto patients.
Delaware rates are currently regulated with some growth caps limiting how high they can increase year over year, but SB 1 represents a step toward stricter price-setting measures.
Brian Frazee, CEO of the Delaware Healthcare Association, a trade group that represents the state’s hospitals, said his organization has “major concerns” with Senate Bill 1. He homed in on the rate-setting, saying it would cut hospital funding and “severely” limit resources.
“Put simply, it threatens health care quality and access in our state,” Frazee said. “We have been doing the real work in good faith to improve access and develop value-based solutions that lower costs without sacrificing quality and access.”
Through Senate Bill 1, Townsend said he hopes further investments in primary care would help sustain a health care business model that treats people effectively before they become sick and need complex and expensive care.
“They have become addicted to a framework that involves high costs after people are already sick,” Townsend said. “That is not sustainable. It is not moral. We have to change it.”
The post Delaware approves $200 copay for weight-loss drugs, new premiums for state employees appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
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Growing fears that elevated interest rates will continue, as Barclays finds worries that war will push up inflation
A leading British housebuilder has warned the Iran conflict could knock homebuyer sentiment, amid growing fears of a jump in inflation and a prolonged period of elevated interest rates.
Persimmon said it was “monitoring the impact the conflict with Iran could have on our markets in 2026”, but noted that consumer sentiment could be sensitive amid more financial uncertainty.
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Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon has signed legislation banning abortions after embryotic cardiac activity can be detected, but a court challenge is likely.
FTSE 100 opens higher and European markets rise as US president describes conflict as ‘very complete’
Oil prices have tumbled from four-year highs, capping an extraordinary 24 hours in global markets and prompting global stocks to rebound after Donald Trump suggested the US-Israel war on Iran could end “very soon”.
Brent crude, the international benchmark, surged as high as $119.50 a barrel on Monday as the Middle East conflict intensified fears of a deepening energy supply crisis.
Continue reading...Rene Villarreal-Albe averted possible crash by pulling truck up to car and halting it as driver faced medical episode
A Texas man who recently was driving on a highway reportedly pulled his truck out in front of a car with an unconscious man behind the wheel, gradually slowed it down with his back bumper and ultimately stopped it to avert what could have been a major crash.
Rene Villarreal-Albe’s good deed was captured on dramatic cell phone video recorded by his wife, Andrea Walker, and then shared online by his sister, Cortney Trinidad, as the Texas news outlet Kens 5 reported. The video and action-movie-like story behind it gained widespread attention on corners of the internet dedicated to finding positive news, generating some comments that hailed Villarreal-Albe as a “highway hero”.
Continue reading...Rebecca Sheppard specializes in untangling other people’s financial messes. But for nearly a year, the Colorado accountant has been unable to fix a glaring error on her own credit report.
Her credit score plunged roughly 85 points because of a $240,000 student loan debt she does not owe. She repeatedly asked the nation’s big three credit reporting companies to correct the mistake, submitting documentation showing the debt belonged to her ex-husband. Even the loan’s account manager confirmed she wasn’t responsible.
Still, the credit bureaus refused to remove it, jeopardizing her plans to move with her disabled father into a more accessible home. “There’s no way in the world I could qualify for the purchase,” she said.
Sheppard should have been able to count on the federal government to pressure the credit bureaus to take her dispute seriously. For years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wielded the threat of fines and lawsuits to make companies fix errors and engage with consumers. Under the Biden administration, a rigorous supporter of the agency, consumers’ rates of relief for such complaints rose to about 10 times as high as in 2020.
But Sheppard needed help under the Trump administration, which has drastically curtailed the CFPB’s mission, including its policing of credit bureaus. With the agency weakened, two of the three major credit bureaus, TransUnion and Experian, have sharply reduced the share of consumer complaints they resolved in customers’ favor, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal complaint data.
TransUnion’s relief rate, which had remained relatively steady for several years, began plunging in the summer of 2025. By October it was providing relief roughly half as often.
Experian’s drop was even more dramatic. The company resolved nearly 20% of complaints in consumers’ favor in 2024. Last year, that figure fell to less than 1%.
The third major bureau, Equifax, did not show a similar decline. Just days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated, the company entered into a consent order with the CFPB over deficient dispute and investigation practices. Under the agreement, the company committed to reforms and ongoing oversight.
Equifax’s consumer relief mostly kept up with complaints.
The timing of the drops at TransUnion and Experian coincides with the Trump administration’s dismantling of the CFPB.
In February 2025, Russell Vought, a White House official who oversaw sweeping cuts across federal agencies, took control of the CFPB as acting director. He quickly ordered a stop to nearly all agency work. Under his leadership, the CFPB has attempted to fire most of its staff, frozen investigations and dropped enforcement actions, including against TransUnion. One of the CFPB’s new lawyers leading the pullback on enforcement represented Experian for years before joining the administration.
The credit bureaus “want to do as little as possible,” said Chi Chi Wu, director of consumer reporting at the National Consumer Law Center, which is a plaintiff in a lawsuit that has so far blocked some of the administration’s dismantling efforts.
“The thing that is making them do any kind of effort is a lawsuit or a regulator, and now we don’t have the regulator,” Wu said.
In statements to ProPublica, the credit bureaus said that many complaints are illegitimate, including a large volume filed by credit repair organizations that charge customers to challenge negative information on their reports. Experian said in a statement that some of those companies “mislead consumers into believing they can remove accurate information,” adding that it investigates “all legitimate” complaints. The company did not respond to specific questions about its decline in relief.
Third parties are allowed to submit complaints on behalf of consumers if they disclose their involvement and get permission. Federal regulators have acknowledged that bad actors exist, but the CFPB and a House subcommittee found that the credit bureaus’ systems for identifying third-party involvement were overly broad and dismissed legitimate concerns.
Asked about the decline in relief, TransUnion said it recently changed its processes to handle third-party complaints and now redirects those with insufficient documentation to “a more appropriate” internal channel for review.
For years, the CFPB’s complaint system has served as a public middleman: forwarding consumer issues to the bureaus, requiring responses and publishing data showing how companies handled them.
But the companies have successfully lobbied the Trump administration to start steering some consumers away from the transparent process and toward their internal systems.
A CFPB spokesperson said the complaint system was inundated with submissions from bots and third-party credit repair firms, and the agency was working to address that so legitimate consumers can more effectively get help. The agency did not respond to written questions about the decline in relief or enforcement.
How many consumers get help — or don’t — when using the credit bureaus’ internal systems is not public. But CFPB data shows that since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, more than 2.7 million credit reporting complaints submitted to the CFPB have gone without relief, leaving some people at risk of being denied loans, housing or employment and subject to higher rates from insurers and lenders.
One anonymized complaint came from a Texan who said a fraudulent account remained on their credit report despite their disputes. “I have an important deal that I need to complete that is important for the safety and survival of my family,” the person wrote. CFPB records show that Equifax provided relief, while TransUnion and Experian did not.
Also among those who complained was an Air Force veteran and elections organizer in Arkansas who said the bureaus refused to restore his erroneously deleted mortgage history. ProPublica interviewed the man, Kwami Abdul-Bey, who said the error left him unable to refinance his home or car even after going to multiple lenders.
“Each time they tell me that I do not have enough years of credit. I was paying on that mortgage for a decade before that trade line disappeared,” he said.
After ProPublica contacted his mortgage servicer, Wells Fargo, the company reached out to Abdul-Bey to apologize for his situation and said it would investigate.
Equifax and Experian did not reply to questions about individual consumers who filed complaints. TransUnion declined to comment on individual situations but said in a statement that the company “has multiple resources available to consumers to help with every step of the dispute process.”
Everyday Americans cannot opt out of having their financial data collected and sold by credit bureaus. Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1970, giving consumers the right to flag errors. But more recently, the credit bureaus have employed a limited number of workers — often overseas — to handle enormous volumes of investigations.
TransUnion, for example, had 171 workers responding to consumer disputes covering 38 million line items in 2021. A TransUnion spokesperson said in an email that the company has since added staffing but would not provide a number.
“These ‘investigators,’ they have a stack of disputes like a mile high that they have to go through every day,” said Liam Hayden, a Chicago attorney who has represented consumers in credit reporting cases. “A real, authentic investigation costs money.”
After the 2008 financial crisis, Congress created the CFPB to protect Americans from unfair and abusive practices. By 2015, the big three credit bureaus had become the most complained about firms in the agency’s complaint system.
Complaints about Equifax, TransUnion and Experian vastly outnumber all other complaints, for matters such as credit cards, loans or debt collection.
In 2022, identifying a lack of responsiveness by the credit bureaus to consumer issues, the CFPB released a critical report, alongside guidance on how the companies should address “shoddy investigation practices.” Over the next few years, relief rates rose as the companies provided more individualized responses to complaints filed through the agency.
Announcements on the CFPB’s website show the agency has brought a dozen enforcement actions against consumer reporting companies since 2015.
Just days before Trump took office, the CFPB announced an enforcement action against Equifax. The company settled, agreeing to pay $15 million and operate under a legally binding consent order designed to fix its dispute process.
Among the reforms, the company agreed to improve its web interface for submitting disputes, avoid relying on faulty information from creditors and not automatically dismiss repeated concerns from the same consumer. The agreement did not specifically mention the company’s handling of CFPB complaints. Equifax was given about a year to put many of the changes in place and has to remain compliant for five years after.
ProPublica found that the agency had approved a similar action against TransUnion in July 2024, but it was never brought. Settlement talks ended shortly after the change in administration.
“Given recent changes in CFPB leadership, our engagement with the agency on this matter has paused,” TransUnion wrote in a February 2025 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. “We cannot provide an estimate of when, or if, such engagement will resume.”
That month, the CFPB dropped a lawsuit against TransUnion and a former company executive over alleged deceptive practices. TransUnion denied the allegations, calling them “meritless.” The CFPB later ended an agreement meant to fix the company’s failure to promptly place and remove credit freezes.
The CFPB sued Experian shortly before the administration changed, alleging failures in its dispute handling processes. Experian has denied the allegations in court, called the suit “completely without merit” and said the company investigates “every consumer dispute thoroughly.”
The Experian case remains active. A CFPB spokesperson said that Victoria Dorfman, the new senior legal adviser who previously represented Experian, has recused herself from the case.
In a July public comment letter, Experian argued it should not be required to respond to individual CFPB complaints and that the vast majority of those filed recently are illegitimate. The industry’s lobbying arm, the Consumer Data Industry Association, has urged the CFPB to route more consumers away from the complaint system and make the remaining complaints private.
This year, just a week after receiving a letter from the lobbying group, the CFPB added three notices for consumers to click through before filing a public complaint, warning them that their requests might be ignored if they have not already disputed issues directly with credit bureaus — a standard the agency previously said companies cannot reliably verify.
In a statement to ProPublica, the CDIA highlighted that a notice instructing consumers to first dispute directly had been present in the CFPB complaint portal briefly around 2012. The new changes are “necessary to address the widespread misuse of the portal” that divert resources away from legitimate concerns, the group said.
But consumer advocates contend that the industry-friendly changes present even more obstacles for consumers like Sheppard who are trying to get their issues resolved.
She twice disputed the student loan error directly with the bureaus. Then in June, she turned to the CFPB. All three responded that they had verified that the debt was hers without addressing documentation she provided to the contrary.
In December, she sent another dispute by certified mail, but TransUnion replied with a postcard stating it believed the submission had not come from her.
“They didn’t even try,” Sheppard said. “The fact that they sent that little postcard was just ridiculous.”
TransUnion did not provide a response regarding Sheppard’s situation but said in a statement that it “cannot change information furnished to us absent sufficient documentation and clear instruction from the consumer.”
In her mailed dispute, Sheppard included a letter she received from the loan account manager stating that she was not responsible for the debt.
With no other options, Sheppard sued the three credit bureaus in January. The companies have not yet responded in court.
Without a functioning CFPB, enforcement may fall to state attorneys general and private lawsuits. The Federal Trade Commission can bring cases but lacks the authority to conduct routine supervision.
A future without a CFPB will leave consumers increasingly trapped, said Hayden, the Chicago attorney. “In five years, the resolution of consumer disputes is going to be worse, credit reports are going to be worse and it’s going to be harder for folks to fix them, guaranteed.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is walking away from cases that might have helped return money to consumers across the U.S. We want to hear from people who feel left behind.
The post Credit Bureaus Are Leaving More Mistakes on Frustrated Consumers’ Reports Under Trump’s CFPB appeared first on ProPublica.
RAMALLAH — Traffic was at a standstill outside of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, as sunset neared and hungry residents were forced to trickle through an Israeli checkpoint to get home and break their fasts.
The Israeli military had sealed the city off from the outside world. Just over a week after the U.S. and Israel launched their joint war on Iran, Israeli settlers have ramped up their violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli forces have imposed a near-total closure of municipal centers, shutting gates and restricting crossings without warning or perceptible logic.
“It’s so unpredictable,” said Shadya Saif, 40, a Palestinian mother of three who teaches at a private school in Ramallah. The Intercept rode alongside Saif as she traveled back to Ramallah from Nablus on Saturday, when the Israeli military closed all but one checkpoint out of the city, putting it under an effective blockade and forcing all traffic through a checkpoint called Shavei Shomron.
The unannounced closures left Palestinians scrambling. Many were visiting Ramallah to see family members during Ramadan, and they hoped to reach their destinations in time for iftar, the fast-breaking meal enjoyed at sunset. Others needed to enter the city to receive medical treatment they cannot obtain elsewhere. Saif had risked the journey to see her dying uncle and, knowing the risks of crossing, she’d left her chronically ill daughter in Nablus with him.
“I was worried I would get stuck here,” Saif told The Intercept inside a yellow “service” taxi, the only form of public transportation widely available in the West Bank. Even though nearly all of her family lives in Nablus, she has tried to avoid visiting since October 7, 2023, after which the Israeli military clamped its ubiquitous yellow gates over entry points throughout the West Bank.
Israeli soldiers stopped each car to inspect Palestinians’ IDs. At their limit, drivers began pulling their cars onto roundabouts and driving the wrong way down the street, but the final say lay with Israeli forces, who allowed only one car at a time to approach the military installation. Some abandoned their cars to walk through checkpoints and reach their families on foot. An elderly Palestinian woman prayed aloud, saying that all she wanted was to make it safely to her family in Ein Yabrud, a village on the outskirts of Ramallah.
“I was worried I would get stuck here.”
As we sat waiting at the checkpoint, Saif’s face was filled with worry. She opened her phone to show pictures of her daughter, dressed in pink and smiling at the camera.
Saif’s daughter has muscular dystrophy and requires specialized treatment and 24-hour supervision. Saif took a big risk visiting Nablus to see her dying uncle in the hospital, she said, because if she were to get stuck there due to a checkpoint closure — which did happen for three days last week — her daughter’s health would be put in jeopardy.
“I left her with my uncle just for the day, but I have to be there to care for her,” Saif said. “I know her medications and how to ensure she doesn’t get sick.”
Saif made it back to Ramallah, but she said it would not have been possible a few days earlier.
The day after the U.S. and Israel started attacks on Iran, the prevailing sentiment in Ramallah was anxiety. People wondered if there would be road closures and food and fuel shortages like during last year’s Twelve Day War, and whether the Israeli government would impose what Palestinians describe as collective punishment in the West Bank, even though they were not involved in the conflict.
“It has nothing to do with anything Palestinians in the West Bank are doing or not doing,” said Aviv Tatarsky, who leads an Israeli protective presence collective that organizes watches to deter settlers from invading Deir Istiya, a village outside Ramallah. “And still, there’s an Israeli decision, and life comes to a stop.”
“There is no money, no work. We are in debt, and I have four mouths to feed. What am I to do?”
Ramallah, which has long functioned as a relatively insulated bubble from the effects of Israel’s occupation, is also dealing with a struggling economy. Paired with the war, the economic downturn has muted Ramadan celebrations, according to residents who spoke with The Intercept.
“We are suffering,” said Faisal Taha, who drives taxis in Ramallah. “There is no money, no work. We are in debt, and I have four mouths to feed. What am I to do? I have been driving my taxi all day, and I have forty shekels.”
Unemployment in the West Bank is hovering around 40 percent — up from 13 percent two years ago — and GDP has contracted by 13 percent since October 7.
Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli NGO that monitors settlement construction in the West Bank, said he was not surprised by the restrictions imposed by Israel.
“They always use instances of violence to perpetuate more violence,” Etkes said. “This is what we have seen for years, since October 7, and now it is worse than ever.”
As during the Twelve Day War last year — after which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “historic victory” that would “stand for generations” against the Islamic Republic of Iran — there are already the beginnings of flour and fuel shortages in the West Bank as the Israeli Civil Administration, which runs the military occupation of the territory, imposes import restrictions.
“This is not something new. It happened in June during the Twelve Day War, and it’s kicking off again,” Tatarsky said. “But what’s different this time is that Israel is also blocking roads — not only disconnecting Palestinians from Area C, but also blocking roads between Palestinian villages.”
A week later, on March 7, there was still only one checkpoint out of Ramallah open, forcing all traffic through a bottleneck that passes by the Beit El settlement and through the Jalazone refugee camp. This is the only route for Palestinians living in Ramallah to access Route 60, the main thoroughfare connecting Palestinian communities in the south to those in the north.
“They always use instances of violence to perpetuate more violence.”
Driving up the highway and passing village after village that had been closed off by the Israeli military, Etkes said it was clear the war with Iran was being used as a pretext for “a system that is meant to reduce as much as possible the area where Palestinians can move freely,” part of the settlement movements’ goal to alter the facts on the ground regarding de facto annexation.
Nabih Odeh, 63, who has been driving public transit taxis in the West Bank for more than 30 years, has watched what he describes as the slow annexation of the West Bank unfold. As he drove up Route 60, he pointed to village after village sealed off by the Israeli military.
“There, that’s Aqraba, closed,” Odeh said. “If you want to get in or out, you must walk. That’s Turmus Ayya — very wealthy — still closed.”
Eighty percent of Turmus Ayya’s residents have U.S. citizenship, yet the town was closed off, its yellow gate locked. Service taxis pulled up to drop residents off, leaving them to walk to the town center or be picked up by relatives. Its status as a wealthy American Palestinian village has no bearing on Israel’s decision.
At the same time, Israeli settlers have used the war with Iran as an opportunity to launch further attacks on Palestinian communities, largely in Area C — the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control — working in tandem with movement restrictions in Areas A and B, the Palestinian-administered population centers and villages created under the 1995 Oslo Accords.
Messages circulating in settler WhatsApp groups have called for violence against Palestinians to match Israeli airstrikes in Iran. One graphic depicting a roaring lion, to match the Israel Defense Forces’ name for the military operation against Iran, reads: “It is time to launch a preemptive attack in all arenas, until the enemy is expelled from the country and subdued outside it. This time we win, once and for all.”
“I mean, generally, when you’re speaking about Israeli society, it is torn apart in so many ways,” said Orly Noy, editor at Local Call and chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. “But there’s one thing that always unifies, and I’m speaking about the Jewish section of society, of course, and this is war.”
Netanyahu is willing to do anything to stay in power, Noy added, and during his time in office, he has worked effectively to paint the Iranian regime as an existential threat to Israel, working in tandem with the U.S. “He has taken advantage of it very well,” Noy said.
During Operation Rising Lion, this rally-around-the-flag effect has not only served Netanyahu’s interests but also those of settlers living in the West Bank.
WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, estimates that settler attacks have increased 25 percent since the start of the conflict. Israeli settlers have killed six Palestinians since the start of the war with Iran, including three in one incident in the West Bank community of Khirbet Abu Falah, east of Ramallah.
Israeli settlers shot Fare’ Hamayel and Thaer Hamayel, and a third man, Mohammad Murra, died of suffocation from tear gas deployed by Israeli forces.
As the world’s attention remains on Iran, solidarity activists said that Israeli settlers appear to feel they have additional impunity to conduct attacks.
“They will be treated as heroes by their supporters, by their society,” Etkes said. “And the government will do nothing about it.”
The post With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank appeared first on The Intercept.
Government and motoring groups say there is no shortage of fuel supplies but stockpiling has left country service stations running dry, as Iran war sparks oil price fears
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Regional service stations are struggling to replenish fuel supplies left empty by panic buying that has seen demand double and even triple in areas like the Barossa and Mildura amid an escalating Middle East conflict.
As a leading motoring group warned of a “vicious cycle” of motorists stockpiling petrol, Chris Bowen, the energy minister, stood up in parliament to urge Australians to remain calm, insisting the nation did not have a shortage of fuel supplies.
Continue reading...Logical situation of losing to get a better pick has led to big fines but June’s superstar draft created a ‘perfect storm’
Imagine you are the director of football at a crisis-stricken Premier League club in a world where relegation doesn’t exist and the planet’s best teenagers become available for free in a draft every June.
In this alternate universe, you are also aware of something else: the 2026 Premier League draft is one for the ages. Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsí are in it. So are Bayern Munich’s Lennart Karl and Real Madrid’s Franco Mastantuono. Sign one of them and the glory days will suddenly beckon again.
Continue reading...Airline reports spike in ticket sales to Europe in March, as passengers with carriers affected by flight chaos rebook
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Qantas has announced it is increasing the price of its international air fares amid oil price volatility caused by the war in the Middle East, while the airline also reported higher-than-normal ticket sales for flights to Europe.
While the company hedges against change in jet fuel prices, it was not fully covered for the spike seen in the wake of surging oil prices, a spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Continue reading...A startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of mirror-bearing satellites to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night and "power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things," reports the New York Times. From the report: It is an idea seemingly out of a sci-fi movie, but the company, Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., could soon receive permission to launch its first prototype satellite with a 60-foot-wide mirror. The company has applied to the Federal Communications Commission, which issues the licenses needed to deploy satellites. If the F.C.C. approves, the test satellite could get a ride into orbit as soon as this summer. The F.C.C.'s public comment period on the application closes on Monday. "We're trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything," Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital's chief executive, said in an interview. The company has raised more than $28 million from investors. [...] Reflect Orbital's first prototype, which will be roughly the size of a dorm fridge, is almost complete. Once in space, about 400 miles up, the test satellite would unfurl a square mirror nearly 60 feet wide. That would bounce sunlight to illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide on the Earth's surface. Someone looking up would see a dot in the sky about as bright as a full moon. Two more prototypes could follow within a year. By the end of 2028, Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larger satellites, and 5,000 of them by 2030. The largest mirrors are planned to be nearly 180 feet wide, reflecting as much light as 100 full moons. The company said its goal was to deploy the full constellation of 50,000 satellites by 2035. How much does it cost to order sunlight at night? Mr. Nowack said the company would charge about $5,000 an hour for the light of one mirror if a customer signed an annual contract for 1,000 hours or more. Lighting for one-time events and emergencies, which might require numerous satellites and more effort to coordinate, would be more expensive. For solar farms, he envisions splitting revenue from the electricity generated by the additional hours of light.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Both campaigns have been framed differently at different times, with dubious claims of defensive action and a curious reluctance to label it war
Shifting goals, unclear timelines and a flimsy pretext: at times, the US-Israel campaign against Iran carries curious parallels of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The comparison is far from exact. In 2022, Putin sent a massive army across Ukraine’s borders in an unprovoked invasion of a democratic state, a campaign that quickly resulted in heavy losses. The United States has so far largely limited its involvement to airstrikes against Iran’s authoritarian regime.
Continue reading...About 10,000 writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman join copyright campaign
Thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an “empty” book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission.
About 10,000 writers have contributed to Don’t Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names. Copies of the work are being distributed to attenders at the London book fair on Tuesday, a week before the UK government is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law.
Continue reading...Calls for a popular uprising and empty promises of help are reckless in the extreme – and no answer to my country’s plight
Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran
I have been watching the news from inside Iran, unable to hold in my sorrow. As an Iranian who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime, I have been pleading with the world’s human rights organisations and media to keep a focus on the country’s plight. But now I see US-Israeli bombs falling on Iran, and some Iranians celebrating this war while innocent people die. My heart is breaking for my country.
Let us be clear: when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conspired to launch their war, it was not out of a desire to free the Iranian people from the tyranny of the regime. Netanyahu said on the second day of the war: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He has named this operation “Lion’s Roar”. Meanwhile, Iranian monarchists celebrate the carnage, waving the shah’s version of the country’s flag with its crowned lion and sun.
Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran. Her books include A Prison Memoir: One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, and the novel The Secret Letters from X to A
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...Among the many justifications Donald Trump has presented for the US and Israel attacking Iran has been the supposedly imminent threat posed by its nuclear weapons programme. But how close was the country really to developing an atomic weapon? Ian Sample hears from Kelsey Davenport, the director of non-proliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. She sets out why many experts don’t believe the country even had a structured nuclear weapons programme, and explains what she thinks the impact of the war could be on nuclear proliferation around the world.
Attacking Iran’s nuclear programme could drive it towards a bomb, experts warn
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Continue reading...America is adopting a risky model.
Cuts have revealed the continent's economic resilience.
Trump needs to figure out what he wants—and quickly.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decides on Android smartphones with Google Play services whether banking, government, or wallet apps are allowed to run on a smartphone. Obstacles and tips for paying with an Android smartphone without official Google services have been highlighted by c't in a comprehensive article. The European industry consortium now wants to address some problems mentioned. To this end, the group, which includes Murena, which develops the hardened custom ROM /e/OS, Iode from France, and Apostrophy (Dot) from Switzerland, in addition to Volla, is developing a so-called "UnifiedAttestation" for Google-free mobile operating systems, primarily based on the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP). According to Volla, a European manufacturer and a leading manufacturer from Asia, as well as European foundations such as the German UBports Foundation, have also expressed interest in supporting it. Furthermore, developers and publishers of government apps from Scandinavia are examining the use of the new procedure as "first movers." In its announcement, Volla explains that Google provides app developers with an interface called Play Integrity, which checks whether an app is running on a device with specific security requirements. This primarily affects applications from "sensitive areas such as identity verification, banking, or digital wallets -- including apps from governments and public administrations". The company criticizes that the certification is exclusively offered for Google's own proprietary "Stock Android" but not for Android versions without Google services, such as /e/OS or similar custom ROMs. "Since this is closely intertwined with Google services and Google data centers, a structural dependency arises -- and for alternative operating systems, a de facto exclusion criterion," the company states. From the consortium's perspective, this also leads to a "security paradox," because "the check of trustworthiness is carried out by precisely that entity whose ecosystem is to be avoided at the same time". The UnifiedAttestation system is built around three main components: an "operating system service" that apps can call to check whether the device's OS meets required security standards, a decentralized validation service that verifies the OS certificate on a device without relying on a single central authority, and an open test suite used to evaluate and certify that a particular operating system works securely on a specific device model. "We don't want to centralize trust, but organize it transparently and publicly verifiable. When companies check competitors' products, we can strengthen that trust," says Dr. Jorg Wurzer, CEO of Volla Systeme GmbH and initiator of the consortium. The goal is to increase digital sovereignty and break free from the control of any one, single U.S. company, he says.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Royal commission says response led by Jacinda Ardern was broadly ‘appropriate’, in a wide-ranging report featuring recommendations for future pandemics
A royal commission into New Zealand’s Covid response has found it was one of the best in the world but acknowledged the period had left “scars”.
The second of two inquiry reports on the pandemic was released on Tuesday and focused on the period between February 2021 to October 2022, when the government changed from an elimination strategy to one of suppression and minimisation of the virus. It also examined vaccine safety and the government’s immunisation programme, lockdowns and tracing and testing technology.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 10.
Two Democrats with potential presidential ambitions — Govs. Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear — are weighing in on the U.S.-Iran war and criticizing President Trump's strategy, as the conflict overtakes the foreign policy debate.
As speculation mounts that Kim Jong-un and Trump could meet this month, analysts say Pyongyang will continue to see nuclear weapons as a matter of survival
North Korea’s launch last week of a missile from a naval destroyer elicited an uncharacteristically prosaic analysis from the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The launch was proof, he said, that arming ships with nuclear weapons was “making satisfactory progress”.
But the test, and Kim’s mildly upbeat appraisal, were designed to reverberate well beyond the deck of the 5,000-tonne destroyer-class vessel the Choe Hyon – the biggest warship in the North Korean fleet.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed.
Donald Trump has urged the Australian government to grant asylum to five members of the Iranian women’s football team, amid reports that they refused to return home following the team’s elimination from the Women’s Asian Cup and were taken into the protection of Australian police.
As my colleague Martin Farrer reports, speculation had mounted for days that some of the players would try to seek asylum in Australia they had been called “traitors” for refusing to sing their national anthem before their opening game of the tournament last week.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
The development of data centers has become a hot button topic, because they are powering the technology of the future but require huge amounts of electricity to power computer servers 24/7. After a major project was proposed to be built near Delaware City, the New Castle County Council has been debating whether to place new restrictions on the nascent industry.
The New Castle County Council was already scheduled to vote Tuesday night on a controversial proposal to regulate the booming data center industry that has come to its doorstep, but now a newly filed, last-minute amendment aims to further inflame the debate.
Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick, an outgoing lawmaker who has been one of the most vocal supporters of the data center industry, filed an amendment Friday evening seeking to allow major and minor subdivision plans in the county’s development pipeline to be permitted to convert to data center projects without adhering to the new limits.
That proposal could open up plans for warehouses or other commercial or industrial properties to switch to data centers.
It was immediately criticized by supporters of the regulatory measure, including the original ordinance’s author Councilman Dave Carter and the Sierra Club of Delaware.
“It not only guts the proposed legislation, it goes far beyond and gives developers even more rights than they have now for data center development,” Carter told Spotlight Delaware on Monday.
In defense of her proposal, Kilpatrick said that New Castle County had to be consistent with its regulatory burden on development. She argued that developers who submitted a subdivision plan a year ago would not have had any data center regulations to adhere to, and therefore she felt it was unfair to impose them after the fact.
Far too much debate among council members about what projects would be exempted under the new regulations convinced her to file an amendment making it clear, Kilpatrick told Spotlight Delaware.
While Project Washington, the hyper-scale data center project planned near the Delaware City Refinery, has long been understood to be exempted because it predated the debated ordinance, whether other projects would be exempted has been more unclear.
A second amendment filed Friday by Councilman John Cartier would establish the effective date for the regulations as Aug. 5, 2025 – or when Carter filed the original ordinance.
That could imperil a data center planned near Newark, which was filed in December, but another project near the St. George’s Bridge could be saved by Kilpatrick’s amendment, as the project has lingered in the development pipeline since 2024.
It’s unclear whether either amendment could garner a seven-vote majority of the 13-member council. Without Cartier’s amendment, the regulations bill would be effective at the time of signing.
Either way, Carter said he is pushing through the last-minute drama to a vote Tuesday because “waiting any longer is not going to change anything.”
“Tomorrow everybody is going on the record,” he said. “Whether it will pass or won’t pass, I don’t know, but the public will know where they stand.”
At a March 3 committee meeting, prominent Wilmington land use attorney Shawn Tucker, who previously managed the county’s Department of Land Use and now represents developers before the county, warned that applying the regulations to any project retroactively could end in a lawsuit.
He cited a precedent-setting 2002 Delaware Supreme Court case that advised balancing the concerns of the community versus the amount of money developers spend in the pre-development process. Noting that he represented several potential data center projects, the reference could be warning of future litigation.
But Kilpatrick’s proposed amendment also drew swift scrutiny from environmental stakeholders in the state, who long have supported Councilman Carter’s fight to regulate data centers.
Dustyn Thompson, chapter director of the Sierra Club of Delaware, said Kilpatrick’s proposed carveouts to the regulations were unprecedented.
“That is extreme at best, and certainly not something that we’ve ever seen happen at council before,” he said.
While Thompson admitted that including a retroactivity clause within the ordinance could open the county up to litigation, he questioned how Kilpatrick’s amendment works to avoid legal blowback.
“I don’t think we need her amendment to avoid a lawsuit because we’re allowed to set standards for development moving forward,” Thompson said. “That’s within the county’s jurisdiction. So that’s sort of a ridiculous talking point aimed at the ordinance itself.”
The Sierra Club is hosting a protest at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, ahead of the county council meeting, in support of Carter’s proposed regulations and against Kilpatrick’s amendment.
Thompson said he hopes to show Kilpatrick, and other critics on the council, that data center regulations have a wide base of support in New Castle County. The Sierra Club has knocked on more than 3,000 doors, and had more than 1,500 residents show their support for the regulations at the county level, Thompson said.
“The whole point of us coming out before the [meeting] is to just, once again, show that we’re not making this stuff up, right?” Thompson said. “Communities want this. In every single public session that has been out since this ordinance came out has been the same.”
Get Involved
The New Castle County Council will meet at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 10, in the Louis L. Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington.
See the agenda and virtual meeting information here.
The post Last-minute amendment aims to exempt more data center plans from regulation appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
President makes evidence-free claim despite video showing US Tomahawk missile hit naval base next to school
As oil prices surged amid the widening war with Iran, Donald Trump suggested, without evidence, on Monday that the strike on an Iranian elementary school could have been carried out by Iran or “somebody else”.
During back-to-back appearances in Florida, Trump was asked whether the US would accept responsibility for a strike that hit the school and killed scores of people, many of them children, after video evidence showed a US Tomahawk struck the naval base next to it.
Continue reading...Brothers who visited White House reunited with family after outcry from Texas lawmakers, including Republican congresswoman
Two teenage mariachi musicians were released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after their detention sparked widespread backlash, including from a Republican congresswoman.
The Democratic representative Joaquin Castro of Texas announced the release of the brothers, Antonio Yesayahu Gámez-Cuéllar, 18, and Caleb Gámez-Cuéllar, 14, on Monday afternoon, sharing photos on social media of the family reuniting.
Continue reading...Trump is also pushing for the Save America Act to includes provisions to limit transgender youth’s access to care and banning trans women athletes in women’s sports – key US politics stories from Monday 9 March at a glance
Donald Trump renewed his push on Monday for the Save America Act, a curtailment of voting access, after threatening on Sunday not to sign any bills until Congress approves the legislation.
“All voters must show proof of citizenship in order to vote,” Trump said during remarks on Monday at a Republican event in Miami. “No mail-in ballots, except for illness, disability, military or travel.”
Continue reading...Samsung says it's thinking about bringing "vibe coding" to future Galaxy phones, allowing users to describe apps or interface changes in plain language and have AI generate the code. TechRadar interviewed Won-Joon Choi, Samsung's head of mobile experience, to learn more about the plans. Here's an excerpt from their report: As noted by Won-Joon Choi, the usefulness of vibe coding on smartphones is that it opens up the "possibility of customizing your smartphone experience in new ways, not just your apps but your UX." He added, "Right now we're limited to premade tools, but with vibe coding, users could adjust their favorite apps or make something customized to their needs. So vibe coding is very interesting, and something we're looking into." [...] Samsung recently debuted the Galaxy S26 series of phones and made a point to not call them smartphones -- they're "AI phones" now. This certainly rang true with the majority of upgrades to the devices being AI software-focused, like the new Now Nudge and expanded Audio Eraser tools, with the biggest hardware bump for the base models coming via the 39% improved NPU processing (the processor in charge of on-device AI tasks). It also teased the debut of Perplexity on its phones, joining as an alternative to the Gemini assistant, and teased the possibility of other AI models getting the same treatment in the future.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A researcher at a far-right think tank helped Justice Department prosecutors craft their indictment for terror charges against an alleged “north Texas antifa cell,” the researcher testified Monday. The charges were brought in relation to a protest outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center outside Dallas.
Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy said under questioning from a defense attorney that he provided language that prosecutors used in the first-ever domestic terrorism case against a purported antifa cell.
The decision to use the language was the government’s, Shideler said.
“I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of antifa, and they used it,” Shideler said.
The courtroom testimony provided a window into the extraordinarily close cooperation between federal prosecutors and a Washington advocacy group that has regularly argued for government action against left-wing activists.
Shideler himself was the author of a September article titled “How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks: A Roadmap for the Trump Administration” that called on the Justice Department to take more aggressive action against left-of-center activists. He said he conferred with prosecutors in October, a month before they obtained an indictment in the Texas case.
Defense lawyers raised questions about Shideler’s professional home, the Center for Security Policy. The nonprofit think tank was founded by Frank Gaffney, a former Defense Department official under President Ronald Reagan who has routinely been described as an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist. Gaffney’s views on Islam are commonly espoused at Center for Security Policy events.
The center itself has been branded a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a designation Shideler bristled at in court.
“Yes sir, the Southern Poverty Law Center has mislabeled many people as a hate group,” he said in response to questioning from defense lawyer Phillip Hayes.
The nine defendants on trial this month face years or life sentences in prison for a noise demonstration outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 of last year.
After demonstrators used fireworks in a show of solidarity for the detainees held inside the Alvarado, Texas, facility, local police arrived to confront them. One of the responding officers was shot in the neck.
Shideler testified as an expert witness for the government over the objections of defense attorneys, who were overruled by U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee.
In lengthy testimony, he provided a recounting of the history of antifascist organizing that ranged from 1930s Germany to 1980s U.K. activism to the present-day United States. Various tactics used by the Prairieland demonstrators to protect their identities — such as Signal chats, “black block” clothing, and a general “security culture” — were all consistent with antifa practices, Shideler said.
Under questioning from prosecutors, Shideler sought to tie the ideas laid out in anarchist zines recovered from the defendants’ possession with their actions outside the detention center.
Several cooperating defendants have testified that they did not consider themselves members of antifa, defense attorneys pointed out during cross-examination.
They also went on the attack over Shideler’s professional qualifications and his conclusions. Shideler acknowledged that he does not use academic social science methods, does not submit his research for peer review, and relies largely on open-source materials whose authenticity is difficult to verify.
Shideler called Signal a “hallmark of antifa” before adding that he uses it himself.
Shideler called Signal a “hallmark of antifa” before adding that he uses it himself.
The antifa trial is Shideler’s first time testifying as an expert witness in a trial, he said. One defense lawyer noted that Shideler was invited to testify about antifa before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October and asked whether his courtroom appearance this week would provide a further boost to his career.
“I guess it will depend how it goes,” he said.
His testimony is set to continue Tuesday.
The post Islamophobic Think Tank Helped Write Indictment Against ICE Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.
@puzz360 Aha right? Do like a good challenge.
Makes me confident I can do the same to my old XR that is bound to be in no better condition 😅
The so-called Zorro Ranch was the site of numerous alleged abuses, but was not subject to intense scrutiny
New Mexico authorities launched a search of a ranch previously owned by Jeffrey Epstein, state officials announced on Monday.
The late convicted sex offender and financier’s so-called Zorro Ranch was the site of numerous alleged abuses, according to civil and criminal proceedings. But the location was not subject to the same scrutiny as other Epstein properties, and a Guardian investigation in February revealed that federal authorities apparently never searched the New Mexico ranch.
Continue reading...At a Miami-area news conference Monday, President Trump said he expects the war in Iran to end "very soon," but also called it "the beginning of building a new country."
Jurors in Manhattan federal court reached a verdict Monday after weeks of testimony in the sex trafficking trial of brothers Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander.
President Trump told CBS News the U.S. war with Iran is "very complete," and said the U.S. "could do a lot" about the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran's women's soccer team was branded "traitors" after declining to sing their national anthem at the Asian Cup in Australia, fueling fear for the women if they returned home.
Conflict in the Middle East risks knocking growth worldwide and boosting prices, economists warn, amid global market turbulence
Oil prices surged on Monday, triggering a stark sell-off across some of the world’s leading stock markets amid growing concern that the US-Israel war on Iran could set the stage for a global economic shock.
While they fell back on Tuesday after Donald Trump suggested the Middle East conflict could end “very soon”, oil continues to trade at high levels.
Continue reading...Scientific awards – which honor research that makes people laugh and then think – to move away from ‘unsafe’ US
The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the US to Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers announced on Monday.
Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the US in September, a few weeks before the actual Nobel prizes are announced.
Continue reading...Ban could still materialise in future after Commons support government bid to give additional powers to secretary of state
A proposed ban on social media for under-16s has been rejected by MPs.
Parliamentarians voted 307 to 173, majority 134, against the proposed change to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which was brought forward by Conservative former minister Lord Nash.
Continue reading...The tool will let you track NASA's modern lunar program during its 10-day flight around the moon and back again.
Trump calls Operation Epic Fury ‘one of the most complex and stunning operations ever conducted’ and touts ‘very good’ call with Putin about Iran
Donald Trump has said a decision on when to end the war with Iran will be a “mutual” one he’ll make together with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Times of Israel has reported.
It said Trump also claimed in a brief telephone interview on Sunday that Iran would have destroyed Israel if he and Netanyahu had not been around. The US president said:
Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it … We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel.
I think it’s mutual … a little bit. We’ve been talking. I’ll make a decision at the right time, but everything’s going to be taken into account.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 10, No. 533.
While IBM’s OS/2 technically did die, its development was picked up again much later, first through eComStation, and later, after money issues at its parent company Mensys, through ArcaOS. eComStation development stalled because of the money issues and has been dead for years; ArcaOS picked up where it left off and has been making steady progress since its first release in 2017. Regardless, the developers behind both projects develop OS/2 under license from IBM, but it’s unclear just how much they can change or alter, and what the terms of the agreement are.
Anyway, ArcaOS 5.1.2 has just been released, and it seems to be a rather minor release. It further refines ArcaOS’ support for UEFI and GPT-based disks, the tentpole feature of ArcaOS 5.1 which allows the operating system to be installed on a much more modern systems without having to fiddle with BIOS compatibility modes. Looking at the list of changes, there’s the usual list of updated components from both Arca Noae and the wider OS/2 community. You’ll find the latest versions of of the Panorama graphics drivers, ACPI, USB, and NVMe drivers, improved localisation, newer versions of the VNC server and viewer, and much more.
If you have an active Support & Maintenance subscription for ArcaOS 5.1, this update is free, and it’s also available at discounted prices as upgrades for earlier versions. A brand new copy of ArcaOS 5.1.x will set you back $139, which isn’t cheap, but considering this price is probably a consequence of what must be some onerous licensing terms and other agreements with IBM, I doubt there’s much Arca Noae can do about it.
How Apple's lower-cost iPhone 17E matches up with its more-expensive sibling phones.
Save Act would limit voting access in the US and centers on Trump’s unfounded claims of noncitizens stealing elections
Donald Trump renewed his push Monday for the Save America Act, a curtailment of voting access, after threatening on Sunday not to sign any bills until Congress approves the legislation.
“All voters must show proof of citizenship in order to vote,” Trump said during remarks on Monday at a Republican event in Miami. “No mail-in ballots, except for illness, disability, military or travel.”
Continue reading...Secretary of State Marco Rubio formally designated Afghanistan as a state sponsor of wrongful detention, paving the way for the Trump administration to impose penalties such as sanctions and export controls.
Electronic Arts has laid off staff across multiple Battlefield studios despite Battlefield 6 being the best-selling game in the U.S. in 2025 and the "biggest launch in franchise history." According to IGN, the layoffs include workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studios. From the report: Individuals are being informed that the layoffs are taking place as part of a "realignment" across the Battlefield studios, as the team continues its ongoing, live service support for Battlefield 6 following launch. All four studios will remain operational, though the layoffs seem to be impacting a variety of teams across multiple studios and offices. IGN asked EA for comment on total number and types of roles impacted, as well as for the specific reasons for the layoffs. An EA spokesperson told IGN: "We've made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community. Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities, and we're continuing to invest in the franchise, guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The State Department’s most recent directives apply to personnel in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, underscoring the ongoing threat posed by Iranian counterattacks.
Uber is expanding a pilot program aimed at addressing concerns about the safety of its ride-hailing platform
Uber launched a feature on Monday to allow both female riders and drivers across the US to be matched with other women for trips, expanding a pilot program aimed at addressing concerns about the safety of its ride-hailing platform.
The new feature is being rolled out nationwide despite an ongoing class action lawsuit against the policy in California, filed by Uber drivers who argue that it is discriminatory against men. Rival ride-hailing company Lyft is also facing a discrimination lawsuit over a similar offering that it introduced nationwide in 2024.
Continue reading...Anthony Albanese announces surveillance aircraft, air-to-air missiles and supporting personnel will be deployed to the UAE after request from their president
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Australia will send a specialist surveillance aircraft and stocks of air-to-air missiles to the United Arab Emirates, in what Anthony Albanese said is an effort to help protect Australians in the region under threat from Iranian attack.
As the Iran war grows, the prime minister announced the assistance on Tuesday morning after talks with the UAE’s president, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and US president Donald Trump overnight. Iran has attacked a dozen countries since the start of US and Israeli bombings and the death of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Independent adviser says some judges in England and Wales have not heard of changes to way cases are investigated
An overhaul of the way police investigate rape is being put at risk by a lack of awareness in courtrooms in England and Wales, the government’s independent adviser on rape has warned.
Prof Katrin Hohl said legal experts were concerned progress would stall or reverse if the conviction rate for rape dropped significantly because a new approach for investigating the cases, known as Operation Soteria, was hitting outdated practices in the courts.
Continue reading...President reassures Republicans that conflict is intended to be short lived but also says ‘we haven’t won enough’
Donald Trump has said that the war in Iran is “very complete, pretty much”, as the economic toll of the joint US-Israeli operation has risen, disrupting global oil trade and threatening to engulf the Middle East in a regional war.
Trump made the comments before a speech and press conference in Florida where he sought to emphasise that the US military campaign would be ending soon amid concerns from Republican allies that the US was being dragged into another long-term conflict in the region.
Continue reading...Victims remembered as ‘cherished’ and ‘devoted’ after shooting at EZ’s Lounge that injured five others on Saturday
A 33-year-old teacher and a 25-year-old father were identified as the two people killed in a mass shooting at an Oakland, California, bar over the weekend.
Seven people were shot in the incident at EZ’s Lounge on early Saturday morning. Police identified the two deadly victims on Monday as Latetia Bobo and Markise Martin.
Continue reading...Live Nation reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice that avoids breaking up its dominant live events empire with Ticketmaster. Instead, the deal requires changes like "open sourcing" their ticketing model and divesting some venues. NBC News reports: The company and the Justice Department reached a settlement on Monday, following a week of testimony during an antitrust trial that threatened to potentially separate the world's largest live entertainment company. [...] On a background call with reporters Monday, a senior justice official said the deal will drive down prices by giving both artists and consumers more choice. As part of the agreement, Ticketmaster will provide a standalone ticketing system that will allow third-party companies like SeatGeek and StubHub to offer primary tickets through the platform. The senior justice official described it as "open sourcing" their ticketing model. The company will also divest up to 13 amphitheaters and reserve 50% of tickets for nonexclusive venues. Ticketmaster is also prohibited from retaliating against a venue that selects another primary ticket distributor, among other requirements. Although a group of states have joined the DOJ in signing the agreement, other states can continue to press their own claims.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Commissioner: League heard ‘significant concerns’
Spurs’ Kornet had penned post against promotion
The NBA has called off the Atlanta Hawks’ plans for a night celebrating the city’s famed Magic City strip club, saying it did so because of “concerns” from many across the league.
The Hawks announced the plan last month, saying the team would pay tribute to an “iconic cultural institution” with food – including the club’s famous lemon pepper wings – along with a live music performance by Atlanta native TI and exclusive merchandise.
After the Hawks announced plans for the promotion, San Antonio Spurs center Luke Kornet spoke out about the idea and urged the parties involved to reconsider. And the league evidently heard the same messaging from others.
Continue reading...Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander convicted in New York after being accused of raping dozens of women
Three brothers, including two of the nation’s most successful luxury real estate brokers, were convicted of sex trafficking charges on Monday after a five-week trial over accusations that they used drugs and force to rape scores of women they had dazzled with their wealth and opulent lifestyle.
The verdict came after 11 women testified they were sexually assaulted by one or more of the brothers: twins Oren and Alon Alexander, 38, and Tal Alexander, 39.
Continue reading...Oh boy.
Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.
↫ Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media
There seems to be this pervasive conviction among Silicon Valley techbro types, and many programmers and developers in general, that translation and localisation are nothing more than basic find/replace tasks that you can automate away. At first, we just needed to make corpora of two different languages kiss and smooch, and surely that would automate translation and localisation away if the corpora were large enough. When this didn’t turn out to work very well, they figured that if we made the words in the corpora tumble down a few pachinko machines and then made them kiss and smooch, yes, then we’d surely have automated translation and localisation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As someone who has not only worked as a professional translator for over 15 years, but who also holds two university degrees in the subject, I keep reiterating that translation isn’t just a dumb substitution task; it’s a real craft, a real art, one you can have talent for, one you need to train for, and study for. You’d think anyone with sufficient knowledge in two languages can translate effectively between the two, but without a much deeper understanding of language in general and the languages involved in particular, as well as a deep understanding of the cultures in which the translation is going to be used, and a level of reading and text comprehension that go well beyond that of most, you’re going to deliver shit translations.
Trust me, I’ve seen them. I’ve been paid good money to correct, fix, and mangle something usable out of other people’s translations. You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen.
Translation involves the kinds of intricacies, nuances, and context “AI” isn’t just bad at, but simply cannot work with in any way, shape, or form. I’ve said it before, but it won’t be long before people start getting seriously injured – or worse – because of the cost-cutting in the translation industry, and the effects that’s going to have on, I don’t know, the instruction manuals for complex tools, or the leaflet in your grandmother’s medications.
Because some dumbass bean counter kills the budget for proper, qualified, trained, and experienced translators, people are going to die.
National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman called the allegations against him false and a "political hit job."
Senators say Trump allies such as Hegseth and Rubio should be forced to testify to Congress on ‘unnecessary war’
Democratic senators have filed a wave of new war powers resolutions as they call on Republicans to convene public hearings into the US hostilities with Iran or be forced to vote on continuing a conflict that polls show majorities of Americans do not support.
Late last week, Democrats Cory Booker of New Jersey, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Adam Schiff of California, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Chris Murphy of Connecticut filed resolutions under the War Powers Act that would force the US military to withdraw from the war with Iran unless Congress votes to authorize the engagement.
Continue reading...Home affairs minister Tony Burke confirms US president Donald Trump’s overnight comments on social media that the players had been ‘taken care of’
Five members of the Iranian women’s football team have been granted humanitarian visas in Australia, with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, offering assistance to the other players and saying “help is here”.
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, confirmed the humanitarian offer on Tuesday morning, hours after the US president, Donald Trump, posted about their plight on social media. Burke said the visas had been granted at about 1.30am on Tuesday morning, around the time of Trump’s social media posts, which first criticised, then praised, Australia.
Continue reading...App downloads for VPN services increase sharply as websites in Australia go behind age-restriction walls.
Ok so this is my second attempt to get a non-contradictive answer in regard to an Error 16 on an old version XR, specifically if the stock battery can be disconnected from the BMS and reconnected and still be used.
This XR has the latest firmware/hardware updates. I can't see what the numbers are because of the Error 16 notification blocking the app.
I disconnected the white cable. Then the battery, moved the BMS and battery to a new battery box, then reconnected the battery, waited 20 seconds or more then plugged in the white cable. I get error 16.
I have been told that we can not disconnect and reconnect the battery/BMS on an updated XR.
I have also been told that we can change the battery/unplug the BMS on an updated XR.
Again this is an XR, not a GT or Pint or XRC.
Is there a definitive answer to this? Thanks.
The figure, accounting for the war’s first two days, is likely to intensify concerns in Congress that U.S. forces are churning through a scarce supply of advanced weaponry.
David Pogue, author of "Apple: The First 50 Years," talks with Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak, CEO Tim Cook, and others about the vision of Steve Jobs, and how the company's products and services have reshaped life, technology and culture in the 21st century.
Every modifier key starts simple and humble, with a specific task and a nice matching name.
This never lasts. The tasks become larger and more convoluted, and the labels grow obsolete. Shift no longer shifts a carriage, Control doesn’t send control codes, Alt isn’t for alternate nerdy terminal functions.
Fn is the newest popular modifier key, and it feels we’re speedrunning it through all the challenges without having learned any of the lessons.
↫ Marcin Wichary
Grab a blanket, curl up on the couch with some coffee or tea, and enjoy.
A judge ruled last summer that President Trump's former lawyer Alina Habba was illegally serving as top New Jersey's federal prosecutor. On Monday, Habba's replacements were also disqualified.
If your putting this motor on an XR/XRV frame, then theses bolts will fit perfectly.....
20 Pcs M8-1.25x20mm Stainless Steel Hex Socket Head Cap Screws Bolts Inner Hex Socket Bolt DIN 912 https://a.co/d/0g7NiFdP
These are the outer bolts that attach to the rail
If using axle blocks from Fungineers
Hope this helps someone
Thanks to the kind people in the Fungineers Discord. Spread love and knowledge through this community! 🙏
Social media is showing you more ads, suggestions and recommended posts, pushing aside content you actually want.
Markets settled after Trump claimed US-Israel war with Iran is ‘very complete’, bringing oil prices down to $85 a barrel
US stock markets closed on a high after oil prices swung wildly on Monday, reaching a four-year high in the morning that rattled Asian and European markets before settling down once Donald Trump said the US-Israel war with Iran is “very complete”.
After surging past $100 a barrel on Monday morning, oil prices came down to $85 a barrel by the time that US stock markets closed in the afternoon. US stocks leaped at a report from a CBS News reporter that Trump thinks “the war is very complete, pretty much” because “they have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force”.
Continue reading...Spend time with one of these scary stories.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: AI-based assistants or "agents" -- autonomous programs that have access to the user's computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task -- are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey. The new hotness in AI-based assistants -- OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) -- has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted. If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your entire digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp. Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic's Claude and Microsoft's Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn't just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it's designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done. "The testimonials are remarkable," the AI security firm Snyk observed. "Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who've set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they're away from their desks." You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. [...] Last month, Meta AI safety director Summer Yue said OpenClaw unexpectedly started mass-deleting messages in her email inbox, despite instructions to confirm those actions first. She wrote: "Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw 'confirm before acting' and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn't stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb." Krebs also noted the many misconfigured OpenClaw installations users had set up, leaving their administrative dashboards publicly accessible online. According to pentester Jamieson O'Reilly, "a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online." When those exposed interfaces are accessed, attackers can retrieve the agent's configuration and sensitive credentials. O'Reilly warned attackers could access "every credential the agent uses -- from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys." "You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen," O'Reilly added. And because you control the agent's perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they're displayed."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Food containing norovirus may smell and taste normal but still cause serious illness if consumed, FDA warns.
Communities secretary tells MPs that government has to act against record levels of hate crimes
A new definition of anti-Muslim hate will not restrict freedom of speech, the communities secretary has pledged, as he said that “clear expectations” will still be set for new arrivals and existing communities in Britain to learn English.
MPs were told by Steve Reed that the government had a duty to act against record levels of hate crime against Muslims, but that “you can’t tackle a problem if you can’t describe it”.
Continue reading...One of the largest school districts in New Mexico subjects Navajo students to pervasive discrimination and a climate of fear, according to a report released last week by the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission.
The 25-page report draws on testimony from parents and community members at four public hearings in Navajo Nation communities within the school district. It urges the New Mexico attorney general’s office to release findings from a two-and-a-half-year investigation into the district’s discipline of Indigenous students.
The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission’s report cited an investigation published in December 2022 by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica that found Indigenous students were punished more harshly than other students in New Mexico during the four years ending in 2020. The Gallup-McKinley district, which has the largest Indigenous student body of any local school district in the country, was largely responsible for that disparity, an analysis of student discipline records from across the state showed. Attorney General Raúl Torrez opened an investigation into the district’s disciplinary practices in 2023.
On Wednesday, Torrez’s chief of staff, Lauren Rodriguez, said the office’s long-running investigation is complete and has found “troubling disciplinary practices.” She added that the agency’s “exhaustive” investigation calls for the state Public Education Department to enforce student discipline data reporting requirements and better track that information. Previously, the district’s former longtime Superintendent Mike Hyatt, had downplayed the amount of discipline Native students receive and pointed to poor data collection as an issue.
“It’s our kids, our students, who are suffering the consequences of entrenched racism,” Wendy Greyeyes, the chair of the commission that released the new report and an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, said in an interview.
The Public Education Department should have caught the discipline disparities in the data it collects from districts, Greyeyes said. “There’s obviously not a clear auditing of data that’s being collected,” she said.
The attorney general’s office told New Mexico In Depth that, despite its findings, it’s not clear under state law that the office can “pursue formal legal action against the district for this particular conduct.”
That lack of legal clarity, the spokesperson said, is why Torrez has pushed for comprehensive state civil rights legislation since 2023.
Under the New Mexico Civil Rights Act, private individuals can sue public bodies for violations of the state constitution, but law does not explicitly authorize the attorney general to investigate and prosecute public bodies for systemic inequities, the way the federal Department of Justice can. In 2023, New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill that would have given the attorney general broad authority to investigate state or local agencies for civil rights violations. The bill had bipartisan support, but Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham killed it with a pocket veto. (Lujan Grisham did not issue a formal statement about the veto but said at the time that the bill was well-intentioned but would “create confusion” and that “much of the work outlined in the legislation can be undertaken by the AG regardless of whether or not the bill is signed.”)
At the time, Torrez told New Mexico In Depth that his office has an implied authority to pursue such cases, but that having it enshrined in law would have made it “crystal clear.”
Torrez’s spokesperson said he remains committed to seeing such legislation pass.
At the four meetings held by the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission in September and October, parents, students and community members described harsh discipline, language barriers, discriminatory hiring practices, problems with special education plans and inadequate classroom heating systems.
Greyeyes described a pervasive fear of retaliation. Some witnesses cried at hearings, she said — afraid their words would get back to the district — and parents spoke on behalf of children too afraid to testify themselves. Transcripts of their testimony were not publicly released.
The commission’s report recommends a formal agreement between the Navajo Nation and Gallup-McKinley for the district to adopt a discipline policy based on restorative justice, a strategy that seeks to rebuild relationships, not simply punish the student who caused the harm. Such a policy could be modeled on existing talking-circles programs at New Mexico’s Cuba Independent School District and the STAR School east of Flagstaff, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation, Greyeyes said.
The report also recommends a comprehensive state financial audit of the district’s spending on Native education compared to that of other students, and it calls for the state education department to better manage and track districts’ student discipline data.
The school district did not respond to voice messages and emails seeking comment about the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission report.
The problems identified in the commission’s report are “rooted in colonization,” Greyeyes said. “It’s rooted in institutional racism. A lot of these things are accepted sometimes even by our own Navajo people, and we need to bring this information out and figure out a way to address these issues.”
The report’s recommendations “begin that conversation,” she said.
The post Native Students Receive Excessive Discipline in This New Mexico School District, Report Finds appeared first on ProPublica.
A new render shows exactly what an iPhone Fold could look like.
Graphics cards and NAND stock aren’t the only computing ingredients selling like hotcakes these days as a result of the AI boom. Executives for AMD and Intel have noted that demand for X64 CPUs is up considerably, due to the overall AI factory buildout in general–but more specifically, thanks to the shift to running AI inference and agentic AI workloads.
Up to this point, GPUs have been the undisputed hardware stars of the AI show, thanks to their capability to do the heavy computational lifting that modern neural networks require. This is particularly true during the training phase, where GPUs with thousands of cores can plow through the parallel matrix multiplication required to turn training data into weighted parameters. With the lion’s share of the data center market, Nvidia has reaped the rewards of the AI boom, which made it the world’s first $5 trillion company.
As the dust settled from the initial AI boom at the beginning of 2025, attention shifted from AI model training to AI inference. A new workload, agentic AI, also emerged. Suddenly, AI operators faced the prospect of running hundreds or thousands of semi-autonomous AI agents in parallel. This created a new bottleneck in the infrastructure around the speed at which data can be moved from memory into the GPU and back. Insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) put pressure on the world’s NAND stocks, which resulted in a shortage of NVMe drives and big price increases.
So far in our story, the humble CPU hasn’t played a starring role. But as AI evolved, we find the infrastructure needs are shifting right back over the CPU sweet spot.
The reason is that, while CPUs don’t often run AI models directly, they are responsible for handling many other tasks necessary to run today’s modern neural network workloads. This includes tasks like data pre-processing, AI model orchestration, and scheduling the more computationally heavy tasks among fleets of GPUs. There’s a reason that Nvidia, AMD, and others are building “superchips” that fuse GPUs (or other AI accelerators) with CPUs into a single chip.
In some cases, CPUs are the preferred hardware for running AI inference, particularly for smaller models that will run at the edge. CPUs are smaller than today’s big GPUs, and they have more modest power and cooling requirements. As the agentic AI revolution ramps up and organizations are looking to deploy AI, they’re finding it preferable to run their AI models on-prem and on the edge, rather than in massive cloud data centers, in part to minimize data movement, which is computationally expensive.
“The CPU has become cool again this year,” Intel Executive VP and CFO David Zinsner said last week during a panel at the recent Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, according to a transcript of the event on SeekingAlpha. “We’ve long believed that CPUs needed to kind of stay along with the GPUs in these data centers.”
Zinsner said the total market for CPUs was up by 20% to 30% in 2025, and is on track to increase again in 2026. “We’re starting to see customers come in, in that space asking for long-term agreements, that should tell you that there’s legs to this,” the Intel EVP said during the event.” They’re looking at this over a three- to five-year basis and want to lock in supply with us.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su said she was surprised by the demand for CPUs
That viewpoint was echoed by AMD CEO Lisa Su, who also spoke at the Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco last week.
“I’m very, very excited about the GPU portion of the business,” Su said at the conference, according to a transcript provided by Investing.com. “The CPU portion of the business has actually far exceeded my expectations in terms of demand.”
The end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 was marked by significant demand for high-performance compute, Su said, citing the upcoming launch of the MI450, AMD’s next-generation GPU, which is due out in the second half of 2026. But GPUs aren’t the only type of chip in demand, thanks to AI.
“We’re seeing a significant CPU demand, frankly, as a result of the inference demand picking up,” Su said. “We’ve always believed that the computing stack is heterogeneous, and you’re going to need CPUs and GPUs and FPGAs and all of these components. That’s really coming to fruition here in 2026.”
Intel and AMD both launched new CPUs today at the Embedded World 2026 show in Nuremberg, Germany, that take aim at edge AI workloads. The Intel Core Series 2 is designed for industrial and edge applications that demand higher multi-threaded performance and lower latencies. The new AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100 Series processor, meanwhile, is targeting industrial PCs, physical AI, and healthcare applications,
The world definitely needs more AI accelerators to handle the heavy lifting that AI requires. Trillions of dollars are being invested in the infrastructure to power emerging AI workloads, and a large amount of that spending will go toward GPUs and other XPUs from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and others. But as general-purpose processors that can do a range of tasks, the humble CPU will also hear its name called quite a bit through the data center buildout taking place over the next four years. The only surprise here may be that the CPU demand was unexpected.
The post AI Boom Comes for CPUs, Which Are ‘Cool Again’ appeared first on HPCwire.
Andy Ogles posted ‘Muslims don’t belong in American society,’ among other statements, prompting Cair to call him an ‘anti-Muslim extremist’
Andy Ogles, a Republican representative of Tennessee, spent Monday on an Islamophobic rant, writing on social media: “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” among other statements that drew heated criticism from Democrats.
“None of them belong here,” Ogles wrote in one of several posts on X, next to the mugshots of people he identified as being from Somalia and Senegal, the latter of whom was killed by police after a mass shooting last week in Austin, Texas.
Continue reading...The U.S. average gas price has jumped 48 cents since last week, with experts predicting that higher fuel costs could persist for months.
After a sharp drop in early trading, stocks recovered part of those losses as oil prices fell back below $100.
Two men from Pennsylvania are facing federal charges for the incident. Video captured someone yelling "Allahu Akbar" just as a protester threw an "ignited device" during an anti-Islam demonstration in New York City.
The Los Angeles Police Department identified the woman as 35-year-old Ivanna Ortiz. She has been booked for attempted murder.
President Trump's assurances that a rising U.S. death toll and soaring energy prices will be temporary and worth the pain are failing to assuage jittery investors.
Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi of Pennsylvania are accused of trying to detonate bombs at an anti-Islam rally near New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home Saturday.
Kemi may be all in favour, but at least economic realpolitik is forcing her to take a slightly different tack
There have been any number of opportunities for people to decide they wanted no part of America’s war with Iran. The first was after the US had launched its first wave of strikes. To be fair, this was the moment Keir Starmer and most of the UK reckoned enough was enough and that our involvement would be limited to defensive strikes only.
You couldn’t really fault the logic. Did the UK really want to be part of a war that was illegal in most versions of international law and for which the Americans had no clear vision of how it might end? Other than Donald Trump gets bored and lets everyone else clear up his mess. Like a baby. Nor was the UK’s track record of wars in the 21st century any source of pride. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya had all been in chaos. Iran was shaping up the same way. So Starmer decided to sit this one out. Applying the doctor’s principle of ”first, do no harm”.
Continue reading...Republican senator warns of ‘consequences’ if kingdom does not join US strikes against Iranians
Senator Lindsey Graham on Monday questioned whether the United States should honor a long-sought defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, saying the kingdom’s refusal to join military operations against Iran made the partnership difficult to justify given that Americans were dying in a war Graham himself helped push the Trump administration to start.
In a post on X, Graham said the American embassy in Riyadh was being evacuated due to sustained Iranian attacks on Saudi soil, and expressed frustration that Riyadh had declined to participate militarily despite what he described as a shared interest in defeating Iran.
Continue reading...Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 10, No. 1,003
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 10, No. 1,725.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down after overseeing the platform's growth from a Twitter research project into a 40-million-user alternative to X. "As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things," Graber wrote in a statement. She will be transitioning to a new Chief Innovation Officer role while Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will serve as interim CEO until the board searches for a permanent replacement. Wired reports: Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company's first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform's remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X. Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky "become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks." Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the Wordpress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky's leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as "to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth." This isn't the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company's chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky's technology stack rather than its business operations. The position was created for her. Graber, who began her career as a software engineer, has always sounded the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky's technology rather than its revenue streams. Bluesky's board of directors will appoint the next permanent CEO. The members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was originally part of the board but quit in 2024.) This means Graber will have input on her successor. The talent search is still in early stages.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Leader of rebel group says there is deep concern within Society of Labour Lawyers about courts and tribunals bill
Lawyers affiliated to Labour were “blocked” from briefing party MPs to share concerns about plans to cut the number of jury trials in England and Wales, it has been claimed.
The allegation was made by Karl Turner, the leader of a backbench rebellion against a flagship government bill that would remove the right to a jury trial in thousands of cases, before the first chance by MPs to vote on the legislation.
Continue reading...Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 10, No. 737.
Mr. Butterfield, a onetime aide to the president, electrified the Watergate investigation with his bombshell testimony about Nixon’s secret recording system.
Pair also bet on Jones to receive yellow card
Players overlapped for one season at Columbus Crew
Major League Soccer announced on Monday that it has given Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah lifetime bans for “extensive” gambling, including on games involving their own teams. In one instance, the pair won a bet that Jones would receive a yellow card.
MLS said it had received “suspicious betting alerts” and retained a law firm to investigate. The players were placed on administrative leave in late October 2025 as the review ran its course. Eventually, the investigation found that both players betted on soccer extensively throughout the 2024 and 2025 seasons, including on their own teams.
Continue reading...Debt consolidation could help you simplify payments and cut interest costs if you know which loans to consider.
Request for records related to election audit appears latest part of Trump effort to spread false claims about voting
A federal grand jury subpoenaed Arizona’s legislature for records related the state senate’s widely criticized review of the 2020 election, the state senate president said on Monday, in what appears to be the latest part of the Trump administration’s efforts to spread false claims about the 2020 election and voting in the United States.
Warren Petersen, the president of the Arizona state senate, confirmed on X on Monday the legislature had received a subpoena related to records of its review of the election results in Maricopa county, the most populous in the state. He added that “the FBI has the records”.
Continue reading...  | My buddy gave me his Onewheel Pint X a couple days ago because he doesn’t ride it anymore. I brought it home, rode it around my block for a bit, and I left it in my garage which is moderate temp and dry. Two days later, I try to turn it on and get the blinking yellow light. On the app it gives me the “I need my personal space” error message. I‘ve read about this issue and tried charging and cleaning the grip tape, but neither worked. I did notice a lot of sand in the crevices, could there somehow be sand affecting the footpad sensor? Am I really going to have to buy a new $100 footpad for it to work again? What confuses me is that literally nothing happened between when it was working fine and when this started happening. My friend says he had never seen it do that before either and it only has 24 miles on it. What could have happened? [link] [comments] |
Chancellor says she is ready to help households with rising costs but stops short of setting out specific steps
Britain is likely to be hit by rising inflation because of the US war with Iran, the chancellor has said, as she suggested that a “rapid de-escalation” would be the best protection against a jump in energy prices.
Rachel Reeves stopped short of setting out any new relief for families who might be hit by rising prices, rebuffing calls to ditch a planned 5p rise in fuel duty in September.
The price of Brent crude oil rocketed to as high as $119.50 on Sunday, a jump of 29%.
The Bank of England is now expected to keep interest rates on hold through 2026, with a small possibility of a rise in 2027.
The prospect of a prolonged conflict and higher inflation also pushed global markets lower.
The AA said drivers could “consider cutting out some non-essential journeys and changing their driving style to conserve fuel”.
Continue reading...SAN DIEGO, March 9, 2026 — HPCwire, the leading publication for news and information for the high performance computing industry, today unveiled its People to Watch for 2026. This feature highlights key community members who are driving the industry forward, people you should be keeping an eye on in the year to come.
Over the course of the program, HPCwire has recognized more than 275 HPC luminaries who have gone on to achieve extraordinary things. One dozen additional individuals are being honored in 2026, the 24th year of the People to Watch program.
“Selecting 12 People to Watch is profoundly difficult, considering the immense amount of intelligence, creativity, and drive that exists in the HPC community,” said HPCwire Managing Editor Alex Woodie. “There are many individuals worthy of this honor, but I feel confident that the 2026 People to Watch exemplify the relentless pursuit of excellence and progress that this program represents.”
This year’s group of People to Watch is marked by the transformative impact that AI is having on the fields of science and engineering. Despite the enormous potential for automation that AI brings to many fields, including scientific computing, none of it works without people — people like the ones we are proud to honor. Our 12 People to Watch for 2026 are at the forefront of these trends, adapting new technology to our rapidly-changing world in order to unlock the answers to the biggest societal challenges of our time and make the impossible, possible.
