Regulations that would block sale of older tires praised by environmental groups amid rightwing backlash
California has become the first state in the nation to mandate that replacement tires be energy efficient, a major auto industry regulation set to block the sale of older tires and make vehicles on the road greener.
State regulators have said the new rules will reduce emissions and drivers’ fuel costs. But the rules – which come as the Trump administrations fights to block other California restrictions to promote greener cars – have already sparked a rightwing backlash, with one conservative news outlet calling the policies a “massive overreach”.
Those unfamiliar with Alaska politics are likely raising an eyebrow at some repeated names.
No, we’re not talking about Dan S Sullivan and Dan J Sullivan, two Republicans with the same name running for US Senate – an issue that went to the state supreme court earlier this summer. We’re talking about the Begiches. Nick Begich III, a Republican, is currently leading the race to represent Alaska in the US House of Representatives for a second term while Tom Begich, a Democrat, is advancing to the general election for governor in November.
The couple said in January 2020 that they would be stepping away from "senior" royal roles and were working to become financially independent from the royal family.
Review by paediatricians links child vaping with poor respiratory health such as coughing, wheezing and asthma
Young people who start vaping risk developing breathing problems and going on to smoke cigarettes, children’s doctors have warned.
Child vaping is consistently linked with poor respiratory health, such as coughing, wheezing, bronchitis symptoms and asthma exacerbations, while vapes have been shown to act as a gateway to smoking cigarettes, according to one of the most comprehensive reviews of the available evidence so far undertaken by the Royal College of Child and Paediatrics Health.
BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil production will continue as usual, but the outlook for its Linux hardware is much less certain. "That's it for this post, all in all it's a bit bleak for the Linux devices, but in the meantime PineStore still have a great lineup of MCU powered devices which will continue to expand with more exciting devices," the company said.
Recalled frozen blueberries and mixed berries that could be contaminated with E. coli pose the most severe category of health risk, according to the FDA.
(The Center Square) – The Pentagon has notified 30 higher education institutions that they must review their academic and research ties to foreign entities or risk losing federal funding.
Two members of the Milligan University cycling team were killed, and several more injured, in a collision with a vehicle on a rural highway in eastern Tennessee Wednesday morning.
With development activities already underway, the new facility expands Diraq’s R&D capacity and strengthens its U.S. presence as part of a global push toward utility-scale quantum computing.
Aug. 19, 2026 — Diraq has opened its first U.S. laboratory in Chicago as part of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park’s (IQMP) On-Ramp program at mHUB.
“Chicago’s superb quantum facilities offer Diraq the ability to rapidly test and prototype our uniquely scalable technology as we advance toward deploying commercial systems,” said Diraq CEO and founder Andrew Dzurak. “Chicago has become an important center for quantum development in the U.S. and establishing a research and development base here puts us in the heart of the country as we expand our capabilities and work toward utility-scale systems.”
The facility expands Diraq’s global testing and measurement capabilities, complementing existing R&D operations in Sydney. Onsite, Diraq’s Chicago team has access to dedicated cryogenic and measurement infrastructure to test and characterize the silicon quantum technology underpinning Diraq’s roadmap to utility-scale quantum computing. This includes two quantum refrigeration units and supporting infrastructure. Development work is already underway in Chicago, including qubit measurements, cryogenic CMOS testing, and component testing and verification.
Building a Global Quantum R&D Network
Diraq’s Chicago team operates as part of a global R&D effort, using complementary time zones to extend experimental work across the day. Work conducted in Chicago will contribute directly to Diraq’s broader development program as it works toward a commercially useful quantum computing system containing many thousands of physical qubits by 2029.
Diraq plans to grow its Chicago team over the next 12 months, building on current capabilities in quantum theory and device fabrication, with the potential to expand into broader engineering functions as the operation grows.
IQMP’s On-Ramp program provides Diraq with access to dedicated cryogenic and measurement infrastructure at mHUB while the permanent IQMP campus is under development. As a key center for quantum development in the U.S., Chicago offers access to industry partners, national laboratories, and a robust innovation ecosystem.
“Diraq’s first U.S. laboratory is exactly the kind of momentum we hoped for when they joined the IQMP,” said Harley Johnson, CEO of IQMP. “Our On-Ramp program at mHUB means Diraq—and every participating tenant—can start collaborating within Illinois’ innovation ecosystem right now, well before the Park officially opens its doors. That’s the foundation we’ve built in Illinois: one ready to sustain momentum like this and make Illinois the global destination for quantum discovery and commercialization.”
“The opening of Diraq’s Chicago laboratory represents the progress we envision for Illinois’ growing quantum ecosystem: Leading companies putting down roots, building their teams, and conducting cutting-edge work here,” said Illinois Economic Development Corporation Chief Quantum Officer Dr. Preeti Chalsani. “Illinois EDC is proud to support Diraq’s continued expansion and to help connect the company with the workforce and resources it needs to succeed in Illinois.”
Scalable Silicon-Based Quantum Computing
Diraq builds quantum processors using silicon spin qubits and CMOS-compatible production processes, an approach designed to leverage established semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure and ultimately enable millions of qubits on a single chip. Diraq’s utility-scale quantum computers (USQCs) will be rack-scale systems that can integrate into existing computing facilities worldwide.
For Diraq, utility scale means reaching the point where a quantum computer generates computational value that exceeds its cost to build and operate. The Chicago expansion adds U.S.-based infrastructure, technical capability, and access to a major quantum center as Diraq works toward that goal.
(The Center Square) – The United States government passed a sobering milestone Wednesday as the national debt topped $40 trillion, up from $39 trillion only five months ago.
Stripe is acquiring AI model marketplace OpenRouter as it pushes beyond payments into the infrastructure behind AI applications. According to The New York Times, the deal is reportedly valued at about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago the company was valued at about $1.3 billion. CNBC reports: OpenRouter has become popular with developers seeking to use AI models, particularly those considered non-proprietary and available for free. Many of these so-called open-weight AI models stem from Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai, which have gained steam among developers for generally being more cost-efficient relative to proprietary AI models from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
In a blog post about the deal, Stripe noted that it's been working with companies to "optimize their token costs and route tokens efficiently," referring to a kind of metric used to measure AI model usage. Stripe said it's difficult to manage AI costs relative to performance because of the rapid "pace at which models are released and repriced." [...]
OpenRouter said in a blog post that combining with Stripe will help with its overall vision of "a healthy AI ecosystem where many models thrive, where AI neurodiversity is a strength, where a lab or an inference provider with a breakthrough can reach millions of developers, and where no single model becomes the default by inertia." "Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI, and together with OpenRouter we'll help businesses maximize profitability by routing their requests intelligently and spending their tokens efficiently," Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said in a statement.
When I wrote about using Windows 11 for a month as part of the ongoing OSNews fundraiser (keep donating to get me to do the same for macOS!), one of the things I mentioned was that “the modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu”. This is, in fact, a long-standing complaint I’ve repeatedly used as the perfect example of just how chaotic and low-quality Windows has become. Thankfully, and naturally I fully attribute this to my repeated complaints (*), Microsoft has been working on a brand new, faster, configurable context menu, and Neowin actually reviewed it.
If you ask me, this revamped context menu addresses just about the biggest problem users had with the one in Windows 11, and that is the need to click through more buttons than necessary to do simple things like renaming a file or opening its properties. That problem is now basically gone.
I have no issues with the new design. It looks modern, it feels more consistent with the rest of Windows, and even though all the new sections can still make it look a little busy, you now have the option to make it as simple or as button-packed as you want. That should cover most use cases and preferences well. I’d even say that when the new context menu becomes available to everyone, my guide on how to bring back the classic context menu might become obsolete.
The biggest reason I’m linking to this is not because I care about whatever monster of a context menu Windows users are having to deal with. No, I’m only linking to this because I never in my life imagined I’d be linking to a review of a context menu. I mean, at least it’s not the chess application icon. That would be embarrassing.
Reports say Duke and Duchess of Sussex intend to relocate from US, with children to start British school in September
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are planning to return to live in Britain, six years after leaving for the US, it has been reported.
The couple and their two children, Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, are expected to relocate later this month to a non-royal residence.
The pillow salesman, Trump supporter and election denier Mike Lindell has offered to personally fund a recount and audit of every paper ballot cast in Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary, which he lost last week.
Lindell’s announcement on Wednesday escalates his bid to challenge the results of last week’s vote, after finishing a distant second to the Minnesota house speaker, Lisa Demuth.
Andy Burnham promises drive to tackle toxic waste, raise fines and use AI-powered drones to detect illegal activity
Illegal dumps in West Yorkshire, Surrey and Kent will be cleared up using taxpayer money, Andy Burnham has announced, as the prime minister promises a new drive to tackle toxic waste.
Ministers have identified dumps in Bradford, Runnymede and the Isle of Sheppey, which collectively contain about 22,000 tonnes of illegal waste, to be cleared in the next phase of the government’s national clear-up effort.
(The Center Square) – State Sen. Aisha Wahab continues to enjoy a small lead over Bay Area Rapid Transit board member Melissa Hernandez in the race for California’s 14th Congressional District.
(The Center Square) - Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has signed a pair of executive orders that fast-track environmental permitting for critical minerals and rare earth production as part of an effort to attract heavy industries to the state.
Amazon says its Prime Air drone delivery service will expand sixfold to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, including metro areas around Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Boise. According to Amazon Prime Air vice president David Carbon, the service has already delivered "hundreds of thousands of packages to customers" this year, typically within about an hour. The Verge reports: These will join 11 locations across the US where Amazon already offers drone deliveries, with each Prime Air site serving an area of approximately 175 square miles. The service aims to quickly deliver packages of up to 5 pounds or less [...]. Amazon reiterated its drone safety features alongside these expansion plans, including Prime Air's "industry-leading Detect-and-Avoid system." That's likely an attempt to minimize any concerns raised by the communities where the service is expanding, given these drones have already been scrutinized for crashing into cranes, internet cables, gardens, and an apartment building.
(The Center Square) – Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are blocked from entering churches of Cooperative Baptists, Quakers and Sikhs to carry out enforcement operations unless they have a warrant, or in certain specified circumstances, the 4th U.S.…
(The Center Square) – The Trump administration unveiled a proposed rule clarifying that hundreds of thousands of noncitizen taxpayers are ineligible for refunds from four individual income tax credits. The move could save the U.S. up to $2.6 billion in…
The Rhode Island town of Narragansett was left with a very smelly cleanup over the weekend after thousands of squid spilled over the highway. The incident happened on Sunday morning when the driver of a tractor-trailer transporting the squid failed to make a turn and the vehicle fell on to its side, the town’s police department said in a statement. It created hours of delays for motorists and a foul stench
Officials say all seven people onboard killed, including Telemundo executive and Ecuador intelligence chief
Seven people, including five Americans, were killed when a safari helicopter crashed on Wednesday morning in a remote part of northern Kenya, according to local police and the state department.
Among the dead were an executive with Telemundo, the US-based Spanish-language network owned by NBC Universal, and the director of Ecuador’s national intelligence service.
Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is "nothing fair" about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted material while rights holders receive nothing. From The Hollywood Reporter: Round Hill is a prominent music publisher whose copyrights include the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," the Kinks' "Lola" and Dio's "Holy Diver." The company provided a list of 500 songs that the defendants had infringed upon. Round Hill said in the suits that the company plans to "amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions," with those damages potentially exceeding $1 billion. "While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI's value to society, there is simply no reason -- other than rote expediency -- to have that progress come at the cost of copyrights holders," prominent music attorney Richard Busch, representing Round Hill, wrote in the suits.
Round Hill further argued that the latter "'expediency' arguments completely falter" when taking into account Suno and Anthropic's significant cash valuations they've earned while "exploiting illicit copies of copyrighted works, including the Round Hill Works." "There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing," Round Hill said.
Suno also faces a lawsuit from Universal Music Group and Sony Music Group.
The UAE, one of Iran’s biggest trading partners, said the move was “in light of regional escalations that undermine regional and international peace and security.”
In conservative Florida, Alex Vindman – a retired army intelligence officer who blew this whistle on Donald Trump in his first term – appeared set to carry the Democratic establishment banner as the party staged a long-shot bid to topple a Republican US senator.
CISA says the Medusa ransomware operation has breached more than 500 U.S. critical infrastructure organizations since 2021, up from more than 300 reported last year. The group has targeted healthcare, government, defense, manufacturing, IT and financial organizations, evolving into a ransomware-as-a-service operation that recruits initial-access brokers and uses stolen data to pressure victims into paying. BleepingComputer reports: The three federal agencies recommended that network defenders secure their networks against the ransomware group's attacks by mitigating security vulnerabilities to protect operating systems, software, and firmware from exploitation attempts. Security teams are also advised to segment networks to block lateral movement after compromise and to block access from untrusted origins to remote services on internal systems.
[...] "Medusa developers typically recruit initial access brokers (IABs) in cybercriminal forums and marketplaces to obtain initial access to potential victims," the advisory says. "Potential payments between $100 USD and $1 million USD are offered to these affiliates with the opportunity to work exclusively for Medusa."
Meeting attendees discussed the open-source library for high performance computing
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Aug. 19, 2026 — Researchers, developers, system administrators, engineers, and students who share an interest in the MVAPICH open-source library for high performance computing (HPC) gathered at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) Monday, Aug. 17, through Wednesday, Aug. 19, for the 14th meeting of the MVAPICH Users Group (MUG).
Participants in the 2026 MVAPICH Users Group (MUG) meeting gather at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) facility in Columbus, Ohio. Image credit: OSC.
The Network-Based Computing Research Group led by Dhabaleswar K. “DK” Panda, a professor of computer science at The Ohio State University, developed and maintains the popular HPC system software package, which is used by more than 3,500 organizations in 94 countries worldwide. As of August 2026, more than two million downloads have occurred from the project’s site. The software is distributed by many vendors and powers several supercomputers in the TOP500 list of global supercomputing systems.
“We are pleased to feature more than two dozen academic and industry speakers from across the globe at this year’s conference,” Panda said. “This annual meeting is a great opportunity for our growing user base to share their knowledge and experiences and learn from each other.”
In addition to expert talks, the event featured presentations from the MVAPICH team on tuning and optimization strategies for various components, an interactive/hands-on session with the MVAPICH developers to discuss issues, and student poster presentation sessions.
Sponsors of this year’s event are 1Finity, Broadcom, Cornelis Networks, National Science Foundation, D-Matrix, Keysight, NVIDIA, Ohio State, ParaTools, X-ScaleSolutions, and OSC.
“OSC is excited to sponsor and host the MVAPICH Users Group meeting,” said Karen Tomko, OSC director of research software applications. “As many OSC clients rely on the software package, we are pleased to provide a forum in which the developers and users can exchange information and optimize its use in their high performance computing work.”
OSC and Panda have collaborated on several research initiatives, including the AI Institute for Intelligent CyberInfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment (ICICLE), as well as a new National Science Foundation-funded project, “Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Designing Next-Generation HPC and AI Middleware with Power-Performance Tradeoffs.”
The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation, and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the services essential to making extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy, and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required for 21st-century jobs.
Aalim Ahmed, five, fell from 15th-floor window at tower block family had asked to be moved out of, court hears
An inquest into the death of a five-year-old boy who fell from a 15th-floor window has heard that more measures could have been taken to make it safer.
Aalim Ahmed, who was autistic, died when he fell from a kitchen window at a residential block in Plaistow, east London. His father, Makail Ahmed, rushed from the top floor temporary social housing flat and discovered his body shortly before 6am on 16 May 2024.
PM wants to reduce department’s stranglehold on public purse and bring long-term thinking to economic policy
Andy Burnham is far from the first prime minister to dream of taming the power of the mighty Treasury.
Boris Johnson all but forced the resignation of Sajid Javid by handpicking his team; Margaret Thatcher favoured her economic adviser Alan Walters over Nigel Lawson, prompting the latter’s furious resignation; and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s power struggle was the stuff of Whitehall legend.
Israel says military police will investigate the killing of Hind Rajab, a young girl in Gaza whose death at the hands of its forces drew an international outcry.
UCL researchers warn repeated exam attempts may dent students’ confidence and raise risk of dropping out
Forcing teenagers who fail GCSEs into multiple resits has a negative impact on their mental health, according to research to be published as pupils receive their grades on Thursday.
The study by academics at University College London (UCL) compared the mental wellbeing of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who failed to reach a grade 4 or equivalent in maths or English GCSEs – and found that only those in England, where resits are mandatory, showed significantly lower wellbeing.
Aug. 19, 2026 — AI is an increasingly useful tool for researchers across the scientific landscape, showing deep promise for accelerating discovery and innovation. However, incorporating AI into research may require training and adjustment for scientists—and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in conjunction with organizers from other institutions, is bridging that gap.
DL4SCI 2026 attendees have the opportunity to share their findings at a poster session. Credit: Berkeley Lab.
From July 20–24, over 230 researchers gathered at UC Berkeley for the 2026 Deep Learning for Science School (DL4SCI), a five-day intensive workshop featuring the newest and most innovative methods and technologies in AI for science.
Initiated in 2019, DL4SCI has become a benchmark in training researchers in AI, even as it has evolved with the technology. This year’s school featured in-depth lectures and research talks, along with sessions on reasoning-centric workflows and agentic systems.
“The school spans the life cycle of AI in science, from foundation models and large-scale training to scientific applications, reasoning, and agentic AI,” said DL4SCI co-organizer Shashank Subramanian. “Bringing together experts from academia, national labs, and industry gives participants a unique perspective on where AI for science is today and where it’s headed.”
DL4SCI is bolstered by advanced theory in deep learning and generative AI, but organizers say what makes the school special is interaction and collaboration with practitioners using these techniques in real, challenging applications in industry and academia. From conversation with experts to networking opportunities and an optional poster session, DL4SCI is known for offering participants the chance to learn how to apply AI for practical science impacts.
Ultimately, DL4SCI is one important way in which Berkeley Lab is preparing researchers to incorporate transformative technologies into their work and developing the workforce of the future.
“This summer school series has been incredibly effective in bringing deep learning techniques to complex science domains,” said Jonathan Carter, Assistant Lab Director for the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Area. “Equipping the next generation of researchers with these capabilities is a vital part to fulfilling the objectives of the Genesis Mission.”
About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab
High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.
(The Center Square) – Gov. Greg Abbott is pushing back against a request to extradite a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in custody in Texas, saying he doesn’t trust Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 19, 2026 — Cerebras Systems has introduced the CS-4, a rack-scale AI system built with three new Wafer Scale Engine 3 Turbo processors. The CS-4 is the first system based on the company’s new Nexus platform architecture and delivers up to twice the performance of the CS-3, according to Cerebras.
Cerebras said the CS-4 delivers up to 30 times the tokens per second per user of GPU-based systems and up to 10 times the throughput per watt of the CS-3. First shipments are scheduled to begin this quarter.
“In AI, speed is productivity,” said Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras. “Historically, fast inference meant using smaller and less capable models. Cerebras CS-4 delivers industry-leading speeds on the largest frontier models, fundamentally changing the paradigm. Every aspect of the design has been optimized to deliver the highest speeds with massive throughput. With the CS-4, AI is so fast that it fundamentally reshapes product experiences.”
The rack scale CS-4 is built from three of the newly released Wafer Scale Engine 3 Turbo (WSE-3T). The CS-4 delivers 750 PFLOPs of AI compute, 7.2 terabits per second of I/O, and 129.6 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth. Total compute fabric bandwidth jumps to 160.5 petabytes per second, and wafer to wafer latency drops as low as two microseconds, enabling the creation of very large clusters and the support of models with over 50 trillion parameters.
“CS-4 makes dramatic improvements in system deployability, reliability, and networking, which enables scaling performance to larger models for large scale token factories,” said Dylan Patel, founder and CEO, SemiAnalysis. “CS-4 will scale ultrafast tokens for larger models and significant user volumes. The Cerebras Backpack is focused on time to market. As ultrafast inference continues to grow, Cerebras’ newest hardware will help ensure frontier speeds.”
A New Leader in AI Inference Speed and Capacity
In a head-to-head comparison on GPT-OSS-120B, when given identical prompts, the CS-4 delivers more than 4,400 tokens second per user (TPS/user), up to 30 times faster than GPU solutions.
“Being 30 times faster doesn’t just make a response feel fast. It gives an agentic system room for more than an order of magnitude as much reasoning, verification, or tool use in the same wall-clock time,” said Sean Lie, CTO and co-founder of Cerebras. “That’s the difference CS-4 makes for real production workloads.”
A New Processor
CS-4 is powered by the newly announced WSE-3 Turbo (WSE-3T). Like the WSE-3, the WSE-3T is the largest AI processor ever built, containing four trillion transistors and 900,000 AI-optimized cores across 46,225 square millimeters of silicon, with 44GB of SRAM integrated directly on the wafer.
The WSE-3T doubles AI compute to 250 PFLOPS per wafer and doubles memory bandwidth to 43.2 petabytes per second. And since memory bandwidth is the determining factor in driving speed and throughput, this translates to a step-change improvement in both. The on-chip fabric bandwidth and off-chip I/O both double to 53.5 petabytes per second and 2.4 terabits per second respectively. I/O latency shrinks from five microseconds to as low as two microseconds.
New System and Rack Design
CS-4 is the first iteration of the new Cerebras Nexus Platform Architecture. It is built around a modular concept with three foundational elements: Compute, Power and I/O. Cerebras brings significant innovation to each element. Modularity enables each element to scale independently so innovations get to market faster. The modular architecture also supports extremely rapid deployment and upgrades.
Pluggable Backpack Design: Cerebras has fundamentally re-imagined the compute subsystem into a rear mounted “backpack” that attaches vertically to the power array. Each Wafer-Scale Backpack is a self-contained assembly that folds power conversion, direct liquid cooling, high-speed I/O, and control electronics into a compact, three-dimensional package built directly around the wafer. By decoupling compute from the power supplies, the Wafer-Scale Backpack simplifies manufacturing and reduces deployment time from days to hours. Compared with the prior-generation system, the Wafer-Scale Backpack has 50% fewer components and uses 60% more automated manufacturing.
High-Density Power Delivery: The Nexus Platform Architecture drives significant power delivery improvements. For example, by moving power conversion 100x closer to the processors – from roughly 50 millimeters away from the processor as on conventional GPU boards to approximately 0.5 millimeters – CS-4 nearly eliminates board-level power loss. This delivers twice as much power to the WSE-3T, enabling higher operating frequencies and faster token generation.
New Modular I/O Subsystem: CS-4 introduces a new programmable I/O subsystem that supports two connectivity modes while doubling I/O bandwidth and reducing latency. More bandwidth and lower latency benefits both aggregated and disaggregated solutions.
The fully programmable Wafer I/O Module supports standards-based RoCE v2 RDMA over Ethernet for seamless integration into existing infrastructure and with an ecosystem of heterogeneous systems. Aggregate off-wafer bandwidth doubles to 2.4 terabits per second per wafer and 7.2 terabits per CS-4 rack solution.
The Wafer I/O Module also supports a new communication mode, called Direct Wafer Links, which enables wafers to be linked within and across racks without a switch. Direct Wafer Links enables wafer-to-wafer latency as low as two microseconds. This low latency communication will allow the creation of massive CS-4 clusters and the ability to support models with more than 50 trillion parameters.
Programmable low latency I/O is particularly beneficial for heterogeneous disaggregated inference, in which a purpose-built prefill engine processes an incoming prompt and then hands it to Cerebras for ultra-low latency decode. The combination of programmability, standards-based interfaces, and very low latency will allow the rapid creation of disaggregated solutions from different Cerebras ecosystem partners, like AMD Helios and AWS Trainium.
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) builds the world’s fastest AI infrastructure. The Cerebras team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers of all types came together to make AI blisteringly fast through innovation and invention. We believe that when AI is fast, it will change the world. Leading global corporations, research institutes, and governments choose Cerebras to run their AI workloads. Cerebras solutions are available on premises and in the cloud. Visit cerebras.ai for more.
Prosecutors faced a backlash for bringing felony charges against Los Angeles police officer Daniel Flores, whom they accused of illegally recording colleagues' offensive comments.
Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine significantly reduced both cancer recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial. The treatment could reach patients as soon as next year if regulators approve it. Reuters reports: Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. [...] This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone. Similar approaches are being tested against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers.
[...] The cancer treatment combines Merck's Keytruda with a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from Moderna that is based on an analysis of mutations found in the patients' own tumors. The trial enrolled 1,137 high-risk patients with stage IIB-IV melanoma that had been surgically removed. Volunteers were randomized to receive up to nine doses of Keytruda plus the personalized vaccine or Keytruda alone for about one year. The companies said no new safety signals have emerged in the trial. In January, the companies announced results of a mid-stage trial of the treatment showing that it reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% after five years. Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers. "The positive hit here leads us into truly this next phase in immunotherapy," Knudsen said. "This is an auspicious start -- this is where things begin."
Moderna shares more than doubled on the news, adding about $30 billion to its market value.
The Trump administration’s ‘America first’ approach has contributed to the scale of the crisis now unfolding in one of the world’s poorest countries
For months health experts have warned that the scale of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) could surpass the one that swept west Africa in 2014-16. This week, the authorities in the DRC announced that a grim milestone has already been passed: at least 2,325 people have died from the virus, making it the deadliest of the country’s 17 outbreaks and the fastest-growing in history.
There is no effective vaccine against Bundibugyo – a rare strain of the virus that spread fatally undetected during the spring, often being misdiagnosed as malaria or typhoid. In contrast to neighbouring Uganda, which succeeded in eliminating an outbreak, multiple factors are combining to let the disease rip through the DRC. The worst-affected region is contested by armed groups, and a context of population displacement and chronic insecurity has made monitoring and surveillance more difficult. Ebola treatment centres have been attacked as a result of misinformation and community distrust.
(The Center Square) – Despite crime down across the country, antisemitic crimes remain high as 2025 marked the “third highest year on record” for hate crimes targeting Jewish people, according to a new FBI report.
Officers still investigating deaths of Zeina Alayn, Hassan El-Khawas and daughter Sara El-Khawas at Shoreham-by-Sea
A father, mother and their teenage daughter who died off the Sussex coast on Tuesday have been identified.
Sussex police named the victims as Hassan El-Khawas, 55, his partner, Zeina Alayn, 37, and their 14-year-old daughter, Sara El-Khawas. A younger girl who was also part of the family is in hospital in a critical condition. She has not been named.
Caption: On September 12, Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA members and Girl Scouts in second grade and older can spend two 2½-hour sessions doing maritime activities that connect naturally with Scouting’s emphasis on learning through experience. Photos courtesy of the Kalmar Nyckel and edited with AI on 8/19.
Kalmar Nyckel event on September 12 will challenge Scouts with boat racing, knot tying, cannon drills, sea chanteys and an outdoor adventure course
By George D. Rotsch, Editor and Publisher of Delaware LIVE
WILMINGTON — Long before young people learned leadership around a campfire, sailors learned many of the same lessons aboard ships: Work together, master practical skills, accept responsibility and be prepared when conditions change.
Those shared traditions will come together Sept. 12 when the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation hosts its annual Scout Day at the Copeland Maritime Center campus and nearby Fort Christina Park.
The event is designed for Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA members and Girl Scouts in second grade and older. Two 2½-hour sessions will offer maritime activities that connect naturally with Scouting’s emphasis on learning through experience.
Participants will be assigned to groups and rotate through five hands-on stations: a Rain Gutter Regatta, an outdoor adventure course, knot tying, sea chanteys and cannon drills.
Each activity introduces a different part of maritime life while reinforcing teamwork, communication, problem-solving and personal confidence.
Small boats create a big challenge
The Rain Gutter Regatta brings one of Scouting’s familiar traditions to the maritime campus.
Scouts will race small boats through narrow channels, discovering how a boat’s design, balance and movement can affect its performance. The activity combines friendly competition with basic lessons about buoyancy, propulsion and the challenges of moving a vessel through water.
It also encourages Scouts to observe what works, make adjustments and try again — the same problem-solving process used by sailors, engineers and shipbuilders.
The regatta may be on a much smaller scale than the Kalmar Nyckel, but the challenge reflects a much larger maritime principle: A successful voyage begins with a vessel designed to move efficiently through the water.
Knots with a purpose
At the knot-tying station, Scouts will practice one of the most fundamental skills in both Scouting and sailing.
Knots aboard a ship are not decorative. Sailors depend on them to secure equipment, manage lines and keep people and cargo safe. Each knot must be appropriate for the job and tied correctly.
Scouting teaches the same combination of knowledge, practice and responsibility. Learning a knot requires concentration and repetition, but it also gives a young person a skill that can be used while camping, boating or responding to an emergency.
The station will help Scouts understand why sailors had to know not only how to tie a knot, but also when and why to use it.
Cannon drills demand coordination
The cannon drill will introduce Scouts to the highly organized teamwork required aboard a historic vessel.
Operating a ship’s cannon required crew members to perform different tasks in a precise order. Each person had to understand an assigned role, listen for commands and work safely with the rest of the team.
The activity turns history into a group exercise. Instead of simply hearing how a tall ship’s crew worked, Scouts will experience how communication, timing and shared responsibility allowed sailors to complete a complicated assignment.
Those lessons closely match Scouting’s patrol system, in which young people learn that a team succeeds when every member understands the plan and carries out a responsibility.
Singing that helped sailors work
Sea chanteys will bring music into the Scout Day experience, but the songs historically served a practical purpose.
Sailors used chanteys to establish a rhythm when performing demanding group tasks, such as hauling a line or raising a sail. The song helped crew members coordinate their movements and apply their effort at the same time.
For Scouts, the station will demonstrate how music could become a tool for teamwork. It also provides a window into the culture of sailors who spent long periods living and working together at sea.
The activity connects history, performance and cooperation while giving Scouts an opportunity to participate together.
An outdoor test of confidence
The outdoor adventure course will draw on another strong connection between the Kalmar Nyckel and Scouting: the belief that young people build confidence by confronting manageable challenges.
The course will require Scouts to listen, move, think and work with others. Like many Scouting activities, the objective is not simply to finish. Participants must determine how to approach a challenge and support the other members of their group.
The station brings maritime adventure onto land while reinforcing the qualities needed aboard a ship: awareness, preparation, perseverance and trust.
Learning by doing
Together, the five stations create a progression of experiences rather than a traditional classroom lesson.
Scouts will race, tie, sing, drill and navigate physical challenges. Each station approaches maritime education differently, but all are built around active participation.
That approach reflects a central value shared by Scouting and the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation: Young people often understand a lesson more deeply when they have an opportunity to put it into practice.
The activities also demonstrate that leadership is not limited to the person giving directions. Leadership can mean completing an assigned task, communicating clearly, helping a teammate or remaining focused when a challenge becomes difficult.
Adventure tied to Delaware history
The event’s setting adds another layer to the experience.
The original Kalmar Nyckel carried Swedish settlers to the Delaware Valley in 1638. They established New Sweden at The Rocks, near present-day Fort Christina Park.
The modern Kalmar Nyckel serves as Delaware’s tall ship and a floating classroom, helping visitors understand the maritime skills, risks and decisions that shaped the region’s early history.
Scout Day allows young people to encounter that history near the place where Delaware’s colonial story began. It supports another value shared by Scouting and the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation: Citizenship begins with understanding the community and history people inherit.
Before or after their assigned session, Scouts may also participate in the Junior Ranger Program at Fort Christina Park, part of First State National Historical Park. Scouts who complete that program will receive a wooden Junior Ranger pin.
Every Scout who completes the five-station Scout Day rotation will also receive an exclusive Kalmar Nyckel Scout patch.
Registration is limited and open to troops as well as individual Scouts.
To Go Box
What: Annual Kalmar Nyckel Scout Day
When: Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026
Morning session: Check-in at 8:30 a.m.; activities from 9 to 11:30 a.m.
Afternoon session: Check-in at 12:30 p.m.; activities from 1 to 3:30 p.m.
Where: Copeland Maritime Center at the Kalmar Nyckel Shipyard, 1124 E. Seventh St., Wilmington. Sessions conclude at Fort Christina Park.
President says he plans to meet dictator this year but Kim Yo-jong says Washington remains Pyongyang’s enemy
Donald Trump has said he is planning to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un later this year, though the reclusive leader’s younger sister cast doubt on their communications and dampened hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough between them.
Trump, who also claimed North Korea had 57 nuclear weapons, had suggested he and Kim were holding secret negotiations on Tuesday after announcing the US would downgrade its participation in military exercises held by South Korea, a US ally. Asked whether Kim had responded to his request for a conversation, Trump said: “Yeah, he has.”
Incumbent Dan S Sullivan, the US senator, advanced in Alaska’s non-partisan primary race for his seat on Tuesday alongside Mary Peltola, a former Democratic congresswoman.
With the top four candidates moving forward from Alaska’s open primaries to the general election, the Associated Press reported that Sullivan and Peltola had qualified for November’s general election.
Discovery marks latest grim finding in lake as water levels in crucial reservoir outside Las Vegas continue to decline
Human remains have once again been discovered at Lake Mead outside Las Vegas, Nevada, marking the latest in a line of gruesome discoveries as water levels in the crucial reservoir continue to drop, authorities said.
These remains were discovered on 16 August, USA Today reported. The National Park Service (NPS) told the outlet there did not appear to be anything suspicious about the body.
Image captured in early June shows animal foraging in the waterway in first since early 1900s, signaling its recovery
An otter has been spotted in the Bronx River for the first time in more than 100 years, in a further sign that New York’s previously befouled waterways are recovering some of their ecological health.
The North American river otter was photographed by a motion-activated camera foraging near some vegetation in the Bronx River, a waterway that flows through New York’s Bronx and empties into the East River.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 19, 2026 — SandboxAQ today announced the general availability of AQPotency, its Large Quantitative Model (LQM) for predicting how well a potential drug will work, now available on Claude via Model Context Protocol (MCP). For any disease target, AQPotency scores how strongly candidate molecules are likely to act on it, and it does this without the expensive, time-consuming lab work that older methods depend on. Drug discovery teams can now rank enormous libraries of molecules by computer in seconds, then spend their limited lab budgets only on the candidates most likely to succeed.
Early drug discovery is a high-stakes guessing game. Teams have to decide which molecules to test in the lab, and a wrong call can cost months of work and significant expense. The established computer methods for narrowing the field are slow and costly to run, and they only work when scientists already have a detailed structural map of the disease target. Many of the most valuable targets have no such map, so those methods never reach them, and promising programs stall before they start.
AQPotency clears that roadblock. It runs on ordinary computing hardware, ranks pairs of molecules and targets in seconds, and costs as little as $1 per 1,000 comparisons. For every prediction, it also reports how confident it is and whether the target falls within the range where the model performs reliably. Older tools give scientists a single score with no sense of its reliability. AQPotency tells them not only what it predicts, but when they can trust it, which makes the results something teams can act on.
AQPotency also works in the other direction. Starting with a single promising molecule, it scans a broad panel of proteins across the body and returns a ranked list of the ones it is most likely to act on. When a molecule shows a useful effect but no one yet knows why, this gives research teams a focused set of leads to test.
“SandboxAQ’s models have been very impactful for our work as we develop new treatments for Parkinson’s,” said Professor Dario R. Alessi, OBE, FMedSci, FRS, Director of the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit at the University of Dundee. “These models enable us to explore a much larger biochemical space in a short timeframe and improve both activity and selectivity. SandboxAQ’s unique datasets and models stand out in the industry for their impact.”
“This collaboration with SandboxAQ highlights the power of combining advanced AI-enabled discovery with rigorous experimental validation to unlock novel opportunities against historically difficult membrane targets. By identifying selective SV2C binders from a broad commercial library, the work establishes a compelling foundation for the development of first-in-class small-molecule tools and future therapeutics aimed at Parkinson’s disease and other disorders of dopaminergic signaling,” said Dr. Gary W. Miller the Adrienne Block Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and the Vice Dean for Research Strategy and Innovation at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Andrea Bortolato, Vice President of Drug Discovery, at SandboxAQ, said: “AQPotency has given us and our customers a faster, scalable and reliable way to prioritize compounds in the workflows we already run, without needing a 3D crystal structure of the target. This opens up programs that structure-based methods simply couldn’t reach. The confidence intervals make the output actionable for biopharma companies, and the model has already been successfully used in eight customer programs with experimentally validated impact.”
“What’s compelling about AQPotency is that it makes high-value discovery decisions faster and more practical,” said Robin Roehm, CEO and Co-Founder at Apheris, which offers federated data and AI networks for life science companies. “Researchers can prioritize the most promising compounds with greater confidence, focus experimental resources where they matter most, and expand discovery efforts to targets that have traditionally been harder to pursue.”
AQPotency is generally available today through Claude via MCP and SandboxAQ’s website, with availability on Google Cloud’s Marketplace to follow. Its general availability is paired with the GA on Claude and Claude Science of a second LQM, AQCat Adsorption Spin, for catalyst discovery.
About SandboxAQ
SandboxAQ is a B2B company delivering solutions at the intersection of AI and quantum techniques. The company’s Large Quantitative Models deliver critical advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, and other sectors. SandboxAQ is an independent, growth backed company funded by leading investors and strategic partners including funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Google, Alger, IQT, US Innovative Technology Fund, S32, Paladin Capital, BNP Paribas, Eric Schmidt, Breyer Capital, Ray Dalio, Marc Benioff, Thomas Tull, and others. For more information, visit www.sandboxaq.com.
Andy Burnham has said government money alone may not be enough to get rough sleepers off the streets by Christmas, as experts called for more of a plan to deal with the problems that cause homelessness.
Speaking on a visit to the north-east of England, the prime minister said he felt “very passionately” about tackling rough sleeping and wanted the wider society to play a part in wiping it out.
The Republican nominee for the South Carolina Senate seat will be determined in the runoff between Sen. Darline Graham and Rep. Ralph Norman on Aug. 25.
Military orders criminal investigation into deaths of five-year-old and six family members in Gaza in 2024
The Israeli military admitted on Wednesday its troops had opened fire on a car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members in Gaza in 2024, saying it had ordered a criminal investigation into the killing.
The killing of Hind and her family was one of the most high profile of a series of incidents involving civilian casualties during the first months of the Gaza conflict which prompted international outrage.
Presidential deputy chief of staff Iryna Mudra dismissed day after former defence minister called for wartime election
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired a senior aide amid a fresh corruption investigation – one day after a former defence minister warned the country was facing “a crisis of governance” and needed to hold a wartime presidential election.
Iryna Mudra, a presidential deputy chief of staff, was dismissed by decree after multiple reports in Ukrainian media that her house was being searched by officials investigating an alleged money-laundering scheme.
Austin, Texas — Gov. Greg Abbott says dozens of technology companies have agreed to tougher standards for data center development after Texas temporarily halted approvals for projects seeking connections to the state power grid.
The pause affects an interconnection queue containing more than 1,800 projects representing about 474 gigawatts of proposed electricity demand — more than five times Texas’ record peak demand. Abbott said roughly 90% of those requests involve data centers.
Under Abbott’s directives, regulators must audit proposed projects before approving grid connections. Developers must disclose information about electricity and water use, ownership, tax incentives and measures intended to limit impacts on surrounding communities. Projects failing the review can be denied access to the grid.
Abbott also wants developers to pay infrastructure costs rather than shifting them to other electricity customers, conserve water and avoid disrupting residential areas. Reuters reported that the pause has created uncertainty for developers that have already committed substantial deposits toward grid connections.
Companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Equinix and Core Scientific have publicly supported stronger development standards, according to The Center Square.
Texas has at least 335 operating data centers, with hundreds more proposed as artificial intelligence drives rapidly increasing electricity demand.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: X's algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X's feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site's algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user's For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear. "In 2026 that's maybe not the most surprising headline ever," Ziv Epstein, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and co-author of the paper, told 404 Media. "So we actually dug in a little deeper to figure out why this is actually happening, and it turns out that X's feed algorithm, like a lot of these social media algorithms, is optimized for engagement [but] it turns out that not all types of engagement are considered equally."
The researchers found that X's algorithm can push users toward content that conflicts with their stated values, especially when they reply to posts that anger or provoke them. Although replies accounted for just 6.8% of interactions, they appeared to carry disproportionate weight: "It's this feedback loop of outrage baiting. The algorithm learns that you get outraged and then continues to serve more content in that direction," said Epstein.
It's unclear why X seems to serve ragebait to Democrats more often than Republicans. 404 Media speculates that it may be because there's more rightwing content on X overall or that Democrats tend to engage with posts they disagree with more often. "There might be some kind of differential effects on information diets there, or it might be something more psychological about how different you know partisan identities are triggering different kinds of actions and reactions, but ultimately I don't want to speculate too much," said Epstein.
X's former product chief Nikita Bier confirmed that the site had been set to favor replies. "This is no longer true," Bier said in a post on X. "The largest contributor of seeing ragebait was the reply predictor and we were aware that angry replies were causing people to see more of that content. So last month, we gave the reply predictor a 15x boost if it's a friend's post -- and it reduced ragebait by [an] order of magnitude."
A weak yuan guarantees Beijing massive trade surplus even as the White House tries tamp down on Chinese imports
Since China offered a truce in the trade war last October following its threat to deprive the United States of rare-earth magnets, the Trump administration has been happy to stop escalating. After all, imports from China have been falling, down by 40% in the year to June, compared with the same period in 2024. Best to declare victory and call it a day.
But the US hasn’t won this battle – and there’s strong evidence to show it’s too chicken to really try.
Overton has said that Congress should strictly regulate abortion drug mifepristone ‘to protect women and children’
Donald Trump nominated Dr Heidi Overton – an abortion opponent who stood next to the president as he made false claims about vaccines – to be commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“Today I am honored to nominate the wonderful Dr. Heidi Overton, MD, PhD, as our next FDA Commissioner. Dr. Heidi has been a ROCKSTAR in my Administration, where she has worked directly with Secretary Kennedy, Dr. Oz, and team, to deliver on the MOST TRANSFORMATIVE Health Agenda in History. She is known to take on the HARDEST issues, and bring me solutions that work best for the Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.
Police in Philadelphia are searching for a man they say chased at least a half dozen people last week within a half hour while wearing a Chucky-style mask.
A U.S. Army battalion at Fort Stewart is offering soldiers a four-day pass timed to the release of Grand Theft Auto VI if they reenlist for at least two years. The program is limited to one unit for now, but it fits the Army's broader effort to appeal to gamers as a recruiting and retention pool. CBS News reports: Twenty soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia in the Army's 9th Brigade Engineering Battalion, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, have already chosen this incentive as part of their reenlistment, an Army spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday. "The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what Soldiers are interested in," Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a spokesperson for the 3rd Infantry Division, said in a statement. "The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist."
[...] The Army memo, which has circulated online, says any soldier who signs a reenlistment contract between Aug. 1, 2026 and Nov. 14 will be authorized for a special four-day pass designated to coincide with "the highly anticipated release of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6)." About 130 soldiers are currently eligible for the incentive, Tomko said. Eligible soldiers must reenlist for a minimum of two years and up to six years.
Travelers counting on a cheaper vacation this fall may be in for a surprise. Shoulder season has traditionally brought lower prices, but some of those bargains are getting harder to find this year.
Physicists use advanced quantum technologies to test decades-old theory predictions
Aug. 19, 2026 — When different materials transition from one phase to another, such a water coming to a boil or a magnet losing its ability to attract metals, something remarkable can happen: They begin to behave identically, following the same mathematical rules. “Physicists call this trait universality—the messy, microscopic details wash out and only a few essential features survive,” explains Jason Alicea, William K. Davis Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. The math underlying these universal traits is commonly described by a theoretical framework called conformal field theory.
Left to right: Yuan Le, Xiangkai Sun, Jason Alicea, Manuel Endres, Stephen Naus, and Richard Bing-Shiun Tsai in the Endres lab at Caltech. Credit: Caltech/Gyohei Nomura
Reporting in the journal Nature, a collaboration between the experimental group of Caltech’s Manuel Endres, professor of physics, and Alicea’s theory group, together with theorists at Université Paris-Saclay and the Technical University of Munich, performed first-of-their-kind experiments on two different conformal field theories using quantum simulators, which are simplified versions of quantum computers tailored for specific tasks.
Using new technology developed for these quantum simulators, the team reports the first direct measurement of energy levels in synthetic quantum matter as predicted by the Ising and tricritical Ising conformal field theories. (Ising refers to Ernst Ising, a physicist who, in the 1920s, solved an early model of magnetism.) Both theories describe universal behavior that emerges when a quantum system—exhibiting exotic traits such as entanglement and superposition—is placed at a tipping point between two states, one of which is more ordered than the other.
Unlike transitions familiar from everyday life such as water turning into steam, this one is driven not by temperature but by quantum effects alone that happen to take place at temperatures near absolute zero. Once at that tipping point, the system can be excited by lasers to reach a series of specific energies, like the rungs of a ladder. “The energy levels predicted by these theories are important because they encode profound information about the theories themselves,” Alicea says.
For four decades, researchers used conformal field theories to calculate the spacings between those rungs, which come in precise ratios, but nobody had measured them in an experiment until now.
“Our new tools borrow from quantum computing platforms,” says Xiangkai Sun, a co-lead author of the new study and a graduate student working in the Endres lab. “Over the past 10 years, people have been learning to control these systems, and now we are at the point where we can use them to do fundamental physics research.”
The quantum system in the study is based on platforms the Endres lab uses to build quantum computers: arrays of neutral atoms trapped by lasers called optical tweezers. A related neutral-atom platform in the lab recently set a milestone by trapping 6,100 atoms in a single array. Though the tweezer technology behind these arrays was developed largely with quantum computing in mind, in the new study, the team turned it toward a question in fundamental physics.
For the experiment, the researchers used optical tweezers to trap strontium atoms in a line. They used other lasers to excite the atoms into high-energy states called Rydberg states, which makes neighboring atoms interact strongly. The chain of atoms then behaved as a single entity rather than as independent particles. Next, the researchers tuned the lasers in a way that placed the chain at the tipping point.
To read out the energy ladder, the team applied a new tool developed for these studies, called many-body modulation spectroscopy. In this approach, the researchers gently shook the entire chain by modulating the lasers at a chosen frequency, then measured how strongly the atoms responded. By sweeping through frequencies and noting where the response spiked, the team was able to map out the rungs of the ladder. The method is similar to running a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass: At the right speed the glass resonates with sound, and at the wrong speed nothing happens.
“We repeated the experiment on chains of up to 35 atoms, and the rungs came out as predicted by the Ising conformal field theory: the spectra collapsed onto a single universal curve once rescaled for size,” Sun says. “We then tuned to the tricritical point and measured the lowest levels of its distinct spectrum, which came out in the different ratios theory predicts.”
Because every atom in the array can be addressed individually, the team could also do things that are far harder using traditional materials. They sorted the excitations according to their symmetry, revealing a second family of rungs hidden from the first measurement. And by adjusting the atoms at the two ends of the chain, they changed how the ladder was arranged—each setting produced a different pattern that the tricritical Ising theory predicts.
“Even though we believed these theories to be true, it’s important to have an experimental realization, something you can poke and prod,” Alicea says. “To see those predictions borne out is a beautiful thing.”
In the future, the team plans to use an even larger quantum system to study conformal field theories using not just atoms in a line but atoms in a grid. “In two dimensions, the conformal field theories are not as well understood, so this is an exciting opportunity,” Sun says.
“What excites me is that the technique doesn’t require knowing the answer in advance. Here we could check our measurements against exact predictions,” Endres says. “The next step is to point this at systems where nobody knows the response of the system quantitatively—including regimes that classical computers can’t reach.”
The Nature study, “Observation of conformal field theory spectra in a quantum simulator,” was funded by the US Department of Energy, including its Quantum Systems Accelerator and its Quantum Science Center; the National Science Foundation, including the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech (IQIM); the Army Research Office; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Other Caltech authors include Yuan Le, Stephen Naus, Richard Bing-Shiun Tsai, and Lewis Picard, who is now working at the Caltech-linked startup Oratomic. Additional authors are Sara Murciano of the Université Paris-Saclay (previously a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech) and Michael Knap of the Technical University of Munich and the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology.
President Trump wants to meet again with Kim Jong Un to discuss denuclearization, the Wall Street Journal reports, despite having nothing to show for 3 previous summits.
Mykhailo Fedorov’s blistering critique comes at a time of growing pressure for democratic renewal in Ukraine
For more than a month, demonstrators have gathered in Ivan Franko Square outside Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office. The protesters have been chanting a name – not that of Ukraine’s embattled president but that of the man he recently sacked as defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. On Sunday evening, 2,000 people marched along Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, waving cardboard banners in support of their ousted hero.
Zelenskyy has refused to reinstate Fedorov, who during his six months in the job was widely seen as an effective and reforming figure. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, voted to approve a successor as defence minister, Yevhen Khmara. The move shows that Fedorov has been shut out from government permanently, and confirms his transition from trusted insider and Zelenskyy loyalist to a potent political opponent.
Republican James Comer writes to private equity investor demanding full cooperation with investigation
The Republican chairman of the House oversight committee has threatened to hold the private equity investor Leon Black in contempt if he does not fully cooperate with the panel’s ongoing investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, amid accusations that the billionaire is purposely delaying and disrupting the panel’s inquiry.
A letter released by Representative James Comer’s office on Tuesday, which was addressed to Black’s lawyer, revealed new details about the high-stakes clash between the powerful Kentucky congressman and Black, the co-founder of Apollo Asset Management who was Epstein’s friend and former client and paid Epstein tens of millions of dollars in fees.
Senator Jon Ossoff, who is up for re-election, came up with arguably the standout line of the midterm elections so far
Jon Ossoff really struck a nerve. That much is clear.
The US senator for Georgia, running for re-election in November, came up with arguably the standout line of the midterm elections campaign so far when discussing Donald Trump at a rally on Sunday.
Nige’s dodgy donations, Dicky’s love of global heating and so much more – what fun it is watching the party implode
You would need to have a heart of stone not to fall about laughing. There was a time not so long ago when Reform could give a passable impression of a vaguely functional political party. One that knew its audience and had learned how to get its message across through the media. Admittedly this was largely because the party was a one-man band with all its MPs accepting that they owed their entire existence to Nige. They were satellites to his sun. Nigel Farage was Reform, and Reform was Nige.
In recent months though, things have been falling apart and Reform now resemble an anarchic end–of-the-pier clown show. And chaos has seldom been this entertaining. The fun started when Nige had an uncharacteristic fit of humility and tried to pretend he was only a first among equals with the grandiose announcement of a “shadow cabinet” of four people. Largely because that’s about as many serious politicians as he had at his disposal.
Elections in Florida, Alaska and Wyoming provide a sense of how voters are feeling ahead of November’s midterms
Primaries in Florida, Alaska and Wyoming held on Tuesday provided the latest view into how voters are feeling ahead of November’s US midterm elections.
One candidate aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) netted an extraordinary win while another was defeated handily. Donald Trump’s handpicked candidates received a mixed reception from voters. In Alaska, voters chose their fighters for one of the year’s marquee US Senate races, and in Florida, extremism remained alive and well among Republicans.
Chery, which makes the Jaecoo and Omoda car brands, said the launch of a new R&D site was “the next step in our long-term plan” for Britain as it also moves towards manufacturing its cars in the UK.
(The Center Square) – A new report from the Archbridge Institute ranks states by occupational licensing, with Oregon ranking the worst by having the most “barriers to work,” and Missouri ranking the best by having the least barriers to work.
After their hit Untitled Goose Game, Australian studio House House is back with a new game where your only goal is to go exploring with friends – so we took them on a big walk inside Big Walk
When I arrive to meet with the tiny team at Melbourne game developer House House, they’re sitting in a circle under a eucalyptus tree. After introductions, the five of us set off into the scrub. Over the course of our hike we take a train to the beach, huddle on deck chairs in the sand dunes and climb a mountain as the sun rises. All without ever leaving our desks.
Welcome to the world of Big Walk: House House’s new game after the runaway global success Untitled Goose Game, which saw millions fall in love with being a naughty goose rampaging through a bucolic village. After Untitled Goose Game’s overwhelming success, House House wanted their next game to be very different and “unusual”. Despite this, Big Walk has been an immediate success, with more than 1m downloads in the first week of release.
Chinese robotics giant Unitree surged more than 600% in its Shanghai stock market debut, marking the first mainland Chinese listing by a humanoid robot maker and a major milestone for Beijing's robotics ambitions. The BBC reports: Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing's ambitions to develop advanced technology. It has become a robotics industry leader, selling devices from sensors and automated arms to four-legged and human-like machines. The firm shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year as demand for the technology grows.
Unitree is one of the few companies in the sector to make money, delivering a net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025. It is a fierce rival to developers in the US as it produces robots with similar features but at lower prices. The company is based in Hangzhou, in eastern China. The region is home to a so-called golden cluster zone of robotics firms, which have benefited from huge government investments. That support helped drive a more than threefold increase in the number of Chinese robotics firms between 2020 and 2024, according to state-run China Daily.
[...] Unitree's robot dogs start at $2,700, a fraction of the roughly $70,000 price tag for Boston Dynamics' four-legged device, Spot. "They're not exactly comparable because some of Unitree's dogs are much smaller," [said Harold Soh, a researcher from the National University of Singapore]. "But the price is a big difference." Unitree has been selling humanoid robots since 2023, with its $13,500 child-sized G1 model hitting the market the following year. Meanwhile, major US rivals -- including Elon Musk's Tesla -- have yet to start delivering rival products.
[...] Some experts expect Unitree's market debut to be a gauge of investor appetite for the fast-growing humanoid robotics sector. The listing has given the public a rare chance to invest in a humanoid robotics company and could set a benchmark for other manufacturers, said Jack Pearson from investment firm RoboStrategy. The listing also marks a "turning point" for China's robotics industry, as Unitree's success comes even as the US is curbing imports of foreign-made robots, Pearson said.
Interest rates, now sitting at about 3.5-3.7%, expected to go up if inflation doesn’t come down to Fed’s 2% target
The US treasury is doubling its buyback of government debt in an effort to balance out the bond market as officials at the US Federal Reserve remain divided over how to deal with high inflation.
The yield rate on 10-year, 20-year and 30-year treasury notes all hit 20-year highs this week, with the 30-year treasury yield rising to its highest rate since 2007. The rapid rise was concerning news for borrowers as major loans, including mortgages, are backed by treasuries.
Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies said they uncovered group responsible for money laundering $3.35m but did not name individuals involved
The rise in Germany’s borrowing costs to a 15-year high reflects the increased security challenges facing the country following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the need to spend much more defence, the Finance Ministry said on Wednesday.
German 10- and 30-year borrowing costs hit a fresh 15-year high in Wednesday’s session. Bond yields of other major Western economies including the US and Japan have also climbed to multi-decade highs this week due to ballooning government debt and geopolitics, increasing borrowing costs for companies and households and complicating policy.
“I am grateful to the MPs for supporting Andrii Sybiha for the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and Yevhenii Khmara for the position of Minister of Defence of Ukraine.
The tasks for both ministers are absolutely clear: Ukraine needs more strength. And it will have it. Glory to Ukraine!”
Network Rail and Southern owner GTR apologise after investigators reveal picture of possible heat-buckled track
Rail operators have apologised after a report into last Thursday’s derailment in East Sussex found a track defect on the approach to where the train derailed on the hottest day of the year so far.
An interim report by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) said CCTV images showed the “track geometry irregularity” existed before the incident near Lewes injured 30 people.
PM pledges to get rough sleepers off streets for Christmas but issues ‘rallying call’ for community and voluntary organisations to help with plan
Andy Burnham has admitted government funding “may not fully be enough” to achieve his aim of offering a place to stay to every rough sleeper by Christmas, as he made a “rallying call” for communities to get behind his plan.
Speaking on a visit to the north-east of England, the prime minister said:
The government money itself may not fully be enough. So I am saying, putting the call out to community and voluntary organisations – we’re at one here in Newcastle today, doing fantastic work.
But we’re saying to the wider community, voluntary, and faith sector: come on, let’s get behind this. Let’s show what Britain can do when we all pull in the same direction.
We did it in the pandemic, we can do it again, and it’s a rallying call, really, that I’m putting out there today with a lot of government money behind it.
We did bring the numbers right down, but because we were the only area providing a high level of support, more people started to travel and it became difficult.
Asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea threaten US national security, Republican fill-in senator Darline Graham hesitated. “I’m just going to be honest here,” she told Tuesday night’s debate audience. “I’m – not that informed on national security, so – but I do support the military.”
Gasps, and boos, rolled through the opera house hosting the only debate before next week’s Republican runoff – a race to succeed her brother, Lindsey Graham, who was one of the Senate’s most committed rightwing foreign policy hawks before his sudden passing in July. She did not retreat.
The Spanish government has U-turned and said it will allow 500 migrant children in Ceuta to relocate to the mainland.
The majority of the estimated 70,000 people who crossed into Ceuta – a Spanish territory on the coast of north Africa – on 30 July have returned to Morocco. However, under Spanish law, the state has a duty of care to young, unaccompanied migrants until they reach the age of 18.
In just over two weeks’ time, Saxony-Anhalt – home to historic timber-framed houses, the dramatic Harz mountains and the birthplace of Martin Luther – will hold what could prove one of the most significant state elections in Germany’s postwar history.
The vote, on 6 September, could see a far-right party whose local branch is officially classified by the country’s domestic intelligence service as “confirmed rightwing extremist” appoint a state premier and govern a state alone, for the first time.
Expected quarterly price cap rise of 4% likely to wipe out benefits of Andy Burnham’s VAT cut on electricity bills
Household energy bills across Great Britain are expected to climb to a three-year high this winter as the impact of the Middle East war wipes out Andy Burnham’s tax cut on electricity bills.
The government’s cap on energy prices is on track to rise by 4% from this October to the equivalent of £1,729 a year through the last three months of 2026, which could hit struggling households especially hard this winter, according to analysis by the energy consultancy Cornwall Insight.
Justice department claims there’s ‘no dispute’ over whether ex-FBI head’s post could be read as a threat against Trump
The US Department of Justice has defended its prosecution of former FBI director James Comey, claiming in new court documents there is “no serious dispute” that his social media post last year featuring a photo of seashells arranged to read “8647” could be interpreted as a threat against Donald Trump.
“There is no serious dispute that an objective viewer of Comey’s post could read it to mean ‘Kill President Trump’,” prosecutors wrote in a document filed on Tuesday in response to efforts by Comey’s efforts to have the case dismissed.
Berlin to seek suspect’s extradition for 2022 explosions that damaged gas pipelines to Russia
A Ukrainian man has been arrested in Croatia as part of an investigation into the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Germany and Russia.
Undersea explosions in September 2022, just months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, damaged three of the four pipelines built to carry Russian fossil gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
People say they’ve been secretly filmed in their own homes, at concerts and at work. Are the wildly popular smartglasses the final nail in the coffin of personal privacy?
“I’ve had one person who told me that their intentions were creepy,” a man tells me over a video call, on condition of anonymity. He’s based in Los Angeles, and while we speak, he eats what appears to be tuna directly out of the can. “He said: ‘I go to strip clubs, and I want to record the strippers … Normally I put my phone in my chest pocket, but the glasses are more convenient.’”
The man I’m talking to runs a business called Ghost Metas. He’s one of hundreds of vendors, easily discoverable online, who specialise in disabling the flashing LED light embedded in Meta’s smartglasses that blinks when wearers capture photos, videos and audio. After Ghost Metas disables the LED, it’s impossible for someone to know they’re being filmed.
This is the first installment of a three-part Delaware LIVE series examining Delaware’s literacy results, announced by the State Department of Education this week; the changes required to reach the state’s 2028 goal; and the expanding responsibilities of local school boards.
Third-grade proficiency rose 1 percentage point, leaving Delaware with a 13-point gap to close in two years
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a three-part Delaware LIVE series examining Delaware’s literacy results announced by the State Department of Education this week, the changes required to reach the state’s 2028 goal and the expanding responsibilities of local school boards.
By George D. Rotsch Editor, Delaware LIVE.
DOVER, Del. — Delaware students made modest progress in reading on the latest statewide assessments, but the results show the state remains far from its goal of having 53% of third graders reading proficiently by 2028.
Across grades 3 through 8, English language arts proficiency increased from 41% to 42%.
The movement is positive, but the larger result remains concerning: Six in 10 Delaware third graders did not meet the state’s grade-level proficiency standard.
Delaware now needs to gain another 13 percentage points over the next two testing cycles to reach its 2028 target.
State highlights literacy-coaching gains
In an announcement this week, the Department of Education emphasized results from schools receiving state-supported literacy coaching.
All eight schools with literacy coaches and comparable third-grade results improved from 2025 to 2026. Those schools averaged gains of nearly 7 percentage points, compared with the 1-point statewide increase.
Johnson Elementary School in the Red Clay Consolidated School District and Las Américas ASPIRA Academy each posted 12-point gains. Gateway Charter School improved by 11 points.
The department said those results give state and local leaders reason to examine the relationship among literacy coaching, instructional materials, school leadership and classroom practices.
The results do not prove that coaching alone produced the improvement. Changes in leadership, curriculum, enrollment, attendance and student intervention also may have contributed.
The proficiency level after an increase also matters. Johnson Elementary, for example, improved from 3% to 15%. That is a substantial one-year gain, but it means 85% of the school’s third graders remained below proficiency.
State calls progress modest
The state’s announcement acknowledged that Delaware’s overall performance remains inadequate.
“A one-percentage point statewide increase is not the win,” Education Secretary Cindy Marten said. “The more important question is what we learn from schools where students are moving faster and what we change where students are not making enough progress.”
Marten said Delaware must study schools showing stronger improvement and apply those lessons more broadly.
The department also said proficiency remains below where students need it to be, progress is uneven and achievement gaps remain significant.
Schools highlighted for improvement should be studied, the department said, but their results should not be interpreted as evidence of statewide success.
Understanding what the numbers mean
Julia Keleher, executive director of First State Educate, said statewide averages are an important starting point, but the work of a local school board begins with understanding what those results look like for the students and schools it governs.
“The statewide result tells us the size of Delaware’s literacy challenge, but every board needs to understand its own results,” Keleher said.
School boards are responsible for establishing the outcomes they expect for students and monitoring whether the district is making progress toward them. “State assessment results give boards an annual measure of performance, but effective governance requires going further: understanding how the district performed against its goals, where results differ across schools and student groups, and what the superintendent is doing in response. Boards can then monitor progress throughout the year rather than waiting for the next annual assessment to know whether the district is on track.”, Keleher said.
Board members could ask
What do these results tell us about progress toward our district’s student outcome goals?
Where are students making progress, and where are they not?
Are all student groups making progress toward the outcomes we established?
What does the superintendent believe is driving the differences in performance, and what is the district doing in response?
Are our budget, policies, and resources aligned with the outcomes we are trying to achieve?
What will we monitor throughout the year to know whether the district’s strategy is working and students are on track
Keleher’s organization works with school board members on governance and data interpretation. It is one of several potential resources boards may use to understand local results and evaluate district strategies.
High school performance declines
The elementary results were accompanied by a decline in high school reading and writing performance.
Among students taking the SAT School Day assessment, generally administered in 11th grade, 44% demonstrated proficiency in evidence-based reading and writing. That was down from 47% in 2025.
SAT essay proficiency rose by 10 points to 43%.
The high school results suggest Delaware’s literacy challenge does not end after elementary school. Students who advance without strong reading foundations may face greater difficulty as assignments become more complex across English, history, science and other subjects.
Proficiency and growth are different
The results released this week measure proficiency—whether students met grade-level expectations.
Delaware will release student-growth results separately. Growth measures how much students improved academically, including students who made progress but remain below grade level.
Both measures are important.
Growth can show whether a student is catching up and whether an intervention is helping. Proficiency shows whether the student has reached the state’s grade-level standard.
The state’s 2028 third-grade target is based on proficiency.
A significant challenge remains
Delaware has recorded an improvement, but the state is not currently progressing fast enough to reach its goal.
The 2026 results provide encouraging examples that deserve further examination. They also raise difficult questions about schools where most students remain below the reading standard.
As Keleher noted, the next step is not merely acknowledging a statewide number. It is understanding what produced improvement in some schools and what must change in schools where progress remains limited.
Coming Thursday:
Delaware must raise third-grade reading proficiency by an average of 6.5 points in each of the next two years. Part 2 examines what that would require, how boards can measure progress between annual tests and whether the state has established sufficient accountability.
Compton’s Cafe is one of the earliest examples of LGBTQ+ resistance. Today, a prison company occupies the site
One of the earliest documented examples of LGBTQ+ resistance against police happened on a hot summer night 60 years ago this month. It started not with the throwing of a brick, as it did in New York City’s 1969 Stonewall riots, but with the throwing of a coffee cup inside Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco.
When police attempted to raid Compton’s – a hub for the drag performers, trans people and sex workers in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood – hundreds of people in the community fought back. A drag queen threw a coffee mug at a police officer; others threw dishes and chairs outside. It was the culmination of years of police harassment, arrests and violence against the community and the beginning of the city’s trans movement.
Firefighters describe being pushed to limit by a brutal wildfire season, with key leadership roles going unfilled
The US has faced a critical shortage of firefighters at the US Forest Service (USFS) this summer as thousands of fires erupted across the country.
Despite officials’ claims that the firefighting workforce was stronger than ever, the agency has failed to keep pace with escalating conditions and the catastrophic fires fueled by them, according to nine firefighters who spoke to the Guardian anonymously, because they are barred from disclosing the information to the public.
Michael Caruso, once praised by Ron DeSantis, removed from Palm Beach county civic official roles after arrest
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has suspended a former close ally and senior civic official who was arrested on felony child sexual abuse charges.
Michael Caruso, who was removed as clerk of court and comptroller for Palm Beach county on Tuesday, was a vocal supporter of a law signed by DeSantis in 2023 that allowed the death penalty for anybody convicted of the sexual battery of a child under 12.
Long weekends do not last forever, so make the grill count. These 13 dishes cover steak, chicken, seafood, vegetables, salads, and a smoky guacamole for the cookouts still left on the calendar.The post 13 grill dishes worth making before the…
More travelers are choosing to spend months at sea instead of days. World cruises are drawing a broader mix of guests, not just the affluent ... Read moreThe post World cruise demand is rising, and a new wave of remote…
Fernando Cerimedo, 42, arrested on suspicion of ordering shooting of Bolivian lawyer Nadia Beller
A senior adviser to many of Latin America’s new wave of far-right leaders has been arrested for allegedly masterminding the attempted murder of his girlfriend.
The businessman and political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, 42, had been working as an adviser to the Bolivian president, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, and was one of the main strategists behind Javier Milei’s campaign in Argentina’s 2023 presidential election.
Some restraint on Trump’s excesses might be accomplished if November’s midterm elections give Democrats more power
Donald Trump is essentially unrestrained when it comes to enriching himself during his second term, with no sign of stopping. If anything, he’s ramping things up.
The numbers so far are astonishing. He amassed $2.2bn in 2025 revenues, the Guardian and other news outlets have reported.
In an upset for the Democratic establishment, progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.
Nixon, a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had significantly less funding going into the primary – with $975,000 to Vindman’s $16.3m at the end of July, according to Florida Politics.
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y., Aug. 19, 2026 — IBM today announced it has successfully joined and cooled down two cryogenic modules into a single environment. The new architecture is designed to scale into the modular, shared, and ultra-cold system required to link hundreds of quantum chips into a more powerful quantum computer capable of solving large problems. Its deployment is a milestone on IBM’s path to delivering IBM Quantum Starling in 2029, which is expected to be the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer and will integrate advances across error correction, processor design, decoding, and systems engineering.
IBM’s scalable and modular cryogenic system to support fault-tolerant quantum computing. Credit: IBM.
Combined, the first two operational modules stand more than 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide, and initial tests demonstrated they can jointly cool down to 4 Kelvin (the temperature of liquid helium) in under 5 days, reaching a final temperature of below 15 millikelvin shortly after. Each module’s vacuum enclosure offers up to 12 times more wiring space than the most widely used IBM quantum systems, enabling more chip-to-chip connections both within and between modules.
IBM’s new box-shaped design allows modules to connect in a tight row and use this larger space to directly link quantum processors with IBM’s “L-coupler” technology. L-couplers connect separate quantum chips together to share information, communicate, and operate as part of a larger quantum computer.
By 2027, IBM’s quantum roadmap plans to use L-couplers to link multiple processors into a larger quantum computer with at least 1,000 programmable qubits, which are qubits that can be directly used to perform computations. Towards this goal, IBM will install IBM Quantum Nighthawk processors into the cryogenic modules later this year to expand operational performance testing. At the time Starling is delivered, IBM plans for each cryogenic module to house thousands of qubits.
IBM’s plans for Starling were introduced last year with a new error correction code that dramatically reduces the physical resources required for fault tolerance. Since then, the company’s progression has remained on course, including the demonstration of core hardware components and breakthroughs in efficient error-correction decoding.
“Bringing fault-tolerant quantum computers to industries depends on several fundamental advances,” said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. “The successful connection and operation of these cryogenic modules signals a leap forward in that direction and will accelerate our progress alongside continued innovation in quantum hardware, software, and algorithms.”
IBM expects its scalable cryogenic modules to help speed its pace of innovation. For example, three essential components of IBM Quantum System Two’s environment are built into the new architecture, but now in a way that allows each part to be independently tested, improved, and rapidly iterated.
The delivery of these new cryogenic quantum modules is further evidence that IBM is systematically delivering against its quantum roadmap, solving another one of the major hurdles required to accelerate its path to fault-tolerant quantum computing.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global 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 governments 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.
Trump administration put sanctions on the international criminal court’s president and a senior trial lawyer
The international criminal court on Wednesday condemned the latest US sanctions targeting senior ICC staff, including its president, as a “flagrant attack” on the global tribunal’s independence and vowed to continue seeking justice for atrocities around the world.
The state department announced on Tuesday that it had hit the ICC president, Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, and ICC senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, who is from Senegal, with sanctions that freeze any assets they have in US jurisdictions or come into contact with the US financial system.
Aug. 19, 2026 — To commercialize quantum computing, manufacturers need high-quality superconducting materials for microchips, but they also require a reliable, sustainable nanofabrication process.
Tantalum is a corrosion-resistant metal that meets the first criteria but not the second. That’s because it has to be deposited on a substrate at temperatures that typically exceed 400 degrees Celsius – too hot for many semiconductor foundries’ current tools.
A team led by Valla Fatemi, assistant professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics in Duffield Engineering, developed a method that uses krypton gas to slash the deposition temperature of the corrosion-resistant metal tantalum, resulting in thin films that have substantially higher electronic conductivity. Photo credit: Bridget Reinsko.
Cornell University researchers have developed a method that uses krypton gas to slash that deposition temperature to 200 degrees while depositing on silicon, a standard high-quality substrate. The process resulted in thin films that also have substantially higher electronic conductivity.
“Tantalum as a material has been shown to be very exciting from a device performance perspective, but its manufacturability had some question marks because of integration challenges such as required process temperatures,” said Valla Fatemi, assistant professor and Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering, who led the project. “We figured out a relatively simple change, by using some physical and materials insights, to bring that temperature down into a zone that is translatable to nanofabrication systems in industry, while showing that in our academic context we can have leading-edge performance of these devices.”
The findings published Aug. 18 in Nature Materials. The study’s lead author is postdoctoral researcher Maciej Olszewski.
Quantum computing promises to handle faster, more complex computations by leveraging the unique quantum mechanical properties of superconductors, which carry current with little to no energy loss. The basic building blocks of the hardware are quantum bits, or qubits, which can store and process massive quantities of information. But correctly combining high-performance materials and nanofabrication techniques has proved to be one of the primary bottlenecks slowing the technology’s commercial development.
Fatemi’s lab explores the intersection of experimental condensed matter physics and quantum devices. Recently, his team developed the characterization and nanofabrication methods to achieve high-end performance for niobium-based materials. In that work, niobium was bombarded with ions of the noble gas argon, which knocked off nobium’s atoms so they deposited on a substrate – a process called sputtering – forming a thin film.
“That work got the ball rolling for us in understanding a lot of the surface science and how that correlates with improving performance,” Fatemi said.
The researchers swapped niobium for tantalum, a transition metal with more stable surface properties and high resistance to corrosion – and a leading material for many superconducting components. But tantalum is not without challenges. When deposited at lower temperatures, the material is in a crystal phase with undesirable properties. That problem that can only be remedied by heating it more than 400 degrees Celsius for deposition or by seeding the surface with other materials to alter its performance. At the same time, if tantalum gets too hot, it can mix with the silicon substrate and form a thick layer that leads to information loss and lowers the chip’s performance.
The new solution: Olszewski hypothesized that using krypton as the ionized gas instead of argon would transfer more momentum and kick off the tantalum atoms with greater energy, thereby stabilizing the targeted crystal phase on the silicon substrate – all at a much lower temperature.
“There’s this whole set of tooling and fabrication lines that don’t really go above 400 Celsius, and they’re built for that. And tantalum on silicon, when you use the old method, was right on the border of that,” Olszewski said. “There was little margin to do things reliably. Using krypton brought that threshold down to 200 Celsius. So you now have this big window to be able to do reliable fabrication.”
A crucial final step of the process: adding what is known as a Josephson junction, an overlap of two metals separated by an electrical insulator that enables the quantum tunneling of electrons that creates qubits.
“The performance of the devices in our lab are very sensitive to that step now. Historically, that was not necessarily obvious. But our devices are at a level of performance that we’re able to see big differences based on subtle changes that we make to the formation of the Josephson junction,” Fatemi said. “So we’re entering a new domain for what matters or doesn’t matter.”
The researchers found that the resulting thin film produced qubits of incredibly high quality and greatly boosted device performance.
“We’re right at the world-leading edge,” Fatemi said. “This is a big step forward not only for our group but also Cornell’s efforts in superconducting quantum information devices.”
Co-authors include David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering in Duffield Engineering and co-director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science; doctoral students Lingda Kong, Daniel Tong, Haoran Lu, Saswata Roy and Luojia Zhang; postdoctoral researchers Simon Reinhardt and Xinyi Du; Gabriele Di Gianluca of University of Florida, Gainesville and the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility Research Experience for Undergraduates (CNF REU) program; and Aleksandra Biedron of the New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering and Science (NY CREATES).
The research was supported by the Microelectronics Commons Program, a DoW initiative, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The researchers made use of CNF, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, which is supported by the National Science Foundation, and the Cornell Center for Materials Research.
The Trump-backed incumbent has struggled to raise money for his reelection bid as the House Ethics Committee investigates numerous allegations against him.
The former defense minister, whose firing sparked weeks of protests, said Ukraine needed to find a way to hold elections despite the prolonged war with Russia.
The move from an architect of Ukraine’s drone program is a remarkably direct challenge to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s authority and may test Ukrainian unity.
Lansing, Michigan — Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Rogers received about $95,000 from telecommunications industry political committees over two decades while supporting legislation that aligned with some of those companies’ policy priorities, according to federal campaign finance records reviewed by Michigan Advance.
The contributions came from AT&T, Verizon and wireless industry group CTIA and went to Rogers’ congressional campaigns, Senate campaigns and political action committee. AT&T accounted for $56,000, Verizon contributed $28,500 and CTIA gave $10,000, according to the report. Federal Election Commission records confirm Rogers is currently running for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat.
While chairing the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, which would have expanded private companies’ ability to share cybersecurity information with the federal government. AT&T, Verizon and CTIA supported the legislation, while civil-liberties organizations warned it could weaken privacy protections.
Rogers also opposed federal net-neutrality regulations before leaving Congress in 2015. He subsequently worked as a cybersecurity adviser for AT&T, continuing his ties to the telecommunications industry.
Rogers’ campaign rejected suggestions that contributions influenced his policymaking, saying his national-security positions have remained consistent throughout his career.
Rogers is running against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters.
AUSTIN, Texas and PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 19, 2026 — EigenQ, Inc., a quantum technology company, and Silicon Valley Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, today announced the confidential submission of a draft registration statement on Form S-4 for review by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to EigenQ’s and SVAQ’s previously announced proposed business combination transaction to take EigenQ public. Submission of the Draft Registration Statement for SEC review reflects continued progress and forward momentum relative to the proposed Business Combination and represents another key milestone toward completing the transaction.
Completion of the proposed transaction is subject to shareholder approval, SEC review and effectiveness of the Registration Statement, among other customary closing conditions. Upon completion of the proposed Business Combination, the combined company is expected to operate under the name EigenQ Holdings, Inc., securities of which are expected to trade on Nasdaq, subject to exchange listing approval.
“The submission of the Draft Registration Statement for review by the SEC represents another important milestone in our journey toward becoming a public company. We are pleased to continue advancing this transaction together with SVAQ while remaining focused on disciplined execution, furthering our commercialization plans with channel participants, OEMs and customers, and creating sustainable long-term value for our shareholders,” said Dr. José Rosas-Bustos, EigenQ’s Chief Executive Officer.
The proposed Business Combination remains subject to approval by the shareholders of SVAQ and stockholders of EigenQ, respectively, the registration statement on Form S-4 being declared effective by the SEC, and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions. The Business Combination is currently expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to satisfaction of applicable approvals and closing conditions. Upon completion of the proposed Business Combination, the combined company is expected to operate under the name EigenQ Holdings, Inc., securities of which are expected to trade on Nasdaq, subject to exchange listing approval.
While the go-public process continues to advance, EigenQ remains focused on executing its technology and commercialization strategy.
“Our mission is to build and deploy trusted infrastructure enabling governments, enterprises, and critical industries to operate securely in the Quantum Era. We believe that becoming a public company will expand our ability to accelerate innovation, deepen strategic partnerships, and bring foundational quantum technologies to U.S. and global markets. We remain committed to leading the transformation toward trusted, resilient, and quantum-ready digital infrastructure,” said Dr. Jesse Van Griensven, Chairman of EigenQ’s board of directors.
About EigenQ
EigenQ is an applied quantum technology company building the trusted infrastructure for the Quantum Era. Headquartered in Texas, USA, the Company develops foundational technologies across quantum security, communications, networking, and sensing – helping public and private sectors prepare for a future shaped by quantum computing and AI.
Working alongside a developing ecosystem of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), technology partners, and industry leaders, EigenQ is poised to deliver deployable, market-ready solutions that combine post-quantum cryptography, quantum-derived entropy, hardware-rooted trust, secure identity, and cryptographic agility to strengthen the existing digital infrastructures of governmental and commercial enterprises.
EigenQ has entered into a previously-announced definitive business combination agreement with SVAQ to effectuate the proposed go-public transaction. In connection with the completion, if any, of the Business Combination, the transaction parties are seeking approval from Nasdaq for shares of Pubco common stock to trade under the symbol “EIGQ”.
Additional information about EigenQ is available at www.EigenQ.com. The Registration Statement will become publicly available at a later stage of the transaction process; supplemental information about the proposed Business Combination and its terms can be found in SVAQ’s public filings which are available, free of charge, at the SEC’s website (www.sec.gov).
About Silicon Valley Acquisition Corp.
Silicon Valley Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: SVAQ) is a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company organized for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses. For more information, visit https://svacquisitioncorp.com.
During the 1990s, a new strata of independent film studios and distributors revitalised the Hollywood movie machine. The likes of Miramax, New Line Cinema and October Films challenged the ageing behemoths of the industry and pushed forward offbeat directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky and Jane Campion. The decade is widely considered an artistic high point for western cinema after the bloated mainstream excesses of the 1980s. Could something similar now be happening in games?
Certainly, we have a comparable setup. The big players of the games business are in various states of creative disarray: Electronic Arts (EA) has been bought out by a Saudi-led consortium, which is likely to lead to more cautious, hit-driven decisions; Microsoft bought Activision and Bethesda and then ordered waves of redundancies; Ubisoft has cancelled several titles and is posting big losses. Those companies are also facing rising development costs, so they’re circling the wagons, focusing on legacy brands and freezing recruitment. It’s hard to imagine any left-field works of genius emerging from this imaginative quagmire.
About 100 people crammed into a Harrington Public Library meeting room for a city council meeting discussing the future of data centers. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
Prosecutors in Charlie Kirk 's killing pointed to an engraved bullet, arguing that its inscription shows Kirk was targeted for how the defendant perceived his politics.
The UK’s competition watchdog has launched investigations into Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and Red Driving School over concerns that all three companies displayed misleadingly low prices to their customers.
The Competition and Markets Authority’s investigations are part of a broader clampdown on “drip pricing”, an illegal practice that makes a product appear cheaper by not including all mandatory fees.
Right to assisted dying established for patients with conditions assessed as incurable and causing unbearable pain
Legislation granting incurably ill adults the right to assisted dying has been formally adopted in France after the text was approved by the country’s highest constitutional authority and published in the official journal.
The law, known as a law on “end of life” or “aid in dying” rather than “assisted dying” or “euthanasia”, means France joins the small group of countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada to have legalised the practice.
Move by Years, which provides personalised meals in subscription-based service, follows recipe change
A dog food brand has recalled all of its fresh meals after reports that a recipe change may have caused some animals to develop an eye condition that, if left untreated, can lead to sight loss.
The brand Years said owners should stop feeding its fresh meals to their dogs “immediately” and also told them not to feed the meals to any other animal, or to donate or sell them.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s co-opting of conservative language to discuss a movement against state-sanctioned killings of Black people is damning
August has brought us a referendum on “Woke 1” – a term that reductively brands 2020’s social justice movement – as prominent liberal voices reflect on that time period with disappointing hindsight. During a recent appearance on ABC’s This Week, when asked about 2020-era demands to abolish prisons and police, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman from New York, abandoned her previous support of the “defund the police” movement, and instead joked: “Woke 1 was crazyyyyy.”
Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, implied that the still-resounding calls for municipalities to reduce police budgets and to divert aid to poor communities were worth advocating for during the 2020 uprising, but are now “crazyyyyy”. In 2020, she noted that “a lot of people cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like. Tell them it looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing more than they fund police.” But she has since backtracked on that idea.
New findings further call into question scientific judgment of current health leaders in the Trump administration
A French researcher whose work was praised by Donald Trump and Dr Mehmet Oz during the Covid-19 pandemic published hundreds of papers with “substantial” ethical and legal concerns, according to a new analysis.
An international team of scientists found concerns in 853 articles published by the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection, or the IHU, hundreds more than previously flagged by past investigations into work at the large research hospital. Of those, institute founder Didier Raoult was listed as co-author on 758 of them, according to one of the researchers behind the new analysis.
A study of more than 64,000 people born around the end of Britain's postwar sugar rationing found that those exposed to less sugar during their first 1,000 days had lower rates of five cancers decades later, including roughly 69% lower liver cancer risk and 36% lower breast cancer risk. They also "showed signs of slower biological aging" and "continued to consume less sugar and had healthier diets overall," according to the authors of a new study published in The Conversation. From the report: After the second world war, sugar remained rationed in Britain for several years. But in September 1953, rationing ended and people started eating a lot more sugar. Consumption nearly doubled. This meant that children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood. For our study, we used data from over 64,000 people born in Britain between 1951 and 1956. Those born earlier spent a larger share of their first 1,000 days under sugar rationing, while those born later experienced progressively less of it.
[...] What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It's how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people's diets even 50 years later. We found that people who experienced sugar rationing early in life still consumed less sugar in adulthood, around age 50. They also ate less overall, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time.
A rise in lawsuits over AI use in employment decisions is raising questions about how companies hire and fire
For the last four years, Erin Kistler has applied for thousands of jobs at companies like Paypal, Microsoft and Netflix, only to find her résumé disappear into a black hole. A product manager with nearly 20 years of experience, Kistler believes she was qualified for every role, yet she never received a single interview.
Now, Kistler is suing Eightfold AI, the Silicon Valley maker of hiring software used by hundreds of companies, including those where she applied, in a class-action lawsuit. The case, filed in January in California court, is one of the first to argue that automated screening functions as an undisclosed consumer report or applicant dossier, ranking job applicants on their likelihood of success without giving them the chance to see or challenge the results, according to Kistler’s legal team.
Harvard University has agreed to pay $53 million to resolve lawsuits by families alleging it mishandled the bodies of loved ones donated to its medical school.
Move could be confirmed along with $100m US Open pot
Slams have been in dispute with players for 18 months
Tennis’s grand slam tournaments have agreed to establish a formal player advisory council in a move aimed at defusing the row over prize money. The joint venture could be confirmed on Wednesday as part of the US Tennis Association’s (USTA) announcement of this year’s US Open prize money, which is expected to top $100m (£74m) for the first time.
The four slams have been in dispute for almost 18 months, with leading players – including Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka– demanding a greater share of tournament revenues as part of a wider overhaul of the sport’s finances and operations that would also lead to the major tournaments making contributions to player welfare and offer meaningful player representation.
Rightwing populist’s inconsistent positions on Europe and Russia suggest he is testing how far he can push partners and electorate
One evening nine years ago in the Bulgarian town of Balgari, a Brazilian tourist approached the casually dressed, middle-aged man surrounded by bodyguards, bystanders and photographers. “Why are you important?” she asked. “I’m not so important,” he replied. She repeated the question and he admitted: “I’m the president.”
Now, in 2026, the rightwing populist Rumen Radev is no longer the president, but the prime minister – the more powerful of the two positions – after his Progressive Bulgaria party secured an overwhelming majority in April’s election. While many in Europe breathed a sigh of relief that month at the demise of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, others wondered if Radev would become the EU’s next disruptor-in-chief.
Ahead of U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds’ win in Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary, he launched an attack ad against Democratic nominee David Jolly over transgender issues.
The Friends of Byron Donalds PAC ad shows short clips of Jolly speaking about issues involving transgender people, including Florida’s crackdown on rainbow street art and school sports participation.
The ad’s text says Jolly supports “gender changing surgeries on kids” and plays a clip of Jolly saying, “We embraced it, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care.”
The ad echoes what Donalds told patrons of a Doral restaurant in July, when he said that Jolly believes “it’s okay to change the gender of young kids.”
Did Jolly say he supports surgeries for children to affirm their gender? No, the ad twists Jolly’s words from a 2025 podcast interview.
In context, Jolly was quoting someone else when he made the comment about gender-affirming care — a broad term that isn’t limited to surgery.
When asked by reporters about medical care for trans youth, Jolly has said he supports families making medical decisions with a doctor. It is not standard medical practice for doctors to provide gender-affirming surgeries for young children.
PolitiFact contacted Jolly’s campaign about the ad and his position on gender-affirming surgeries for minors but received no response.
Although he relayed a story about healthcare for a youth transitioning from one gender to another, we found no examples in the public record of Jolly talking specifically about gender-affirming surgeries for kids. The Donalds’ campaign did not provide any in response to our inquiry.
“I do not know what further statement you need when he says it pretty plainly himself,” Donalds spokesperson Skylar Swanson said.
The clip of Jolly speaking about gender-affirming care comes from his September 2025 interview with “For St. Pete’s Sake,” a LGTBQ+ focused podcast hosted by members of Pinellas County’s Stonewall Democrats. In the interview, Jolly talked about a grandfather whom he said called Jolly a few years earlier about the man’s trans grandchild in high school.
Jolly said the man said his grandchild was experiencing suicidal thoughts and wondering whether they should leave home. “As a family we embraced it, we sought the right pathways, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care, for this grandchild,” Jolly recounted that the man as saying.
Jolly said the call happened a few years ago, when state lawmakers were weighing SB 254, which criminalized providing gender-affirming medical care to minors, making it a third-degree felony. By Jolly’s account, the man told him the family’s doctor could be arrested for providing gender-affirming care for his grandchild and the parents could lose custody under the bill.
The bill became law in May 2023. In addition to criminal penalties for healthcare providers, the law grants courts emergency jurisdiction over child custody disputes in cases where a minor is receiving gender-affirming care.
What Jolly has said about gender-affirming care for minors
Gender-affirming care includes a range of approaches to support a person’s gender identity, including using a different name or the person’s preferred pronouns. According to medical best practices, gender-affirming treatments available to adolescents can include puberty blockers, hormone therapy and, in rare cases, surgeries for older teens. Medical intervention for minors requires parental consent.
When Politico asked Jolly in July for his position on “gender medicine for minors,” he responded: “I simply subscribe to the old-school Republican position that government should stay out of your life, out of your doctor’s office, and out of your bedroom. The last person you need sitting on the foot of your bed during hard family conversations is Byron Donalds.”
In August, Jolly told a crowd in The Villages that Donalds was stoking a culture war because “I believe that local communities should be able to celebrate their own and that government should stay out of your medical decisions.” His campaign labeled the clip, “My response to Byron Donalds.”
Our ruling
A Donalds PAC campaign ad said Jolly said that he supports “gender-changing surgeries on kids” and uses a clip of him speaking about gender-affirming care.
The clip was deceptively edited to make it look like Jolly was saying he “embraced” giving kids gender-affirming surgery. The full video shows Jolly was quoting another person, and he doesn’t mention surgery.
When asked by reporters about medical care for trans youth, Jolly said he supports families having the ability to make medical decisions with their doctor. Gender-affirming care can include using a different name or a person’s preferred pronouns, and treatments are typically available only to adolescents and adults. In rare cases, that can include surgeries for older teens with parental consent — not young children.
Dearborn, Michigan — Roughly 2,000 protesters and counterprotesters gathered Tuesday outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library as a Christian nationalist demonstration led by pardoned Jan. 6 rioter Jake Lang brought heightened tensions to the heavily Arab American community.
Lang organized what he called a “Christian Crusader March” and later addressed the Dearborn City Council, accusing Muslims of attempting to gain political and demographic control. Police in riot gear formed a line separating Lang’s supporters from counterprotesters as both sides traded chants and insults.
The council meeting was moved to the library because of safety concerns. Although several confrontations appeared close to becoming physical, much of the hostility remained verbal. Dearborn police had not immediately released information about arrests or injuries.
Lang organized the event with Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell, a Trump supporter who serves on Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers’ Faith Coalition Leadership Team. Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign called on Rogers to disavow the rally and Sewell’s participation.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Rep. Rashida Tlaib were among Democratic officials condemning the demonstration as anti-Muslim.
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said fear surrounding the rally caused some businesses to remain closed. Resident Muhammad Al-Thibabawi said many participants ultimately saw Dearborn as “just a normal city” whose residents value their constitutional rights and America.
Poll after poll shows the same thing. The American people know that the current economic system is rigged
The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated.
Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the enormous threats posed by AI or an immoral and destructive foreign policy, progressives are talking about the real issues facing working families. And they are providing real solutions. Establishment Democrats are not.
Klaire Rhodes was attacked by a brown bear in state park but spray helped her escape with ‘relatively minor injuries’
An Alaska marathon athlete used a repellant spray to fend off an attacking bear that officials say injured her while she ran on a popular trail recently – an encounter that she has since described as “a nightmare come to life”.
The particularly harrowing episode unfolded on 13 August, when a woman who later identified herself online as marathon winner Klaire Rhodes, 28, was running alone on the Wolverine Bowl trail in Chugach state park, officials with Alaska’s fish and game department said. A brown bear on the trail attacked and injured her, according to the agency.
What Happened: Citing reporting by ProPublica, eight Democratic U.S. senators have criticized the Trump administration’s demands to access the health data of millions of people as a condition of giving lifesaving aid to other countries. In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the senators, including minority leader Chuck Schumer, said the U.S. demands were “unprecedented and at odds with U.S. policy concerning the data of American citizens.”
The inquiry into the administration’s approach to foreign health data referred to a ProPublica story published in June about agreements the U.S. struck with African countries — and the risks they posed to people there. Experts told ProPublica that the deals are vague and lack language used in most data-sharing agreements to adequately limit what information is collected and how it can be used. As a result, they said, there is an increased risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.
The senators — who include Tim Kaine of Virginia; Chris Van Hollen of Maryland; Brian Schatz of Hawaii; Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Christopher Coons of Delaware; Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who led the effort — requested a briefing on the healthcare agreements’ data requirements. They also asked Rubio to respond in writing to a list of questions by the end of August.
What They Said: In the letter, which was sent last week, the senators expressed concern that the requirement to access foreign health data might reverberate beyond the countries where the aid agreements were struck and “set international precedents that ultimately harm Americans.” They noted that the demands for data appear to be at odds with the Trump administration’s National Cyber Strategy, which emphasizes the right to privacy for Americans and their data.
“These new demands set an alarming precedent that is seemingly contrary to the Administration’s longstanding support for the privacy of U.S. citizens’ data,” they wrote.
The senators also laid out the details of a data-sharing agreement between the U.S. and Uganda that were first reported by ProPublica. The deal demanded that Uganda provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the nation’s health data systems.
“While global health programs have historically included data sharing components,” the senators wrote, “they have never required direct access to privileged electronic systems for U.S. government representatives.”
The letter ends with more than a dozen questions for Rubio, including why the State Department has not made the health care agreements public, as federal law requires, and whether any of the data will be shared with “U.S.-based third parties for any commercial purpose, including to train any artificial intelligence models.”
The senators also asked what privacy rights foreign citizens will have over data that is transferred to the U.S. and how those rights will be enforced in the case of a data breach or another unethical use of their personal information.
Background: After the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing foreign aid. The State Department has since faced the challenge of finding new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics. The task has been especially challenging because the administration cut ties with most of the international partners and fired staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work.
In the past, PEPFAR, the U.S. program that provides aid for treating and preventing HIV around the world, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from foreign government health records. In contrast, the Ugandan agreement provides the U.S. with direct access to the government’s own health data systems.
Through separate agreements, the U.S. has also arranged for countries to provide it with specimens of pathogens that could cause pandemics, along with related information.
The effort to establish these new aid arrangements was led by Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who founded three healthcare companies, one of which sold for a reported $2.7 billion. Before joining the State Department, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become the Department of Government Efficiency and oversaw some $67 billion in cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The U.S. agreement with Uganda provides up to $1.7 billion in aid for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, among other diseases. As a condition, the deal calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed and specifies that the information should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services. But experts told ProPublica that it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized.
The shift in the approach to health data is part of the America First Global Health Strategy, which is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations.” Rubio explained in September that under this new strategy, aid will be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest.”
Why It Matters: Privacy experts say that, if health data is mishandled under the agreements, it could have serious consequences. Revealing healthcare histories, including whether someone has had an abortion, a mental health condition, substance-use treatment or a sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence.
In the age of artificial intelligence, health data has become especially valuable. But the agreements reviewed by ProPublica provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in how their data is used or whether they would receive any potential financial benefits.
Response: The State Department declined to answer specific questions about the senators’ letter, saying that it does not respond to questions about congressional correspondence. In a statement sent to ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson defended the data requirements in the health agreements.
“Neither the U.S. government nor any private American companies receive or review any personally identifiable information (PII) under these data sharing agreements,” the statement said, going on to note that the new deals “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals.” The spokesperson also said no country has been coerced to sign the agreements with the U.S.
(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan and Mary Peltola advanced to November's general election for U.S. Senate in Alaska's crucial race to determine control of the upper chamber.
The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino (2005) This is one of those books that stays with you long after you finish it. The hit from Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino, who died last month, puts a dark twist on a story about loyalty and the obligations that come with it. This was my first interaction with Higashino’s famous “Detective Galileo.” Think of a police procedural wrapped in a shroud of mathematical philosophy. This book is a dark gem. — Akela Lacy
Good People, Patmeena Sabit (2026) It’s easy to be lulled into thinking this propulsive, polyphonic novel is a true crime beach read: The book opens with a disclaimer about police refusing to weigh in on an open investigation, followed by short vignettes that serve as witness testimonies to an unfolding crime narrative. But it’s actually a beautiful picture of community, family tragedy, and the court of public opinion, and a wonderful reminder that, despite the current political climate, we should be proud to be a nation of immigrants. — Celine Piser
Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita(2026) It’s become almost cliché in this era of wanton imprisonment of immigrants to invoke the incessant relevance of the United States’ WWII concentration camps for Japanese Americans, but Karen Tei Yamashita brings hundreds of new lives to one of the country’s most infamous domestic crimes. She once thought “that about ‘the camps,’ we’d been there, done that,” she writes in a postscript to Questions 27 & 28, “but as those who continue to research and write about these events know very well, it’s never done.” The questions that make up the novel’s title were the last two in an infamous loyalty questionnaire administered to incarcerees: The first asked if they would enlist in the Army for the same United States of America that had incarcerated them; the second if they would swear undying allegiance to the U.S. and forsake any ties to Japan. Between those two questions, “There are eight possible answers,” Yamashita writes, some of which would get you sent to war, others that would deepen your incarceration. “But or if answers are useless … it doesn’t matter what you think or believe; only your answers to 27 and 28 matter.”
In a rigorous history lesson coated in a fun, twisty work of fiction, Yamashita sets out to capture the varied political leanings and personal narratives that might lie behind a single checkbox marked yes or no or left blank. The novel — and it is one, despite being stuffed with historical figures who really lived through the incarceration — is multi-formatted and polyvocal, making use of the kind of staggeringly varied structure that has become something like Yamashita’s signature. It’s broken into three “boxes,” as if in a historical archive, which Yamashita plumbs for precisely reproduced documents and imagined conversations about how they came to be. With stories spanning more than a century, it grapples with the role of Japanese imperialism in constructing racial identity, the place for violence in politics, what it means to be a citizen of a state — and whether one that would lock people up over race or nationality is worth having at all. — Maia Hibbett
The Vivisectors, Missouri Williams (2026) I read a lot of contemporary fiction and have the scars to prove it. And, candidly, I haven’t even finished Williams’s sophomore novel, which takes place in a lightly dystopian college town being consumed by enemies both plant and animal. Let that make this endorsement all the more ringing: It’s truly rare that I slow my reading of a novel because I want to take in each sentence fully, and that I want to immediately start re-reading before I’ve even closed the hardcover. Williams is a sly, darkly funny observer of our world and what she imagines as the next. Jump on board now, or risk being left behind on one of literature’s up-and-coming voices. — Katherine Krueger
The Full Catastrophe, David Carkeet (1990) We often say a string of words in a very specific order that intentionally has no meaning. Or spit out a different combination of them that has the opposite meaning of what is spoken. Why is it hard to say what we want to really say?
A lovelorn, laid-off linguist who gets enraged by empty expressions like “Have a good one” and “We’ve come full circle” finds a new job at the Pillow Agency, run by the rich, eccentric, incomprehensible Mr. Pillow, a believer of love. The linguist is to embed (“occupy”) with an assigned couple at their home, listen to their verbal interactions, and analyze whether this marriage can be saved, despite his own lack of experience in the field of commitment. This is somehow not the premise of a couple’s therapy reality TV show today; it’s much funnier and less self-conscious! Perhaps because it published in 1990? I thought it was headed in a surreal “Being John Malkovich” direction at the start, but The Full Catastrophe author, David Carkeet, takes a more difficult path and, with serious honesty, tackles the later-stage, post-honeymoon relationship troubles — excavated down to their true awkwardness — that come from miscommunication. Brutal things get said and heard! Because of that, I was surprised by how romantic (and hilarious) this book is. Pairs well with Ross McElwee’s 1986 film “Sherman’s March.” — Nara Shin
The Makioka Sisters, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1948) This quiet, deeply thoughtful novel follows several years in the lives of four sisters in a once-prominent upper-middle-class family in a suburb between Kobe and Osaka in the late 1930s. The slowly building characterization of each sister’s personality and how she moves through the world is one of the most artfully realistic portraits of family life I’ve ever read.
While mostly focused on the relationship between the sisters, the novel takes place in the shadow of the impending world war, and in scattered moments throughout the book Tanizaki sketches a compelling depiction of people who — despite being otherwise caring, empathetic, and worldly — are reflexively loyal to a government that is, at the time of narration, actively committing unspeakable crimes abroad.
For fans of: Thomas Mann, Colm Tóibín, Elena Ferrante. — Noah Hurowitz
The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (2017) A great contrast from the Nolan movie, which simply regurgitates the male heroic stereotype — I think (I have not seen it). — David Bralow
Nonfiction
The Kentucky Cave Wars, David Randolph Kem (2014) Soliciting recommendations, our editor helpfully intoned that “It doesn’t have to be a nonfiction book about war!” So, naturally, this is a nonfiction book about war.
Beneath the gentle rolling hills of Kentucky are hundreds of both mapped and hitherto yet uncharted miles of labyrinthine subterranea which have wormed their way through hollowed limestone over queer aeons. Yet all is not sanguine in these netherworlds, the mirthful perusal of which has been rendered “quixotic” if one is attempting the maintenance of a fairly fairy tale vernacular (or “illegal,” if one is not) through the corrosive joint forces of State and Capital, which seep hideously into the ground, oozing from the words and deeds of those who have no business being alive.
And so, we have the Kentucky Cave Wars, wherein to stop people from killing one another over rival private cave enterprises, the government stepped in and closed off miles of caverns under the standard doublespeak veneer of ostensibly opening them up under the hollow promises of a cavernous national park. This is America, land of the free, where entry into cave systems now requires government permission.
The real losers of the cave wars weren’t manipulative businessmen, who were arguably already losers by simple clear cut reason of being businessmen in the first place; no, they were those of us who were imprisoned in the outer realm by the unbridled malignity that is the National Park Service, condemned to beg for entry into the Earth on which we live, and into which we die. — Nikita Mazurov
Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li (2025) “Grieving mother’s resilience in the face of repeated tragedy” doesn’t feel quite right here. While I hesitate to call the word “resilience” trite, the way Yiyun Li narrates the process through which she navigates her two sons’ deaths makes me feel like the word does not encompass enough — that living through Terrible Things necessitates a kind of self-justification, but also doubt, denial, and optimism, that threatens the living and spurs it on. Things in nature do merely grow, and they’ll develop based on different external conditions. But their interiority, we’ll never know. — Fei Liu
Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing, Molly Gebrian (2024) Some really interesting discussion that is applicable to everything we do. — David Bralow
Double Eagle, Charles McCarry (1979) A chronicle of the first successful balloon journey across the Atlantic. Previous attempts claimed five lives. Written in 1970s magazine style with occasional odd asides about the crew’s marriages, it’s a fascinating tale of rich men determined to do the impossible for no particular reason. — Matt Sledge
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey(launched October 2018) Fair warning: Host Andrew Hickey is the kind of obsessive cataloguer of popular culture who never met a parenthetical — say, about the session drummer’s later production credits — that wasn’t worthy of explication. So while I can’t recommend this podcast for the kind of casual half-listening that the medium often invites, I can promise that your attention to detail will be well rewarded.
Over and over again, Hickey offers a helpful corrective to the various mythologies of early rock ’n’ roll, especially by later (mostly white) critics who have policed genre boundaries and exalted a narrow range of guitar gods and studio auteurs. From the beginning, he is careful to emphasize the communal and collaborative nature of musical production, drawing attention to figures who’ve been marginalized in other histories. Along the way, he smuggles in some fascinating lessons in social history, political economy, and even music theory. — Michael Sherrard
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan (2021) It is incredibly well-written and easy to read. The book grapples with the realities of gender, class, race, and politics in really thought-provoking ways. — Jessica Washington
Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution, Anand Gopal (2026) Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria, Loubna Mrie (2024) The constant onslaught of news these days can make us forget that, just a decade and a half ago, the Middle East and North Africa were rocked by a series of uprisings and revolutions that changed the face of the region. Perhaps none was more consequential than Syria’s eventually successful revolution, and yet so few people have an in-depth understanding of the circumstances. If the old saw about being doomed to repeat history holds true, we would do well to educate ourselves, to better understand the pitfalls and potentials of our paths. That’s where two new books from Anand Gopal and Loubna Mrie come in.
Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage traces the story of the Syrian Civil War through the eyes of the mid-sized city of Manbij. A masterwork of literary reporting, Gopal’s hearty volume recounts the waves of political power that swept over the city — a revolutionary movement, a more neoliberal city council, the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic State group, and so on — with Gopal deftly reporting out intimate views of each, provided by those who fought for, against, or simply lived through them.
Loubna Mrie’s striking memoir about the war, Defiance, provides the one view Gopal doesn’t go deep on: Syria’s ruling Alawite sect. Neither does Mrie, however, provide a straight-ahead understanding of the regime that controlled the country for more than half a century. Instead, it provides a window into that world precisely by departing from it. Mrie’s family was firmly in the pro-regime fold, but her observations, empathy, and intellect quickly led her to become a revolutionary. What follows from there is a harrowing personal journey whose contours are best left to Mrie herself, who lets the reader so far into her travails and inner life that it feels almost intrusive to keep reading — but also makes it impossible to stop. — Ali Gharib
Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple (2026) At this point it is perhaps redundant to recommend this extraordinary, beautifully written history of the Jewish Labor Bund, by friend-of-The-Intercept, Molly Crabapple. But for those who have yet to read it, I couldn’t recommend a book more highly. Molly offers us a gift: richly rendered revolutionary characters, rigorously researched history, and a corrective to Jewish historical narratives that treat Zionism as transhistorical and inevitable. Here’s to Molly! — Natasha Lennard
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977) I first read German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey about 20 years after it was published. My mind wasn’t blown. It was blown up.
I suspect that almost 50 years after it was published, the book still packs a formidable punch. Every page seemed to be a revelation, drawing on myriad sources from 19th century philosophy, sociology, psychology, literature, physics, medicine, and, seemingly, everything else. The volume was slim, but it seemed to be packed with more startling information than any three great books. It wasn’t a history of train travel, it was an exploration of modernity and an explanation of how human perceptions of distance, time, space, speed, personal autonomy, psychological integrity, and physical trauma were shattered and remade by the advent of railway travel, creating a new “industrialized consciousness.”
Much of The Railway Journey now exists as a blur in my mind, much like the sheer speed of the train fundamentally changed how people experienced the landscape, forcing passengers to focus only on distant vistas and transforming what had been an immersive experience in nature to a series of (window-)framed, here and gone, two-dimensional images of a panoramic landscape. But for all that I’ve forgotten of the book, for every fact that has long since fled my mind, I have never looked at the world in the same way again.
“The notion that the railroad annihilated space and time was not related to that expansion of space that resulted from the incorporation of new spaces into the transport network,” Schivelbusch observed. “What was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology.” Travelers had, that is, experienced the physical space between cities as a “living entity” and had been embedded in that landscape before the train obliterated such “travel space.” Schivelbusch called on 19th-century poet and writer Heinrich Heine to explain the incredible disorientation experienced by early train travelers. Without The Railway Journey, I would probably have been ignorant of the existence of Heine (and so many other forgotten thinkers past). But I’d pick up a copy of the book for Heine’s commentary on the opening of railway lines from Paris to Rouen and Orléans in 1843, alone:
What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone. … Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.
Why Should Delaware Care? For years, policymakers have debated why Delaware public school students have consistently scored low on standardized tests. The state’s 2026 assessment and accountability results showed some growth for third through eighth grade English language arts and math proficiency rates.
Delaware’s public school students continue to struggle academically, but kids who attend schools with specialized literacy coaches have shown signs of improvement.
According to annual proficiency scores released by the state Tuesday, less than half of Delaware’s third through eighth graders read and do math at a proficient level. And just 18% of 11th graders were proficient in math.
The scores, taken from the 2026 statewide assessment and accountability results, reflect an average for Delaware’s public schools across all three counties. They are the first of multiple performance releases coming from the education department in the coming weeks, which includes multilingual learner progress.
The proficiency scores showed that the highest performing traditional school district in Delaware was Cape Henlopen. The lowest was the Capital School District. Among charters, the highest performing school was Newark Charter while the lowest was Positive Outcomes Charter School in Camden.
Delaware Secretary of Education Cindy Marten says the scores show the state’s students are not where they need to be. But she said there are bright spots.
Students who attend nine schools in Delaware that received state-supported literacy coaches last year showed increases in their English proficiency rates.
Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten.
Third graders at Johnson Elementary School in the Red Clay Consolidated School District and third graders at Las Americas ASPIRA Academy charter school saw their English proficiency increase by 12 percentage points.
The other schools with new literacy coaches saw more modest gains for their third graders, except for South Dover Elementary where reading proficiency dropped.
Marten said the results should not be seen as a “victory lap,” noting that the proficiency rates in these schools are still low.
But the gains for schools with literacy coaches are one of her “proof points.” The next step, she said, is to “scale and replicate” the literacy coach initiative into more schools.
“Lock it, load it, replicate it,” she said.
Overall, 42% of Delaware’s third through eighth graders scored proficiently in English on the state’s assessment, compared with 41% the year before. The same age group’s math proficiency crept up from 34% to 35%.
The report also included SAT results for 11th grade students, which showed that high school mathematics remains a concern for the state.
According to the report, Delaware’s SAT mathematics proficiency rate remained at 18% for the third consecutive year.
Earlier this year, Marten unveiled what she said was the Department of Education’s first strategic plan in over a decade.
According to the plan, the department’s funding would focus on four central pillars.
Those include expanding access to early childhood education; supporting student well-being and teacher retention; improving student achievement and test scores; and transitioning to a school funding formula that would send additional dollars to schools with large numbers of low-income students or English-language learners.
At the time, Marten also announced the Delaware Department of Education’s target goals for 53% proficiency in third grade English, and 35% proficiency in eighth grade math by 2028.
During a legislative budget committee hearing earlier this year, Sen. Dave Lawson (R-Marydel) said he has heard similar sentiments for the last 14 years as test scores have declined.
“So if [performance metrics] aren’t accomplished, what are going to be your actions? Are you still going to be secretary?” he asked.
In order to meet Marten’s goals, Delaware’s third grade students’ reading proficiency would have to jump 13 percentage points within two years. Eighth graders’ math scores would have to increase by 6 percentage points.
Marten told Spotlight Delaware that Delaware students can meet those goals within the next two years, but reiterated that what she wants to see is “sustained movement, not quick fixes.”
“Not, ‘They hired this consultant, or they bought this program, and they went up 15%,’” she said.
More accountability to come
In recent years, Delawareans across the political spectrum have grown increasingly frustrated with the state’s education spending, compared to students’ test scores.
Marten said the fact that the SAT math proficiency rate has remained at 18% for three consecutive years means the state must look at how students are faring in middle school algebra and other earlier coursework, which impacts students’ understanding of more complex math principles later.
She also said greater accountability is needed.
To do that, state education officials are working with school districts, charter schools, and other stakeholders to discuss how Delaware can strengthen its support and responses to low proficiency.
“We’ve got to create a clearer and a more differentiated support system for monitoring and accountability as a state,” Marten said.
Gov. Matt Meyer, who previously spent time as a middle school math teacher, has plans to reform the state’s education system. | PHOTO COURTESY OF MEYER CAMPAIGN
Her statements come just two months after Gov. Matt Meyer signed into law two bills that would lay the groundwork for Delaware to implement a new school funding system.
One of the bills, sponsored by State Sen. Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred), would enable the Delaware Department of Education to begin implementing the hybrid school funding model.
The hybrid model will shift education spending away from a per-student basis to one that directs more dollars toward students with higher need.
The bill also includes a provision to mandate that no school receive less money under the model than it would have under the previous funding model. It also allows for the hybrid model to be implemented during the 2028 fiscal year.
It is not immediately clear whether any financial accountability mechanism will be in place under the new funding model.
But, because the new formula offers tiers of support, there will be “real action” taken if a school continues to underperform “for so many numbers of days, weeks, months, years,” Marten said.
Marten did not specify what those actions may look like, but said the Delaware Department of Education’s responses to districts’ proficiency rates would be made available to the public.
“When you provide the support and the funding, which we’re doing, you’re going to move, and if you’re not moving, you get another treatment from the state,” she said.
Why Should Delaware Care? A boom in the construction of data centers to power the artificial intelligence industry has sparked a nationwide backlash over fears that the facilities’ electricity use could cause power bills to surge. In Delaware, the backlash has centered most recently around Kent County where residents have called for moratoriums and even outright bans on data centers.
About 100 people crammed into a Harrington Public Library meeting room on Monday for a city council meeting discussing the future of data centers in the Kent County municipality.
The crowd spilled into the hallway and out the back door, many wearing stickers that said “No data center.”
It was the largest showing at the small city’s council meeting in at least six years, Assistant City Manager Amanda Marlow said.
When attorney Max Walton asked the crowd who was against a proposed rule change that would allow data centers in the city, every resident in the room raised their hand.
“It’s really a shame that you guys would even consider a cute town like this to have a horrible data center,” Harrington resident Ardyn Overko said during the hour-long public comment period.
At issue during the council meeting was a measure to change the city’s zoning code to allow data centers in manufacturing areas. Developer Maguire Hayden requested the change so it could build a data center on the site of a former cold storage warehouse. The proposed facility would use 24 megawatts of energy — or about the same as 20,000 homes.
Ultimately, the council voted unanimously against the zoning change, prompting cheers and a standing ovation. Also eliciting support from the crowd was a call from Vice Mayor Darrin Simpson for a ban on data centers in the city, although the council did not discuss that measure further.
The council’s denial of the zoning change came after the developer behind the proposal offered the city of about 4,000 people contributions totaling $1 million, according to a summary of a proposed community benefits agreement.
The offer was particularly striking because historically in Delaware, governments have offered money to companies to attract them, rather than the other way around.
But, for the case in Harrington, the proposal came amid rising opposition to data centers across the county, which has made it more difficult for developers to find sites to build the sought-after facilities.
Following Harrington’s vote, the developer’s attorney, John Paradee, said the team does not have any additional plans for the site and may have to return it to the bank.
Proponents argue that the facilities, which are the backbone of the booming artificial intelligence industry, would bring construction jobs and tax revenue to places that desperately need it.
Harrington rejected a plan to change zoning for a property to allow for a data center. Pictured above is the Cloud HQ data center facility in Loudoun County, Virginia | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
Despite those arguments, when data center proposals come before elected bodies, local residents have made passionate pleas to officials to reject them. Many cite concerns about the impact they could have on electricity bills and the local environment.
“Just say no!” Harrington residents shouted repeatedly during the meeting.
Communities across the country have also opposed data center development, just as tech companies race to build the massive energy-hungry facilities needed to train and operate their artificial intelligence technologies.