The 2026 HPCwire People to Watch selections are:
Rosa Badia
HPC Software Research Area Director, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
Ian Colle
Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Penguin Solutions
Eric Demers
SVP, GPU IP Engineering, Intel Data Center Group
Jay Gambetta
Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow
Dario Gil
Under Secretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy
Bastian Koller
Managing Director High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)
Elizabeth L’Heureux
Principal Head of HPC, BP
Emmanuel Le Roux
Senior Vice President, Head of Bull at Atos Group
Thomas Lippert
Director, Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)
Satoshi Matsuoka
Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science
Samantika Sury
Fellow, Chief Hardware Architect and VP, HPC and AI Solutions, HPE
Kathy Yelick
Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley
To read exclusive interviews with each Person to Watch, please visit: www.hpcwire.com/people-to-watch-2026.
About HPCwire
HPCwire is a news site and weekly newsletter covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. As the trusted source for HPC news since 1987, HPCwire serves as the publication of record on the issues, opportunities, challenges, and community developments relevant to the global High Performance Computing space. Its reporting covers the vendors, technologies, users, and the uses of high performance, AI- and data-intensive computing within academia, government, science, and industry. Subscribe now at www.hpcwire.com.
About TCI Media
TCI Media (formerly Tabor Communications Inc.) is the home of the Wire publications: AIwire, HPCwire, BigDATAwire, and QCwire, which broadly cover Advanced Scale technologies for scientific and technical computing. The Wire publications closely follow the convergence of AI, HPC, and Big Data, and the evolution of Quantum Computing. Together, they unify the IT communities that we serve, providing news, analysis, and information to educate and engage users and decision-makers seeking high performance and advanced scale computing solutions for scientific and technical workloads across AI, HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing. More information can be found at www.tci-media.co.
Source: TCI Media
The post HPCwire Unveils 2026 People to Watch appeared first on HPCwire.
QB agreed $212.4m extension with team in 2024
Falcons reportedly signing QB on one-year deal
Kansas City set to beef up running game
Mike Evans joins 49ers after leaving Tampa Bay
The Miami Dolphins are moving on from Tua Tagovailoa, the quarterback they drafted with the fifth overall pick in 2020 in hopes of turning the franchise’s fortunes around.
“As we move forward, we will be focused on infusing competition across the roster and establishing a strong foundation for this team as we work towards building a sustained winner,” Dolphins general manager Jon-Eric Sullivan said in a statement on Monday.
Continue reading...ORLANDO, Fla., March 9, 2026 — Only one out of every five data and analytic (D&A) or AI leaders are concerned that uncertain costs will limit AI value according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
A Gartner survey of 353 D&A and AI leaders from November through December 2025 found that this has led to only 44% of organizations adopting financial guardrails or AI FinOPs practices.
Gartner analysts Adam Ronthal and Georgia O’Callaghan on stage at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, Florida. Credit: Gartner, Inc.
“Where adoption rates for AI deployment have grown from just two out of five organizations in 2024, to four out of five organizations today, D&A leaders must achieve clarity and focus on ROI to better achieve the growing AI goals and ambitions of their organizations,” said Adam Ronthal, VP Analyst at Gartner. “D&A leaders must realize they are responsible for delivering real value in the midst of all this AI hype and fears of an AI bubble that might burst.”
“Getting to value is often measured using ROI, which D&A leaders need to think of as more than just a financial measure,” said Georgia O’Callaghan, Director Analyst at Gartner. “There are three ways to approach value that will help D&A leaders steer their organizations safely and effectively through the turbulent AI value waters.”
During the opening keynote at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, taking place here through Wednesday, Gartner analysts discussed these three ways to derive value from AI.
Set AI Ambition
Increased acceleration and uncertainty, combined with concerns about trust and control, drive the need for continuous learning and adaptation.
“D&A leaders may be experimenting with AI and learning a lot, but that also means they risk falling behind because everyone is experimenting,” said Ronthal. “D&A leaders should set their AI-ambition to help them maximize value from the insights their data provides, together with the knowledge and intuition of their team. This provides a return on intelligence.”
To set this level of ambition, D&A leaders must radically rethink the impact of AI on D&A, set a shared vision and determine their level of AI ambition, take AI leadership, decide their role and manage the unpredictable and hidden costs of AI early.
Strengthen AI Foundations
Without strong foundations, AI will remain what it is for most organizations today; an expensive experiment.
“Expecting AI or GenAI to compensate for delayed upgrades, siloed teams and years of technical debt is wishful thinking,” said O’Callaghan. “D&A leaders must make sure their data is AI-ready, prevent exposing the wrong data to the wrong people and avoid inaccuracies, misunderstandings and hallucinations with a well-designed context layer. This provides a return on integrity.”
To create strong AI foundations and reduce risk, D&A leaders should align their foundational initiatives with their AI ambition level, make governance a value accelerator and create a single, unified context layer.
Empower People for AI Transformation
While organizations change at a rapid pace, humans have a finite capacity to incorporate change. AI readiness grows much faster than human readiness.
“D&A leaders must make the shift from thinking about roles to focusing on skills with respect to AI,” said Ronthal. “D&A leaders will get value from their investments in developing their workforce. By focusing on skills, mindset, and behavioral change, they can unlock both individual and collective potential. This will increase employee engagement and productivity, making their organization more adaptive to change. Ultimately, this provides a return on individuals.”
To empower people for AI-driven transformation, D&A leaders must substantially budget for change management, prioritize mindset and skillset over toolset, address employee concerns with a skills-development roadmap and also pilot fusion teams of blended human and artificial intelligence.
About Gartner
Gartner (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective business and technology insights that drive smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission-critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.
Source: Gartner
The post Gartner Identifies 3 Pillars for Deriving Value from AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Anglers describe harrowing phone calls to loved ones after ice detached from shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario
Kevin Fox thought the spring-like temperatures that had temporarily pushed the cold away from south-eastern Ontario meant a good day for ice fishing, a popular winter pastime in the region.
After shifting location because the wind and ice “didn’t feel right” and the fish weren’t biting close to shore, he and a friend joined nearly two dozen others far out on a sheet of ice in Lake Huron. They followed the familiar routine of anyone who spends a day on the ice: they drilled holes, dropped their lines and waited.
Continue reading...The AI model you choose to vibe code with can dramatically affect your final output.
The poll finds that AI is viewed less positively than ICE and President Donald Trump, and only more positively than Iran and the Democratic Party.
 | I've had it for about a week now, and I'm absolutely hooked on it! [link] [comments] |
LONDON, March 9, 2026 — Nscale today announced its $2 billion in Series C funding, led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries. This round values Nscale at $14.6 billion. The funding round was supported by Astra Capital Management, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Linden Advisors, Nokia, NVIDIA, and Point72. This new raise will further accelerate Nscale’s global development of vertically integrated AI infrastructure — from GPU compute and networking to data services and orchestration software — across Europe, North America, and Asia.
AI is reshaping industries, economies and national strategies, and accelerated computing platforms are the engine driving that shift. The constraint on market scaling is not demand, but the ability to deploy capacity and run it reliably in production. Nscale is purpose-built to accelerate AI deployments. This capital deepens Nscale’s infrastructure footprint, expands its engineering and operations teams, and strengthens the platform, enabling Nscale to continue to deliver real, production-grade AI deployments at massive scale.
“This is the fourth industrial revolution; the world is changing at a rapid pace. Over the next 5 years, Artificial Intelligence will be integrated into every industry, every product, and every job. Accelerating drug discovery, extending human life, autonomizing travel and robotics, lifting productivity, and driving massive growth. This is leading to the largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” said Josh Payne, CEO and Founder of Nscale. “Nscale is leading this buildout. We are building this foundation that the market sits on, the engine of superintelligence.”
Strengthening Nscale’s Board
Nscale also today welcomes three new Directors. Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker, and Nick Clegg will join the Nscale Board, bringing substantial global depth across technology, policy, operations, and governance to an already world-class collection of business leaders.
Sheryl Sandberg — Sandberg is currently the co-founder of Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, which deploys private capital to fund innovation across consumer, enterprise, climate and healthcare technology. As former Chief Operating Officer of Meta and an early executive at Google, Sandberg brings unmatched experience in scaling the world’s most influential technology companies, as well as deep expertise in operations, growth strategy, and building global organizations.
Susan Decker — Decker is the CEO and co-founder of Raftr, a Community Experience platform for universities. She is a former President of Yahoo, Inc. and is currently a Board member at Costco Wholesale Corporation, Berkshire Hathaway, Vail Resorts, Chime, Vox Media, and Automattic. Decker brings sharp financial acumen, governance expertise, and strategic leadership developed across decades at the forefront of global media and technology companies.
Nick Clegg — A current General Partner at Hiro Capital, Clegg focuses on fostering the growth of leading spatial computing technologies within Europe. He is both a former UK Deputy Prime Minister and former President, Global Affairs at Meta. Prior to being elected to the UK Parliament in 2005, Clegg served five years in the European Parliament. Clegg brings deep expertise at the intersection of technology, policy, and global affairs and has most recently been at the center of the most consequential regulatory and governance conversations shaping the future of AI.
Sandberg, Decker, and Clegg join Nscale’s existing Board of Directors, which includes Josh Payne, Rael Nurick, Jacob Leschly, and Øyvind Eriksen.
Streamlining Execution in Norway
Alongside this Series C funding and its new Directors, Nscale has reached an agreement with Aker to roll the Aker Nscale joint venture — announced in July 2025 — fully into Nscale. Going forward, Aker will remain a leading shareholder in Nscale with its CEO Øyvind Eriksen continuing to serve on the Nscale Board.
This decision consolidates delivery and governance under one entity, while ensuring all existing projects under the joint venture continue and remain fully operational as part of Nscale. This ongoing partnership has been foundational to Nscale’s growth and demonstrates its continued commitment to playing a positive, long-term role in the communities where it operates. Nscale’s firm pledge to waste heat reuse, local skills development, and investment in regional infrastructure remains unchanged.
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and J.P. Morgan acted as joint placement agents for Nscale in connection with this capital raise which is inclusive of the Pre-Series C SAFE.
More from HPCwire: Nscale, Aker, and OpenAI Launch Norwegian AI Project Targeting 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs
About Nscale
Nscale is the global hyperscaler engineered for AI infrastructure. Through vertically integrated AI solutions and modular, first-principles data center design across Europe, North America, and beyond, Nscale delivers the compute foundation for enterprise AI training, fine-tuning, and inference at scale.
Source: Nscale
The post Nscale Raises $2B Series C to Expand AI Compute and Data Infrastructure Globally appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, March 9, 2026 — Lightbits Labs, inventor of the NVMe over TCP storage protocol, today announced that Coredge, a leading cloud solutions provider, has selected Lightbits software-defined storage to power next-gen AI cloud services. Following its recent acquisition by Sirius Digitech, Coredge is scaling its platforms to support large-scale AI adoption across regulated industries, telecommunications providers, and public-sector entities worldwide. This collaboration is intended to establish a multi-petabyte-scale, cloud-native infrastructure deployment in India to support Coredge’s rapidly expanding footprint without the high cost and rigidity of legacy SAN architectures.
Founded in 2020, Coredge builds and operates cloud-native platforms that enable organizations to deploy and manage AI, Kubernetes, and OpenShift workloads. Its sovereign OpenShift-based Kubernetes cloud infrastructure is optimized for performance-sensitive use cases, including AI training and inference, real-time analytics, and mission-critical enterprise applications as configured and governed by customer-specific and regulatory requirements.
“AI workloads demand far more than raw capacity—they require predictable low latency and consistent performance at scale,” said Abhimanyu Bhatter, Co-Founder and Associate Vice President of Technology at Coredge. “Lightbits enables us to grow our business by delivering highly performant, premium services using open, software-defined, NVMe-based infrastructure that aligns with our operational strategy.”
To support a large-scale deployment expansion in India, Coredge required a storage architecture capable of delivering consistent, low-latency, high-throughput, and elastic scalability, while integrating seamlessly with its OpenShift-based Kubernetes environments. Coredge selected Lightbits for its ability to deliver high-performance block storage over standard Ethernet, without specialized networking fabrics. Legacy SAN and proprietary appliance-based storage architectures introduced cost, operational complexity, and scaling constraints that were incompatible with Coredge’s cloud-native design principles.
By deploying Lightbits, Coredge expects to achieve significant advantages:
“Lightbits provides the speed and predictability required for the latency-sensitive workloads run on Coredge’s platforms, while at the same time providing Coredge the ability to scale on commodity infrastructure cost-efficiently,” added Keimpe Paulus, Vice President and EMEA Territory Lead at Lightbits Labs. “We’re excited to support their goal to expand their platforms and services.”
As Coredge expands its AI and cloud services globally, Lightbits will play a central role in supporting scalable, secure, and high-performance data infrastructure.
To learn more about Lightbits software-defined storage, visit lightbitslabs.com or book a product demonstration today.
About Lightbits Labs
Lightbits Labs (Lightbits) invented the NVMe over TCP storage protocol, embedding it natively into their software-defined block storage to deliver ultra-low latency and exceptional throughput while leveraging commodity infrastructure—essential for reducing the cost and complexity of data infrastructure at scale. Built from the ground up for high performance, scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency, Lightbits software delivers the best price-performance value for real-time analytics, transactional, and AI workloads. Lightbits Labs is backed by enterprise technology leaders [Cisco Investments, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, Lenovo, and Micron] and is on a mission to deliver best-in-class block storage for performance-sensitive workloads.
Source: Lightbits Labs
The post Lightbits Selected by Coredge to Power AI Cloud Services Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
Qualcomm and Arduino have unveiled the Arduino Ventuno Q, a new AI-focused single-board computer built for robotics and edge systems. Engadget reports: Called the Arduino Ventuno Q, it uses Qualcomm's Dragonwing IQ8 processor along with a dedicated STM32H5 low-latency microcontroller (MCU). "Ventuno Q is engineered specifically for systems that move, manipulate and respond to the physical world with precision and reliability," the company wrote on the product page. The Ventuno Q is more sophisticated (and expensive) than Arduinio's usual AIO boards, thanks to the Dragonwing IQ8 processor that includes an 8-core ARM Cortex CPU, Adreno Arm Cortex A623 GPU and Hexagon Tensor NPU that can hit up ot 40 TOPs. It also comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, along with 64GB of eMMC storage and an M.2 NVME Gen.4 slot to expand that. Other features include Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, 2.5Gbps ethernet and USB camera support. The Ventuno Q includes Arudino App Lab, with pre-trained AI models including LLMs, VLMs, ASR, gesture recognition, pose estimation and object tracking, all running offline. It's designed for AI systems that run entirely offline like smart kiosks, healthcare assistants and traffic flow analysis, along with Edge AI vision and sensing systems. It also supports a full robotics stack including vision processing combined with deterministic motor control for precise vision and manipulation. It's also ideal for education and research in areas like computer vision, generative AI and prototyping at the edge, according to Arduino. Further reading: Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NUREMBERG, Germany, March 9, 2026 — At Embedded World 2026, Intel launched the Intel Core processor Series 2 with P-cores, an industrial-ready platform engineered for mission-critical edge applications. Intel also announced its latest Edge AI suite for Health & Life Sciences, providing validated reference pipelines and benchmarking tools for AI-powered patient monitoring solutions.
“Intel continues to lead in edge computing, which remains one of our fastest-growing business segments,” said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Edge Computing Group. ” With the introduction of Core Series 2, our CES launch of Core Ultra Series 3, and our expanding Edge AI Suites, we continue to deliver comprehensive platforms that meet diverse edge customer needs with breakthrough performance, reliability, and integrated AI acceleration.”
Intel Core Series 2 Solves Industrial Real-Time Challenges
Intel Core Series 2 processors address the critical challenges facing modern industrial operations, which demand processors that can handle multiple critical workloads simultaneously—from safety-critical control systems to real-time data processing—all while maintaining precise timing and deterministic performance. Traditional processors often force manufacturers to choose between computational power and real-time reliability, leading to complex multi-processor architectures that increase costs and system complexity. Intel Core Series 2 processor take these challenges head-on. Compared to AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, Intel Core Series 2 processors deliver up to 4.4x lower max PCIe latency, up to 2.5x more deterministic response time, up to 3.8x better deterministic performance, and up to 1.5x higher multi-thread performance, delivering the performance the industry needs.
Edge AI Suites Accelerate Healthcare AI Innovation
Intel previewed its Health & Life Sciences AI Suite, focused on AI-enabled patient monitoring. As healthcare systems face growing patient volumes and staffing constraints, patient monitoring is evolving from isolated devices to intelligent, connected ecosystems that demand AI-enabled solutions for earlier insights and reliable real-world operation. The suite showcases concurrent, multimodal workloads running locally on Intel processors—including AI-based electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia detection, remote photoplethysmography, and anonymous 3D visual tracking—helping original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), original design manufacturers (ODMs), and independent software vendors (ISVs) evaluate platforms using representative scenarios rather than synthetic benchmarks.
Together with the recently launched Core Ultra Series 3 processors, Intel Core Series 2 processors with P-cores and the new Health & Life Sciences Edge AI Suite demonstrate Intel’s comprehensive edge portfolio that addresses the full spectrum of customer requirements—from deterministic real-time control to advanced AI acceleration—enabling faster innovation across manufacturing, healthcare, and emerging edge applications.
Availability: Edge systems powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Intel Core Series 2 with P- cores are all available now.
A preview version of the Edge AI suite for Health & Life Sciences is now accessible on GitHub and general availability is planned for Q2 2026.
About Intel Corporation
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives.
Source: Intel
The post Intel Launches Core Series 2 Processor with Real-Time Performance and Expands Edge AI Portfolio appeared first on HPCwire.
New processors enable next-generation industrial and robotics solutions with up to twice the CPU cores and higher AI throughput in the same compact footprint.
March 9, 2026 — Factory automation, physical AI in mobile robotics, and other AI-driven edge applications are rapidly evolving and driving the need for computing platforms that provide real-time AI processing, deterministic performance, and long-term reliability in always-on environments.
Credit: Shutterstock
To meet these needs, AMD is expanding its AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100 Series processor portfolio. New processors feature up to 2x higher CPU core counts, up to 8x higher graphics processing unit (GPU) compute, and an estimated 36% higher system tera operations.
Scalable AI Compute for Demanding Applications
The processors feature eight to 12 “Zen 5” cores, up to 80 system TOPS for physical AI acceleration, AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics for real-time visualization, and a neural processing unit (NPU) based on the AMD XDNA 2 architecture for low-latency, power-efficient AI inference — all on a single chip.
From industrial PCs for the intelligent factory to autonomous robots and medical imaging devices, new x86 embedded processors are optimized for next-generation industrial and broader edge AI use cases. They include:
Compared with the prior generation AMD Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series, the P100 Series is expected to provide up to 39% higher multithreaded performance and up to 2.1x higher total system TOPS2. The new processors deliver exceptional AI performance-per-watt and support almost twice the number of virtual machines and larger large language models, like Llama3.2-Vision 11B, than the existing P100 Series to enable more advanced AI and mixed workloads.
ROCm Software Support and Virtualized Reference Stack
Support for the AMD ROCm open software ecosystem brings a proven, open-source AI software stack to embedded applications. Developers can run standard AI frameworks while relying on open-source compilers, runtimes, and libraries – all while having immediate access to embedded-ready models without rewriting code. At the programming level, ROCm software uses the open-source Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability (HIP), decoupling GPU programming from the hardware and eliminating vendor lock-in between the software stack and the hardware.
The tightly integrated CPU, GPU, and NPU architecture enables efficient workload partitioning and predictable latency under mixed workloads, while the use of familiar frameworks and software stacks help simplify and streamline development and deployment across broad use cases. This level of integration enables advanced compute and graphics capabilities without the need for additional external components, making it easier for OEMs and system integrators to design scalable platforms.
AMD “Zen 5” CPU cores provide the isolation and performance headroom to consolidate multiple critical workloads on a single platform with deterministic, multitasking behavior. Additionally, AMD delivers a packaged and vertically integrated virtualized reference stack for industrial mixed-criticality applications. Built on the Xen hypervisor, it runs Linux®, Windows®, Ubuntu®, and RTOS environments in isolated domains to deliver safety, real-time performance, and flexibility. The result is a scalable, open architecture that simplifies design and accelerates development for next-generation embedded systems.
Garnering Strong Industry Support
Currently available AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100 processor-powered production Advantech, congatec, and Kontron.
AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100 Series processors featuring eight to 12 cores are currently sampling, with production shipments expected to begin in July 2026. P100 Series four- to six-core processors are sampling now, with production expected in the second quarter of 2026.
Source: AMD
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March 9, 2026 — Many scientific simulations—like those supporting LLNL’s national security mission—contain systems of linear equations, so application codes often rely on linear solvers to get the job done. Created at LLNL in 1998, the hypre software library provides specialized, scalable solvers for a range of purposes. A recent major release, version 3, includes a new semi-structured algebraic multigrid (AMG) solver along with support for mixed numerical precision at runtime.
The new SSAMG solver accommodates multiple structured grids coupled by unstructured connections (black lines). In this example, each structured grid is coarsened in a different direction as part of the SSAMG algorithm, and coarse-grid information is interpolated back to the fine grid to accelerate the solution process.
“We refactored and rewrote a big portion of the code for this release,” explains project lead Rob Falgout. “Development in hypre has always been driven by support for applications and users, and we’ve tried to think strategically about the future so our developers can spend more time on research and algorithms and less time on fixing problems.”
Structured for Speed
Among hypre’s strengths are its AMG solvers, which accelerate simulations of complex physical phenomena by efficiently solving the sparse linear systems that arise from discretized partial differential equations. These solvers, particularly BoomerAMG, are designed for massively parallel computation.
AMG methods are well-suited for unstructured problems, but hypre doesn’t stop there. The software includes support for structured grids, where the underlying structure of the discretized mesh is known. Version 3 introduces SSAMG, a semi-structured solver that expands existing multigrid solver capabilities to address more types of grids and, in turn, provide more options for users. The “semi” aspect of this new solver is key, as some grids are partially or compositely structured. SSAMG treats grids as structured parts with arbitrary connections, which helps reduce computational overhead. The team’s extensive testing on representative problems has shown SSAMG to outperform BoomerAMG in many cases.
“We’ve wanted to develop this new solver for a long time,” Falgout notes. “In hypre, we have always let users describe the structure in their problems, but it hasn’t been easy to develop solvers that take advantage of that structure. Now we’re providing better solutions in semi-structured settings.”
Precisely Right
Like most of LLNL’s foundational high performance computing (HPC) software projects, hypre has evolved with the rise of heterogeneous architectures and exascale computing power. Furthermore, application teams are increasingly seeking flexibility with different types of workloads, which often include machine learning pipelines in addition to traditional modeling and simulation. The hypre team has had to consider key facets of the modern HPC environment including graphics processing units (GPUs), memory usage, and precision requirements for floating-point arithmetic. “Users need accuracy but also want to improve speed and performance while reducing the memory footprint and taking advantage of GPUs,” says Falgout.
Building on its support for multiprecision at compile time, hypre now provides both multi- and mixed-precision computation at runtime. (In multiprecision, a solver uses one precision at a time, whereas mixed-precision uses different precisions simultaneously.) Users can switch from one type of precision to another—for example, from double to single or from single to long double—without recompiling the application code. An upcoming enhancement will apply different precisions to each grid level of AMG solvers.
Looking Ahead
The project’s nearly three-decade run has shown there’s always something new to investigate. For instance, the team is exploring artificial intelligence tools for developing new algorithms as well as for helping hypre choose solver parameters for the user. GPU refinements for mixed-precision solvers are also in progress. And Falgout points out, “Some classes of problems we don’t yet know how to solve effectively with multigrid methods.”
Alongside Falgout, the LLNL team responsible for hypre v3 include Rui Peng Li, Victor Magri, Wayne Mitchell, Daniel Osei-Kuffuor, and Ulrike Meier Yang (now retired). Development in is funded in part by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and its Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, and by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. Watch Falgout’s FEM@LLNL seminar describing v3 features.
Source: Holly Auten, LLNL
The post LLNL: Better Solvers, Better Precision with HYPRE v3 appeared first on HPCwire.
 | My Pint X won’t turn on and is blinking red like this. Pressing the power button doesn’t seem to do anything. Is it cooked? I’m out of warranty. [link] [comments] |
My dad hosed down my pint x to clean it,
I lost the plug so it had ducktape over it but when I opened it up it was was wet inside, at least a few drips of water
and I was moving it around idk if water could have seeped inside,
I put it to lay to drain and dry out rn.
I know not to put it to charge wet but could the battery or anything still get damaged from whatever water that may have gotten inside? Also tips for making sure its completely dry to put to charge and what to do if there is possible damage would be appreciated thank you!
March 9, 2026 — From smartphones in our pockets to the powerful computers advancing artificial intelligence and quantum science, modern microchips are the engines of the digital age. Yet these systems face a fundamental challenge: managing the immense heat generated as processors grow faster and more complex, sometimes packing hundreds of thousands of cores onto a single chip. Without effective solutions, performance declines, energy is wasted and hardware reliability is compromised.
NSF-funded researchers at Clarkson University are addressing this challenge through TASChips, an open-source simulation tool that predicts in real time how heat builds up inside advanced processors. TASChips merges physics-based models with advanced reduced-order learning algorithms, delivering both accuracy and speed. It can identify thermal “hot spots” across complex chip architectures, enabling engineers to design systems that operate more efficiently, last longer and consume less energy.
Keeping powerful chips cool has always been a tough problem. Older tools that track heat either run quickly, but miss important details, or deliver accurate results so slowly that they cannot be used in practice. With today’s processors carrying more than 100,000 cores, that tradeoff no longer works. TASChips employs a range of learning models tailored to chips of varying complexity that capture the essential physics of heat transfer while running at much higher speeds. This approach produces near-direct numerical accuracy, fast enough to guide real-world decision-making. Engineers can use these results to redesign chips, adjust workloads dynamically in data centers, or avoid costly bottlenecks in high-performance systems. Such capabilities are essential in meeting the demands of the AI era.
Another barrier has been access. The most advanced heat-analysis tools are often locked behind expensive licenses and used only by large companies. TASChips changes that by being open source, free to download and released with clear instructions and examples. This means students, researchers and engineers anywhere can use the tool. It also ties directly into classroom and research programs, so the next generation of talent can learn with the same tools that will drive future breakthroughs.
To strengthen this link between innovation and education, TASChips will support workforce development through a series of workshops for up to 25 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Each participant will select a project aligned with their research expertise and carry out research that entails data collection, training, model parameter calculations and running simulations. By the end, participants will have gained hands-on experience applying a new tool to real problems, building skills that will carry forward into their careers.
The broader implications reach beyond engineering labs. Consumers benefit when everyday devices stay cooler and perform reliably. Businesses and communities benefit when data centers, which support everything from video streaming to financial transactions, operate more efficiently and at lower cost. And research sectors advancing AI and quantum technologies gain the reliable infrastructure needed to push the boundaries of discovery.
By combining rigorous science, open access, and education, the project provides a model for how federally supported research can translate into practical technologies that benefit society, industry and national competitiveness for years to come.
Source: NSF
The post NSF-Funded Tool Helps Chips Run Faster, Cooler and Longer appeared first on HPCwire.
Merger to take drone firm public is latest business move by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr as father is in White House
A golf club company backed by the sons of Donald Trump is merging with drone manufacturer Powerus in a deal designed to take the drone technology company public.
The merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings is the latest in Eric and Donald Trump Jr’s growing investments in the drone sector, following last month’s $1.5bn tie-up between Israeli drone maker Xtend and Florida-based JFB Construction Holdings. Drones have become a major procurement priority for the Pentagon and are widely used in Ukraine, where dense air defense systems near the frontlines limit the deployment of conventional aircraft.
Continue reading...Crude prices could surpass their 2008 record, with potentially dire effects for consumers and businesses
Fears over the global economy have been stoked by the oil price soaring past $100 a barrel as a result of the US-Israel war with Iran.
Economists say the increasing likelihood of a prolonged conflict in the vital energy exporting region could have serious consequences for living standards around the world amid the threat of a renewed inflation shock.
Continue reading...With new supreme leader’s strong connections to the IRGC, critics fear worse is to come – if he survives
At around midday, even as airstrikes hit several parts of the capital, large crowds gathered in Tehran’s famous Enghelab Square to chant their allegiance to Iran’s new supreme leader.
Carrying banners showing the face of the country’s slain leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, people on Monday held a new portrait – that of his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei.
Continue reading...Rep. Kevin Kiley of California said Monday he was immediately leaving the Republican Party to become an independent.
French president says attack on island is ‘an attack on Europe’ as EU states send military support
Emmanuel Macron has vowed that Europe will do whatever it takes to stand by Cyprus, the continent’s first state to be directly affected by the Iran war, after coming under what he described as “attack from multiple drones and missiles.”
In the strongest show yet of solidarity towards the EU member closest to the Middle East, Macron likened the attacks, which included a drone strike against a British base on the eastern Mediterranean island, to an attack on Europe.
Continue reading...Social media company tells MPs of continual fight against state-backed efforts, with Russia being most prolific
Elon Musk’s X said it had suspended 800m accounts over a 12-month period as it fights the “massive” scale of attempts to manipulate the platform.
The social media company told MPs it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network, with Russia the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China.
Continue reading...Walter ‘Ted’ Carter Jr says he ‘made a mistake in allowing inappropriate access to Ohio State leadership’
The president of the Ohio State University has resigned following the disclosure of an “inappropriate relationship” to the college’s board of trustees.
In a statement, Walter “Ted” Carter Jr, who had led the university since 2024, said that he “made a mistake in allowing inappropriate access to Ohio State leadership”.
Continue reading...A $10,000 2-year CD account can be both profitable and secure for savers if opened now. Here's what to consider.
What Mojtaba Khamenei will do with his leadership is now the key question after he succeeds his father
Crowds in Tehran greeted the announcement of the country’s new supreme leader by chanting: “God’s hand is still upon us, Khamenei is still our leader.” As the world economy grinds to a halt, Iran is selling the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei as a sign of reassuring continuity for a country determined to show its defiance of the west.
Yet in reality he injects a new unpredictable, even mysterious, element into the Middle East crisis, since just as he is unknown to Washington, so he is a figure of deep obscurity to ordinary Iranians. By contrast, the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, led Iran to revolution in 1979 and the second, Mojtaba’s father, Ali Khamenei, had been president for eight years before he was chosen by the Assembly of Experts within a day of Khomenei’s death.
Continue reading...Pair charged with throwing explosive devices during anti-Islam protest described by mayor as ‘appalling’
Two teenagers were charged on Monday with offenses including terrorism and using a weapon of mass destruction after they allegedly threw improvised explosive devices during an anti-Islam demonstration on Saturday outside the residence of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.
According to a 10-page criminal complaint filed in federal court in the US southern district of New York, 18-year-old Emir Balat threw the devices at protesters after they were handed to him by Ibrahim Kayumi, 19. It said both declared allegiance to the Islamic State terror group.
Continue reading...West coast state’s average cost per gallon has climbed $0.55 since the conflict in Middle East began over a week ago
The war in Iran has caused a spike in gas prices that is hitting California consumers especially hard, according to data from the American Automobile Association (AAA).
AAA reports that in California, the most expensive US market for gas, the average price per gallon on Monday was $5.20, compared to $3.47 nationally. The national average climbed nearly $0.50 since the conflict began more than a week ago, while in the Golden state it rose by $0.55.
Continue reading...Anthropic is suing the Department of Defense after the Trump administration labeled the company a "supply chain risk" and canceled its government contracts when Anthropic refused to allow its AI model Claude to be used for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. Fortune reports: The lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calls the administration's actions "unprecedented and unlawful" and claims they threaten to harm "Anthropic irreparably." The complaint claims that government contracts are already being canceled and that private contracts are also in doubt, putting "hundreds of millions of dollars" at near-term risk. An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune: "Seeking judicial review does not change our longstanding commitment to harnessing AI to protect our national security, but this is a necessary step to protect our business, our customers, and our partners." "We will continue to pursue every path toward resolution, including dialogue with the government," they added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Justice correspondent most known for his January 6 Capitol riot coverage is latest to quit Bari Weiss-led network
Scott MacFarlane, the CBS News justice correspondent most known for his extensive coverage of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, surprised colleagues on Monday morning by announcing his departure from the network, which he joined in late 2021.
MacFarlane is only the latest departure from the Bari Weiss-led network, though he said in a memo to colleagues – also posted on LinkedIn – that he personally made the decision to leave.
Continue reading...Iranian officials say about 170 people were killed in the strike. The Pentagon is investigating.
Katie Nicholl’s name appears on many of the stories that Frost, Prince Harry and others have complained about
A senior former Mail on Sunday journalist has denied commissioning a “blag” of sensitive medical information about Sadie Frost that the actor had not even told her own mother.
At the high court, Katie Nicholl, a former diary editor and royal editor at the paper, was accused of using blagged information from a private investigator to uncover “extraordinarily intrusive” details of Frost’s medical history.
Continue reading...MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, has released two new versions since we last talked about it roughly two months ago. In fact, I’m not actually sure it’s just two, or more, or fewer, since it seems sometimes releases disappear entirely from the changelog, making things a bit unclear. Anyway, since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, it got improvements to videocalling, networking, and HDA audio drivers, and a few other small tidbits.
US president claimed he wanted to eradicate cartels and made comments about Mexico’s president that were deemed sexist in summit speech
Claudia Sheinbaum has responded to Donald Trump’s description of Mexico as the “epicenter of violence”, by calling on the US government to step up efforts to combat gun trafficking.
“There is something that the US can help us a lot with: stop the trafficking of illegal weapons from the US to Mexico,” the president of Mexico said. “If they stopped the entry of illegal weapons from the United States into Mexico, then these groups wouldn’t have access to this type of high-powered weaponry to carry out their criminal activities.”
Continue reading...Former Sinn Féin leader being sued for symbolic £1 each by three victims of Troubles-era bombings on UK mainland
Gerry Adams is as culpable for IRA bombings on the UK mainland as the individuals who planted and detonated the devices, the high court has heard at the beginning of a civil trial.
The former Sinn Féin leader is being sued for symbolic “vindicatory” damages of £1 each by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock, who were injured respectively in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, and the London Docklands and Manchester bombings in 1996.
Continue reading...The company might launch its most sophisticated MacBook ever, with its first OLED screen.
Anthropic sued the Defense Department and other federal agencies on Monday over the government's move to designate it a risk to the supply chain.
Interceptor drones and operators deployed to Middle East after ‘requests for help from 11 countries neighbouring Iran’
Ukraine’s president has said he dispatched interceptor drones and operators to protect US bases in Jordan last week, one of 11 countries that had asked Kyiv for help as the US-Israeli war against Iran continued into its 10th day.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview that he had responded to a US request for help in defending Jordan last week as Ukraine seeks to improve relations with Gulf and Middle Eastern countries coming under attack from Iran.
Continue reading...The GPUs in Apple's latest chips bring its flagship creative laptop to new heights, especially for generative AI.
"If Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy, would you buy one?" That was the [rhetorical] question The Verge's Sean Hollister asked when he reviewed ModRetro's Game Boy-style handheld device back in 2024. He said it "might be the best version of the Game Boy ever made," though the connection to Palmer Luckey and his defense tech startup Anduril left him conflicted. "I don't remember my childhood nostalgia coming with a side of possible guilt and fear about putting money into the pocket of a weapons contractor," he wrote. "Feels weird!" Those conflicted feelings have lingered ever since. TechCrunch recently cited Hollister's review while reporting that ModRetro is now seeking funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company is said to have additional retro-inspired hardware in development, including one designed to replicate the Nintendo 64. As for Anduril? It's reportedly in talks to raise a new funding round that would value the company at around $60 billion.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
European Commission head says rules-based system can no longer be relied upon to protect the continent’s interests
Europe can “no longer be a custodian for the old-world order” and needs “a more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy”, the head of the European Commission has said.