Over the past year, the Delaware legislature passed several laws to try to ensure data centers do not raise energy bills. New Castle County Council also passed other regulations aimed at preventing environmental harm.
The flurry of regulations continued last month when Kent County Levy Court passed regulations similar to New Castle County’s.
In nearby Dover, city leaders also advanced a proposed moratorium on data centers earlier this month in order to writing updated zoning regulations to address the industry.
Why Should Delaware Care? Next month’s primary elections will decide the fate of more than half of Delaware’s statewide or statehouse races this cycle. Gov. Matt Meyer’s recent endorsement of two candidates seeking to unseat sitting senators has bucked historic precedent and opened new controversies within the state Democratic Party.
Gov. Matt Meyer’s endorsement of two Working Families Party-backed candidates looking to unseat Wilmington-area state senators in next month’s primary election has drawn the ire of a top Democratic leader.
The endorsements — of Adriana Bohm and Shay Frisby over Sens. Dan Cruce (D-Wilmington) and Ray Seigfried (D-North Brandywine), respectively — were part of a larger slate of 10 candidate backings the governor released Tuesday morning, and they drew swift criticism from Delaware’s top senator.
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Senate President Pro Tempore Dave Sokola (D-Newark) — who is not seeking reelection this year — said the endorsements amounted to political grudge-holding by the governor.
Sokola said Meyer’s endorsement of Frisby comes after he “failed in his 11th hour effort to run roughshod over State code and State Party rules to undermine the special election in Senate District 5.”
“As Democrats, we shouldn’t be trying to undo past elections that didn’t go our way,” he added.
Sokola’s comments harken back to the intra-party conflict among Delaware Democrats surrounding the 2025 special elections that first sent Seigfried and Cruce to the Senate.
“After County Executive Meyer hid the results of his botched reassessment from the public until he was elected Governor, he refused to sign legislation that largely cleaned up the mess,” Sokola said, referring to Senate Bill 228.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, a spokesperson for Gov. Meyer rebuffed Sokola’s statement, saying Meyer chose to endorse candidates who “align most closely with his values.”
“No one is entitled to his endorsements,” said Nick Merlino, Meyer’s deputy chief of staff.
Merlino also said Meyer chose candidates who are willing to buck “The Delaware Way,” a term often used to describe the go-along-to-get-along mentality of First State politics, and work against the grain.
Bohm and Frisby both expressed gratitude on Tuesday afternoon for receiving Meyer’s endorsement.
Adriana Bohm secured the endorsement of Gov. Matt Meyer Tuesday morning. | PHOTO COURTESY OF ADRIANA LEELA BOHM FOR STATE SENATE / FACEBOOKShay Frisby secured the endorsement of Gov. Matt Meyer Tuesday morning. | PHOTO COURTESY OF SHAY FRISBY FOR DELAWARE / FACEBOOK
Both candidates said they could not speculate on Meyer’s motives, but highlighted their respective advocacy and community-focused work they said stretches far beyond their current campaigns.
Along with Bohm and Frisby, Meyer also endorsed the following candidates on Tuesday, part of what his statement called his first slate of endorsements:
Kathy Jennings for Attorney General
Nisha Lodhavia for Senate District 15
Rep. Alonna Berry for Representative District 20
Rep. Krista Griffith for Representative District 12
Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha for Representative District 1
Rae Krantz for Representative District 6
Dave Redlawsk for Representative District 23
Kyle Grantham for New Castle County Council District 3
Meyer’s endorsements, motives aside, mark an unusual move for a sitting governor, as they have not historically endorsed candidates in statehouse races ahead of a primary election.
Special election drama turns into deja vu
Sokola’s grudge-holding claims date back to late 2024, and the campaigns to replace then-state Sens. Sarah McBride and Kyle Evans Gay.
After McBride and Gay were elected to higher office — the U.S. House of Representatives and office of Lieutenant Governor, respectively — in November 2024, two special elections were needed to fill their seats inside the Senate Chamber.
When a senate seat goes vacant in Delaware, the head of that legislative chamber must issue what state law calls a “writ of election” within 10 days. The law further directs the state to hold a special election between 30 and 35 days after the issuance of the writ of election.
The law also directs committees from the political parties of the relevant district to submit someone as their nominee. Due to the quick turnaround, state law does not call for a primary election. As a result, a small number of active political party insiders ultimately choose who could represent these districts for years.
Meyer criticized that system, arguing in a letter to Democratic Party leaders at the time that they should hold a primary prior to special election slated for February 2025.
Such a process “would require our candidates to organize, persuade, and get out the vote in order to earn the Democratic nomination,” he said in the letter.
Party leaders, however, said there was not enough time to amend the special election structure.
“We welcome a dialogue to evaluate the current official replacement process under the Delaware Code, the Delaware Democratic Party rules, and the laws of other subdivisions and municipalities,’’ then Delaware Democratic Party Chair Betsy Maron wrote in a response letter, first reported by WHYY. “At this time, however, we cannot support your proposal.”
Along with Meyer’s critiques, Spotlight Delaware also reported that a handful of political influencers coalesced around the establishment candidates, Cruce and Seigfried, and lobbied others to do the same.
Both men would go on to win the Democratic Party nomination, beating out the women they are once again facing in this election cycle.
Earlier this year, a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers attempted to change how special elections are conducted in Delaware, but their efforts stalled in the House of Representatives.
That bill, House Bill 183, would have called for special elections to include primaries, moving the state away from its current process of political party leaders choosing candidates.
Karl Baker contributed to this report.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Rae Krantz’s name. We regret our error.
Labour could lose dozens of seats to the Green party if the government allows new drilling in the North Sea, according to internal research shared with the Guardian.
Green party analysis suggests up to 50 Labour MPs, including Andy Burnham’s key ally Louise Haigh, could lose their seats at the next election if the government fails to make urgent climate action a priority or allows new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea.
The Guardian’s climate forum 2026: On Tuesday 20 October, join Damian Carrington and our panel of experts, including Prof Andy Haines, Katie White, Asad Rehman, Shruti Suresh, Gareth Thomas and Amy Fairman, for a hopeful and solutions-focused evening. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
The Ebola outbreak in Congo has passed 5,000 cases, government data showed, an unprecedented rate of spread that's outpacing efforts to slow it in one of the country's remotest regions.
Beto Coral held up banners in Florida warning fellow Colombians to not vote for Abelardo de la Espriella
In the week before Colombia’s presidential election, Beto Coral, a well-known activist living in the United States, travelled to Florida to persuade fellow Colombians not to vote for the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella.
Coral held banners outside polling stations in Miami warning that the millionaire lawyer, whose candidacy was endorsed by Donald Trump, would “help deport all of you”.
Human by day, vampire by night, Coen has difficult choices to make – beginning here in the 1300s, his adventure could span centuries in upcoming sequels
The Blood of Dawnwalker could be the start of an epic saga. Created by some of the talent behind The Witcher 3, this dark fantasy role-playing game takes place in the 14th century in the fictional land of Vale Sangora, a Carpathian valley of wetlands, mountains and forests cut off from the rest of the world and under the rule of a vicious vampire clan.
The developers envisage Dawnwalker as a trilogy. And because protagonist Coen is half vampire himself, that trilogy can skip across time, culminating in the modern day.
Speculation about US president’s executive assistant sparks furious backlash from White House
Wearing shoulder-length blonde hair, gold earrings and a red dress, cancer survivor Natalie Harp introduced herself to the 2020 Republican national convention as “a formerly forgotten American from California” and compared Donald Trump with George Bailey, the everyman hero played by James Stewart in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life.
“George Bailey’s father was right,” smiled Harp, her voice echoing in the Andrew W Mellon auditorium in pandemic-hit Washington. “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away. Mr President, that makes you the richest man in the world.”
Baseball showman Bill Veeck’s most audacious stunt sent Eddie Gaedel to bat for the lowly St Louis Browns in 1951 – and created an unforgettable diamond spectacle
Bill Veeck had a track record for designing some of the most elaborate marketing promotions during his four stints as a Major League Baseball owner, including an exploding scoreboard in 1960. But his most outlandish publicity stunt was sending 3ft 7in inch pinch-hitter Eddie Gaedel to the plate at a game 75 years ago Wednesday.
Sporting uniform number 1/8, Gaedel was greeted with a standing ovation at Sportsman’s Park in St Louis as he came to bat in the second game of a doubleheader on 19 August 1951 for the St Louis Browns. A famous Associated Press photo shows Detroit Tigers catcher Bob Swift sitting on his knees with a ball in his glove, towering over Gaedel and his tiny strike zone. Not surprisingly, he walked on four pitches, and was immediately lifted for a pinch-runner.
Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Francine D. Martin, Army National Guard photo by Sgt. 1st Class Brandon Nelson, Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty Images, Jake Warga/Corbis via Getty Images, Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images, Getty, U.S. Treasury via Wikimedia Commons.
ProPublica is examining U.S. military budgeting, spending and contracting, and we’re asking for your help.
We’ve spent years talking to people who’ve worked in the defense industry, the Pentagon and the armed services, so we know that these topics are critically important.Every day, Pentagon contracting officers, defense industry workers, congressional staffers and others make decisions that affect the most expensive military in the world, with great consequences for the safety of soldiers and for the country at large. Yet it’s well documented that, even when those involved have good intentions,many Pentagon projects end up mired in delays, cost overruns and performance issues. The causes of these problems are often opaque to the taxpayers who foot the bill.
“There’s no way that you can follow the money, because it keeps getting twisted like a Rubik’s Cube,” said John Ferrari, a retired Army major general and now a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “None of it is set up to be transparent.”
ProPublica is setting out to untwist this Rubik’s Cube with the help of those who understand the issues best. These topics are especially relevant right now, with Congress considering the president’s proposal to increase the defense budget to a record $1.5 trillion next year. To help the public understand what’s really at stake here, we need to speak to experts in this world,which means anyone who knows how the Pentagon is spending taxpayer money and what defense contractors are doing with it.
We especially want to learn from those who can help us understand whether things are working as they should. In our first story in this series, we spoke to dozens of people who’ve worked for General Dynamics, the Army and the Pentagon. Many of them spoke to us because they felt that things they were seeing on the job weren’t good uses of taxpayer money or weren’t helping to keep the country safe.
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The sums are vast, but the explanations for the spending range from vague to inscrutable. Consider these items in the law that funded the Department of Defense this year:
For “Other Procurement, Air Force”: $32.6 billion. For “Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide”: $35.2 billion. And for “supplies and associated support services” related to U.S. Code Title 10 Section 3601 subsection(c)(3)(B) clauses (i) through (iv): a mere $650 million.
Determining what, exactly, all this public money is paying for requires cross-referencing thousands of pages of financial tables, accounting records and congressional committee documents that will leave all but the most determined budgeting sleuth at a loss. Yet this is how the U.S. government explains its funding decisions for the most expensive military in the world. And the cost is growing.
“There’s no way that you can follow the money, because it keeps getting twisted like a Rubik’s Cube,” said John Ferrari, a retired Army major general and now a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “None of it is set up to be transparent.”
ProPublica is setting out to untwist this Rubik’s Cube in a series of investigative articles, and we’re asking for your help. In the months to come, we will grapple with how President Donald Trump is spending taxpayer money at the Department of Defense (or the Department of War, as his administration calls it). With your assistance, we hope to emerge with vital, previously untold investigative stories.
While accounting is rarely the stuff of action thrillers, the black box that is the Pentagon budget contains a world of grandiose plans and staggering consequences, from extraordinarily expensive jets, ships and missiles, to high-stakes projects gone terribly awry, to closed-door dealmaking with the world’s most powerful arms sellers. (Consider our first story in this series, about the epic dysfunction of an artillery factory bankrolled by $533 million from the U.S. Army.)
The scale is hard to fathom. Congress appropriated $1 trillion for defense this year, more than the combined appropriations for agencies overseeing health, veterans affairs, education, housing, agriculture and justice — twice as much, in fact. If the president prevails in his priorities for next year’s budget, defense spending will soar dramatically higher still, to $1.5 trillion. That would be more, adjusted for inflation, than the country spent annually on defense during the height of World War II. The Pentagon’s balance sheets are opaque even to the Pentagon itself: The agency as a whole has never received a passing grade on a comprehensive financial audit. (The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.)
One thing is clear: Vast sums are funneled into developing costly weapons systems that often come in over budget, get delivered behind schedule or are rendered obsolete by the time they’re finished — if they’re finished at all.
These poor outcomes follow grand promises. The Zumwalt class of naval destroyers was lauded for its “affordable and flexible design.” A ground-control system for GPS satellites called Next Generation Operational Control System was billed the “best-value GPS control system for the future.” And the F-35 jet was promised as “a truly remarkable, capable and affordable multirole fighter” that would be built “on schedule and on cost.”
Each of these programs went years past their original delivery deadlines and cost far more than originally budgeted. In 1998, the price tag for Zumwalts was estimated at $1.5 billion per ship, according to the Government Accountability Office. Now the expected price exceeds $10 billion per ship (in part because the Navy reduced the quantity it ordered). Expected costs for the GPS control system increased from $4.5 billion to over $7.5 billion. And developing, producing and maintaining the F-35 is anticipated to require $2 trillion, making it the DOD’s most expensive weapon system in history, according to the GAO. (A Lockheed Martin spokesperson called the jet “a critical capability for the United States and our allies” and said the company “is proud to serve as its prime contractor.”)
Estimates include research and development costs. The Zumwalt increase was in part because the program was reduced from 32 ships to three. All numbers are in 2024 dollars.
After the delays and cost increases, these projects have not exactly delivered reliable marvels. Only three of the originally expected 32 Zumwalts have been built. The GPS system was canceled — after 16 years and $6.27 billion in program costs, including payments to defense contractor RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies). And F-35s are able to perform all of their missions only a quarter of the time.
Experts in defense spending cite many systemic causes for such outcomes, including the Pentagon’s frequent preference for complex designs, its habit of starting production before the design has been finalized and, not least, its dependency on companies operating virtual monopolies over niche defense products. There are few lasting consequences for contractors who fail to deliver, the experts said. “Industry just says, ‘Shucks, write us another check,’” said one defense congressional staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about internal defense spending deliberations. “Congress just throws cash at the problem.”
Other types of notable figures abound, like the $7 million that the Pentagon reportedly spent on lobster tail in one month last year, the thousands of pages of regulations that would-be Pentagon contractors must navigate, the 4,000% by which a company was found to be marking up products sold to the DOD and the $111 million that RTX fraudulently extracted from the Pentagon by misleading the agency, according to the Department of Justice. (In 2024, RTX admitted to engaging in two schemes to defraud the Pentagon, including for Patriot missile systems, and paid over $950 million to resolve federal investigations. RTX did not respond to a request for comment.)
Those in positions to reform U.S. military spending can benefit from the high-spending status quo. Former four-star generals, Pentagon officials and congressional staffers alike find a welcome reception in the industry they once oversaw. Defense spending bills present excellent opportunities for members of Congress to direct jobs to their districts. And the largest defense firms enjoyannualprofits in the billions of dollars.
This windfall ends up in the hands of a powerful few. From 2020 to 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, RTX and Northrop Grumman — received DOD contracts worth a combined $771 billion. (General Dynamics and Boeing declined to comment. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin did not respond to requests for comment on the value of their DOD contracts.)
None of this is a secret. It was four decades ago, during another military buildup under a Republican president, that reports of the Pentagon paying $400 for a hammer led a presidential commission to study wasteful defense spending. It’s because this dynamic has been allowed to persist (despite periodic reform efforts) that ProPublica believes the topic deserves renewed attention.
The current administration, for its part, says that it is undertaking its own reforms, limiting stock buybacks by defense contractors, boosting new entrants to the defense industry and promising new financial accountability. Yet some fear Pentagon spending is becoming even more unrestrained in the second Trump era. Two of Trump’s marquee Pentagon programs, panned by some as boondoggles, are estimated to collectively cost more than $1 trillion. Companies connected to the president’s family and appointees have scooped up numerous DOD deals. The administration gutted the office that tests weapons systems for safety and efficacy. All in all, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told investors in April: “This is a golden opportunity right now based on who’s in government.”
Not everyone views U.S. military spending as excessive — some defense hawks have spent years clamoring for more of it. Measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, they note, U.S. defense spending has fallen from previous highs. A large chunk of the defense budget goes toward paying the salaries of service members. And even if they take longer and cost more than expected, American defense products are sought after the world over. “Weapons are expensive because our standards are high,” said longtime defense lobbyist Jim Dyer. “The outcomes are good.”
ProPublica is setting out to examine military spending and its outcomes. If you have worked in the world of defense budgeting, spending or contracting, we’d like to hear from you.
Many Pentagon projects face delays, budget increases and performance issues. The causes of these problems are often opaque to the taxpayers who foot the bill. Help point us to the most important stories.
Turn the Volume Up! at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University highlights the activism of everyday people who have confronted injustice. New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, quoting the Bronx rapper KRS-One’s song Turn The Volume Up during his election-day victory speech inspired the name of the exhibit. Featuring work by artists such as Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems and the Guerrilla Girls, the show examines how protests and collective action can create and inspire social change
July’s increase in inflation, to 2.9%, is likely to be the first of several, underlining the challenge facing Andy Burnham in shielding consumers from a fresh cost of living squeeze this autumn.
Rising energy bills, as an increase in Ofgem’s quarterly price cap came into force, were the main driver of the jump in inflation, from 2.6% in June. That was partly offset by cheaper fuel prices – the knock-on effect of hostilities easing in the Middle East, after Donald Trump hailed his “memorandum of understanding” with Iran in June.
Virgin Australia has apologised to a disability advocate who said he was “humiliated” by his removal from a flight over his wheelchair motor.
The airline called Shane Hryhorec on Wednesday afternoon to offer an apology, two days after the Adelaide-based man published a viral video showing the incident onboard a flight from Sydney.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump has delayed a planned 50% tariff on roughly $20 billion in Canadian imports for three days after the United States and Canada reached a tentative agreement aimed at keeping broader trade negotiations alive.
The tariffs had been scheduled to take effect Aug. 19 and would have covered products including dairy, liquor, cement, honey and hockey sticks. Energy products, potash, fish and critical minerals were among the goods excluded from the tariff action.
Trump said the temporary pause would give negotiators time to complete documentation for the agreement. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had intensified talks with the administration as the deadline approached, while Canadian officials prepared possible retaliatory measures if the tariffs took effect.
The dispute has centered partly on automobiles, alcohol and dairy products, areas where Trump has repeatedly accused Canada of maintaining unfair barriers to U.S. exports. Business groups on both sides of the border have warned that prolonged tariff uncertainty could disrupt supply chains and raise costs for companies and consumers.
Canada sends roughly 72% of its exports to the United States, making the trade relationship especially important to its economy. The latest pause prevents an immediate escalation but does not resolve the broader disagreements between the two governments.
Negotiators now have three additional days to finalize the terms of the agreement.
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles -- potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually be the basis of a future 'quantum internet,' offering a level of security and computing power beyond anything possible today. In new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Xi-Yu Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei has pushed that vision further than ever, entangling two quantum memories across 420 kilometers (261 miles) of optical fiber -- more than four times the previous record.
Tallahassee, Florida — State Rep. Angie Nixon scored one of Tuesday night’s biggest primary upsets, defeating former National Security Council official Alex Vindman for Florida’s Democratic U.S. Senate nomination despite being dramatically outspent.
Nixon, a progressive lawmaker and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won about 56% of the vote to Vindman’s 44%, according to election results. Vindman had raised roughly 16 times as much money as Nixon, making her victory particularly unexpected.
Vindman became nationally prominent after testifying during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment proceedings in 2019. Following Tuesday’s defeat, he congratulated Nixon and pledged to support her against Republican Sen. Ashley Moody in November.
Nixon has emphasized her labor activism and progressive economic policies while downplaying ideological labels. Although she belongs to the DSA, the national organization did not endorse her campaign. Her victory comes amid uneven results for democratic socialists: Rep. Jared Moskowitz easily defeated DSA-backed challenger Oliver Larkin elsewhere in Florida.
Nixon now faces a difficult general-election environment. Florida has shifted substantially toward Republicans in recent election cycles, and Moody, a former state attorney general appointed to Marco Rubio’s Senate seat, enters the race as the favorite.
The November winner will serve the remaining two years of Rubio’s Senate term.
Lee Jae Myung has long pushed for stronger homegrown defences, yet Donald Trump’s move has sparked alarm in some quarters
At their first summit, in August last year, the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, told Donald Trump: “If you, Mr President, become the peacemaker, then I will assist you as the pacemaker.”
The remark at the Oval Office captured the thrust of Lee’s approach to North Korea: dial down the military posturing and make repeated peace overtures to revive dialogue, even if they have been consistently rejected by Pyongyang largely over Seoul’s insistence on denuclearisation.
Food Foundation sounds alarm over supply risks and price shocks as about 40% of Britain’s food is imported
The UK is vulnerable to food price shocks because of its dependence on imports of fruit and vegetable from countries even more exposed to the climate crisis, researchers say.
The City of Newark is once again facing a budget shortfall, and officials warn that residents should expect to pay more in taxes and utilities next year.
Alpine communities hit out after influencer videos draw huge queues to Friedrich August refuge in Dolomites
Hundreds of people overwhelmed a mountain hut in the Italian Dolomites, not for the panoramic views but in search of a creamy pastry, reigniting the debate about social-media-driven tourism.
The visitors ventured en masse to the Friedrich August refuge – perched at 2,300 metres (7,500ft) above sea level, between Col Rodella and Passo Sella in Val di Fassa – some reportedly waking up at dawn or camping overnight, just to ensure they could buy a freshly baked krapfen, a traditional German pastry similar to a doughnut, before they ran out.
US president delays 50% tariffs by three days, and says contentious oil project ‘may be awoken from the grave’
Canada has temporarily avoided a bruising 50% US tariff, reaching a Tuesday-evening agreement with Trump administration officials hours before a hike that would have affected $20bn worth of goods was set to take effect.
Donald Trump posted late on Tuesday on social media that he had paused the tariffs for three days “based on the fact that Canada and the USA, subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!”
Milwaukee match major-league record dating to 1887
Yelich, Hamilton and Lara hit three-run home runs
Catcher Sánchez completes five-hitter with slowballs
The Milwaukee Brewers matched baseball’s modern-era record for the biggest shutout, beating the Seattle Mariners 22-0 on Tuesday night behind three-run homers from Christian Yelich, David Hamilton and Luis Lara and a two-run shot by Jake Bauers.
The major league-best Brewers (78-48) matched a franchise record for runs in a game.
GOP Sen. Ashley Moody and Democratic State Rep. Angie Nixon will face off in November after winning their primaries for U.S. Senate on Tuesday night, the Associated Press projects.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, [Vishal Patel, first author of the study based at Harvard Medical School] and colleagues report how they focused on the release of 10 major albums, launched between 2017 and 2022, selected for having the highest number of Spotify streams over a single day. [...] The team found streaming volume for the top 200 songs in the US was 43% higher on the date of major album releases compared with the days surrounding the releases -- although such data does not reveal whether the music was being streamed in a car.
[...] The researchers used data from a population-based registry of fatal US motor vehicle crashes to look at the number of traffic fatalities on the dates these albums were released, as well as for the 10 days either side. After taking into account the day of the week upon which the album was released, as well as federal holidays, and time of year, the researchers found the number of US traffic fatalities showed a relative increase of 15.1% on the date of major album releases, compared with similar days either side. "This is equivalent to approximately 182 fatalities in the US attributable to the release days of the 10 included albums," the team writes.
Patel said the release of a new album could distract drivers because accessing music is a search task, not a single button press. "You unlock the phone, open the app, find the release, read down a tracklist, tap the right song. That's several seconds of looking at a screen," he said, adding unfamiliar music also demands more attention, while research has suggested listening to new, high-energy music measurably degrades driving performance. The researchers add the rise in traffic fatalities was greater among certain groups -- such as younger drivers, male drivers, people who were driving alone, and people driving cars with a built-in infotainment platform. The authors say the results suggest that "online music streaming through smartphones may significantly contribute to distracted driving and traffic fatalities."
Saints’ Bell alert as he was driven from the field
At least six fights mar joint practice at training camp
Donovan Ezeiruaku ejected for throwing punches
New Orleans wide receiver Ronnie Bell was carted off the field because of the effects of Southern California heat after being involved in one of several fights during a chippy joint practice between the Saints and Dallas Cowboys on Tuesday.
“He just had to go inside for a little bit. He just got a little bit overheated,” New Orleans coach Kellen Moore said.
President Trump ordered the exercises be scaled back, citing what he said was a good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea's refusal to join the U.S. war against Iran.
South Korea’s military has confirmed that joint military drills with the US will be cut short, days after Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back the exercises.
In a statement on Wednesday, South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said at the request of the US side, the Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercise – which began on Monday would end on Friday, six days earlier than originally planned.
Greenbelt, Maryland — A former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to conceal federal records connected to COVID-19 research and government grants.
David Morens, 78, admitted using a personal Gmail account and other methods to keep communications outside government systems and evade Freedom of Information Act requests. Prosecutors said the conduct began in 2020 as scrutiny intensified over coronavirus research grants and the origins of the pandemic.
Morens worked in NIAID’s Office of the Director and served under longtime agency director Dr. Anthony Fauci. According to prosecutors, Morens also shared nonpublic government information with associates while helping coordinate efforts related to an EcoHealth Alliance grant involving bat coronavirus research.
Court records cited by The Hill say Morens received bottles of wine from an associate while engaging in what he called “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” His guilty plea covers conspiracy to commit offenses and defraud the United States. He faces up to five years in prison, with sentencing scheduled for Nov. 12.
Fauci has not been charged in the case and previously said Morens was not an adviser on policy matters. The case grew from investigations into government transparency and pandemic-era research funding.
This follows comments made on Friday at a speech at a police academy on Long Island, New York, where Trump said “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz strait a territory of the United States. … Essentially, that’s what it is. We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to.”
PALO ALTO, Calif. and TOKYO, Aug. 18, 2026 — D-Wave Quantum Inc. and NTT DOCOMO, INC. today announced that DOCOMO has deployed a second D-Wave-powered quantum computing application in production. The new application reduced location registration signals generated when devices cross tracking area list (“TA-List”) boundaries by 65.3% at the daily peak while also reducing paging signals by 7.0%, lowering network signaling load and improving operational efficiency. TA-Lists group geographic areas within a mobile network and must be carefully optimized to reduce signaling load while maintaining network performance and connectivity.
The deployment expands DOCOMO’s production use of quantum computing to a broader network optimization challenge. While its first D-Wave-powered application reduced paging signals within tracking areas, the new application optimizes TA-Lists across multiple tracking areas, balancing location registration and paging signals that typically move in opposite directions.
The application reduced the daily peak volume of location registration signals by 65.3% and paging signals by 7.0%. In a representative problem spanning 333 base stations, three TA-Lists and nine tracking areas, it completed the optimization in approximately five minutes, with the results incorporated into DOCOMO’s network planning and day-to-day operations.
“DOCOMO is showing telecom operators around the world what production quantum adoption looks like: move beyond a single use case and apply the technology to distinct, increasingly complex operational challenges,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “Telecom networks are highly complex, resource-constrained environments, and these results demonstrate how D-Wave’s annealing quantum computing technology can help operators improve network performance and efficiency today.”
“With our second production application powered by D-Wave’s hybrid quantum technology, we are applying quantum optimization to a broader and more complex area of network operations,” said Hiroshi Kawakami, Senior Manager of Data Platform Department, NTT DOCOMO, INC. “The application balances two competing network requirements, significantly reducing location registration signaling while also lowering paging signals. Together with our first production application, it demonstrates how quantum computing can help us address multiple aspects of network optimization and use our infrastructure more efficiently.”
About D-Wave Quantum Inc.
D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services. It is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the first and only to offer dual-platform quantum computing products and services, spanning both annealing and gate-model quantum computing technologies. D-Wave’s mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum today through enterprise-grade systems available on-premises and via its Leap quantum cloud service, which offers 99.9% availability and uptime. More than 100 organizations across commercial, government and research sectors trust D-Wave to address complex computational challenges using quantum computing. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how D-Wave is shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: www.dwavequantum.com.
Byron Donalds, a congressman backed by Donald Trump, won the Republican nomination for governor on Tuesday in the race to succeed Ron DeSantis.
Donalds, who has represented south-west Florida since 2021, trounced three reasonably prominent Republican rivals, including Jay Collins, DeSantis’s handpicked lieutenant governor.
Ossoff, running for re-election in Georgia, intensifies White House feud after remarks about ‘Natalie’ drew ire of president and allies
The Democratic senator Jon Ossoff called Donald Trump a “draft-dodging, crook president” while defending the senator Mark Kelly as a hero during a Tuesday campaign appearance in Georgia, escalating his public feud with the US president.
“I don’t think anything illustrates the times more aptly than that the draft-dodging, crook president, who has plunged our nation recklessly into a war he knows not how to end or to win, tried to imprison this man, who embodies American heroism,” Ossoff said while appearing alongside Kelly and his wife, the former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
The AI boom has largely been powered by standardized hardware, including powerful GPUs, all-purpose CPUs, and as much HBM and DRAM as one can comfortably grab. But recent events–including AMD’s acquisition of Taalas, Etched’s $700 million fundraising round, and frontier AI labs developing their own chips–suggest that custom-built hardware could play a bigger role in AI’s future than initially thought.
There has always been a tradeoff between performance and flexibility in hardware design, and there likely always will be one. For instance, general-purpose CPUs can run all sorts of workloads, and do it somewhat efficiently. But if you want to run math- or graphics-heavy workloads in parallel, you’re better off with a more specialized chip, like a GPU.
Talaas HC1 demonstration chip plugs into the PCIe bus
Even within GPUs, chipmakers make decisions about the types of workloads they’ll run. AMD has decided that double-precision 64-bit computing is important for its HPC customers, so it’s loading its upcoming Instinct MI430X GPUs with loads of FP64 cores. Nvidia, on the other hand, foresees more demand for AI workloads that run with 4-bit to 32-bit precision, so that’s how it designed its latest data center-class GPU.
As the focus in AI moves from training to inference, it’s shaking up the chip design precepts again, forcing the big chipmakers to rethink their priors. It’s also driving the big AI labs and cloud companies to double-down on developing their own custom chips.
For instance, instead of delivering the DRAM-heavy Rubin CPX GPU, which it announced nearly one year ago as its flagship AI inference chip, Nvidia pivoted in December 2025 and spent $20 billion to acquire the assets of Groq, which developed a speedy chip, heavy with Static Random Access Memory (SRAM), called a language processing unit (LPU). At its March conference, Nvidia announced the Groq 3 LPU, which is optimized for extreme low-latency token generation, with rates in the thousands of tokens per seconds, while quietly removing the Rubin CPX from its roadmap.
Source: Talaas
AMD is now making a similar move with its planned acquisition of Taalas, which it announced two weeks ago. Like Groq, the Talaas ASIC was designed to do one thing: generate tokens as fast as possible. When it came out of stealth in February, Talaas touted a demo chip, the HC1, that could generate 16,000 tokens per second, nearly 10x faster than the next fastest chip on that particular AI model.
There was just one catch: HC1 only works on Meta’s Llama 3.1-8B model. The Toronto-based chipmaker had achieved that tremendous token generating figure by essentially hard wiring Llama 3.1-8B weights directly onto the silicon. This allows the chip to generate tokens at an astounding rate, but it eliminates nearly all programmability. It also forces Talaas to tweak its hardware to adapt to new or changing software, which slows its responsiveness to changing market forces. This reduced flexibility is the cost of gaining speed.
It’s not clear exactly what AMD has in mind for the Talaas’ chip. The deal–terms for which were not disclosed–has not closed. In any case, we do know that AMD plans to combine a Talaas ASIC with other chips, including its Epyc CPUs and Instinct GPUs into its new Helios rack, which it unveiled last month. Perhaps AMD will have an easier time incorporating Talaas into its ROCm software stack by utilizing the newly announced AI capabilities in ROCm.ai.
Meanwhile, the startup Etched is taking a similar approach to developing custom hardware. The company’s flagship Sohu chip is an ASIC that’s designed specifically to run transformer models. Sohu can run multiple transformer models, so it’s not restricted to running just Llama, like Talaas’s chip. But it also cannot run other types of AI models, including concurrent neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) models, and recurrent neural networks (RNN). (Anybody remember those?)
By specializing the hardware to a certain workload and stripping out all the extraneous stuff, Etched is able to reap huge performance gains out of the ASIC. The company claimed that its Sohu chip could generate 500,000 tokens per second on Llama 70B, which it says is 20x the throughput of an eight-GPU H100 system.
Etched Sohu ASIC (Image source: Etched)
“We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing methods so frontier models can run with best-in-class throughput, latency cost, and power efficiency for both prefill and decode workloads,” the company claims.
Today, Etched announced it has raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation. The round was led by Jane Street with participation from other investors. In addition to being an investor, Jane Street is also a customer, and is running an Etched cluster in production. All told, Etched said it has $1 billion in orders across public and private frontier AI companies and clouds.
Etched also announced that it’s looking to innovate further up the stack. The company has developed what it dubs Low Voltage Inference (LVI), which boosts the overall efficiency and density of a cluster by throttling down the math cores during AI inference. It also touts Cluster Scale Memory (CSM), which is “a hybrid memory subsystem that creates a massive shared memory pool across an entire cluster rather than a single chip.”
“Our inference systems are built to push the entire pareto curve on frontier models, including many-trillion-parameter MoEs, long context, and agentic workloads,” the company says on its website. “This required intense co-design, from new chips, packages, PCBs, cold plates, interconnects, and more.”
To be sure, there are technical challenges up and down the AI stack that have yet to be solved. For instance, we’re still waiting for Nvidia to start shipping the BlueField4 DPUs, which are the last and critical components for its CMX architecture that it hopes will address the KV cache bottleneck. You can have the fastest processors in the world, but they’re useless if you can’t move data in and out of them.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (left) and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan displaying the Jalapeno wafer
Meanwhile, the leading AI labs are also looking to get into the custom-processor game. First we had OpenAI announcing the first custom-built AI inference processor. Dubbed the Jalapeno, the chip was co-developed by OpenAI and Broadcom, with help from Celestica. The company promises to provide performance details in the months to come.
Not to be outdone, Anthropic is also looking to make a move with custom chips. The company reportedly is in discussions with Samsung to take advantage of its advanced 2nm fabrication nodes and packaging technology to develop custom chips for AI training. While the Claude maker will still continue to rely on chips from Nvidia, Google, and Amazon, it also sees a future in custom hardware.
All three cloud giants have their own custom hardware too, Google Cloud with its TPU, Amazon Web Services with Trainium, and Microsoft Cloud with Maia. When you’re running a certain fraction of the world’s computational workload, the economies of scale work in your favor to develop a chip that meets your exact needs, as the cloud giants have done.
As the AI boom plays out and companies demand to see returns on AI investments, squeezing as much performance from hardware will become even more important. The two stages of the AI inference workload, prefill and decode, are unique enough from other AI and HPC workloads that the costs of not only developing custom silicon–but also the cost of eliminating the flexibility to do anything else with it–are such that it makes financial sense to do so.
Police report shows Brian Hickerson and his brother, Zach Hickerson, were at Greenville, South Carolina, residence
Hayden Panettiere’s on-and-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson and his brother, Zach Hickerson, were at the South Carolina apartment where the actor died over the weekend, according to a police report released on Tuesday.
A Greenville police officer who responded to the residence on Sunday afternoon was met by the brothers and then observed paramedics performing CPR on an unresponsive woman, the report states.
More than 40 charities write to Pat McFadden and review head Alan Milburn over fears of stricter eligibility rules
More than 40 of the UK’s leading charities have warned ministers against imposing tougher benefit sanctions or cuts on disabled young people, as the government considers how to encourage more young people into work.
The charities raised concerns that an imminent review of young people and work by Alan Milburn could bring in stricter eligibility rules for keeping disability benefits – or remove them altogether – as part of a wider plan to boost flagging youth job rates.
Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub's status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation -- error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub's incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot.
The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.
Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.
US supreme court declined to halt execution of William Frances Silvia, and state has two executions next month
A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting his estranged wife and wounding his mother-in-law was executed on Tuesday, continuing the state’s aggressiveuseof the death penalty in the final term of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.
William Frances Silvia, 61, was pronounced dead at 6.11pm after receiving a three-drug injection at the Florida state prison near Starke.
Researchers find capacity stunted by pollution was restored after introduction of ultra-low emission zone
Children’s lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found.
Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution.
Mykhailo Fedorov’s appeal is most direct challenge to Volodymyr Zelenskyy since Russian invasion in 2022
Ukraine’s recently dismissed former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called for a wartime presidential election in the most direct political challenge to Volodymyr Zelenskyy since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
The politician, whose abrupt sacking last month triggered a wave of protests, said that Ukraine had to “restore a full democratic process even amid a prolonged war” in a video address released online late on Tuesday evening.
(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump's 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, including cars, dairy and alcohol, take effect Wednesday, and the U.S. importers who pay them still have no federal estimate of what the levies will…
National Trust for Historic Preservation filing comes after president made emergency bid for construction to continue
A historic preservation group that sued to block construction of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom urged the US supreme court on Tuesday to suspend the project while it considers whether the work can continue.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed its request less than a week after the Trump administration asked the nation’s highest court to allow the White House to continue construction on its $400m ballroom project during the appeals process.
Advice and guidance services for doctors in England found to be creating risk of missed or late detection of illness
Cancer diagnoses have been missed or delayed because of a system designed for GPs to seek specialist advice before referring patients to hospital, according to an investigation.
The Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) identified patient risks linked to how advice and guidance (A+G) services have been implemented across England.
Comcast is activating Wi-Fi motion sensing on millions of compatible Xfinity gateways, allowing the routers to detect movement by measuring disruptions in signals between the gateway and connected devices. The free feature, part of Xfinity Shield, can send activity alerts through the Xfinity app and offers Home, Away, and nighttime monitoring modes without requiring separate motion sensors. The Verge reports: Wi-Fi motion sensing is a technology that has been around for a while, but it's only recently that it's become accurate and reliable enough to catch on. Linksys launched a similar service in 2021, but discontinued it a few years later. Lighting company Wiz launched a line of Wi-Fi-sensing smart bulbs in 2023, and more recently Philips Hue deployed a similar radio-frequency sensing technology in its products (using Zigbee rather than Wi-Fi). Comcast's motion sensing pairs with new modes in the Xfinity app -- Home Watch, Away Watch, and Dark Watch (a night/sleep mode) -- allowing you to turn sensing on or off based on your activities.
(The Center Square) – After months of not commenting on federal border wall and barrier construction in the Big Bend region of Texas, including barrier construction underway in Big Bend National Park, Gov. Greg Abbott broke his silence on Monday.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will implement several new diagnosis codes that medical watchdog Do No Harm says are important for supporting those who underwent transgender procedures and later detransitioned.
Following an executive order that called for breaking up the combination measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a “recent” study “just came out” that “very strongly supports” the idea. But there’s no evidence of any such credible study, past or present.
In a CNN interview that aired on Aug. 15, Kennedy defended President Donald Trump’s Aug. 10 executive order on childhood vaccines, which among other things, asked officials to begin pursuing a way to offer single-disease shots. Those vaccines have not been available in the U.S. for nearly two decades. The combination MMR vaccine has been in use for more than 40 years.
The order did not present a scientific reason to split up the shot, but while signing the document, Trump falsely claimed that in contrast to single vaccines, the combination shot is “quite lethal” and that breaking it up “will have a huge impact on autism.”
The president doubled down the next day, claiming that given separately, the MMR is “fine,” but when combined, the vaccine is “sort of like a nuclear weapon, according to some.”
In the CNN interview, after the host noted that the current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website says there is no evidence showing a benefit to separating out the MMR vaccine, he asked Kennedy who was right — Trump or the CDC.
Kennedy replied that the CDC website “probably is outdated.”
“There is a recent study that just came out that supports President Trump on that,” he continued. “It looks at the timeline for when the autism epidemic began and … it’s a synthesis of — essentially a meta review — of all the existing science. And it very strongly supports the president.”
Later, Kennedy again suggested that new evidence had emerged, saying that “particularly in light of recent science,” he thought people “should have that option if they want to go with a single antigen vaccine.”
Throughout the interview, he emphasized that while he thought the MMR was effective in preventing measles, he did not think there was enough evidence on its safety, including on whether the shot causes autism. The MMR vaccine has been rigorously studied and no credible link to autism has been found.
We searched PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s online database of the biomedical literature, but did not find any new study suggesting that the MMR vaccine needed to be split up. Experts, too, said they were not aware of one.
“There are no data to suggest that the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, if divided into its three component parts, will make the vaccine safer,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us.
“Quite the opposite,” he added. “It will mean that children will get six shots instead of two. It means that there will be a delay in when they receive these shots, which will only increase the period of time during which children are susceptible to these diseases with no benefit.” (The MMR is typically given in two doses at 12 to 15 months and 4 to 6 years.)
“Since the current combined MMR vaccine is safe, it does not make sense” to split it up, Dr. Andrew Pollard, an immunologist and director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, told us.
“There is no safety problem that is trying to be fixed by separating MMR and doing so would take a tremendous amount of time and effort” since those shots aren’t currently licensed, Daniel Salmon, a vaccinologist and director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University, told us. “This is a solution in search of a problem.”
HHS did not respond to our inquiry asking what study Kennedy was citing or whether the CDC website would be revised.
Contrary to Kennedy’s claim, in our search, one recent study, published on July 28 in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, supported the safety of the combined shot. Consistent with many previous studies, it analyzed electronic medical records from more than 2.5 million American children and found no association between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Similarly, we also identified a review published last month that compared the vaccination policies for mumps in the U.S. and Japan. It noted the shortcomings of the Asian country’s approach. In the CNN interview, Kennedy briefly mentioned Japan, saying the country has “a single vaccine … and it works for that population.”
As we’ve noted before, and as Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford Medicine explained in the same CNN segment, Japan did discontinue its combination MMR vaccine in 1993 after a rare side effect was observed with that vaccine’s mumps component, which was never used in U.S. vaccines. Autism rates did not decline after Japan stopped using the MMR shot.
Today, however, Japan doesn’t split out all of the components. Instead, there is a combination measles and rubella vaccine, along with an optional mumps standalone vaccine. And the country may be moving back to a fully combined vaccine. In May, Japan licensed a new combination MMR vaccine with a mumps component similar to the one used in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world.
According to the recent review, Japan’s policy has not been very successful in controlling mumps, in contrast to the U.S., which still has some outbreaks but is not plagued by the same large-scale issues.
“Low vaccination coverage has led to a lack of herd immunity and recurrent epidemics, and ‘mumps deafness’ is an unresolved public health concern,” the review states. Mumps is usually mild, but the disease can cause complications, including brain or testicle inflammation. Deafness, usually in a single ear, might occur in as many as 1 in 1,000 cases, according to a study in Japan.
Years of relying on separate shots has also likely contributed to low vaccination rates for measles. A massive measles outbreak in 2001 infected more than 250,000 children, and Japan was for many years a major source of imported measles cases in the U.S.Scott, who wrote about this concern in October 2025 when health officials first broached the idea of separating out the MMR, said then that Japan “provides a cautionary tale.”
A ‘Junk’ Autism Review
We did identify a paper that Kennedy might have been thinking of, but it is not new evidence, nor is it published in a reputable journal.
“It’s junk and would never be published in a legitimate medical journal,” Salmon told us.
The paper, which purports to be a review on the “determinants” of autism, is from May 2026 and roughly matches Kennedy’s description of a study looking at a “timeline.” It was mentioned in a Children’s Health Defense news story about Trump’s executive order. Children’s Health Defense is the nonprofit that Kennedy used to lead and that has long been a source of inaccurate vaccine information.
Citing Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British physician who fraudulently proposed the MMR vaccine might cause autism in 1998 and first suggested the vaccine be split up, the CHD story described the paper as a “comprehensive review” that “identified vaccination as the leading ‘modifiable risk factor’ for the condition.”
Wakefield is in fact one of the authors of the paper, as are several otherindividuals, such as Peter McCullough, whom we andothers have fact-checked before for sharing inaccurate medical information.
The paper appears in an outlet called the Journal of Independent Medicine, which is not indexed on PubMed — a very basic indicator of at least some reliability — and is published by a group that has promotedunproventreatments for COVID-19.
“This is a narrative review of previous studies,” Anders Hviid, head of the epidemiology research department at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, who has studied the MMR vaccine in large studies in his home country, told us. There is a short section titled “Compound Vaccination,” he said, “but there is no evidence there to suggest breaking up the vaccine would be beneficial.”
“There is no credible study which links MMR vaccine to autism and a very large body of data which finds no association between vaccination and autism,” Pollard said.
If there were a legitimate new study showing a problem with the combined MMR vaccine, which has been used for decades and given globally to more than a billion people, it would almost certainly be major news. Offit said in that case, scientists would act upon that information.
“Historically, when vaccines have been shown to be harmful, we do act on it,” he said. “We care about vaccine safety deeply — deeply. And that’s why we are very responsive to studies that are well done, well controlled, and published in reputable journals and reproduced by others.”
“That’s not this,” he said, of Kennedy’s claim. “This is just a sort of vague handwaving reference to a study that doesn’t exist.”
Splitting the Vaccine Could Lower Vaccination Rates
Multiple experts told us that splitting up the MMR vaccine was not necessary and was unlikely to happen — but if it did, it would not lead to greater vaccine uptake, as Kennedy suggested.
Kennedy said in the CNN interview that if single-disease shots were available, “maybe then more people are going to end up taking the vaccine because they don’t want to take all three.”
While that’s possible in some cases, vaccine experts told us it’s likely that more people overall would miss one or more shots or be left unprotected for longer periods of time.
“I think splitting up MMR will lead to lower uptake,” Hviid said, noting the burden of six appointments rather than two. “Some of these will be postponed or missed completely. I am speaking as a parent myself here.”
He cited a 2017 study that found that kids in the U.S. who get combination shots when they are available were more likely to complete their vaccination schedule and to do so on time. Scott, the Stanford doctor who fact-checked Kennedy’s claims for CNN, also pointed to this study.
“Delaying vaccines or separating doses unnecessarily does not make vaccination safer and can leave children unprotected,” the World Health Organization said in a statement two days after Trump signed the executive order.
When “vaccines are split and more doses or visits are needed,” Pollard said, “the result is that doses are missed and protection in the population drops. This is very dangerous in the cases of these viruses, not least with outbreaks of measles already [o]ngoing,” he said in an email. “[T]he last thing we need for the health of our children is to have more doses missed.”
Kate Yandell contributed reporting to this story.
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(The Center Square) – As the national debt quickly approaches $40 trillion, economists warn that skyrocketing deficits will distinctly impact Americans of all generations, including students, families and retirees.
Disney and ABC are suing the FCC to block an early review of eight station licenses, arguing the Trump administration is using the agency's regulatory power to punish the network over programming and editorial decisions it dislikes. Reuters reports: In a lawsuit (PDF) filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, Disney said the FCC was seeking to coerce and retaliate against "a network that refuses to bow to the administration's demands," calling the agency's actions an "extraordinary assault on free speech."
Trump has waged an aggressive series of attacks on the news media and the latest move follows a two-year-long battle between Trump and Disney. Last month, Trump again called for ABC stations to lose their licenses because the network refused to air a prime-time speech on elections. The court case will pose a key test of the free speech rights of media outlets. Disney and ABC asked the court (PDF) to quickly issue a temporary restraining order halting the license renewal proceedings and preventing the FCC from scheduling a hearing. The company said the public comment period ended earlier this month and the FCC could act at any time.
The lawsuit alleges that the administration is violating the company's First Amendment free speech rights, saying that the FCC "is using its regulatory power to retaliate against (Disney and ABC) for programming and editorial decisions the administration dislikes." The FCC said the move stemmed from a year-long investigation into whether Disney's diversity policies amounted to unlawful discrimination, an allegation the company denies. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan issued an order on Tuesday directing the company and the FCC to propose a schedule for considering the request for a temporary restraining order and told the agency to notify her if it moves to start the process of revoking the ABC licenses.
Larry Montes, already facing state charges, allegedly attacked 63-year-old woman and security guard on Friday
The man accused of attacking a woman and security guard at a New York City synagogue during Shabbat services Friday has been charged with hate crimes in Manhattan federal court, prosecutors said.
Larry Montes, who is already facing state-level hate crime charges, allegedly struck a 63-year-old woman as security was trying to boot him from Central synagogue. He allegedly spat at, and head-butted, a security team member and damaged synagogue property, authorities said.
Almost 45m acres of national forests could be potentially opened to road construction, drilling and logging
The Trump administration said on Tuesday it plans to rescind the “roadless rule” that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years, potentially opening up almost 45m acres of national forests to road construction, drilling and logging.
Conservationists had feared the announcement was coming since last summer after Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, targeted a rule brought in by Bill Clinton’s administration, describing it as “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development.
"Today, Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas," ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons said in a statement.
Brian Hickerson and his brother, Zach, made the 911 call that brought first responders to the apartment where Hayden Panettiere was found unresponsive.
The lawsuit accuses the social media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms.
Washington, D.C. — The Trump administration is moving to eliminate a 25-year-old federal rule that limits road construction, logging and other development across millions of acres of national forest land.
The U.S. Forest Service on Tuesday formally proposed rescinding the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The Agriculture Department says the change would return more authority to local forest managers, who could approve projects aimed at reducing overgrowth, insect damage and wildfire hazards.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the current rule has prevented managers from taking steps needed to improve forest health. The administration argues that removing the restrictions would make it easier to thin forests and respond to dangerous conditions.
Environmental groups strongly dispute that reasoning. The Natural Resources Defense Council says the rollback could expose roughly 45 million acres to new roads and development, threatening wildlife habitat, drinking-water sources and recreation areas. Research cited by conservation groups has found wildfires are more likely to start near roads than in roadless forests because of increased human activity.
The Roadless Rule covers about 30% of National Forest System lands, although state-specific protections in Colorado and Idaho reduce the acreage directly affected by the federal change.
The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the proposal through September 21.
RAM prices have exploded over the past year, with some DDR5 kits approaching 500% year-over-year increases and a 128GB kit now selling for $3,399, which is more than 10 times its previous low. Tom's Hardware reports: Things improve as you step down the memory capacities and speed tiers, but not as much as we'd like. You're still looking at $392 for a memory kit that was just $72 last year. To reinforce the point, I pulled the latest average price data from PCPartPicker, comparing where we are today (August 2026) to exactly one year ago. This data is somewhat approximate, but it should be broadly accurate. [...] A standard 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 kit that would have cost you under $200 last summer is now demanding over $1,100. It is a 5x multiplier on a component that used to be a fairly boring and predictable line item in a PC build budget.
If you plan to just wait it out on an older AM4 or LGA1700 motherboard with DDR4, you'd better hope your memory holds out too, because DDR4 isn't safe from the fallout. With DDR5 entirely out of reach for most builders, the resulting scramble for older platforms running DDR4 memory has created a massive knock-on effect, and as a result, DDR4 kits are up anywhere from 120% to nearly 180% across the board. Nowhere near as bad as DDR5 pricing, but it still stings when a kit that was $105 last year is $281 this year.
This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to the US, either. German tech site ComputerBase have also been tracking this global trend, reporting just this week that average RAM prices in Europe have skyrocketed by 345% compared to September 2025. Their data shows the squeeze is bleeding into other components too, with hard drive and SSD prices both climbing over 125% in that same timeframe. In fact, the situation is so severe that hyperscale buyers have reportedly already locked in almost all of the global DRAM production capacity for 2027, handing over advance deposits to guarantee their supply of precious DRAM, which is now among the highest-value commodities in the world by weight; mainstream DRAM chips are worth over half as much per kilogram as solid gold.
Harvard, Yale, Stanford and others face directive to review and cut alliances Pentagon deems national security risk
Thirty US universities could lose federal funding unless they review and cut foreign academic partnerships the Pentagon considers a national security risk within the next two weeks, under a Pentagon directive aimed largely at ties to Chinese institutions.
Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Cornell are among the institutions ordered to conduct and report the reviews – and end partnerships deemed problematic – by 31 August, according to a US official who provided the full list to the Guardian.
Riley English said she was in the grips of a mental health crisis and abusing drugs, and that she planned to kill Scott Bessent
A Massachusetts woman who told police that she brought homemade firebombs to the US Capitol to kill Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, was sentenced on Tuesday to just over six years in prison.
Riley English, a 26-year-old transgender woman, said she was in the grips of a mental health crisis and abusing drugs when she drove to Washington in January 2025 and told Capitol police that she was there to kill Bessent on the day of his Senate confirmation.
The Trump admin. pressured attorneys to investigate allegations of antisemitism at elite universities even though there was no factual or legal basis to do so, former DOJ lawyer says.
Minnesota attorney general sues Texas governor in case of ICE agent charged with wounding a man in Minneapolis
Minnesota’s attorney general has sued the governor of Texas to force him to extradite an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent charged with wounding a man and then lying to justify the shooting during the US agency’s controversial crackdown in Minneapolis.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, is asking a federal judge to bar the sheriff in Cameron county, Texas, from releasing ICE agent Christian Castro, and to order Greg Abbott, Texas’s governor, to sign his extradition warrant so that Minnesota officers can take custody.
(The Center Square) – Seventeen Iranian men have been charged in a cybercrime case being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Rodney Greer accused of securing unauthorized prescriptions for GLP-1 drugs and selling them to customers
An Illinois man allegedly impersonated doctors – and evidently referred to himself online as “$hotboy1” – is facing criminal charges that he secured unauthorized prescriptions for Ozempic and Mounjaro pharmaceutical drugs that facilitate weight loss and are taken by some for cosmetic rather than legitimate medical reasons.
Rodney Greer purportedly launched the allege scheme in early 2023, according to court filings from federal prosecutors and a US justice department news release issued on Monday.
The narwhal’s tusk is the left canine tooth, which grows through the jaw and lip and can reach more than two meters in length. (Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources via SWNS)
One in seven Americans (15%) who are married or in a relationship admit they have romantic feelings for someone who isn’t their partner, according to new research. The survey of 2,000 Americans revealed that Gen Z Americans were the most…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Your iPhone, SamsungGalaxy, andGoogle Pixel have a 1-year warranty. Unless you cough up extra dough for an extended service plan, you'll pay a hefty fee if you damage the screen and need a replacement (around $329 for an iPhone 17 done directly from Apple). But it doesn't have to be this way. What if you could order the part from the manufacturer and do the repair yourself? That dream is finally being realized for American consumers, thanks to Fairphone.
The Dutch company is bringing its repairable and sustainably built Android smartphone -- the Fairphone (Gen 6+) -- to the US. Each one comes with a screwdriver. A replacement screen from Fairphone costs just $90. A new USB-C port is $20. A fresh battery is $40. In all, there are 12 modular elements you can swap yourself. It remains the only smartphone series with a 10/10 repairability scorefrom iFixit, not to mention an unmatched 5-year warranty and software updates through 2033.
The new Fairphone (Gen 6+) is a small upgrade over the Gen 6 that the company launched last year. It has a newer Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor and double the RAM at 12 GB, but is otherwise largely the same device (hence the "plus" in the name). It now comes in Cobalt Blue, a nod to the miners who extract the cobalt used to make phone batteries, and the company's efforts to improve working conditions in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The new Fairphone is available on Amazon and at Fairphone.com for $650, and it's officially certified to work on T-Mobile and AT&T's networks. While this will mark the U.S. debut of its flagship smartphone, the company first entered the stateside market last year with its repairable earbuds and headphones. It also plans to launch its next-generation Fairbuds 2 wireless earbuds later this year.
As President Donald Trump has pressured Congress to rewrite election laws, many of his allies have said Democrats support requiring identification for all sorts of activities — but not voting.
Most recently, a Florida Republican congressman said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will require ID to shop at city-owned grocery stores.
“He’s requiring ID to prevent non-residents (and non-citizens of NYC) from walking in and snatching up the discounted food,” U.S. Rep. Randy Fine said in an Aug. 16 fundraising email.
“Democrats are perfectly fine putting up barriers and demanding identification when it comes to rationing cheap groceries,” Fine’s email said. “But the second we talk about protecting the integrity of our elections, they act like requiring ID is some kind of civil rights violation.”
Fine’s fundraising email called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide documentary proof of citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate when registering to vote, and a government-issued photo ID when voting.
Fine’s accusation about Mamdani came nearly two weeks after the mayor and his spokespersons said they will not require an ID to shop at the stores. Fine’s congressional office referred us to his reelection campaign, which did not respond to our queries.
Official mentioned a ‘library card-esque thing,’ but Mamdani has said no ID will be required
On July 27, New York City officials announced they will create five municipal grocery stores where certain items such as fresh produce, meat and milk will be 30% cheaper than in retail stores.
Mamdani asked grocers and operators to apply to run the stores.
City officials aim to reduce the price of food for New Yorkers who struggle to pay their bills, but the discounted prices will be available to anyone who shops there, regardless of income. The first store is expected to open by the end of 2027.
A written announcement from the city did not say shoppers would need ID, and Mamdani didn’t say it either. However, an official with a city-affiliated organization raised the possibility during a July 27 press conference.
A reporter asked whether there will be a limit on the number of discounted items someone can purchase.
Mamdani replied that the goal is to help New Yorkers put food on the table and not to let people “make a quick buck through reselling.”
He then asked Jeanny Pak, interim president and CEO of New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, to provide details.
Pak said the city is seeking proposals from potential store operators, and she floated the idea of “a library card-esque thing” for shoppers.
Republican politicians and others — including the House Republicans X account; U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C; and podcaster Joe Rogan— took a clip of Pak saying “library card-esque” and shared it online. They said her statement was evidence that Mamdani will require ID at the grocery stores.
Mamdani has refuted those claims.
He chuckled at the idea of requiring ID in an Aug. 3 interview with liberal commentator Joy-Ann Reid. “When we’re talking about a city-run grocery store — one in each borough, which, by the way, you do not need an ID to shop at, no matter what you’ve just heard.”
Mamdani spokespersons said on X there is no ID requirement.
“The only card we’ll have is a voluntary savings card like they have at any typical supermarket,” Dora Pekec wrote.
A New York City Economic Development Corporation spokesperson told PolitiFact that officials are discussing the possibility of a customer card to prevent people from buying large quantities of discounted staples for resale. The card, which will have a bar code, is expected to function similarly to a supermarket loyalty card. However, details have yet to be decided because store operators have not been chosen.
The city’s July 27 request for proposals said that the operator(s) “will create a voluntary free-to-access membership card program to monitor sales activity, and implement the discount program and any associated demand management measures.” It said that the card will not be required to access the stores and will be made easily available to anyone requesting one.
Fine sent his email more than a week after multipleoutlets, including the conservative New York Post, debunked the grocery store ID requirement idea.
Fine said Mamdani is “requiring ID” to shop at city-run grocery stores.
An official with a city-affiliated organization said the city was considering a “library card-esque thing,” without elaborating, at a news conference.
But Mamdani has said people won’t need an ID to shop. The city is considering having the stores’ operator develop a card that would prevent people from buying at a discount and then reselling large quantities of food.
The burden of proof is on the speaker, and Fine provided no evidence to support the statement.
Migration minister asked how he intends to stop deportations of people ‘who had lived in Sweden for decades’
The deportation and removal of British citizens from Sweden over Brexit residency rights is damaging relations with the UK amid efforts to improve links with London, a Swedish MP has said.
Häkan Svenneling, representative for Vârmland, where a 78-year-old British widow, Joyce Thomas, has been given four weeks to leave Sweden after 21 years of residency, has written to the migration minister, Johan Forssell, asking what he “intends to do to stop the deportations”.
Marco Rubio targets ICC’s Tomoko Akane and Abdoulaye Seye, who was investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza
The US has sanctioned the president of the international criminal court (ICC) and a prosecutor tasked with investigating crimes committed by Israel during its war on Gaza.
The new sanctions designations were unveiled by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, who called the Hague-based ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”, in a statement.
The Trump administration has been quietly deporting migrants from Mexico to Central America, despite the Mexican government's willingness to accept the return of all its citizens.
Aug. 18, 2026 — Biology doesn’t happen at one scale. Molecular interactions unfold in milliseconds and nanometers, while disease-associated change such as in Alzheimer’s spreads across millimeters of brain tissue. Understanding complex biological systems requires scientists to watch both — ideally at the same time and with the same sample. Historically, this has meant shuttling samples between specialized instruments, often damaging biological context and slowing results. There’s also a common crux across microscopes: the closer you look at living tissue, the more the image blurs, and the more detail you capture, the more overwhelming the resulting data becomes.
Five imaging modes provide complementary views of the same dividing human retinal pigment epithelial cell (hTERT-RPE1). From top left, clockwise: Lattice Light-Sheet Structured Illumination Microscopy (LLS-SIM), widefield, 3D-SIM, oblique illumination, lattice light sheet. This shows how different microscopy techniques compare when imaging the same cell, giving them a more complete picture of what’s happening inside. (Credit: Fu, Liu, Milkie, Ruan et al., Nature Methods, 2026)
A new instrument aims to address these problems — and has revealed a third, arguably harder challenge that Berkeley Lab is uniquely positioned to address.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and collaborating institutions have developed the Multimodal Optical Scope with Adaptive Imaging Correction (MOSAIC) — a reconfigurable microscope that consolidates more than ten imaging techniques into one compact instrument. It processes its massive datasets using computational tools developed at Berkeley Lab, funded by a Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) award and supported by the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).
Featured on the cover of Nature Methods, MOSAIC allows scientists to track biological processes across scales and compare imaging methods on the same sample. It generates data at a pace that is pushing the boundaries of what biology can discover.
“MOSAIC can generate up to four terabytes of data per hour — far beyond what conventional processing workflows or human inspection can handle,” said Srigokul “Gokul” Upadhyayula, a faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division and co-corresponding author. “The microscope is only as useful as our ability to process those data and extract biological meaning from them. Berkeley Lab’s expertise in high-performance computing and large-scale data analysis is essential to closing that gap.”
How MOSAIC Works
MOSAIC grew from the adaptive-optical lattice light-sheet microscope reported by Nobel laureate Eric Betzig, Upadhyayula, and their colleagues in 2018. That earlier system delivered exceptional performance but was so large it occupied a 10-foot by 4-foot optical table. As demand from the broader research community grew, the team designed the MOSAIC to retain and expand those capabilities while reducing the instrument’s footprint.
“MOSAIC has been built over a dozen times in different places with over 50 research licenses already shared. We also created comprehensive documentation on how to build this instrument — think an IKEA-style instruction set geared towards a scientist who has no deep optical expertise but is willing to learn.”
MOSAIC’s main innovation is that it can be quickly reconfigured in two to five seconds to switch between a dozen distinct imaging modes. The team designed a smart modular system where the same lasers, mirrors, cameras, and computational hardware serve multiple imaging functions through a custom optical switching system. Critically, every one of those modes is enhanced with adaptive optics: a technology borrowed from astronomers who developed it to sharpen images of distant stars blurred by Earth’s atmosphere. This corrects blurring caused by aberrations in the living tissue itself.
“ Sample-induced aberrations distort and redirect light, reducing both signal and resolution,” said Upadhyayula. “Adaptive optics measures those distortions and corrects them. It is like turning on the windshield wipers while driving in the rain: the information is present all along, just obscured.”
MOSAIC also relies on fluorescent molecules that allow biologists to mark specific cellular structures and molecular activities in living cells, fast and gentle light-sheet imaging that captures cellular dynamics with minimal stress or damage, and high-speed data transfer infrastructure capable of moving and processing massive imaging datasets.
What Becomes Visible When You Clear the Windshield?
MOSAIC’s ability to image with minimal invasiveness at large scales over long durations has already enabled several experiments: tracking single molecules in living cells, observing organelle dynamics in developing zebrafish embryos, mapping neuronal architecture in expanded human brain tissue from a person with Alzheimer’s, and imaging neural activity in live mouse brains. In that last application, adaptive optics correction revealed roughly 2.5 times more detectable neural calcium events than imaging without it — suggesting conventional microscopy has been quietly undercounting brain activity.
MOSAIC is also the instrument that powered a related study on Volumetric Imaging via Photochemical Sectioning (VIPS), published in Science in 2025. That project used MOSAIC and the computational tools developed at Berkeley Lab to image two complete adult mouse olfactory bulbs at nanoscale resolution, generating roughly a petabyte of data in approximately two weeks. Analyzing it took two years: an illustration of the gap between what these instruments can see and what researchers can currently process.
“ The bottleneck is no longer our ability to acquire the data,” said Upadhyayula. “These microscopes can generate massive datasets at staggering rates. The key bottleneck is turning dense five-dimensional observations into biological understanding.”
Berkeley Lab’s contribution helps to target this gap.
Round-the-Clock Data Collection for Biological AI
Supported by an LDRD award, Eric Betzig and Upadhyayula’s group developed PetaKit5D, an open-source software toolkit that can handle MOSAIC’s terabyte-per-hour output in real time and cuts processing costs by more than an order of magnitude compared to previous approaches. The team also secured computing allocations on the Perlmutter supercomputer at NERSC to process and visualize portions of the largest datasets. But processing data efficiently is only half the equation. The other half is generating enough of it — consistently, at scale, and of sufficient quality — to train the kind of AI model that could one day make sense of it all.
At UC Berkeley, two MOSAIC instruments now run around the clock, capturing the five-dimensional data — three spatial dimensions, time, and molecular identity — that will be needed to train a new state-of-the-art AI model.
The data flowing from those instruments already represents a fundamental shift in how biology can be practiced. For the first time, researchers can watch in vivo biochemistry unfold inside cells living within their native tissues, inside a living organism.
What comes next, he believes, could be transformative: a vision language model that reasons natively over biology, connecting what it sees with molecular identity, experimental context, and prior biological knowledge to determine which observations matter and which experiments should come next.
“Connected to automated microscopes, sample handling, and perturbation systems, that capability could provide the foundation for self-driving biological laboratories — and fundamentally change the rate at which we can make discoveries,” said Upadhyayula.
Twenty-nine US states are seeking huge damages, claiming Meta’s platforms were addictive by design
In 1994, more than 40 US states came together to sue one of the most powerful industries on Earth: big tobacco.
The suits brought together diverse claims centred on tobacco companies’ misleading advertising and contribution to a mounting public health crisis. They ended in a negotiated settlement with the US government, in which the companies agreed to pay more than any industry ever, and the states agreed to drop a large portion of their claims.
Latest LightBundle eKit delivers terabit-class optical connectivity with up to 335 microLED channels operating at 3 Gbps each
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 18, 2026 — Avicena today announced that it has begun shipping 1 Tbps LightBundle evaluation kits (eKits) to customers and partners developing next-generation AI infrastructure. The shipment milestone follows the introduction and demonstration of the LightBundle eKit in March 2026 at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC26) and advances the platform from initial evaluation availability to terabit-class operation in customer laboratories.
The latest LightBundle eKit incorporates a 335-channel microLED array, with each microLED data channel operating up to 3 Gbps, coupled with an Avicena multicore fiber bundle to a 335-element integrated photodiode array. Together, the channels provide up to 1Tbps of aggregate raw throughput displaying the core advantages of Avicena’s laser-free optical architecture: low power, high bandwidth density, robust operation at elevated temperatures, and flexible reach beyond the practical limits of copper interconnects.
The platform enables hyperscalers, AI accelerator and memory developers, networking companies, and system architects to evaluate terabit-class microLED optical connectivity for both AI scale-in and scale-up applications. Target use cases include die-to-die and die-to-memory links, XPU-to-XPU connectivity, and XPU-to-switch interconnects.
A Terabit-Class Platform for AI Connectivity
AI systems are driving rapid increases in the bandwidth required between accelerators, memory, and switch fabrics. As link rates rise, copper interconnects face increasing challenges in reach, routing density, and energy efficiency. Conventional optical solutions based on lasers and silicon photonics can extend reach, but have power, bandwidth density, cost, and reliability challenges.
Avicena’s LightBundle technology replaces lasers with dense microLED transmitter arrays coupled through a multi-core fiber bundle to integrated photodetector arrays. This architecture is designed to deliver high bandwidth density and energy-efficient optical connectivity while operating reliably across demanding system temperatures.
The 1 Tbps eKit gives engineering teams a complete platform for evaluating link behavior in their own laboratories. Host interface boards, integrated diagnostics, and a graphical user interface support a set of features, including characterization of optical signal integrity, link budgets, eye quality, crosstalk, power efficiency, and bit error rate performance.
“Shipping our 1 Tbps LightBundle eKits extends Avicena’s microLED-based optical interconnect leadership and represents a significant milestone in delivering the terabit-class connectivity required to scale next-generation AI infrastructure,” said Marco Chisari, CEO of Avicena. “LightBundle addresses the bandwidth density, power, reliability, reach and cost requirements that are critical for scale-in and scale-up links, such as XPU-to-XPU, XPU-to-memory, XPU-to-CPU and XPU-to-switch connectivity.”
“Avicena shipments of a 1 Tbps LightBundle evaluation platform is a meaningful milestone for the optical-interconnect industry and reinforces the company’s pioneering leadership in microLED-based connectivity,” said Bob Wheeler, Analyst at Large at LightCounting. “Providing AI infrastructure developers with a practical terabit-class platform enables them to evaluate microLED technology for demanding XPU-to-XPU, XPU-to-memory, and XPU-to-switch links. This advances microLED interconnects towards production for next-generation AI scale-in and scale-up architectures.”
Availability
Avicena is now shipping 1 Tbps LightBundle eKits. Organizations interested in evaluating the platform or discussing LightBundle integration may contact Avicena at nigel@avicena.tech.
About Avicena
Avicena Tech Corp. is a privately held company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, pioneering microLED-based optical interconnects for AI infrastructure. Avicena’s LightBundle technology enables low-power optical connectivity with high reliability, scalability, and bandwidth density, helping semiconductor and datacenter innovators build the next generation of AI systems.
Enables vendors and consumers to test custom workloads and run proprietary models for greater flexibility and security
GAINESVILLE, Va., Aug. 18, 2026 — The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) today announced the release of the SPECapc for Siemens NX 2024 Workload Development Kit (WDK). Integrated directly into the existing SPECapc for Siemens NX 2024 benchmark, the new WDK offers a powerful, standardized framework for users to run and measure their own GPU-specific workloads and proprietary graphics models.
Siemens NX is award-winning, processor-intensive software that helps designers and manufacturers deliver better products faster through a powerful combination of CAD and CAM solutions. The SPECapc for Siemens NX 2024 benchmark executes graphics tests that include rotation, pan, zoom and clipping for each model. Viewport tests within the benchmark measure performance for field of view and feature regeneration operations.
Professionals, students, and artists, as well as hardware developers and vendors, use the benchmark to discover how different hardware configurations affect the performance of their applications. The addition of the SPECapc for Siemens NX 2024 WDK gives these users a framework to evaluate internal models and specialized workflows, providing greater flexibility and security for proprietary information.
“Adding the SPEC Workload Development Kit to the SPECapc for Siemens NX 2024 benchmark means users have the flexibility and framework to gain greater insight into the performance of workloads that matter most to them,” said SPECapc Chair Jessica Heerboth. “This is another important way that SPEC is responding to the needs of our user communities.”
Seamless Integration for Current Users
The WDK operates as a parallel customization framework and does not modify the base benchmark or baseline scoring. Current licensees can access the WDK immediately by downloading and reinstalling the updated benchmark package.
About SPEC
SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance for the newest generation of computing systems. Its membership comprises more than 120 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies worldwide.
New benchmark categories for generative AI and agentic workflows arrive alongside updated LLM tests, as the industry standard for measuring PC AI performance evolves
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 18, 2026 — MLCommons, an open engineering consortium dedicated to improving machine learning performance and transparency, today announced the release of MLPerf Client v2.0, the latest version of its industry-standard benchmark for evaluating AI performance on personal computers.
MLPerf Client measures how effectively PCs—from laptops and desktops to workstations—run AI workloads locally. With the release of v2.0, the benchmark now includes new Agentic AI and Image Generation capabilities alongside its established LLM benchmarking of real-world tasks like summarization, content creation, and code analysis, reporting metrics for both responsiveness and throughput.
New in MLPerf Client v2.0
Version 2.0 introduces a range of new features, refinements, and expanded support designed to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI-enabled hardware and software:
Major Workload Changes
New Image Generation Category: Adding this category significantly enhances the benchmark’s utility by enabling evaluation of generative visual capabilities. This category features Flux.2 klein 4B as an experimental test.
New Agentic AI Category: Benchmarks agentic AI performance through Software Engineering (SWE) Agent and Data Analyst Agent scenarios. It reports end-to-end performance, including a breakdown of LLM inference and tool execution times.
Updated LLM Inference tests: This release upgrades Phi 3.5 mini instruct in the required workloads to Phi 4 Mini Instruct, while introducing Qwen 3 8B as an experimental test. Base tasks now include an Intermediate Summarization task featuring an input prompt of roughly 4K tokens.
These updates mark another major step toward a comprehensive, cross-platform benchmark for client AI computing.
MLPerf Client is the product of a collaboration among technology leaders, including AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and top PC OEMs. These participants have contributed resources and expertise to the creation of this AI benchmark.
MLPerf Client v2.0 is freely available for download, and the source code is open for inspection and community contribution via the MLCommons GitHub repository. For downloads, documentation, and additional details, visit mlcommons.org.
MLCommons is an open engineering consortium with a mission to make machine learning better for everyone. The organization produces industry-leading benchmarks, datasets, and best practices that span the full range of ML applications—from massive cloud training to resource-constrained edge devices. Its MLPerf benchmark suite has become the de facto standard for evaluating AI performance.
ST. PAUL, Minnesota — Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday, seeking to force the extradition of an ICE agent charged with shooting a man in Minneapolis and then allegedly filing a false account of the encounter.
Christian Castro, 52, faces four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime stemming from the Jan. 14 shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis during Operation Metro Surge. Prosecutors say Castro fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home, striking Sosa-Celis in the leg. The bullet ultimately lodged in a child’s bedroom wall.
Federal officials initially said Sosa-Celis and another man attacked an officer with a broom handle and snow shovel. Those federal charges were later dismissed, and ICE Director Todd Lyons acknowledged that agents had lied about circumstances surrounding the incident.
Castro was arrested in Texas on May 29 and remains jailed in Cameron County on a $200,000 bond. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz requested extradition in June, but Abbott has not signed the warrant.
Ellison is now asking a federal judge to order Abbott to comply and prevent Castro’s release. He warned that Texas law could require Castro’s release after 90 days in custody and said jail calls indicate Castro has discussed moving to Mexico.
Abbott’s office said it would not comment on pending extradition matters.
The lawsuit cites a 1987 Supreme Court ruling holding that governors generally have no discretion to refuse valid interstate extradition requests. Minnesota prosecutors say three unrelated defendants have been extradited from Texas without difficulty since Castro’s arrest.
Castro has not been convicted, and the charges remain allegations.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 18, 2026 — Velaura AI, Inc., an AI compute infrastructure company developing ultra-low-power silicon and software technologies, today announced that it has raised $110 million in Series A financing, bringing its total valuation to more than $1 billion. The round reflects investor conviction in a proven technology foundation, multiple hyperscaler engagements, an experienced leadership team, and a vision for AI compute spanning data centers and Physical AI.
Credit: Velaura AI
Velaura is addressing two of the biggest growth opportunities emerging from the AI megatrend: ultra-low-power compute and Physical AI. Artificial intelligence is increasingly constrained not by the demand for compute, but by the electrical power required to support it. Hyperscalers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI data centers with long lead times on power availability for deployment. Also, as Physical AI with intelligent robots, drones, and autonomous systems move toward mainstream deployment under strict power and thermal limits, energy-efficient computing with purpose-built solutions has become one of the industry’s defining challenges.
Velaura’s Series A financing to address these growth opportunities was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from new investors Capricorn Investment Group and Prosperity7 Ventures, as well as existing investors including Mayfield, Maverick Silicon, MARA, Premji Invest, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and StepStone Group.
The new capital will accelerate the development and commercialization of Velaura’s AI compute portfolio, including its recently announced Titan Core silicon platform. It will also support the expansion of the company’s engineering and customer-facing teams with deepening collaborations with strategic partners and customers developing next-generation AI infrastructure and Physical AI solutions.
The company’s leadership team combines decades of experience delivering many of the semiconductor industry’s leading high-performance and low-power platforms. Velaura brings together executives and engineers from Apple, NVIDIA, Google, Qualcomm, and Marvell, along with leaders who have built and scaled multiple semiconductor companies and shipped billions of devices.
Velaura’s Titan Core, proprietary digital chip IP and design platform, delivers a 2-4x improvement in performance per watt for mathematical operations in AI accelerators while maintaining performance. The underlying technology has been validated at commercial scale and deployed in more than 30 million ASICs in leading semiconductor process nodes, demonstrating world-class manufacturing yield and reliability. The company is applying this expertise across AI accelerators while extending the ultra-low-power architecture to Physical AI, including intelligent robots, drones, and other embodied AI systems.
“Every advance in AI, from reasoning models to embodied intelligence, creates demand for more compute, and ultimately more power,” said Rajiv Khemani, Co-founder and CEO of Velaura AI. “The next era of AI will be defined not only by better models, but also by fundamentally better compute economics. Velaura is building the ultra-low-power silicon and software foundation needed to scale AI from hyperscale data centers to intelligent machines operating in the physical world.”
About Velaura AI
Velaura AI develops ultra-low power silicon and software technologies that enable the next generation of AI infrastructure. Its solutions are designed for hyperscale data centers and Physical AI applications, including robotics, autonomous systems and embodied intelligence. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Velaura combines proven semiconductor innovation with deep expertise in architecture, silicon design, and software to fundamentally improve the energy efficiency of AI computing. For more information, visit www.velaura.ai.
NEW YORK, New York — Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is reviving his signature direct-payment proposal as artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the economy, this time calling for families to receive $15,000 annually.
Yang told Scripps News that Americans should be compensated because their personal data helped create the enormously valuable AI systems now being developed by companies such as OpenAI, Google and Meta.
“These AI models are built upon our data,” Yang said, arguing that technology companies are capturing enormous value while ordinary Americans receive little direct benefit.
The proposal echoes Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign, when he promoted a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 per month for every American adult as protection against automation-driven job losses. His warnings that technology would displace large numbers of workers were considered unconventional at the time but have gained renewed attention as companies increasingly use AI to reduce staffing and automate white-collar work.
Yang also criticized both major political parties, saying elected officials have been too slow to address AI’s economic consequences and remain focused on partisan conflict rather than emerging problems.
His $15,000 proposal raises significant unanswered questions, including whether payments would go to individuals or households, how they would be financed and whether they would replace or supplement existing benefits. The Scripps interview did not detail a full funding mechanism.
Yang, who founded the Forward Party after leaving the Democratic Party, also declined to rule out another presidential campaign in 2028, saying he remains interested in helping the country if circumstances align.
SAXONBURG, Pa., Aug. 18, 2026 — Coherent Corp., a global leader in photonics, has announced that it has begun sampling of its 300mm high thermal conductivity silicon carbide (SiC) substrates to leading AI semiconductor partners. The milestone advances Coherent’s scalable materials platform for the growing thermal management requirements of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
As AI processors move toward higher power densities, effective heat removal is becoming a primary constraint on system performance, reliability, and datacenter efficiency. Customer sampling moves Coherent’s 300mm SiC platform from internal development to customer evaluation across the AI semiconductor ecosystem.
Silicon carbide combines high thermal conductivity, mechanical strength, and thermal stability for next-generation heat spreaders and related packaging solutions. Coherent’s vertically integrated capabilities in SiC crystal growth, wafering, polishing, and characterization provide control across the production process and support progression toward future high-volume manufacturing. The high thermal conductivity substrates are engineered to improve heat spreading by up to 25% more than current solutions while maintaining compatibility with existing semiconductor manufacturing platforms.
“AI performance is increasingly constrained by the industry’s ability to remove heat from next-generation processors,” said Craig Mullaney, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Coherent. “Advanced SiC thermal management materials can play an important role in addressing that challenge. By combining decades of silicon carbide expertise with a scalable 300mm manufacturing platform, Coherent is helping build the materials foundation for future AI infrastructure.”
This milestone marks the next step in Coherent’s roadmap to expand its 300mm SiC platform for AI and high-performance computing. By combining customer engagement, vertically integrated materials expertise, and a scalable manufacturing strategy, Coherent is positioning its SiC capabilities to support successive generations of AI infrastructure.
About Coherent
Coherent is the global photonics leader. We harness photons to drive innovation. Industry leaders in the datacenter, communications, and industrial markets rely on Coherent’s world-leading technology to fuel their own innovation and growth. Founded in 1971 and operating in more than 20 countries, Coherent brings the industry’s broadest, deepest technology stack; unmatched supply chain resilience; and global scale to help its customers solve their toughest technology challenges.
San Diego Padres minor-league catching coordinator Oswaldo Pirela remained in federal immigration custody on Tuesday after being detained at an airport in El Paso, Texas, while returning from a work trip.
Pirela’s family said the 34-year-old Venezuelan has a pending asylum claim and has continually renewed his work authorization. The Department of Homeland Security said he does not have legal status and will face removal proceedings.
Google has agreed to pay $10 million for a massive trove of anonymized Spirit Airlines data following the carrier's shutdown, including internal communications, spreadsheets, booking and frequent-flyer records, transactions, and employee information. CNN reports: Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worked there? Then your information will soon be feeding Google's artificial intelligence model. The discount airline halted all operations in May, and it's been selling off its remaining assets through the bankruptcy process ever since. While most of that is planes, equipment, and real estate, there's other things that are valuable, too.
It was disclosed late Monday that the company agreed to sell its data to Google for $10 million. That includes emails and internal communications, spreadsheets, transactions with the public including bookings and frequent flyer information as well as human resources information on its employees. The data has been stripped of anything that would allow individuals to be identified, according to the court filing. But it is still a massive amount of useful intelligence.
Patrons at two of the chain’s London pubs were all for Tim Martin’s ban on playing music or taking calls on speaker
The terrace of the Moon Under Water Wetherspoons pub in Leicester Square was full of people enjoying the warm weather and chatting between tables – without a TikTok video or speakerphone call in earshot.
At Wetherspoons, the convivial atmosphere can no longer be punctuated by rude customers taking phone calls on blast, or playing videos without headphones after Tim Martin, the owner of the pub chain, banned both on his premises.
Jacque St Ann, 17, and his friends broke into Plaza Tower and he fell as they were descending an interior staircase
A high school student recently fell to his death after entering an abandoned high-rise tower in downtown New Orleans with his friends – in an apparent case of urban exploration highlighting the dangers of unaddressed city blight.
New Orleans police said Jacque St Ann, 17, and his friends, of the nearby community of Belle Chasse, Louisiana, traveled into the city and broke into the fenced-off, 45-story Plaza Tower in the central business district, which has stood derelict for years.
Once again, the subject of changing how many justices sit on the Supreme Court—and for how long—is in the news.
On Aug. 13, 2026, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) spoke at the National Association of Black Journalists conference about the various changes he felt were needed at the Court. Jeffries was upset with the Court’s April 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down a state law that allowed the use of race as a determining factor in creating election districts, and a related decision about districts in Alabama, Allen v. Millgan (2026)
“The Supreme Court steps in and overturns that decision [in Alabama], it tells me that they don't have the credibility for us to move forward, acting like everything is okay and the status quo is acceptable. It's not. And we're going to push for dramatic reform of the Supreme Court,” Jeffries said.
Among the various Supreme Court changes proposed recently, and in prior years, are establishing term limits for the justices; changing the number of justices on the bench; creating an enforceable ethics code for justices; and regulating cases appearing on the Court’s emergency or interim docket.
Some of these ideas are hardly new. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, President Joe Biden formed a presidential Supreme Court commission to study possible reforms. In 2015, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee openly discussed Supreme Court term limits during his primary campaign. There was a robust academic debate on term limits nearly a decade earlier in the aftermath of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s death.
And famously, President Franklin D. Roosevelt fell short in his 1937 attempted to change the number of justices on the Supreme Court.
Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices
Limiting the time served by the justices on the Supreme Court is perhaps the idea most discussed among reformers.
Article III of the Constitution defines the Supreme Court’s basic role in the separation of powers and the lifetime tenure of the justices. “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish,” it states. And the justices serve as long as they show “good behavior” in office.
In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton supported the idea of lifetime service from the justices to serve the principle of judicial independence. “The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government,” Hamilton wrote. “It is the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.”
The 2021 Biden commission report identified several arguments made by Supreme Court term limits supporters. Supporters argued that the United States is the only democracy without term and age limits for high court justices. Also, many supporters believed a staggered system where each justice was limited to 18 years on the bench would allow a president to appoint two justices during a four-year presidential term, thus reflecting the voice of the electorate in choosing the president and senators who take part in the nomination and confirmation process.
Lifetime tenure supporters countered that the Constitution’s text and history strongly supported the system of service during “good behavior” in office, and a staggered system with term limits would make the Supreme Court nomination process more political as a recurring election issue.
One of the key challenges for supporters of Supreme Court term limits is the method of implementing change. The Congressional Research Service, in a December 2023 report, raised questions about the ability of Congress to set term limits by statute and not by a constitutional amendment. “Because Article III guarantees that Supreme Court Justices ‘shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,’ most commentators agree that Congress could not impose a term or age limit for Supreme Court Justices without amending the Constitution,” wrote legislative attorney Joanna R. Lampe.
Others argue that Congress can pass laws to create an active/senior justice model where justices serving on the Supreme Court would become senior justices after 18 years and move on to other duties in the judicial system. Justices with senior status would be fully compensated members for life and able to exercise official duties on and off the bench for as long as they choose.
If a term limits law survived the Senate filibuster and passed Congress, opponents could still bring a challenge to the law in court.
Changing the Number of Justices and Other Ideas
Unlike the idea of term limits, the Constitution grants Congress the power to choose how many justices serve on the Supreme Court—a power that Congress has exercised many times across American history. The Judiciary Act of 1789 established the first Supreme Court, when Congress decided that six justices should serve. The number of justices on the Court varied from 1802 to 1869. A Judiciary Act sponsored by Sen. Lyman Trumbull in 1869 put the number at nine Justices. Since then, the number has remained stable.
Some proponents of reform would like to see the number of Supreme Court justices increased for several reasons. During a House hearing in May 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D- Md,) offered one rationale for a change to 13 justices to match the number of federal circuits in America. But a bill changing the size of the Court is still subject to a filibuster and would face opposition.
In 1937, the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill sponsored by President Roosevelt failed in the Senate, where the Democrats held 76 out of 96 seats. The bill would have allowed the president to appoint an additional justice for every sitting justice who was over 70 years of age.
Also, creating an enforceable ethics code for the justices faces its own set of problems. In November 2023, the Supreme Court adopted a voluntary code of conduct. However, the ability of Congress to sanction the justices is limited by the Constitution. Article III of the Constitution bars Congress from altering the justices’ compensation. The House could impeach a Supreme Court justice, as it did when Justice Samuel Chase faced charges in the Senate in 1804, but the removal decision would still be left in the hands of the Senate. Chase was acquitted by the Senate, setting a precedent that justices shouldn’t face impeachment for political reasons.
Congress could have role in determining how cases are presented to the Court’s non-merits interim or emergency docket. According to the Congressional Research Service, “Judicial procedures are generally based on statutes or court-created rules rather than constitutional mandates, and Congress can alter those procedures through legislation.” In May 2026, Rep. Raskin offered several reforms that would require the Court to explain in writing how it issued orders on the docket and would create a panel federal appellate judges to decide which emergency cases go before the justices.
Such efforts likely would face resistance in Congress. Reforms also could raise separation of powers issues, especially about the ability of Congress to compel the Supreme Court to write non-merits opinions on short notice.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
ST. PAUL, Minnesota — A federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking Minnesota’s voter-registration data, marking the latest defeat in a nationwide Trump administration effort to force states to turn over sensitive voter information.
The Justice Department sued Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon after he refused to provide a voter list containing names, birthdates, addresses and partial Social Security numbers. Simon argued the request was unusually broad and lacked a clear legal justification.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez rejected the government’s case, writing that DOJ appeared to be seeking discovery before establishing a valid claim.
“The government suggests it is permitted to use a civil action as a ‘fishing expedition,’” Menendez wrote. She added that ordinary litigants cannot seek evidence first and develop a legal theory later, and that the federal government has no special privilege to do so.
The ruling adds Minnesota to a long list of states where similar federal lawsuits have been dismissed. According to Route Fifty, the Justice Department is now 0-23 in these cases.
The administration has justified its voter-data push as an election-integrity effort, but it comes amid President Donald Trump’s continued false claims that widespread voter fraud affects U.S. elections. Documented illegal voting remains rare.
A recent ProPublica investigation found that federal authorities subpoenaed about 130 people in Minnesota as part of a high-priority illegal-voting investigation, but only one case had been referred for prosecution.
The Minnesota ruling further weakens the administration’s effort to centralize access to voter-roll information maintained by the states.
Apple is overhauling its EU App Store fees to settle its Digital Markets Act dispute, simplifying the fee structure and "[resolving] Apple's disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution." Developers can sign the new terms starting today, and the changes go into effect on October 1. MacRumors reports: The initial acquisition fee and store services fee are being removed for apps distributed outside of the App Store, and Apple will now charge a 5% Core Technology Commission on digital purchases that replaces the prior per-install Core Technology Fee. Commission rates are changing for App Store apps, alternative payments, and apps distributed through alternative app marketplaces or the web.
Developers can offer in-app purchase options alongside alternative payment options in the EU, which is something Apple did not allow before. Apple says there will be presentation requirements so users have a consistent, transparent experience. Developers distributing apps in the EU must select their payment options and maintain those options for 12 months before making changes to "provide consistency and clarity for users." Apple will still use a Notarization process for apps downloadable through the web and through alternative app marketplaces.
Apps in the Kids category or being used by children under 13 will not include links to websites to complete transactions. All apps that use alternative payment processing or link to a website for transactions have to include a parental gate if the user is under 18. Apple is relaxing the rules for operating an alternative app marketplace.
Madonna leads all artists with 11 nominations at this year's MTV VMAs, and a full sweep would tie her with Beyoncé and Taylor Swift for the most VMA wins in history.
Deepens Colorado investment with new global headquarters and celebrates alongside government and community leaders
LOUISVILLE, Colo., Aug. 18, 2026 — Infleqtion is celebrating the grand opening of the Colorado Quantum Innovation Center (CQIC), its new facility in Louisville, Colorado at 1315 W. Century Drive. The grand opening coincides with growing recognition of the Boulder–Louisville–Broomfield corridor as “America’s Quantum Peak,” recognizing the region’s concentration of quantum research, talent, and industry.
“Colorado is leading America’s quantum future, and Infleqtion’s new Quantum Innovation Center is further proof that our growing technology sector draws more businesses to our state and strengthens our economy,” said Governor Jared Polis.
“Quantum is no longer a future technology, it’s becoming foundational to national security, scientific discovery, advanced sensing and space systems,” said Matt Kinsella, CEO at Infleqtion. “Neutral-atom technology was born out of research happening right here in Colorado, and it’s fueling a new generation of jobs, companies and breakthroughs. We see our new headquarters as both a reflection of our roots in Colorado and a convening point for the quantum ecosystem, including our partners across industry, national laboratories, research institutions and academia.”
The Colorado Quantum Innovation Center will serve as Infleqtion’s global headquarters and anchor facility in the region, supporting the company’s work across quantum computing and quantum sensing, including deployments with the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, and the UK Royal Navy. The opening reflects the broader shift underway in the quantum industry, from scientific discovery toward industrial deployment at scale.
“Colorado is the epicenter of America’s quantum future, and Infleqtion’s new Quantum Innovation Center is proof of what’s possible when we invest in research, talent, and industry together,” said Rep. Brittany Pettersen (CO-07). “From our national laboratories to our universities to companies like Infleqtion, Colorado is building the ecosystem the quantum industry needs to thrive.”
The company is celebrating in an event featuring remarks from Colorado Governor Jared Polis, U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen and Louisville Mayor Chris Leh, alongside CU Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz, Elevate Quantum CEO Jessi Olsen, Infleqtion CEO Matt Kinsella and Infleqtion founder Dana Anderson. The ribbon-cutting also includes participation by representatives from the offices of U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse; members of the Louisville City Council; leadership from Elevate Quantum; Infleqtion employees; and leaders of the local quantum community.
The Boulder–Louisville–Broomfield corridor is home to more than 30 quantum companies and an ecosystem spanning industry, national laboratories, research institutions, and academia. The region’s roots trace to JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology founded in 1962, which has produced four Nobel Prize-winning physicists whose work laid the foundation for modern quantum science. Elevate Quantum, the federally designated Tech Hub for the region, anchors a broader consortium of more than 100 organizations across Colorado and the Mountain West.
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.
The guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold spent four days without power last month after a problem with its engineering, according to a spokesperson for the Navy's 7th Fleet.
Picture showing White Helmets volunteer unconscious and with bruises on his body went viral
Syrians have protested over the death of a man who was arrested and allegedly beaten by security forces, sparking widespread anger at a practice thought to have ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
A crowd gathered in the city of Aleppo, demanding accountability for the security forces who are alleged to have carried out the torture, with participants holding signs and slogans such as: “Do not repeat the same oppression that we revolted against.” Protests were also planned to take place in front of Syria’s parliament in Damascus on Tuesday, as well.
Wildfires and extreme heat show climate change is now Europe’s biggest security threatExpert commentthilton.drupal
The continent is increasingly vulnerable to arson attacks, while climate disasters are diverting militaries from other threats. Policymakers must respond with a security-based approach to climate change.
Climate change is now Europe’s biggest systemic security risk. As the continent faces its worst ever summer of extreme heat, drought and wildfires, no other threat is simultaneously affecting so many countries, people and critical systems.
The extreme heat contributed to an estimated 10,000 excess deaths during the June heatwave, which also destroyed roughly 9 million tonnes of crops from the European harvest. Drought and wildfires have affected almost the entire continent; so far this year over 600,000 hectares of land and forests have burned, with hundreds of thousands of people forced to evacuate.
The disruption extends far beyond the immediate disaster zones and across national borders. Extreme heat and water shortages are threatening water and food security, restricting river and rail transport and putting strain on health and emergency services.
Homes, businesses and essential infrastructure have been damaged. Falling river levels have forced nuclear reactors to shut down due to a lack of suitable cooling water, threatening to disrupt energy supply chains.
Climate terrorism
Climate change is also making Europe more vulnerable to non-conventional attacks. Prolonged heat and drought can turn countries into a ‘tinderbox’, as UK prime minister Andy Burnham warned last week, before his government sent a national emergency alert over wildfires.
Arson attacks are easy to carry out and difficult for authorities to prevent.
In these conditions, a single act of arson can cause mass evacuations, destroy infrastructure and overwhelm emergency services. These arson attacks are easy to carry out and difficult for authorities to prevent. This makes wildfire a potentially devastating instrument of terrorism or asymmetric warfare.
This year, France has arrested almost 500 people on suspicion of starting fires; as of 30 July, the interior ministry said around 70 per cent of those detained were accused of deliberate arson.
Meanwhile, Russian strikes have repeatedly set forests ablaze in Ukraine. In May 2026, drone attacks caused multiple forest fires in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and Zhytomyr.
Demands on militaries
Climate change also affects European military readiness by damaging bases, airfields and transport networks. For example, prolonged dry conditions contributed to wildfires that began at military training grounds in the Netherlands in April.
Any disruption to wider infrastructure such as electricity or transport networks can also directly undermine military operations.
Europe’s armed forces must now prepare to be called upon more frequently to fight fires, reinforce flood defences, support evacuations, deliver emergency supplies and restore critical infrastructure. This will divert personnel and logistical capacity away from other security threats.
This is already happening. According to the Council on Strategic Risks, militaries were deployed over 30 times in response to wildfires across Europe in June and July alone. In July, Spain deployed more than 1,200 military personnel and 400 vehicles for a single major fire. In the UK, around 200 military personnel are currently fighting wildfires in south Wales.
How to respond
The scale and scope of these risks require action.
The NATO Science and Technology Organization’s January 2026 climate security assessment already acknowledges climate change as a ‘systemic problem’ that impacts all other security risks.
It concludes that NATO’s existing Climate Change and Security Action Plan (published in 2021) should be thoroughly updated and translate climate knowledge into practical action. This should be supported by better, more institutionalized coordination between scientists, defence professionals and policymakers.
Beyond NATO’s plan, a broader European security-based approach to climate change is needed. It must achieve four goals.
Deal with wildfires
First, it must strengthen preparedness for climate disasters that are already happening.
In the case of wildfires, this means acting before they break out. This involves managing dry vegetation and landscapes, enforcing fire-safe building and land-use rules, monitoring high-risk areas and reducing preventable sources of fire. It must account for both deliberate and accidental fires.
It also requires adequately staffed and trained emergency services, better specialist equipment such as ‘water bomb aircraft’, stronger early-warning and evacuation systems, and greater capacity to respond to several emergencies at once.
The military has an important supporting role within this system. Armed forces will need to provide aircraft, engineering expertise, communications, logistics and personnel when civilian capacity is overwhelmed, particularly during large-scale evacuations or simultaneous disasters. But they should form part of a planned, multi-agency response rather than become a permanent substitute for underfunded fire and rescue services.
Consider climate spending as security
Second, governments need to consider spending on climate as a core security investment.
European NATO members have committed to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, including up to 1.5 per cent on broader investment related to defence and security, such as critical infrastructure and resilience.
Despite NATO recognizing climate change as a security threat, it has not explicitly designated climate adaptation as defence-related spending. But investing in climate change adaptation can make a critical contribution to long-term resilience.
Likewise, investments in infrastructure, civil protection and preparedness should all be climate-resilient and future proof. These could potentially be categorized under the vaguely defined 1.5 per cent of broader security-related spending.
Considering climate measures as important security investments would therefore help to focus scare resources and improve resilience, while also potentially helping members to meet their spending commitments.
Address underlying causes
Third, a security approach must accelerate decarbonization to mitigate climate change as the underlying cause of the escalating threat.
European climate and energy policies have helped cut EU27 emissions to approximately 35 per cent below their 1990 levels, but the EU27 is still responsible for 3.2 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually, or six per cent of global emissions. Europe’s decarbonization matters not only for reducing emissions but also for its global signalling effect in encouraging other countries to follow suit.
Preparedness and adaptation can reduce casualties and damage, but they cannot keep pace indefinitely with worsening heat, drought, floods and fires. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent. Its existing policies and climate pledges will not be sufficient to adapt fully to the expected 2.4°C to 3.9°C increase in global mean temperature this century.
Investment in resilience must therefore be accompanied by rapid emissions reductions and stronger political commitment to decarbonization. This is the principal way to prevent the threat from becoming progressively more severe and unmanageable.
Public involvement
Fourth, building societal resilience to climate shocks will depend on governments working with the public.
This does not mean just issuing one-off instructions during emergencies. People need trustworthy information, practical guidance and opportunities to participate in local preparedness activities. Examples include ‘heat-health’ plans to protect people from heat-related risks, water conservation to cope with drought, and evacuation exercises and support for vulnerable neighbours.
Such measures are all part of the basic infrastructure that allows society to continue functioning during a crisis.
The benefits outweigh the costs
What will all this cost? Assessments suggest the EU needs to invest approximately €70 billion a year in climate adaptation until 2050 to prevent the worst impacts. The UK needs to invest around £11 billion annually, according to a May report by the UK Climate Change Committee.
Although these sums may appear substantial, they are modest compared with the escalating cost of inaction. Climate-related disasters caused a yearly average of €45 billion in direct EU losses during 2020–2024, while inadequate adaptation could cost the UK £60-260 billion annually by 2050.
Many measures will pay for themselves several times over. For example, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, every euro invested in protection against coastal flooding can avoid around €6.35 in damages while also saving lives and protecting other resources.
The estimated costs for adaptation are small compared to the risks averted and damage avoided. Climate adaptation should therefore be understood not as an environmental expense, but as a cost-effective and necessary investment in European national security and strategic autonomy.
Tune in to our upcoming episode of the Independent Thinking podcast this Friday to hear more from our experts on the challenges of climate change.
Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant has created the Microsoft Rebrand Registry, cataloging 72 Microsoft products and the 158 names they've had over the years. His analysis finds that Microsoft product names survive an average of two years and eleven months. The site even predicts which products are most likely to get renamed next, "by considering the amount of time the current name has applied, prior names, and the frequency with which Microsoft changes names of products in the same family," reports The Register. "That methodology led him to suggest an 'elevated' likelihood of name changes for the Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, Azure DevOps, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service." From the report: Readers may remember that Strant has also created the site Let Me Correct That For You, which lists the exact names of Microsoft products -- an effort he told The Register he thinks is useful because Microsoft in its wisdom uses Camel Case for names like PowerPoint but went with conventional capitalization for Copilot.
Another of his sites immortalizes Microsoft cloud product logos. He's also created HumbledandHonored.com, a site that generates social media posts MVPs can use to announce they have earned or retained Microsoft's awards.
Strant told The Register that the Rebrand Registry came about after some banter between himself and other MVPs, during which the topic of Microsoft's many product name changes came up. He decided to do something about it.
The prime minister says the ‘absolutely massive’ move would protect thousands of jobs
Moscow has threatened the UK with “consequences” after reports that British drones have been used to strike targets on Russia’s mainland for the first time.
Ukraine used drones made by two UK companies as part of a so-called deep-strike campaign, the Sunday Times reported.
Buses in Manchester and London are franchised (ie owned by a private company but operated under a local authority brand.) It seems strange that the Government didn’t try and facilitate this or encourage another private operator to take over the enhanced partnership operation in the West Midlands but instead transfer c. £100m of liabilities to local taxpayers backed by The UK Govt & ultimately UK taxpayers.
Aug. 18, 2026 — Webster University has been awarded a three-year grant for $746,008 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the Connect-HPC project. Led by Webster University Professor Xiaoyuan Suo, who teaches in the George Herbert Walker School of Business & Technology, the venture will expand access to high-performance computing (HPC) education across Missouri through a collaboration between Webster, Missouri Western State University, Drury University, Truman State University and Southeast Missouri State University.
This is the second NSF grant Suo received this year that will improve technology education in Missouri.
“There is a growing demand for employees with skills in high-performance computing as data needs from employers and consumers continues to grow exponentially,” Suo said. “Through this collaboration, we will be able to train up to 40 STEM instructors on how to integrate HPC and computational methods into their courses, sharing that information with more than 800 undergraduate students among the five partner institutions. This program also will serve as a model that can then be shared with other institutions, further enhancing the quality of technical education offered in the state.”
According to the grant, the project is unique because it is a scalable, low-barrier approach that integrates HPC concepts, ranging from unplugged algorithmic activities to hands-on distributed computing tasks, directly into existing introductory and intermediate coursework without requiring full curricular redesigns. As part of the project, the 40 STEM instructors will be trained through summer workshops and a sustained mentoring network, while simultaneously preparing undergraduate student instructional facilitators to provide peer support.
Suo is listed as the principal investigator. Professor Marcus R. Bond from Southeast Missouri State University, Professor Jeffrey N. Woodford from Missouri Western State University, Professor Colin DeGraf from Truman State University and Professor Ying Cao from Drury University were listed as co-principal investigators.
Earlier this year, Suo received a $300,000 National Science Foundation CyberTraining grant to create a summer bootcamp for undergraduates to study and research cyberinfrastructures. That project will provide undergraduate students with hands-on experience using high-performance computing to solve real-world scientific problems across STEM disciplines through peer mentoring and authentic research experiences.
In 2023, Webster was one of four institutions in Missouri awarded a two-year grant by the National Science Foundation to expand high-performance computing education.
“These grants further strengthen Webster’s work in advanced computing education, undergraduate research, and workforce preparation,” said George Herber Walker School of Business & Technology Dean Sam Dotson. “Congratulations to Professor Suo for leading the way in ground-breaking research and programs that continue to propel Webster into a leadership position in technology education.”
The latest award is pursuant to the authority of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, as amended (42 U.S.C. 1861-75) and is subject to the NSF Grant General Conditions dated May 29, 2026. Named “Collaborative Network for STEM Undergraduate Education through Computational Training in High Performance Computing,” the award is number 2539366.
The Delaware Coalition for Human Trafficking Survivors hopes to close those knowledge and coordination gaps through Delaware’s inaugural Human Trafficking Awareness, Prevention and Action Summit on Friday, Oct. 2, at Hyatt Place Dewey Beach.
Delaware’s inaugural statewide summit will bring survivors, national experts, professionals and concerned citizens together to improve prevention, identification and survivor support.
By George Rotsch, Editor of Delaware LIVE
DEWEY BEACH — Human trafficking can remain hidden in plain sight, leaving teachers, medical professionals, police officers, business leaders and concerned residents uncertain about how to recognize the warning signs or respond safely.
The Delaware Coalition for Human Trafficking Survivors hopes to close those knowledge and coordination gaps through Delaware’s inaugural Human Trafficking Awareness, Prevention and Action Summit on Friday, Oct. 2, at Hyatt Place Dewey Beach.
The summit is open to professionals, organizational leaders and members of the public who want to better understand human trafficking and help Delaware build a more informed and coordinated response.
“It’s for everybody,” said Jennifer Cooper, the coalition’s Community and Continuing Education Committee chair and one of the summit’s organizers. “It’s not just for people doing the work. It’s for people who may want to learn a little bit more.”
Cooper, a registered nurse and forensic coordinator at Nemours Children’s Health, said the program will explain trafficking, challenge common misconceptions and help participants understand how exploitation occurs in Delaware.
“We’re going to break down the myths, dispel the myths and talk about what trafficking looks like in Delaware,” Cooper said.
Public engagement is part of the response
Marcia Ferranto, board chair of the Delaware Coalition for Human Trafficking Survivors, said public involvement is essential because human trafficking cannot be addressed solely by law enforcement agencies or organizations serving survivors.
“Human trafficking affects Delaware communities, but too often it remains unseen or misunderstood,” Ferranto said. “We need residents, business leaders, educators, health care professionals, faith communities and policymakers to understand the warning signs and recognize that each of them can play a role in prevention.”
Ferranto said trafficking affects Delaware even when victims are not immediately identified and cases are not publicly described as trafficking.
“Trafficking does not happen only somewhere else; it is affecting people here in Delaware,” Ferranto said. “When the public understands what exploitation looks like and knows how to respond, we become better able to protect vulnerable people, support survivors and make Delaware a much more difficult place for traffickers to operate.”
Delaware needs its own summit
Cooper has worked with the forensic team at Nemours since 2012 and became its coordinator in 2019. Through that work, she began seeing more young patients affected by or vulnerable to exploitation.
Her involvement in Delaware’s anti-trafficking efforts also showed her that professionals frequently had to travel outside the state to receive advanced training.
“I went to a lot of conferences, and I realized that I wasn’t going to anything in Delaware,” Cooper said. “I was traveling. And I said, ‘Delaware needs its own.’”
That realization helped lead to the October summit.
National experts and local authorities are expected to participate as keynote speakers, panel moderators and breakout-session presenters. The program will include learning tracks focused on survivors, law enforcement, mental health, direct-service workers and medical providers.
Continuing education credits for eligible medical and other professionals are planned, with additional details to be announced.
Bringing Delaware’s response together
Cooper said the summit has two immediate goals: raising awareness among leaders and bringing together the professionals and organizations already working with vulnerable people and survivors.
“I want to bring together the people who are doing the work,” Cooper said. “There are organizations doing phenomenal work, and right down the street there may be another organization doing something a little differently. They really could benefit from each other.”
Better coordination could help Delaware identify trends, determine where services are missing and direct resources toward needs involving young people, labor trafficking, health care, housing and other areas.
“By bringing all of the people together, we can see what our trends are in Delaware and where we need more services,” Cooper said.
The summit also is intended to support professionals engaged in emotionally demanding work.
“From a trauma perspective, this is very challenging and very tough work,” Cooper said. “Making sure that everybody has their own resources and people to bounce things off of is really important.”
A private executive roundtable will precede the public summit Thursday, Oct. 1. Attendance at the roundtable is by invitation only.
The roundtable is expected to bring Delaware leaders and decision-makers together to review state-level information and consider potential policy, training and legislative responses. The public summit the following day will focus on education, professional development and building connections among participants.
A problem that can be difficult to identify
Cooper said one of the challenges involving young people is that victims may not identify themselves as having been trafficked. They may believe they willingly participated in an exchange or may not recognize food, housing, drugs, alcohol or other items of value as part of commercial sexual exploitation.
Under federal and state law, proof of force, fraud or coercion is not required when a minor is induced to perform a commercial sex act. A commercial exchange also does not have to involve cash.
Cooper said 80 juvenile cases were referred to Delaware’s Juvenile Trafficking Oversight Team last year. Those cases involved young people identified as being at risk of trafficking, suspected of being trafficked or confirmed as victims.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline has identified 301 trafficking cases involving 662 victims in Delaware since 2007. The hotline received 51 signals from Delaware in 2024, including eight from victims or survivors.
Hotline figures reflect only situations reported to the organization and should not be interpreted as representing the full extent of trafficking in the state.
Survivors and experts lead the program
Opening keynote speaker Kevin McNeil is a retired police officer, trafficking and sexual-abuse survivor and motivational speaker. His presentation, “Stuck in Traffic,” will compare the experience of being trapped in vehicle traffic with the sense of being trapped in exploitation.
Marty MacGibbon, a trafficking survivor, therapist, author and comedian, will discuss the intersection of human trafficking and substance abuse. She also will close the program with a presentation addressing mental wellness, self-care and trauma-informed practices.
Breakout sessions will address trafficking fundamentals, myths and realities; care for survivors; familial trafficking; legal and law enforcement considerations; trauma among children and adults; and the development of multidisciplinary response teams.
The program also will include survivor perspectives and discussion of vulnerabilities affecting boys and members of the LGBTQ community.
Why leaders and residents should attend
For leaders in government, health care, education, law enforcement, hospitality, nonprofits and other community institutions, the summit offers an opportunity to examine whether their organizations have adequate training, policies and referral relationships.
Front-line professionals can learn more about recognizing possible exploitation, interacting with survivors without causing additional trauma and coordinating with other service providers.
For parents, faith leaders, volunteers and concerned residents, the summit offers a clearer understanding of what trafficking can look like, which warning signs deserve attention and how to report concerns without placing a potential victim at greater risk.
Established in 2014 as Meet Me at the Well Delaware, the Delaware Coalition for Human Trafficking Survivors provides individualized assistance to survivors seeking to leave sex trafficking and rebuild their lives. Its work includes education, street outreach, advocacy, mentoring and connections to housing, employment and treatment resources.
The larger objective of the summit is to create a more unified statewide response capable of recognizing exploitation sooner, supporting survivors more effectively and making Delaware a more difficult place for traffickers to operate.
To Go Box
What: Human Trafficking Awareness, Prevention and Action Summit
When: Friday, Oct. 2, 2026
Where: Hyatt Place Dewey Beach, 1301 Coastal Highway, Dewey Beach
Who may attend: Professionals, organizational and community leaders, service providers and members of the public
Hotel: A discounted room rate is available through Sept. 3. Call 1-855-556-1297 and request the Delaware Coalition for Human Trafficking Survivors rate using group code G-DECO.
Information: Visit the coalition’s summit information page, call 302-250-5918 or email contact@dcfhts.org.
The Justice Department is scrapping its longtime practice of hiring outside experts to help review competitive grant applications, multiple sources told CBS News.
Teen version is intended for children aged 13 to 17 and includes content protections on self-harm and sexual chats
OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers – the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence – who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship.
The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches on Tuesday, is tailored for children aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things such as suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays.
Bonnier Books will no longer publish UK’s top-selling true crime author following Guardian investigation
The main publisher of the bestselling true crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee has dropped the author after a Guardian investigation into allegations of violence andsexual abuse against him, which he denies. Waterstones has also removed his books from sale.
“We are shocked and appalled by the very serious allegations relating to Christopher Berry-Dee, and our thoughts are with those affected,” said the publisher Bonnier Books in a statement to the Guardian.
(The Center Square) – The taxable value of Wisconsin property went up 8% again in 2026, matching the rise from the year before, according to new data from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: For most Indians, paying by Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become almost absurdly routine. Scan a QR code, tap a few buttons and the money moves instantly. There is no card machine, no cash, and -- most importantly -- for the user, no visible fee. That may be about to change. India has paved the way for banks and payment companies to charge merchants a fee on UPI transactions, potentially ending a decade-long experiment in free digital payments.
The government has yet to decide the rate or exactly where it will apply, but proposals under discussion include a merchant discount rate (MDR) of 0.3-0.5% -- a small fee paid by a business to the banks and payment companies that process its UPI payments -- on larger transactions at big businesses. The government says consumers and person-to-person UPI payments will remain free. If merchant fees are introduced, they will apply only to some transactions above a set threshold, at a nominal rate, meaning most UPI payments will remain free. The question is whether putting a price on UPI could weaken the network that made it such a success.
The stakes are enormous. Launched in 2016, UPI has grown into one of the world's biggest real-time payment networks. According to official data, in July alone, there were 23.6 billion UPI transactions worth 29.87 trillion rupees ($313.5 billion). Fintech apps such as PhonePe and Google Pay account for most UPI payments. In the financial year just ended, the figure was about 241.6 billion transactions -- almost 12,000 times the volume in UPI's first full year. More than 550 million people now use it, and the system is now available in some form for payments in 11 countries outside India. India's UPI became ubiquitous partly because it made digital payments almost frictionless for merchants, including small vendors who can accept payments with little more than a QR code. New research suggests that merchant acceptance was "not just a result of UPI growth, but one of its key drivers."
As RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra put it, "Someone will have to pay the cost." The challenge will be making UPI sustainable without weakening the merchant network that helped it take off.
‘First meaningful rain for a long time’ is forecast but water firms continue to ask customers to restrict use
Floods and drought could hit the UK at the same time this week, with heavy rain forecast to fall on hard, parched soil.