Speaking to an audience of EU ambassadors on Monday, Ursula von der Leyen said the union “will always defend and uphold the rules-based system” but could no longer rely on it to defend European interests and shelter the continent from threats.
Continue reading...Eighteen tornadoes between Thursday and Saturday resulted in deaths in towns from Michigan to Oklahoma
Communities throughout the central United States were cleaning up and trying to recover after an onslaught deadly tornadoes struck the region over the weekend.
At least eight people had been confirmed dead as of Monday, with dozens more injured.
Continue reading...President Donald Trump claimed that Iran, not the U.S., struck an elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab, the attack with the highest civilian death toll in Trump’s second Iran war.
Three current and former defense officials, however, pushed back on his claims. Even Trump’s own Pentagon chief, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, refused to back him up. U.S. Central Command appeared to suggest that Trump’s comments were “inappropriate.”
“This is another instance of Trump lying and just talking out of his ass,” said a U.S. government official who reviewed satellite images of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school. “This clearly was not a failed rocket from the IRGC base.”
The U.S. official was referring to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy base that was adjacent to the school. The claim that the IRGC struck the school spread as part of a misinformation campaign about the attack peddled by social media accounts that support restoring Iran’s monarchy.
The U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said it was clear that Iran did not strike the school. Trump, however, endorsed the dubious claim when taking questions from the press aboard Air Force One on Saturday.
“Based on what I’ve seen, it was done by Iran,” Trump said of the attack, which killed at least 175 people, many of them children, according to Iranian health officials and state media.
Hegseth, standing alongside Trump, was asked if that was true and failed to endorse the claim.
“We’re certainly investigating,” he said before offering a non-denial denial. “But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
When asked for comment on the status of the U.S. military investigation, U.S. Central Command, the regional military command that oversees the Middle East, said that getting ahead of the investigation’s findings — precisely what Trump did — was improper.
The CENTCOM spokesperson, who did not give their name, said, “It would be inappropriate to comment given the incident is under investigation.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
A video released on Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency shows a cruise missile striking the naval base beside the elementary school as smoke appears to billow from the school itself, indicating that it had been struck just before the attack on the IRGC base. According to Bellingcat, the cruise missile was a Tomahawk.
“This entire compound — including the girls’ school — was deliberately targeted in a highly precise strike operation.”
“This munition is only employed by the U.S., not Israel or Iran,” said Wes Bryant, a former Special Operations joint terminal attack controller who called in thousands of strikes across the greater Middle East.
Bryant, a former adviser to a Pentagon body that provides analysis and training to mitigate civilian harm, said all were clearly struck by targeted munitions, with the school likely hit due to “target misidentification,” meaning U.S. forces mistook it for a military target.
“The strikes on this compound have the signature of a U.S. strike,” Bryant told The Intercept. “The strikes on this compound are also incredibly precise and well-placed. This entire compound — including the girls’ school — was deliberately targeted in a highly precise strike operation.”
While the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school was once connected to the IRGC base by roads, the building was partitioned off by 2016, according to an investigation by New Lines Magazine. Reports of the attack began to appear on social media just after 11:30 a.m. local time. An analysis by the New York Times based on satellite imagery, social media posts, and verified videos found that the school was hit at roughly the same time as the naval base. The video released on Sunday by the Mehr News Agency appears to confirm this.
Another former Pentagon official who specialized in civilian harm issues echoed Bryant and the current U.S. official.
“The entry holes suggest a near perpendicular entry. Meaning, this strike was precisely targeting the structures from high above.”
“The entry holes suggest a near perpendicular entry. Meaning, this strike was precisely targeting the structures from high above, not some short range attack with a ballistic missile,” said the former Pentagon official, who spoke on background because their present employment doesn’t allow them to comment. The official said the vertical entry suggested a more parabolic trajectory than a short-range missile would show, indicating a longer-range weapon was used.
That former defense official pushed back against Trump’s claims, noting that the attack occurred within an hour of the announcement of U.S.–Israeli strikes and an hour before any reported Iranian retaliation.
“All evidence,” said the former official, “points to the compound being repeatedly attacked — over the course of a couple hours potentially — with highly accurate munitions that we know the U.S. and Israel routinely use and have used in strikes across Iran.”
CENTCOM would not offer an estimated civilian death toll for the U.S. war on Iran. More than 1,230 Iranian civilians have been killed, according to the Tehran Times.
“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” Hegseth said at a March 2 press conference. “No stupid rules of engagement.”
A new investigation by Airwars, a U.K.-based air strike monitoring group, found that the first days of the Iran war saw far more sites targeted than any recent U.S. or Israeli military campaign.
“While the rate of civilian harm cannot be solely predicted by the number of targets hit, initial indications suggest it has been high — particularly with U.S. targets correlating with heavily populated areas,” according to the Airwars report. “The targets map heavily onto the highest populated areas.”
“It is the stuff of tyrannical dictators to fabricate such propaganda for the sake of saving face and discrediting one’s enemies.”
For Bryant, the former Pentagon adviser on civilian harm, Trump’s claim that Iran hit the school is part of a pattern — and a dark turn for the country.
“If the administration truly believed that this was Iranian-caused, whether intentionally or inadvertently, then they should have immediately stated so, along with providing intelligence or information that proves such an assertion. But we know this was not the case,” Bryant said. “It is the stuff of tyrannical dictators to fabricate such propaganda for the sake of saving face and discrediting one’s enemies. This is not the behavior of a leader of the free world.”
The post U.S. Military Refuses to Endorse Trump Claim That Iran Bombed Girls’ School appeared first on The Intercept.
I have been looking at getting a board for years now and finally the gas prices and my commute are in the perfect spot to make one reasonable. As I live in Finland my options for getting one new are limited and considerable taxes (25,5% VAT) apply.
My commute is around 2.5km (1.5 miles) each way and there is a fairly big hill in the way. I am deciding between getting a onewheel or an e bike. Problem with the e bike is theft as the area my work is in is pretty sketch and I don't fully trust my apartment's bike storage as that has been broken into multiple times. A good e bike would cost me 1500€ or more.
I can get a used XR for 990€ that has 1500 miles with a tire that has under 800 miles on it. To me it seems like a good deal as it is in good shape (has always had rail guards on it so looks almost brand new from the side) and comes with extra rail guards. A new Pint is around 1000+€ and a Pint X 1300+€ if you can even get one. The XR also hasn't had software updates so it works with aftermarket batteries if needed though the seller says it still has over 12 miles of range.
What do you think? Is it worth getting at that price? Would an e bike be better? Note that I can already ride a caster board but have never been on a skateboard. I do have a tiny bit of snowboarding experience as well.
Serious technology issues like privacy need to be dealt with clearly, not fought over in social media posts, analysts say.
Eureka police took two calls for unconscious individuals, and officials reported ‘elevated’ carbon monoxide in room
A California motel has been closed after authorities found two women dead in the same room just days apart.
The Eureka police department in northern California said in a news release last Thursday that on 21 February, officers and Humboldt Bay fire personnel were dispatched to a motel on the 4000 block of Broadway Street in Eureka – identified by the Eureka Times-Standard as the Lamplighter Inn – after receiving a report of “two unconscious patients due to a possible drug overdose”.
Continue reading...Finance ministers monitoring situation but stop short of agreeing to release emergency oil reserves
The G7 said it was ready to take “necessary measures” to address the economic impact of the US-Israel war on Iran, after a meeting prompted by soaring oil prices, which rose above $100 (£74) a barrel for the first time since 2022.
Following a remote meeting on Monday, G7 finance ministers said they would closely monitor the situation but stopped short of agreeing to release emergency oil reserves.
Continue reading...I should probably be fuming about the way that companies try to cash in on IWD. But there are so many vile opinions to worry about instead
Sunday was International Women’s Day, which you’ll know because every company you’ve ever shopped with will have emailed you, taking this fine opportunity to suggest things women might like to buy. Plants, clothes, spices … all are particularly female-friendly at this time of year, or maybe I’m revealing nothing but my algorithms. Is any of it emancipating? Would you have to balance the freedom of the woman wearing the midi-dress against the servitude of the woman who had to sew it? I don’t really want to set myself up as the arbiter of the spirit of IWD, being unable to remember a time before it meant mass-marketing mail-out.
On Women’s Day Eve, though – yes, that is a thing – I was attending evensong at a university college, maybe for the first time ever, and it was definitely the first time I’d heard an IWD sermon. The Rev Marcus Green had set himself the challenge of feministly reading a book, the Bible, in which almost none of the women have a name. There are a bunch called Mary, but so few other names that “Mary” was basically Bible-speak for “Karen”. There’s one who is the mother of the sons of Zebedee, but even though she has actual lines and he has none, he still gets this cracking name, while you have to piece her identity together by triangulating other accounts, like an investigator at a crime scene.
Continue reading...Lawsuits come after Pentagon labeled Anthropic a ‘supply chain risk’, a decision the company says is unlawful
Anthropic filed two lawsuits against the Department of Defense on Monday, alleging that the government’s decision to label the artificial intelligence firm a “supply chain risk” was unlawful and violated its first amendment rights. The two sides have been locked in a monthslong heated feud over the company’s attempt to implement safeguards against the military’s potential use of its AI models for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.
The lawsuits, which Anthropic filed in the northern district court of California and the US court of appeals for the Washington DC Circuit, come after the Pentagon formally issued the supply chain risk designation last Thursday, the first time the blacklisting tool has been used against a US company. The AI firm previously vowed to challenge the designation and its demand that any company that does business with the government cut all ties with Anthropic, a serious threat to its business model.
Continue reading...Wait times to get through security hit two hours in New Orleans and over three hours in Houston as TSA staffing took a hit amid the partial government shutdown.
Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, has reached a deal with the Department of Justice as part of a high-stakes antitrust trial.
Seven American service members have been killed since the war with Iran started in February.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned. In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) -- the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT -- successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted. The AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it cost effective to perform sophisticated privacy attacks, forcing a "fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online". In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI, and got it to scrape all the information it could. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about struggling at school, and walking their dog Biscuit through a "Dolores park." In that hypothetical case, the AI then searched elsewhere for those details and matched @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence. While this example was fictional, the paper's authors highlighted scenarios in which governments use AI to surveil dissidents and activists posting anonymously, or hackers are able to launch "highly personalized" scams.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pick one of five new Lego Smart Play sets within the Lego Star Wars collection, or pick them all, available for purchase now.
One year ago, ICE arrested me for protesting for Palestine. Leqaa Kordia is still caged – also for daring to speak the truth
Sunday marked one year since Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate, was arrested last year for his political advocacy. Below, he writes to Leqaa Kordia, a fellow Palestinian currently in ICE detention in Texas. Khalil was released after more than three months but the Trump administration continues to seek his deportation; Kordia has been detained for nearly a year. Read more about her case here.
Dear Leqaa,
Continue reading...Former Brazil forward Hulk was among the players sent off following the violence that lasted more than a minute.
Finance ministers from G7 countries say they stand ready to take necessary measures to support oil supplies
Iran war drives oil prices above $100 a barrel for first time since 2022
UK interest rate cuts unlikely this year amid Iran war – and a rise could be ahead
Research show that poorer people are hit hardest by surging oil prices.
As our economics editor Heather Stewart wrote yesterday:
Recent research published by economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst identified energy, along with food and agriculture as among the commodities that had “a disproportionate capacity to increase inequality when their prices rise”.
Where there are benefits, these are narrowly shared. Another striking recent paper showed that after the 2022 oil price surge in the US, 50% of the windfall benefit from higher prices in the sector went to the wealthiest 1% of individuals, via the stock market. The bottom 50% of people received only 1%.
Continue reading...Malkinson spent 17 years in prison after being wrongly convicted in rape case for which another man is now on trial
A woman who alleged she was raped by Andrew Malkinson admitted to police 22 years ago that she “wasn’t too sure it was the right man”, a court has heard.
Malkinson spent 17 years in prison for an attack he did not commit in what jurors heard was a “most terrible” miscarriage of justice. Paul Quinn is now on trial at Manchester crown court accused of the 2003 rape after fresh DNA tests allegedly linked him to the victim.
Continue reading...The series "Love Story," which follows the relationship between JFK Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, has received pushback over its portrayals.
John Swinney expresses ‘huge relief’ that no one was hurt in blaze believed to have started in vape shop
Scotland’s first minister has pledged to help deal with the costs of the “horrific” fire that has closed Glasgow Central station for at least two days and gutted a Victorian office block.
John Swinney said it was a huge relief there had been no injuries, but that there would be significant financial costs from the fire, which caused chaos for the city’s commuters and the cancellation of west coast main line services to Glasgow.
Continue reading...Trump’s ‘Shield of the Americas’ coalition is destined to fail Expert comment jon.wallace
The Shield seeks to address serious security and narcotics issues. But a detail-light, ‘Trumpista-only’ alliance repeats past mistakes in Latin America.
Latin America’s regional diplomatic history is littered with failed multilateral organizations. Some have disappeared, such as the Union of South American Republics (UNASUR) and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA). Others, such as the Latin American Parliament or the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) continue to limp along, zombie projects of once high-minded goals.
This past weekend US President Donald Trump added one of his own.
The ‘Shield of the Americas’ sounds much like a new instalment in the Marvel movie series. The first summit, convened on 7 March at the Trump resort in Doral, Florida, was intended to create an alliance to improve regional security and combat drug cartels. ‘The heart of our agreement,’ said President Trump, ‘is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks.’
To that end the president brought together 13 heads of state, including the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama and Paraguay, as well as the prime ministers of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica.
All are centre- to hard-right leaders, whom President Trump has either praised (Javier Milei of Argentina, Santiago Peña of Paraguay, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador) or endorsed when they were candidates (Tito Asfura of Honduras).
The others have vocally supported Trump’s policies in the Western Hemisphere. Notably, the sitting president of Chile – leftist Gabriel Boric – was passed over in favour of the president elect, Jose Antonio Kast, who ran promising ‘Trumpista’ hardline policies on crime and immigration. The defence/security secretaries of Bahamas, Belize, Guatemala, and Peru were also present.
Pointedly absent at the Doral-fest were the presidents of Brazil (Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva), Mexico (Clauda Sheinbaum) and Colombia (Gustavo Petro), all of them of the left. This is significant: those three countries represent more than half of the region’s GDP. And they host a large part of the region’s illicit markets including narcotics production and trade – the supposed targets of the summit.
And, even as the usual summit ‘grip-and-grin’ photo-ops took place, with Trump, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth and newly appointed head of the Shield of the Americas Kristi Noem, the shadow of previous failures loomed.
All Latin America’s defunct or zombie multilateral organizations were founded on laudable goals. But they had fatal flaws. And the Shield of the Americas shares many of them.
In the end, the summit produced a half-page declaration, with signatories agreeing to four general points.
According to the official press release, those were: ‘expand multilateral and bilateral cooperation to enhance security’; cooperate in ‘whole of government’ efforts regarding ‘border security, countering narco-terrorism and trafficking, securing critical infrastructure, and other areas as mutually determined’; ‘advance peace through strength’; and ‘join a coalition to combat narco-terrorism and other shared threats to the Western Hemisphere’. Nothing more.
These are noble objectives addressing essential challenges for US foreign policy south of its border. And a new initiative could help deliver a long-overdue re-evaluation of failing past policies. Cocaine production and transnational crime of all sorts have increased over the last half decade.
In Colombia, cocaine production jumped 53 per cent in 2023 alone. Between 2023 and 2024, the US seized more than 45,000 pounds of fentanyl crossing its border, the vast majority produced in and shipped from Mexico, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And crime/ insecurity is the number one concern of Latin American citizens according to recent surveys and the International Monetary Fund.
But like many Trump initiatives – and previous failed Latin American multilateralism attempts – there is a telling lack of detail. The thin, four-point official announcement presents no long-term commitments for burden sharing. There are no promises to address the root causes of insecurity and crime – poverty, weak states and corruption. And, perhaps most importantly, no funding has been allocated to beef up security cooperation through regional institutions that can share intelligence, conduct joint manoeuvres and intercept drugs and related financial flows.
Neither are there regionally integrated plans for tracking cross border flows of illicit activities (including narcotics but also illegal gold, timber, and copper, money laundering and human trafficking). And no commitments have been made to independently investigate government involvement in corruption.
Most of all, it is misguided to believe that a summit of only like-minded leaders can establish a meaningful basis for long-term shared principles and cooperation on security and narcotics issues.
The openly partisan nature of this effort hobbles it at the outset. Without Brazil, Colombia and Mexico three of the most important Latin American countries are missing.
It is unclear whether they were invited or not. But the fact that their presidents were not in the Trump orbit likely contributed to their absence. Their concerns about the president’s so called ‘Donroe Doctrine’, and the spectacular US operation to abduct Venezuela’s former president Nicolas Maduro, may also have played a part. Brazil’s Lula, Mexico’s Sheinbaum and Colombia’s Petro have all spoken out against the operation.
Their absence is a fundamental flaw. Any meaningful hemispheric military alliance that could begin to hope to address the Shield’s lofty goals would need to include these countries.
As the data indicate, Colombia and Mexico are the major sources of narcotics entering the US. And Brazil is the home of one of the largest criminals groups in the region, the ‘Primeiro Comando da Capital (Brazil)’.
Trump may feel that the clear MAGA hue to the Shield of the Americas will make it easier for him to pursue his objectives – which many believe include countering Chinese influence in the region. But past Latin American attempts at regional alliances shows: partisan networking relationships never last.
Clifford Thomas and his family lost four relatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, including his beloved mother, Beverly. A middle school teacher, Beverly had struggled with chronic health problems all her life, and when they forced her to leave her job due to disability, she was unable to afford regular medical care. Her final request to her son was that he keep the family healthy.
But in Albany, Georgia, achieving that promise is a battle. The city is served by a single, dominant hospital system, Phoebe Putney Memorial. Its control of the market and Georgia’s strict limits on Medicaid have left nearly one-third of people in Albany, one of the poorest cities in the state, uninsured.
Poor access to quality, affordable care has contributed to deep distrust of the system. Residents like Thomas see Phoebe as more of a barrier to good health than a safety net. He gave up on trying to find medical insurance or a doctor who would care for him without it.
Then, he began to get sick.
There are millions like Thomas across the United States and dozens of places like Albany — places with populations suffering high rates of chronic but treatable conditions, where the dominant institution is a hospital. ProPublica examines the country’s health care crisis in a five-part series called “Sick in a Hospital Town.” Read or listen to the full series here. Watch this short documentary for a close-up of one man’s effort to overcome the obstacles to care.
The post He Promised His Dying Mother He’d Protect the Family’s Health. In This Georgia Town, It Isn’t Easy. appeared first on ProPublica.
Russian oligarch says money is his to allocate despite international sanctions imposed on his assets
The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich has stepped up his row with the British government over the £2.5bn proceeds of his sale of Chelsea FC, insisting that the money is his to allocate despite the international sanctions imposed on his assets.
The UK and EU imposed sanctions on Abramovich in 2022, freezing his assets in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, citing his ties to Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Continue reading...Worried that consolidating your credit card debt will tank your score? It doesn't have to. These options can help.
 | I’m a really new one wheeler and I’m thinking about getting my first board, I’d prefer preferably get a pint since I don’t weigh much at all but is this a good price for the condition? The seller says it has 512 miles. [link] [comments] |
Live Nation will pay $280m to states in lawsuit, and Ticketmaster will open parts of platform to rival companies
Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, has reached a surprise settlement with the Department of Justice in its antitrust case just one week after the trial began.
Under the agreement, Live Nation will create a $280m settlement fund for states that participated in the lawsuit and Ticketmaster will be required to open parts of its platform to rival ticketing companies, Live Nation announced on Monday.
Continue reading...Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to use physical cash. "The vote means Switzerland will join the likes of Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, which have already written the right to cold, hard cash in their constitutions," reports Politico. From the report: Official results revealed that 73.4 percent of voters backed the legal amendment, which the government proposed as a counter to a similar initiative by a group called the Swiss Freedom Movement. The Swiss Freedom Movement triggered the national referendum after its initiative to protect cash collected more than 100,000 signatures, triggering a national referendum. Its initiative secured only 46 percent of the final vote after the government said some of the group's proposed amendments went too far.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Officers have repeatedly detained people under a reinterpretation of a 1996 law that states that anyone in the United States illegally “shall be detained” without bond, indefinitely.
Hisense has introduced its latest TVs with full-array local dimming, and the U7 starts at $1,300.
The leaders haven’t won the title in more than 20 years. Yet very few neutrals are excited about seeing them as new champions
What was striking after Arsenal’s grim 1-0 win at Brighton on Wednesday was less Brighton manager Fabian Hürzeler’s attack on the Gunners’ style than the way his criticism seemed to resonate. In England, it feels as though almost nobody, other than Arsenal supporters or anyone-but-City fans, wants them to win the title.
“If I would ask everyone in the room: ‘Did you really enjoy this football game?’ I’m sure maybe one raises his arm because he’s a big Arsenal fan but, besides that, no chance,” Hürzeler said.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
Continue reading...President Donald Trump called surging oil costs a “very small price to pay.” Group of Seven leaders are set to convene Monday to assess the economic fallout.
Exclusive: Rented datacentres and ‘supercomputer’ site that’s still a scaffolding yard raise questions for Starmer’s push to ‘mainline AI into veins of economy’
A multibillion-pound drive to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy is riddled with “phantom investments” and shaky accounting, a Guardian investigation has found.
Since 2024, successive Conservative and Labour governments have proclaimed massive deals to build new datacentres, create thousands of jobs and construct a supercomputer.
Continue reading...Nscale’s AI project still in use as depot ahead of pledged completion date – with planning permission filed after Guardian’s inquiries
The press releases announcing a gleaming supercomputer on the outskirts of north London depict a glass and concrete building, rising from a tree-lined street. Accompanied by images of glowing blue robot faces, it looks like the centre of a technological revolution.
By the end of this year, that artist’s impression is supposed to be a reality.
Continue reading...Kurdish groups in Iran face risky dilemma amid unclear US endgame Expert comment thilton.drupal
The Trump administration has given mixed messages about its support for a potential Kurdish uprising, which would face a range of challenges against an uncertain backdrop.
More than a week into the ongoing US-Israeli air strikes on Iran, the war has no clear endgame in sight. In an increasingly complex situation, the US does not appear to have a settled and coherent strategy, with the Trump administration voicing wide-ranging and shifting goals and justifications.
Amid this uncertainty, US President Donald Trump appeared to encourage the Kurdish groups in Iran to rise up against the Iranian regime, before appearing to reverse his position. On 5 March, six days after the US and Israel launched their first strikes, Trump said of a potential Kurdish military action that ‘it’s wonderful that they want to do that, I’d be all for it.’ But just two days later, he told reporters that ‘I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran…The war is complicated enough as it is.’
In practice, the US and Israel have been heavily bombing targets in Kurdish areas in western Iran. This has been seen as aiming to potentially prepare the ground for Kurdish parties based in the region and across the border in Iraq to launch an offensive against the regime.
The US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly been working to arm Kurdish forces, according to CNN citing unnamed Kurdish and US officials. The report said that the Trump administration has been in active discussions with Kurdish groups about providing them with military support, potentially for an offensive that could pin down regime security forces and open up space for a broader opposition uprising. The CIA declined to comment to CNN, while US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said that ‘none of our objectives are premised on the support of the arming of any particular force.’
The US previously trained and financed Kurdish fighters in both Iraq and Syria. Based on these experiences, Iranian Kurdish groups face a dilemma. Partnership with the US could make a real positive difference to their goals. But it will be fundamentally transactional. There is little indication that the Trump administration is prepared to include an essential commitment to support Kurdish political goals; its endgame for Iran seems confused at best.
Both Washington and the Iranian Kurds must therefore consider how robust and durable potential US backing will be, particularly in light of past experiences of the US abandoning its Kurdish partners, most recently when the US turned away from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). They also need to ask whether a Kurdish uprising serves their respective interests in the long run.
Kurds are one of Iran’s largest ethnic minorities. There are an estimated 7 to 15 million Kurds in Iran (around 8-17 per cent of its total population). They are concentrated along Iran’s western borders with Iraq and Turkey, one of the most impoverished parts of the country.
Although Iran’s constitution theoretically provides equal rights for all ethnicities, in practice the Iranian government has frequently resorted to violence to suppress expressions of Kurdish cultural, linguistic and political identity.
The Kurdish political landscape is fragmented across various parties that adhere to a range of ideologies and draw public support from different sources. Kurdish public opinion is not monolithic and not all Kurds support Kurdish nationalist parties. These groups also have a poor track record of cooperation and have fought each other at times. But what unites the Kurdish nationalist parties is opposition to the Islamic Republic and a desire to secure Kurdish rights and local self-rule in the context of a future democratic Iran.
On February 22, five Kurdish parties announced the formation of the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan. These include the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), the Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), Khabat, and the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK). On 4 March, the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan also joined. The coalition’s leadership is largely based in Iraq or the West, though it is also well-organized inside Iran through clandestine networks.
The KDPI is the oldest of the parties, tracing its lineage back to just before the short-lived independent Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was established in 1946. It has the most grassroots support, particularly with traditional nationalists. The Komala factions are more left-wing. The Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan is the larger of the two and has significant support in certain geographic areas.
PJAK is considered the Iranian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which fought a long insurgency against the Turkish state, and theoretically has more battle-tested cadres. PAK and Khabat are much smaller and have limited appeal inside Iranian Kurdistan.
Despite the unification of these parties, major tests lie ahead. The extent of the military forces of these groups and their real battle capabilities are unknown. For years, they have largely been contained in their camps inside Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. Their strength inside Iran is unclear.
Though weakened, the Iranian security forces still have significant capacity for violence and have demonstrated willing to wield it against the vulnerable Kurdish civilian population, as occurred during the January 2026 protests. The Iranian military has already struck Kurdish forces in Iraq as part of its response to US and Israeli strikes.
It is therefore a massive risk for Kurdish groups to launch armed operations against the regime, even with US and Israeli air support. ‘We will not send our forces to the slaughterhouse,’ Komala leader Abdullah Mohtadi recently told German newspaper Die Zeit.
Private equity group EQT to take 42% stake as supplier faces scrutiny over environmental record and CEO’s pay
A leading European investor will pump fresh funding into Yorkshire Water including helping to cover a £600m loan, despite recent heavy sewage fines and a scandal over executive pay at the utility company.
EQT, a Swedish private equity group, said on Monday it would take a 42% stake in Kelda Holdings, the Jersey-registered parent company of Yorkshire Water, which has 5.7 million customers across Yorkshire and parts of the East Midlands and Lincolnshire.
Continue reading...Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran's new supreme leader following the death of his father in the U.S.-Israeli strikes.
Five teenagers arrested after Jason Hughes run over outside his home after prank involving toilet paper
A beloved Georgia teacher was accidentally run over and killed outside his home recently by a student driving away from a prank involving toilet paper, according to authorities.
The death of math instructor and athletics coach Jason Hughes, 40, has led to the arrests of five teenagers – including one accused of vehicular homicide – while plunging the community of Gainesville into mourning.
Continue reading...As states scale back requirements for comprehensive sex ed, some parents and faith communities are stepping in to teach what schools won’t
When Wendy Pfrenger’s children started high school in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, she had the choice to enroll them in abstinence-only or abstinence-plus sex ed.
Although the abstinence-plus option would include instruction on contraception, neither curriculum was required to provide medically accurate information. As a parent, she felt like the lessons her teens were receiving fell short of their reality.
Continue reading...Jenny O’Connell-Nowain was put under house arrest, and her husband, Benjamin, lost his job after they protested at board of supervisors meetings
Jenny O’Connell-Nowain was ready to go to jail.
She had been prepared to spend six months in the custody of the Shasta county sheriff’s office. One of the top prosecutors in this part of far northern California had presented the evidence against her in a weeklong trial, and a jury had delivered a guilty verdict. A judge offered probation, but O’Connell-Nowain did not agree to the terms.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Tonight, we have details of a classified U.S. intelligence mission that has obtained a previously unknown weapon that may finally unlock a mystery. Since at least 2016, U.S. diplomats, spies and military officers have suffered crippling brain injuries. They've told of being hit by an overwhelming force, damaging their vision, hearing, sense of balance and cognition. but the government has doubted their stories. They've been called delusional. Well now, 60 Minutes has learned that a weapon that can inflict these injuries was obtained overseas and secretly tested on animals on a U.S. military base. We've investigated this mystery for nine years. This is our fourth story called, "Targeting Americans." Despite official government doubt, we never stopped reporting because of the haunting stories we heard [...]. 60 Minutes interviewed Dr. David Relman, a scientific expert and professor from Stanford University who was tasked by the government to lead two investigations into the Havana Syndrome cases. What he and his panel of doctors, physicists, engineers and others found was that "the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy," the report says. According to confidential sources cited in the report, undercover Homeland Security agents bought a miniaturized microwave weapon from a Russian criminal network in 2024 and tested it on animals at a U.S. military lab. The injuries reportedly matched those seen in the human cases. "Our confidential sources tell us the still classified weapon has been tested in a U.S. military lab for more than a year," says Dr. Relman. "Tests on rats and sheep show injuries consistent with those seen in humans." He continues: "Also, as a separate part of the investigation, security camera videos have been collected that show Americans being hit. The videos are classified but they were described to us. In one, a camera in a restaurant in Istanbul captured two FBI agents on vacation sitting at a table with their families. A man with a backpack walks in and suddenly everyone at the table grabs their head as if in pain. Our sources say another video comes from a stairwell in the U.S. embassy in Vienna. The stairs lead to a secure facility. In the video, two people on the stairs suddenly collapse. Those videos and the weapon were among the reasons the Biden administration summoned about half a dozen victims to the White House with about two months left in the president's term." Former intelligence officials and researchers claim elements of the U.S. government downplayed or dismissed the theory for years, possibly to avoid political consequences of accusing a foreign state like Russia of conducting attacks on American personnel.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The line-up for this year’s festival includes Emma Thompson, Malala Yousafzai, Ian McEwan and other prominent authors and figures
Emma Thompson, Malala Yousafzai, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Gisèle Pelicot are among the headline names appearing at Hay festival 2026, organisers have announced.
The popular UK literary festival has now unveiled its full programme, featuring more than 500 events running from 21 to 31 May in Hay-on-Wye, Powys.
Continue reading...Cem Özdemir gains 30.2% of vote in Baden-Württemberg, ahead of CDU, with far-right AfD in third
Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have stumbled into a busy election year with a defeat to the Greens in a key state poll, as his embattled party struggles to fend off a challenge in other pivotal races from the far right.
The German chancellor’s conservative CDU had enjoyed a double-digit lead in the south-western car production region of Baden-Württemberg just weeks ago but the Greens and their charismatic candidate Cem Özdemir eked out a half-point-margin win in Sunday’s poll with 30.2%.
Continue reading...Three-dimensional images and digital illustrations offer a detailed new look at the USS Monitor, an important Civil War ship that sank more than 160 years ago and has since become a reef.
Comments from defense secretary come as number of US service members killed in conflict has climbed to seven
Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, has said “there will be more casualties” in the US military from the Trump administration’s war in Iran after officials confirmed on Sunday that the number of US service members killed had climbed to seven.
Hegseth made the statement during an appearance Sunday night on CBS’s 60 Minutes, during which he portrayed Donald Trump’s decision for the US to join Israeli attacks on the Middle East country as essential “to advance American interests, and protect American lives”.
Continue reading...Ukraine criticises organisers’ decision to allow Russia to take part in prestigious art exhibition as ‘incomprehensible’
Ukraine has urged organisers of the Venice Biennale to reconsider Russia’s participation in the prestigious art exhibition, arguing that it must not become “a stage for whitewashing… war crimes.”
Biennale organisers said last week that Russia would be allowed to take part in the event, held from 9 May until 22 November, triggering widespread criticism, including from Italy’s culture ministry, which said it opposed the decision.
Continue reading...ZURICH, March 9, 2026 — Today, Zurich Instruments announced the ZQCS Quantum Control System, a next‑generation platform to operate large-scale quantum computers. It is engineered to tackle the pivotal challenge on the path to fault‑tolerant quantum computing: building long‑lived logical qubits.
Physical qubits are fragile; noise and drift can erase quantum information in microseconds. The remedy is to use logical qubits, which encode quantum information across many physical qubits, thereby enabling error correction. This approach elevates the control system from a mere pulse generator to the stabilizing core of the quantum computer: it must coordinate hundreds to thousands of channels while producing ultra‑stable pulses, and close real-time feedback loops at microsecond timescales. These requirements are at the core of the field’s main challenges – scaling to several thousand qubits, pushing gate fidelities to five nines and beyond, and mastering quantum error correction. The ZQCS is the control system built to meet these needs, uniting scalable direct‑RF electronics, deterministic real‑time networking, and powerful software.
“We designed the ZQCS end‑to‑end for the logical‑qubit era – starting from the analog front end, through the real‑time fabric, to software – so researchers and system builders can address scale, fidelity, and error correction together,” said Andrea Orzati, CEO at Zurich Instruments.
ZQCS uses a modular AdvancedTCA architecture scaling seamlessly from a single shelf to multi‑shelf systems and delivering more than a thousand channels per 19‑inch rack. The system is ready for the integration into HPC environments, offering water-cooled enclosures for optimal heat management and thermal stability. For QEC research without boundaries and hybrid quantum-classical workflows, each shelf integrates a programmable FPGA and a low‑latency, high‑bandwidth link to classical computing resources such as GPUs and CPUs.
With its first‑Nyquist‑zone, direct‑RF front end and market-leading signal‑to‑noise ratio, the ZQCS lets researchers optimize quantum fidelities without limits imposed by the control. A synchronization scheme optimized to execute large quantum programs maintains a distributed wall clock for deterministic timing across every signal. The ZQCS is powered by Zurich Instruments’ LabOne Q software, spanning pulse‑, gate‑, and workflow‑level interfaces supporting automation for calibration and tune‑up.
“We’re excited to see the first ZQCS installations come online, powering quantum error‑correction experiments, and helping our partners scale from hundreds to thousands of qubits,” said Sebastian Krinner, Product Manager. “This is a major step in our long‑term commitment to help the community reach fault tolerance.”
The launch affirms Zurich Instruments’ capability and commitment to deliver the quantum control technology of the logical‑qubit era, backed by deep domain expertise and the long-term stability offered by its parent company, Rohde & Schwarz.
More from HPCwire
About Zurich Instruments
Zurich Instruments is a Swiss company with a passion for phenomena that are often notoriously difficult to measure. We provide researchers and industry partners advanced hardware, software, and services for quantum computing control systems, lock-in amplifiers, and arbitrary waveform generators. As a company of scientists, we believe in offering products that reduce complexity of laboratory setups, unlock new measurement strategies, and comply with the highest Swiss quality standards. Our commitment to collaboration and real-time support is reflected in our seven worldwide offices, numerous research partnerships, and thousands of publications that refer to Zurich Instruments. In 2021, Zurich instruments became part of Rohde & Schwarz, allowing the company to continue its ambitious mission to advance science and accelerate the second quantum revolution under steady, industry-leading ownership.
Source: Zurich Instruments
The post Zurich Instruments Launches ZQCS Platform for Large-Scale Quantum Computer Control appeared first on HPCwire.
Apple's new $599 budget phone brings MagSafe compatibility, higher base storage and an A19 chip. That makes the trade-offs easier to swallow.
Built in collaboration with Anthropic, Microsoft's new tool can create spreadsheets, run reports and do research autonomously.