While some parts of the UK will have the “first meaningful rain for a long time” in the coming days, it will not reverse widespread drought conditions that have put pressure on wildlife, farmers, firefighters and water resources.
U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack says an Israeli attack on a Syrian air force base was an "unnecessary escalation that does not advance regional stability."
Aug. 18, 2026 — Each year, the SC Technical Papers program recognizes outstanding research through its Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards. To make this process more transparent, the following is an overview of how these papers are nominated, evaluated, and selected.
Credit: SC
The nomination process begins within each technical area. During the online review discussions and subsequent Program Committee meetings, reviewers and Area Chairs identify papers they believe merit consideration for the Best Paper or Best Student Paper awards. Each area may nominate papers in one or both categories. In some cases, a student-authored paper may be nominated for both Best Paper and Best Student Paper and may be a finalist in each category. Best Paper is selected first and takes precedence. As such, if a student-authored paper wins, it is no longer eligible for Best Student Paper. Candidates for the Best Student Paper award must be presented by a student author who made a significant intellectual contribution to the work.
Because nominations are made independently within each area, an area-level nomination should not be interpreted as the strongest submission across the entire Technical Papers program. Instead, these nominations identify those papers that each technical area believes should advance for broader consideration. This approach gives every area the opportunity to highlight technically diverse papers with the greatest scientific merit.
After the area-level nominations are complete, the nominated papers become finalists for the corresponding award. A separate committee of judges will evaluate the finalists during the conference. The judges remain anonymous until the Awards ceremony. This preserves the independence of the evaluation process and allows the committee to assess each finalist without external influence.
Final award decisions will be based on two components:
Quality of the final published paper.
Quality and effectiveness of the conference presentation.
The judging committee will complete its evaluation during the conference after attending the finalist presentations. They then consider both the written papers and presentations as part of the review. Following these deliberations, the Best Paper and Best Student Paper award winners will be announced during the SC26 Awards Ceremony.
In addition to recognizing the winners, all finalist teams will be acknowledged for their outstanding contributions to the SC26 Technical Papers Program.
The Nominees Are…
Eligible for either Best Paper or Best Student Paper
Sensor Placement for Tsunami Early Warning via Large-Scale Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design
Sreeram Venkat, Omar Ghattas, Stefan Henneking, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Real-time tsunami early warning relies on distributed sensor networks to infer seismic sources and seafloor motion. Optimizing these networks via Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) is exceptionally challenging for systems governed by hyperbolic partial differential equations, which lack the spectral decay required by standard low-rank approximations. We present a scalable Bayesian OED framework for linear time-invariant systems. By reformulating the inverse problem in the data space, we transform OED into dense matrix subset selection. We propose a multi-GPU, Schur-complement-update-based, greedy algorithm that solves the OED problem using a pipelined approach that fully overlaps I/O with GPU computations. Our framework achieves near-perfect weak and strong scaling across hundreds of GPUs on Perlmutter and Frontier. Applied to the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize-winning digital twin for tsunami forecasting in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, we optimize a 175-sensor network, minimizing the uncertainty of a parameter field with over one billion degrees of freedom.
Format-Driven Automatic Pipeline Construction and Load Balancing for SpMM on GPUs
Kelun Lei, Hailong Yang, Kaige Zhang, Zhongzhi Luan, Kejie Ma, Tianyu Feng, Xin You, Yi Liu, Depei Qian, Da Huo, Beihang University, China
Sparse Matrix-Dense Matrix Multiplication (SpMM) is critical for graph neural networks, yet GPU optimization faces challenges from irregular sparsity and load imbalance. Existing hand-tuned solutions tightly couple format design with kernel implementation, requiring complete reimplementation when the format changes. We present Sparsene, a format-driven automated framework that derives all kernel-level optimizations from a single sparse format specification. A hierarchical DSL decouples format structure from implementation via declarative blocking primitives and dynamic lowering transformations. The frontend compiles the DSL into a pGraph of fine-grained pTasks, whose granularity and dependencies are entirely determined by the format. This format-derived pGraph then drives both automatic pipeline construction, where a hardware-aware simulator and two-stage hybrid search identify high-quality pipeline plans, and format-aware load balancing, which selects among binding strategies to mitigate thread-block imbalance. Experiments on NVIDIA A100, H100, and RTX 4090 demonstrate up to 8× speedup over state-of-the-art solutions with strong performance portability.
Every Microsecond Matters: Achieving Near Speed-of-Light Latency in GPU Collectives Torsten Hoefler, Siyuan Shen, Tiancheng Chen, ETH Zürich; Jeff R. Hammond, Anton Korzh, John Bachan, Nishank Chandawala, Kamil Iskra, Sylvain Jeaugey, Arnav Goel, Zhenhao He, NVIDIA
GPU collective communication is often optimized for bandwidth, yet many emerging workloads are latency-bound. Long-context LLM inference is a key example, where small collectives lie on the critical path of token generation, making microsecond-scale overheads impactful. In this work, we study how to approach the hardware Speed-of-Light (SoL) lower bound for GPU collectives within a scale-up network. We identify key design principles, including barrier-free synchronization and efficient use of symmetric memory and multicast. Building on NCCL’s device-side API, we develop low-latency interfaces for constructing custom kernels and implement new symmetric collectives in NCCL. Microbenchmarks show substantial latency reductions, achieving within 10% of the measured SoL bound. Integrated into applications, these kernels reduce inter-token latency and improve throughput in LLM inference, while also accelerating cuSOLVERMp, demonstrating benefits across AI and HPC workloads.
Best Student Paper Nominees
Do We Need Tensor Cores for Stencil Computations? Qiqi Gu, Haibing Guan, Chenpeng Wu, Jianguo Yao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China; Heng Shi, Shanghai Enflame Intelligence Technologies Co. Ltd, China
Stencil computation is a fundamental kernel in scientific computing, widely used in applications such as fluid dynamics and weather simulation. Although stencils are traditionally considered memory-bound and thus ill-suited for compute-oriented Tensor Cores, recent studies report substantial acceleration, creating an apparent contradiction. This paper resolves this discrepancy through a systematic performance analysis of stencil computations on Tensor Cores. We revisit stencil-to-Tensor-Core mappings, quantify the computational redundancy introduced by hardware-driven transformations, and develop an enhanced performance model that captures arithmetic-intensity shifts under temporal fusion. From this model, we derive analytical criteria that provide a first-order estimate of whether Tensor Cores will outperform, match, or underperform CUDA Cores for a given stencil and hardware setting. Our analysis identifies the performance sweet spot for Tensor Core acceleration. Evaluations on NVIDIA GPUs with state-of-the-art implementations, including EBISU, ConvStencil, and SPIDER, validate our criteria and show its value for guiding stencil optimization.
DOLPHIN: Scalable Disk–RAM–GPU Pipelined Training for Massive Temporal GNNs Wenbo Zhen, Xike Xie, Rui Guo, Zezhong Ding, Junlin Lv, University of Science and Technology of China, China; Jianliang Xu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR
Temporal graph neural networks (T-GNNs) play a key role in modeling dynamic graphs by learning representations that capture evolving structures and interactions. However, scaling T-GNNs remains challenging, as massive real-world graphs and complex temporal dependencies incur prohibitive runtime and memory costs. Existing systems often preload entire datasets into RAM and rely on RAM–GPU pipelines, suffering from batch-boundary pipeline bubbles, thereby limiting throughput. In this paper, we present DOLPHIN, a scalable Disk–RAM–GPU pipelined system for massive T-GNNs. DOLPHIN groups training batches into chunks and incorporates two key techniques: an I/O-efficient feature window scheduler for just-in-time Disk-to-RAM chunk provisioning, and a dependency-graph–based parallel execution plan that improves GPU utilization while preserving model quality. Together, these techniques improve pipeline efficiency across the Disk-RAM-GPU memory hierarchy and computation phases. Experiments on six real-world graphs show DOLPHIN delivers up to \textbf{21.07$\times$} faster training and reduces RAM usage by up to \textbf{92.04\%} compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Best Paper Nominees
FSZ: Breaking the Prediction-Throughput Trade-off in GPU Lossy Compression
Jiajun Huang, University of South Florida, USA
Existing fast GPU error-bounded lossy compressors achieve high throughput but limited compression ratios because they use a fixed first-order predictor on independent blocks. We propose FSZ, which redesigns the prediction stage with three mutually reinforcing innovations within a single CUDA kernel: (1) cross-block prediction state carries Lorenzo prediction across block boundaries, eliminating 7 of 8 boundary residuals; (2) per-tile adaptive multi-order prediction and centering selects the best strategy per tile from first-order, second-order, and centering variants; and (3) single-pass four-way evaluation exploits a mathematical property of finite differences to evaluate all variants from a single data read. Experiments on NVIDIA GH200 with 8 real-world HPC datasets show that FSZ outperforms cuSZp-P by up to 10.95x and the state-of-the-art cuSZp-O by up to 2.92x in compression ratio, while simultaneously achieving the highest throughput (676 GB/s compression, 785 GB/s decompression) among all evaluated compressors.
From Alert Fatigue to Root Cause: Causal Failure Cascade Discovery in HPC System
Awais Khan, Christopher Zimmer, Anjus George, Ahmad Maroof Karimi, Feiyi Wang, Woong Shin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Production HPC systems generate massive volumes of heterogeneous logs that encode rich signals about failure propagation across hardware and software layers. In this paper, we present a framework for causal discovery in HPC logs that combines three complementary methods: Transformer-based counterfactual intervention, PCMCI+, and transfer-entropy. Because production environments lack labeled ground truth, our framework uses cross-method triangulation to assign confidence to discovered causal relationships. We further introduce an architecture-aware AI-agent that evaluates the physical plausibility of these relationships and enriches them with mechanism-level explanations, diagnostic commands, and severity assessments grounded in Frontier system documentation. We apply the framework to 18.4 billion log events from the Frontier supercomputer and construct a structured taxonomy of 87 event types spanning diverse hardware and software subsystems. Our results reveal causal relationships across HPC-subsystems, including rare failure pathways and multi-hop cascade chains. This work provides a scalable path toward architecture-grounded root-cause diagnosis in production HPC-systems.
DySpin: A Plug-and-Play Library Advancing Dynamic Sparse Long-Context Inference Chengyu Sun, Dazhao Cheng, Yaqi Xia, Wuhan University, China; Xiaobo Zhou, University of Macau, China; Donglin Yang, NVIDIA Corporation, USA; Ruirui Pan, Central China Normal University, China
We propose DySpin, a plug-and-play library designed to advance Dynamic Sparse long-context inference. DySpin introduces a training-free runtime allocation strategy that dynamically adjusts token budgets, preserving critical tokens that fixed-budget methods would otherwise discard, thereby improving model accuracy. To mitigate the attention kernel workload imbalance inherently caused by runtime allocation, we develop FastEstimate, a fused kernel that integrates token importance evaluation and selection to efficiently generate dynamic scheduling indices. These indices then guide a specialized decoding attention kernel, ensuring fine-grained, load-balanced computation. To tackle memory capacity constraints with accuracy preservation, DySpin incorporates 6-bit KV cache quantization. By enabling register-level parallel unpacking and dequantization through a novel packing format, DySpin significantly alleviates the severe dequantization overhead during attention computation. DySpin can be seamlessly integrated into existing sparse frameworks, delivering superior model accuracy and lower latency for long-context inference.
SwarmLoRA: Batched Computation across Isolated Functions for Serverless LoRA Inference Mausam Basnet, Tong Shu, University of North Texas, USA
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has produced over 100,000 adapters for Large Language Models, driving demand for efficient multi-adapter serving. All adapters share the same expensive base-model computation, creating a natural opportunity for batching. Existing serverful systems batch across adapters for high throughput but sacrifice per-tenant isolation and elastic scaling. Serverless systems provide both, but at the cost of redundant computation and cross-adapter batching efficiency. We present SwarmLoRA, a disaggregated serverless architecture that resolves this tradeoff by batching shared computation across isolated functions. A persistent aggregator executes a single GEMM for all active requests, while lightweight workers hold only per-adapter state. SwarmLoRA achieves 4.4-5.6x higher throughput than ServerlessLoRA and ServerlessLLM; under trace replay, it completes 98-100% of requests, where baselines complete fewer than one-third. Cold starts take 619 ms (2.9x faster than the fastest baseline) with 95 ms adapter swaps. SwarmLoRA delivers serverful batching efficiency with serverless isolation.
Source: Trilce Estrada and Hatem Ltaief, SC26 Papers Co-Chairs
At the cybersecurity conference Black Hat, researchers showed how an AI assistant at one of America’s largest retailers could be tricked into following hidden instructions and exposing sensitive system information.
Melting ice and power shifts: Europe and Canada should seize their Arctic momentExpert commentLToremark
As geopolitical competition heats up in the Arctic, security and science must go hand in hand.
The Trump administration has once again churned up the frozen waters of the Arctic. This time by ending federal support for an annual Arctic climate report. On 10 August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced it will no longer produce the well-respected Arctic Report Card, which for two decades has collated, analyzed and published key data on the health and changes of the greater Arctic environment. More than 100 international scientists and organizations have fed NOAA information ranging from ice coverage measurements to sea depth and weather patterns, expanding US situational awareness and scientific leadership of the Arctic.
Trump’s team now says that someone else must take the lead.
While detrimental to both the US and the greater Arctic research community in the short term, this is an opportunity for an allied Arctic nation or organization to take the lead – with the potential to gain both a strategic and data edge. The Arctic is in the crosshairs of almost all top geostrategic interests – including energy, defence, tech, transportation, minerals and fishing – and is changing quickly as ice melts and previously unnavigable areas open.
Controlling data collection, priority-setting and analysis at a time when data is one of the most valuable assets to have should be high on the list of many nations. It certainly is for China. Although it is a non-Arctic nation, China has seven polar research stations – compared to America’s four – a fleet of dual-purpose ice breakers, and prioritizes polar research within its annual $1 trillion research budget.
It is ironic that the Trump administration is diminishing the US position in the Arctic research community while at the same time raising the alarm about Chinese and Russian ambitions in Greenland and the North Atlantic. US military leaders know well that their ability to defend against submarine and other incursions in the north will depend on a continuous research and development process using every scientific input available.
Even the US’s own Arctic Research Commission has stressed the link between national security and research. In 2025, it identified research topics within four key sectors – military, community, energy and economy – which ‘inform both domestic and foreign policy, ideally, in a mutually reinforcing manner, and are often interlinked’. The key to securing the vast North American Arctic area is cutting edge research and knowledge, from reinforcing US national scientists to linking arms with partners, allies and indigenous communities.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has made counterintuitive policy moves in the Arctic. Key to Trump’s foreign policy doctrine is the concept of geographical spheres of influence. US control of Greenland – an autonomous territory of US ally Denmark – as a geographical security imperative has become a regular talking point for Trump. It has also inspired significant new European and Canadian activity in the region.
European governments are stepping up under the rubric of increasing Arctic security against Russian and Chinese expansion. This is a good outcome from an unnecessarily tense standoff with their American ally. Indeed, underneath it all, Trump’s concern about Chinese and Russian activity in the Arctic is well founded. And it requires concrete European Arctic leadership and action.
Such recent action includes a growing strategic presence in Greenland. Norway, France, Canada and the European Union all have (or soon will have) diplomatic offices in Nuuk. Meanwhile, European leaders and their defence teams have met regularly this year to discuss Arctic security and Greenland, while the seven Arctic NATO members (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the US) gather as a NATO subgroup. In May, following a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Sweden, they called out the shift in American policy in a joint statement noting the increased role played by Europe and Canada.
More recently, Denmark announced that it has begun to rotate groups of new conscripts through Greenland for training, while the UK sent a carrier strike group to the North Atlantic/High North as part of NATO’s new Arctic Sentry mission, completing its first phase in July.
This increased activity is well timed. Russia and China are taking historic steps this summer that signal future intentions.
In an unprecedented operation, Russia is sending a convoy of tankers carrying up to one million tonnes of oil along a rarely used route north of 81.5°N, accompanied by nuclear-powered icebreakers. Meanwhile, six Chinese carriers have signed up to use Russia’s northern sea route (NSR) this month to avoid the treacherous Red Sea. For the first time, the ships will go from Ningbo-Zhoushan to Felixstowe, saving an estimated 22 days. Crucially, it is also the first time Chinese ships will have access to predictive rather than observational ice data from the Chinese Ministry of Transportation – made possible thanks to China’s years of investment in Arctic research.
This should be a wake-up call for the US and its allies. Domain awareness is and will continue to be the linchpin for success for all nations with interests in the Arctic. To take the lead, European allies and Canada should focus on three key areas.
One, they should extend and resource initiatives that enhance shared domain-awareness assets: satellite coverage; underwater sensor arrays in the GIUK gap (the open waters between Greenland, Iceland and the UK) and the Barents Sea; and maritime patrol aircraft rotations. A priority satellite project could be the Hybrid Alliance Layered Operations in Space (HALO), launched at this year’s NATO summit, through which seven European allies and Canada have agreed to connect and integrate their military satellites into a shared ‘mega constellation’ architecture. For underwater awareness, both the UK’s new Atlantic Bastion and NATO’s Arctic Sentry programmes are building underwater sensing technology networks. In the air, Germany and Denmark have new or planned Boeing P-8 capabilities to add to substantial operations already run by the UK, Norway and Canada.
Two, Arctic research and development should be prioritized in national planning and budgeting processes. This should include establishing a joint Europe–Canada Arctic data consortium – within or tightly connected to the existing research architecture to avoid duplication of efforts – to take on the Arctic Report Card work and build a top-in-class digital research infrastructure. European and Canadian leaders should also reorient the Arctic Council to overcome the stagnation stemming from Russia’s suspended engagement following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, compounded by a consensus system that makes formal workarounds difficult. They must also work to resolve a key Arctic research dilemma: the current lack of Russian data.
Three, NATO’s Arctic seven should establish a shared policy position on Chinese and Russian control of the NSR, which could include building Arctic maritime support systems and physical infrastructure to erode Russia’s monopolistic claim. As one proposal highlights, ‘the goal is not confrontation, but normalization, so that the rules of the High North reflect global interests – not unilateral control’.
As Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen famously said: ‘adventure is just bad planning’. While there was arguably never a time for adventure in the Arctic – it’s too brutal, too vast and too changeable – now is the moment for European Arctic nations and Canada to take the lead in both Arctic research and security. One without the other would be a foolish adventure.
Network alleges FCC is trying to send ‘chilling message’ in retaliation for content the administration disapproves of
ABC has sued the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), arguing that it is being retaliated against for content-based reasons in a move it warns threatens the independence of the press.
The network filed the lawsuit on Tuesday after being forced to apply early to renew its license to broadcast on the eight local television stations it owns. It is waiting to hear whether the Brendan Carr-led FCC approves its renewal requests, or, more likely, holds a hearing on their merits.
Great Britain risks running out of gas in the 2030s despite its growing clean energy sources, unless ministers take “unprecedented” action to guard against a future supply shock, according to an official assessment.
The government is considering plans to provide direct financial support to safeguard the country’s ageing gas infrastructure after a consultation found that a “high stress scenario” could mean homes and businesses run out within the next decade.
Bridget Phillipson writes to watchdog asking it to look into claims Tether.bet and Fispay operated without a licence
The Gambling Commission has been urged to investigate claims that companies linked to Reform UK donors and allies of Nigel Farage have been operating without a licence.
The Labour party’s chair, Bridget Phillipson, has written to the watchdog asking it to look into Tether.bet, a Montenegro-based gambling company, and Fispay, a UK company owned by Reform’s data protection officer, Mowbray Jackson.
Whether Tether.bet, and its operators, provided or advertised remote gambling facilities to consumers in UK without the required licence
Whether Fispay Ltd, or any other UK company, provided or supported gambling facilities or services to consumers in the UK without the required licence.”
Country’s second fatal school shooting in two months took place in southern city of Zamboanga
A student livestreamed himself shooting and killing another pupil in a classroom in the southern Philippines before taking his own life, the second school attack in the country in less than two months.
The shooting took place at a school attached to Ateneo de Zamboanga University in the southern city of Zamboanga, a Catholic private institution in western Mindanao. Zamboanga city’s mayor, Khymer Adan Olaso, told the DZMM radio station that the shooter “managed to enter carrying a high-powered firearm and a .45-calibre pistol”.
Attorneys for Ábrego, who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, say the DoJ’s appeal was ‘flat wrong’
The Trump administration has asked a federal appeals court to reinstate criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García that were dismissed in May by a judge who said the prosecution of the man who unwittingly became a symbol of the White House’s mass deportation campaign was “vindictive in nature”.
In a filing to the US sixth circuit court of appeals, the justice department insisted that human smuggling allegations against Ábrego are genuine – and not retaliation for challenging his wrongful deportation to El Salvador in March 2025.
Tech Transparency Project’s report shows whenever governments mull platform regulations, company recruits influencers to promote its safety features
In July 2025, Meta gathered parenting influencers from all over Australia at a waterfront venue overlooking the Sydney Opera House. It was a camping-themed event and in many ways was like any other influencer affair. There were Instagram-branded tents to take pictures in, an Instagram-branded step-and-repeat, a custom-tote making station and Instagram-branded snacks and coffee cups.
But this “screen smart” event wasn’t about the photo op.
Funding boost worth $100,000 has recently materialized in form of new marmot-themed cryptocurrency
Scientists who turned to OnlyFans to help save long-running research into marmots have raised more than $100,000 after harnessing the support of another, very modern, funding avenue – cryptocurrency.
The 60-year project of continuous study of marmots – stout, ground-dwelling rodents that are the largest members of the squirrel family – across the US west was facing termination following science funding cuts imposed by Donald Trump’s administration.
Popular American chat app Discord says it suspended livestreams in line with a Brazilian government order, amid fierce criticism over a 13-year-old girl's death.
Andy Burnham says the UK will continue to “support Ukraine 100%” after Russia threatened consequences after strikes by British-made drones.
The Russian embassy to the UK said on Monday that Britain had been deliberately escalating the Ukraine conflict and the deeper its involvement, “the higher the price it will pay”.
Edward Zimbardi, 59, who had fled US, will appear in court in Los Angeles on wire fraud and money-laundering charges
A man from Flowery Branch, Georgia, has been deported from Fiji to face charges in his home state accusing him of defrauding more than 6,000 investors and causing more than $165m of losses in a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, the US attorney in Atlanta said on Monday.
Edward Zimbardi, 59, was indicted on 12 counts of wire fraud, 12 counts of money laundering and one count of money-laundering conspiracy.
Marie Ebert, Alexander Cromie and their pilot died when their aircraft crashed on island of Sifnos
Greek police believe a mechanical fault may have caused a helicopter to crash moments before it was due to land on the island of Sifnos, killing a British couple on honeymoon and the pilot.
Authorities were focusing on Tuesday on the “strange noise” the aircraft, a privately chartered Bell 206, is reported to have made before falling to the ground and exploding on impact.
Critics called it the "anti-transparency" bill. Newsom quietly enacted the controversial part and may now veto the part the rail watchdog says he needs, sources tell CBS California.
Oil prices have risen again after the two-month window to negotiate a peace deal in the US-Israel war on Iran expired on Monday with no end to the conflict in sight.
Iran said on Monday that it would take a more aggressive stance if talks with the US failed, while Donald Trump demanded Tehran “put up the white flag of surrender” in an interview with Fox News.
Some petrol stations are still not passing on changes in wholesale prices quickly enough and more than 1,000 warning letters have been sent to retailers failing to give prices to the Fuel Finder service, the UK competition watchdog has said.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) raised concerns in its latest quarterly update on the fuel market over “passive pricing strategies” used by the majority of retailers, which it said were helping to keep profit margins high amid soaring cost pressures on drivers from the Iran war.
Creators of chase compilations reject any moral qualms and say they show ‘death is waiting’ for those who join war
To many observers they will appear dehumanising and offensive. To many Ukrainians, however, they are a brutal reminder of the fate that awaits Russian soldiers who take part in Vladimir Putin’s invasion, as well as a potent propaganda weapon.
Over the past year and a half, videos of kamikaze drones chasing Russian service personnel to their deaths have become a distinctive genre on social media. They are the brainchild of Robert Brovdi, the head of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces and founder of “Magyar’s Birds”, named after his call sign.
Several US states have accused Instagram and Facebook’s parent company of deliberately causing young people harm with its products. Plus: the Italian nuns fighting to keep control of their spot in the sun
Good morning. More than half of the states in the US have joined together in an unprecedented lawsuit against Meta that goes to trial on Tuesday, accusing the parent company of Instagram and Facebook of deliberately designing addictive products that lured in young people and caused them harm.
The sweeping legal proceedings could have profound consequences for the company. The attorneys general say that if Meta is found liable, damages could be as high as $200bn – equivalent to the company’s 2025 annual revenue. The lawmakers are also asking that Meta be compelled to change the design of its products to make them safer for children, which may have longer-term effects than a fine.
What is Meta accused of? The 233-page lawsuit, first filed in October 2023, alleges that Meta regularly collects data on children under the age of 13 without parental permission. The lawmakers claim in court documents that Meta “refuses to abandon its use of known harmful features” and that its motives are based solely on profit.
How has Meta responded? Meta denies all allegations and says: “Rather than sticking to the facts or the law, the states have instead decided to chase an outlandish payout. The state AGs may call this a landmark case, but their limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate.”
Why have conditions onboard the ship become contentious? The Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier left port from San Diego on 21 November 2025 and has now set a modern record for the longest time at sea without a port call. It has been more than 250 days since it has touched land.
What else is causing concern with US navy ships? A US guided-missile destroyer reportedly spent four days adrift and without power in the South China Sea in July. The USS Benfold was reported to have been towed to Subic Bay in the Philippines.
Sonic’s creators explain how the speedy scamp has kept on running through generations as an enduring avatar of ‘attitude in the face of adversity’
One day in the early 1990s, I came home from university for the weekend and discovered that my dad had bought himself a Sega Mega Drive, bundled with a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I knew about Sega’s mascot of course. The launch of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game in 1991 was a landmark moment for the company, massively boosting the sales of its 16bit console in the west, ripping market share from the dominant Super Nintendo. While Mario was the family favourite, Sonic with his speed, attitude and brash visual energy encapsulated the edgy spirit of the early 1990s MTV culture. That weekend, Dad and I did little else but team up for daylong Sonic sessions, the game’s two-player mode letting us play cooperatively as we zoomed through those dense, beautiful play zones.
Thirty-five years later, I am still a Sonic fan. There have been plenty of rough times (Sonic 06, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic Free Riders – sorry, I can’t go on), but there have been plenty of good ones too. (Rush, Mania and Colors, and I have a soft spot for Sonic R, a racer developed by Traveller’s Tales, which went on to make the Lego games). Few people know this rollercoaster better than Takashi Iizuka, who worked on Sonic 3 as a designer and has been series producer for almost 20 years. When he joined Sega in 1992 he wanted to work for the company’s arcade division, but after playing the original Sonic – especially Sonic 2 – he was seduced.
Officials have had to remove thousands of tons of sargassum from Florida’s beaches amid the climate crisis
Dealing with seaweed is the bulk of Chris Bumpus’s job during the summer. As chief of conservation for Miami-Dade county’s parks, recreation and open spaces department, Bumpus is in charge of cleaning sargassum off 17 miles (27km) of county beaches. But some days, the odds are stacked against him and his team.
More and more sargassum, a kind of floating brown algae, has been washing up on the beaches of south Florida, west Africa, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Last-minute talks were continuing between the U.S. and Canada in an effort to head off President Trump's plan to impose 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods.
Woodland Trust says trees struggling in drought stress, with older ‘survivors’ disproportionately affected
England’s ancient oak trees are dying in the summer’s extreme heat and dry weather, according to the Woodland Trust, with trees and ecosystems unable to adapt fast enough to the changing climate.
The heatwaves across much of Europe this summer have had a notable impact on crop growth and plant health. To cope with the extreme conditions, many trees are undergoing “early autumn”, wilting and losing their leaves early.
Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Sainsbury's has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop. "I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless," Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal. The comedy promoter was buying supplies in the store in East Dulwich, in south-east London, for a standup event at Dulwich Hamlet football club when, after scanning his items and a Nectar card, he was approached by two managers who told him he could not be served owing to an earlier incident. He was then asked to leave and they tried to escort him from the store.
As he left, he saw an overhead CCTV monitor alert with a red circle surrounding his face. He asked the shop staff to keep his shopping in the trolley so his friend could come and pick up the supplies for the comedy night happening soon next door. "I think they were quite confused by this, understandably, but agreed and my colleague Dave went in to pay for and pick up the shop about five minutes later. There was no pause for thought from the staff, no suggestion that they understood this is not how a shoplifter would behave. Just blindly following the machine's orders." Sainsbury's head office apologised to Arnold the next day and has paused use of its AI-assisted Facewatch technology in the store while an investigation takes place. Arnold says the facial recognition tech should be paused in all stores. "Anyone could be falsely accused and at some point that will be someone vulnerable, someone with mental health issues like anxiety. It's inevitable," said Arnold. "Also, I would worry about the confidence-destroying effect of it happening to a younger person or someone less willing or able to stand up for themselves as I have done."
A Sainsbury's spokesperson said: "We have contacted Mr Arnold to apologise for his experience at our Dulwich superstore. The incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology. Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager." A Facewatch spokesperson said their technology was not at fault in this case. "A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled in store," they said.
Case of Abderrahim Fakir is first in which legal shield giving police greater protection from prosecution has been invoked
If, before 19 July, few people in Italy beyond his family and friends knew who Abderrahim Fakir was, by the late afternoon of that day the final moments of his life were being watched across the country.
Video footage widely shared online showed him being handcuffed and forcibly restrained by police on a street in Pilastro, a neighbourhood in the north-east of Bologna.
Government borrowing costs in several advanced economies continued to rise to levels not seen in decades on Tuesday, as hopes of an end to the US-Iran war faded.
Shopping baskets took on a decidedly summery complexion during last month’s heatwaves as consumers filled up on a British picnic staple: picky bits, and grocery inflation slowed.
Spending rose on foods such as potato salad, olives and coleslaw, while ice-cream sales also increased, according to new data from Worldpanel by Numerator, a market research company.
PALM BEACH, Florida — President Donald Trump voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary Tuesday, even as he continues pushing to sharply restrict the same voting method nationwide and repeatedly claims, without evidence, that mail ballots are inherently vulnerable to fraud.
Palm Beach County records show Trump requested a mail ballot in late July and returned it Aug. 13. The White House defended his decision by pointing out that Trump’s proposed restrictions would preserve exceptions for voters who are traveling. (thehill.com)
The irony is difficult to miss. Trump has repeatedly described mail-in voting as “crooked,” “cheating” and a source of widespread election fraud, despite no evidence of systemic fraud sufficient to alter national election outcomes. Reuters has noted that Trump has pushed those claims for years while using mail voting himself.
Trump’s administration is currently asking the Supreme Court to allow implementation of an executive order tightening mail-ballot procedures before the November midterms. Federal judges have blocked key provisions, finding that the president lacks authority to unilaterally regulate state election procedures.
The administration’s March order would require states to provide approved mail-voter lists and directs the Postal Service to restrict delivery of ballots that do not meet federal requirements. The White House says the measures are intended to improve election security.
Trump also voted by mail in a Florida special election earlier this year while publicly denouncing the practice, making Tuesday’s ballot another example of him personally using a system he portrays as fundamentally suspect.
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — A 21-year-old Louisville woman was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement while attending a scheduled interview for a marriage-based green card, separating her from her U.S.-citizen husband and their 19-month-old son.
Armelle Bondonga arrived legally from the Democratic Republic of Congo as a child in 2013 but remained after her visitor visa expired. Her attorney, Arianit Osmani, said Bondonga later became part of her father’s asylum proceedings and is now pursuing legal permanent residency through her marriage to Terrance Bradshaw.
Bondonga appeared voluntarily for the Aug. 12 USCIS interview. Bradshaw said the meeting initially appeared to be proceeding normally before ICE agents separated the couple and detained his wife.
ICE said Bondonga received a final removal order from an immigration judge on Nov. 6, 2025, and defended the arrest by saying she had overstayed her visa. Her attorney says separate proceedings involving her family’s earlier asylum case remain unresolved and is seeking an administrative stay to prevent deportation while those issues and her marriage petition are considered.
Local reporting also indicates attorneys are considering a habeas corpus petition challenging her continued detention. A marriage to a U.S. citizen can provide a pathway to permanent residency, but it does not automatically erase an existing removal order.
Bondonga remains detained in Indiana while her attorneys seek to keep her in the country long enough for her pending legal claims to be reviewed.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: A faithful copy of the world can’t compare with art that displays the imagination to understand it.
The Intersection of Tastelessness and Nepotism: A government museum’s new patriotism exhibit shows what happens when politics replace artistic judgment.
Disgrace on the USS Lincoln: Sailors enduring a punishing deployment deserve leaders who recognize that exhaustion is more than a public-relations problem.
The 2026 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Induction: This year’s inductees remind us that basketball’s greatest achievements aren’t earned alone.
Basquiat, directed by Julian Schnabel: Jeffrey Wright gives this visually vivid but occasionally crowded portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat the humanity it needs.
“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Ella Fitzgerald: A witty Rodgers and Hart lament becomes something braver—a woman hearing herself clearly at last.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“If hand-painting does not correspond with the natural optics, then it should be made illegal by a decree from the state.” - Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German dictator
“You don’t paint what you see, you paint what you feel.” - Romare Bearden (1911-1988), American visual artist
(Romare Bearden Foundation)
Here we have two contrasting philosophies of painting. The first is by a failed artist who wanted to inflict his ideas about art (and everything else) on the entire world. The second is by an artist who understood that true art is always an act of interpretation, not reproduction. Today, anyone with a smartphone can reproduce an exact likeness of the world. But even in the Vienna of the early twentieth century, when Hitler tried and failed to make a living as a painter, people who could paint the world as it appeared on its surface were a dime a dozen—or, rather, a heller a hundred. But a true artist’s job is to offer up an image of the world filtered through their skills, their imagination, and their vision of the world. That’s what Picasso did, and Chagall, two painters born on the same continent and in the same decade as Hitler, who succeeded as artists, and are remembered today far more fondly than their Austrian contemporary.
Romare Bearden was a true artist. He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1911, but his family moved to Harlem when he was a toddler as part of the Great Migration. His father was a grocer and a pianist, his mother a journalist and the founder and leader of the Colored Women’s Democratic League, and their home was a meeting place of many of the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1930s, Bearden attended Lincoln University, the nation’s second-oldest historically Black college, then transferred to Boston University before returning to New York to study at NYU. His degree was in science and education, but his heart was already leading him in another direction. He began to study at the Art Students League and worked as a cartoonist for African-American newspapers like The Baltimore Afro-American.
He was also a talented athlete: at BU, he was the football team’s starting fullback and pitched for the school’s baseball team. Legend has it that Connie Mack offered him a Major League contract with the Philadelphia Athletics in the early 1930s, more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, on the condition that the light-skinned Bearden pass as white—something Bearden was unwilling to do.
As he developed his artistic style in the 1930s and ‘40s, he supported himself as a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services, a job that gave him a particular window into the city life that would become his abiding subject. He also served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II.
He was one of the era’s great expressionists, a style “in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Incorporating the influence of jazz, cubism, and photomontage, one of his signature styles was a collage that layered cut paper, photographs, and paint to depict aspects of community, spirituality, and struggle, combining scenes of Harlem life and Southern memory into a unified vision.
Yet, Bearden didn’t see himself as a pioneer of African-American art. “Black art has always existed,” he said. “It just hasn’t been looked for in the right places.” That was a generous point of view. More likely, it hadn’t been looked for at all. The museums, critics, auction houses, and schools that were the gatekeepers of the era simply weren’t interested in visiting the regions or neighborhoods where Black art was being made. When they finally did make those trips, they classified their “discoveries” as folk art, a form of segregation that put those artists in their own lesser corner as gifted primitives, rather than center stage with the real artists.
Bearden understood the institutional weight of that frame, and the way it diminished the value of the canvases it contained. If the existing rooms wouldn’t display his people’s work, he would help build new rooms that would. He helped found Spiral, a collective of Black artists, as well as Cinque Gallery, and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. I learned a lot of this story as a teenager when I wandered into the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and read about the Harlem Renaissance. An entire movement of painters, writers, and musicians was sitting right there in plain sight, though the mainstream culture had given me no reason to look for it. I had assumed that silence meant absence, but it was just another form of prejudice. Inside that library, I found poetry, paintings, and music, all organized, dated, and undeniable. An empty space in my education suddenly overflowed.
Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows
A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.
These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.
Mohammad Ali Kialha’s first hours were all he knew of peace. He was born on February 26 in Iran’s capital, Tehran. Two days later, President Donald Trump began his war on that country. “Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” Trump wrote on social media on February 28.
That day, the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands more would be killed or wounded in U.S.–Israeli strikes, according to World Health Organization estimates. Since a June ceasefire collapsed and the U.S. resumed attacks, Iran’s Health Ministry says U.S. strikes have killed or wounded more than 650 people.
Mohammad’s parents — Fatemeh Rostami, known to her family as Hannaneh, and Ali, her husband — brought him home to their apartment in eastern Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood. Despite the danger, Hannaneh’s mother, Tahereh Sarbaz, traveled almost 100 miles from the city of Qazvin to meet her newborn grandson, as Trump lobbed threats and missiles at Tehran. “Today Iran will be hit very hard! Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time,” he wrote on Truth Social on March 7. Sarbaz witnessed the destruction that week and felt a blast wave firsthand while driving through the capital. “I was in Tehran. I saw what happened there,” she recalled. “People were being bombed every night. Families everywhere were losing their children.”
Pirouzi, a crowded working- to middle-class residential area, with a major shopping mall, hospital, sports complex, and several transit hubs, is home to around 600,000 people. When the war erupted, it was hit hard. As U.S. and Israeli munitions laid waste to buildings there, people flooded into the streets — Hannaneh’s family among them — seeking safety. Ali was still going to work each day but suggested that Hannaneh and the children decamp for the relative safety of Qazvin, which was not attacked nearly as much as the capital. “My daughter refused,” Sarbaz recalled. “She told him, ‘I will not leave you here alone.’”
Sarbaz eventually headed across town, to northern Tehran, where her son, Mehdi Rostami, lived with his wife and their three children, thinking it would be safer. After a short visit, she returned, alone, to Qazvin.
On March 17, Sarbaz checked in with Hannaneh by phone. “I called her and asked how she and the baby were doing,” Sarbaz said. “I asked whether the fighter jets were still coming. Whether she was afraid. Whether there was a lot of noise. And I told her to be careful.”
“Mother, the thing you were afraid of has happened.”
The next day, Rostami’s whole family traveled across Tehran to visit Hannaneh and her children. Not long after, Sarbaz received a call from another daughter-in-law. “She sounded extremely distressed. She was trying to prepare me for something,” Sarbaz recalled. “Finally, I asked her, ‘What happened? Why are you so worried?’” The daughter-in-law said: “Mother, the thing you were afraid of has happened.”
Sarbaz was initially so stunned that she couldn’t process the news. It wasn’t until other family members broke down in tears that she could comprehend the enormity of her loss. An airstrike hit Hannaneh’s apartment building while her brother’s family was visiting. The attack killed Rostami; his wife, Manzar al-Sadat Zarrabadi; and their three children: Ali, 13; Fatemeh, 9; and Zeynab, 7. Also slain were Hannaneh and her two children: Mohammad Hassan Kialha, 7, and Mohammad Ali Kialha, who was just 20 days old. Ali, Hannaneh’s husband, survived; he was out at the time of the attack.
“They told me that my family in Tehran had been killed,” Sarbaz said. “Inside, I was heartbroken.”
Dr. Nader Azadeh, a high-ranking official with the Tehran Fire Department, was coordinating emergency response and rescue operations in the capital following airstrikes and deployed to the Pirouzi neighborhood just after the attack on the family’s apartment building. Amid all the carnage he witnessed over weeks of war in Tehran, the toll on the Rostami family — eight dead — had a lasting impact on him. He said he could not forget the scale of their loss.
A rescue worker who participated in the response said that the entire building was demolished by the strike. He estimated that 30 people, in total, died. It took hours to unearth what was left of the family and other victims from the rubble. Most of the dead had been exhumed when neighbors explained that an infant was still somewhere under the debris, prompting the search to begin anew. Hours later, they finally located the tiny body, he recalled.
No one knows how many survivors in Iran are grieving over loved ones killed in Trump’s war. Global attention has focused on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school — almost to the exclusion of the other schools, homes, hospitals, apartment buildings, and other civilian sites damaged or destroyed in other U.S.–Israeli strikes. The U.S. military has used this tunnel vision to its advantage, advancing the farcical claim that the elementary school strike is the only incident of civilian harm during the entire conflict. “There is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in May.
CENTCOM has continued these claims in response to queries from The Intercept. “We have no new updates at this time pertaining to current investigations or munitions that were expended during Operation Epic Fury,” a spokesperson said.
Asked if CENTCOM was aware of any allegations of civilian harm in Iran on or about March 18, the command dodged the question. “The U.S. military takes all reports of civilian harm seriously,” a defense official told The Intercept. “All allegations of civilian harm reported to CENTCOM have been reviewed.”
While CENTCOM was tight-lipped, Sarbaz refused to stay silent. “I want people around the world to know that civilians died in this conflict. I want people around the world to know that the president of the United States, a man mired in corruption and scandal, came and took my children from me,” she told The Intercept. “What crime had my 20-day-old grandchild committed?”
The funeral of 20-day-old Mohammad Ali Kialha in Qazvin, Iran, on March 23, 2026.Photo: Azam Dadashi/ISNA Photo
It’s unclear if Hannaneh and Ali’s apartment building was the intended object of a U.S. or Israeli strike, a targeting error, or so-called collateral damage. The family says it knows of no regime officials who resided in the building or military uses of the site.
The Israel Defense Forces announced it killed “Mehdi Rostami Shamastam, one of the key commanders in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence” in Tehran on the same day that Mehdi Rostami and his family lost their lives in Hannaneh’s apartment. Sarbaz said her son was an academic, not an intelligence official. “I deny this,” she said of the assertion. “My son was a university professor. But if what Israel claims were true, I would be very glad.”
Sarbaz said that if her son was, in fact, a top intelligence chief, killing him alongside his family, including a baby, would make it an even graver atrocity. “The presence of a 20-day-old infant among the victims, and the killing of eight members of one family, is such an enormous crime,” she said. “Why didn’t they target him in the street?”
Following the attack, the Iranian regime did not treat Mehdi Rostami as it often does senior commanders or influential figures killed in enemy strikes, making no public acknowledgment of his service to the state. Mehdi and Rostami are also common names. The Israeli military did not respond to multiple requests for clarification if the Mehdi Rostami Shamastam it referenced and Mehdi Rostami were the same person. CENTCOM did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it or Israeli forces had conducted airstrikes in Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood on March 18.
The strike that killed the Rostami family was part of an unrelenting blitz. The U.S. and Israel struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes near unprecedented in modern conflict, according to the civilian harm monitoring group Airwars. In the first 24 hours of the war alone, the U.S. said it had struck more than 1,000 targets, and Israel 500. A May 18 report by Human Rights Activists in Iran counted 12,798 “unique attacks” by the U.S. or Israel, 77 percent of them involving civilian harm or damage to civilian infrastructure.
The U.S. bears some responsibility for all attacks as the chief of the coalition attacking Iran. “Only the United States of America could lead this,” self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth said on March 4. “But when you add the Israeli Defense Forces, a devastatingly capable force, the combination is sheer destruction for our radical Islamist Iranian adversaries. … Fighting shoulder to shoulder with such a capable ally is a true force multiplier and a breath of fresh air.”
After initially striking Iranian military assets in the opening rounds of the war, the U.S. shifted to targeting civilian infrastructure, Sina Toossi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy specializing in U.S.–Iran relations, told The Intercept. Targets included oil facilities; steel and pharmaceutical plants; universities; and even the headquarters of Iran’s space program. He noted that bridges were targeted, killing civilians as well as first responders.
This summer, as a second ceasefire imploded and Iran stepped up attacks on U.S. bases causing large numbers of casualties, Trump has increasingly unleashed unhinged rants, including threats to attack civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants, that would “affect 91 million people.”
In July, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., cajoled chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine into what seemed like a half-hearted pledge to “not target, even in retaliatory sense, infrastructure that is generally considered to be primarily for civilian survival.” The very next day, Trump announced that “any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz … the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.”
Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army officer and intelligence official and now the associate director for campaigns and policy at Win Without War, drew specific attention to the attacks on the bridges and water reservoirs. It is “quite dangerous to be conditioning the U.S. military to carry out orders that are clearly war crimes,” he warned.
The World Health Organization puts the Iranian casualty toll at an estimated 37,181, including 3,375 deaths. Iranian state and semi-official media reported similar figures, just under 3,500 killed. Mansoureh Mills, a regional researcher with Amnesty International, noted that earlier government figures put the civilian toll at roughly 45 percent of the total, including 383 children.
The total number of U.S.–Israeli strikes on apartment buildings is unknown, but certainly significant. Reports of civilian harm were recorded every day from the beginning of the war on February 28 to the first ceasefire on April 8, according to Airwars. This includes six strikes on March 18, the day that the Rostami family was killed. Airwars found that civilians were frequently slain in attacks on residential areas, with such strikes accounting for 147 out of the 297 — almost 50 percent — of the civilian harm incidents it tracked. Eighty-seven of these took place in Tehran province. A Washington Post investigation, relying on data from the Institute for the Study of War, counted 285 attacks across Tehran with strikes “blanket[ing] almost a third of all neighborhoods, some with upward of 11 strikes.”
“To kill one person, they bombed a 14-story residential building and killed somewhere between 50 and 200 people living there.”
Azadeh, the fire department official, recalled chaotic and emotionally overwhelming nights of bombardment that killed untold numbers of civilians. In one attack on an apartment building in central Tehran, on the first day of the war, he recalled the death of a mother, her daughter, and the child’s grandmother. In another strike on a 10-unit apartment building in the Pirouzi neighborhood, he recounted the slaying of most of its residents, including seven children and teenagers. “When our rescue teams arrived, the force of the explosion had thrown many of the bodies into the street,” Azadeh said.
Azadeh drew specific attention to the death of Saeed Shamghadri, an academic killed with his son and daughter in an attack on their home in northern Tehran in March. “To kill one person, they bombed a 14-story residential building and killed somewhere between 50 and 200 people living there,” Azadeh said. “To eliminate one person, many civilians were attacked.”
When asked how many civilians have been killed in U.S. strikes and, if the military did not know the answer, to explain why, CENTCOM told The Intercept: “The U.S. military does not deliberately target civilians.” After being told that response didn’t address the question, Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, said CENTCOM had “nothing additional to add.”
The WHO estimates that 229 healthcare centers, 49 hospitals, and 78 pharmaceutical facilities, laboratories, and warehouses were damaged in U.S.–Israeli strikes. “While I was on my way to my son’s house, Gandhi Hospital came under attack,” said Sarbaz of the medical facility in northern Tehran that saw its entire front facing torn off in a March 1 strike. Sarbaz said that the massive shockwave from the explosion rocked the car she was in. “The media are lying when they say ordinary people were not targeted. Gandhi Hospital, where pregnant women were present, was also attacked.” Videos of the private hospital, known for fertility treatments, show it sustained significant damage, and government sources noted it had to evacuate patients, including babies in incubators.
These attacks came after Hegseth’s Pentagon spent a year slashing measures to prevent civilian casualties, including firing the military’s top lawyers, who advise leaders on international laws of armed conflict. “U.S. strikes on civilian infrastructure in Iran, including the elementary school in Minab, have been absolutely devastating and completely inexcusable,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept. “I continue to have deep concerns about how the school in particular was targeted, especially as the strike was deliberately planned for the first day of the conflict and did not occur amid the fog of war. Secretary Hegseth’s catastrophic cuts to civilian harm mitigation efforts at the Department of Defense and his disdain for the rules of engagement will only continue to put innocent men, women, and children in danger.”
A group of Democratic lawmakers told Hegseth in a July letter that his “gutting civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) efforts” has left the Pentagon unable to “comply with the law and its congressionally-mandated CHMR responsibilities.” They added: “The Trump administration — potentially in violation of federal law — has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts.”
That letter, sent by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Gillibrand, and eight other lawmakers, echoed concerns raised by a War Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” The May report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones or track harm when it occurs.
These criticisms were echoed in an as-yet-unreleased official report revealed by The Intercept that found Hegseth’s Pentagon gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones. The War Department’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence reduced its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report. And cuts have been even more catastrophic at the tip of the spear.
When questioned by lawmakers about U.S. attacks on civilian targets in Iran, Caine dismissed the concerns. “We have a robust process which considers a target. It goes through a system that looks at a variety of considerations, to include what you’re alluding to around both purely civilian or dual-use targets,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair said. “I have trust and confidence in CENTCOM that they’re looking at the range of those things on a daily basis.”
There are good reasons not to trust that system. The 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM has been reduced to just one individual, according to Cooper, the CENTCOM commander. Another recent yet-to-be-released Pentagon report on civilian casualties noted that 15 attacks in Yemen from early 2025 are still under review by CENTCOM. “How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn’t finished Yemen?” a U.S. official lamented to The Intercept. Both current and former government officials told The Intercept that the massive cuts have left the Pentagon unable to protect civilians in war zones like Iran.
Asked if anyone would be held accountable for the February strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, Trump replied in June: “No. If it was a fault — and as you know that’s under investigation. It’s such a strange question to be asked at this date. You’re talking about a long time ago.”
The Rostami family was large and close-knit. Sarbaz said that 16 children and grandchildren made a pilgrimage from Tehran to Qazvin every Friday. “We would spread a large tablecloth and eat together,” she said. After the bodies of her children and grandchildren were pulled from the rubble, the eight deceased made a last trip to their ancestral home for a funeral procession and burial.
A large crowd gathered outside Sarbaz’s home on March 23. “They were crying,” she recalled. “People came from everywhere. They were chanting ‘Death to America’ and mourning my children.” Azadeh, who accompanied the bodies back to Qazvin, recalls being deeply affected as Sarbaz received the corpses. “When we returned the bodies, I saw the mother arrive carrying an Iranian flag. She was the only surviving immediate family member there,” he said of Sarbaz. “She said the reason she was crying was because she herself had not been martyred alongside them.”
Footage from Iranian state television of the martyrs’ procession shows a huge crowd with women pushing children in strollers, men waving Iranian flags, and others carrying poster-sized photos of the dead, behind decorated funeral trucks bearing the bodies of the victims. Photos from the Iranian Students’ News Agency show crowds carrying coffins wrapped in the green, red, and white of the Iranian flag and a cleric clad in a black robe and turban holding the body of a white-shrouded baby aloft.
The funeral was attended by thousands of people, Sarbaz remembered.
Mourners at the funeral of Mohammad Ali Kialha in Qazvin, Iran, on March 23, 2026.Photo: Azam Dadashi/ISNA Photo
In June, just after agreeing to a ceasefire that quickly collapsed, Trump returned to threatening to kill Iranians. “If they don’t behave,” he said, “we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.” Attacks followed. “We can knock down their bridges in one hour. We can knock out their energy supply,” he said in July. “We can knock out their electricity and power generating plants. … Every plant will be gone.” Later that month, Trump posted: “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!”
Sarbaz now lives with the fallout of Trump’s war of choice and his disregard for civilian lives. “After three sons, God gave me this daughter, and she was all my hope. We had named her Fatemeh, but because her father loved the name Hannaneh, we used to call her that,” she explained. “But today, I no longer say Hannaneh or Fatemeh.”
As his war in Iran has imploded, Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. “We’re knocking the hell out of it,” he said of Iran earlier this month. “I do not want to kill people. But at some point we’re gonna.” But Trump has already killed many thousands of Iranians — including school children, hospital patients, the elderly, and, in Tehran’s Pirouzi neighborhood on March 18, most of a family, including its youngest member. “Knocking the hell out of them,” said Trump as he continued to rant about his attacks on Iranians last week. Mohammad Ali Kialha was one of those people; perhaps the youngest killed by Trump’s war.
And Sarbaz wants an answer from Trump about why he had to die: “What sin had my 20-day-old grandchild committed that he had to be martyred?”
This article is published in collaboration with Egab.
Why Should Delaware Care? Guatemalan immigrants have established a community in Georgetown — some having been here for decades, and others who recently moved here to reunite with family members and start jobs. The community organizes themselves once a year to remember Tacaná, the town where most Georgetown Guatemalans come from.
Yolanda Mendez remembers having the crown placed on her head that made her queen of the town fair in Ixchiguán, Guatemala, during her teenage years.
Last Saturday, it was her teenage daughter, Jenny Marisol Robles, who was crowned “Reyna de Tacaná,” or Queen of Tacaná, during Georgetown’s annual festival honoring the Guatemalan namesake.
Despite being thousands of miles away from their birth place, Guatemalan natives like Mendez have managed to keep a piece of their home through the Feria Internacional Tacaná — a yearly cultural event that features traditional Marimba music, dance groups and several soccer tournaments to remember the small town where they migrated from.
This event in Georgetown mirrors a festival taking place on the same day in Tacaná, which falls every year on Aug. 15 and honors the Virgin Mary. Both are filled with the same music, food and dances that could be seen in Georgetown on Saturday.
Amel Lopez, another Guatemalan native living in Georgetown, remembers the mountains overlooking Tacaná that brought in fresh cool air and were filled with vegetation.
This year, he continued to honor those memories with his fruit stand selling cut up watermelons, mangos, cucumbers and traditional Guatemalan snacks like raspados, or fruit-flavored water ice.
Lopez still recalls the days he took part in Tacaná’s soccer tournaments that characterized the annual festival.
“This reminds me of when I was little, and although we didn’t have an official soccer ball like they do right now, but at least we had a soccer ball we made from nylon rags when we were little,” Lopez said. “Even if it wasn’t real, it was still soccer.”
A little Tacaná
Kevin Santizo, a Guatemalan native, has lived in southern Delaware for about 20 years. When he first came, Guatemalans were far and few in between. Those numbers have more than doubled, he said.
Hispanics make up around half the town’s population. By Santizo’s estimates, around 3,000 are from Guatemala. And of these, most migrated from Tacaná or San Marcos, mountainous regions located near Mexico’s southern border.
Some Guatemalans have been here for decades, like Santizo and Lopez, who have been here for 22 years.
Others have migrated more recently.
Florencio, one of four music players who filled the crowd’s ear with traditional music characterized by the fluctuating pitches of wooden Marimba bars, has been in Georgetown for two years.
Florencio was joined by three other musicians who played traditional Marimba music characterized by the long percussion instrument. He felt the most “Chapin” or Guatemalan when people began requesting songs from their childhood, he said. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
He took turns playing the Marimba and the drums. He said participating in the festival makes him feel more “chapino,” an endearing term for being Guatemalan.
“May we never forget where we came from or who we are,” Florencio said. “I am not ashamed of where I come from the mountain ranges, I grew up there and I am not ashamed because I might be here today but perhaps tomorrow or the day after that I’ll be in Guatemala.”
Florencio is currently undergoing a legal process to obtain residency. His story resonated with other attendees who came to the U.S. escaping poverty and violent situations in parts of Guatemala.
A business-minded community
Guatemalans in Georgetown work across a variety of industries.
Ziulin Moreno, a Venezuelan native, is a business coach at La Plaza, a nonprofit in Georgetown that helps Hispanic entrepreneurs. Her first community event after moving to Georgetown in 2023 was the Feria Internacional Tacaná, where she quickly learned what characterizes the large Guatemalan community.
Moreno said she has seen many Guatemalan immigrants go from being employees to employers, particularly in the construction industry, commercial cleaning service and the food business.
“Latinos have a reputation of being very hardworking, but in the case of the Guatemalan community, they are not only hardworking but also perseverant — and that is important,” Moreno said. “Many of them started with small businesses, yet they remained steadfast in their efforts. And today, I truly see successful businesses run by Guatemalans.”
Sebastiana Mendez, Robles’ grandmother, attended the festival not only to witness her two grandchildren carry their crowns, but also to sell chuchitos — traditional, savory Guatemalan corn tamales with chicken or pork. She goes around to different grocery stores on a weekly basis selling the typical street food.
Sebastiana Mendez had her own stand with homemade chuchitos, a savory Guatemalan treats wrapped in corn husk and elote or corn. Mendez said she enjoys making them week-by-week and sharing these home-cooked foods with Georgetown’s Guatemalan population. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CRISTAL SANCHEZ
The fair’s sponsors included local construction groups, painting services and car repair shops.
Political landscape decreases participation
Santizo, one of the fair’s organizers, said participation has been dwindling since President Donald Trump took office two years ago.
At its peak, Santizo said the event would bring in upwards of 5,000 people. When Spotlight Delaware spoke to him the day before this year’s event, he hoped at least 2,000 would show up.
Santizo even made changes to this year’s fair to encourage attendance, like making the celebration free of charge, focusing more on his partnerships with local businesses and leaning heavily on social media promotion.