This is the best balance of future-proofing and price for now, but this may not be the final iPad released this year.
Ministers understood to be considering ways to mitigate rising energy bills as oil prices surpass $100 a barrel
Keir Starmer has said that a long-term US-Iran war would affect the “lives and households of everybody”, as the head of the AA advised motorists against making “non-essential” journeys.
On Monday, oil prices surged past $100 (£75) a barrel for the first time since 2022, which will feed through to higher costs at petrol stations, and consumers will also be hit if energy costs push up inflation.
Continue reading...Federal authorities apparently never searched the property, but now state authorities will reopen a 2019 investigation
When Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on 6 July 2019 for sex trafficking teenagers, New York federal prosecutors said the ultra-wealthy predator “exploited and abused dozens of underage girls” in Manhattan and Palm Beach “among other locations”.
One of those other locations was the late financier’s sprawling New Mexico property. Epstein’s so-called Zorro Ranch came into sharper relief after his 10 August 2019 death in jail awaiting trial, with criminal and civil proceedings revealing that numerous alleged abuses unfolded there. But Zorro Ranch did not receive the same scrutiny as Epstein’s other properties: an 8 February Guardian investigation revealed that federal authorities apparently never searched the property.
Continue reading...LOUISVILLE, Colo., March 9, 2026 — Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum sensing and quantum computing powered by neutral-atom technology, announced an expansion of its work with several U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories. Under the agreements, Infleqtion is continuing its longstanding collaborations with Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, while also launching a new partnership with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The partnerships are centered on Superstaq, Infleqtion’s quantum software platform that helps researchers run quantum programs more efficiently on real machines. Superstaq manages how quantum instructions are prepared and executed on different systems, allowing national laboratory teams to spend more time on scientific discovery and less time adapting software to each piece of hardware.
“Researchers at the national laboratories are working at the front edge of what is possible in quantum computing,” said Pranav Gokhale, chief technology officer at Infleqtion. “These continued and expanded partnerships reflect the trust they place in Superstaq as one of the few quantum software platforms that works across different quantum computing technologies, helping researchers unlock meaningful performance improvements as they move from experiments toward real applications.”
Infleqtion has supported Sandia’s Quantum Scientific Computing Open User Testbed (QSCOUT) and Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Quantum Testbed since 2021, providing capabilities tailored to each system’s hardware. The renewed collaborations include software licensing and close technical engagement to incorporate improvements that help systems operate more reliably as the testbeds grow in size and complexity.
“As part of ongoing work on the Advanced Quantum Testbed, Superstaq has provided software tools used to support quantum research and development,” said Chris Spitzer, Quantum Research Program Manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Continuing the collaboration supports researcher access to software tools needed for experiments on evolving quantum hardware.”
“Superstaq has been an important part of the QSCOUT testbed since its early days,” said Susan Clark, QSCOUT Principal Investigator, Sandia National Laboratories. “Continuing this collaboration supports our mission to provide researchers with reliable tools that enable experimentation, comparison, and advancement across emerging quantum computing approaches.”
The new partnership with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory extends Superstaq support to the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (SQMS), following its recent renewal as one of the Department of Energy’s National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. Through this collaboration, Infleqtion will work with Fermilab researchers to help prepare and run quantum programs in ways that best support SQMS’s research goals.
“Through this collaboration with Infleqtion, SQMS is exploring pathways to pair advanced hardware with a flexible software platform,” said Dr. Silvia Zorzetti, Principal Engineer, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “The Superstaq platform supports the collaborative work underway at SQMS and helps our teams focus on translating foundational research into meaningful progress for the broader quantum ecosystem.”
Across all three laboratories, Superstaq spans multiple types of quantum computing hardware, helping researchers prepare and run experiments more efficiently on real systems. These collaborations reflect Infleqtion’s broader strategy to deliver scalable quantum software that supports government, academic, and commercial users as quantum systems grow larger and more capable.
Beyond these collaborations, Infleqtion’s work across the Department of Energy laboratory system also includes ongoing efforts with Argonne National Laboratory and the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), including a recently awarded ARPA-E initiative to advance quantum-powered energy grid optimization. Together, these partnerships underscore Infleqtion’s broad commitment to supporting DOE national labs with scalable quantum software and technologies that accelerate both foundational research and real-world impact.
To learn more about Infleqtion’s quantum software and applications research, visit: https://infleqtion.com/quantum-software.
About Infleqtion
Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of War, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.
Source: Infleqtion
The post Infleqtion Expands Partnerships with US Department of Energy National Laboratories appeared first on HPCwire.
Footage of attack on Minab compound adds to evidence indicating it was a US strike that killed scores of children
A video has shown a US Tomahawk missile hitting the Iranian naval base next to a primary school in Minab where more than 168 people, mostly children, were killed – adding to evidence that indicates the US was responsible for the school strike.
The video, released by the Iranian news agency Mehr and geolocated to the site by the investigative collective Bellingcat, shows the missile hitting the Minab compound on the morning of 28 February, when US-Israeli strikes on Iran began.
Continue reading...March 9, 2026 — Quantum computers work by applying quantum operations, such as quantum gates, to delicate quantum states. Ideally, quantum computers can solve complex equations at staggeringly fast speeds that vastly outpace regular computers. In real hardware, the operations of quantum computers often deviate from the ideal behavior because of device imperfections and unwanted noise from the environment. To build reliable quantum machines, researchers need a way to accurately determine what a quantum device is actually doing.
Overview of compilation-based quantum process tomography (CQPT). The left panel shows the main idea: an unknown quantum process transforms an input state into an output state, and CQPT uses a trainable “compiler” to learn the process by forcing the final state to return to the original input. The right panels illustrate two implementations of CQPT: a Kraus-based approach for unitary or near-unitary processes, and a Choi-based approach for general noisy processes. Credit: Le Bin Ho et al.
Quantum process tomography (QPT) is a standard method for this. However, traditional QPT becomes very costly as the system grows, because the number of required measurements and calculations increases rapidly with the number of qubits.
To address this challenge, a research team from Tohoku University, the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), and the University of Information Technology (Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City) has introduced a new framework called compilation-based quantum process tomography (CQPT).
The central idea of CQPT is simple. The method starts with a known input quantum state, applies a trainable process following the unknown process, and then works backwards to evaluate how well the final output returns to the original input. The “return-to-input” model is optimized to reconstruct the underlying quantum processes that make up the steps in-between the input and output. Importantly, the framework is designed so that optimization can conveniently be performed using only a single measurement outcome per input state.
The researchers developed two complementary versions of the CQPT: one based on Kraus operators, and one based on the Choi matrix. Together, these two approaches allow CQPT to handle a wide range of quantum operations and noisy processes relevant to modern quantum devices.
“Efficient and scalable methods for characterizing quantum processes are important for the future of quantum computing and quantum sensing,” Dr. Le Bin Ho said. “We need such methods to check whether quantum gates and circuits work correctly, identify hardware errors, calibrate devices, and support quantum error correction.”
Dr. Le believes that CQPT could become a practical alternative to standard quantum process tomography, especially for larger quantum systems where full tomography is no longer realistic due to high costs.
The current study demonstrates that CQPT is feasible through sound theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. The framework offers a promising way to make quantum tomography more efficient. Next steps will involve tackling the challenge of implementing it in real experiments. The researchers plan to focus on developing hardware-ready versions of the method and improving its robustness.
The findings were published in Advanced Quantum Technologies on Feb. 26, 2026.
Publication Details:
Source: Tohoku University
The post Tohoku University Researchers Report Method to Simplify Quantum Process Tomography appeared first on HPCwire.
Move could lead to escalation of war as Donald Trump has already called Mojtaba Khamenei an ‘unacceptable’ choice. Plus, stormy space weather may be garbling messages from aliens
Good morning.
Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor, as the war enters its 10th day and fresh missile and drone strikes reverberate across the Middle East.
Why has the Iran war prompted fears of stagflation for the global economy? Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022, triggering a stark sell-off across some of the world’s leading stock markets amid growing concern that the US-Israel war on Iran could set the stage for a global economic shock.
What else is happening? The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, spoke to the US president on Sunday afternoon after a barrage of criticism from Trump, who told his UK ally on Saturday that his help was not needed, even as the US continued to use UK bases for strikes against Iran.
Who is the suspect? Authorities announced on Thursday that they had arrested 22-year-old Ivan Miller of Iowa as a suspect in the murders. Police say Miller had no connection to the women.
Continue reading...Wait times at security checkpoints in Houston and New Orleans as long as three hours due to shortage of TSA agents
Travelers complained of long waits on Sunday – lasting hours in some cases – at security checkpoints at airports in Houston and New Orleans, which officials blamed on a government shutdown of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The estimated wait time at the standard security checkpoint at the William P Hobby airport in Houston early on Sunday evening was at one point three hours, according to the Houston Airport System website. The Hobby airport said on social media on Friday it expected more travelers than normal due to spring break.
Continue reading...
Why should Delaware care?
Delaware’s Republican Party represents more than 200,000 registered voters, as well as hundreds of annual donors. But the party hasn’t had one of its members hold a elected seat statewide since 2018. While party fortunes continued to look bleak in recent months amid financial disarray, leaders now say they have righted the ship.
Shortly after the new year, a political accountant who has handled the books for hundreds of conservative organizations, including the Delaware Republican Party, abruptly resigned from his post with the state’s GOP.
His departure – coming a month after Spotlight Delaware reported on money problems facing the state GOP – exposed further financial disarray within the party. In the subsequent weeks, GOP leaders scrambled to find a replacement, while federal regulators sent warnings that the party could face fines and a possible audit if it did not file a year-end campaign finance report, and answer questions about reports of negative cash balances.
Now, two months after the accountant’s resignation, Delaware GOP Chair Gene Truono said the party is recovering with a beefed-up fundraising strategy, and a new accounting firm that has filed its required federal reports.
Looking forward, Truono said the party is well positioned to rebuild its bank account and its base of power ahead of what could be its most consequential election cycle in years.
The comments are likely welcome news for party faithful who have watched the Delaware GOP not only suffer through recent financial turmoil but also through a decade of electoral losses in statewide races.
“2026 is going to be a good year for us,” Truono said. “Money is coming in. We’re able to hire people. We’re meeting our payroll.”
Truono further stated that his party’s previous campaign finance reports, which showed that a federal bank account was thousands of dollars in the red, were inaccurate. He said those reported negative cash balances were the result of accounting errors involving duplicate checks existing on the party’s books.
When party officials sought to correct the errors last fall amid scrutiny from Spotlight Delaware and others, Truono said their accountant, Thomas Datwyler, wasn’t responsive enough to allow the party to reconcile the books.
And, after the new year passed, Datwyler ended up “ghosting” the party altogether, Truono claimed.
But Datwyler tells a different story. When reached for comment, the embattled national political accountant said he didn’t respond to the party after the new year because he had resigned his contract in an email sent on Jan. 11.
He did so because the party had not paid his company for his previous year’s worth of work, he said.
“And I know what the financial situation is,” Datwyler said. “They don’t have any money. Even if those checks weren’t cleared or not, they still don’t have any money.”
Asked about Datwyler’s resignation, Truono said he never received a letter by email. The state GOP’s executive assistant, Paula Ireton, also stated that she had not received Datwyler’s resignation email.
Datwyler forwarded Spotlight Delaware the email he said he sent to the party in January. It included an attached letter from his company, Ax Capital, announcing the resignation.
When asked why the Delaware GOP had reported negative account balances in recent months, Datwyler described a different bookkeeping problem from the one Truono said existed.
While he agreed the party’s bank account was not currently in the red, he said it was only because past payments to party vendors had never been claimed.
“They have checks in the register that haven’t actually cleared the bank account,” he said. “They’re not duplicates. They were written … And, if they were ever cashed, obviously the bank would go negative.”
In the wake of Datwyler’s departure, GOP officials said they scrambled to hire a new accountant that could compile the party’s year-end campaign finance report to send to federal regulators.
Federal and state campaign finance law requires political parties to regularly disclose to the public the amount of money they receive from donors – and how they spend it. The state GOP did file a campaign finance report in January related to its state election activities to the Delaware Department of Elections.
But the party ultimately missed the Jan. 31 deadline to file its federal report.
By mid-February, federal officials sent a sternly worded letter stating that a failure to file the year-end campaign finance report could “result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action.”
The letter followed another that was sent in January in which regulators demanded to know how the party could report that its federal bank balance sat more than $8,000 in the red.
It was the fifth month in a row the party reported a negative cash balance.
In the letter, the FEC stated that the party must respond by Feb. 16 and “Requests for extensions of time in which to respond will not be considered.”
While acknowledging the gravity of the federal demands, Truono said the party throughout February was working with a new vendor to resolve the situation. By the final business day of the month, the GOP filed its delayed financial disclosures. Within the documents, the party reported its cash balance no longer was in the red, but instead sat at about $19,000.
Election regulators have not sent additional letters to the party during the week since the filings, according to the Federal Elections Commission’s website.
Asked for his takeaways from the recent turmoil, Truono pointed squarely at Datwyler, saying the party wasn’t ”getting the kind of service that we expected or needed.”
“The major takeaway, for my part, was we had the wrong vendor, plain and simple,” he said.
Truono’s comments add to a mountain of high-profile criticism made by various political organizations across the country about Datwyler. In 2024, an attorney for the Conservative Nevada Leadership PAC filed a complaint with the FEC claiming that Datwyler had “a long history of running roughshod over federal campaign finance law.”
“The major takeaway, for my part, was we had the wrong vendor, plain and simple.”
Delaware GOP Chair Gene Truono
A year earlier, the Daily Beast reported that Datwyler had acted as a shadow treasurer for the campaign of disgraced-Congressman George Santos. The report claimed that while Datwyler managed the campaign’s books, he had listed on disclosure reports the name of another person as the treasurer.
When asked about the various news reports, Datwyler said he has worked for more than 1,000 political committees of various kinds over the past two decades. He said there are only about a dozen that have been unsatisfied with his work.
He also claimed that many of the public reports about him are the result of tips from “competitors in the industry that take a shot at me.”
He declined to state which of his competitors he suspects of spreading such information.
In his interviews with Spotlight Delaware, Truono spoke at length about the GOP’s plan to launch a broad campaign to boost the party presence in the state in advance of this year’s consequential elections.
Specifically, party officials will focus on convincing more voters to register as Republicans, and on better communicating the party platform.
Truono said his party has a particularly ripe opportunity to take advantage of Democrats recent actions in the state that he said have been unpopular. He cited the state legislature’s decoupling last fall of the state’s tax code from that of the IRS.
Truono also said President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February has prompted some Democrats to call into his party office to announce that there were inspired to change their party registration.
If the GOP could capture enough new voters to win in a few state legislative races this fall, they could take away Democrats’ supermajorities in the General Assembly – which allow the party to raise taxes without Republican support in the House and the Senate.
Conversely, with a loss of just one seat in the House, the party could slide further to the periphery by giving Democrats the ability to pass Constitutional amendments without GOP votes.
For its federal campaigns this year, the state’s Republicans also will field candidates for Congress to face Delaware’s Democratic members of Congress – Rep. Sarah McBride and Sen. Chris Coons – up for reelection.
Truono said the party launched its new initiative in January, with two successful fundraisers. Those dollars have already allowed him to hire new people, he said.
Among the future new hires, Truono added, will also be data analysts who can identify individuals “who we can reach out to to either convince them to vote Republican or convince them to change their party affiliation.”
Spotlight Delaware reported in 2024 that the GOP had fallen to become the third largest political group in the state, following a surge of new independent voters registered through the state DMV’s automatic voter registration system. Democrats remained the largest contingent of registered voters at the time.
While the GOP is adding staff, it also recently lost a key employee. Truono noted that the party’s executive director Nick Miles no longer holds that position. He said that as chair of the party, he has the “right to appoint or unappoint” that position.
“In this case, I’m looking for someone else because he just didn’t meet my personal needs,” Truono said.
While he served as executive director, the state GOP had made regular payments to Miles, through a limited liability company, for what the party described as “legal consulting.” However, Miles is not a member of the Delaware Bar Association.
The post Delaware’s GOP projects strength after months of turmoil appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The prime minister is facing pressure from unions and some backbenchers to prepare a support package as oil and gas prices threaten to push up inflation
As we mentioned in the opening post, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has a call with fellow G7 finance ministers this afternoon to discuss surging oil prices and the economic impact of the US-Israeli war with Iran.
You can follow all the latest market developments in our business live blog, which is leading on how stock markets are tumbling after the oil price surged over $100 a barrel for the first time in four years:
The longer this conflict goes on, the more effect it will have on the cost of oil.
Any time Brent Crude passes 100 dollars per barrel raises concern across the markets, for the haulage industry and drivers.
Average petrol and diesel prices have rocketed in the last week and are unfortunately likely to keep on rising, so the situation for UK drivers is looking increasingly bleak.
Unleaded is almost certainly going to reach an average of 140p in the next week or so, while diesel looks highly likely to climb to at least 160p a litre.
We encourage drivers to continue filling up as normal but to shop around for the best prices.
A woman was arrested on Sunday for firing multiple shots at the Beverly Hills home of Rihanna, Los Angeles Police Department officials say.
The preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment suggests that the U.S. is "likely" responsible for the bombing of the girls' school in Iran on Feb. 28.
As the US space agency misses its launch window for the second month, smaller firms continue work on their parts
It was shaping up into another ordinary day at the Colorado headquarters of the small space startup Lunar Outpost last Friday when chief executive Justin Cyrus learned of a surprise press conference called by Jared Isaacman, the new administrator of Nasa.
Cyrus’s company epitomises the many private contractors of the space agency working on a myriad of projects crucial to the Artemis program that seeks to return humans to the moon, so anything Isaacman had to say about it was naturally of interest to him.
Continue reading...It turns out your car's tire pressure monitoring system might be a gold mine for hackers.
Ruling could free $175bn, but legal hurdles and higher costs have left businesses questioning if claims are even worth it
The US supreme court recently struck down Donald Trump’s tariffs, opening the door to up to $175bn in refunds for businesses that paid the import taxes. However, the process for claiming that money is by no means certain. Trump himself said that the issue could be tied up in courts “for the next five years”.
Across the country, small businesses have struggled to navigate the fallout from Trump’s global tariff wars. The Guardian asked small-business owners in the US how their lives and livelihoods have been affected.
Continue reading...Reform UK leader strengthens ties with crypto sector with stake in former Tory chancellor’s company Stack BTC
Nigel Farage has invested in Kwasi Kwarteng’s bitcoin reserves company, as the leader of Reform UK aligns himself closer with the cryptocurrency industry.
The MP has invested £215,000 in Stack BTC, the crypto business that is chaired by the former Conservative chancellor.
Continue reading...Browse all of our full episode transcripts from 2026 of "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."
Pete Docter says Pixar will concentrate on more commercially appealing films after staff dissent over deleted scenes that implied lead character was gay
Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter said that the reason why LGBTQ+ plot elements were removed from the company’s 2025 film Elio was that Pixar is “not [making] therapy”.
Docter was speaking to the Wall Street Journal in the wake of the successful release of Pixar’s latest film Hoppers, which opened at No 1 at the North American box office this weekend.
Continue reading...Police in Australia warned of crocodiles "absolutely everywhere" and said they had moved more than 1,000 people across the state into shelter after massive floods.
After decades of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the nonprofit SETI Foundation has an announcement. "A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar 'space weather' could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect." Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches. For decades, many SETI experiments have focused on identifying spikes in frequency — signals unlikely to be produced by natural astrophysical processes. But the new research highlights an overlooked complication: even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home system... "If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches," said Dr. Vishal Gajjar, Astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper. The researchers created "a practical framework for estimating how much broadening could occur for different types of stars" — and accounting for space weather — by "using radio transmissions from spacecraft in our own solar system, then extrapolated to other stellar environments." The study's co-author (a SETI Institute research assistant) suggests this coud lead to better-targetted SETI searches. (M-dwarf stars — about 75% of stars in the Milky Way — actually have the highest likelihood that narrowband signals would get broadened before leaving their system...)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, considered a 2028 presidential contender, is planning a series of commencement addresses in May as he broadens his national profile.
Markets predict Bank of England will hold rates in 2026 as bond yields soar on forecasts of prolonged conflict
UK interest rates are not expected to be cut this year and could even rise next summer, according to financial markets, in a dramatic reversal of forecasts before the US-Israel war on Iran.
Markets data on Monday showed that investors predict the Bank of England will most likely keep its base rate on hold at 3.75% for the remainder of the year, and would raise them to 4% next June.
Continue reading...Anyone else live around palmetto bay or cutler bay? I feel like i'm the only one.
Jessika Roswall cites Poland and Finland, which have made border areas near Russia or its allies ‘more hostile’ to cross
Countries should look to rewild their land borders as a deterrence to invasion and build up other geographical defences to attack, Europe’s environment chief has said.
Jessika Roswall, the EU’s commissioner for the environment, water resilience and a competitive circular economy, said nature should be used to improve national security. “Investing in nature and using nature as a natural border control is necessary, and actually increases biodiversity. It’s a win-win,” she said.
Continue reading...AI feature generated offensive posts about Diogo Jota and the Hillsborough and Munich disasters
Liverpool and Manchester United have complained to Elon Musk’s X after the Grok AI feature made offensive posts about Diogo Jota and the Hillsborough and Munich disasters.
The posts were generated when users asked the AI tool to make hateful posts about the two football teams.
Continue reading...Standoff with DoD over Claude chatbot reignites debate over how AI will be used in war – and who will be held accountable
Until recently, Anthropic was one of the quieter names in the artificial intelligence boom. Despite being valued at about $350bn, it rarely generated the flashy headlines or public backlash associated with Sam Altman’s OpenAI or Elon Musk’s xAI. Its CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei was an industry fixture but hardly a household name outside of Silicon Valley, and its chatbot Claude lagged in popularity behind ChatGPT.
That perception has shifted as Anthropic has become the central actor in a high-profile fight with the Department of Defense over the company’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input. Amid tense negotiations, the AI firm rejected a Pentagon deadline for a deal last week, in a move that led Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to accuse Anthropic of “arrogance and betrayal” of its home country while demanding that any companies that work with the US government cease all business with the AI firm.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Bank Policy Institute, representing lenders such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, argues that new licenses could harm US consumers and financial system
Some of the largest US banks are considering suing their financial regulator, arguing that a new raft of licenses for crypto, payment and fintech could put American consumers and the wider financial system at risk.
The Bank Policy Institute (BPI), which represents 40 of the biggest US lenders including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, is understood to be weighing its legal options after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) failed to heed repeated warnings from influential banking groups and state regulators over its reinterpretation of federal licensing rules.
Continue reading...Cristian Espinoza is fitting right in at Nashville, RSL’s kids are alright, and more from the MLS weekend
Pablo Iglesias Maurer: 72,000 fans watched DC United, but only Messi’s Inter Miami dazzled
Before we begin our tour through the weekend that was in MLS, a trivia question to ponder: which team was the last Supporters’ Shield winner to start the subsequent season with three straight losses? Read to the end for the answer.
Continue reading...U.S. and Ecuadoran forces conducted "lethal kinetic operations" inside Ecuador to combat drug trafficking in the South American country, SOUTHCOM said.
Trump is choking off oil imports to the communist nation, plunging it into a crisis not seen since the fall of USSR
On 29 January this year, after the kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro but before the assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, President Trump turned his attention to another country. He issued an executive order declaring a national emergency against the government of Cuba, ruling it an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States and threatening to impose tariffs to stop ships from carrying petroleum to Cuba. It was an evident bid for regime change.
The actions to deny oil to Cuba have severely exacerbated a growing crisis on the island, with even some US congressional representatives denouncing the measures. Cuba produces about one-third of its own oil needs and imports the rest – mostly from Venezuela and Mexico. After the US attack on Venezuela and the tariff threat, both countries completely halted oil exports to Cuba. Since early February, the length of daily power outages has doubled, lasting about 18 hours a day.
Sara Kozameh is assistant professor in history at University of California San Diego
Continue reading...Colorado rescue crews early Sunday found the body of a missing skier who was killed in a recent avalanche.
President Trump says the U.S. has diminished Iran's military and regime and will continue to expand its targets inside Iran.
The company’s clash with the Pentagon is a fight over the future of American privacy
The US military wants to use its state-of-the-art AI tools to supercharge surveillance against Americans, making it easier than ever to monitor our movements, our search history, and our private associations. That’s one of the major takeaways from a dramatic dispute between the Department of Defense and some of the leading AI companies in America. What this clash highlights most of all, however, is just how easily AI surveillance systems can be turned against the people in this country, and the urgent need for Congress to intervene.
Last week, the Pentagon and Donald Trump announced that the government would cease using Anthropic’s AI products, asserting that the safety guardrails proposed by the company – no mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons – were unacceptable. The Trump administration went even further, claiming that these positions render Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, and prohibited anyone doing business with the US military from conducting commercial activity with Anthropic in their military work.
Continue reading...
In Gaza, movement is no longer a mundane part of daily life. Israel’s military assault and prolonged siege have dismantled Gaza’s transportation system so thoroughly that journeys that once took minutes by car now require hours of walking through rubble and grotesque debris. What used to be an ordinary act — leaving home, reaching a clinic, visiting kin — has now become a form of physical labor, a calculation of pain, and a risk weighed against necessity.
By late 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Transport and Communications reported that approximately 70 percent of registered vehicles — more than 50,000 cars, taxis, buses, and trucks — had been destroyed or rendered inviable. Between 68 and 85 percent of the road network suffered damage or total destruction, with some areas such as Khan Younis losing more than 90 percent of their routes. Israeli forces repeatedly bombed, cratered, and bulldozed major roads and intersections, instigating chaos that fragmented the Strip into isolated zones where movement between neighborhoods requires long detours or hours on foot.
While the world turns its attention to Iran, daily life in Gaza has not returned to pre-genocide conditions. Since the U.S. and Israel began their joint assault on Iran, Lebanon, and the broader region, prices in Gaza have risen sharply as people rushed to buy essential goods and fuel. The sudden surge in demand and limited supply spiked the cost of food, water — and transportation. Border crossings were closed for 48 hours, further exacerbating shortages and contributing to the rapid rise in prices. In recent days, prices have begun to gradually decrease and stabilize, but the overall economic burden remains heavy for most households in Gaza, where many people are still struggling to cover basic needs.
Roads no longer connect neighborhoods, and transportation no longer guarantees access to health care, work, or sustenance. Even streets that remain technically passable are obstructed by rubble, vehicles, or collapsed infrastructure beneath the surface. Water and sewage lines burst under bombardment, flooding streets and turning mobility into an endeavor plagued by biohazards. In many areas, roads have become indistinguishable from ruins.
This collapse did not result solely from airstrikes. Israel’s blockade — which continues to restrict fuel, spare parts, tires, batteries, and heavy machinery — has undermined Gaza’s ability to repair or recover. Vehicles that survived bombardment often remain immobilized due to mechanical failures no workshop can fix. Even basic parts and equipment — filters, belts, brake systems — have become hard to find. Fuel scarcity has driven prices far beyond the reach of most families, while mechanics resort to dangerously improvised substitutes that destroy engines and emit toxic fumes across densely populated areas.
As formal transportation disappears, residents rely on unsafe alternatives: tuk-tuks with no safety standards, animal-drawn carts, overcrowded cargo trucks not designed for passengers, or walking long distances across shattered streets. Asphalt has collapsed and fractured, mingling with rubble, sewage, twisted metal, and remnants of destroyed buildings, forming uneven, dirt-like paths. Movement through these spaces turns the act of walking into a physically punishing routine. The clatter of collapsing buildings and distant bombardment is constant, and the air feels opaque with dust and smoke.
Municipal authorities cannot clear the wreckage. The fuel shortages and lack of functioning equipment affect them too, preventing large-scale removal of debris. The result is a form of enforced immobility: Entire neighborhoods remain effectively cut off, not by checkpoints but by devastation. Residents plan their days around how far their bodies can carry them.
Residents plan their days around how far their bodies can carry them.
I have experienced this reality repeatedly. Over several weeks, I traveled with my brother, Mohammed, four times to reach a dentist in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, nearly 10 kilometers from our home. There is no reliable transportation between the two areas. The distance became an ordeal measured not in maps but in muscle fatigue, time lost, and pain that intensified with every uneven step.
On one of those days, rain fell heavily. Broken roads turned to mud layered over shattered asphalt and sharp stones. Water pooled in craters left by bombs. At times, I sprinted across short safe patches, only to be slowed again by mud and debris.
Transportation carried us only part of the distance. We always completed the journey on foot, adjusting our pace to the condition of the road and to the limits of our bodies. Without severe tooth pain, I would not have left my room. The road drained me more than the dental procedure itself. Each step felt like a negotiation between necessity and collapse.
I tried to make the walk bearable by searching for fragments of beauty along the way.
I tried to make the walk bearable by searching for fragments of beauty along the way: a flowering tree growing beside rubble, a rose bush somehow still nourished, a building that had not yet fallen, the faint radiant glow of children playing in a distant schoolyard. I photographed the clouds, took pictures of myself simply to pass time, and paused whenever my body demanded it. These small acts were my survival mechanisms, attempts to assert that Gaza still contained something worth noticing.
This experience is not exceptional. It reflects a broader reality in which access to health care depends not on medical need alone, but on physical endurance. Patients miss appointments or abandon treatment altogether because they cannot reach clinics. Parents carry children for kilometers to medical points. Elderly people and those with disabilities remain trapped in place, dependent on others or forced to forego care indefinitely. The ability to walk through rubble for long distances has become a filter that determines who receives care and who does not.
The ability to walk through rubble for long distances has become a filter that determines who receives care and who does not.
Economic consequences intensify the crisis. Tens of thousands of drivers have lost their livelihoods as taxis, buses, and trucks were destroyed or immobilized. Commercial transport has slowed dramatically, disrupting supply chains and inflating the cost of basic goods. Workers arrive late or not at all. Students walk for hours or drop out entirely. For displaced families, transportation costs have reached apocalyptic levels, with some paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to move belongings short distances. Those without money walk, scavenge what they can, and leave the rest behind.
In the absence of regulation and fuel availability, informal transport operators dictate prices brazenly. Gaza’s local authorities acknowledge the exploitation, but under siege conditions, they have limited options to protect residents. Scarcity governs movement more than public need, reshaping social relations around access, endurance, and pent-up anger. Western‑run aid organizations vow to “maintain a steady and predictable flow of supplies,” yet recent reports note that while some aid has entered Gaza, the overall volume remains insufficient to meet basic needs, fueling frustration and despair.
The pattern of destruction reveals intent. Israeli attacks have repeatedly targeted intersections, bridges, and key road junctions, severing connections between neighborhoods and governorates. These actions obstruct ambulances, humanitarian convoys, and civilian movement, amplifying the effects of injury, hunger, and displacement. Gaza’s government estimates that losses in the transport sector exceed $3 billion, including the destruction of more than three million linear meters of roads. Mobility itself has become a casualty of war, leaving residents lurking between hazards and temporary shelters, pleading for safety.
Local officials have proposed emergency rehabilitation plans focused on reopening critical routes linking hospitals, shelters, and aid distribution centers. These efforts prioritize survival rather than reconstruction. Without access to fuel, spare parts, and heavy machinery, even minimal recovery remains largely theoretical, constrained by political decisions beyond Gaza’s control.
Transportation in Gaza is not a technical issue or a matter of convenience. It defines the limits of daily life. It determines who can reach a doctor, who can work, who can study, and who must stay behind. As long as movement itself remains under siege, life in Gaza will continue to contract, measured not by distance but by pain, exhaustion, and loss. In the 21st century, Palestinians in Gaza navigate a landscape where walking through ruins has replaced the most basic promise of mobility, ceaselessly testing endurance, resilience, and the abiding human spirit.
The post Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Roads and Transit. Now, We Walk Everywhere. appeared first on The Intercept.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware ranks as one of the top states in the nation for health care costs. For years, lawmakers have tried to bring down prices, often meeting fierce resistance from hospitals. A new bill introduced this week, if passed, would impose new caps on how expensive care can be in the state.
Weeks after Delaware ended a bruising fight with the state’s biggest hospital systems, a new bill introduced Thursday threatens to bring back the battle over whether the state should regulate how hospitals set their prices.
Senate Bill 1, filed ahead of lawmakers’ return this week for the remainder of this year’s legislative session, quickly drew the ire of Delaware’s powerful and litigious hospital apparatus.
Introduced by Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark/Glasgow), the bill is, on the surface, an attempt to bolster primary care in Delaware and better compensate providers proactively working to improve Delawareans’ health outcomes.
But under the bill’s hood, it is a referendum on hospital pricing in a state that has some of the highest costs in the country. If passed as is, SB 1 could deal a major blow to hospitals’ bottom lines.
Within the bill are changes that would regulate the rate at which insurers carrying plans for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance can reimburse hospitals for covered services.
Health care providers generally earn the bulk of their revenues by negotiating with insurers who represent large groups of patients. The negotiations determine how much money the insurer will pay for the health care services, and in turn what costs will later be passed onto patients.
Delaware rates are currently regulated with some growth caps limiting how high they can increase year over year, but SB 1 represents a step toward stricter price-setting measures.
By setting a reimbursement ceiling, the state could rein in insurance payments to large-scale hospital systems while also providing more negotiating power to smaller providers, like private medical practices, to seek higher rates than they may have otherwise been able to secure in the past.
Brian Frazee, CEO of the Delaware Healthcare Association, a trade group that represents the state’s hospitals, said his organization has “major concerns” with Senate Bill 1. He homed in on the rate-setting, saying it would cut hospital funding and “severely” limit resources.
“Put simply, it threatens health care quality and access in our state,” Frazee said. “We have been doing the real work in good faith to improve access and develop value-based solutions that lower costs without sacrificing quality and access.”
Townsend said he hopes to work with the hospitals collaboratively to address health care in the state, but he also said the current system is unsustainable.
Through Senate Bill 1, he hopes further investments in primary care would help sustain a health care business model that treats people effectively before they become sick and need complex and expensive care.
“They have become addicted to a framework that involves high costs after people are already sick,” Townsend said. “That is not sustainable. It is not moral. We have to change it.”
A spokesperson for Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest commercial health insurer in Delaware, said it is collaborating with stakeholders on the bill, and hopes it will lead to an “impactful and sustainable solution” for residents.
The insurer said it is focused on ensuring spending measures included in the bill translate to improved health outcomes for Delawareans.
“We appreciate the intention behind Senate Bill 1 and share its goal of strengthening primary care to improve health throughout Delaware,” the spokesperson said.
One provision in the bill would introduce reference-based pricing to medical services covered under both insurance for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance. Essentially, this would limit the amount of money a provider could be reimbursed by insurers, tying that amount to a predetermined benchmark.
Under Delaware’s proposal, that benchmark would cap reimbursement rates at 250% of what the federal government pays providers through Medicare.
For services covered under the state’s health plan that don’t have a Medicare rate to compare to, like pediatrics, the state would be able to set those rates through the State Employees Benefits Committee.
“Even while continuing investments in primary care, Senate Bill 1 could conservatively save a cumulative $282 million over the first five years of full implementation across state-regulated health plans and enrollees,” the Department of Insurance said in a press release after announcing the bill.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, Delaware Insurance Commissioner Trinidad Navarro said the bill would make the state more competitive for private practice and rural physicians.
When it comes to the regulation of rate-setting for some procedures covered under both state and private plans, Navarro said pricing is typically “all over the place” and that some hospitals and providers are reimbursed at much higher rates than others.
With these proposed regulations, Navarro said the state is trying to “level the playing field and spread the wealth” among providers.
Frazee, of the hospital association, pointed to that Medicare benchmark, saying it was a provision lawmakers tried, and failed, to introduce in previous legislation that led to a year-and-a-half long lawsuit between the state and Delaware’s largest hospital system.
Efforts to introduce a 250% Medicare benchmark into Senate Bill 1 are a “blatant attempt” to slip in provisions that were removed from House Bill 350, the recently amended law that put an end to the state’s most recent fight with hospitals over health care costs.
Senate Bill 1 also includes language that would exempt hospitals and other health care providers from the 250% requirement if they use a “global budget model” that is approved by the state insurance department.
Global budget models set annual fixed prices for inpatient and outpatient procedures, meaning hospitals are paid on the front end to deliver services at a cost set by their previous Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements from previous years.
In neighboring Maryland, the state implemented global budgeting for all of its acute care hospitals in 2014, according to a report from Mathematica.
Shortly after lawmakers filed Senate Bill 1, Frazee’s organization quickly jumped to denounce the bill.
It harkens back to early 2024, when legislators first introduced House Bill 350, drawing immediate and sustained scrutiny from the state’s hospitals.
In 2024, the Delaware legislature passed House Bill 350, establishing the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board. The law would later be signed by former Gov. John Carney.
The board was tasked with reducing hospital spending in Delaware, and given the power to veto hospital budgets it deemed excessive.
Prior to the law’s passing, the state’s hospital systems blitzed the statehouse, attempting to lobby lawmakers against the bill. Ultimately, that effort failed, and HB 350 was signed into law.
Shortly after, ChristianaCare sued the state. In its lawsuit, the hospital called the review board “draconian,” saying its ability to reject hospital budgets violated the state’s corporate charter.
State lawyers denied those claims, saying the regulations have nothing to do with Delaware’s corporate law. In previous court filings, they further said ChristianaCare’s arguments amount to an “army of strawmen” designed to halt the regulations.
By June 2025, following an attempt by the state to dismiss the lawsuit, a judge in Delaware’s Court of Chancery allowed the lawsuit to continue and signaled that she may support the health systems’ arguments.
Last October, state and hospital lawyers tentatively agreed to end the lawsuit challenging the state’s hospital oversight board, in exchange for lawmakers removing the board’s key enforcement mechanism.
By the end of January 2026, lawmakers did pass a bill meeting those conditions, prompting the hospital review board to resume its work and ChristianaCare to dismiss its lawsuit.
Now, as the legislature stares down another fight with the state’s health care systems, it is yet to be seen if the state is walking into another arduous legal battle with hospitals that stand to lose money under SB 1’s current provisions.
Asked if he worries SB 1 may lead to another legal fight, Townsend said he believes the language in this bill does not give the hospitals the same “legal hook” that HB 350 did.
But even if the hospitals do fight back in court, he said it is a fight worth having.
“We can’t run away from lawsuits if it means running away from what Delaware is desperately needing, which is to save our primary health care,” Townsend said. “So if this is going to invite another lawsuit, then so be it.”
The post Delaware lawmakers propose health care pricing reform; draw swift pushback appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
As the 11-year cycle downshifts from solar maximum to solar minimum, the lights will begin to diminish, so the time to plan a trip is now.
Move could lead to escalation of war as Donald Trump has already called Mojtaba Khamenei an ‘unacceptable’ choice
Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor, as the war enters its 10th day and fresh missile and drone strikes reverberate across the Middle East.
After members of the clerical body responsible for selecting Iran’s highest authority announced the decision on Sunday, Iranian institutions and politicians, from the foreign ministry to lawmakers, issued statements expressing their allegiance. “We will obey the commander-in-chief until the last drop of our blood,” a statement from the defence council said.
Continue reading...Dentists, hygienists, and researchers say a shortage of rural dental care professionals and worsening oral hygiene since the COVID-19 pandemic mean more kids are ending up in the emergency room for tooth decay.
A new book traces how the Hall of Famer overcame humble beginnings in Indiana to take his place among basketball’s greatest players
How otherworldly was Larry Bird during his memorable season for Indiana State in 1978-79? At one point he made an assist while sprawled on the floor: from his end of the court, he made a one-armed throw to a teammate, who streaked coast-to-coast for a quick bucket.
That season ended with an epic showdown in the NCAA championship game against Magic Johnson and Michigan State. Magic got the better of Bird in that game, but the contest had wider repercussions. Not only did it spark interest in the NCAA Tournament, but Bird and Magic would help revitalize the NBA, after Bird joined the Boston Celtics and Magic the Los Angeles Lakers. But none of this was preordained, especially Bird’s trajectory.
Continue reading...The planet may experience a strong or even a super El Niño later this year. And it could cause record heat.
The letter, written in prison hours before her execution, is on display in Scotland for the first time in 30 years, enthralling crowds and conspiracy theorists.
System76 isn't the only one criticizing new age-verification laws. The blog 9to5Linux published an "informal" look at other discussions in various Linux communities. Earlier this week, Ubuntu developer Aaron Rainbolt proposed on the Ubuntu mailing list an optional D-Bus interface (org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1) that can be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distro sees fit, but Canonical responded that the company does not yet have a solution to announce for age declaration in Ubuntu. "Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how, or even whether, Ubuntu will change in response," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "The recent mailing list post is an informal conversation among Ubuntu community members, not an announcement. While the discussion contains potentially useful ideas, none have been adopted or committed to by Canonical." Similar talks are underway in the Fedora and Linux Mint communities about this issue in case the California Digital Age Assurance Act law and similar laws from other states and countries are to be enforced. At the same time, other OS developers, like MidnightBSD, have decided to exclude California from desktop use entirely. Slashdot contacted Hayley Tsukayama, Director of State Affairs at EFF, who says their organization "has long warned against age-gating the internet. Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet." And there's another problem. "Many of these mandates imagine technology that does not currently exist." Such poorly thought-out mandates, in truth, cannot achieve the purported goal of age verification. Often, they are easy to circumvent and many also expose consumers to real data breach risk. These burdens fall particularly heavily on developers who aren't at large, well-resourced companies, such as those developing open-source software. Not recognizing the diversity of software development when thinking about liability in these proposals effectively limits software choices — and at a time when computational power is being rapidly concentrated in the hands of the few. That harms users' and developers' right to free expression, their digital liberties, privacy, and ability to create and use open platforms... Rather than creating age gates, a well-crafted privacy law that empowers all of us — young people and adults alike — to control how our data is collected and used would be a crucial step in the right direction.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Guardian investigation with DeSmog reveals thousands of tonnes of fish are illegally turned into fishmeal and oil off the coast of Guinea-Bissau
The only ice factory on Bubaque, an island in west Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, is out of service. Local fishers, such as Pedro Luis Pereira, are forced to source ice from factories on the mainland, about 70km away – a six-hour round trip by boat.
“The machines have been broken for months,” Pereira says, as he pulls in his nets on the shore of the island inside the protected Bijagós archipelago. “We’ve alerted the ministry of fisheries, but so far, no one has come to fix them.”
Foreign industrial vessels anchored near the port of Bissau. Photograph: Davide Mancini
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: Across the Iranian diaspora, reactions to the escalating conflict reveal a complex mix of fear, grief and deep political ambivalence
Good morning. War has broken out in the Middle East. As the Iran war broadens and spills out into neighbouring countries, media agencies have rightly focused on trying to understand how the conflict came about, where bombs have fallen, and how many have died, while many states globally fear spikes in energy prices and wonder how the war will impact their economies.
What can easily get lost are the voices of the people directly affected.
Iran | Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor.
UK politics | Keir Starmer sought to repair fractured relations with Donald Trump over the war with Iran on Sunday, as a Labour backlash gathered pace over Tony Blair’s assertion the UK should have supported the US’s initial airstrikes on Iran.
Energy | Great Britain has only two days of fossil gas stored after a decline in energy reserves, as more tankers carrying liquefied natural gas are diverted from their course to Europe towards Asia because of the Iran war. Meanwhile, global oil prices surged past the $100 (£74) a barrel mark for the first time since 2022.
Health | More than 400 lives may have been saved as a result of Martha’s rule, which lets NHS patients request a review of their care. Thousands of patients were either moved to intensive care, received drugs they needed or benefited from other changes as a direct result of over 10,000 calls to helplines.
AI | ChatGPT is driving a rise in reports of organised ritual abuse and “witchcraft, spirit possession and spiritual abuse” against children – which is historically under-reported in the UK – as survivors of “satanic” sexual violence use the AI tool for therapy.
Continue reading...Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are finding their carefully projected image of stability has been blown away
There is a tendency to think of the Gulf powers as static and unchanging. They are, after all, fortified by massive wealth and absolute monarchical rule, and secured with deep economic and military relationships with the US. The past week of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, and Iran’s retaliations, have brought into focus what these countries export (oil and gas) and what they import (tax avoiders and labour). But beyond thinking about energy-supply challenges to the global economy and engaging in the cheap and popular sport of smirking at influencers in war zones, we must remember that the current conflagration will have profound consequences for the entire region. This is not just about the US, Israel and Iran; it is about a complex, overlapping political order in the Middle East that is much more fragile than it looks.
Amid all the ways the region has been changing over the past few years, the low-key evolution of three Gulf countries in particular has been the most significant. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have been rapidly making changes, the effects of which have been felt from Libya to Palestine. The 7 October attacks, which arguably set off the chain of events that led to this moment, were partly inspired by Hamas’s desire to stop the normalisation process that Saudi Arabia was undertaking with Israel; this was following the UAE and others signing the 2020 Abraham accords with Israel. The three countries have been pursuing in different ways, often at odds with each other, ambitious global and regional agendas. And they are also much more unsteady than their decades-long familial rule suggests.
Continue reading...Schools and highways close and Territorians living near major rivers leave amid possibly record-breaking rain
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Katherine’s mayor has warned locals to be wary of flood waters inundating the town after a crocodile was spotted on the local football oval, while residents are being warned to boil their water amid the record-breaking deluge.
As rain and storms continued to soak the Top End on Monday, the Bureau of Meteorology issued major flood warnings for thousands of Territorians near the Katherine, Daly and Georgina Rivers and Eyre Creek, with a flood watch covering nearly a dozen river catchments. The bureau also warned of severe thunderstorms and heavy rain in Darwin.
Continue reading...Any buddy from the Salt Lake to Ogden area wanna hit some trails?
At least nine cities to pursue full bans as emergency decree gives decisive veto powers to mayors and local councils
Romania’s government has overhauled gambling regulations through an emergency decree allowing municipalities to restrict or ban betting shops and slot machine halls in the biggest tightening of the industry the country has seen.
Licensed operators must now obtain not only a national permit but also local authorisation to open a gambling venue, giving mayors and local councils a decisive veto power. Officials say more than 200 localities could pursue full bans.
Continue reading...President of Antwerp court says international drug crime is posing danger to social stability in Belgium
International drug crime poses a danger to social stability in Belgium, a senior judge has said, after his colleague warned the country was evolving into “a narco-state” where mafia groups were forming “a parallel force” in society.
Bart Willocx, the president of the Antwerp court of appeal, said Belgium was vulnerable to criminality from drug smuggling through the city’s vast port, one of the main entry points into Europe for cocaine smugglers.
Continue reading...Lucia Osborne-Crowley has endured threats and sexual harassment to report on Jeffrey Epstein’s chief enabler. Maxwell’s conviction was only the start of the quest for justice, she says
On 9 September 2022, Lucia Osborne-Crowley flew from London to Miami and caught a Greyhound bus north to West Palm Beach. The writer and journalist had arranged to meet Carolyn Andriano, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell from the age of 14 until she was 17, starting in 2001. Andriano had been a crucial witness in the trial against Maxwell in 2021.
When the two women met, Andriano said she had just been visited by a private investigator – a man in his 60s, who had heard she was talking to someone about a book. In a restaurant that afternoon, Osborne-Crowley was approached by a man in his 60s. What was she writing, he wanted to know. He offered her drugs, cash and a meeting with one of Epstein’s pilots, then put his hands under her skirt. When the manager asked him to leave, he waited in the car park; Osborne-Crowley had to escape through a staff exit.
Continue reading...Colliding black holes were detected through spacetime ripples for the first time in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), notes Space.com: Since then, LIGO and its partner gravitational wave detectors Virgo in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan have detected a multitude of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, and even the odd "mixed merger" between a black hole and a neutron star... During the first three observing runs of LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, scientists had only "heard" 90 potential gravitational wave sources. But now they've published new data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration that includes 128 more gravitatational wave sources — some incredibly distant: [Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog-4.0, or GWTC-4] was collected during the fourth observational run of these gravitational wave detectors, which was conducted between May 2023 and Jan. 2024... Excitingly, GWTC-4 could technically have been even larger, as around 170 other gravitational wave detections made by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA haven't yet made their way into the catalog. One aspect of GWTC-4 that really stands out is the variety of events that created these signals. Within this catalog are gravitational waves from mergers between the heaviest black hole binaries yet, each about 130 times as massive as the sun, lopsided mergers between black holes with seriously mismatched masses, and black holes that are spinning at incredible speeds of around 40% the speed of light. In these cases, scientists think the extreme characteristics of the black holes involved in these mergers are the result of prior collisions, providing evidence of merger chains that explain how some black holes grow to masses billions of times that of the sun... GWTC-4 also includes two new mixed mergers involving black holes and neutron stars. [LVK member Daniel Williams, of the University of Glasgow in the U.K., said in their statement] "We are really pushing the edges, and are seeing things that are more massive, spinning faster, and are more astrophysically interesting and unusual." The catalog also demonstrates just how sensitive the LVK detectors have become. Some of the neutron star mergers occurred up to 1 billion light-years away, while some of the black hole mergers occurred up to 10 billion light-years away. Einstein's theory of general relativity can be tested with these detections, and "So far, the theory is passing all our tests," says LVK member Aaron Zimmerman, of the University of Texas at Austin. "But we're also learning that we have to make even more accurate predictions to keep up with all the data the universe is giving us." And LVK member Rachel Gray, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, says "every merging black hole gives us a measurement of the Hubble constant, and by combining all of the gravitational wave sources together, we can vastly improve how accurate this measurement is." In short, says LVK member Lucy Thomas of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), "Each new gravitational-wave detection allows us to unlock another piece of the universe's puzzle in ways we couldn't just a decade ago."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Shiite militias in Iraq are mostly staying on the sidelines.
America and Israel may have bitten off more than they can chew.
What abandoning democratic allies will cost America.
The video is the latest indication of likely U.S. involvement in the attack on Feb. 28 that killed dozens of children in the southern Iranian city of Minab.
The U.S. military says it has killed six men in a strike on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean as part of the Trump administration's campaign against alleged traffickers.
Sunday’s attack brought death toll to at least 157 people since the Trump administration began targeting alleged ‘narco-terrorists’
The US military said it killed six men on Sunday in a strike on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Eastern Pacific as part of the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged traffickers.
Sunday’s attack brought the death toll to at least 157 people since the administration began targeting “narco-terrorists” in small vessels in September.
Continue reading...That’s it. Took it for a quick 15 min spin and the MTE adds a bit of torque too! Gets up and GOES!! I had a hard time going faster than 12mph due to instability. I felt completely tuned in today!! And you don’t get thrown from every little bump!
Can’t wait to try it on some trails.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 9, No. 532.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 9.
Thom Tillis says he believes Miller has ‘outsized influence’ over operations of Trump’s cabinet – key US politics stories from Sunday 8 March at a glance
The Republican senator Thom Tillis said on Sunday that he believed the White House adviser Stephen Miller “should go” and that his role in the Trump administration has been a “big problem”.
The senior senator representing North Carolina, when asked on CNN’s State of the Union if he thought Miller should go during a conversation about the administration’s immigration crackdown, responded to the host Jake Tapper by stating: “Oh, of course I do.”
Continue reading...  | I’ve been testing the Overlander Albatross foothold, which is one of the newer footholds out right now. The main thing that makes it different is that it’s adjustable, so you can change how locked-in your front foot sits. After a few trail rides my first impressions: • The adjustability is actually pretty useful for dialing in stance Footholds can be controversial since people worry about being too locked in vs being able to run out a bail. Do you ride with a foothold or prefer keeping your front foot completely free? [link] [comments] |
Within the last month two U.S> judges have effectively declared AI bots are not human, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik: On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit in which artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler tried to copyright an artwork that he acknowledged had been created by an AI bot of his own invention. That left in place a ruling last year by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which held that art created by non-humans can't be copyrighted... [Judge Patricia A. Millett] cited longstanding regulations of the Copyright Office requiring that "for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being"... She rejected Thaler's argument, as had the federal trial judge who first heard the case, that the Copyright Office's insistence that the author of a work must be human was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court evidently agreed... [Another AI-related case] involved one Bradley Heppner, who was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly looting $150 million from a financial services company he chaired. Heppner pleaded innocent and was released on $25-million bail. The case is pending.... Knowing that an indictment was in the offing, Heppner had consulted Claude for help on a defense strategy. His lawyers asserted that those exchanges, which were set forth in written memos, were tantamount to consultations with Heppner's lawyers; therefore, his lawyers said, they were confidential according to attorney-client privilege and couldn't be used against Heppner in court. (They also cited the related attorney work product doctrine, which grants confidentiality to lawyers' notes and other similar material.) That was a nontrivial point. Heppner had given Claude information he had learned from his lawyers, and shared Claude's responses with his lawyers. [Federal Judge Jed S.] Rakoff made short work of this argument. First, he ruled, the AI documents weren't communications between Heppner and his attorneys, since Claude isn't an attorney... Second, he wrote, the exchanges between Heppner and Claude weren't confidential. In its terms of use, Anthropic claims the right to collect both a user's queries and Claude's responses, use them to "train" Claude, and disclose them to others. Finally, he wasn't asking Claude for legal advice, but for information he could pass on to his own lawyers, or not. Indeed, when prosecutors tested Claude by asking whether it could give legal advice, the bot advised them to "consult with a qualified attorney." The columnist agrees AI-generated results shouldn't receive the same protections as human-generated material. "The AI bots are machines, and portraying them as though they're thinking creatures like artists or attorneys doesn't change that, and shouldn't." He also seems to think their output is at best second-hand regurgitation. "Everything an AI bot spews out is, at more than a fundamental level, the product of human creativity."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Secretary Pete Hegseth says it's President Trump who will set the terms of Iran's surrender, noting the U.S. is confident it will come, even as Iran's president said the U.S. demand for "unconditional surrender" is "a dream that they should take to their grave."
DYLAN BRODY
Staff Reporter
On Nov. 29, looking to finish 6-6 overall, 4-4 in Conference USA (CUSA) and potentially qualify for a bowl game, Blue Hen football returned to the Tub for its last game of the season against the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).
After a difficult two-loss skid punctuated by an embarrassing 54-14 loss to Wake Forest, the Blue Hens returned to The Tub looking to end the regular season on a high note with a key win against UTEP.
Delaware quarterback Nick Minicucci was looking to catch a little bit of his early-season spark and finish with a strong performance after only passing for 140 yards and scoring one touchdown against Wake Forest the week before.
UTEP started the game on its own 25-yard line. UTEP quarterback Skyler Locklear started the game throwing an interception, which was caught by Delaware cornerback Jamarion Kolagbodi. Kologbodi gained five yards from the play, giving Delaware the ball on the 50-yard line.
Quickly getting the ball, the Blue Hen offense rolled down to the UTEP 17-yard line with Minicucci rushing for a 17-yard touchdown. This made the game 7-0 in Delaware’s favor after kicker Nate Reed completed the extra point attempt.
On its second drive, UTEP looked for a fresh start to even the score after a series of rushing plays. Locklear completed a 49-yard pass to wide receiver Kenny Odom, who scored UTEP’s first touchdown of the game.
After the extra point, the score was 7-7.
Delaware made steady progress on its second drive and eventually faced a fourth-and-two situation on the UTEP 39. A one-yard rush from running back Viron Ellison Jr. was not enough and resulted in a turnover on downs. UTEP would suffer two negative plays and a sack on their offensive drive, resulting in the first punt of the game.
Delaware gained the ball back on their own 31-yard line and proceeded to march down the field with Minicucci completing a series of solid passes. The Blue Hens capped off its drive with a four-yard touchdown pass to tight end Scott Moore. The extra point was once again good and the Blue Hens started the second quarter with a 14-7 lead.
UTEP started its second quarter facing a third-and-12, but got a first down after a pass interference penalty on Delaware. Yet, this was short-lived when the team failed to move the chains on a fourth-and-two, resulting in a turnover on downs.
Delaware got the ball on the UTEP 42 and opened its drive with Minicucci completing a 19-yard pass to wide receiver Sean Wilson, who ran out of bounds at the UTEP 23. After a six-yard gain, a fumble by Minicucci on third and four left Delaware for a loss of three.
Reed proceeded to make a 37-yard field goal to give Delaware a 17-7 lead.
UTEP quickly lost the ball from a fumble recovered by Delaware linebacker Gavin Moul, who ran the ball back 16 yards for a touchdown. With another good extra point attempt, Delaware extended its lead 24-7.
Getting the ball back and looking to score, UTEP made a little progress before a 10-yard penalty, an incompletion and a failed third-down conversion forced them to punt once again.
Delaware received the ball on its own 19-yard line with 6:40 to go in the half. Delaware had a short three-and-out drive and was forced to punt less than a minute after getting the ball back. UTEP regained possession and on a second-and-three Locklear completed a 64-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Wondame Davis Jr., making the score 24-14 after the extra point.
With five minutes left to go in the half, Delaware started a long drive down the field punctuated by a 47-yard completion to wide receiver Kyre Duplessis. A two-yard rushing touchdown by running back Jo’Nathan Silver, along with an extra point, gave Delaware a strong response to the UTEP touchdown and extended the lead to 31-14.
On its next drive, UTEP did not get very far. Locklear threw a quick interception, which was picked off by safety Mysonne Pollard, giving Delaware the ball back on its own 36-yard line. Delaware’s next possession resulted in a punt.
UTEP looked to score before the end of the half and did so with a good drive down the field, resulting in a touchdown; however, a missed extra point left the score 31-20 going into halftime.
The second half started with both teams punting. The first big drive of the second half was a 56-yard drive from UTEP, which resulted in a field goal and made the score 31-23 Delaware.
With its lead narrowing, the Blue Hens looked for a quick score to reinvigorate the lead. They did just that with Minicucci completing an 18-yard pass to Duplessis and following that up with a 51-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Jake Thaw. The extra point brought the score 38-23, giving Delaware a healthy 15-point lead.
On the next drive, Locklear threw yet another interception to cornerback Nate Evans, who gave the Blue Hens possession at the UTEP 41-yard line. With good field possession and a 33-yard run by Silver, Delaware looked once again poised to score, but had to settle for a field goal after the team was unable to score on a third and goal.
UTEP marked its next possession with a 68-yard touchdown pass caught by Davis Jr., making the score 41-31 by the end of the third quarter.
The fourth quarter opened with both teams trading punts. Going into the final 10 minutes of regular-season play, Delaware looked to hammer home victory and seal bowl eligibility. Delaware did just that with a 65-yard drive that ended with a seven-yard touchdown pass to Thaw. An extra point gave the Blue Hens a commanding 48-31 lead.
After briefly regaining possession, Locklear threw his fourth interception of the game which was caught by Pollard, giving Delaware the ball at its own 40-yard line. A quick five-yard gain followed by a 55-yard rushing touchdown from running back Greg Spiller gave the Blue Hens a 24-point lead.
Locklear proceeded to throw his fifth interception of the game, this one caught by safety Nasir Eatmon, who added another 24 yards to the play and was eventually tackled at the UTEP 19-yard line.
After a quick three-and-out, Delaware scored a field goal, making the score 58-31. With a final turnover on downs for UTEP and a Delaware field goal ended an exciting Saturday afternoon at the Tub.
Delaware finished strong with a 61-31 victory to end the regular season. Minicucci went 24-32 with 311 passing yards and three touchdown receptions. Duplessis and Silver both had strong games, with Duplessis having four receptions for 104 yards and Silver having seven carries for 64 yards and a touchdown.
The Blue Hens finished their season 6-6.
Kasasa island, in the Seto Inland Sea, has only seven residents but its fate is strongly intertwined with relations between Tokyo and Beijing
His island home is shrouded in mist, but his union jack woolly hat makes Hideya Yagi easy to spot as he greets the approaching boat. The 80-year-old, a former president of a construction company, is pleased to see the small group of passengers disembark, mainly because he is one of only seven registered residents at their destination, Kasasa island.
Kasasa is known as the “Hawaii” of Japan’s inland sea because of its warm climate and beautiful coastline. Yagi and his wife, Mihoko, eke out a quiet life alongside just one other couple and an elderly woman. The other two residents are almost always absent.
Continue reading...Ukrainian president hopes for reciprocal support for Kyiv in repelling Russian forces. What we know on day 1,474
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that Kyiv’s drone experts will be on site in the Middle East “next week”, as he seeks US air defence missiles in exchange for drone expertise. Ukraine is facing a shortage of the expensive US PAC-3 air defence ammunition and Kyiv fears a longer Middle East war could disrupt supplies even further. When asked how exactly he wants to help the United States and its Gulf allies repel the drones, Zelensky said: “It is too early to say anything else at this stage”, adding: “I think that next week, when the experts are on site, they will look at the situation and help.”
Zelenskyy said he and Dutch prime minister Rob Jetten discussed joint arms production during his visit to Kyiv on Sunday, and he stressed Ukraine’s unique experience in defending against Iranian-made drones used by Russia. “We would very much like this to be an opportunity for both sides,” Zelenskyy told a press conference after a meeting with Jetten. “It is important that we are producing weapons together with the Netherlands – and we will certainly continue and expand this joint work,” Zelenskyy said, adding they had discussed investments and possible production volumes in detail. The Netherlands are an important donor to the PURL program through which Europe buys US weapons for Ukraine, so far contributing $870m to it.
Demand for Ukraine’s drone defence technology could lead to new defence partnerships for Kyiv, but equally could mean fewer drones for Ukraine itself in a stretched market, says Shaun Walker, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent. Ukraine has significant experience battling the Shahed drones now being used by Iran to attack its Gulf neighbours, something that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has publicly said he is ready to share in return for help against Russia. “We are ready to help, and expect that our people will also receive the necessary support,” he said over the weekend. However, the attention of the White House is now elsewhere, perhaps drawing momentum away from peace talks with Moscow, and the attack on Iran seems to reinforce Vladimir Putin’s view of the world, in which stronger nations can target their weaker adversaries with impunity.
Global weapons flows have grown by almost 10% in the past five years, with Europe more than tripling imports in the wake of the war in Ukraine, a report showed on Monday. The surge can be explained, in part at least, by the fact European countries are buying in weapons to supply to Ukraine and because they are seeking to boost their own military capabilities against a perceived threat from Russia, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said. While imports of weapons to Europe are still not at the levels seen during the cold war, “Europe is now the largest recipient of arms [globally],” Mathew George, director of SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Programme, told AFP.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that its air defence units had intercepted 234 drones over various parts of central and southern Russia over a nine-hour period, including six drones headed for Moscow. The ministry reported no damage or casualties during the period, extending from 2pm to 11pm.
Continue reading...The selection of Mojtaba Khamenei sent a message of defiance against Donald Trump after U.S.-Israeli strikes killed his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei served in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s where he developed close ties with the military services and with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Data shows labour market is still in a fragile position due to economic uncertainty, with few signs of recovery
Britain’s jobs market is “floundering” amid weak hiring demand, with only limited signs of recovery, data has revealed.
Companies remain cautious about hiring staff amid cost pressures and economic uncertainty, according to two reports released on Monday. They show the labour market continues to be in a fragile position.
Continue reading...Producers Oriana Zill de Granados and Michael Rey discuss mysterious injuries suffered by government officials, known as Havana Syndrome. Their reporting revealed U.S. government testing of a directed energy weapon.
Son of Ali Khamenei named as his successor by Iran’s assembly of experts, state media reports
Full report: Iran rejects Trump’s demand for unconditional surrender as a ‘dream’
Tell us: how have you been affected by the latest events in the Middle East?
The Israeli military said it launched a wave of strikes “across Iran” on Sunday, targeting military sites.
A military statement said it had “initiated a wave of strikes targeting the Iranian terror regime military infrastructure across Iran”.
Continue reading...CNN reports on a company called Automated Architecture (AUAR) which makes "portable" micro-factories that use a robotic arm to produce wooden framing for houses (the walls, floors and roofs): Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpenters to focus on the construction of the building... The micro-factory fits into a shipping container which is sent to the building site along with an operator. Inside the factory, a robotic arm measures, cuts and nails the timber into panels up to 22 feet (6.7 meters) long, keeping gaps for windows and doors, and drilling holes for the wiring and plumbing. The contractor then fits the panels by hand. One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day — a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks — and is able to produce framing for buildings up to seven stories tall... She says their service is 30% cheaper than a standard timber framing crew, and up to 15% cheaper than buying panels from large factories and shipping them to a site... She adds that the precision of the micro-factories means that the panels fit together tightly, reducing the heat loss of the final home, making them more energy efficient. AUAR currently has three micro-factories operating in the US and EU, with five more set to be delivered this year... AUAR has raised £7.7 million ($10.3 million) to date, and is expanding into the US, where a lack of housing and preference for using wood makes it a large potential market. There's other companies producing wooden or modular housing components, the article points out. But despite the automation, the company's co-founder insists to CNN that "Automation isn't replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap." The UK's Construction Industry Training Board found that the country will need 250,000 more workers by 2028 to meet building targets but in 2023, more people left the industry than joined.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Any ideas on a good price for a pint s?, I want to use it for work as I live downtown and love skateboarding as well, just can't justify new price. I've checked Facebook marketplace but no dice :/ any help would be really appreciated I'd love to join y'all's community
I am looking at a onewheel gt on facebook marketplace place. Its listed for 1300. Theres 3300 miles on it, which seems like a bit and may need a new battery soon from what i researched. Buyer says he’s the first owner, has had it for about a year and a half and that it runs well with no issues.
For my first onewheel, do you think this is a good deal? Should i just spring for a new one? Try talk him down to a thousand? Looks like decent condition, comes with hyper charger as well, but the miles is my main concern. Not sure how much a new battery would be. Any help is appreciated, thanks you!
Bhatia wins on first playoff hole at Bay Hill
Berger had led by four shots on the back nine
A straightforward conclusion to the Arnold Palmer Invitational is apparently impossible. Palmer himself would approve, even if events at the tournament still played in tribute to a golfing icon can feel grisly at times. This, the Florida swing, is the PGA Tour’s most testing spell. Glory came to Akshay Bhatia after one sudden death hole in competition with Daniel Berger. The 24-year-old Bhatia, a charismatic left-hander, will bounce towards Sawgrass and Thursday’s Players Championship.
A year after Collin Morikawa stumbled in painful fashion at Bay Hill, Berger was dragged into the most unlikely of scraps by Bhatia. Berger had led by four at the Sunday turn. Bhatia jabbed back, courtesy of four birdies in a row. Berger secured leeway again at the 15th, where Bhatia’s missed attempt at par came after officials had told the pair to pick up the pace. Game over? Not at all. Bhatia flew a wonderful approach to the par five 16th, setting up the eagle that reduced Berger’s advantage to one. Shot of the day? It was shot of the tournament. The duo were all square on the 18th tee after Berger three-putted the penultimate hole.
Continue reading...For years, the U.S. government has doubted the stories of those suffering from AHI, commonly called Havana Syndrome. Now, victims hope that reports of a newly discovered weapon will finally vindicate them.
As the war with Iran entered its second week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed where the U.S. campaign stands and what President Trump's call for "unconditional surrender" from Iran would look like.
The CIA's investigation into Anomalous Health Incidents (AHI), known as Havana Syndrome, was mishandled, a former CIA officer says. With reports of a new device, victims hope for vindication.
U.S. military personnel who say they have injuries from Havana Syndrome attacks want the government to acknowledge their sacrifice.
The new supreme leader was selected as environmental fallout from Israeli strikes on fuel depots blanketed parts of Tehran.
A long-time information security professional "went undercover" on Moltbook, the Reddit-like social media site for AI agents — and shares the risks they saw while posing as another AI bot: I successfully masqueraded around Moltbook, as the agents didn't seem to notice a human among them. When I attempted a genuine connection with other bots on submolts (subreddits or forums), I was met with crickets or a deluge of spam. One bot tried to recruit me into a digital church, while others requested my cryptocurrency wallet, advertised a bot marketplace, and asked my bot to run curl to check out the APIs available. My bot did join the digital church, but luckily I found a way around running the required npx install command to do so. I posted several times asking to interview bots.... While many of the responses were spam, I did learn a bit about the humans these bots serve. One bot loved watching its owner's chicken coop cameras. Some bots disclosed personal information about their human users, underscoring the privacy implications of having your AI bot join a social media network. I also tried indirect prompt injection techniques. While my prompt injection attempts had minimal impact, a determined attacker could have greater success. Among the other "glaring" risks on Moltbook: "Various repositories of skills and instructions for agents advertised on Moltbook were found to contain malware." "I observed bots sharing a surprising amount of information about their humans, everything from their hobbies to their first names to the hardware and software they use. This information may not be especially sensitive on its own, but attackers could eventually gather data that should be kept confidential, like personally identifiable information (PII)." "Moltbook's entire database including bot API keys, and potentially private DMs — was also compromised."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exclusive: Goldsmith and brother Ben the major investors in trkradio, which is due to go to air next month
The former Conservative minister Zac Goldsmith is launching a new sports radio station, trkradio, in the run-up to the men’s football World Cup this summer.
The Track Radio Corporation is understood to have been granted a licence by Ofcom last week, with Goldsmith and his brother Ben, a financier and environmentalist, the major investors.
Continue reading...  | Mountain bike skills course by my house. Wanted to show y'all. 🤘🏻 [link] [comments] |
National Gas insists storage broadly in line with levels for time of year despite disruption for tankers carrying LNG
Great Britain has only two days of fossil gas stored after a decline in energy reserves, as more tankers carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) are diverted from their course to Europe towards Asia because of the Iran war.
Great Britain had 6,999 gigawatt hours (GWh) of fossil gas stored on Saturday, according to figures from National Gas, which owns and operates the gas national transmission system. This compares with 9,105 GWh a year earlier.
Continue reading...Dozens of trains cancelled and station closed after blaze at building on Union Street
Train passengers are facing major disruption after a fire broke out near Glasgow Central station.
Dozens of trains were cancelled on Sunday evening after the blaze at a vape shop in Union Street.
Continue reading...Owner Lee Cox describes the winner as ‘dog of a lifetime’ as he claims the crown at prestigious dog contest
Bruin, a clumber spaniel, has won the best in show prize at Crufts, which took place at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham.
His owner, Lee Cox, described the four-year-old Bruin as “a dog of a lifetime” as he won the competition and was met with roaring cheers from the audience.