Lopez said he also has felt the decrease in attendance from his fruit stand.
“It’s a little sad to be honest, what’s going on in our community,” Lopez said. “But a lot of people, despite what’s been going on, have the bravery and strength to go out, and that’s what’s most important.”
Attendees said other predominantly Hispanic events have also been affected.
Moreno, the business coach from La Plaza, said parents are hesitant to let their children attend events, fearful they will be racially profiled for their Latin features, even if they are U.S. citizens.
It is a fear that resonates with Moreno. Her own 19-year-old nephew was arrested by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in Newark earlier this year. Moreno’s family has since been able to bring him home after the attempted deportation.
The community is not only attending fewer events, they are also becoming more distrustful, said Yamaris Zabzla, a coordinator with the nonprofit organization Abriendo Puertas/Open Doors, which offers help to victims of domestic violence.
“Our hotline calls have diminished, too, because the victim has fear of calling because they think we are going to report them to [ICE],” Zabzla said.
Despite this, the community remains eager to carry on their traditions, especially to the new generation of Guatemalans in the U.S.
“It’s thanks to God that they want to continue this when they are young women,” Sebastiana Mendez said of her two grandchildren who took part in this year’s coronation for Reyna de Tacaná in Georgetown. “They put the example for other young women to get closer to their culture and participate because we are all children of God.”
The festival also chooses a specific cause to fundraise for each year. In the past, donations were used to help fund the construction of a church in Tacaná. This year, vendors were encouraged to donate part of their earnings to Hospital Los Angelitos, a local hospital in Tacaná that offers free medical services to its patients.
The festival is set to continue next year in Georgetown.
For now, festival organizers share updates on their Facebook page — from events in both Tacaná and Georgetown, to soccer matches and images and videos of Tacaná’s festivities — to further connect the Delaware community with its Guatemalan roots.
Why Should Delaware Care? Proposed data centers could have major impacts on electric bills and water use in New Castle County. Three primary races for New Castle County Council seats could shape the future of the debate over how to regulate the facilities beyond rules passed earlier this year.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the district number that Syam Kosigi and Valerie George are running in. The story has been updated.
The debate in northern Delaware over how best to regulate data centers has reemerged this primary election season between candidates for the New Castle County Council.
And whoever ultimately wins could have outsized influence over the future of data center policy in the county.
Two seats in contention this year are currently held by retiring council members Janet Kilpatrick and Penrose Hollins. Earlier this year, each voted against a narrowly rejected measure that would have retroactively imposed new data center regulations onto projects that had already been submitted to the county – including the controversial Delaware City data center project, known as Project Washington.
Another of the no votes on the measure, Valerie George, also is facing a primary challenger.
Now, each of the three races for those council seats includes one candidate who wants to impose the county’s new stricter data center rules onto Project Washington, as well as other existing data center plans.
The others argued that such retroactivity moves may not be legal or effective. The policy split also extends to a potential county moratorium on new data center land-use applications.
Primary Election Delaware’s primary election will be held from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 15, with early voting running from Sept. 2 to 13. Polls are closed Sept. 6 and 7 for the Labor Day holiday. The new voter registration deadline for the primary is Aug. 22.
The debate, which has played out largely on social media, has grown testy this month, most recently from dueling posts by candidates Jason Hoover and Curtis Linton, who are seeking to replace Hollins.
Earlier this month, Linton accused his opponent of misleading the public about his stance on a previous county measure to regulate data centers.
“Jason Hoover is playing politics with the truth,” Linton said.
In response, Hoover said Monday that his critique of Linton’s stance on data center regulations was simply taken from comments he made about the measure last year.
“I have relied on primary sources: his own public comment before County Council,” Hoover said in his post.
A year since the Delaware City data center
Jason Hoover, an engineer and web designer, is running for the New Castle County Council. | PHOTO COURTESY OF JASON HOOVER
Last March, New Castle County passed data center regulations that require new data centers to maintain buffer zones around them, and to use energy-efficient backup generators, among other regulations.
Councilman Dave Carter first proposed the rules last summer, after developers submitted their proposal for Project Washington, which would consume 1.2 gigawatts of energy – or roughly the same amount as a million homes.
What followed was a monthslong political fight that largely pitted the Delaware trade unions against an array of individuals concerned about the environmental and affordability impacts of data centers.
Curtis Linton, business manager for the Delaware Laborers Local 199, is running for New Castle County Council. | PHOTO COURTESY OF CURTIS LINTON
The fight hit its height in November when Councilman Tim Sheldon flipped the middle finger at Councilman Kevin Caneco, a data center opponent.
Shortly after that, the debate also veered into electoral politics when a union leader from the Delaware Building Trades announced what became a short-lived challenge to Carter for his seat.
Shortly after that, Linton announced his candidacy.
Although he is also a trade union leader, Linton at the time told Spotlight Delaware that he was not as staunch in his support for data centers as others in organized labor.
Over the months after Carter proposed the regulations, other data center proposals have also been submitted to New Castle County. If all are ultimately built, they collectively could double the state’s electric demand.
What do the candidates think?
There are only three competitive primaries for New Castle County Council seats, and all of them are Democratic.
Syam Kosigi, a former nonprofit executive, is running against the incumbent Valerie George in District 5.
Kira Alejandro and Kyle Grantham are competing to replace Kilpatrick in District 3.
Syam Kosigi, a former nonprofit executive, is running for New Castle County Council. | PHOTO COURTESY OF SYAM KOSIGI
And in the three-way primary for Hollins’ District 4 seat, Helena Creamer is running against Linton and Hoover.
George and Creamer did not respond to requests for an interview.
Kosigi, Hoover and Alejandro all said they support a data center moratorium out of worries that the recently-passed regulations do not do enough to protect residents from potential effects of the facilies to the electric grid and the environment.
Hoover, an engineer and web designer, cited a study that suggested the proposed data centers in New Castle County could raise the wholesale electric rate in Delaware by 80%.
He said he supports the laws the Delaware legislature recently passed to try to put those costs onto the data center companies. But he said the scale of the proposed data centers are so unprecedented that the county needs more time to study their impacts.
“Our laws are clearly not ready for data centers,” Hoover said.
Alejandro, a barista and community advocate, also expressed concerns about electric bills rising, as well as potential environmental impacts of data centers.
“I think [a moratorium] gives us more time to learn about some of these consequences, which are still coming to light,” Alejandro said.
Kira Alejandro, a barista and community advocate, is running for the New Castle County Council. | PHOTO COURTESY OF KIRA ALEJANDRO
Kosigi, an IT professional, said a moratorium would allow the council to create additional regulations with more public input.
“The approach should be bottom up,” Kosigi said.
Kosigi, Hoover and Alejandro said they would use the moratorium to try to figure out a way to make the county’s existing data center regulations apply retroactively to data center projects currently in the pipeline.
Two of the opposing candidates, Linton and Grantham, also said they are worried about the effects of data centers.
Kyle Grantham, a documentary filmmaker, is running for New Castle County Council. | PHOTO COURTESY OF KYLE GRANTHAM
Grantham said he personally dislikes the idea of new data center development and supports further regulations. He also wants the county to look closely at its code for any loopholes data center developers could exploit.
Linton said he is open to the idea of more regulations, but would need to hear the specific proposal and the reasoning behind it.
But Linton and Grantham were both hesitant about the idea of a moratorium, and both opposed making the current data center regulations retroactive.
Grantham, a documentary filmmaker and a former New Castle County communications staffer, said he doesn’t think the moratorium or applying the regulations retroactively would be legal moves.
“We’re probably going to wind up going to court, probably going to spend millions of dollars, and probably lose,” Grantham said.
But he said more regulations may act effectively as a moratorium.
“If we can change those things and make this an area where they’re going to pay their fair way … then this no longer becomes an attractive area,” Grantham said.
Linton, a local union leader, said he may support a moratorium, but he is concerned it may not be effective.
“If we do that, are we actually going to take a deeper dive and research … or are we just going to say we’re putting a freeze on them because we don’t want them here?” he said.
Linton said he would likely oppose making the regulations retroactive because it could discourage other industries from coming to Delaware.
“They might be saying, ‘OK, I don’t know if we want to invest in Delaware because we could be investing, and next thing you know, they change the rules on us,’” Linton said.
Participants race during the 2025 Special Olympics Delaware Cycling Classic. Photo Courtesy of Special Olympics Delaware.
The Special Olympics Delaware Annual Cycling Classic will be held on August 22, at DelDOT’s Danner Campus in Dover.
Special Olympics Delaware announced that the 2026 Special Olympics Delaware Cycling Classic will be held at the Danner Campus located in Dover, Delaware, on Saturday, August 22, via a press release on August 13.
The event will bring over 90 athletes and 30 coaches from Delaware and surrounding states to the campus to compete in multiple different cycling events. The other states represented in the event are Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, according to the release.
“Cycling showcases so much more than athletic achievement. Behind every athlete is a network of coaches, family members, volunteers, and supporters who help make success possible,” said Director of Sports & Area Engagement for Special Olympics Delaware, Kylie Lavelle, via the press release. “The encouragement athletes receive throughout training and competition builds confidence, creates meaningful connections, and reinforces the sense of belonging that is at the heart of Special Olympics. It’s inspiring to see our community come together to celebrate each athlete’s accomplishments both on and off the course.”
The event will start at 8:00 a.m. with registration and warm-ups for participants. The opening ceremonies will begin at 9:30 a.m. and the racing will start at 10:00 a.m. The event will end around 3:00 p.m.
Awards for racers will be given out throughout the day.
To learn more about the event and Special Olympics Delaware check out their website here.
A great and concise history of the run-up to MS-DOS 2.0.
Yet, there was a nagging feeling that a single-tasking CP/M clone was inadequate for the new generation of personal computers. Digital Research released multi-user, multitasking MP/M-86 in September 1981 and announced the single‑user multitasking Concurrent CP/M in early 1982. In response, Microsoft came up with a plan for tiered approach to its operating systems: single-user/single-tasking MS-DOS at the bottom; multi-user/multitasking XENIX at the top; and in the middle, something called XEDOS: a single-user version of XENIX. This “pyramid of upward-compatible operating systems” was announced in a Byte Magazine editorial in January 1982.
I’ve always found this tiered approach fascinating, and the world surely would’ve looked quite different had Microsoft been able to make it work. I doubt Windows NT would ever have existed, and most of the world would probably be running a XENIX-based Windows today (all else being equal, which is of course unlikely and silly). Regardless, MS-DOS 2.0 contained a few UNIX-like utilities to deal with its brand new support for directory trees and other new features, and even had a /dev directory.
ATLANTA, Georgia — Vaccination rates among Georgia kindergarteners remain below 90% for several major childhood diseases, while vaccine exemptions continue to rise, according to newly released federal data.
For the 2025-2026 school year, roughly 89% of Georgia kindergarteners were vaccinated against diseases including measles, diphtheria and polio. That was an improvement from about 87% the previous year, but still below the national rate of roughly 92%. (cdc.gov)
At the same time, about 5.1% of Georgia kindergarteners received vaccine exemptions, up from 4.8% a year earlier. Only 0.1% were medical exemptions, meaning most were granted for other reasons allowed under state law.
The trend matters because measles is highly contagious and requires very high vaccination coverage to prevent sustained spread. Georgia’s current rate remains below the level generally associated with strong population protection. More than 2,500 measles cases have been reported nationally this year, according to the CDC. (cdc.gov)
The data arrives amid a broader political fight over childhood vaccines. President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order seeking changes to federal vaccine guidance and challenging states that restrict religious or personal exemptions. He also repeated false claims linking vaccines to autism, despite extensive research finding no causal connection.
Georgia physician Dr. Cecil Bennett blamed misinformation and weak federal leadership for declining confidence in vaccination, urging parents to consult pediatricians and family doctors rather than relying on online claims.
If you thought pervert glasses weren’t bad enough, Apple is taking it up a notch by adding cameras to its AirPods.
Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate.
In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,” says the voiceover text.
AirPods are tiny. I’ve seen people use them at the gym. I’ve seen them on playgrounds. I’ve seen them around swimming pools. People use them at the beach. They’re used at schools. In locker rooms. Tiny cameras in tiny AirPods that can photograph anything in front of the user are a pervert’s wet dream. Abusers are going to love this. Why wear bulky glasses anyone can see and try to demand you take off, when you can wear tiny AirPods that have already been fully normalised in society? Was there not a single woman or parent on the team that made this?
All over the United States, people are destroying Flock surveillance cameras. More and more communities are rising up and demanding these things removed from their streets and neighbourhoods. The awareness of just how pervasive mass government surveillance has become is growing, and Silicon Valley’s complicity is not exactly a secret. And in this climate of rapidly growing concern and anger, Apple is going to add tiny cameras to its tiny AirPods. Was there not a single person of colour or protester on the team that made this?
How detached from reality do you have to be to greenlight something like this? Does anyone – regardless of skin colour, gender, or political leaning – want even more cameras around them?
I was around when Quake was launched, but I was entirely unaware of this story.
By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.
The concept was implemented. The CD was announced on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later. The archive contained QCRACK.EXE, a tool allowing to decrypt every single game on the CD-ROM.
The system id employed turned out to be incredibly primitive and simple, and hackers found out quite easily that the system required no secret sauce from id at all – the code you’d get over the phone contained no secret, and all the validation program on the disk did was check to ensure the code received over the phone matched the code generated by the disk.
No wonder it took them only 39 days to crack this.
Earlier this year, Natalie Vock made a splash with a set of patches to the Linux kernel that greatly increased performance on AMD GPUs with lower amounts of VRAM. With that work now accepted by upstream, Vock decided to turn their attention to another interesting problem: what if you run out of VRAM, and how can we improve performance when we do?
Regardless, what I hope this blogpost can demonstrate is that even if you end up with some memory evicted to system RAM, the slowdown can be manageable. There’s measures that drivers (particularly, the kernel driver) can take to make overcommit work as fast as possible, and even applications can do their part in coordinating with the driver stack to mitigate the effects of their memory being evicted. With everything in place, VRAM overcommit isn’t really as big of a deal as one may think it is at first sight.
The work Vock has done has already been in SteamOS for a while, and they’re currently in the process of upstreaming it to the vanilla kernel as well. Since this is a complex set of patches and changes, this may take a while, and as such, they’ve prepared custom kernel and Mesa branches for adventurous users. Do note that these branches won’t be maintained much, and are entirely experimental, not as well-tested as the SteamOS kernel, and probably won’t yield the same performance improvements.
Still, this is the kind of work that has a material impact for users. Not everyone has a 16GB monster GPU, especially not today with supply chains ravaged and ruined by slopmakers, so it’s great to see the Linux world working to improve performance for everyone, not just the wealthy few.
Buying a vacuum cleaner isn’t as easy as you might think. With so many brands and models to choose from, it can be bewildering. Sticking with established brands isn’t necessarily a safe bet, with past performance being no guarantee that the latest models will be as good. Meanwhile, prices can be deceptive, with some affordable models now closing the gap on top-of-the-range brands when it comes to cleaning performance.
You can’t know all this by browsing through a department store or online. The ideal thing to do would be to take a few models home to try them out – but good luck persuading anyone to let you do that. Thankfully, you won’t have to try because I’ve tested an array of models for you. I’ve measured each one’s ability to perform a range of real-world cleaning jobs, so you can discover the best vacuum cleaner for you.
Co-created by a developer and his sewing-obsessed partner, this design game is ‘the most technically challenging’ its lead programmer has ever made
When Jonathan Hau-Yoon wanted to make something as meaningful as the environmental strategy game Terra Nil, he turned for inspiration to his longtime partner. Sabrina Becker had worn a dress she made herself to their very first date, and would have studied costume design abroad had hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (a connective tissue disorder I also have) not put those plans on hold.
The pair developed a concept around the creative decisions involved in dressmaking, like trying to fit pattern pieces on to available fabric while observing the grain line (the direction of the thread in woven fabric). Other decisions followed: a 3D model on which to place garment pieces, buttons and trims with which to decorate them, clients with commissions as creative prompts.
There are many tech irritants that are a scourge of modern life, yet we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them ... until now
The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user”. Essentially, it is the thing (or more often, things) you have to click away in order to read the thing you wanted to read. It is the “accept cookies” box, the “allow notifications?” box, the “sign in with Google” box, the pop-up video box, etc.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that dickovers are the only terrible thing about technology in 2026. Until now, though, we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them, so here are some suggestions.
The former Dallas Cowboys star is on indefinite leave after being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving. His future in a competitive business is now in doubt
After Tony Romo’s arrest last month, TMZ published a 31-minute “extended cut” of the body-camera footage from the Wisconsin police officer who arrested CBS Sports’ star NFL analyst on suspicion of operating a vehicle while under the influence.
It’s an uncanny watch. The former Dallas Cowboys quarterback’s familiar goofy geniality collides with the gravity and stilted formality of an encounter with law enforcement. The video of a disoriented Romo struggling to answer basic questions and failing a field sobriety test, and his rictus-grinning, disheveled, head-askew mug-shot, form a glaring contrast with his smart-suited look a year earlier: beaming as he posed in the spotlight with his play-by-play partner, Jim Nantz, at the network’s preseason media preview.
Politics that worked for Democratic candidates in New York, Minnesota, Michigan won’t cut it in red Florida, analysts say
If primary elections elsewhere this summer were tussles between progressives and moderates for the direction of the Democratic party’s political future, Tuesday’s contests in Florida could not be more different.
In a former swing state that has in recent years become reliably red, moderate Democratic candidates Alex Vindman and David Jolly are heavily favored to become the party’s nominees for November’s Senate and governor’s race, respectively.
Authorities blamed Nanner for knocking over a heat fixture, but Brittany Jacobs contends it was trying to escape blaze
The snake didn’t start the fire. So says a Virginia science teacher who owns a python that was found outside its enclosure in a middle school classroom that caught fire recently.
Authorities, meanwhile, have publicly blamed the fire on the snake, named Nanner, alleging the python knocked over a heat fixture in her owner’s classroom, igniting a blaze that caused damage at Bedford county’s Forest middle school and killed a tortoise there.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents appear to have worked directly with government officials in Iran to deport over 100 Iranian nationals as the United States prepared to bomb their home country, according to a newly released trove of internal emails from ICE.
In the process, immigration officials indicate they complied with an Iranian request to repatriate three specific people who were living in the United States.
Hundreds of emails spanning from May to November of last year show ICE officials, operating under the orders of then-Acting Director Todd Lyons, scrambling to put together plans for three controversial charter flights to Iran in the clearest picture yet of the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes planning for the trips.
The flights delivered more than 100 people to an uncertain fate in Tehran just months or weeks before the U.S. and Israel launched their current devastating war, which has to date killed thousands of Iranians. While Israel and the United States bombed Iran during the Twelve-Day War last year, the flight planning remained ongoing. The coordination marked a reversal in decades of immigration policy toward Iranians, who were typically allowed to remain in the United States, even with a final removal order, due to fear of persecution from a regime U.S. leaders have accused of wantonly murdering its own citizens.
The emails, which were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, and provided exclusively to The Intercept, show heavy pressure from high-ranking Trump administration officials to make the flights happen; discussion of coordination between ICE and Iranian officials, often through Qatari intermediaries but at times directly; and even an apparent mix-up in which ICE officialsaccidentally put the wrong person on a deportation flight bound for Iran.
Iranians were already under increased targeting by ICE, according to data obtained by NIAC. The timing of the about-face from long-standing policy was particularly cruel, said Jamal Abdi, the group’s president.
“It seemed clear that Iranians were under the microscope all of a sudden,” Abdi told The Intercept. “And we now know that it was actually in the middle of the [Twelve-Day] war where the White House was directing ICE to start removing Iranians.”
“We now know that it was actually in the middle of the [Twelve-Day] war where the White House was directing ICE to start removing Iranians.”
Each flight arrived in Tehran carrying at least a dozen deportees, including political activists and ethnic and religious minorities who had good reason to fear persecution upon arrival. Many of the people flown to Tehran were transported against their will, including one man who later told the New York Times that he attempted suicide before the flight and ICE agents physically forced him onto the plane.
The bulk of the emails released to NIAC illustrate the planning and execution of the first mass deportation to Iran on September 29, 2025.
Most of the correspondents have their identities and contact information redacted, with the exception of officials such as then-acting director Lyons, head of removal operations Marcos Charles, then-deputy director Madison Sheahan, and Joshua Coster, whose email signature identifies him as the ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations — attaché at the agency’s U.S. Embassy branch office in Tel Aviv. In the run-up to the flight, Coster appears to have acted as the primary liaison with the Qatari government in back-and-forths over landing permits, passenger manifests, and details of the transfer in Doha to the final leg of the journey on a Qatar Airways charter. His level of involvement, Abdi said, “reveals how integral the ICE office in Tel Aviv has been to this transnational network of ICE officers removing people from America.”
In one of the most confounding episodes that took place during the first flight, Coster informed his colleagues that an Iranian national not included on the final list of deportees somehow wound up on the plane to Doha.
“An Iranian national not included on the final manifest we sent to Qatari MOI was boarded on the flight,” Coster wrote to colleagues on September 30, 2025. “This is unfortunate.”
“I have no idea how the case/person got through to the plane,” one of Coster’s colleagues responded.
Screenshot: ICE emails provided to NIAC via FOIA / Illustration: The Intercept
After the stopover in Doha, the accidental passenger was sent to Iran anyway.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, declined to comment on the apparent mix-up.
Formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran have been severed since 1979, and communications between the two nations have typically taken place either through intermediaries or through Iranian representatives operating out of the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C. That made the issuance of travel documents necessary for deportation nearly impossible, and Iranians were often allowed to remain in the country indefinitely.
Yet the move to begin deporting Iranians took place at a time in which relations between the U.S. and Iran were at a particularly low point.
Screenshot: ICE emails provided to NIAC via FOIA / Illustration: The Intercept
The so-called Twelve-Day War was in full swing when, on June 19, 2025, the orders came down to ICE officers to begin putting plans into motion.
In an email sent from his BlackBerry to Charles and Sheahan that day, Lyons directed his underlings to “launch target cases as a priority.” Less than an hour later, Charles forwarded Lyons’s missive to several ICE officials and included marching orders of his own.
“Please begin working on a plan to remove all removable FO [final order] Iranians in custody,” Charles wrote. “We need a plan forward ASAP.”
In a series of emails among ICE officials, all of whose names were redacted, the pressure to develop a plan was clear. One staffer, whose email signature listed them as an assistant director of the ERO’s removal division, appeared pessimistic about the timing.
“Unfortunately I do not have great news,” wrote the staffer. “I’ve learned from the team that Iran is currently uncooperative and does not issue [travel documents] in a timely manner.”
As a result, the staffer told Charles, “removal will prove difficult.” To make matters worse, “due to the current conflict, the airspace in Iran is closed to all ( not just U.S.) until further notice,” wrote the official. “Neighboring land borders are also a challenge.”
Screenshot: ICE emails provided to NIAC via FOIA / Illustration: The Intercept
Still, in other emails, the assistant director urged colleagues to press ahead with the orders.
“Please initiate conversations with [the Department of] State first this [sic] tomorrow,” the official wrote in an email forwarding the commands to his colleagues. “They need to help us identify a solution for this WH [White House] priority.”
Just 24 hours later, however, an ICE official wrote with good news.
“The team has come together and developed a few viable options for removals to Iran,” the official wrote. All of the plans were redacted.
Screenshot: ICE emails provided to NIAC via FOIA / Illustration: The Intercept
Lyons, Charles, and Sheahan did not respond to requests for comment. When The Intercept contacted Coster at his official ICE email address, the reporter received an automatic out-of-office reply indicating that Coster’s area of focus had shifted to North Africa.
For years, Iranians facing deportation from the U.S. have been protected by two realities: the lack of diplomatic relations between the two nations and the threat of retribution at home.
But the Trump administration has dispensed with both roadblocks in its quest for mass deportations, in which Trump has dismantled the asylum system for refugees from almost any country — with the notable exception of white Afrikaners.
“It seems that this administration will stop at nothing to make sure that these physical deportations actually happen, no matter what the cost, and they’ll just turn people over to despotic regimes,” said Hassan Ahmad, an immigration attorney who has represented a number of high-profile people targeted for deportation in recent years. “I’ve been an immigration lawyer a long time, but with this administration, every day it’s a new low.”
It has become virtually impossible for ethnic minorities and political dissidents fleeing persecution in Iran to find safety in the United States, despite Trump’s strident criticism of the Iranian government’s human-rights record.
“Iran commits grievous human rights abuses and arbitrarily detains foreigners, including United States citizens, on spurious charges without due process of law, subjecting them to abuse,” Trump wrote in a February 2025 national security policy memo announcing his administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign. The following January, during a deadly crackdown on protests against the Iranian government, Trump issued messages of support for the people of Iran opposed to the regime — even as ICE agents were set to deport a dozen more people to Tehran later that month.
Amid all its bluster against Iran, his administration was doing everything it could to send Iranians back to that government.In June 2025, according to figures tallied up in an email from Charles, there were 522 Iranian nationals in ICE detention, including 244 who were under a final order of removal, and another 278 who were in removal proceedings. Charles wrote that the agency’s internal portal showed more than 5,000 other cases of Iranians in deportation proceedings who were not in ICE custody.
Around that time, ICE embarked on a dramatic scaling up of detentions of Iranian nationals not already in custody, arresting between 290 and 300 people between June and July of that year, according to NIAC’s data.
“At the same time the U.S. and Israel were plotting a new phase of war with Iran, ICE’s attaché in Israel was coordinating to send asylees back to a government that threatens their lives,” Abdi said. “The people of Iran are wronged at every turn: by their authoritarian government and by the U.S. that speaks as if it is their ally, only to pursue policies that block them from the American dream, impoverish them, and drop thousands of bombs on their country.”
The first war with Iran under the second Trump administration ended on June 24, 2025, and efforts to organize the first flight to Tehran continued apace. Throughout August, ICE agents at field offices around the country made repeated mention of a charter flight scheduled for later that month. But by August 22, that charter appears to have fallen apart.
“It looks like there is some finger pointing going on,” wrote Coster, the ERO attaché then based in Tel Aviv, “because the Qataris, [Ministry of the Interior] and [Ministry of Foreign Affairs], are saying the Iranians did not approve in time.”
A few days later, his colleague was passing on an ask from Iranian officials. “Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest an expedite the removal process,” an ERO officer wrote on August 29, with further specifics redacted. Within a month, the plan was a go.
On September 29, a plane operated by the private contractor Omni Air and brokered by CSI Aviation, neither of which responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment, took off from the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana and flew to Puerto Rico for a brief refuel before traveling on to Cairo, according email records and to data provided to The Intercept by ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First.
After a stop in Cairo, the plane continued on to Qatar, with 54 Iranians onboard, who were transferred to a charter flight operated by the state-owned Qatar Airways. On October 1, at about 11:00 a.m. local time, the Qatar Airways flight arrived at its final destination, at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.
Screenshot: ICE emails provided to NIAC via FOIA / Illustration: The Intercept
For reasons that are not made clear in the emails, the Iranian deportees numbered fewer than half the 120 Iranian nationals that Qatar and Iran were expecting. The Qataris were not happy.
“We would like clarification on why the number of passengers has been reduced from 120 to 54, as this directly affects our internal operations,” wrote a representative of the Qatari Ministry of the Interior in an email to ICE officials. “Last-minute changes are not welcome, especially since we are an intermediary with the Iranians.”
If U.S. officials gave an explanation to Qatar, it does not appear in the correspondence. The emails do reveal the inclusion of an Iranian not slated for the flight — as well as further specific requests from Iran, in which officials appear to ask that certain individuals be sent back to the country.
“The lran Embassy just issued passports or travel documents for the three listed below. They requested they be added to the flight leaving out on the 29th,” an official wrote on September 26, 2025.
Screenshot: ICE emails provided to NIAC via FOIA / Illustration: The Intercept
The description of coordination between representatives of the two hostile nations, and the requests from Iran that individuals be included in the flight appears to bolster claims made in a lawsuit filed last month in federal court by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, which accused ICE of handing over sensitive information to the Iranian government. In court filings, ICE has dismissed those claims as “hearsay.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for DHS again denied sharing sensitive information with the Iranian government.
“These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” the spokesperson wrote. “ICE is committed to ensuring that illegal aliens are informed of their right to communicate with their consular representatives. Consistent with established protocols, ICE provides illegal aliens the opportunity to contact their consular post and facilitates consular access to detained individuals, in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and agency policy.”
The emails end on November 25, when the U.S. was planning a second flight that transited deportees to Iran through Kuwait on December 7. A third flight took place on January 25, again through Kuwait, and a fourth one was scheduled for late March.
According to filings in the lawsuit, it was derailed when, in late February, the U.S. and Israel again began bombing Iran.
Russians are withdrawing billions, causing liquidity problems for banks and undermining the Kremlin’s ability to issue bonds to finance the fight in Ukraine.
Hospitals set up special testing sites to prevent measles patients from spreading the disease in waiting rooms. The virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves. Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images
The U.S. recently reached a grim milestone: As of July 23, more measles cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than in any year since 1991. It took less than seven months to blow past the three-decade high recorded last year.
This potentially deadly disease is easily prevented. Shots are widely available and, in many cases, free. Still, since the beginning of last year, more than 4,850 people here have been infected, and three have died. Among them were two unvaccinated girls in West Texas whose deaths made national headlines.
It may feel like the continuous stream of cases is just the way things are now. But it is dangerous to shrug off the resurgence of measles. In a story I reported earlier this year, I showed what’s happened in parts of the world that have let their guard down to vaccine-preventable diseases. My reporting found that long-forgotten scourges roared back, killing and disabling children. Even countries that made what seemed like subtle changes to immunization policies suffered disastrous consequences years later.
Babies were born blind, deaf and with intellectual disabilities because their mothers caught rubella in the early weeks of pregnancy. Parents saw why diphtheria used to be known as “the strangling angel of children.” Doctors told me they couldn’t undo the damage when these horrors returned. Modern medicine can do a lot of things, but it can’t reverse paralysis from polio.
The story also showed how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, and President Donald Trump have been transforming a government that for decades promoted the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that sows doubts about their safety. Last week, the president issued another executive order that’s sure to fuel further hesitancy about the shot that has protected children from measles, mumps and rubella for decades.
It’s a sharp departure for a government that, since the 1960s and with bipartisan support, built vaccination programs that shielded kids from deadly and disabling diseases. Federal and state health leaders strengthened those policies based on lessons learned from measles outbreaks. That’s because measles, among the most contagious diseases in history, is almost always the first vaccine-preventable disease to strike when immunization rates fall.
Some U.S. schools have set up vaccination clinics as immunization rates have dropped in many parts of the country.Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images
In my many months of reporting for that story, I learned that measles is like the bright dye that plumbers flush through pipes to find leaks in a complex system. The continued appearance of the virus’ telltale rash in state after state since last year warns of cracks in our once-solid protection, leaving communities vulnerable to other deadly contagions.
My reporting also found that access to vaccines may be in peril: Since last year, Kennedy has been considering changes to an obscure but crucial government program that could prompt the few companies that make vaccines for American kids to flee the U.S. market. If that were to happen, even parents who still want vaccines for their kids wouldn’t be able to get them.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the agency has not limited access to vaccines. In an email, the spokesperson wrote, “Secretary Kennedy believes that trust is rebuilt through an open review of safety data, the willingness to ask the hard questions, and ensuring the American people have all emerging information as soon as we know it.”
Several dozen people who’ve worked on U.S. government vaccination programs here and around the world conveyed to me a sense of foreboding about America. They fear that children will wind up fighting for their lives against infections that have long been preventable.
“I think there always was a worst-case scenario,” said Dr. Melinda Wharton, who retired last September after more than three decades leading CDC immunization programs. “I don’t think I imagined it could or would be this bad.”
Doctors I spoke to told me they had seen images of those diseases in textbooks, but these were problems medicine had solved long ago. They never thought they’d see an actual patient until an unvaccinated child lay before them, gravely ill with one of these ancient scourges.
I’ll never forget what one German doctor, whose hospital treated an unvaccinated boy who later died of diphtheria, told me of the infection: “It was taught as history,” he said.
Here in the U.S., measles was taught as history, too. Now it isn’t.
We’ve been covering public health and vaccine policies for years. Let me walk you through reporting from my colleagues and me that helps show how we ended up here and where we might go.
In 2020, I reported with my colleagues on how the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by COVID-19, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders. And we also foreshadowed how the government’s response to COVID-19 led to a loss of trust in public health institutions — a lingering resentment that RFK Jr. has tapped into. (The CDC and the White House declined to comment on this story.)
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I learned that CDC leaders ordered staff not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles was high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates were lagging.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the disease that had then infected fewer than 500 people in 19 states, the records show. (At the time, the CDC told us that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know” and that the agency continued to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”)
Not long after I broke the news about the buried measles forecast, I learned more about a vaccine program that RFK Jr. plans to overhaul, one that’s vital to Americans’ access to immunizations. I showed how dramatic changes to this little-known program — which offers payouts for people who suffer rare side effects from shots without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent — could prompt vaccine makers to stop selling them here.
(HHS declined to answer detailed questions about Kennedy’s plans. Previously, an HHS spokesperson had said that Kennedy is “not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety.”)
That story laid bare how surprisingly fragile the nation’s vaccine system is. Kennedy still hasn’t revealed what he plans to do.
Two Stanford epidemiologists had modeled the scenario. My colleague Lucas Waldron created a chilling visualization that allowed us to depict how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available.
ProPublica shared the key findings of that scenario with HHS. An agency spokesperson didn’t address the modeling but said “HHS has not limited access or insurance coverage to any FDA-approved vaccines” and routinely recommends the shots for children.
As measles cases continued to rise, a team at the CDC was investigating whether the disease has become endemic in this country again. In June, my colleague Nat Lash and I showed how hard it will be for them to prove that it isn’t, after what Nat found when he analyzed the genetic code of cases around the country.
A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency was conducting a more comprehensive investigation and that genetic sequences “alone cannot determine whether” measles is endemic.
The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too.
With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that.
I have never spent this much reading about and pondering a technology seemingly nobody liked and that I never really used. I still think there’s merit to the idea of screen on a keyboard, but only if the screens are integrated into the individual keys (as some products have tried over the years). Of course, this would also be astronomically expensive, delicate, and virtually impossible to repair, so I’m not sure something like that can be reasonably made at an affordable price.
AleRunner writes: "Solar has been doing the 'heavy lifting' to help Europe meet its energy needs amid a string of blistering heatwaves," Euronews tells us. Meanwhile, as Europe's energy demands rise with the heat, jellyfish have been causing shutdowns and reduced power output at multiple reactors at French nuclear plants, as we already discussed. Euronews reports: A new analysis from energy think-tank Ember found that solar output in European countries rose by up to 17 percent on heatwave days in June and July. Researchers say that this helped power the grid as electricity demand increased by as much as a quarter on hot days. Heatwaves often trigger a spike in electricity consumption due to the sudden need for cooling, mainly from energy-intensive air conditioning (A/C) units.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that space cooling, which is mostly A/C units and fans, consumed around seven percent of the world's electricity in 2022. Even in countries where A/C ownership is low, countries experience energy demand spikes when scorching temperatures hit. During the early summer heatwaves of 2025, France, for example, recorded an evening electricity peak that was 25 percent above the off-season average due to air conditioning.
Ember's analysis found that during the late-June heatwave this summer, daily electricity demand rose byup to 28 percent in Italy, 23 percent in Hungary, 14 percent in France and 13 percent in Spain compared with pre-heatwave days. It says as heatwave-driven demand increased, solar was the only major power source to perform "better than usual." Compared with other days in June and July, average daily solar generation during the heatwaves was 17 percent higher in France and Hungary, five percent higher in Spain and the same in Italy.
State attorneys general allege that tech company intentionally designed addictive products that harm young people
More than half of the states in the US have joined together in an unprecedented lawsuit against Meta that goes to trial on Tuesday, accusing the parent company of Instagram and Facebook of deliberately designing addictive products that lured in young people and caused them harm.
The jury trial is taking place in federal court in Oakland, California, and is expected to last between six and eight weeks. The jury is expected to hear from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and employee turned whistleblower Arturo Béjar.
South Korea’s president has renewed his push to regain independent control of the military from the US in the event of war and urged faster progress in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines after Donald Trump’s order to cut joint drills.
On Sunday night, Trump instructed the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” this week’s joint military exercises with South Korea, saying the nuclear-armed North “has been unthreatening and respectful” and that the US president had a “very good relationship with Kim Jong-un”.
Marta Kostyuk and Peyton Stearns beat American pair 6-2, 1-6, 10-8
Serena and Venus enjoy ‘fun’ on-court reunion despite defeat
One game into the family reunion of the decade, Venus Williams launched herself inside the baseline in her single-minded pursuit of a puffball second serve. For a brief moment the Cincinnati Open was transported back 15 years. Williams pounded her forehand return directly at the right hip of her opponent Marta Kostyuk, instantly eliciting gasps from the audience as she snatched the point. Back when the Williams sisters spent their spare time racking up grand slam titles for fun, this was how they dealt with most adversaries.
In the end, Venus and Serena’s first doubles match together in four years, and only their second in the past decade, ended in a rollercoaster 6-2, 1-6, 10-8 defeat to Kostyuk and Peyton Stearns, another wildcard pair and two formidable singles players. For once, the result did not seem to matter.
Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen?
One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight.
But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere. It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have turned out differently. They still can. And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia. And they worried it might turn out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos. Why didn’t anyone listen?
The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorise, and reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I have met have malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions – facts of which they are blissfully innocent.
A quarter century before 9/11, an upsurge in global terrorism prompted the historian David Fromkin to examine its purpose and method. Terrorism was a strategy of the weak, Fromkin wrote in these pages, but modern technology had enabled it “to enter the political arena on a new scale.” And its surprising success seemed to be due, in large part, “to a miscomprehension of the strategy by its opponents.”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Buy now, pay later" loans took off during the pandemic as a way for online shoppers to go on retail splurges without using a credit card. Now, lenders are offering the loans as a means for people to finance basic households needs. The lending apps Flex and Zip allow customers to take out loans to pay for their broadband, electricity, health insurance, mobile phone service, mortgage and water bills. Affirm, one of the most popular pay-later apps, has started providing some tenants loans to extend their monthly rent payment for a few weeks. Many dentists, veterinarians and medical clinics now often offer instant pay-later financing, and Intuit this year started promoting "File Now, Pay Later" loans to TurboTax users who owe money in their tax return.
Pay-later loans are becoming the "working capital for the modern middle class," said Karen Webster, the chief executive of Pymnts, a news and market research company for the payments industry. "Consumers are using it more for essential, everyday things." Americans spent $160 billion last year through pay-later loans, according to research released recently by Federal Reserve economists -- nearly twice what consumers spent two years earlier, in 2023. That's still a fraction of the more than $3 trillion U.S. shoppers spend annually on consumer credit cards. But the industry continues to expand by double-digit rates each year.
How much of that growth reflects consumer preferences, versus desperation, is a question economists and industry analysts are trying to unravel. The rise in pay-later financing comes as many households are leaning more on debt to keep up with their daily expenses. Paying interest -- to afford basic needs -- adds to the overall cost of living, which has already been rising amid higher medical, housing and fuel costs. For many borrowers, the loans have become their only option: Half of those using them said they could not make ends meet otherwise, according to the latest edition of a survey that LendingTree, a loan marketplace, has compiled for years.
Family were set to sell stake to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner
Jeanie Buss is reportedly challenging her siblings’ attempt to sell the family’s remaining stake in the Los Angeles Lakers.
Hours after the Buss family released a statement revealing their intention to sell their 17.8% ownership of the franchise to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, CNBC and ESPN reported that Jeanie Buss’s lawyer sought to halt her siblings’ sale on legal grounds.
CNN says attack ‘beneath the office’ after Kristen Holmes asked president about Jon Ossoff’s comments on key aide
The White House launched a personal attack against a CNN reporter on Monday with a social media post that mentioned her children and accused her of asking a “disgusting and inhumane question”.
A White House post targeted Kristen Holmes, a senior White House correspondent for the network, after she asked Donald Trump to respond to a widely shared comment by Democratic senator Jon Ossoff in a speech on Sunday.
Republican senator Thom Tillis deplored Trump’s decision to cut US military drills with South Korea, which comes despite military officials from both countries warning that Kim Jong-un’s regime is learning new battlefield expertise, including new drone tactics, from assisting Russia with its war in Ukraine.
South Korea has been a solid military ally for over 70 years that possesses exquisite military capabilities. Reducing joint exercises with South Korea does nothing more than free up thousands of North Korea’s troops to support Putin’s systematic kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of innocent Ukrainian citizens.
U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that the Trump administration's move to divert funding and cancel a plan to move the FBI to Maryland was "arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with law."
On Monday, Judge Gregory Carro issued an order giving prosecutors until Oct. 9 to respond to Mangione’s lawyers’ motion that the state charges be dismissed.
President, who has decried mail-in ballots amid false claims of election fraud, issued March order to curb voting by mail
Donald Trump voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary, Politico reports, citing Palm Beach county voting records. The White House has confirmed the president’s mail-in vote, according to the New York Times, which added that this was at least the third time the president has mailed his ballot.
In March, the president signed an executive order restricting the use of mail-in ballots ahead of the November midterm elections that will decide control of US Congress. Trump has repeatedly criticized mail-in voting, calling for restrictions on the policy for years and falsely claiming that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud.
BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, Texas — The Trump administration has temporarily halted all border construction inside Big Bend National Park after bipartisan opposition from Texas officials, residents and conservationists over new roads, barriers and surveillance infrastructure.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott announced Monday that work would stop while he conducts a personal “on-the-ground evaluation” and meets with local officials, community members and law enforcement.
The pause follows weeks of criticism after heavy equipment began clearing land in the remote West Texas park. Earlier plans for a 30-foot border wall inside Big Bend had already been abandoned, but CBP continued preparing for patrol roads, vehicle barriers, lighting and surveillance technology.
Opposition has crossed party lines. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he discussed the project with federal officials, while Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether extensive construction is necessary in terrain already dominated by steep cliffs, desert and the Rio Grande.
Big Bend historically sees far fewer illegal crossings than many other sections of the southern border, and crossings there have fallen further during the past two years. Critics argue the relatively low numbers make environmental disruption particularly difficult to justify.
The administration has not said how long the pause will last or whether portions of the project will ultimately be canceled.
Scott said CBP remains committed to border security while also protecting “the natural beauty and cultural significance” of the national park.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. national debt is approaching $40 trillion, a record milestone that economists warn reflects years of rising deficits, higher borrowing costs and repeated failures by both parties to confront the government’s long-term fiscal imbalance.
PBS NewsHour reported that annual interest costs on the debt now exceed $1.2 trillion, meaning the federal government spends more servicing past borrowing than it does on national defense.
The debt accelerated during major economic shocks, including the 2008-09 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, but has continued climbing even outside emergencies. Recent administrations have added to the imbalance through a combination of higher spending and tax cuts, while Congress has repeatedly avoided politically difficult changes to major programs or revenues.
The warning comes as the Congressional Budget Office projects a roughly $2.1 trillion federal deficit for fiscal 2026, about $200 billion more than it forecast earlier this year. Rising Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending, weaker corporate tax receipts and sharply higher interest expenses are contributing to the shortfall. (cbo.gov)
Fiscal watchdogs warn that continued borrowing could eventually mean higher taxes, deeper spending cuts or both. The risk is not that a crisis is imminent, but that delaying action makes the eventual adjustment more painful.
PBS noted that the debt is already on track to approach $50 trillion within several years if current trends continue.
Author Adam Johnson criticises Waverley council saying ‘reality is often upsetting’ while Palestinian group says libraries should hold ‘challenging’ books
A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack.
Waverley library at Bondi Junction is in the same council area as Bondi beach.
The Loco Beach Coconuts and Texas Tailgaters played the first ever Banana Ball series in Wilmington, Delaware, from August 13 – August 15.
Fans enter the plaza before the gates to the stadium officially open for the game.
A young fan dressed as a Banana walks around the plaza pregame.
Delaware resident Mike Husni came dressed in a hot dog costume to see Banana Ball in person for the first time.
Husni meets Tailgater assistant coach Andrew Bartman pregame.
A couple young Banana Ball fans pose for a picture with their signed yellow baseballs. Players from both teams spent over an hour in the plaza signing autographs before the game.
The Hulagans share the stage with the Coconuts’ traveling band “Sitting on Saturn” during the Loco Beach Live Show during the pregame festivities.
Tailgater head coach Joe Mikulik (No. 00) and Coconuts assistant coach Anthony Marks pose for a selfie with a group of fans on the field pregame.
Texas Tailgater Zach Watson leads off the first Banana Ball ever played in Delaware.
Coconuts Peyton Chatagnier (No. 1) fields the throw down to second on Sal Jacobo’s (No. 2) shoulders during warmups.
Tailgater outfielder Travis Moniot (No. 16) bumps the ball into the air to intiate a trick play out between him and Jordan Hussein (No. 5).
Hussein completes the trick play out, catching the ball in his cowboy hat.
Catcher Ashby Vining (No. 11) looks into the Loco Beach dugout ready to celebrate after driving in a walk-off run in the bottom of the first inning. Banana Ball rules require teams to win the inning to earn a point. The team with the most runs in an inning wins the inning and the point.
(To read more about the Banana Ball experience click here.)
Coconut players Grady Morgan (No. 31) and Dane Tofteland (No. 23) recreate the scene from “Titanic” after Tofteland as hit by a pitch.
Coconut outfielder Gideon Antle (No. 18) just barely gets a hand in before the tag from Tailgater catcher Taj Porter (No. 26) winning the fourth inning for the Coconuts. They led, 2-1, through four innings.
A pair of dualing fathers pick up their youngest children on first base as they race around the diamond to collect there children before reaching home during the fourth inning. The two dad’s hilariously “forgot” their middle child on second base.
Both teams broke out into an impromptu water balloon fight during Nick Lopez’s (Tailgaters’ No. 9) at-bat. Lopez was not allowed to step out of the box because a rule of Banana Ball requires the hitter to stay in the box no matter what. If the batter steps out of the box the batter is out.
Tailgater Kyle Martin (No. 27) gets the handoff from his head coach on his way home after hitting a solo home run.
The stadium goes dark in the middle of the eighth as the teams and crowd sing along to “3 Little Birds” by Bob Marley.
Tailgater Jose Gonzalez (No. 28) celebrates after getting a hit. The Tailgaters ended up winning the game, 6-3.
All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work check him out on Instagram @bfr_photo
Person dies after landslide hits apartment building in southern city of Geoje as torrential rains lead to power cuts and mass evacuations
Torrential downpours that pounded southern parts of South Korea since Saturday have killed one person and injured four others, officials have confirmed.
Heavy rains have been recorded in South Gyeongsang province, including the city of Geoje, where an 800mm (31in) deluge over the weekend triggered a landslide, the interior and safety ministry said. The rain continued on Monday, bringing the cumulative rainfall total to 912mm by 6pm.
Shasta county, hotbed of US election denialism movement, set to appoint ex-Colorado clerk who served prison term
A northern California county that has become a hotbed of activism for those who sow doubts about the reliability of voting machines plans to hire Tina Peters, the prominent Colorado election denier recently released from prison, to work on elections.
Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta county, told the Guardian he plans to hire Peters as a consultant to replace Brent Turner, his top deputy, who has been on medical leave. He said Peters would not have access to the county’s voting system and did not directly respond when asked what her responsibilities would be. Plans to hire Peters, who is still on parole and must receive permission to travel outside Colorado, were first reported by Action News Now.
Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murdering her children, but her attorneys don't deny that she caused the deaths of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan.
Lindsay Clancy's Massachusetts murder trial resumed Monday in Plymouth Superior Court. Clancy's mother and sister were on the stand after the prosecution rested its case.
President hosts Nathanial Rai and lifeguard Ryder Williams at White House after video of California rescue went viral
Nathanial Rai had been swept off his feet along the California coast, was rescued by a 16-year-old lifeguard – and was now sitting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump.
Of the rescuer, Ryder Williams, Trump said to Nathanial: “He’s a real hero. I don’t know if I’d do it.
The baby was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which requires a series of surgeries. The parents had asked the surrogate to get an abortion when they learned of the diagnosis.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court today rejected Verizon's attempt to get a $47 million refund from the Federal Communications Commission. In a list of orders (PDF) issued by the court, Verizon's petition was denied without explanation. The denial apparently ends any possibility of Verizon asking a lower court to review the fine and order the FCC to issue a refund. However, AT&T and T-Mobile are continuing to challenge similar fines on grounds that selling device-location data did not violate US telecom law.
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were fined a total of $196 million in 2024 for selling mobile users' real-time location data without their customers' consent. The carriers sold device-location information to data aggregators, who resold it to other firms. The carriers paid the fines and sought to have them overturned in courts, claiming their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial was violated. Challenges by AT&T and Verizon were combined into a single case, and the Supreme Court ruled against the carriers in June of this year.
The court ruled that the FCC penalty process does not violate the Seventh Amendment because the carriers could have obtained jury trials if they refused to pay the fines and waited for the government to try to collect. The ruling (PDF) against the carriers was 8-1, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.
The Sydney Swans coach, Dean Cox, says he is “extremely disappointed” as the team and the AFL face a decision on whether to stand down several Swans players under investigation over an alleged sexual assault.
Victoria police attended the Pullman Hotel in East Melbourne on Monday and said they were investigating a report of sexual assault in the early hours of the morning.
Prosecutors accuse Duane Davis of orchestrating 1996 shooting in retaliation for attack by rapper’s entourage
The trial of a former gang leader accused of orchestrating the 1996 killing of rap star Tupac Shakur began in a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday, featuring testimony from a witness to the shooting and a former police officer.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis is on trial for murder for his alleged role in the shooting of Shakur, who died after a drive-by shooting. Prosecutors allege Davis was the “on-the-ground, on-site commander of the effort to kill Tupac” and that he planned the shooting in retaliation for Shakur’s entourage attacking Davis’s nephew.
Nurses, medical experts and green campaigners reject party deputy leader’s dismissal of efforts to reach net zero
Reform’s deputy leader has been accused of spreading misinformation after he dismissed efforts to tackle the climate crisis and urged British people to enjoy the warmth of the recent heatwaves.
Richard Tice prompted a backlash from nurses, medical experts and green campaigners on Monday after he told a press conference he believed it was “arrogant” to try to stop the climate emergency, while encouraging people to focus on upsides such as better English wine.
The ship’s crew lost access last month to drinkable water, running toilets and air conditioning, as the fleet sees heavy use by the Trump administration.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Navy awarded Raytheon a $22.9 billion, multi-year contract to accelerate production of Tomahawk cruise missiles, aiming to build more than 1,000 of the long-range strike weapons a year.
Apple Wallet's driver's license and state ID feature is set to expand to North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia, bringing the total to 18 states plus Puerto Rico. The digital IDs can be used at participating TSA checkpoints and businesses without handing over or unlocking an iPhone, though users are still generally advised to carry a physical ID because acceptance remains limited. MacRumors reports: A few days ago, North Carolina's DMV announced that it plans to launch a mobile ID program later this year. As reported by WRAL, North Carolina residents will be able to set up a digital ID through a new NC Wallet app starting in December, with Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, and Samsung Wallet support to follow in "early 2027." As mentioned, you do not need to unlock, show, or hand over your device to present an Apple Wallet ID in person, ensuring user privacy.
Apple Wallet IDs are generally not accepted by law enforcement, so carrying a physical ID is still legally required for traffic stops. In addition, the number of businesses that accept Apple Wallet IDs is still quite small. At least for now, Apple Wallet IDs are designed to be a convenient alternative where they are accepted. "Your mobile ID is a valid form of identification in North Carolina," the DMV said, in a FAQ on its website. "However, as retailers, restaurants and other businesses transition to mobile IDs, some may not be set up to accept them right away. For now, carrying your physical card gives you a backup when needed." According to code seen by MacRumors, Apple Wallet IDs are also coming to Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia, but there is no timeframe for availability.
Paula Musgrove stated her daughter had said medications were ‘destroying’ her mind and she was becoming ‘paranoid’
The defense in the Lindsay Clancy filicide case called the defendant’s mother as one of its first witnesses Monday, after three weeks of prosecution evidence laid out, in often harrowing detail, events surrounding Clancy’s killing of her three children.
Under questioning from defense attorney David Reddington, Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, testified that her daughter’s statements and actions had unsettled her in the months leading up to 24 January 2023.
Previous winners of the award have included Saint Peter, Attica, Orana by the late Jock Zonfrillo, and Quay
Armenian-Lebanese eatery Zareh has been named Gourmet Traveller’s restaurant of the year, in a category of the annual industry awards that has historically been dominated by European-leaning cuisine and fine-dining establishments.
The restaurant’s menu pulls from the Armenian, Egyptian and Lebanese backgrounds of co-owners Tom Sarafian and Jinane Bou-Assi: aish baladi (Egyptian flatbread) is made with flour milled in the Mornington Peninsula; kafta nayyah comprises raw minced lamb from Tasmania and Victoria; hummus is crowned with spanner crab.
Donald Trump berated a CNN reporter at a press availability, insisting that she 'be quiet' after she asked about a reduction in US military exercises with South Korea. The CNN correspondent, Kristen Holmes, pressed Trump on whether Kim Jong-un had requested a reduction in military activities. When another reporter asked about the extensive accounts of deteriorating living conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln during its lengthy deployment in the strait of Hormuz, the president dismissed the complaints: ' It was fake news reporting from CNN'
After three years of construction, the glistening, state-of-the-art new Hodgson Vocational Technical High School that opens next week is "a place that will change lives for generations," Principal Christine Colihan said.
Move means holders will be able to travel free on local services at any time of day or night from April next year
Disabled people across England will be able to use their free bus passes at any time of day from next April, as Andy Burnham expands a policy he introduced as mayor of Greater Manchester.
The prime minister has said the current weekday restrictions on when disabled people can use their bus passes will be removed from 1 April 2027. Their passes are valid only between 9.30am and 11pm on weekdays, although some councils pay to allow people free travel outside those hours.
Wilmington's Riverfront has been one of the biggest recipients of state bond money for decades now, helping to spur economic development in Delaware's largest city. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Lawyers seek dismissal of state charges after Mangione pleaded guilty in federal case over Brian Thompson killing
A New York state judge on Monday effectively postponed Luigi Mangione’s trial on murder and weapons charges over the 2024 killing of a health insurance company CEO, after Mangione pleaded guilty last week to separate federal charges.
The trial had previously been scheduled to begin on September 8. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to the state charges. Mangione’s lawyers on Friday asked New York state justice Gregory Carro, who is overseeing the state case, to dismiss the charges.
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy first held rare talks with Hamas’s new leader in Egypt over the weekend in his effort to advance the stalled 15-point plan.
(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump says he'll declare the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory, but no federal agency has said what controlling the key oil chokepoint would cost taxpayers.
Deep Origin this month announced that its AI drug discovery framework delivered nearly a 31% hit rate for a cancer immunotherapy enzyme, nearly 100x higher than common machine learning-based approaches. The company said the breakthrough is a function of its approach to combining physics-based simulations alongside AI-based approaches, including new co-folding models.
A big challenge in computational drug discovery is creating models that are accurate as well as generalizable. New co-folding models based on deep learning approaches, such as AlphaFold and Boltz-1, are trained on vast repositories of existing molecules, which boosts the predictive capacity of the model. In some cases, the accuracy of these models can exceed 80%.
Source: Deep Origin
However, when these models are exposed to novel compounds, that accuracy deteriorates considerably and predicting which ligands will fit into which proteins becomes more of a crapshoot. In the real world, AI-based virtual screening methods are credited with discovery about 1% of new drug candidates, thanks to numerous false positives, according to Deep Origin.
Deep Origin seeks to overcome this limitation with its AI drug discovery framework, which spans two products. That includes DODock, an AI-powered and physics-based molecular docking engine, as well as DOScore, its engine for estimating thermodynamic binding affinities across ultra-large chemical spaces.
DODock combines a diffusion model with a physics-based search and refinement stage that’s built on a Vina-style energy function (DOFast) and an enhanced global optimizer. “The goal is to put learned components exactly where they add value (proposing and ranking poses) and keep an interpretable, low-parameter physical model wherever generalization is what matters,” the company says on its website. “Once machine learning proposes candidate poses, a compact physics model refines them, reasoning from how molecules physically interact with each other rather than from resemblance to training data. These refined poses are then ranked, giving our resulting structures.”
The use of physics allows DODock to build on first principles rather than on prior data. This is an important distinction, as it enables the software to maintain its accuracy on novel targets, where AI-only approaches lose accuracy, the company says.
Deep Origin says the combination of AI and physics-based modeling is a key differentiator for its approach. Rebuilding platforms to get established C++ and Fortran-based physics engine to run on GPUs also represents a technical hurdle that not every company will be able to overcome.
“Building physics-ML hybrids requires deep integration across quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics force fields, and differentiable neural network architectures,” the company tells HPCwire. “Most startups lack the architecture and skill sets to blend both.”
Deep Origin co-founders
The company, which was founded in 2022 by Michael Antonov and Garegin Papoian, says it is taking a long view of the challenge of AI-powered drug discovery. It’s not a quick ‘chase milestones’ effort,” the company tells us.
“Virtual screening has been widely used for more than 40 years, yet it has rarely delivered an actual drug,” stated Garegin Papoian, the company’s chief scientific officer of Deep Origin. “The field learned to live with a low accuracy ceiling. We set out to change that by pairing physics with machine learning, ensuring our method holds its accuracy on novel targets where training data alone runs out.”
The zero-leakage split is also an important aspect of how Deep Origin works. It’s common practice in machine learning to hold back a portion of one’s training data for evaluation purposes to avoid “snooping.”
Deep Origin says that, in order to test and validate it AI, it uses a “strict double-similarity filter” that removes any protein sharing 30% or more sequence identity and any ligand exceeding 0.4 Tanimoto similarity. (Tanimoto similarity is a mathematical metric used to compare how alike two objects or sets are, with 1 being a perfect match and 0 being no match.)
Combined, these approaches allow Deep Origin to successfully run virtual screens against novel biological targets without existing crystallographic data (the structural information about atoms, ions, and molecules inside crystalline solids) or known small-molecule binders. The company claims it’s able to maintain 50% to 89% pose accuracy where the pure AI and ML approaches failed.
Source: Deep Origin
The San Francisco company, which has raised $82 million, is publishing an article in BioRxiv on the wet-lab validation work it did in the lab against a synthetic compound library with more than 80 billion compounds. Deep Origin highlighted the results on four compounds in particular, including CD73 (nucleotidase), IRAK4 (kinase), Factor XIa (protease), and IL-17A (protein-protein (PPI) target).
Across all four targets, Deep Origin’s hits “demonstrated high scaffold novelty, with a ECFP4 Tanimoto similarity of 0.22–0.27 relative to known binders. “The screens discovered entirely new chemical matter rather than minor variations on existing drugs,” the company says.
In particular, against CD73, which is important in slowing cancer’s growth, Deep Origin achieved a 30.6% hit rate in finding ligands that pair with the enzyme, which is about 100x better than pure AI/ML-based approaches, the company said.
These results demonstrate Deep Origin’s approach, said Antonov, who is the CEO.
“What matters is how a screen behaves on a target no one has solved yet, so that is where we tested our model with strict splits and cases built to make it fail,” Antonov stated. “How our model performs on those rigorous tests, not on inflated benchmarks, is what dictates how many molecules brought to the bench are likely to be real.”
USS Benfold lost power after ‘engineering casualty’ leaving sailors without galley services, toilets and air conditioning
A US guided-missile destroyer reportedly spent four days adrift and without power in the South China Sea in July, furthering concerns about strain being placed on deployed military members.
The USS Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer which had been sailing with the George Washington carrier strike group, was reported to have been towed to Subic Bay in the Philippines, according to the US Naval Institute News, an independent military publication.
District Court Judge Eric Elliff has ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS in recovering roughly 50TB of archival material stored through now-defunct vendor OSS. "He found that the station is the rightful owner of the materials and entitled to recover them from OSS' storage systems," reports Current.org. Nine PBS must identify a third party to help retrieve the files, pay outstanding storage fees, and ensure that data belonging to other OSS customers isn't disturbed or accidentally recovered. From the report: Under his order, Nine PBS is to identify a third-party vendor, such as a former OSS employee, who can assist in accessing and retrieving the data from the infrastructure that's housed in Iron Mountain's center within 30 days. Elliff acknowledged the complexities of Iron Mountain's position as a vendor to OSS, which, according to Nine PBS' complaint, is in delinquency. Iron Mountain is the "custodian" of Nine PBS' data, but it isn't the vendor that contracted with the station to store and preserve its data. That obligation remains with OSS. Under the order, Nine PBS will pay Iron Mountain current and past-due fees for data storage, starting from when OSS stopped paying Iron Mountain for use of its data storage facility.
During the hearing, Gregory Rich, an attorney representing Nine PBS, said the station seeks access to a physical cage where the data is housed within Iron Mountain's facility. The station is in contact with a former OSS employee who is willing to help obtain the data. The attorney noted that the data could potentially be stored in physical form, such as tapes that could be easily retrieved. But if the materials are on a server, Nine PBS could lose the materials forever if Iron Mountain shuts it down. William Cravens, the attorney representing Iron Mountain, told the judge his client doesn't know the format of Nine PBS' materials that were stored by OSS. He expressed concern about whether Nine PBS' archival material is lumped together with data from other OSS clients. Iron Mountain wants to avoid potentially corrupting the other data, Cravens added.
Elliff ordered the immediate return of any physical devices that hold Nine PBS' data once access to OSS' storage system is granted. If data retrieval turns out to be more complicated -- if it is encrypted, for example -- he will schedule another hearing to determine how to proceed. Once Nine PBS retrieves its data, the station must work with a third party to ensure that no data from other OSS customers is among those materials.
Storm that brought heavy rains and winds damaged at least 100 homes and bridges and left over 100,000 without power
Hawaii residents began to clean up after tropical storm Lala blew past the Big Island, leaving more than 100,000 without power and damaging at least 100 homes and bridges.
Lala was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it grazed the islands, but it brought heavy rains and winds to the Big Island. Hawaii’s total rainfall over 48 hours topped 3.5ft in some areas, according to AccuWeather. The rising floodwaters damaged or swept away about 100 homes in the area, along with six bridges.
El 60% de los aperitivos tienen demasiados ingredientes y muchos estadounidenses ya están buscando opciones más simples. Una encuesta de 2.000 estadounidenses encontró que, para el 66%, entre menos ingredientes tenga un aperitivo, más confianza les genera. Esta preferencia es…
When 18-year-old Nolan Wells went missing, his story immediately touched a nerve in Black families. He was last seen while hanging out with a group of white friends, at a popular beach near Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Wells never came home from the trip, and he was found dead days later. Many questions about how he died remain unanswered publicly. And the mystery surrounding his death has revived an old conversation within Black communities: are we ever truly safe in white-dominated spaces? Who will feel responsible for our children’s safety when we send them out into a world where Black life is not valued? Host Kai Wright talks with historian Stacey Patton and writer Ashley Stoney about why Wells’ story has captured so much attention – and sparked so much anxiety – among Black parents, in particular. What does our collective reaction to Wells’ disappearance and death reveal about the limits of interracial society today?
(The Center Square) – U.S. Customs and Border Protection Chief Rodney Scott said he paused all construction activity in Big Bend National Park and arrived in Texas on Monday to meet with Texas officials and stakeholders in person. He said…
MPs, friends and campaigners gathered to remember former Cambridge professor after his death on Friday
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Trafalgar Square in London to remember and pay tribute to Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who died on Friday.
Stand Up to Racism, which organised the vigil, estimated that 30,000 mourners had gathered in the square to listen to emotional speeches from MPs, friends and campaigners on Arday’s life and legacy and join in a minute’s silence. Many were dressed in black and held flowers, which they were asked to leave beneath Nelson’s column. People also carried placards reading “rest in power”.
Image: Hillary Olson comes to Hagley Museum and Library with nearly 30 years of experience working in natural and cultural history museums, science centers and planetariums. Photos courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library and image created using AI on 8/17/26
Museum innovator Hillary Olson plans to invite employees, visitors, educators and the wider community to help shape Hagley’s future
WILMINGTON — For Hillary Olson, Hagley Museum and Library is more than a place to study what inventors and business leaders accomplished in the past. It is a place where a child, family or researcher can begin imagining what might be possible in the future.
Olson, who became Hagley’s CEO in July, wants to build on that sense of inspiration and discovery as the museum prepares for its next era.
Hagley is now in the fifth and final year of its current five-year strategic plan, which will conclude at the end of 2026. In 2027, Hagley will begin developing its next strategic plan through a collaborative process involving employees, volunteers, board members, visitors, educators, community organizations and other stakeholders.
The new plan has not yet been written. Input gathered during the 2027 planning process will help establish Hagley’s priorities and direction for the years ahead.
“In any strategic planning process I’m a part of, when we say that we’re engaging our stakeholders, it’s not just our board, it’s not just our members,” Olson said. “It is people who don’t visit, because it’s a great time to find out why.”
The effort will consider how Hagley can reach more people, strengthen its educational programs, expand community partnerships and maintain its historic property for future generations.
“I can tell you that it will probably be a visitor-focused strategic plan,” Olson said.
Visitors will be broadly defined to include families, students, museum guests, scholars and researchers who use Hagley’s library.
A career built around museums and stories
Olson comes to Hagley with nearly 30 years of experience working in natural and cultural history museums, science centers and planetariums.
Her original academic background is in astronomy and geology. She later returned to school and earned a master’s degree in museum leadership, bringing together her interest in science with a passion for helping museums tell stories in engaging and understandable ways.
Before joining Hagley, Olson served as president and CEO of the Rochester Museum and Science Center in New York. There, she led an organization with three sites and more than 1.2 million collection objects. Her work included strategic and master planning, capital improvements, fundraising and building relationships with regional communities.
Olson said her passion is helping people engage with authentic artifacts, documents and historic places in ways that encourage them to see history, science and culture differently.
A museum visit, she said, should do more than present facts. It should give visitors an opportunity to encounter an object, understand how it was used and consider what they might create or improve themselves.
That focus on storytelling and discovery made Hagley especially appealing.
Olson had visited Hagley when she lived in Philadelphia and later returned with her young children. She remembered the powder yards, exhibitions and setting along the Brandywine.
When she learned the CEO position was available, she began studying the museum, its library, finances and programs. She was drawn to the complexity of an institution that combines industrial and business history, science, technology, horticulture, historic preservation and public education.
“I saw the wonderful complexity of it all, which is something that I’m drawn to,” Olson said.
Hagley’s board also helped persuade her to take the position. She said its members are open to change and new initiatives while remaining committed to protecting Hagley for future generations.
Inspiration built into the property
Hagley occupies 235 acres along the Brandywine and includes the site of the gunpowder works founded by E.I. du Pont in 1802. Its working machinery, millrace, historic homes, gardens, museum artifacts and collections, and business history archives allow visitors to encounter history through objects and experiences.
Olson sees those resources as tools for inspiring people to ask how things work, how they can be improved and what problems they might solve.
“The historic gunpowder yard is full of STEM,” she said. “It’s an engineering endeavor.”
Visitors can watch water turn machinery installed during the 19th century. They can study small patent models created to demonstrate inventions and improvements. They can also see how science, mathematics and engineering helped transform a gunpowder operation into the foundation of a major American company.
Olson said innovation does not always require creating something entirely new. Frequently, it begins by improving something that already exists.
“You’re not just inventing the wheel; you’re improving the wheel,” she said.
That message could be particularly valuable for children who may not yet think of themselves as scientists, engineers or inventors.
During Hagley’s gunpowder demonstrations, the sound of a small explosion immediately captures people’s attention. Olson said that excitement creates an opening to ask how people solved difficult problems hundreds of years ago — and what problems today’s students might one day solve.
“What are you going to figure out, fourth grader, in your life?” Olson said. “What is the problem that you’re going to solve?”
Bringing classroom lessons to life
Expanding school partnerships is expected to be an important part of Hagley’s planning.
Olson wants the museum to speak directly with teachers about their curriculum requirements and develop field trips that support what students are learning in school. Hagley guides create programs using the working equipment in the powder yards to demonstrate technology concepts that can be difficult to understand from a textbook.
Hagley also offers opportunities involving history, social studies, horticulture, and science. Its DuPont Discovery Loft includes current technologies like 3D printers and space for hands-on STEM activities.
Olson described the goal as providing “hands-on, minds-on” experiences that offer something beyond what children can receive in a classroom.
The programs must be educationally useful because teachers often need to demonstrate that a field trip meets curriculum standards before a school can approve the cost.
Hagley will also expand fundraising to provide free or subsidized field trips for students from underserved communities. Olson said access to transportation and admission should not prevent students from experiencing the museum’s resources.
Expanding partnerships with community organizations could help Hagley reach new audiences while also bringing in expertise and connection, meeting the needs of community members in setting rooted in the history of innovation.
Asking the community what it needs
Olson began listening immediately upon arriving at Hagley.
During her first several days, she sent a survey to the museum and library’s more than 150 full- and part-time employees. She asked what they wanted her to understand about their jobs, what they believed Hagley was doing well and what opportunities they saw for its future.
The responses reflected considerable pride in Hagley and its mission, as well as an interest in more collaboration and connection with each other.
That internal conversation is expected to grow into a broader community discussion when Hagley begins developing the new strategic plan in 2027.
Olson said outreach should include people who attend Hagley’s popular events, families who visit its museum and gardens, teachers who bring students and scholars who travel to Delaware to use the library. It should also reach residents who live in the region but have never visited.
Their absence, she said, is itself valuable information. Hagley must understand whether people are unfamiliar with its programs, do not see something that speaks to their interests or face practical barriers to visiting.
The objective is to make Hagley welcoming and relevant to more people while staying true to its strong connection to northern Delaware.
Local roots and a wider reach
Olson believes Hagley can remain a community institution while attracting more visitors from the broader region.
Its museum audience is largely local, but its library already has a national and international reputation. Scholars travel from around the world to examine its collections of business records, advertising materials and other primary-source documents. Some researchers visit for a few hours, while others remain on campus for months.
Olson sees an opportunity to expand the museum’s regional reach and impact, introducing Hagley to new visitors and people who are traveling to the Brandywine Valley.
But expanding Hagley’s audience will not mean leaving the local community behind.
“Serving the people in the immediate community is step one,” Olson said.
Preserving a complicated historic site
Hagley’s future also depends on maintaining the property that makes its educational mission possible.
Historic buildings, waterways and working machinery require specialized skills and regular investment. Hagley must address rising costs while raising money for capital improvements, operations and educational programs.
The 2027 planning process is expected to examine philanthropic support as well as earned revenue from admissions, memberships and programs.
Olson said Hagley benefits from long-serving employees, dedicated volunteers, support from members of the du Pont family and many other donors, and a board willing to consider change while protecting the institution’s legacy.
That balance — preserving the past while encouraging discovery — helped attract her to Hagley.
Few institutions bring together industrial history, science, a dynamic library and archive, gardens, historic homes and hands-on education in one place. Olson believes those resources can be used to inspire more people to understand how earlier generations solved problems and to imagine what they might make possible themselves.
The answers will come not only from Hagley’s leadership. They will also come from the employees who care for its collections, the teachers seeking new ways to reach students, the families and guests who use its grounds, and the community that surrounds it.
At a glance
What:Hagley Museum and Library’s next strategic planning process
When:Hagley is in the final year of its current five-year strategic plan, which concludes at the end of 2026. Development of the next plan will begin in 2027.
Who will participate:Hagley employees, volunteers, board members, donors and sponsors, visitors, educators, community partners, academics, researchers and people who do not currently visit
Likely areas of discussion: Visitor engagement, educational access, community partnerships, digital engagement, regional growth, fundraising, capital improvements and long-term sustainability
Central question: How can Hagley use its history, library, land and collections to help more people discover what they can create, improve or make possible?
President says US carrier is ‘beautifully maintained’ and calls network ‘fake news’ over reports of poor conditions
Donald Trump claimed he had third-hand reports that the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was “beautifully maintained” despite extensive accounts of deteriorating living conditions during its lengthy deployment in the strait of Hormuz.
At the White House on Monday, the president berated Kristen Holmes, a CNN reporter, at a press availability, insisting that she “be quiet” and describing the reporting as fake news.
(The Center Square) – More than two dozen organizations writing briefs for a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court case on the future of climate change had ties to fossil-fuel linked companies, according to a new report.
(The Center Square) – The president of the Illinois Education Association applauded Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s record on Monday, but other teachers unions have called on the governor to do more for schools.
Hayden Panettiere, who starred in "Remember the Titans" as a child actor and rose to fame in the series "Heroes," has died at the age of 36. The coroner's office says she was found in cardiac arrest.
A group of legislators and state officials gathered in Centre County to discuss the Governor’s Housing Action Plan and potential solutions for outdated, insufficient, or overly expensive housing.
Meta is heading to trial in a case brought by dozens of states accusing it of deliberately designing addictive features, misleading users about safety, and illegally collecting data from children under 13. Meta says the states are seeking penalties as high as $1.4 trillion, though the judge has already called that figure "unreasonable." The case could, however, influence thousands of similar lawsuits against the company. Engadget reports: The trial kicks off Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, after Meta lost a last-ditch attempt to get the case dismissed last week. It could see testimony from top officials at Meta, including Mark Zuckerberg, and could result in record-breaking penalties for the company. The case stems from a 2023 lawsuit brought against Meta from dozens of states, which accused Meta of intentionally creating addictive features and violating consumer protection laws. The action came after a multi-state investigation into the company's safety practices that officials said revealed serious harms to children and teens.
During the trial, federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will hear claims from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey that Meta violated state consumer protection laws by intentionally misleading the public about the safety of its apps. Those four states and 25 others are also suing Meta over alleged violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The states allege Meta broke the law because it knew Instagram and Facebook had users under the age of 13 and collected data about them without permission. [...] For Meta, the stakes are especially high because the company is currently facing thousands of other lawsuits that accuse it of harming users. Juries in Los Angeles and New Mexico have already ruled against Meta in high-profile trials that deal with similar issues. (Meta has said it will appeal in both cases.) Another loss could not only be a financial blow, it could give other lawsuits an easier path forward. And while Meta isn't exactly hurting for money, its legal costs are adding up. The company said it spent $2.4 billion on legal costs in the second quarter of 2026 alone.
The jury in the case has already been selected and opening arguments are set to begin Tuesday, August 18. The trial is expected to last about six weeks. Unlike in a standard jury trial, the eight-member jury will serve in an "advisory" role, as Law360 explains. The judge will have full power over the final verdict and penalties. Along the way, the trial could also see testimony from some of Meta's most visible executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. Both men are likely to testify, according to Reuters. [...] Audio from the trial will be live streamed on the court's YouTube channel. A spokesperson for Meta issued the following statement: "The State AGs may call this a landmark case, but their limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate. The AGs offer no proof anyone in their states was misled, claim benign features like having an additional Instagram account somehow harmed their residents, and attempt to penalize Meta for industry-wide challenges like age verification," the spokesperson continued. "Rather than sticking to the facts or the law, the states have instead decided to chase an outlandish payout. We stand by our record of creating strong protections for teens, and look forward to making our case in court."
Controversial project has faced bipartisan opposition by critics who say it mars pristine environmental area in Texas
Construction on a US-Mexico border project in Big Bend national park has halted, the Trump administration said Monday, as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) evaluates the controversial project in Texas.
“CBP is pausing all construction activity in Big Bend National Park while I visit and conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation,” CBP’s head, Rodney Scott, wrote in a social media post.
Likud’s depiction of Zohran Mamdani is latest move in spat between Israel’s prime minister and New York City mayor
Benjamin Netanyahu’s party has compared the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah on a campaign billboard.
The billboard in central Tel Aviv depicts Mamdani alongside the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the chief of the militant group Hezbollah, Naim Qassem.
Image: State Rep. Josué Ortega and Councilwoman Shané Darby want the Delaware Department of Justice to use its authority to obtain records from the city and its towing contractor and independently examine the program.
Officials cite 19,083 vehicle tows, incomplete financial records and questions about how cars are selected, held and disposed of
WILMINGTON — A state representative and Wilmington City Council member are asking the Delaware Attorney General’s Office to investigate the city’s vehicle-towing and parking-debt collection practices, citing records they say raise questions about financial accountability, enforcement and the loss of residents’ vehicles.
State Rep. Josué Ortega and Councilwoman Shané Darby submitted the referral after reviewing city records covering 19,083 vehicles towed from fiscal years 2020 through 2025.
The officials are not alleging that any individual committed a crime or asking the attorney general to accept their conclusions. They want the Delaware Department of Justice to use its authority to obtain records from the city and its towing contractor and independently examine the program.
“The reason we are asking the attorney general to look at this is straightforward,” Ortega said. “Some of the questions raised by those records can be answered only by an office empowered to compel the city and its towing contractor to produce records that a member of the public cannot reach on their own.”
The Attorney General’s Office had not publicly announced whether it would open an investigation as of Monday.
Wilmington’s tow volume questioned
According to the referral, Wilmington towed more vehicles during the six-year period than all other Delaware municipalities that responded to related public-records requests combined.
The officials said Wilmington’s per-capita towing rate was roughly twice that of comparable Delaware cities.
They contrasted Wilmington’s system with Newark, which generally immobilizes vehicles for parking debt instead of towing them. Immobilization allows an owner to recover the vehicle after resolving the debt without the vehicle being immediately removed and impounded.
The figures and comparisons were presented by Ortega and Darby based on records obtained through Delaware’s Freedom of Information Act. They have not been independently audited by the Attorney General’s Office.
Questions about money collected
A central issue is whether the city can document how much parking debt it collects when a vehicle is towed.
According to the referral, an assistant city solicitor responded to a public-records request by saying the city “does not maintain records responsive to this request” when asked for the amount of ticket revenue collected through towing.
Ortega and Darby said the city’s reported revenue appears to account for a flat vehicle-release fee but does not separately identify payments toward the parking tickets that triggered the tow.
“Delawareans expect that when a government takes a person’s car, the records will show the debt that justified the tow,” Ortega said. “When those records cannot be produced, an independent look is warranted.”
Thousands of vehicles reportedly scrapped
About 29% of all vehicles towed during the period were scrapped rather than returned to their owners, according to the referral. Among vehicles towed specifically for parking debt, the figure was approximately 58%.
Under the city’s arrangement, the towing contractor retains proceeds from vehicles that are scrapped or resold, the officials said. The city then waives the underlying ticket debt when ownership is transferred to the contractor.
Ortega said towing itself is not evidence of misconduct but argued that government must be able to document what happened to a vehicle and the debt associated with it.
“Cities tow cars,” he said. “But how a city tows cars matters.”
Few appeals and no recorded owner victories
The referral also raises questions about the appeals process.
Of approximately 4,564 tows reviewed over an 18-month period, only 30 vehicle owners appealed, according to the officials. None of the records showed an appeal decided in favor of the owner.
Appeals are heard within the same city department responsible for ordering tows and collecting the debt, the referral said.
Darby said investigators should examine whether the process provides vehicle owners with a meaningful opportunity to challenge a tow.
“Why not one appeal is recorded as decided in an owner’s favor — those are questions that require access to records the council cannot reach on its own,” she said.
Uneven enforcement alleged
The officials also questioned how the city selects vehicles for enforcement.
More than 2,000 vehicles reportedly carried balances above the city’s threshold for booting, but only a small percentage were towed during any particular month. Some vehicles with the largest unpaid balances were apparently not targeted.
The referral does not conclude that the differences resulted from favoritism or intentional discrimination. It asks investigators to determine whether the city follows consistent criteria when choosing which eligible vehicles to boot or tow.
Vehicles held for years
Ortega and Darby identified 182 vehicles that were held for more than 180 days after the city ordered them towed under collection-related accounts.
Fifty-eight of those vehicles had no recorded release or final disposition, according to the referral. Some had reportedly remained in the records for more than five years.
The city identified five vehicles as having been disposed of through Justice of the Peace Court lien proceedings initiated by its towing contractor. However, the officials said the contractor’s operational records did not contain corresponding entries documenting a release, sale or other disposition.
One was a 1990 Lotus Esprit whose record reportedly contains only its towing date. The five vehicles had a combined estimated private-party value of at least $55,000 based on current published valuation guides, while the contractor’s records listed each with a zero balance, according to the referral.
Those valuations are estimates and do not establish the vehicles’ condition or value when they were towed.
Earlier review raised similar concerns
The referral contends that questions about Wilmington’s towing records predate the current contractor.
In 2018, an assistant city solicitor told AAA Mid-Atlantic that the city had never received vehicle-sale records from its towing contractor and said monthly reporting would begin.
AAA’s 2019 report examined 3,671 vehicles towed during a 15-month period. It found records of only 468 notices to owners and said 1,320 vehicles appeared never to have been released.
Although Wilmington has since changed towing contractors, Ortega and Darby contend that gaps in recordkeeping remain.
City did not respond before referral
The officials said they presented their questions to the city in July and gave the administration until Aug. 14 to respond or announce an audit. According to their release, the city did neither.
Darby sponsored a 2024 City Council resolution calling for a comprehensive audit of Wilmington’s towing and parking-enforcement practices. The administration declined to conduct it, she said.
Ortega previously worked in the city’s Office of Constituent Affairs from 2016 to 2021, where he said he handled complaints from residents about towing.
“This request is not adversarial to the city of Wilmington,” Darby said. “I represent the city. I want its systems to work fairly, uniformly and lawfully.”
The referral asks the attorney general to determine what the city collects when it tows a vehicle for parking debt, whether payments are reconciled with the underlying tickets, how enforcement targets are selected, whether appeals are handled fairly and what happens to vehicles that are not reclaimed.
At a Glance
What happened: State Rep. Josué Ortega and Wilmington Councilwoman Shané Darby asked the Delaware Attorney General’s Office to investigate Wilmington’s towing, impoundment and parking-debt practices.
Period examined: Fiscal years 2020 through 2025.
Vehicles involved: 19,083.
Vehicles reportedly scrapped: About 29% of all towed vehicles and approximately 58% of those towed for parking debt.
Appeals reviewed: Thirty appeals among roughly 4,564 tows during an 18-month period. None was recorded as decided for the vehicle owner.
Long-term impounds: The referral identifies 182 vehicles held longer than 180 days, including 58 with no recorded release or disposition.
What the officials want: An independent investigation with authority to obtain records from the city and its towing contractor.
What happens next: The Attorney General’s Office must decide whether to open an investigation. The referral itself does not establish wrongdoing.
A day after attributing the decision to a good relationship with North Korea, President Donald Trump also tied the move to South Korea’s refusal to help with the Strait of Hormuz.
NBA is looking into claims of salary cap circumvention
ESPN says league has no proof owner funneled money
Steve Ballmer denies allegations; Leonard trade on hold
The NBA has disputed an ESPN report on the league’s investigation into possible salary cap circumvention by the Los Angeles Clippers.
On Monday, ESPN reported that, after an 11-month investigation, the NBA was not able to show proof that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer funneled money to Kawhi Leonard via team sponsorships to bypass the salary cap. The outlet also said the two sides have been “negotiating a resolution to the investigation”.
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, has accused his Republican opponent of playing a major role in the opioid crisis.
Former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers “helped to architect the legislation that kicked off the opioid epidemic,” El-Sayed said in an Aug. 5 interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
El-Sayed, a former public health official, and Rogers are in a high-profile campaign for the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, a key battleground state that could determine control of the chamber in the November election. Rogers ran for Senate in 2024, narrowly losing to Democrat Elissa Slotkin. He represented Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2015.
Asked for evidence that Rogers sparked the opioid crisis, El-Sayed’s campaign pointed PolitiFact to a bill Rogers proposed multiple times in Congress to increase attention on chronic pain care, parts of which ultimately were signed into law as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
“Mike Rogers was a ‘leading advocate’ in Congress for ‘boost(ing) opioid prescriptions,’” spokesperson Sophie Pollock said, quoting from a 2024 Bridge Michigan article about Rogers’ proposals.
But there’s a timeline problem with El-Sayed’s telling. Opioid prescription and overdose death rates began rising at the end of the 1990s. Rogers didn’t start introducing legislation related to pain care until 2003 and his proposals didn’t become law until 2010. So the legislation couldn’t have “kicked off” the opioid addiction crisis.
Policy experts generally point to a moment in 1996 as marking the beginning of the U.S. opioid epidemic: when Purdue Pharma introduced the pain medication OxyContin and aggressively and deceptively marketed it for long-term use, downplaying its addiction risks.
“You have this multifaceted campaign that gets launched to convince the medical community that we’ve been underprescribing opioids — that the risk of addiction had been overblown, that millions of people are suffering because we’re too stingy with these drugs,” said Andrew Kolodny, an opioid policy researcher at Brandeis University.
In the 2010s, addiction and opioid-related deaths further drove the epidemic as people turned to illegal substances such as heroin and synthetic opioids containing fentanyl.
Rogers proposed legislation to study and broaden pain management
Rogers introduced or cosponsored four versions of the National Pain Care Policy Act, beginning in 2003. The legislation called for greater attention on chronic pain as a public health problem, increased treatment access and more clinician training, including what it described as the “medically appropriate use of controlled substances.”
Rogers said in 2003 that the legislation was intended to “stimulate improvement in pain research and extend accessibility of care to more and more Americans suffering with chronic pain.”
“It was about both increasing sales of opioids, the idea that people who need them are not getting it, but it was also about preventing policymakers from taking actions that would have reduced prescribing,” Kolodny said.
Internal industry documents show opioid manufacturers promoted Rogers’ legislation, often through groups like the American Pain Foundation. A 2004 American Pain Foundation presentation said it “piloted mobilization strategies” and contributed to “strategic planning” for Rogers’ bill. The foundation also held a forum on pain treatment in 2006 “in cooperation with” Rogers, according to a flyer for the event.
Alyssa Brouillet, Rogers’ spokesperson, said in a statement that Rogers worked on the legislation because chronic pain research was fragmented and there was little clinical training or standardized systems for pain treatment. She said Rogers’ experience with bladder cancer and watching his brother suffer from chronic pain informed his perspective.
“He understands the struggle and was in a unique position to fix these problems so that Michiganders could live normal lives, rather than suffering through debilitating pain. And that’s exactly what he did,” Brouillet said.
Rogers’ campaign also pointed to his co-sponsorship of the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005, which set up an interstate prescription monitoring system for controlled substances to prevent abuse. Rogers was one of 34 bipartisan cosponsors on the bill, which became law in 2005.
By the time the National Pain Care Policy Act passed in the House in 2008, Democrat Lois Capps of California was the lead sponsor and Rogers was the original Republican cosponsor, and it passed with broad bipartisan support. That bill stalled in the Senate, but portions of it were written into the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Here’s what that section did:
Called for federal health regulators to convene a Conference on Pain to increase recognition of chronic pain as a public health problem and produce a report on the state of pain treatment in the U.S.
Directed the National Institutes of Health to expand pain research and created a committee to coordinate and advance federal pain research.
Authorized grants to educate healthcare providers about pain assessment and treatment.
What were the bill’s effects?
The legislation didn’t lead to a surge in opioid prescription rates, experts said. Prescription rates that had already been climbing peaked between 2010 and 2012. But they soon began to fall as addiction awareness and scrutiny on prescription practices increased, even as the ACA’s provisions that Rogers advocated for continued. The American Pain Foundation disbanded in 2012 after a Senate investigation into opioid makers and their deceptive marketing and prescribing recommendations.
&&
Opioid overdose deaths continued to rise over the next decade, but that was driven primarily by illicit drugs like heroin and fentanyl, not prescriptions. Deaths from common prescription opioids rose slightly between 2010 and 2017, then declined. Deaths from heroin spiked after 2010, and fentanyl overdoses became the major driver starting in 2013.
&&
Kolodny said Rogers’ pain care legislation was in line with the industry’s efforts to avoid regulations on prescribing practices.
“Even though I do think it’s not an accurate statement to say the legislation kicked off the opioid epidemic, I would say the legislation was an aspect of a campaign that fueled the epidemic and impeded its response,” Kolodny said.
Harry Nelson, a healthcare industry attorney and policy expert, said it’s “absurd” to say the legislation kicked off the opioid crisis and pointed to the origins in aggressive industry marketing in the late 90s.
“If the argument is that Rogers participated in this early-2000s political movement to treat pain more aggressively and reduce barriers to pain treatment, that’s a true statement,” he said. “To suggest that that was kicking off the opioid crisis is irresponsible.”
El-Sayed’s campaign also pointed PolitiFact to two other bills Rogers cosponsored — a veterans pain care bill and a 1995 Michigan law that shielded pharmaceutical companies from legal liability.
Rogers was one of 30 cosponsors on the veterans’ pain bill, and parts of it calling for pain care research and standardization were signed into law in a broad veterans health bill. The Michigan law, passed in 1995 when Rogers was a state senator, covered more than drug companies, but it provided broad legal protections for pharmaceutical manufacturers. The law made it harder for Michigan residents and the state to sue drug manufacturers for their role in the opioid epidemic, Bridge Michigan reported in 2023.
Our ruling
El-Sayed said Rogers “helped to architect the legislation that kicked off the opioid epidemic.”
Health policy researchers point to deceptive marketing of the new painkiller OxyContin in the mid-1990s as the epidemic’s launch point, driving addiction and overdose deaths. As scrutiny led to tighter prescription protocol, around 2014, illicit drugs became the major driver of opioid overdose deaths in the U.S.
Rogers authored drug-manufacturer-backed legislation to study pain treatment and access years after opioid prescription and overdose rates began to climb. It didn’t become law until 2010, when opioid prescription rates were near their peak.
There’s a small element of truth, because Rogers authored and pushed for legislation to research and expand access to pain treatment, including prescription medications. But the legislation didn’t launch the crisis, experts said. We rate the statement Mostly False.
Party wants to cut £50bn from UK welfare bill but charity says proposals would cause ‘horrific levels of destitution’
Hundreds of thousands of children would be tipped into poverty and destitution under plans unveiled by Reform UK to slash £50bn a year from the UK benefits bill, campaigners have warned.
The warnings came after Reform published plans to drastically reduce disability payments, ban non-UK citizens from claiming benefits and introduce compulsory 20 hours a week unpaid workfare for thousands of long-term unemployed people.
US president’s abrupt order to scale back joint exercises with Seoul is meant to ‘flatter’ North Korea’s dictator, top Democrat says
Donald Trump’s move to gut Washington’s 73-year-old military alliance with Seoul has been called “inane” and “shortsighted” as lawmakers warned it risked strengthening Russia’s hand in Ukraine.
The US president abruptly ordered the Pentagon to scale back joint exercises with South Korea just days after North Korea test-fired ballistic missiles, justifying the decision by citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong-un, the nuclear-armed dictator such exercises exist to deter.
After improving significantly in 2024, processing times and pending fiancé visa petitions are on the riseSource: Manifest Law analysis of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services dataThe slowdown in fiancé petition adjudications is beginning to affect the broader K-1 visa system.…
Foreign fiancé petition approvals are well below peak 2024 levelsSource: Manifest Law analysis of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services dataAfter pandemic-era disruptions reduced adjudications and contributed to growing backlogs, USCIS substantially increased K-1 fiancé petition approvals throughout 2023 and the…
Photo Credit: Zayatsphoto / ShutterstockThe K-1 fiancé visa occupies a unique place in the U.S. immigration system. It is a nonimmigrant visa, though it functions as a direct pathway to permanent residence, allowing foreign nationals engaged to U.S. citizens to…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: PJM Interconnection, the biggest U.S. grid operator, proposed on Thursday a new framework that would force data centers to use back-up generators when electricity supply on the grid approaches dangerously low levels. The grid operator's proposal dovetails with President Donald Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a non-binding initiative to protect residential customers from getting saddled with costs related to data center power consumption, PJM said.
A new emergency procedure would notify utilities to reduce or transfer the electricity demand from data centers and other large power users ahead of any action that would shut off traditional consumers such as households. PJM said it does not, however, currently have the authority to curtail power to those sites and would require the cooperation of individual state governments.
PJM manages the electricity for 67 million people in a territory that stretches from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. Its proposal highlights a growing tension between the rapid expansion of data centers and the ability of the nation's power grid to keep up. If PJM cannot close its supply gap, millions of residents and businesses face an increased risk of blackouts, and the cost of new generation could be passed on to other power consumers. At its recent capacity auction, PJM hit its $325-per-megawatt-day price cap but still came up about 6.8 GW short of its projected reliability needs.
With rapidly expanding data centers adding pressure to the grid, PJM has also proposed creating a registry to track their locations and power consumption.
OpenAI has signed a 10-year lease for an enormous Ohio data center that will eventually provide 8 gigawatts of computing capacity and require at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation. According to OpenAI, Nvidia will be supplying the chips and guaranteeing up to $105 billion in lease and power obligations. From the report: The facility -- which will be built and owned by SoftBank's SB Energy -- illustrates the immensity of the computing and power needed to fuel the growth of the AI economy. The data center will have 8 IT-gigawatts of computing capacity, powered by 10 gigawatts of new energy generation, on private land and federal property formerly used for uranium enrichment.
Nvidia -- which will be the exclusive provider of chips to the site -- agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payment obligations to SB Energy, according to an SEC filing (PDF). The so-called "land, power and shell" deal structure could allow for multiple upgrade cycles for new generations of Nvidia infrastructure at the site, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on X.
A massive 9.2 gigawatts of new gas-fired power is ultimately envisioned for the Ohio project, which U.S. officials say Japan is funding under the 2025 trade and investment deal. SB Energy and SoftBank "will build at least 10 GW of new energy generation," a joint announcement from Nvidia, OpenAI and SB Energy states. Nvidia also said today that it's investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy to back its "continued evolution into a leading AI infrastructure developer."
Revelation about security leak follows person pretending to be senior White House aide contacting prime minister
At least three UK cabinet ministers have had their personal mobile phone numbers published online, amid mounting concern over the security of senior politicians after Andy Burnham was targeted by an impersonation scam.
The defence secretary, Wes Streeting, the justice secretary, Alex Norris, and the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Bryant, had their numbers available online with their names.
Ms. Panettiere was in cardiac arrest before she died, the coroner’s office said. In a May memoir, she detailed the difficulties she had growing up in the public eye.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 17, 2026 — HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd., through its wholly owned subsidiary BUZZ High Performance Computing Inc. (BUZZ HPC), today announced that it has signed a five-year GPU cloud services agreement with an investment-grade enterprise customer (all amounts in US dollars, unless otherwise indicated).
The agreement represents approximately $350 million in total contract value over five years and adds approximately $70 million in annualized revenue. This brings BUZZ HPC’s total annualized revenue to approximately $180 million, comprised of approximately $35 million in active, realized ARR today and approximately $145 million in contracted ARR expected to come online through Q4 2026. The contract is expected to generate attractive long-term economics and meaningful recurring cash flow as the cluster reaches full deployment.
Under the agreement, BUZZ HPC will deliver a dedicated AI infrastructure cluster consisting of 2,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs in NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack-scale systems, interconnected with NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking and supported by VAST Data’s high-performance storage platform. The system is being designed in accordance with NVIDIA’s reference architecture to support large-scale AI training, inference and advanced enterprise workloads.
The cluster is expected to become operational later this year at the Bell AI Fabric facility in Merritt, British Columbia.
The Merritt facility is powered by 100% renewable hydroelectric energy and utilizes advanced closed-loop liquid cooling technology, eliminating ongoing water consumption for cooling and reinforcing BUZZ HPC’s commitment to delivering sustainable, high-performance AI compute infrastructure.
Accelerating BUZZ HPC’s AI Cloud Growth
The new contract represents another significant step in the rapid expansion of BUZZ HPC’s AI cloud platform and demonstrates the Company’s ability to secure large-scale, long-term commitments from investment-grade customers.
The five-year term provides BUZZ HPC with long-term contracted revenue visibility while supporting the Company’s strategy of building a portfolio of high-performance accelerated computing infrastructure serving Canadian sovereign AI requirements, global enterprises and leading AI organizations internationally.
The dedicated cluster will support advanced AI training and inference workloads while leveraging BUZZ HPC’s expertise in NVIDIA accelerated computing, high-performance networking, enterprise storage and AI cloud infrastructure.
Attractive Long-Term Contract Economics
The Company expects capital expenditures associated with the deployment (including the accelerated computing cluster and all associated hardware and service warranties) to total approximately $185 million. The Company will receive an upfront deposit of approximately 10% of the total contract value of $350 million from the customer. The approximately $35 million deposit, together with HIVE’s previously announced financing initiatives and additional equipment financing, is expected to support the deployment and optimize the Company’s capital structure.
Upon completion, HIVE will retain ownership of the NVIDIA AI infrastructure, creating a long-lived strategic asset, with potential for continued cashflows. The five-year contract is anticipated to deliver an attractive return on invested capital, with meaningful upside from continued ownership. That value is driven by the long, useful life of NVIDIA accelerated computing, enabled by industry-leading throughput per watt and lowest token cost.
NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure is expected to be delivered and deployed in calendar Q4 of this year, at which point, HIVE’s HPC/AI daily revenue will be approximately $500,000.
Sustainable AI Infrastructure
BUZZ HPC’s AI cloud strategy combines leading-edge computing performance with access to sustainable power infrastructure.
The Merritt deployment will operate entirely on renewable hydroelectric power while utilizing closed-loop direct liquid cooling technology designed to maximize energy efficiency without requiring ongoing water consumption for cooling.
By combining renewable energy, advanced cooling technology and NVIDIA accelerated computing, BUZZ HPC is building AI infrastructure designed to deliver both the performance and sustainability increasingly required by enterprise and AI customers.
Building a Canadian AI Cloud Platform with Global Reach
BUZZ HPC continues to rapidly scale its position as a leading Canadian AI cloud provider, delivering sovereign accelerated computing infrastructure and enterprise AI cloud services to customers in Canada and internationally.
By combining purpose-built AI infrastructure, renewable energy, NVIDIA accelerated computing, high-performance networking and enterprise cloud technologies, BUZZ HPC is building a vertically integrated AI platform designed to support the growing global demand for AI.
The agreement further demonstrates the increasing demand for BUZZ HPC’s infrastructure and the Company’s ability to translate its growing AI platform into long-term contracted revenue.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Aug. 17, 2026 — NVIDIA today announced that it has secured land, power and shell (LPS) capacity through a partnership with SB Energy at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, to host NVIDIA compute. OpenAI will be the customer. SB Energy will build, own and operate the data center under a 20-year lease to OpenAI.
Credit: Shutterstock
Demand for AI is growing at an extraordinary pace. AI is becoming infrastructure, requiring a full stack of critical resources, including LPS. To meet this moment, NVIDIA is securing the LPS capacity at PORTS-Pike to exclusively host NVIDIA AI factories. This unique campus development will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s breakthroughs, enabling communities to drive scientific discovery, health care advances and regional economic development.
OpenAI will utilize the capacity at the site. The AI factory will use NVIDIA’s full-stack DSX AI factory platform, including GPUs, CPUs and networking. The initial deployment is designed to support 4.25 IT-GW of AI factory capacity. NVIDIA has the option to extend the opportunity at PORTS-Pike beyond the initial capacity. The DSX AI factory architecture used at PORTS-Pike will deliver resiliency across the full stack – facilities, hardware, and software together – reducing infrastructure overhead and accelerating time to tokens for the next generation of AI factories.
“AI is becoming infrastructure – the foundation for intelligence in every industry – and land, power and shell have become vital in the age of AI. Now is the time to scale the AI infrastructure that will power the next industrial revolution,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We are securing long-lived infrastructure for NVIDIA compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics.”
“Infrastructure is vital for the AI economy. With SoftBank Group, OpenAI and NVIDIA, SB Energy is building power-first infrastructure at unprecedented scale while strengthening the communities that make it possible – protecting ratepayers, creating tens of thousands of well-paying jobs, and investing in infrastructure to revitalize Southern Ohio that has long shaped America’s future,” said Rich Hossfeld, co-CEO of SB Energy.
“This is going to be a huge site, with enough computing power to help millions of people use AI to do things we can only start to imagine today, from finding new medicines to starting businesses and solving hard problems,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “We’re proud to build it in Pike County, a place that is once again at the heart of American industry and leading the future. We want the people who live here to feel the benefits too, through good jobs, more opportunity for local businesses, and investment in the community for years to come.”
“The next era of intelligence will transform every industry — and require infrastructure built at unprecedented speed and scale. Together with our partners, SoftBank will help unlock the power of AGI and move humanity forward,” said Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp.
Campus to Bring New Jobs and Benefits to Ohio
SB Energy’s PORTS-Pike Technology Campus is reindustrializing the decommissioned Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the surrounding area, bringing a new generation of jobs to Appalachian Ohio, while creating an opportunity for the region to play an important role in the next era of American industry. Spanning private and federal land, the campus is being developed in collaboration with AEP Ohio, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. The planned capacity is expected to come online in phases beginning in 2028.
In support of the surrounding Ohio community, SB Energy and SoftBank will build at least 10 GW of new energy generation, which results in 8 IT-GW of AI factory capacity, and invest at least $4.2 billion in new regional grid infrastructure through an innovative partnership with AEP Ohio designed to protect ratepayers. OpenAI has agreed to build on SB Energy’s originally announced $40 million community benefits fund with an incremental $40 million designed to support local priorities, including affordable energy, job creation and workforce development, and community and economic development.
NVIDIA Invests in SB Energy
NVIDIA will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, joining existing investors SoftBank Group and OpenAI. The investment supports SB Energy’s continued evolution into a leading AI infrastructure developer, while supporting Pike County and other local communities, with the vast opportunity ahead to deliver compute infrastructure at speed and scale.
This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of any securities in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or other jurisdiction.
Advisors
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan served as financial advisors for SB Energy. Morgan Stanley served as NVIDIA’s financial advisor.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
About SB Energy
SB Energy is a leading integrated data center and power infrastructure company purpose-built for the AI economy. The company develops, constructs, and operates gigawatt-scale data center campuses and utility-scale power generation assets. Through its vertically integrated, power-first model, SB Energy addresses the industry’s primary bottleneck and accelerates speed-to-compute, with a focus on community, reliability, and cost discipline. For more information, visit www.sbenergy.com.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is making powerful AI accessible, useful and abundant for people and businesses everywhere to build, solve problems and expand what they’re able to do.
Funding opportunities prioritize foundational research across the sciences and engineering and advance a new portfolio-based approach to grant-making, offering researchers more flexibility in award periods and reducing administrative burden
Aug. 17, 2026 — The U.S. National Science Foundation today released 12 new notices of funding opportunity (NOFOs) providing over $1.5 billion for foundational research, including basic and use-inspired inquiry across the sciences and engineering.
These funding opportunities support the foremost goal in the administration’s memorandum “Ushering in a New Golden Age of American Innovation: Fiscal Year 2028 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities” which calls for investing in the foundational research that remains the bedrock of American science and technology leadership. They also deliver on a central premise of the report Science: A New Golden Age — that America must respond to the forces reshaping the scientific enterprise and create conditions in which exceptional science can occur more often and progress more rapidly. Rather than treating every research question alike, NSF will take a portfolio-based approach to federal grantmaking that deliberately matches funding mechanisms, institutional models, research modalities and grant durations to the character of the research. NOFOs announced today will support a mix of long-horizon awards for ambitious, transformative research and rapid short-term grants to quickly test promising ideas.
NOFOs advance NSF’s core mission to support foundational research that leads to scientific breakthroughs and opens new frontiers of knowledge. NSF investments in foundational research underpin technological innovation across industries, strengthening U.S. economic competitiveness, enhancing national security and improving quality of life for all Americans. The funding opportunities place particular emphasis on bold, paradigm-challenging inquiry, foundational research that forges new connections across disciplines, and projects that harness artificial intelligence, advanced computation and automation to make qualitatively new science possible.
“America’s scientific enterprise is shaped by how we empower researchers to explore the frontiers of discovery,” said Brian Stone, Performing the Duties of the NSF Director. “The investment that we are announcing today will enable researchers to accelerate fundamental research, giving rise to the transformational breakthroughs that will power our future.”
“In Science: A New Golden Age, the administration made foundational research in the sciences and engineering a national priority,” said Michael Kratsios, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “NSF’s investments today ensure the United States continues to drive the scientific breakthroughs that underpin the industries of the future and will support a wider range of meritorious science by matching the size, speed and duration of an award to the character of the research it supports.”
The new opportunities reflect a wider range of R&D funding mechanisms so that the structure of an award better fits the research it is intended to support. Where scientifically justified, researchers are encouraged to request awards of up to five years of support for long-term, ambitious research questions, allowing them to focus on truly paradigm-shifting research instead of producing incremental results to secure the next award. To rapidly test and de-risk novel ideas, researchers are also encouraged to make greater use of NSF’s existing rapid, short-term grant mechanisms.
Many of the new funding opportunities will also enable structured experiments in how NSF supports discovery. NSF plans to rigorously assess and validate whether changes in proposal design, award duration, review methods and funding speed improve the quality and ambition of scientific results. NSF plans to scale these changes over the long term as appropriate, building the metascience capabilities and self-improving scientific enterprise called for in the administration’s FY 2028 R&D budget priorities memorandum.
The new solicitations are shorter, fewer in number and easier to navigate, opening NSF’s funding opportunities to a broader cross-section of the nation and advancing NSF’s ongoing efforts to reduce paperwork burden. They also complement NSF’s announcement last winter that the agency is piloting changes to the merit review process, including new mechanisms to surface unconventional proposals that may not advance through traditional consensus-driven review panels. Early-career researchers are especially encouraged to apply across funding opportunities.
View the full list of new funding opportunities here.
Exclusive: Research also finds stark ethnic disparities, and 40% of deaths among group classed as avoidable
People living with severe intellectual disabilities are dying 24 years younger on average than the wider population, a study has found, with 40% of such deaths being avoidable.
The study also found that within this group, people from minority ethnic backgrounds were dying 14 years younger than their white counterparts.
LISLE, Ill., Aug. 17, 2026 — Molex, a global electronics leader and connectivity innovator, today announced a strategic investment in CAEPlus, Inc., an early-stage company focused on the development of active liquid cooling technology designed to help data centers manage increasing heat loads driven by AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads. This investment advances Molex’s Data Center Thermal Management strategy by accelerating the innovation of CAEPlus’ BoundaryCool platform, a compact, active cooling architecture that addresses next gen GPU/ASIC thermal challenges.
Molex’s strategic investment in CAEPlus accelerates the BoundaryCool active liquid cooling platform to deliver higher heat‑removal performance for next‑generation AI and HPC data centers.
“Advanced thermal management is becoming a critical enabler for the next wave of compute performance,” said Jairo Guerrero, VP and GM, Copper Solutions Business, Molex. “Our strategic investment in CAEPlus reflects Molex’s commitment to supporting innovations in liquid cooling while working with emerging technology leaders to help customers address rapidly evolving AI and compute-intensive data center requirements.”
The strategic collaboration will support continued advancements across the BoundaryCool platform, engineered to deliver significantly higher heat transfer performance and greater reductions in CPU/GPU/TPU chip temperatures compared to passive cold plate solutions while remaining compatible with legacy data center architectures.
“CAEPlus was founded to address the rapid pace of change in data center cooling requirements by enabling an entirely new class of active liquid cooling solutions,” said Milad Bashirzadeh, founder and CEO, CAEPlus, Inc. “In addition to its investment, Molex brings deep engineering expertise and a strong track record of helping scale innovative technologies. We are excited to work together in advancing our proprietary cooling technology and meet unrelenting industry requirements for higher levels of performance and efficiency.”
The addition of CAEPlus technology to Molex’s comprehensive thermal management portfolio offers data center customers a broader range of solutions engineered to address the most demanding computing requirements. As part of the agreement, Molex retains exclusive licensing to apply CAEPlus technology to the Molex portfolio of pluggable I/O solutions. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.
About Molex
Molex is a global electronics leader committed to making the world a better, more-connected place. With a presence in more than 40 countries, Molex enables transformative technology innovation in the consumer device, aerospace and defense, data center, cloud, telecommunications, transportation, industrial automation and healthcare industries. Through trusted customer and industry relationships, unrivaled engineering expertise, and product quality and reliability, Molex realizes the infinite potential of Creating Connections for Life. For more information, visit www.molex.com.
SWORDS, Ireland and CLEVELAND, Aug. 17, 2026 — Trane Technologies, a global climate innovator, and intelligent power management company Eaton today announced a strategic collaboration integrating advanced thermal management and electrical system architectures to help accelerate AI-factory deployment, enhance efficiency and lower costs.
Trane Technologies and Eaton are introducing a first-of-its kind reference design that replaces a traditionally slow, manual and siloed design process with a unified, intelligent system for power and cooling for next-generation data centers. By advancing medium-voltage designs for higher-power density AI factories, the companies can achieve combined energy efficiency gains of up to 15%, cut copper use by as much as 80% and reduce installation costs by up to 30% compared to conventional, low-voltage designs, while enabling faster deployment and reducing complexity. As global data center capacity may almost triple by 2030, with AI driving about 70% of that growth, the reference design provides a more resource-efficient approach to scaling data center infrastructure.
The new reference design is included in both the Trane Continuum Rubin DSX and Eaton Beam Rubin DSX platforms, built in alignment with the NVIDIA DSX platforms, with Eaton’s technology helping provide power distribution for the Trane platform. By combining the expertise of both companies into coordinated reference designs, data center customers can help accelerate development cycles through pre-coordinated thermal and electrical power systems from grid to chip. The companies’ approach breaks down traditional systems-in-silos architectures, enabling power distribution and cooling systems to exchange leading indicators, respond more dynamically to needs and enhance data center performance.
“AI and high-performance computing are transforming the demands placed on data centers, and customers want solutions that can keep pace with their needs,” said Mauro J. Atalla, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology and Sustainability Officer, Trane Technologies. “By combining our advanced thermal management solutions with Eaton’s innovative power management solutions, we’re delivering a coordinated design that helps customers accelerate deployment, improve efficiency and confidently plan to scale for the future.”
“We’re advancing the industry standard for speed of deployment by progressing reference designs into unified systems teams can deploy repeatedly. Aligned with the NVIDIA DSX platform, we’re integrating our medium-voltage power systems and white space thermal management solutions with Trane’s advanced thermal management system architecture to help accelerate AI-factory deployment at scale,” said Michael Regelski, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Electrical Sector, Eaton.
The Eaton and Trane Technologies reference design is built to work smoothly with the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint for AI data centers. The combined approach establishes a more consistent, predictable method for planning and delivering electrical, thermal and digital control infrastructure required for AI‑driven environments. The coordinated architecture simplifies setup, reduces risk during deployment, and improves overall performance for today’s technologies. It is also designed to evolve as emerging liquid cooling technologies and direct current architectures become mainstream.
“AI factories demand tightly coordinated power, cooling and compute infrastructure to operate efficiently at scale. By aligning with the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint, Trane Technologies and Eaton are helping customers reduce complexity and accelerate deployment of next-generation AI data centers,” said Vladimir Troy, Vice President of AI Infrastructure at NVIDIA. “This new integrated approach supports the robust, scalable foundations enterprises need to unlock the full potential of generative and reasoning AI and turn data into faster, smarter outcomes.”
About Trane Technologies
Trane Technologies is a global climate innovator. Through our strategic brands Trane and Thermo King, and our portfolio of environmentally responsible products and services, we bring efficient and sustainable climate solutions to buildings, homes and transportation. For more on Trane Technologies, visit www.tranetechnologies.com.
About Trane
Trane – by Trane Technologies (NYSE: TT), a global climate innovator – creates comfortable, energy efficient indoor environments through a broad portfolio of heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems and controls, services, parts and supply. For more information, please visit www.trane.com or www.tranetechnologies.com.
About Eaton
Eaton is an intelligent power management company dedicated to protecting the environment and improving the quality of life for people everywhere. We make products for the data center, utility, industrial, commercial, machine building, residential, aerospace and mobility markets. We are guided by our commitment to do business right, to operate sustainably and to help our customers manage power ─ today and well into the future. By capitalizing on the global growth trends of electrification and digitalization, we’re helping to solve the world’s most urgent power management challenges and building a more sustainable society for people today and generations to come.
Founded in 1911, Eaton has continuously evolved to meet the changing and expanding needs of our stakeholders. With revenues of $27.4 billion in 2025, the company serves customers in 180 countries. For more information, visit www.eaton.com.
SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 17, 2026 — Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd (Credo), an innovator in providing connectivity at scale through fast, reliable, and energy-efficient system solutions, has announced its plans to standardize an interconnect within the Open Compute Project (OCP) Community for addressing the memory wall challenge. The memory wall is the gap between how fast processors can compute and how fast memory can supply data, causing expensive compute resources to sit idle waiting for data. In modern AI inference environments, memory bandwidth and capacity—not compute power—are often the dominant constraints on system performance.
Credit: Credo
Credo has formed the OCP Open Chiplet Economy (OCE) Lightweight Serial Interconnect (LSI) Workstream to develop interconnect solutions to overcome the memory bottlenecks that limit AI inference scalability in data infrastructure. In combination with the creation of the OCE LSI Workstream, Credo intends to contribute its OmniConnect lightweight AXI framer specification to OCP, with the goal to advance an open ecosystem of OmniConnect products from Credo and third parties that enable memory disaggregation and chip-to-chip communications.
High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) suffers from very high cost, limited availability, and density issues. The standardization of a lightweight, high-efficiency serial interconnect option promotes the flexible composition of chiplet-based and modular AI systems and reduces reliance on HBM. AI system designers can flexibly compose domain-specific architectures optimized for diverse and evolving AI models, data flows, and workload characteristics, enabling up to 25x increase in memory density and 5% increase in bandwidth compared to HBM4. The effort supports the broader industry transition toward composable infrastructure—where compute, memory, and storage can be optimally combined—helping unlock higher performance, better resource utilization, and greater cost efficiency for AI at scale.