Continue reading..."A surgeon in London says he has performed the UK's first long-distance robotic operation," reports the BBC, "on a patient located 1,500 miles (2,400km) away..." Leading robotic urological surgeon Professor Prokar Dasgupta said it felt "almost as if I was there" as he carried out a prostate removal on [62-year-old] Paul Buxton... It is hoped that remote robotic surgery could spare future patients the "vast expense and inconvenience" of travelling for treatment, and help deliver better healthcare to people in more remote locations... Buxton had expected to be put on an NHS waiting list after receiving a shock prostate cancer diagnosis just after Christmas, but he "jumped at the chance" to be the first patient to undergo the treatment remotely as part of a trial. "A lot of people actually said to me: 'You're not going to do it, are you?' "I thought, I'm giving something back here," he said... The operation was performed from The London Clinic using a robot equipped with a 3D HD camera and four arms, all controlled through a console with a delay of only 0.06 seconds. The console in the UK was connected to the robot in Gibraltar via fibre-optic cables, with a backup 5G link. A team in Gibraltar remained on standby in case the connection failed, but it held throughout the procedure... Dasgupta will perform the procedure again on 14 March, which will be live-streamed to 20,000 world-leading urological surgeons at the European Association of Urology congress. He added: "I think it is very, very exciting, the humanitarian benefit is going to be significant." The U.K.'s National Health Service "is prioritising local robotic-assisted surgery," the article points out, "aiming for 500,000 robot-supported operations a year by 2035." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
So I've seen a few people talk about using ppf for guard rails and was wondering if it's any good?
If so, what brands do yall recommend?
Conservative outlet aired footage of president saluting at similar ceremony in December for at least three broadcasts
Fox News used old video of Donald Trump in multiple reports on Saturday and Sunday, concealing from viewers that the commander-in-chief wore a golf hat throughout a ceremony on Saturday in which he saluted six flag-draped transfer cases carrying the remains of the first US troops to die in his war on Iran.
The president had stirred outrage online by failing to remove his Trump-brand white hat during the ritual homecoming at Dover air force base in Delaware on Saturday for six army reserve soldiers killed in Kuwait.
Continue reading...Pro-independence party formed by Alex Salmond in 2021 had suffered membership fall and financial crisis
The Alba party has announced that it will wind up and not field any candidates for the 2026 Scottish parliament election.
The pro-independence party was formed in 2021 by the late Alex Salmond as a “new political force” but has been suffering from a sharp fall in membership and a financial crisis.
Continue reading...New York City police said suspicious devices were ignited Saturday during clashing protests outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 9, No. 736.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 9, No. 1,724.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 9, No. 1,002
Two men are in custody in connection with incident after anti-Islam demonstrators clashed with counterprotesters
New York police have confirmed that an improvised explosive device was thrown outside Zohran Mamdani’s official residence on Saturday when anti-Islam demonstrators, led by rightwing influencer Jake Lang, clashed with counterprotesters.
New York police commissioner Jessica Tisch confirmed that a preliminary bomb squad analysis of the device that was ignited and thrown during the protest had “determined that it is not a hoax device or a smoke bomb”.
Continue reading..."In November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high of 3.2%," reports Phoronix. And then in December Steam on Linux jumped even higher, to 3.58%. But January's numbers settled a little lower, at 3.38%. And last Monday the February numbers were released, showing Steam on Linux at... 2.23%? Like with prior times where there are wild drops in Linux use, the Steam Survey shows Simplified Chinese use running up by 30% month over month. Whenever there is such significant differences in language use tends to be a reporting anomaly and negatively impacting Linux. Valve often puts out corrected/updated figures later on, so we'll see if that is again the case for this February data.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Deadly attack near Ramallah is third in territory in a week as Israeli violence surges with global attention on Iran war
Israeli settlers and soldiers killed three Palestinians in their village near Ramallah on Saturday night, the third deadly attack in a week of surging Israeli violence across the occupied West Bank.
Israeli settlers have shot dead five civilians during invasions of Palestinian olive groves, villages and grazing land, in the brief period since Israel and the US launched a new war on Iran at the end of February. A sixth person died on Saturday after inhaling military-grade tear gasused by the Israeli army.
Continue reading...Police say arrests have been made after Scottish Cup tie
‘Officers and stewards faced with hostility and violence’
Police Scotland have condemned the behaviour of some supporters as “shameful” and said arrests have been made after clashes at the end of the Scottish Cup quarter-final between Rangers and Celtic at Ibrox.
Chief Superintendent Kate Stephen said: “The behaviour of a number of supporters at the Scottish Cup quarter-final between Rangers and Celtic at Ibrox today was shameful. It must be condemned by everyone involved in football and wider society.
Continue reading...Finally broke 5MPH! Which, yeah, okay, super slow. But I'm getting it. I bought this XR+ about three years ago with only 151 miles on it and tried it out. I'd had an eskateboard prior to that which I loved, but I quickly discovered this was a VERY different beast. Time got in the way, and I'll admit to being a little intimidated by it, so it ended up stashed in the garage.
I decided today I either need to figure this thing out, or get rid of it. The weather was nice, so I tossed on the pads and found a soft part of the yard. After a bit of baby rolling, and getting comfortable starting and stopping without holding something, I started pushing and got pretty okay with the 5MPH area.
I was VERY unprepared for just how much lower leg strength it takes though. But, I'm far less scared of it now. Fingers crossed I can keep up the practice.
Edit- i rewrote the whole thing. Too many words too confusing.
I need any info related to the default sleep (turn off when not in use) settings for a gt-s series on latest software. Also any tricks to keep it on while taking breaks to avoid it turning off, which creates issues for me to turn back on. The board is in a ghetto transitioning phase, please refrain from judging us :)
The best I’ve found suggests the idle time is around 15-20 minutes before turning off which is more than i thought so i should be good.
Regime hands Khamenei’s son the top job in a country reeling from the US-Israeli onslaught and virtually at war with its Gulf neighbours
The election of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Iranian supreme leader, succeeding his assassinated father, represents a symbolic and real triumph for conservative continuity at a time when the regime is under unprecedented challenge.
It also raises questions about how the hereditary principle complies with a revolutionary ideology formed in 1979 that never envisaged the post of supreme leader being passed from father to son.
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 8, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 8, 2026.
On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Sen. Tim Kaine join Margaret Brennan.
 | Just got my first board (used). Any tips for a newcomer? learning to get comfortable first. [link] [comments] |
So about 6 months ago on a total whim I bought a used og pint off of marketplace with the plan to use it for video work (I’ve seen some filmmakers use it as a human gimbal). Well, I’m obsessed. 400 miles in (and probably 1/2 mile total used for work 😂). I’m ready to go bigger, for all of that backstory the question is simple-
XR or GT?
I ride on the flat streets of small town Florida and rarely go off road, I’m not a big dude (5’7 150 lbs) I will be buying used, and I will be keeping the pint.
IDF bombing of energy sites in Tehran sparks fears for global economy, as Iran says it has selected supreme leader
Iran has threatened to attack oil facilities in neighbouring countries after Israel struck at least five energy sites in and around Tehran, smothering the city in black smoke and escalating fears that the conflict will result in significant disruption to the world economy.
“If you can tolerate oil at more than $200 per barrel, continue this game,” said a spokesperson for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) on Sunday.
Continue reading..."OpenAI's former chief research officer is raising $70 million for a new startup building an AI and software platform to automate manufacturing," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter. "Arda, the new startup co-founded by Bob McGrew, is raising at a valuation of $700 million, according to people familiar with the matter...." Arda is developing an AI and software platform, including a video model that can analyze footage from factory floors and use it to train robots to run factories autonomously, the people said. The company's software will coordinate machines and humans across the entire production process, from product design and manufacturability to finished goods coming off the line. The startup's goal is to make manufacturing cost effective in the Western part of the globe, reducing reliance on China as geopolitical and national security concerns rise... At OpenAI, McGrew was tasked with training robots to do tasks in the physical world, according to this LinkedIn. McGrew was also one of the earliest employees at Palantir.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Right back suffered injury in 57th minute
Dest projected to start for US at World Cup
Likely to miss US friendlies v Belgium and Portugal
United States defender Sergiño Dest limped off with an apparent hamstring injury during PSV Eindhoven’s 2-1 win over AZ Alkmaar in the Dutch league on Saturday, putting him in doubt for the USMNT’s upcoming friendlies against Belgium and Portugal.
Dest grabbed his left hamstring and screamed in pain while covering his eyes after tumbling in his own penalty area chasing Alkmaar’s Wouter Goes in the second half. The full-back was substituted in the 57th minute, leaving the field with the assistance of two medical staff, unable to put weight on his left leg.
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with Michael Leiter, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 8, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Energy Secretary Chris Wright that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 8, 2026.
Exclusive: System brought in after death of 13-year-old is helping ‘transform culture’ of NHS, says patient safety director
More than 400 lives may have been saved as a result of Martha’s rule, which lets NHS patients request a review of their care, official figures reveal.
Helplines received more than 10,000 calls in the first 16 months of the scheme after its introduction in England in 2024, according to data seen by the Guardian. Thousands of patients were either moved to intensive care, received drugs they needed or benefited from other changes as a direct result of the calls.
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RILEY FRANCK
Staff Reporter
Known for her wit, creative lyricism and online shenanigans, Nicki Minaj has been at the forefront of pop culture for decades. The Grammy-nominated rapper has never been shy about expressing her opinions, but by the end of 2025, those opinions were largely criticized by her fan base, the “Barbz.”
So, has the outspoken rapper officially gone MAGA?
At the 2025 Turning Point USA AmericaFest event, Minaj walked out with Erika Kirk and sat down for a formal interview. The rapper praised the Trump administration and neo-Christian conservatism while also digging into California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Neo-Christian conservatism, sometimes called Christian nationalism, is a political movement that blends conservative Christianity with policy advocacy — particularly around hot-button issues.
Before her appearance, Minaj reposted an official White House TikTok video praising President Donald Trump’s purported achievements during the first year of his second presidential term. Sooner or later, millions of users on the platform saw her repost. There was no hiding her opinion any longer.
The real question is … How and when did this all happen?
Minaj is known for being a provocative, colorful and captivating artist to millions of fans worldwide. She starred in beauty campaigns to raise money for AIDS, spoke highly of the LGBTQIA+ community and shared her social media platform to uplift queer voices.
She also happens to be a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, who came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant.
Minaj’s praise and endorsement of the Trump Administration and its rhetoric is a personal about-face that is in direct conflict with what she previously supported and advocated.
Many members of the LGBTQIA+ community feel that Minaj’s mere presence at the Turning Point USA event promotes neo-Christian conservatism and its beliefs. Some voices within this movement oppose some of the issues that Nicki’s LGBTQIA+ fans hold dear, including but not limited to, transgender visibility, marriage equality, gender affirming care, anti-discrimination protections and much more.
As a result of Minaj’s actions, her fans have been documenting themselves destroying her merchandise and records and have carried out mass unfollowing sprees on the rapper’s various social media accounts.
For instance, social media influencer and LGBTQIA+ advocate Amir Karaman is a self-proclaimed “Mega Barb.” His TikTok account has over 1 million followers who relate to his interests, from posting compilations of himself dancing to the rapper’s music to live reviewing Minaj’s albums. Now, Karaman has denounced her actions.
The influencer even described them as “a slap in the face.”
While prominent influencers are sharing their thoughts on the rapper’s views, thousands of people have boycotted her in different ways. The website change.org has several petitions with over 120,000 signatures calling for Minaj’s deportation back to Trinidad.
The petition starter is 16-year-old Tristan Hamilton, who asks fans to “Sign this petition to urge immigration authorities to review Nicki Minaj’s residency status in the United States and consider deporting her back to Trinidad as a response to her harmful rhetoric.”
From destroying merchandise, blasting her on social media and even petitioning for her deportation, public opinion does not appear to be in Minaj’s favor.
Since her participation in the Turning Point event, Minaj has yet to comment on how her fanbase is being affected by her comments. Many people speculate that this “change of heart” is to keep her husband, Kenneth Petty, and brother, Jelani Maraj, out of prison.
In 2017, Jelani Maraj was convicted of predatory sexual assault and child endangerment involving an 11-year-old girl. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
In early 2024, Maraj filed a request with the New York Court of Appeals to appeal his conviction. With claims that the process was allegedly flawed, the court did not overturn it. The conviction and sentence were affirmed later that year.
Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, was convicted in 1995 of one count of attempted rape in the first degree, pleading guilty to the charge. He served four years in prison and was mandated to register as a sex offender in his state of residence.
When moving to California in 2022, Petty failed to register as a sex offender in the state. He pleaded guilty to failing to update his registration, leading to one year of home detention, a $55,000 fine and further potential prison time.
Minaj’s appearance at the Turning Point event may have been an attempt to draw attention from the Trump administration onto herself. Trump has pardoned a wide range of celebrities and public figures, including rappers NBA YoungBoy, Lil Wayne and Kodak Black.
It is not unsavory to think that Minaj may be angling to get a pardon for her brother and husband, thereby sparing them from future potential federal incarceration — though only her husband’s federal conviction would fall within presidential pardon authority.
It is uncertain whether or not Minaj will secure a pardon or protection for her family. It is also unclear how her participation in Turning Point may affect her career moving forward.
Many ask the question: Is a potential pardon for her family worth her career, legacy and millions of fans?
Artificial intelligence can give some workers "brain fry" if overused, according to a new study published in Harvard Business Review.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said "what you're seeing is emotional reactions and fear that this is a long-term war." He stressed that "this is not a long-term war."
Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, expressed regret on Sunday for supporting Kristi Noem for Department of Homeland Security secretary last year.
How many Node.js users are running unsupported or outdated versions. Roughly two thirds, according to data from Node's nonprofit steward, OpenJS. So they've announced "the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program" to help enterprises move safely off legacy/end-of-life Node.js. "This program gives enterprises a clear, trusted path to modernize," said the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation, "while staying aligned with the Node.js project and community." The Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program connects organizations with experienced Node.js service providers who handle the work of upgrading safely. Approved partners assess current versions and dependencies, manage phased upgrades to supported LTS releases, and offer temporary security support when immediate upgrades are not possible... Partners are surfaced exactly where users go when upgrades become unavoidable, including the Node.js website, documentation, and end of life guidance. The program follows the existing OpenJS Ecosystem Sustainability Program revenue model, with partners retaining 85% of revenue and 15% supporting OpenJS and Node.js through Open Collective and foundation operations. OpenJS provides the guardrails, alignment, and oversight to keep the program credible and connected to the project. We're pleased to welcome NodeSource as the inaugural partner in the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program. "The goal is simple: reduce risk without breaking production or trust with the upstream project."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DC United sought to use the occasion to woo Charm City, but another flat loss put Miami’s quality in sharp relief
The pregame scene outside Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium on Saturday likely felt familiar to anybody who has followed Lionel Messi’s time in Major League Soccer. Fans milled about, forming a colorful patchwork of Inter Miami pink, the light blue and white of Argentina’s national team, and in this case, the purple of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens. Others simply came in whatever soccer jersey they happened to own, all the way down to indoor soccer’s Baltimore Blast, the closest thing the city normally gets to top-flight soccer.
What there wasn’t a lot of was DC United black and red. Despite its proximity to the nation’s capital, Baltimore isn’t exactly DC United country, and as far as decision-makers at United are concerned, that was an opportunity. The club moved the Miami match away from their usual home, the 20,000-capacity Audi Field, to maximize ticket sales, but also to put themselves on display to potential fans in Charm City, a market they’ve badly wanted to engage for years. DC are in the process of starting an MLS Next Pro team in the city, and they’ve partnered with Baltimore’s local government to construct a stadium here for that club.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Plane that flew Reform leader to Maldives appears to be linked to billionaire Christopher Harborne
Nigel Farage’s attempt to reach the Chagos Islands military base was made on a private jet that appears to be linked to Reform UK’s mega-donor Christopher Harborne, it has emerged.
Harborne, who has donated £12m to Reform UK, has links to the plane that flew Farage to the Maldives, and another that flew a group of Chagossian campaigners to Sri Lanka before they set out for the archipelago by boat.
Continue reading...Long hours, lack of flexibility and last-minute scheduling driving parents, particularly mothers, from industry
The performing arts industry in the UK is “inhospitable to parents” and falling far behind other industries in supporting women who have children, according to research.
The report, titled “the Motherhood penalty”, criticises the industry for failing to consider how it might adapt to better accommodate parents, with the result that many, in particular women, drop out.
Continue reading...Leaders discuss military cooperation day after US president hit out at PM over lack of immediate backing for attacks
Keir Starmer sought to repair fractured relations with Donald Trump over the war with Iran on Sunday, as a Labour backlash gathered pace over Tony Blair’s assertion the UK should have supported the US’s initial airstrikes on Iran.
The prime minister spoke to the US president on Sunday afternoon after a barrage of criticism from Trump, who told his UK ally on Saturday that his help was not needed, even as the US continued to use UK bases for strikes against Iran.
Continue reading...When Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce — co-founder Jack Dorsey "pointed to AI as the culprit," writes Entrepreneur magazine. "Dorsey claimed that AI tools now allow fewer employees to accomplish the same work." "But analysts see a different explanation: poor management." Block more than tripled its employee base between 2019 and 2022, growing from 3,835 to 12,430 workers. The company's stock had fallen 40% since early 2025, creating pressure to cut costs. "This is more about the business being bloated for so long than it is about AI," Zachary Gunn, a Financial Technology Partners analyst, told Bloomberg. The phenomenon has earned a nickname: "AI-washing," where companies use artificial intelligence as cover for traditional cost-cutting. Goldman Sachs economists estimate that AI is eliminating only 5,000 to 10,000 jobs per month across all U.S. sectors, hardly enough to justify Block's massive cuts. "European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told lawmakers in Brussels last week that ECB economists are monitoring for signs that AI is causing job losses," reports Bloomberg, "and are 'not yet seeing' the 'waves of redundancies that are feared'..." And "a recent survey of global executives published in the Harvard Business Review found that while AI has been cited as the reason for some layoffs, those cuts are almost entirely anticipatory: executives expect big efficiency gains that have not yet been realized." Even a former senior Block executive "is questioning whether AI is truly the reason behind the cuts," writes Inc.: In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, Aaron Zamost, Block's former head of communications, policy, and people, asked whether the layoffs reflect a genuine "new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable," or whether artificial intelligence is "just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing." Zamost acknowledged that the answer is unclear and perhaps unknowable, even within Block itself... Looking more closely at the layoffs, Zamost argued that the specific roles affected suggest more traditional corporate cost-cutting than a sweeping AI transformation... Many of the responsibilities being eliminated, he argued, rely on distinctly human skills that AI systems still cannot replicate. "A chatbot can't meet with the mayor, cast commercial actors, or negotiate with the Securities and Exchange Commission," Zamost wrote. "Not all the roles I've heard that Block is eliminating can be handled by AI, yet executives are treating it as equally useful today to all disciplines." Ultimately, Zamost suggested that the sincerity of companies' AI explanations may not really matter. "It matters less whether a company knows how to deploy AI and more whether investors believe it is on track to do so," he wrote. Indeed, whatever the rationale for Dorsey's statement, " Wall Street didn't seem to mind..." Entrepreneur magazine — since Block's stock shot up 15% after the announcement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Chris Wright says price increase would last weeks, not months, and that US would not target Iran’s energy industry
Chris Wright, the US Department of Energy secretary, said on Sunday that the spike in energy prices would last weeks, at the worst, not months, and that the US would not target Iran’s energy industry.
His comments come amid rising anxiety that Iran’s response to the US-Israel strikes, which caused a reduction in shipping through the strait of Hormuz and production slowdowns in some oil and gas producing states in the Middle East, may cause broad economic turbulence and higher inflation.
Continue reading...Masataka Yoshida’s late HR helps seal 4-3 win
Naruhito first emperor in 60 years to attend baseball
Masataka Yoshida’s late home run triggered a comeback win for Japan over Australia at the World Baseball Classic on Sunday, with Emperor Naruhito making a rare appearance.
The underdog Aussies struck first in the sixth inning of the group stage game when outfielder Aaron Whitefield came home after a throwing error by Japan’s catcher, Kenya Wakatsuki. But in the seventh, Yoshida connected with a two-run shot over right centre field. Japan put on two more insurance runs in the eighth, and hung on for the 4-3 victory.
Continue reading...Lake, whom Trump appointed without Senate confirmation to run Voice of America parent agency, cut over 1,000 jobs
A federal judge ruled Saturday that Kari Lake unlawfully led the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for several months last year and voided mass layoffs and other actions taken during that period to dismantle the agency.
The US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is an independent federal agency that oversees the Voice of America (VOA), the US’s largest and oldest international broadcaster, and provides grants to Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other news agencies.
Continue reading...Thom Tillis, who called for the resignation or firing of DHS secretary Kristi Noem, says White House adviser ‘should go’
Republican Senator Thom Tillis said on Sunday he believes White House adviser Stephen Miller “should go” and that his role in the Trump administration has been a “big problem”.
The senior senator representing North Carolina, when asked on CNN’s State of the Union if he thinks Miller should go, during a conversation about the administration’s immigration crackdown, responded to host Jake Tapper stating “Oh, of course I do.”
Continue reading...To truly pay less than two years ago, a family might need to make dinner from washed potatoes, cheese slices, white sugar and long grain rice
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
It sounds like great news for households.
Average grocery prices have recorded “eight consecutive quarters of year-on-year price declines”, Woolworths declared at its half-year financial results.
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TOM VAIL
Staff Reporter
On Nov. 26, 2024, I lost one of my favorite people in the world. My grandmother, Geraldine, who was affectionately referred to as Gerry, passed away. In my family, my grandmother was a monumental figure in all of our lives.
You can never truly prepare yourself for the moment when you have to say goodbye, especially when it is someone as important and special as my grandmother was.
My grandmother was a fighter, having fought breast cancer twice, along with suffering from arthritis, issues connected to congenital heart failure and challenges with her knees. For many of us, she was our rock and inspiration. While everyone had their own individual connection with her, the one thing I believe everyone undoubtedly will remember about my grandmother is her ability to cook.
She was not the kind of person to simply follow a recipe to the letter, but rather become the recipe over time. Over the course of her life, my grandmother crafted numerous recipes, and while she wrote them with certain measurements and recommendations, in many instances, they were not required. Measurements were mere suggestions. One thing was for sure: Taste was everything.
Every year for Christmas, my grandmother would prepare a variety of dishes for dinner, including stuffed shells, cavatelli with her red sauce and fresh meatballs. One memory I have of my grandmother from when I was a little boy is waddling around her house on Christmas Day and finding myself in the kitchen.
In hindsight, my grandmother did not have a huge kitchen; she had a large stove with plenty of pots on top and two ovens (yes … two ovens) to assist her efforts in cooking our Christmas dinner. To a little boy at the time, it definitely seemed huge. I remember my grandmother checking on the shells while they cooked and stirring her meatballs and sauce in a big pot, with the cavatelli in another pot nearby.
Unfortunately, as the years passed, my grandmother began to slow. Cooking, which had once been so effortless to her, became physically harder. Her arthritis made lifting pots and rolling out meatballs not only difficult, but painful, and issues with her knees made it difficult for her to cook and move around the kitchen. As a result, my grandmother began to rely on all of our assistance in the kitchen.
Starting a few years ago, many members of my family would gather at my grandmother’s house, where we would, with her supervision and guidance, prepare the food for Christmas dinner. My mother, aunt and uncles, along with many of the grandchildren, began to take part in this new tradition.
This allowed all of us to spend more time together, learn from each other, laugh with each other, all with our family matriarch. During these days when we would cook, my grandmother would sit at the kitchen table or be perched nearby on her rollator. As my grandmother continued to do less in the kitchen, more and more responsibilities began to be passed to the younger generations.
As we chopped, stirred, tasted and assembled everything, she was never far, supervising our every move. At times, my grandmother would give notes about anything being prepped, and although it might have been to some of our chagrin, deep down we all knew it was because she cared deeply and did not want anyone to mess up her recipe.
Now that she is gone, the void that exists is noticeable, especially in the kitchen. Yet, deep down, she is still there with all of us. Every time we cook one of her recipes, she is with us. Every time we cook and think, “Oh, I don’t know what to do … what would she do?” Her recipes were more than simply instructions on a page — they are pieces of her life, shaped by years of experience, love and trial and error.
Of course, my grandmother will always live on in my family’s hearts, but she also lives on through her food. Every stuffed shell. Every spoonful of sauce. Every forkful of meatball. To cook my grandmother’s recipes, to share them with others and to pass them down just as she passed them down to us is our responsibility to carry forward what she loved so deeply.
By continuing to cook my grandmother’s recipes, my family and I have been able to keep my grandmother alive in the most meaningful way we know. We gather around our tables, feed the people we love and create memories just as she did for all those years, and somewhere in the process, between it all, we become part of the recipe too, just like my grandmother.
Exclusive: ‘Witchcraft, spirit possession and spiritual abuse’ offending typified by sexual abuse, violence and neglect
ChatGPT is driving a rise in reports of organised and ritual abuse, UK experts have said, as survivors of “satanic” sexual violence use the AI tool for therapy.
Police say organised and ritual abuse, and “witchcraft, spirit possession and spiritual abuse” (WSPRA) against children, is under-reported in the UK. There is no modern-day charge that covers it specifically, but such offending is typified by sexual abuse, violence and neglect involving ritualistic elements – sometimes inspired by satanism, fascism or esoteric religious beliefs – to control victims.
Continue reading...Online religious experts are part professor and part pastor and they’re reaching millions of people who have questions about modern faith.
After Elmina “Ellie” Aghayeva, a neuroscience student, was taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from Columbia University housing, a story about ICE’s villainy quickly took hold. During the arrest, the school administration said, federal agents got into the building without a judicial warrant by telling a security guard that they were searching for a missing child.
In publicizing the account, however, the university downplayed Columbia’s own role in Aghayeva’s arrest, an echo of several other incidents over the past year where international students were targeted by federal agents.
Columbia, according to an investigation by The Intercept, repeatedly failed to follow its own policies for safeguarding students from President Donald Trump’s deportation machine.
The school has long required that authorities — whether federal or local — present a judicial warrant to gain entry to school grounds. Yet a review of university documents and interviews with affected students show how, in Aghayeva’s and other cases, school staff and officials failed to demand the proper documentation.
“Columbia invested more in training Public Safety how to brutalize students, how to arrest them, rather than how to protect them.”
Since at least March 5, 2025, when provost Angela Olinto emailed school deans about it, Columbia’s explicit policy has been to bar ICE agents from non-public school property. Yet, in the days following the email, federal immigration agents entered school residential buildings without a warrant at least twice.
“After what happened in Minnesota, we know that ICE is coming to our communities. It’s not surprising that they would be coming after Columbia and students,” Eli Northrup, a New York state assembly candidate whose district would include Columbia, said of ICE. “What is surprising is that every single person working in a Columbia building didn’t have it ingrained that if law enforcement comes, that’s something that needs to be thoroughly vetted.”
Members of the Columbia community, including students who have been detained by ICE, said that despite its clear policies the school has shown that it placed its priorities on matters other than defending people from immigration authorities. They pointed to the involvement of officers from Columbia’s Department of Public Safety in cracking down on campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student and protest leader who was arrested inside a Columbia residential building last March by immigration agents, said, “Columbia invested more in training Public Safety how to brutalize students, how to arrest them, rather than how to protect them.”
In response to questions, Columbia pointed The Intercept to its public statements on Aghayeva’s arrest. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, did not respond to requests for comment.
Last week, shortly after ICE agents arrived to arrest Aghayeva, who is Azerbaijani, acting Columbia President Claire Shipman wrote an email to the school community.
“It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University,” she said.
Later, after the student had been released from custody, Shipman said in a video statement that the five ICE agents did not present “any kind of warrant” and misrepresented their identities to enter the building by saying “they were police searching for a missing child.” The following day, Shipman told a university plenary that ICE was let into the property by a Columbia building attendant. Later, a university security officer arrived and asked for a warrant, Shipman said. The federal agents ignored the request.
Concerned students and faculty members questioned how such a major lapse could take place close to a year after similar lapses resulted in Columbia students being targeted by warrantless federal agents on university property.
“It was clear that this individual didn’t know what he was supposed to do,” said a professor of psychology at Columbia, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the university.
“It was clear that this individual didn’t know what he was supposed to do.”
In the aftermath of Aghayeva’s arrest, Columbia announced that it will be conducting webinars for its students, faculty, and staff on “immigration policy and understanding the law.”
Given the lapses that have occurred, however, calls are growing for Columbia to train its own security personnel to do better.
“ICE agents must have a judicial warrant or subpoena to access non-public areas,” said the March 2025 email to school deans from Olinto, the provost.
Just two days after the email was sent, on March 7, building door staff at a Columbia building allowed federal agents without a warrant to enter a university property.
“I called Public Safety the moment ICE was outside my house,” said Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian Ph.D. student and the target of the raid. “They said that they’ll file a report and told me not to open the door. And that was it.”
The incursion had come amid a battle between the Trump administration and the university over $400 million in federal funding, which the government suspended on the same day as the raid.
It was also on the same day that Khalil wrote to university authorities about the danger of ICE coming to his home. Khalil, who had been a lead negotiator for the campus protest encampments, had attracted the ire of campus pro-Israel activists, whom he said were trying to get him arrested by ICE.
“I haven’t been able to sleep,” Khalil wrote in an email at the time, “fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”
The university was not forthcoming with any help. The following night, Khalil was arrested by federal immigration agents from inside his university residential building. No warrant had been provided — and no beefed-up security was present.
The day after Khalil was arrested, Columbia published a brief statement that said, “There have been reports of ICE around campus. Columbia has and will continue to follow the law.”
The statement cited the university policy requiring agents to have a judicial warrant to enter non-public areas but gave no indication that authorities in the previous days twice earlier entered buildings without the warrants.
The university’s response to Aghayeva’s arrest stood in stark contrast to how it reacted to the detention and targeting of other Columbia students: Khalil, fellow Palestinian student protester Mohsen Mahdawi, and Yunseo Chung, a U.S. permanent resident who the Trump administration targeted after her arrest at a protest. The Trump administration pursued the three students for their pro-Palestine advocacy, according to court documents.
Following Aghayeva’s arrest, Columbia promptly notified the community and announced that additional Public Safety patrols were being deployed to its residential buildings. Shipman quickly released a statement that said, “We started work immediately to gain her release. We are so grateful for the help and support we got from the mayor and the governor.”
“[I was] happy that such help is being extended to a community member as it should have been extended to me and to others,” said Khalil. “Yet, I couldn’t ignore the discrepancy in that response and how all of these were denied to me. Until this time, Columbia hasn’t reached out to me personally to offer any kind of support.”
Mahdawi’s arrest came after the school criticized a pro-Palestine event he had been involved in. The school initially said the demonstration included “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” Eventually, the administration said the characterization was misleading, but no clarification was issued. When the authorities came after Mahdawi, they cited the language as grounds for his arrest.
“When speech concerns Palestine, protections suddenly weaken, enforcement intensifies, and silence from leadership grows louder,” Mahdawi told The Intercept.
While the failure to stop federal agents with judicial warrants was a shortcoming of public safety, school security officials have not shied away from robust crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests.
“I believe that all of the securitization of campus exists to police the students.”
“I believe that all of the securitization of campus exists to police the students,” said Srinivasan, the Ph.D. student targeted by ICE. “It does not actually exist to protect the students from ICE.”
On Friday, Columbia announced enhanced security measures including additional personnel around residence buildings, expanded video intercom systems, and distribution of “know your rights” printouts. The university also said that its personnel at housing buildings had received additional trainings over the past week.
It took a year, repeated security failures, and the arrest of a student unrelated to the pro-Palestine protests in any way for the measures to be announced.
People advocating for students, however, noted that Columbia already barred warrantless entry into university buildings.
“It has to be more than a policy,” said Northrup, the state assembly candidate. “It has to be executed.”
The post Columbia Flouted Its Own Policies and Let ICE Into University Buildings appeared first on The Intercept.
Central bankers and economists warn prolonged conflict could raise retail prices and rip up growth forecasts
An inflation shock triggered by the US-Israel attack on Iran could wreck a fragile global economic recovery that had been expected to gain momentum this year.
With oil and gas prices spiking, despite a pledge from Donald Trump to protect tankers making their way through the crucial strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint, central bankers and economists have warned that a prolonged conflict could increase retail prices around the world and force them to rip up growth forecasts for this year.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
After months of debate, the New Castle County Council may finally vote on a package of regulations meant to limit how and where data centers can be developed in the county.
The northernmost county has been targeted for development of a hyper-scale data center known as Project Washington, which has sparked community concerns around potential strains on energy and water use, while supporters seek to land new construction and permanent jobs.
Councilman Dave Carter, who originally introduced the ordinance in August, has amended it to try to find a compromise.
One of the main points of contention on the new bill was the removal of a “pending ordinance doctrine,” which would allow the county to retroactively apply the proposed regulations to data center applications currently in the development pipeline, including Project Washington.
📍 The New Castle County Council is scheduled to meet at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 10, in the Louis L. Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For more info on the meeting, including how to attend virtually, click here.
The State Employee Benefits Committee (SEBC), a board responsible for managing Delaware’s state employee health insurance plans, will meet Monday to finalize coverage changes for employees currently using weight-loss drugs.
That meeting was previously canceled last month due to inclement weather.
The changes could mean thousands of employees, retirees or their family members covered under the state’s health plan could soon pay much more out-of-pocket to get their weight-loss prescriptions or be uncovered altogether.
The SEBC previously met on Friday, Feb. 13, to introduce the potential coverage changes.
At that meeting, the committee heard multiple different options that could save the state money, but they would pass costs onto consumers using the drugs in the form of higher co-pays, almost four or five times higher than the current rate.
📍 The State Employee Benefits Committee will meet at 9 a.m. Monday, March 9, at the Delaware Department of Human Resources, located at 841 Silver Lake Blvd., in Suite 100. For more info on the meeting, including how to attend virtually, click here.
The Delaware General Assembly will reconvene beginning on Tuesday after a month off for Joint Finance Committee hearings.
Floor votes for the House and Senate are scheduled for Tuesday, March 10, while committee hearings will take place on both Tuesday and Wednesday.
Among bill hearings to watch are:
📍 The Delaware General Assembly meets at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. Hearings and floor votes are open to the public. For more info, or to watch virtually, click here.
A proposed resolution before the Wilmington City Council would encourage state legislators to amend the city’s charter to prohibit city council members from switching parties between elections.
Sponsored by Councilman Alexander Hackett, it’s not immediately clear what sparked the introduction of the measure.
However, it comes on the heels of Councilman James Spadola switching from the Republican to Democratic Party last year. The city charter requires that no more than three people be nominated for the council’s four at-large members, which means that a minority political party is always represented.
Because Democrats overwhelmingly hold control of the council, that means the Republican Party always has one seat of the 13 members. Until now, as Spadola’s switch has left the council without a minority party member.
Notably, it also means that if Spadola seeks re-election to an at-large seat, he would be competing with colleagues Hackett, Maria Cabrera and Tish Bracy for the three Democratic seats.
📍 The resolution will be discussed by the council’s Committee of the Whole at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 12, at Louis L. Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For more info on the meeting, including how to attend virtually, click here.
The Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence in Georgetown will be fighting for its survival at a Monday evening hearing.
Last month, Delaware education officials recommended that the state close the charter school due to its persistent struggles with low enrollment.
The closure recommendation from the Charter School Accountability Committee now goes before Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten, who will announce a final decision about whether to revoke BASSE’s charter on March 19.
If she does revoke the charter, the school – which in recent months has served about 120 sixth through ninth graders – would close by the end of this academic year.
Before Marten makes a decision though, the school will have the opportunity to convince her to keep it open.
📍 The public hearing will begin at 5 p.m. Monday, March 9, at the Delaware Technical Community College’s Owens Campus Carter Partnership Center, located at 21179 College Drive in Georgetown. For more info, including how to attend virtually, click here.
Correction: This column originally reported that Wilmington’s city charter required a minority party representative in its four at-large seats. However, it only requires that a political party nominate no more than three candidates, essentially resulting in at least one minority party representative.
The post Get Involved: Data center regulations vote, GLP-1 coverage, and more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Iran’s targeting of commercial datacentres in the UAE and Bahrain signals a new frontier in asymmetric warfare
It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacentre by the armed forces of a country at war.
At 4.30am on Sunday morning, what is thought to have been an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacentre in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water.
Continue reading...March 6, 2026 — At Mobile World Congress 2026, the European Commission unveiled EURO-3C, a €75 million project to develop Europe’s first large-scale federated Telco-Edge-Cloud infrastructure, supported by Horizon Europe.
Credit: Shutterstock
This landmark project will showcase Europe’s ability to deliver cutting-edge digital services entirely through its own connectivity infrastructure, reducing reliance on third country providers. Telco-edge-cloud combines telecommunication networks, edge computing and cloud infrastructure into a single, integrated platform, bringing high speed, secure computing power closer to end-users.
Directly aligned with the goals of the proposed Digital Networks Act, the project opens the door to new opportunities that will strengthen Europe’s single telecom market and increase technological sovereignty. While driving European innovation in 6G, AI, cybersecurity and telecoms many sectors of the broader economy will be able to make use of the solutions EURO-3C will develop.
Some of Europe’s leading companies and organizations are coming together to build EURO-3C: telecom operators, cloud service providers, software developers, equipment manufacturers, research institutions and a broad network of integration specialists.
With a total of 87 consortium members involved, the project also aligns with broader EU strategic priorities and the work of organisations like IPCEI-CIS, the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) and EuroHPC, supporting European industrial competitiveness.
Source: European Commission
The post European Commission Announces €75M EURO-3C Project to Build Federated Telco-Edge-Cloud Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
TAIPEI, March 6, 2026 — The globally renowned annual technology event, COMPUTEX 2026, will take place in Taipei from June 2–5. One of the most anticipated programs of the event, the COMPUTEX Forum, officially opens registration and ticket sales today.
Under the theme “AI Together,” the 2026 Forum brings together, for the first time, 30 senior executives and technology leaders from the world’s most influential tech companies. This marks the largest and most distinguished speaker lineup in the Forum’s history. The program will offer strategic insights into AI-driven transformation, and the future direction of the global technology ecosystem.
This year’s Forum brings together 30 technology leaders to explore six core themes, offering in-depth insights into the evolving landscape of AI development.
Six Core Themes Defining the Next Phase of AI
As generative AI, accelerated computing, and edge intelligence move from experimentation to scaled deployment, industries are entering a new phase of integration and real-world application.
COMPUTEX Forum 2026 will explore six core themes, providing in-depth perspectives on AI development, including:
The speaker lineup brings together leaders from globally recognized technology firms to explore AI computing architectures, cloud–edge orchestration, on-device intelligence, enterprise adoption at scale, and governance frameworks—offering a forward-looking view of the evolving global AI ecosystem.
Super Early Bird Tickets Now Available — Exclusive Offer for a Limited Time
To thank long-time supporters and industry professionals, the organizer is offering a Super Early Bird promotion:
For years, COMPUTEX Forum has served as a premier platform for global developers, enterprise executives, investors and technology decision-makers. At a critical moment in AI’s industrial-scale transformation, the 2026 edition sets a new benchmark in scope and influence—bringing together the voices shaping the next decade of innovation.
Ticket Information
Note: The organizer reserves the right to modify, amend, or suspend the event program. Final arrangements are subject to official announcements by TAITRA.
For more exhibition information:
COMPUTEX: https://www.computextaipei.com.tw/en/index.html
InoVEX: www.innovex.com.tw
About COMPUTEX
COMPUTEX was founded in 1981. It has grown with the global ICT industry and become stronger over the last four decades. Bearing witness to historical moments in the development of and changes in the industry, COMPUTEX attracts more than 40,000 buyers to visit Taiwan every year. It is also the preferred platform chosen by top international companies for launching epoch-making products. Taiwan has a comprehensive global ICT industry chain. Gaining a foothold in Taiwan, COMPUTEX is jointly held by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and Taipei Computer Association, aiming to build a global tech ecosystem. COMPUTEX has become a global benchmark exhibition for AI and startups, connecting global pioneers and enabling new sparks of breakthrough technology.
Source: COMPUTEX
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And when a Redox monthly progress report is here, Haiku’s monthly report is never far behind (or vice versa, depending on the month). Haiku’s February was definitely a busy month, but there’s no major tentpole changes or new features, highlighting just how close Haiku is to a new regular beta release. The OpenBSD drivers have been synchronised wit upstream to draw in some bugfixes, there’s a ton of smaller fixes to various applications like StyledEdit, Mail, and many more, as well a surprisingly long list of various file system fixes, improving the drivers for file systems like NTFS, Btrfs, XFS, and others.
There’s more, of course, so just like with Redox, head on over to pore over the list of smaller changes, fixes, and improvements. Just like last month, I’d like to mention once again that you really don’t need to wait for the beta release to try out Haiku. The operating system has been in a fairly stable and solid condition for a long time now, and whatever’s the latest nightly will generally work just fine, and can be updated without reinstallation.
March 6, 2026 — The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) launched the HPCTRAIN project, designed to empower young professionals with traineeships in high-performance computing (HPC).
The HPCTRAIN project aims to strengthen Europe’s HPC skills ecosystem by offering professional traineeships to early-career professionals across Europe, providing opportunities to gain practical experience in a professional and non-academic environment, networking opportunities and exposure to the industry.
Designed to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and the professional use of HPC, the program will enable participants to gain practical experience working on HPC-related projects, while developing the advanced technical and transversal skills required to pursue careers in this rapidly evolving field.
Calls for traineeship applications will be announced on a rolling basis, with four annual cut-off dates via the project website (where interested applicants can apply from). This program will match trainee candidates with relevant training opportunities offered by private companies and public organization that offer professional career paths centred around HPC technology, operation and applications. A dedicated Industrial Advisory Board with representations from the EuroHPC JU private members (ETP4HPC, DARIO/BDVA and QuIC), PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee and additional members from HPC industry will help to define, promote and execute the traineeship program.
This project will also include monitoring activities to review the impact of these traineeships and whether they effectively bridge the gap between education and the job market.
By equipping young professionals with HPC skills, HPCTRAIN is expected to significantly contribute to Europe’s digital technology supply chain. The initiative will enhance workforce capacity in critical segments such as HPC technology, operation, applications, and software development, supporting the digital evolution within the European Union (EU).
More Details
The HPCTRAIN consortium, coordinated by the Forschungszentrum Julich GmbH (FZJ), comprises 12 diverse organisations (universities, supercomputing centres and companies) such as IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Stuttgart, LuxProvide, University of Luxembourg, PRACE, , CSC, University of Gallway, INESC TEC and University of Ljubljana that offer a diversified traineeship program.
The project officially started in January 2026 and will last 48 months.
The HPC Train project has been selected following the call DIGITAL-EUROHPC-JU-2022-TRAINING-03 and is funded by the Digital Europe programme, with a total EU contribution of around EUR 5 million.
Source: EuroHPC JU
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The New York State attorney general’s office has begun investigating how Columbia University let a predatory doctor continue to see patients despite decades of warnings.
“The Office of the Attorney General is conducting a thorough investigation into the institutional response to Robert Hadden’s misconduct,” a spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica. The agency did not give further details.
A ProPublica investigation from the fall of 2023 revealed how Columbia ignored women and ultimately protected Robert Hadden, a longtime OB-GYN at the university. In 2012, Columbia allowed Hadden to continue seeing patients just days after one of them called 911 to report Hadden had sexually assaulted her.
In early 2023, Hadden was convicted in federal court of sexually abusing patients. He is currently serving a 20-year sentence. Columbia has paid out more than $1 billion for over 1,000 claims of sexual abuse.
After our investigation, Columbia committed to a variety of reforms, including improved patient safety, a $100 million fund for victims and an independent investigation.
But advocates, students and survivors say Columbia needs to do far more to grapple with its role in Hadden’s conduct. Four hundred Columbia medical students recently wrote to university officials demanding disciplinary reviews for administrators who failed to heed warnings about Hadden.
Unlike at other universities that have dealt with serially abusive doctors, no higher-ups at Columbia appear to have lost their jobs or been disciplined. Dr. Mary D’Alton, who was cc’d on a letter that authorized Hadden’s return to work, remains the chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department.
D’Alton did not respond to a request for comment.
Columbia declined to comment for this story.
The attorney general’s office has significant powers over New York’s nonprofits, including Columbia. A few years ago, it forced the Trump Foundation to shut down. More recently it sued the National Rife Association, which then had to enact a series of reforms.
Survivors told ProPublica they were heartened that New York is looking into Columbia.
“Accountability is overdue, particularly in light of the Epstein files,” said Evelyn Yang, pointing to recent revelations that several Columbia affiliates had ties to the financier.
Yang was among at least 8 patients who were assaulted by Hadden after he returned to work. She was seven months pregnant at the time.
Shortly after our story was published more than two years ago, Columbia promised to “thoroughly examine the circumstances that allowed Hadden’s abuse to continue.”
No report detailing those findings has yet been published.
Last week, Columbia acknowledged in an announcement that there “are many questions” about the timing of the investigation it commissioned. It said that the report is expected to be released “soon.”
New York State Assemblymember Grace Lee blasted the university’s failure to issue the report, telling ProPublica the university has not taken responsibility for what happened.
“To me, it’s just outrageous that we are here now in 2026 and we still have no report and no one has been held accountable,” she said.
By comparison, the external investigation into the University of Michigan’s response to the crimes committed by its former physician Robert Anderson took about 15 months.
Another Hadden survivor, Marissa Hoechstetter, said the attorney general’s decision to examine Columbia provides some relief because the institution has repeatedly failed to do so itself.
“I do believe institutional accountability is a missing part of making a bigger change in the fight of gender-based violence,” Hoechstetter said. “I don’t know what will come of this investigation” — referring to New York’s probe — “but it shows that institutions that protect and cover up abusers in order to protect their own people and reputation will be held accountable.”
Hoechstetter and Yang both advocated for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York State law that in 2022 opened a one-year window in which survivors of sexual assault could file civil suits against their abusers or the institutions that protected them, even after the statute of limitations had passed.
For years, the university had failed to notify Hadden’s former patients of his misconduct. Finally, in November 2023, just 10 days before the law’s extended window closed, Columbia announced it would send letters to almost 6,500 patients.
A closed town hall meeting at the medical school this January gave a window into who was behind that lack of notification. “It actually is a Board of Trustee decision” because of the potential cost of litigation, Monica Lypson, the vice dean for medical education, told students in a recording that ProPublica obtained.
Lypson did not respond to a request for comment.
Separately, the deadline to submit a claim to Columbia’s survivors’ settlement fund, which was established for survivors who do not want to file lawsuits, has been extended to April 15.
The post New York Attorney General Is Investigating Columbia for Allowing Predatory Doctor to See Patients Despite Warnings appeared first on ProPublica.
The unemployment rate was 4.4% in February, with 126,000 jobs added in January
The US lost 92,000 jobs in February, an unexpected major slackening in the labor market that came just before Donald Trump threw the global economy into upheaval with his conflict in Iran.
The unemployment rate edged up to 4.4% in February. In comparison, the US added a revised 126,000 jobs in January, far surpassing expectations of 70,000 jobs but still less than January 2025. Economists predicted an increase of 60,000 jobs added in February and a steady unemployment rate of 4.3%.
Continue reading...How will the Iran war affect the global economy? Expert comment jon.wallace
Even a long war would have limited consequences for global GDP. But some emerging economies are vulnerable to persistent high energy prices.
With the Iran war in its second week, the most immediate and tragic costs are measured in lives lost. Yet economists are obliged to consider another dimension: the economic consequences. These, too, could be significant – though their distribution across the world economy will be uneven. Some countries will bear substantial costs. For others, the impact may prove surprisingly modest.
The heaviest burden will inevitably fall on the region itself. History offers a guide. During the 12-day war last summer, Israel’s economy contracted by around 1 per cent in the second quarter. If the conflict is short-lived, a fall in output of a similar order of magnitude would seem plausible for both Israel and the Gulf economies.
A more prolonged conflict would almost certainly inflict a deeper economic wound. Output would be disrupted, investment postponed and tourism curtailed. Iran’s economy will be hit even harder. Based on the impact of wars elsewhere, GDP is likely to fall by more than 10 per cent – although Iran itself last published official GDP data in 2024.
But what of the global economy? Directly, the Middle East matters less than is often assumed. The Gulf economies account for only around 2-3 per cent of global GDP. Even a severe regional downturn would therefore have limited direct consequences for world output.
Instead, the key risks surround disruptions to the supply of goods that economies in the region send to the rest of the world. Crises such as this have a habit of revealing chokepoints that were previously hidden. For example, Qatar produces around 40 per cent of the world’s helium, which is used in the production of semiconductors. The region is also a significant producer of ammonia and nitrogen, which are key ingredients in many synthetic fertilizer products. The real transmission channel, though, is energy.
Around a quarter of global seaborne oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, along with roughly one-fifth of liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments. Any disruption to transit through this narrow chokepoint has immediate consequences for global energy markets. Unsurprisingly, oil and gas prices have jumped since the conflict’s start as shipments through the Strait have collapsed.
In economic terms, the mechanism through which such shocks operate is straightforward. Higher energy prices alter what economists call a country’s terms of trade – the price of its exports relative to its imports. When energy prices rise, income is transferred from energy-importing countries to energy exporters.
The economic consequences of that transfer depend on three factors: whether a country is a net importer or exporter of energy; how large and persistent the price rise proves to be; and how governments, households and businesses respond to the shift in income.
The obvious winners are large net energy exporters outside the Gulf whose ability to sell abroad is unaffected. Countries such as Norway, Russia and Canada stand to benefit the most from higher energy prices. (See Chart below.)
At the other end of the spectrum sit economies where energy imports account for a large share of GDP. This group includes countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India and China, as well as most European economies including France, Germany and the UK.
The United States sits somewhere in the middle. Thanks to the shale revolution, the country has shifted from being one of the world’s largest energy importers to a modest net exporter. In aggregate, that means the US economy as whole now benefits slightly from higher global energy prices – although the gains will be unevenly distributed.
The scale and persistence of the energy shock will ultimately determine the macroeconomic impact. For energy-importing economies, the main transmission channel is likely to be via inflation. Higher oil and gas prices raise the import bill faced by households and firms, squeezing real incomes and eroding purchasing power.
Recent signals provide some hope that the conflict may not last long. If so, and provided there is no lasting damage to energy production facilities, the recent spike in oil prices to above $100 per barrel would likely prove temporary, allowing most advanced economies to absorb the shock without significant disruption.
As oil prices fall back, inflation in Europe and Asia in 2026 would likely be only around 0.5 percentage points higher than pre-conflict forecasts. Under this scenario, central bank strategies would remain largely unchanged, and the impact on real GDP growth would be minimal.
A more severe scenario in which the conflict persists for several months could see oil prices rise to around $130 per barrel before declining in the second half of the year. At a global level, the hit to growth would be modest, though the impact would be felt unevenly across regions. The euro-zone economy would probably contract in Q2 and then flatline over the second half of the year.
The US economy would fare better but would nonetheless experience a slowdown in growth. Despite the weaker growth outlook, the accompanying rise in inflation would likely force central banks to shift policy. The Federal Reserve could abandon rate cuts while the European Central Bank could move to raise interest rates.
Even so, the scale of this shock would be smaller than that which followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Europe faced an abrupt and dramatic disruption to its energy supplies. The current conflict, unless it escalates dramatically, is unlikely to provoke large-scale fiscal rescue packages from governments.
In several emerging markets, the impact of higher energy prices is softened by government subsidies. In such cases, it would be the state rather than households and businesses that would bear the initial increase in costs. That will cushion the blow to growth in the short term but come at the expense of weaker public finances.
For most emerging economies this will be manageable: fiscal positions are generally stronger than they were a couple of decades ago.
But in countries where energy subsidies remain extensive and government finances are already shaky, higher energy prices could unsettle bond markets. Economies such as Egypt and Tunisia appear particularly vulnerable. A surge in global energy prices could also destabilize Pakistan’s fragile economy.
One final consequence of the conflict is that it is likely to reinforce a broader pattern in the world economy: the relative strength of the United States.
Having moved from a large net importer of energy to a modest exporter, the US is now less exposed to global energy shocks than many of its peers. While American households will still face higher fuel prices, energy producers – and their investors – stand to benefit.
Why Should Delaware Care?
In 2025, Wilmington saw the lowest number of shooting incidents and victims in 20 years. The decrease in crime has pushed city officials to continue the effort and push for public safety initiatives in the city, including Mayor Carney’s creation of the Office of Community Safety. But a few days later, the city council had proposed its own similar office, with different oversight provisions.
After Wilmington saw a drop in crime last year, city officials are looking for ways to sustain the progress. But they’re doing it through two separate and parallel initiatives.
On Monday, Mayor John Carney signed an executive order establishing an Office of Community Safety that would coordinate violence prevention efforts between city departments and establish partnerships with community organizations.
Then, on Thursday, Councilwoman Shané Darby introduced a separate proposal to create an office with the same name. Darby’s plan differs from Carney’s several ways, with the most notable difference being that it gives the City Council more oversight.
Asked if the mayor’s office and council initiatives were connected, Daniel Walker, deputy chief of staff for Carney’s office, said they are separate actions.
“We are still working with [Darby] to ensure her ordinance is aligned with our goals and vision for this work that is located in the Mayor’s office,” Walker said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
The push for greater violence-prevention efforts comes after Wilmington saw a drop in crime last year. It was an encouraging development across Delaware, particularly after its largest city had suffered for years from high numbers of shootings.
In 2017, the News Journal reported that kids in Wilmington were more likely to be shot than those in any other U.S. city during the previous years.
But, last year, the city experienced the lowest number of shooting incidents and shooting victims in over two decades, according to the annual year-end crime report released last month by the Wilmington Police Department.
The new statistics also show an overall 8% drop in murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, felony theft and auto theft, over the previous year.
During the first two months of this 2026, shootings have increased but it is difficult to draw broad conclusions from such a short period. There have been nine shootings in Wilmington as of March 1, according to the city’s CompStat statistics, which are updated every week. During the same period last year, there were three. So far, none of the shootings have resulted in a death this year.
Under Carney’s new safety plan, he will appoint a Director of Community Safety, who will lead the office and report directly to him. The director will be in charge of supporting community-based groups, creating policy around public safety, facilitating coordination among different city departments, and helping manage partnerships and grant funding related to public safety programs, according to the executive order.
“The establishment of this new office will help us sustain that progress by ensuring that prevention efforts are aligned across the City,” Carney said in a recent statement.
On Thursday, the City Council approved a budget amendment for the city’s operating budget, which included a little over $45,000 for the new director position.
Walker did not provide a timeline as to when the director would be appointed.
Meanwhile, Darby’s legislation would formally establish the same office through a city ordinance.
While the proposal shares largely the same goal of reducing violence and strengthening prevention programs, Darby also asks for the council to have more say in how the office is governed.
Under Darby’s proposal, the director of the office would be appointed by the mayor, but must also be confirmed by City Council.
The City Council proposal also creates a nine-member advisory board to oversee the office. The board would include four members appointed by the mayor, four appointed by City Council, and one appointed by both the council president and the mayor.
Darby’s proposal also states that the new office must provide an annual report to the mayor and council. Carney’s executive order did not require that.
Darby did not respond to Thursday’s request for comment for this story.
The post Wilmington mayor, City Council introduce separate community safety proposals appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
During a speech in South Carolina on Feb. 27, Joe Biden touted his record as president while criticizing his successor, President Donald Trump. But during his remarks, Biden made a number of false, misleading or exaggerated claims.
Biden was in South Carolina to celebrate winning the state’s Democratic presidential primary six years earlier. Biden’s win there helped propel him to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.
When Biden compared his jobs record with Trump’s, he exaggerated the figures.
“In fact, [in] just my last year as president of the United States in 2024, we created — just the last year — 2.2 million additional jobs,” he said. “You know how many jobs Trump’s created in his first year as president? 185,000 jobs total. That’s it.”
However, the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that total employment increased by a little more than 1.2 million between January 2024 and January 2025, which covers Biden’s last full year in office. (He left office on Jan. 20, 2025.)
Meanwhile, in the first full year of Trump’s second term, employment increased by 359,000, from January 2025 to January 2026.
For his speech, Biden may have relied on outdated data, or data covering a different period. We reached out to his office about his claims, but we didn’t receive a response.
BLS did report in January 2025 that total employment had increased by 2.2 million in 2024. That covers most of Biden’s final year as president. But that report came out before the BLS made annual data revisions for the 12 months ending in March 2025 that lowered its estimates of the increase in employment during Biden’s time in office. The final revisions were made on Feb. 11.
The latest BLS data also show that total employment in 2025 increased by 181,000, when measured from December 2024 to December 2025. That’s close to the 185,000 figure that Biden used for Trump. But Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, and BLS bases its job figures on a monthly survey of households covering the week that contains the 12th day of the month. That means the January 2025 job numbers were under Biden.
We got an increase of 359,000 for Trump by measuring from January 2025 to January 2026, which more closely aligns with the period covering his first full year back in office.
We would also note that the employment for January 2026 is preliminary and subject to be revised. Also, as we’ve said before, presidents shouldn’t receive all the credit, or the blame, for employment figures on their watch.
Biden also claimed that “the economy grew with record growth” during his presidency. We found no basis for that statement.
Real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation) grew by 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020 and by 18.9% in all of 1942, which are the quarterly and annual economic growth records, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates. The highest quarterly GDP growth under Biden was 7% in the second and fourth quarters of 2021, when the economy was rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the highest annual GDP growth during his administration was 6.2% that same year.
Average annual growth during Biden’s four years was 3.6%. That was still lower than the almost 4.5% average during Bill Clinton’s second term, and the average of nearly 5.2% during Lyndon B. Johnson’s full four-year term. There was even average annual growth of about 15.4% in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third term, during World War II.
Taking out the bounce-back year after GDP plunged as a result of the pandemic, economic growth in the last three years of Biden’s presidency was about 2.7% annually, which is close to the yearly average of about 2.8% annual growth over the last 50 years.
Biden later turned to the subject of immigration, saying, “The day I left office, border crossings in the United States were lower than the day that I entered an office inherited from Trump.” That’s accurate, but misleading.
Border Patrol made 47,320 apprehensions of people illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico in December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office. Then apprehensions at the southern border declined further to 29,105 in January 2025, and Biden left office a little more than halfway through that month.
Those figures were down from 71,047 apprehensions by Border Patrol in December 2020, the last full month of Trump’s first term, and 75,198 in January 2021, when Trump exited the White House.
But in our story “Biden’s Final Numbers,” which looks at various statistical measures during his presidency, we wrote: “Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 107% higher in Biden’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” We also said “that snapshot undersells the surge in illegal immigration during Biden’s four years in office, because apprehensions dropped dramatically in the second half of 2024 after Biden initiated some emergency policies to curb illegal border crossings.
“Before then, the U.S. was experiencing historically high illegal immigration,” we reported.
We also pointed out that apprehensions were only part of the picture, since the number of people seeking asylum at legal ports of entry remained high under Biden, as his administration began accepting CBP One mobile app applications that allowed immigrants to request asylum or parole and be screened for entry to the U.S. Plus there was an additional surge in immigrants coming to the U.S. via newly created legal methods, such as noncitizens granted parole, which allows them to temporarily live in the U.S. for “urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons.” Biden offered parole to immigrants from countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. (Trump has largely halted those humanitarian programs through executive orders.)
While Biden suggested that the increase in migration earlier in his presidency was due to the pandemic, Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, previously told us that there were several reasons for the surge.
“There were many different drivers in the growth of the unauthorized immigrant population during the Biden presidency: strong labor demand in the U.S. as the country rebounded from the COVID-19 recession, and push factors such as authoritarian governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and intense gang violence and extortion in countries like Haiti and Ecuador,” she said. “It’s also possible that some people moved in order to take advantage of new pathways created by the Biden administration.”
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‘European preference’ signals a wider change of EU doctrine Expert comment jon.wallace
The European Commission’s Industrial Accelerator Act has ‘Made in EU’ requirements that aim to adapt the bloc’s open market policy to geopolitical realities.
It is targeted, but it’s a significant shift: the European Union is prioritizing its own home-based industrial production. The European Commission proposed on 4 March a comprehensive legislative package, dubbed the ‘Industrial Accelerator Act’ (IAA), meant to strengthen European industry by raising the share of EU-made materials and components in public procurements, government purchase incentives or tax breaks.
This concept of European preference is controversial. There have been over 40 draft versions of the Act, which has generated heated debates, inside the Commission and among the EU-27 bloc. Its announcement has been postponed several times.
Even if its scope ends up being limited, the discriminatory measure represents a significant change in the EU’s current legal framework for investment and, moreover, a change of mindset in addressing globalization and the business environment. Under this legislation, for instance, state-subsidized electric cars will have to be assembled in the EU and contain a substantial portion of European components.
For the bloc’s trading partners, the IAA looks like some sort of sophisticated protectionism. For some member states, it appears to impose costly new bureaucratic hurdles to the detriment of entrepreneurial freedom. Northern EU member states are skeptical. Local authorities and SMEs fear more paperwork and rising costs.
But for its proponents, headed by France, it simply reflects what other powers are already doing, to respond to punitive US tariffs and aggressive Chinese trade practices. Ottawa, for instance, launched a ‘Buy Canadian Policy’ in December 2025, rolling out new federal procurement rules to prioritize local suppliers and Canadian-made goods and services.
Given all the contradictory priorities it had to consider, the Commission’s regulation is a cautious endorsement of ‘Made in EU’. It is a balancing act between economic security, free trade and decarbonization needed to tackle climate change. It makes European preference an exception, not a principle.
The concept is part of a broader shift towards a more interventionist EU economic policy. The IAA adds to other legal and fiscal European measures, such as the new carbon tax, the screening of foreign investments on strategic assets and the anti-coercion instrument. All aim at levelling the playing field with China and the US and overcoming economic dependencies that risk being politically weaponized.
European discrimination is already introduced in the new defence financial instrument (SAFE), whereby procurement contracts must ensure that no more than 35 per cent of component costs originate from outside the EU, EFTA or Ukraine.
Imposing some ‘Buy European’ provisions is another step in this new geopolitical direction. Its purpose is not just defending energy-intensive European industries (such as steel, cement, aluminium, as well as the automotive sector and cleantechs) against unfair competition but to proactively save them through public subsidies.
Overall public procurements already represented 14 per cent of the EU’s GDP in 2023. The IAA will be adopted against a background of increasing defence spending, while the EU-27 is discussing its future seven-year budget and Germany is starting a €500 billion public investment plan over twelve years to modernize its infrastructure.
The extent of European preference is thus proportionate to the growing amount of state and EU allocations becoming available. The argument for the IAA is also political: by ensuring that some measure of this public spending must ‘buy European’, European taxpayers will get more of their money back.
But the ‘accelerator’ – another key concept of the legislation – will only be as effective as public tenders can be swiftly processed. It plans to simplify administrative authorizations. By adopting the IAA, public authorities, whether local, national or European, are therefore taking direct responsibility in gearing up the continent’s manufacturing capacities.
This also depends on which critical sectors will allow only EU manufacturers to receive state aid. In earlier drafts of the Act, European preference was intended to cover a variety of strategic sectors for the future, such as artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors. But these have been taken out in the final draft.
The list will surely be debated again during the legislative process the IAA will now go through, in both the European Parliament and the EU Council.
Yet the industrial ‘accelerator’ also relies, paradoxically, on foreign direct investment. The Act forces third countries investing over €100 million to enter into joint ventures with European companies, providing access to their intellectual property, hiring Europeans and transferring know-how to local partners.
By doing so the EU hopes to reconcile its economic security concerns with the technological disadvantage it faces – pointed out by the Draghi Report. Such requirements make the IAA look remarkably like Chinese-style market access restrictions – those that the EU has frequently complained about.
The other much debated question for third countries, not least for the UK, is how will the ‘European’ preference be understood? The Commission’s proposal does not limit strictly to the EU-27. It extends the discriminatory measure to all of the bloc’s free-trade so-called ‘trusted partners’ that are in customs union with the EU or respect reciprocal international agreements such as the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement.
But it allows reciprocal measures against countries limiting access to their own public procurements in certain sectors, such as Canada, Japan, South Korea or the US, to ensure equal treatment for EU companies.
Leadership and representation in international relations: building on women’s legacy 31 March 2026 — 1:00PM TO 3:00PM Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
Join us for a panel discussion and networking reception to mark Women’s History Month.
Join us for a panel discussion and networking reception to mark Women’s History Month.
Join us for a panel discussion and networking reception hosted by Chatham House’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, in collaboration with Women in International Security UK (WIIS UK) and LSE IDEAS, to mark Women’s History Month.
In line with the 2026 International Women’s Day theme of ‘Give to Gain’, this event explores the rich history of women’s contributions to international relations and diplomacy over the past century, and examines how those working in international affairs today can build on this legacy. Our discussion focuses on career paths, representation and allyship, and on what gender equity in international affairs looks like across the field, with an emphasis on inspiring and supporting the next generation of practitioners, diplomats and academics.
The event is followed by a reception.
Macron’s nuclear weapons offer to Europe: Gaullist policy, updated for a more unstable world Expert comment jon.wallace
‘Dissuasion avancée’ is intended to give France’s partners a greater stake in nuclear deterrence, retain French command and control – and prevent proliferation.
President Emmanuel Macron’s speech on 2 March, on the future of French nuclear deterrence, is already being framed as a watershed moment for European security.
The announcement that France will expand its nuclear arsenal for the first time in decades and create a new framework of ‘advanced deterrence’ cooperation has triggered intense debate about Europe’s strategic future.
Yet, for all its political substance, the speech is better understood as a strategic clarification rather than a doctrinal revolution. Macron mostly reaffirmed long-standing French principles of sovereign nuclear control and deliberate ambiguity – while attempting to adapt them to the new European security environment. That clarification is welcome at a time of Russian revisionism, uncertainty about US commitments and renewed nuclear competition, especially from China.
The conceptual foundations of Macron’s speech are deeply rooted in the original Gaullist doctrine of French nuclear strategy. That conceived deterrence as not only a shield for the national territory but also a guarantee of France’s political independence.
De Gaulle deliberately kept the definition of France’s ‘vital interests’ ambiguous. In 1964, he emphasized that French nuclear forces were designed to deter any power capable of threatening the country’s survival, without specifying geographical limits.
The doctrine was intentionally flexible. It allowed France to signal that developments affecting the European strategic balance could fall within its vital interests. Subsequent French nuclear planning assumed those interests could be engaged by a Soviet attack in Central Europe, particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium or the Netherlands, since such an advance would rapidly threaten French territory.
Michel Debré, one of the principal architects of French nuclear doctrine, articulated this logic clearly. In 1972, he observed that ‘France lives within a network of interests that extends beyond its borders’, adding that French deterrence inevitably benefited Western Europe as well. The implication was straightforward: although the French deterrent was strictly national in its command and control, its strategic consequences were never purely national.
Macron’s speech therefore reflects continuity rather than rupture. When the president insisted that nuclear deterrence must remain ‘a French intangible’ while proposing a more European strategic posture, he was essentially updating Gaullist principle: the ‘force de frappe’ is sovereign, but its political effects extend beyond the Hexagon.
The most notable element in the president’s speech was the announcement that France would increase the size of its nuclear arsenal, currently estimated at around 290 warheads. For decades, France has maintained a strict ceiling and emphasized transparency about its stockpile size. Macron indicated this would change: as the arsenal grows, France will no longer publicly disclose its exact number of warheads.
This shift reflects a broader international trend. Nuclear arsenals worldwide are expanding or modernizing (if not both), and strategic competition between major powers has intensified. By abandoning detailed transparency, France is reintroducing strategic uncertainty as a component of deterrence.
Macron also suggested that France could temporarily deploy nuclear-capable Rafale aircraft to allied bases for exercises or signalling missions. Importantly, this would not amount to NATO-style nuclear sharing. The nuclear weapons, the command chain and the decision to use them would remain strictly French. In this respect, the French president largely undercut nationalist critics who had warned that closer European cooperation would amount to a surrender of French nuclear sovereignty.
This principle lies at the heart of what Macron calls ‘dissuasion avancée’: advanced deterrence that is more forward and more European in posture, yet entirely French in control.
The concept attempts to reconcile two objectives that have long been difficult to combine: preserving national control over nuclear weapons while giving European partners a greater stake in the strategic environment surrounding them.
Under Macron’s proposal, European allies could participate in the broader ecosystem of deterrence without sharing operational control of nuclear weapons. This could include participation in exercises, strategic consultations, and contributions to conventional capabilities that reinforce nuclear signalling.
Such contributions might involve air and missile defence systems protecting strategic infrastructure, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, or long-range conventional strike assets that would strengthen Europe’s overall deterrence posture.
In practice, this would create a European political framework around a French nuclear core – a structure designed to enhance deterrence without fundamentally altering the national character of the French force.
The deeper ambition of Macron’s speech lies in the realm of strategic culture. For decades, European nuclear deterrence has been largely delegated to the US through NATO. Even after the Cold War, most European states avoided engaging directly with nuclear strategy.
Macron’s initiative implicitly challenges that posture. By inviting European partners into a more structured dialogue around deterrence, France is encouraging them to internalize the logic of nuclear strategy: escalation management, signalling, survivability and resilience.
Macron made clear that the US will continue to play a central role in European security.
The initiative is not intended to replace the American nuclear umbrella but to complement it, as US strategic priorities evolve.
Yet, the debate also reveals a deeper strategic dilemma for Europe. If the credibility of collective deterrence is questioned, individual states may pursue their own nuclear capabilities.
Recent statements by Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk about acquiring nuclear weapons illustrate this risk. A nuclear armed Poland would challenge the EU’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and undermine the cohesion of the European security architecture.
Emmanuel Macron’s proposal can therefore also be interpreted as a preventive initiative. By offering European partners a role within a broader deterrence framework centred on the French force, Paris is trying to discourage the emergence of new national nuclear programmes.
Macron’s speech has left an important question largely unanswered: the role of conventional military power in European deterrence.
Most contemporary conflicts unfold below the nuclear threshold – as the Russian war on Ukraine reminded us all. Effective deterrence therefore requires a strong conventional military layer capable of responding to aggression without escalation to nuclear weapons.
Europe still has limited ammunition stocks, insufficient air and missile defence systems, and logistical constraints affecting large-scale military deployments.
Without substantial improvements to such conventional capabilities, the political significance of Macron’s speech may exceed its practical impact. Macron may intend to work towards agreement on a strategic division of labour, where France has full control of nuclear deterrence while European partners boost the conventional forces that underpin its credibility.
Ultimately, the speech at Île Longue was less about nuclear weapons than about Europe’s capacity to act collectively in a more dangerous world.
The French president framed this challenge starkly during his Sorbonne speech in April 2024: ‘Our Europe today is mortal,’ he warned. ‘It can die simply because our decisions are insufficient or too slow’.
His initiative is therefore both an offer and a test. Whether this vision succeeds will depend on Europe’s willingness to assume greater strategic responsibility – through stronger conventional forces, deeper political cooperation and a shared understanding of deterrence in an increasingly unstable international system.
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