“We formed the OCP LSI Workstream to address a clear industry need for innovative interconnect solutions that address the memory wall problem while also enabling a new generation of high-bandwidth and power-optimized modular architectures for AI systems,” said Vishal Shah, Vice President of Product, Credo. “Advancing an open approach to lightweight framing and serial interconnect is critical to enabling flexible chiplet integration, including near-package pluggable configurations, for the next wave of AI inference.”
“We welcome Credo’s leadership in helping to define open frameworks and standards that can accelerate innovation and scalability across the ecosystem with the OCP LSI Workstream,” said Anu Ramamurthy, Co-Lead, OCP Open Chiplet Economy Subproject. “Credo’s intended contribution of the lightweight AXI framer specification to OCP is an important step toward aligning the industry around AI interconnect architectures that enable interoperability, reduce complexity and support the high-performance requirements of next-generation AI infrastructure.”
The Lightweight Serial Interconnect (LSI) Workstream operates within the OCP Open Chiplet Economy Subproject, under the Server Project. More information on the LSI Workstream can be found here.
Credo’s intended contribution to OCP of its OmniConnect lightweight AXI framer specification is part of Credo’s OmniConnect versatile AXI-over-VSR (Very Short Reach) SerDes bus that enables both die-to-die interconnect and scale-up networking by connecting multiple compute engines via external chiplets. For more information on Credo OmniConnect, visit the product page linked here.
About Credo
Credo’s mission is to transform connectivity at scale through fast, reliable, and energy-efficient system solutions. Our high-speed copper and optical interconnect products deliver industry-leading power and performance at up to 1.6T to meet the ever-expanding data infrastructure demands of AI. Our product portfolio includes ZeroFlap (ZF) Active Electrical Cables (AECs) and ZF optical transceivers, OmniConnect memory solutions, and a suite of retimers and DSPs for optical and copper Ethernet and PCIe, all leveraging the PILOT diagnostic and analytics software platform. Credo innovations enable our customers to connect the systems that connect the world.
Government concedes ‘significant opposition’ requires new approach on quotas for medium-sized development sites
Ministers have dropped plans to relax affordable housing rules for developers in England after a backlash from housing experts who warned it could drastically cut the number of cheaper homes available in rural areas.
The government said on Monday it would not go ahead with proposals to end affordable housing quotas for private builders on sites containing between 10 and 49 houses after a consultation triggered an overwhelmingly negative response.
Sunita Doddamani argues that she was terminated as an assistant U.S. attorney because she prosecuted activists accused of blocking an entrance to an abortion clinic.
Democratic senator Jon Ossoff attacked Donald Trump and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, over the Iran war, saying they lied 'the nation into a war'. Ossoff, who is running for re-election in Georgia in November, made the comments while speaking at a rally in midtown Atlanta on Sunday afternoon
alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon's book buying operation, which hasn't been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands. "Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use," an Amazon spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement.
Decision leaves intact $5m civil judgment against Trump after jury found him liable for sexually abusing writer
The US supreme court has rejected for a second time Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn a jury verdict in 2023 that found him liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll, and later defaming her.
The court announced the decision in an unsigned order on Monday, without providing an explanation of their decision. The order just listed the US president’s petition, along with several other petitions, under “rehearings denied”.
The UN rights chief voiced alarm Monday at the rising civilian toll of escalating hostilities in Yemen, urging restraint and an immediate de-escalation to avoid plunging the country back into a full-scale war.
“I urge all parties to halt immediately any actions that risk returning Yemen to full-scale conflict,” Volker Türk said in a statement, as renewed fighting between the Houthi rebels and the government undermined a 2022 truce.
Israeli PM again insists troops will not withdraw from strip until Hamas first disarms, but calls meeting constructive
Benjamin Netanyahu has told Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner there can be no progress on the stalled Gaza ceasefire deal or an Israeli withdrawal from the coastal strip until Hamas first disarms.
An Israeli official said there had been no breakthrough in the meeting between the pair, saying Netanyahu had made it clear the IDF would not withdraw and would continue to carry out operations in Gaza.
I arrived alone and unprepared for a world of electronic badges, hacking contests and unwritten rules. By the end, I was already thinking about next year’s event.
Georgia Democratic senator has stoked speculation for 2028 presidency bid by delivering stinging attacks on Trump
Democratic senator Jon Ossoff has attacked Donald Trump’s “uniquely despicable” handling of the US-Israel war on Iran, accusing the US president of “re-rigging” a corrupt system for himself in an excoriating speech.
Ossoff, who is running for re-election in Georgia in November, has repeatedly stoked speculation that he is laying the ground for a bid for the US presidency in 2028 by delivering a series of stinging attacks on Trump and his administration.
Virgin Trains has been granted track access by the rail regulator to enable it to run services between London and Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam from 2030, in a key step towards breaking Eurostar’s monopoly on the cross-Channel passenger route.
The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) said it had given approval for Richard Branson’s company to run as many as 20 daily return services using the High Speed 1 line that runs between London St Pancras and the Channel tunnel.
PEPPER PIKE, Ohio — An Ohio man pleaded guilty to laundering $3.4 million for a transnational criminal organization behind what the Justice Department calls the largest healthcare fraud case it has ever prosecuted.
Eldar Zarbavel, 45, admitted laundering proceeds through regional banks on behalf of a network based in Russia and elsewhere. Prosecutors say the organization used fraudulent durable medical equipment companies to submit billions of dollars in false claims to Medicare and private insurers.
Zarbavel opened Northeast Ohio bank accounts for Royce Medical Supply LLC, a Florida company controlled by the organization, according to DOJ. Between July 2022 and July 2024, the company submitted approximately $1.42 billion in fraudulent claims. Medicare blocked nearly all of them, but some payments were made.
Prosecutors say Zarbavel then helped deposit, transfer and withdraw about $3.4 million in fraud proceeds during June and July 2024. The organization allegedly used false ownership and corporate records to disguise who actually controlled its medical equipment companies before moving money through shell companies and overseas accounts.
The prosecution is part of Operation Gold Rush, which DOJ says involved more than $10 billion in fraudulent claims overall. The department’s latest release says 35 people have been charged in the operation and 16 have been convicted.
Zarbavel pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering. He is scheduled for sentencing Dec. 16 and faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Vegetable and grain growers call for urgent action, warning of ‘catastrophic’ harvests due to continent-wide drought
Successive intense heatwaves and an increasingly severe, continent-wide drought have left many of Europe’s farmers in an “unprecedented” crisis, with vegetable and grain growers in particular warning of “catastrophic” harvests.
French vegetable production is down by “a very significant extent” compared with previous years, French growers have said, with shortfalls put at 25% for courgettes, 35% for lettuces, 40% for peas, 60% for broccoli and 50% to 100% for artichokes.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the growing backlash against AI is less about executives sounding alarms and more about a broader "crisis of trust" in companies, governments, and the tech industry. TechCrunch reports: Amodei's comments came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued -- both on the All-In podcast and on X -- that Amodei's warnings about the dangers of AI have helped to fuel a backlash in the United States, particularly against data centers.
Claiming that Amodei has "lost the argument" when it comes to AI regulation (Anthropic has advocated for some regulations, including a California bill that imposes transparency requirements on large AI companies), and given that "he is about to be the CEO of one of the most important companies in the world," Baker wrote, "I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry."
Baker is far from the only one arguing that AI skepticism and even government crackdowns are a natural response to the dire warnings of some AI executives. But in a series of posts, Amodei disagreed with the idea that his "messaging has been disproportionately negative." Instead, he said that his writing has been "about equally balanced between risks and benefits," and that he wrote his essay "Machines of Loving Grace" because he "didn't feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better."
Nonetheless, Amodei acknowledged that "the public has a negative view of AI" and he agreed that "this is a big problem." Where he disagreed was with the idea that this negativity is "primarily caused" by Amodei "or any other AI leader warning about AI's risks." "I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust," Amodei said. "I think that ordinary people don't trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over."
Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is on a diplomatic mission in the Middle East to meet Hamas officials and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in an attempt to salvage a ceasefire in Gaza.
The talks come after Netanyahu rejected the US-backed 15-point peace plan for the territory in a rare public break with the Trump administration this month.
Authorities say man, 50, shot wife in Louisiana and put her body in car before driving and being stopped in Tennessee
A man in Louisiana killed his wife and then took her body on a driving tour through several states before he was arrested in Tennessee, authorities allege.
The suspect’s macabre purported odyssey began in Baton Rouge when, according to Louisiana investigators, Tyronne Brazille, 50, shot dead his wife, Lanessa Bradford, also 50, during an argument at the city’s Independence Community Park.
Energy prices have been high since the US-Israel war with Iran began and the strait of Hormuz was blocked
US gas prices this month are so far the highest ever recorded for August as peace talks between the US and Iran have stalled and Donald Trump launched fresh threats against Oman.
The national average price of gas was $4.06 per gallon on Monday, according to data from AAA, $0.05 higher than last week and $1 more expensive than a year ago. In California and Hawaii, averages hit about $5.50 a gallon.
Belgium wildfire creeps closer to German border, as 104 firefighters and 36 vehicles from France help with Spain wildfire effort
As flagged earlier, Belgium’s King Philippe is now visiting the emergency coordination centre looking after the firefighters tackling the major fire in the eastern part of the country (9:39).
The European Commission has deployed assistance to Belgium and Spain as part of the bloc’s civil protection mechanism.
Industrial output and retail sales slump in July after one of the country’s weakest quarterly growth rates ever
China’s economy is showing signs of extending a slowdown with a slump in industrial output and retail sales in July, adding to pressure on Beijing to intervene with measures to support activity.
After the world’s second largest economy posted one of its lowest quarterly growth readings on record in the three months to June, the latest figures suggest it continued to falter in July.
State police charged a 36-year-old Hockessin man with six felonies following the early-morning confrontation
HOCKESSIN — Wawa employees disarmed and subdued a knife-wielding man after he allegedly cut a co-worker’s hand during an altercation early Sunday, Delaware State Police said.
Troopers responded shortly before 3 a.m. Aug. 16 to the Wawa at 605 Yorklyn Road, near Lancaster Pike. When they arrived, employees were restraining 36-year-old Matthew Ralston of Hockessin, police said.
Investigators said Ralston initially entered the store, made a purchase and went outside but remained in the parking lot. He later returned, went behind the counter, displayed a knife and allegedly threatened and attempted to stab an employee.
Ralston then left the knife on the counter and walked outside, police said. He allegedly returned again, retrieved the knife and waved it above his head before leaving the store once more.
Police said Ralston entered the store again and approached an employee who was calling 911. He allegedly lunged at her and swung the knife, cutting her hand.
Other employees disarmed and restrained Ralston until troopers arrived. The injured employee was taken to an area hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.
Ralston was charged with three counts of possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony, second-degree assault, attempted second-degree assault and aggravated menacing.
Following his arraignment, Ralston was committed to the Delaware Department of Correction in lieu of a $46,000 cash bond.
Ralston is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
TO GO
What: Delaware State Police report on the Hockessin Wawa stabbing investigation When: The incident occurred at about 3 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 16 Where: Wawa, 605 Yorklyn Road, Hockessin Learn more: Read the Delaware State Police report
Many in the crowd watching on screen outside minster have stories of meeting or knowing singer, who died in July
Bonnie Tyler’s songs have echoed through her home town of Swansea in recent days in memory of the late singer, but on Monday the church bells stopped and wellwishers lining the streets fell silent as her coffin arrived for a service celebrating her life.
As the white coffin, covered in bouquets of white roses, was carried into the minster, shouts of “God bless you Bonnie” and “bye Bonnie” punctured the quiet. Those gathered to pay their respects burst into applause. Tyler’s If I Sing You a Love Song and It’s a Heartache played before the private service began, which mourners outside watched on a screen in nearby St David’s Square.
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Concern over impact of Iran war pushes up government bond yields in US, UK, France, Germany and Japan
Government borrowing costs in several advanced economies hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, or even earlier, on Monday as investors feared the Middle East crisis would keep inflation persistently high.
Concerns over rising prices and government spending pushed up the cost of debt issued by Paris, Berlin, Washington DC, Tokyo and London as investors fretted that rising prices would push up interest rates.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Major artificial intelligence companies have donated more than $2 million since 2025 to political organizations supporting Democratic and Republican state attorneys general, even as those same officials investigate and sue AI firms over child safety, deceptive practices and other emerging harms.
According to IRS disclosures reviewed by Sludge, Google gave $250,000 in the second quarter of 2026 to both the Democratic Attorneys General Association and Republican Attorneys General Association. Meta contributed $200,000 to each, while Amazon gave $125,000 to each. Anthropic donated $250,000 to the Republican group in May.
Elon Musk’s xAI also gave $25,000 to the Democratic group, despite simultaneously fighting California Attorney General Rob Bonta in court over an AI transparency law. Bonta’s office is separately investigating xAI’s Grok chatbot over the generation and distribution of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes.
The donations come as scrutiny of the industry intensifies across party lines. In August 2025, 44 attorneys general warned OpenAI, Meta, Google, xAI and other companies about “grave concerns” involving children’s interactions with AI chatbots.
The contributions do not establish that any attorney general altered an investigation or enforcement decision. But they illustrate the increasingly complicated relationship between powerful AI companies and state officials who are becoming some of the industry’s most important regulators.
The stakes are particularly high because states are moving faster than Congress in many areas of AI oversight, including child safety, deepfakes, privacy and transparency. That gives attorneys general significant authority over companies that are simultaneously helping finance the political organizations supporting their elections.
Harvard study finds traffic fatalities increase by 15% on release dates compared with similar days either side
The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes.
The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. “You can’t randomise people into using their phones, and drivers rarely volunteer what they were doing in the seconds before a crash,” said Dr Vishal Patel, first author of the study based at Harvard Medical School.
Laith Alani, who had booked week-long trip to visit theme parks and family, believes US border force profiled him on arrival in Orlando
A British student who was detained and deported after flying to the US claims he was profiled for being Muslim.
Laith Alani said he felt as if he had been kidnapped when he was interrogated for nine hours and detained in a holding cell for another 14 hours by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at Orlando international airport.
Consumer privacy advocates have responded with alarm after Coles and Woolworths confirmed they were testing facial recognition technology that they could use in their Australian supermarkets to record shoppers’ personal biometric data.
The supermarket giants on Monday confirmed they had tested the technology and said they were considering installing it in their Australian stores to crack down on retail crime including aggression towards staff.
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Frogwares Frogwares’ Lovecraftian action-horror is full of grim tenacity and pulp paperback charm, despite a few frayed edges
I’m standing in the prosthetics lab of a campy horror hospital, hunting for a preacher’s flayed face to wear so I can trick the world’s grisliest smart doorbell. Pinned to a board in the corner of the room are a dozen X-rays: shattered bones and metal splints in sepia negative, each with a note attached. It’s a stark, clinical intrusion on the theatrical gore elsewhere. It takes a beat to realise that I’m reading the stories of injuries sustained by soldiers fighting for Frogwares’ native Ukraine. Fingers amputated after severe burns. Limbs lost in mine explosions. Toes torn off by shell fire.
Like so many of my favourite PS3-era seven-out-of-tens, The Sinking City 2 is a pulpy action horror. It’s fuelled by scrappy ambition, Lovecraft fan fiction and wonderfully unhinged scenario design. A puzzle that has you determine which talking jarred brain is telling porkies. A scavenger hunt to fix a crane to move a rotting whale carcass. A gunfight amid the grisly results of a siren pop star’s fan meet-up turned battle royale.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: If you want to record whatever you do on a computer, send those records to OpenAI, use more ChatGPT tokens, and increase your vulnerability to prompt injection, then OpenAI has something for you. It's called Computer History, an opt-in way to record your computer interactions across apps and websites as memories organized on a timeline.
Why would you want to do so? Maybe you found Chronicle, the predecessor of Computer History which compiled similar histories using screenshots, a bit too intrusive but don't mind Computer History's approach -- recording input events and storing them unencrypted locally for 48 hours (or more), with a brief visit to OpenAI's servers. Maybe you're not bothered by the warning OpenAI includes in its documentation: "Computer History files can contain sensitive information. They are not encrypted by Computer History, and other programs running as your macOS user may be able to access them."
Perhaps, having given OpenAI's Codex and GPT Work the run of your computer, you're already sold on the suggestion that storing your computer activity in memory files and arranging those interactions in a timeline will improve ChatGPT responses, surface opportunities for automation, and make it easier to resume prior work. Computer History is, to put it bluntly, a keylogging and event capture system. "Computer History creates an interaction-event stream from allowed apps and websites," OpenAI's documentation explains. "Events can include clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, app switches, and context that macOS exposes through its accessibility system. Computer History periodically turns these events into text summaries and local memory files." OpenAI says the feature doesn't capture screen images, microphone input, or system audio. It also doesn't record private-mode browsing.
"Turn it off during communications with other people unless you have their prior express consent," the company advises, perhaps in acknowledgement of legal risk. "Consider pausing it or excluding apps that contain sensitive health, financial, or personal information." ChatGPT and Codex delete locally stored Computer History interaction events after 48 hours, but data sent to OpenAI to generate memories may be retained locally longer and reused in future chats.
Manufacturing company 3M knew more than 50 years ago that its firefighting products – including components in Pfas “forever chemicals” – could be hazardous to the health of humans and animals and damage the environment, the federal government has claimed in court documents.
In filings as part of its $2bn lawsuit against the multinational company, commonwealth lawyers said products sold to Australia were known to stay present in water and soil, were persistent in the human body and in animals, and contributed to conditions including reduced kidney function, alterations in immune function, effects on fertility and puberty and lower birth weight in babies.
Calls grow for inquiry into media reporting of the case as Cambridge chancellor criticises ‘racist feeding frenzy’
A Windrush campaigner who launched a fundraiser for Jason Arday’s family has said the outpouring of support shows “Britain still cares”.
Arday, who was found dead on Friday, had resigned the previous week from his post as professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge after allegations of plagiarism were made against him.
Party’s ‘welfare to work’ policy would force long-term claimants to do community work or face losing benefits
Robert Jenrick went on to say that long-term benefits claimants will be made to clean up their local high street and do charity work or face having their benefits taken away.
He said as part of the party’s “welfare to work” policy, long-term claimants, who are fit to work, will be forced to do 20-hours of work a week in the community.
They’ll work to clean up high streets and parks, to beautify neglected places, to carry out minor repairs, to staff libraries and community centres to perform many other tasks from the list that we’ve published today.
We’ll also embrace local charities and community groups and ask them to help us and take part. If claimants refuse to participate or fail to show up, they’ll face penalties.
After failing to deliver subpoenas itself, the BBC has asked a Florida court to compel three of President Trump's family members to testify over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The plan has sparked criticism from Democrats, who argue that granting bank status to a business affiliated with the Trump family poses a conflict of interest.
Back in the markets, the pound has hit a three-month high against the weakening US dollar.
Sterling is up a third of a cent at $1.356, its highest level since 12 May.
The longer-term outlook for the US dollar and US bonds looks bearish: investors dislike the boiling Middle East war, which is costing the US way more than it was supposed to (it was supposed to be a few-week operation), while the exploding US debt and the lack of budget discipline from the Trump government weigh on appetite for US debt, as the national debt is about to surpass the $40 trillion mark.
“This is an important next step in bringing competition and growth to the market for international rail services, and we welcome the progress Virgin Trains and London St Pancras High Speed have made.
While there is still more work to do, we are supporting Virgin and the wider industry to grow international services.”
At least 2,325 people have died from the virus, according to official data, with outbreak on track to be biggest in history
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is now the deadliest in the country’s history, with at least 2,325 people dead, according to government data, surpassing the toll from the 2018-20 outbreak.
The DRC’s public health institute said confirmed cases had risen to 4,945, including 101 detected in the previous 24 hours.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s unusual request to reconsider its earlier refusal to hear his appeal of a $5 million civil verdict won by writer E. Jean Carroll, effectively ending his remaining challenge in that case.
A New York jury found Trump liable in 2023 for sexually abusing Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and later defaming her when he denied her allegations. Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court initially declined to hear Trump’s appeal in June. His attorneys then filed a petition asking the justices to rehear that decision, a rarely granted procedure. The court denied that request Monday without explanation.
Trump has already satisfied the judgment. The original $5 million award grew to roughly $5.8 million with interest before the money, which had been held in escrow, was released to Carroll last month.
The ruling does not end Trump’s separate legal fight with Carroll. Another jury awarded her $83.3 million in 2024 for defamatory statements Trump made in 2019 while serving his first term as president. Trump and the Justice Department have asked the Supreme Court to overturn that verdict, arguing that his comments fell within his official presidential duties and should be covered by federal immunity protections.
The justices have not yet decided whether they will hear that separate appeal.
Mother and son Olga and Nikita Belov say they were facing jail and potential torture after asylum case was rejected
A Russian family who were on the brink of being deported from Finland after repeatedly being denied asylum – despite the threat of arrest, imprisonment and torture for their pro-Ukrainian activism – have won a court appeal and will have their case reconsidered.
Nikita Belov and his mother, Olga Belov, fled their homeland for Finland in 2022 after attracting the attention of Russian authorities – including a military summons, threatening messages and attempts to locate them – for expressing opposition to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The conventional thinking for Democrats hoping to win in Florida is to be tough on Cuba, friendly to Israel, and careful to avoid appearing too liberal. It’s a tactic aimed at courting powerful voting blocs, and one that helped Rep. Jared Moskowitz take office in the land of sunny skies and low taxes.
This year, however, he’s facing a challenger attempting to flip that strategy on its head. A Democratic Socialists of America member, Oliver Larkin, is trying to win a primary against Moskowitz by running far to his left on both foreign and domestic policies.
The pair presents a striking contrast: Moskowitz has drawn heavy support from donors associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and an artificial intelligence super PAC, while Larkin, a 34-year-old union organizer, calls himself an anti-Zionist and leans on small-dollar funders.
Polls of the race have produced vastly different results, with one commissioned by Larkin putting him within striking distance, while another from Moskowitz’s campaign showing the incumbent far ahead.
Susan McManus, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of South Florida, said in an email that the race will be a significant tell of the mood in the Democratic electorate.
“Of all the Florida congressional districts, this one will be the biggest test of how deep is the generational and ideological divide in the Florida Democratic Party, and to what extent the socialism label may splinter the Latino vote,” she said.
Theory of Change
That label is one that Larkin wears proudly, describing himself on his website as an active member of the Broward County Democratic Socialists of America. He supports Medicare for All while opposing the embargo on Cuba and weapons transfers to Israel.
In an interview with The Intercept ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Larkin said he rejected the Florida Democratic Party’s tendency to lean right to win Republican and independent votes. That strategy has not worked, Larkin said, pointing to Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist’s big loss to Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2024.
Instead, Larkin argues that an openly leftist candidate can energize the Democratic base while winning over disaffected independents.
“I think another false choice that corporate Democrats make is that non-party affiliated or independent voters want to see candidates split the difference right down the middle. I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “They see the status quo politics as completely broken.”
Moskowitz’s campaign did not respond to an interview request. On his campaign website, however, he leans heavily on his bipartisan bona fides, noting that he served in DeSantis’s cabinet as emergency management director until his election to Congress in 2022.
That credential could help win over voters in a redrawn district spanning much of the coast near Fort Lauderdale that would have voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Moskowitz already represents about half of the new district’s voters in his current 23rd Congressional District.
The new 25th District also has one of the nation’s largest Jewish populations, making Moskowitz’s outspoken support for Israel particularly salient. Last week, pro-Israel activists in south Florida pressured multiple venues to cancel a joint rally that Larkin was to hold with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of the Democratic Party’s most outspoken critics of Israel.
Moskowitz has also accused Larkin — without offering any evidence — of running against him based on his religion, in a letter to the Sun Sentinel where he declined to participate in a joint interview with Larkin.
The South Florida newspaper called that charge “demonstrably untrue” and dinged Moskowitz for dodging opportunities to face off against his opponent.
“The Sun Sentinel has endorsed Moskowitz in all of his previous races. But in this case, his continued avoidance of Larkin shows a lack of respect for voters and can be viewed as an unwillingness to defend his own record,” the paper’s editorial board said.
Dollar Deficit
Larkin was born in Florida, but after his stint as a volunteer and staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, he worked for a consulting firm aligned with the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Sunshine State in 2022. During his run for office this cycle, he has posted respectable fundraising numbers for a first-time candidate taking on an incumbent. In an August 13 press release, his campaign said he had raised over $1 million.
Still, that puts him far behind Moskowitz, who reported receipts of nearly $3 million during this election cycle in his most recent campaign finance report, with $1.8 million remaining on hand.
While some pro-Israel candidates have sought to avoid association with AIPAC this year, given the group’s increasingly toxic brand, Moskowitz has defended its donations to his campaign. His fundraising reports show that he has raised $953,000 from donors associated with AIPAC, according to the transparency website Open Secrets.
An artificial intelligence super PAC is also spending heavily on Moskowitz. The super PAC, Leading the Future, has spent more than $300,000 thus far.
“He doesn’t have a volunteer base, because nobody wants to volunteer for him.”
Larkin believes he can make up the divide in spending on advertising with old-fashioned door-knocking. His campaign boasts of having made more than 200,000 voter contacts — and he says there has been little evidence that Moskowitz’s campaign is attempting to match their ground game.
“He’s got ads on TV. He’s got mail. He has no ground game to speak of. I don’t believe he is even attempting to knock on doors,” Larkin said. “He doesn’t have a volunteer base, because nobody wants to volunteer for him.”
An Argonne-led study has identified a simple geometric design rule that could help engineers build reliable, ultralow-energy computing systems.
Aug. 17, 2026 — From smartphones to data centers, modern electronics rely on billions of tiny switches that consume electricity every time they turn on or off. As global demand for computing continues to grow, so does the energy required to power it. Scientists are therefore searching for alternatives that can perform the same tasks while using far less energy.
Example of geometric transformation of four nanomagnets. Bottom: Magnetic force microscopy contrast image of the rotated nanomagnets. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)
One promising approach uses clusters of tiny magnets, each thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand. A new study led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, with contributions from the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile, has uncovered a geometric rule that determines whether clusters of nanomagnets behave predictably or probabilistically as they relax toward a stable state. The finding challenges standard modeling assumptions and opens new possibilities for ultralow-energy computing.
“What we have identified is a relationship between structure and function,” said Argonne Materials Scientist Hanu Arava, lead author of the study. “In our case, the structure is the geometric arrangement of the magnets with respect to each other, and the function is how energy moves through the system.”
To help explain the process, Arava compares it to dropping a ball from the top of a mountain. The ball naturally rolls downhill along the easiest route until it reaches the lowest point. Scientists call that route an energy-relaxation pathway — the path a system follows as it moves toward its most stable state. In the nanomagnet system, the magnets interact through their magnetic fields in a more complex way, but they follow the same basic principle: moving step by step toward the lowest-energy configuration.
To uncover this relationship, the researchers studied a simple geometric progression at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science user facility. They began with four nanomagnets arranged in a Greek cross or plus sign, then rotated all four simultaneously until they formed a square. At intervals along the way, the team measured how the system relaxed toward its most stable state.
What they found was striking. In the square geometry, the magnets relaxed toward a stable configuration with very high probability. In the cross geometry, the system encountered an energy barrier, and its relaxation became much less predictable, sometimes settling into different outcomes. Between those two extremes, the researchers identified a tipping point.
When the magnets were rotated to the midpoint between the square and plus-sign states, the system reached a balance in which multiple outcomes became equally likely. On either side of that midpoint, the behavior became either more reliable or more uncertain. The same basic pattern held even when the researchers changed the lengths of the magnets.
To understand how the geometry controls the system’s behavior, the researchers used a theoretical model that treated each tiny magnet as an object with internal structure rather than a simple point. That approach revealed hidden interactions at the junctions, showing that simplified models can miss key features of the physics.
For conventional computing technologies, predictability is essential. A device must produce the same result every time it performs a calculation. The new findings suggest that engineers may be able to control that reliability simply by adjusting the arrangement of the magnetic elements.
“If you want to build computing hardware, you typically need the result to be predictable,” Arava said. “One plus one should equal two.”
At the same time, systems that produce multiple possible outcomes could be useful for emerging forms of computing that rely on probability rather than certainty, such as machine learning and optimization.
“The pathway that energy takes determines whether the outcome is reliable or uncertain,” Arava said. “For engineers designing computing devices, that means they may be able to tune the angle of rotation in nanomagnetic clusters to achieve one outcome or the other.”
Although the experiment involved just four nanomagnets, the result has broader implications. In larger magnetic devices, thousands of similar clusters would need to work together. Understanding how a single building block behaves is essential for designing more complex systems. The new findings give engineers a simple design principle: adjust the rotation angle of the magnets to tune how reliably they reach a predictable final state.
Nanomagnetic devices have already demonstrated the potential to operate using extremely small amounts of energy — possibly millions of times less than conventional electronic components. If such systems can be made reliable and scalable, they could help reduce the growing energy demands of computing infrastructure worldwide.
The new research offers a practical step toward that goal.
“We’ve shown that geometry alone can determine how energy moves through these magnetic systems,” Arava said, “and that insight gives us a new way to design computing devices.”
The research appeared in Communications Materials. In addition to Arava, the authors are Ignacio Tapia, Timothy Cote, Justin Woods, Frank Barrows, John Fullerton and Paula Mellado. Funding for the project was provided by DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
Source: Joseph E. Harmon, Argonne National Laboratory
Supermarket chain says ‘human error’, not its Facewatch technology, to blame for ejecting a customer
Sainsbury’s has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop.
“I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless,” Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal.
Version 7.2 of the Linux kernel has been released.
Significant features in this release include common attributes support in the bpf()vsystem call, cache-aware load balancing for the CPU scheduler, large-folio support in the Btrfs filesystem, further swap subsystem improvements, improvements to the Landlock security module, support for block devices with inline encryption hardware via the dm-inlinecrypt device-mapper target, and much more.
We talked about the latest release of Delphi a few days ago, and that brought me to Hans Otten’s website.
This site is about my experience with the Wirth school of languages, based on the ideas and implementations of Prof Niklaus Wirth, Kenneth Bowles, Per Brinch Hansen, colleagues, and their students. And my experience with the various variants, from the P2 and P4 compilers originating in Zürich ETH, via UCSD Pascal P-System to the Borland compilers and Modula and Oberon systems. All applicable to small computers and device control.
On this website you will find information on Pascal for small machines, like Wirth compilers, the UCSD Pascal system, many scanned books and other files on UCSD Pascal, Pascal on MSX and CP/M, Delphi programming on PC, Freepascal and Lazarus on Windows and Raspberry Pi, Oberon systems. Many sources of early Pascal compilers! And last but not least my Pascal-M system!
RALEIGH, North Carolina — Gov. Josh Stein said Monday he will veto legislation that would give North Carolina’s Supreme Court and chief justice substantially greater authority to discipline and suspend lower-court judges, warning that the changes could undermine judicial independence.
House Bill 377 would allow the state Supreme Court to censure, reprimand, suspend or remove judges even without a recommendation from the Judicial Standards Commission. It would also allow the chief justice to suspend a trial judge without pay while an investigation is pending if the commission recommends that step. The bill was formally presented to Stein on Aug. 7.
Stein argued the proposal concentrates too much power in the hands of judicial leadership. He compared it to allowing legislative leaders to suspend elected lawmakers or the governor to suspend other independently elected statewide officials.
Republican supporters say the measure is intended to strengthen accountability. House Speaker Destin Hall has argued that judges who release violent defendants should face consequences, while Republican Sen. Warren Daniel has said suspended judges would retain due-process protections.
Democrats counter that the measure could pressure judges to rule in ways favored by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court and Judicial Standards Commission.
The fight comes amid a broader, years-long struggle over institutional power in North Carolina. Republican lawmakers have repeatedly shifted authority away from Democratic governors, including over appointments and election administration, prompting multiple lawsuits. Courts have upheld some changes while striking down others.
The legislature could attempt to override Stein’s veto when lawmakers reconvene, although leaders have indicated they may delay additional votes until after November’s election.
The latest game from ‘reality-inspired’ studio the Pixel Hunt sees you transporting precious human cargo – and deciding what to do with it
Ithaca has one hell of an opening: Penelope, a disillusioned environmental lawyer, stops her car at a petrol station. But upon returning, she discovers something shocking: the unconscious body of an oil company CEO in her boot, his hands hog-tied together, dangling limply towards the vehicle’s number plate.
This tantalising eco-thriller setup is a long way off the typical knights-and-castles fantasy fare of most role-playing games, more How To Blow Up a Pipeline than Dragon Quest. But road-trip RPG Ithaca arrives via refreshingly original developer the Pixel Hunt, a French outfit that specialises in what it calls “reality-inspired” games. The studio has made a number of arresting works in recent years. One was about a Syrian refugee couple making a perilous migrant journey across Europe; another tackled the life-shattering effects of child sexual abuse. The climate crisis was always in the back of Pixel Hunt founder and Ithaca writer Florent Maurin’s mind. After all, he says, it is the uber problem of our day, the problem that touches all others. It was just a case of when, and, more importantly: “What do we say about it?”
Sixteen-year-old dead and four others wounded including two children at community celebration in Lexington
Authorities in Kentucky charged an 18-year-old man with murder and several counts of assault after a shooting in Lexington park left a teenager dead and four others injured – one of multiple similar cases around the US over the weekend.
Jametrius Griffin was arrested less than 24 hours after Saturday night’s mass shooting at Charles Young Park in the city’s downtown. According to the Lexington police department, officers responded to reports of gunfire in the park at about 7pm and found five people shot, including two adults, a 14-year-old and a four-year-old.
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
[…]
I decided to take that idea and make the attribute path a sequence of button presses in Super Mario Bros. 3. Each node in the tree is a frame of the game, and each child is a button press that produces a new frame. Game states are recursive by nature.
Temperatures could drop by more than 15C compared with last Thursday as cold front moves in
Relief from the unrelenting heat is finally arriving this week across western Europe, with more unsettled conditions bringing the chance of rain. Temperatures are expected to fall back towards the seasonal norm, with some parts of the UK even falling about 3C below normal by Thursday. After such a scorching summer, and with a temperature drop of more than 15C compared with last Thursday’s heat, it may feel surprisingly chilly.
There are signs that some substantial rain could be on the cards for the south of the UK this week as a cold front moves in from the Atlantic on Monday night into Tuesday. As of Monday, parts of southern England had endured 62 consecutive days of no rainfall – this is observed at a Met Office weather station in Wisley, Surrey. Even the last recorded rainfall here on 16 June amounted to just 0.4mm.
I understand gen Z’s concerns about the cost of romance. But anything can be a date if you want it to be
A couple of months ago, I wrote a column imploring young people to keep trying to find love, to not become cynical about romance and avoid the temptation of the accursed “loneliness influencers” peddling antisocial behavior as some sort of newfangled experiment that no one had thought of before. I stand here today saying, hey, I can’t be right all the time. Maybe it is better to be alone, since it costs a hell of a lot less.
Apparently, young people across the country are forgoing dating because it’s too damn expensive. Or at least, I think they are, based on the multiplenewspaperarticles saying so that came out in the last two weeks. As the New York Times put it, the “prospect of a tab of $150 or more for two entrées, two drinks, an appetizer and tip” is too pricey for many gen Z singles. I say, only $150? Where are you going, Chili’s? I went on a date with (shameful brag incoming) a very famous political figure from the late 90s and spent twice that amount, sending my bank account into cardiac arrest. I practically begged her to get dessert, even though it was clear our decade of age difference and general lack of chemistry meant I was better off going home and journaling about it. I paid for the whole thing, and in return, I got an amazing story to tell at parties.
Grant cancellations at leading research institutions appear to target study of impacts of racism on brain health
A new round of scientific grant cancellations has hit brain health and Alzheimer’s disease research at two leading research institutions, Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh.
The latest cancellations are the Trump administration’s most recent effort to remove disfavored topics from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) $47bn scientific portfolio – and appear to target the study of the impacts of racism.
Hi-tech cameras orbiting Earth and on the ground, along with AI, help firefighters extinguish blazes before they spread
The fires in Spokane, Washington, this summer are the latest reminder that when a wildfire is detected can be just as important as where it starts. A blaze found within minutes can often be contained before it spreads. Wait too long, and a small spark can become a major disaster.
A new effort to shorten that timeline began in July when a SpaceX rocket carried the first three FireSat satellites into orbit. The trio is the first part of a planned network of 50 satellites built solely to spot wildfires while they are still small enough to stop.
Why Should Delaware Care? The bond bill is a massive, billion-dollar capital budget the General Assembly passes each June that taxpayers will help to repay over a decade. The details of specific items within the bond bill are often unclear, as the legislature negotiates the capital budget amid its annual end-of-session rush.
While Delaware’s two largest cities will receive roughly $23 million from the state’s omnibus capital budget this year, smaller municipalities will receive no money at all.
And that funding disparity is not abnormal.
A Spotlight Delaware analysis found that lawmakers in recent years have poured hundreds of millions of tax dollars into construction and redevelopment projects in Wilmington and Dover through Delaware’s bond bill, often allocating much less for initiatives in the state’s smaller communities.
Much of the money doled out to Delaware’s largest cities flows through public entities and private nonprofits like Wilmington’s Riverfront Development Corporation and the Downtown Dover Partnership — organizations working to revitalize the downtown cores of the state’s largest and capital cities, respectively, through multi-year master plans.
But money in the bond bill – the state’s annual budget to fund construction and development projects through the issuance of long-term debt – can also be allocated directly to local governments, along with nonprofits or corporations.
And while other municipal projects, like “economic development” in Seaford or “community initiatives” in Newark, have sporadically received capital dollars in recent years, the Riverfront Development Corporation and Downtown Dover Partnership are unmatched in the consistent stream of funding they receive from the bond bill each year.
The result, some local leaders said, is having to apply for grants and seek out private investment — which can be an uphill battle.
Lorissa McAllister, director of the Laurel Redevelopment Corporation, described having to be “very financially responsible,” in order to fund her organization’s projects with limited state support.
For Rep. Bill Bush (D-Dover), who sits on the legislature’s Joint Capital Improvement Committee tasked with putting together the bond bill each year, the difference in funding decisions comes down to how organizations vocalize their financial needs.
“A master plan helps, but you have to communicate it, too,” he said.
How do Wilmington, Dover spend bond bill funds?
Over the past five years, the General Assembly has appropriated roughly $45 million to the Riverfront Development Corporation and $21 million to the Downtown Dover Partnership, according to the Controller General’s office, which oversees legislative finances.
Those distributions often come with relatively few stipulations as to how the funds can be spent.
In this year’s bond bill, Wilmington’s Riverfront Development Corporation received $11.5 million, and the Downtown Dover Partnership received $5 million — amounts that are on par with allocations in recent years.
Megan McGlinchey, director of Wilmington’s Riverfront Development Corporation, gave a presentation to the Joint Capital Improvement Committee in April to explain her organization’s funding request.
She argued the economic returns the redevelopment of Wilmington’s riverfront provides to the city and the state in the form of new jobs and tourism far outweighs the money government officials have invested in the project.
When asked by Spotlight Delaware how the corporation will spend its $11.5 million, McGlinchey said the sum will fund renovations at the Chase Convention Center, a new park next to a luxury apartment complex, beginnings of a new mixed use development project on the east side of the Christina River and updates to the Blue Rocks baseball stadium, among a laundry list of other projects.
The city of Wilmington was separately allocated $7.1 million for the opaque purpose of “city of Wilmington initiatives.”
A spokesperson for Mayor John Carney’s office said this will translate to $1 million for improvements to city-owned golf courses, $3 million for improvements to parks such as Brown Burton Winchester Park and HB Dupont Plaza, and $2 million to acquire vacant properties through the city’s land bank.
The Queen, a well-known concert venue in downtown Wilmington owned by the Buccini Pollin Group, was also given $1 million for building renovations through a so-called “Cultural Access Fund.” The bond bill describes the fund as aimed at enhancing the “quality and availability of Delaware’s recreational and cultural offerings.”
The Downtown Dover Partnership did not present to the Joint Capital Improvement Committee about its funding request this year.
However, Bush, whose district encompasses the downtown Dover area, said the committee has a clear idea of the Downtown Dover Partnership’s long-term master plan, so committee members were inclined to fund the organization.
“In my mind, it’s a great investment,” he said.
The partnership’s Executive Director Diane Laird said its $5 million will go toward its Capital City 2030 plan. The primary projects in the master plan are a “mobility center” parking garage and a 120-unit apartment complex in downtown Dover.
Dover has worked for several years on its Capital City 2030 plan to redevelop the downtown. Officials didn’t even have to pitch the latest investments to get state bond money this year. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Laird told Spotlight Delaware she cannot provide a breakdown of how much will be spent on specific projects because “funds will be used in concert with other public/private funds to ensure projects come to completion.”
The city of Dover has also received multi-million dollar sums from the bond bill in conjunction with the Downtown Dover Partnership in recent years to make wastewater improvements necessary for the downtown project, Laird said, but the city was not allocated those additional funds for FY27.
Redevelopment projects elsewhere
While Wilmington and Dover often receive more than other localities, redevelopment initiatives in other communities around the state also are eligible to receive capital improvement money.
The Riverfront Development Corporation is a public entity, created by a task force of then-Gov. Tom Carper and the General Assembly in 1995. The Downtown Dover Partnership is a private nonprofit with some elected officials on its governing board.
A spokesperson for the Controller General’s office told Spotlight Delaware public entities like the Riverfront Development Corporation, local governments and nonprofit organizations or corporations are all equally able to receive bond bill funds.
Nonetheless, local redevelopment initiatives outside of the state’s two largest cities are frequently left out of bond bill appropriations.
The Laurel Redevelopment Corporation, a nonprofit focused on revitalization around the Broad Creek riverfront in Laurel, did not receive any bond dollars this year.
The organization has sporadically been allocated funding over the past decade, but it has not been given a bond bill appropriation since 2019, according to the Controller General’s office.
The Laurel Redevelopment Corporation has a number of ongoing capital improvement projects, such as a workforce housing development and a park along the creek.
McAllister, the organization’s director, said her group must rely on a combination of grants and private investment, while hoping the state might decide to provide the group funds in future years.
Seaford has also been working on a downtown revitalization project, which includes a riverwalk along the Nanticoke River and transforming the former Nylon Capital Center into a coworking space. City Manager Charles Anderson said Seaford has not received bond bill dollars since 2024, when it was allocated $1.3 million for a combination of different “economic development” projects.
Lauren Swain, Milford’s economic development director, said her city, too, has a redevelopment concept called the “Rivertown Rebirth Master plan,” which has not received any state funding in recent years.
While Bush emphasized that redevelopment organizations need to effectively communicate their plans to the General Assembly in order to receive bond bill funds, he also suggested groups seek out other funding sources, like the state’s Downtown Development District program.
Downtown Development Districts
An additional avenue for local redevelopment funding exists in the form of Delaware State Housing Authority (DSHA)’s Downtown Development Districts program, which offers state dollars and other financial incentives for residential and commercial projects within a specified area of participating cities and towns.
Still, these funds tend to skew toward larger cities, organizers said.
DSHA received $10 million in bond bill funding for the Downtown Development District program this year.
A dozen towns or cities currently participate in the program, and the state is planning to add three more districts this fall.
Wilmington, Milford and Dover were the top three users of the program’s funding in the 2025 fiscal year, receiving $5.4 million, $838,000 and $541,000 in rebates, respectively.
Smaller municipalities like Georgetown and Harrington fell to the bottom of the list, only receiving around $100,000 in state investment, respectively.
DSHA Director Matt Heckles said the unequal distribution of the program’s funds between communities is something his agency frequently “wrestles with.”
Heckles said the housing authority recently changed the scoring process of developer applications for one of its rebate programs in an effort to ensure funding is equitably distributed.
Still, he said, the challenge is that projects in Wilmington tend to be much larger than in other communities, translating to more money being allocated.
While Heckles said his agency is continually focused on ways to make participation in the Downtown Development District program equitable, he argued that it is “apples to oranges” to compare the amount of funding between Wilmington and Milford, for example, because a $2 million project would have a substantially greater impact in Milford.
Four-year-old boy, three men and three women among fatalities since storms began on 11 August, officials say
Days of storms and flooding in Indiana left at least seven people dead as floodwaters peaked in Indianapolis’s White River – and rains were expected to ease in the state capital region and other parts of the state on Sunday.
A four-year-old boy, three men and three women were among those who had died since the storms began on 11 August, state homeland security department spokesperson Liz Woods said.
Some take their criticism even further. Reacting to Flock's changes, an EFF statement calls it "Too little, too late," while calling it Flock's admission that their technology needs reforms. But...
To be clear, our position has long been that police, at a minimum, need to get a warrant, signed by a judge, in order to search for historic ALPR data regarding specific vehicles. For us, it's common sense: if police want to dip into historic ALPR data like they were going back in time to retroactively follow your comings and goings, they need a warrant.
There's also nothing stopping Flock from rescinding these latest reforms.
This all leads to the bigger and more important issue: We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve... It shouldn't be up to Flock or any other ALPR vendor to decide how long police can collect and retain data on millions, if not hundreds of millions, of innocent people. We need lawmakers to step up and pass laws that restrict police's use of surveillance technology.
After all, the surveillance business model is the problem, and a few company-imposed slapdash reforms aren't going to change that.
Robert Smith, Olly Alexander and Paris Paloma also among signatories to letter saying exploitation of Rosebank and Jackdaw fields defies climate reality
More than 200 musicians including Massive Attack and Brian Eno have written to Andy Burnham urging him to reject plans for more oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.
The letter, signed by 211 artists such as Bobby Gillespie, Olly Alexander and Paris Paloma, called on the prime minister to reject the Rosebank oilfield, warning that the project would fail to lower energy bills or provide energy security as most of the oil was likely to be exported.
President said he was ‘not happy’ with plans for large-scale joint exercises he described as ‘inappropriate and hostile’. Plus, how five obscure horses have ended up at the center of a transatlantic betting mystery
Good morning. Donald Trump has said he is scaling back joint US military drills with South Korea aimed at deterring North Korea, despite military officials from both countries warning that Kim Jong-un’s regime is learning new battlefield tactics from the Ukraine war.
The president said he was “not happy” with US participation “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un”. He added that the drills were costly and “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a country that, as long as Donald J Trump has been president, has been unthreatening and respectful”. Trump added that it was too late to cancel the drills so he had ordered the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “substantially reduce” them.
Why are there continuing concerns about USS Abraham Lincoln? Democrats have intensified their demands for answers from the Trump administration over conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln amid concern over crew morale, mental health and living conditions. Ruben Gallego, a Democratic senator from Arizona, said he blamed the carrier’s prolonged deployment on the unresolved war that Donald Trump started in February with Iran as well as lackluster leadership in general from the Republican president’s administration.
Clancy’s live-streamed trial has become fodder for amateur sleuths to push viral conspiracy theories that threaten to undermine efforts to de-stigmatize illness, experts say
Meghan Cliffel was riding the subway in New York City in December 2015 when she became convinced the entire city belonged to a cult that was plotting to kill her and her two daughters. When she got back to her Manhattan apartment she believed the talking heads on the television were speaking to her directly, threatening her, and that the refrigerator was emitting poisonous gas. Her husband, she feared, was part of the cult too.
“I punch him in the face trying to get to the kids,” Cliffel recalled, “Then I’m ultimately trying to get to the roof of our building because I believe if I get up there and show I’m willing to jump, that that’ll show my loyalty to the cult and hopefully stop this whole thing.”
Did you lose someone in 9/11? What do you want people to remember about them 25 years later?
To mark 25 years since 9/11, we would like to hear from people who lost loved ones in the attacks. What do you want people to remember about them 25 years later?
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Exclusive: Raúl Torrez is drafting two bills with state lawmakers to bolster consumer protections and child safety online, building on state’s landmark case against Meta
New Mexico’s attorney general is mounting a full-court press against technology companies to improve their child safety measures, capitalizing on a landmark win in court against Meta earlier this year.
Raúl Torrez is working with state lawmakers to draft two new bills he says will strengthen consumer protections and child safety online. The legislation, expected to be announced in the coming weeks, will build on the state’s case against the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. A jury found in March that the company misled its users about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation. The social media giant was fined nearly $1bn as a result of the case.
Jamie Dimon, the boss of the US bank JP Morgan, has urged John Healey not to use his first budget as chancellor to increase taxes on banks’ bumper profits.
Speculation has been growing that a windfall tax could be imposed on UK lenders to fund Andy Burnham’s cost of living agenda, with campaigners estimating such a move could raise £19bn.
Can Syria build lasting accountability?
26
August 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Online
Human rights and political experts assess how transparency, oversight and civic freedoms can shape Syria’s future governance.
As Syria’s new political order takes shape, experts and polocymakers discuss what reforms are needed to build lasting accountability, protect civic freedoms and strengthen public oversight.
The fall of the Assad regime has created new opportunities for Syrians to engage with public institutions and demand greater accountability. However, the legal and institutional frameworks needed to support public scrutiny and freedom of expression have lagged behind. As Syria’s new political order takes shape, embedding accountability within institutions will be critical to the country’s long-term governance and stability.
This event discusses:
What barriers is Syrian civil society currently facing in advancing accountability?
What opportunities exist to strengthen transparency and public oversight?
What legal reforms are needed to protect freedom of expression?
What institutional changes could help embed accountability in governance?
What role should Syrian actors play in shaping accountability mechanisms?
How can international partners support a more transparent and accountable system?
President Trump said Sunday that the joint military exercises with South Korea are costly and they "send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile" to North Korea.
The chief economist at Russia’s second-largest bank has been fired after a series of critical comments about the state of the economy, including warnings that Moscow would not win a prolonged economic war with Ukraine.
Andrei Klepach, who had served in the role at the state-controlled development bank VEB since 2014, was fired days after Russian media reported on a scathing speech he had delivered to fellow economists in May.
The president was forced to hide in a catering truck amid the Iran war, in an encapsulation of the conflict’s failures
For decades, Donald Trump cultivated a public image based on strength and dominance. He was a brash New York real estate mogul; a reality TV star who deployed his signature phrase: “You’re fired!” to eliminate contestants from The Apprentice; and eventually US president and undisputed leader of the Republican party.
In recent months, Trump has taken his boastfulness to an extreme, reportedly telling confidants that he’s “the most powerful person to ever live” and comparing himself with some of history’s most feared leaders, including Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, near death on Welsh beach in 2023, is thriving in Houston despite lingering pneumonia
A Kemp’s ridley sea turtle native to the Gulf of Mexico is largely thriving after he was found nearly dead on a beach in Wales in late 2023, nursed back to health and then flown to Houston recently to continue recovering – though scans revealed signs that the creature has been grappling with lingering pneumonia, according to his caretakers.
Rhossi’s condition was detailed in a blogpost on Friday from the Houston zoo, whose veterinary team was tasked with caring for the creature – believed to be no older than age four – and giving him the best chance possible at an eventual, successful return to the wild.
Observers call Peltola, who won the red state’s House seat twice and is running to unseat Dan Sullivan, ‘a unicorn’
Dan J Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher and US Forest Service employee living in the town of Petersburg in south-eastern Alaska, who is running as a Republican for the US Senate. Dan S Sullivan is a Republican US senator, who has represented Alaska since 2015.
Both candidates will appear on the ballot, one name after the other, when Alaskans vote in primary elections this week – a complicated quirk of the contest that has drawn howls from Republicans.
Why Should Delaware Care? Pressures from overcrowding and inflation are continuing to burden Delaware schools, particularly in Sussex County. Last fall, officials from the Delmar School District said they would need to pass a referendum to ease those pressures, but residents of the small, working-class community could push back.
The question of whether the persistently overcrowded Delmar School District moves forward with its first tax referendum in more than a decade could depend on who fills a vacant seat on the school board.
Earlier this month, board members deadlocked during a public meeting to consider two candidates for the position, which became vacant in July after then-board Vice President Shane Bowden resigned amid charges of driving under the influence, according to a report from WBOC.
During interviews with the candidates — Shawn Brittingham and Farrah Morelli — board members asked each whether they would support raising taxes to support the district’s operations and capital expenses.
Morelli, who served on the Delmar Board of Education until her term expired earlier this summer, said she may support referendum requests, but would first need to see a proposal from the school district.
“I’m not going to vote just blindly because somebody says, ‘Here, we’re going to vote on operating expenses,’” she said.
Brittingham, who has served on the Delmar school board and with the Delaware State Board of Education, said he supported a potential referendum, arguing that it could ease persistent overcrowding in the school district.
Still, Brittingham noted that the decision of whether to raise taxes ultimately is up to the voters.
“Your taxpayers are the ones that make the decision, not you,” he said to board members during the meeting earlier this month.
Earlier this year, Spotlight Delaware reported on overcrowding in the rural Sussex County district, finding that two high school classes are sometimes held concurrently in the school’s auditorium and that teachers sometimes must leave their classroom during planning periods, so others can use the space.
Separately, former Delmar School District Superintendent Andrew O’Neal said last year he may have to reduce staff, and postpone essential repairs if the district does not find new dollars through a referendum.
At the time, he pointed toward overcrowding, teacher and staff salary increases, and inflation-induced cost increases as reasons for needing to increase taxes.
The Delmar middle and high school replacement was one of dozens of school projects statewide that was not funded under the state budget last year. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Delmar’s struggle reflects a broader challenge facing Delaware schools of keeping pace with rising costs and aging facilities. In many Sussex schools, those challenges pair with a growing enrollment. In some Wilmington-area schools, they pair with struggles of too few students.
While Delaware’s recent capital budget, called the Bond Bill, did free up new dollars for school construction, districts seeking referendum still must ask taxpayers to approve additional dollars.
An operating referendum is raised entirely from local dollars to go toward expenses, such as teacher salaries. Capital referendums pay for school construction with costs split between state and local dollars.
During the meeting earlier this month, the Delmar school board did not select Brittingham or Morelli to fill the vacant seat.
Board members Neil Baker and Jordan Johnson voted in favor of Morelli, while board member Russell Smart and board President Raymond Vincent voted for Brittingham.
The district will continue its search for candidates to fill the vacancy and will hold more interviews during its September board meeting.
Ongoing referendum discussions
Last winter, the Delmar school board announced it would not hold a referendum until 2027.
During a Dec. 9 meeting, Board President Raymond Vincent noted the district’s “very real financial pressures,” saying the need for an operational referendum is real.
But the timing, he said, is not right to ask residents to raise their own taxes.
At the time, Vincent cited overlapping unanswered questions that could affect the way schools in Delaware receive money, from the Public Education Funding Commission’s recommendation to approve a new funding model to the likelihood of updated property tax legislation coming from the General Assembly in the wake of its reassessment committee hearings.
If a referendum passes, the corresponding tax increase would only apply toward Delawareans, and the money raised would only be applied to the district’s middle and high school in Delaware.
Two miles from the middle and high schools, Delmar Elementary School is located in Delmar, Maryland, and is part of the Wicomico County Public School District.
Maryland students living in the town can attend Delaware’s Delmar School District for middle and high school, but only Delawareans are eligible to vote in a district referendum.
The last time the Delmar School District held and passed a referendum was in 2015, when the district raised money for capital improvements to school facilities and for operating expenses.
The American has proved again that she’s in a class of her own. But is that a good thing for her sport?
Over the weekend, more than 16,000 fans, including former and current world champions such as Floyd Mayweather, Terence Crawford and Shakur Stevenson, filled State Farm Arena in Atlanta to witness Claressa Shields dominate Kaye Scott.
Shields made quick work of Scott winning by TKO in six rounds after unleashing a flurry of punches against the Australian, whose corner threw in the towel to stop the fight before more damage could be done.
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.
Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund hears requests
Primary election absentee ballot counting begins
Dueling Port of Wilmington oversight boards hear updates
Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund hears requests
The Transportation Infrastructure Investment Fund Council will meet Tuesday morning to consider four requests for grant funding.
The fund supports road or infrastructure projects that tie into major economic development projects to get them to fruition faster.
The council will consider applications from the city of Dover, Delmar Business Center LLC, DuPont Properties LLC in Dagsboro, and Wine Worx Real Estate Holdings LLC in Millsboro. The details of the projects will be made public in the hearings.
The TIIF council will meet Tuesday, Aug. 18m at 10 a.m. in the Delaware Conference Room of the DelDOT Administration Building, located at 800 Bay Road in Dover. For more info and a link to remote viewing, click here.
Primary election preparations begin
Kent County officials will begin scanning absentee ballots for this year’s primary election on Monday afternoon.
Officials will not formally count votes until after polls close on Election Day, 8 p.m. on September 15. But the process of preparing those ballots for counting will begin at 2 p.m. Monday.
The preparation meeting will reconvene daily until all votes have been processed.
New Castle County election officials will follow suit and begin the absentee ballot scanning process on Friday morning.
The November midterm elections will be the least competitive for statewide races in years, a Spotlight Delaware analysis found.
📍 The Department of Elections will meet at 2 p.m. Monday inside its Kent County office, located at 100 Enterprise Place, Suite 5, in Dover. For more information, click here.
📍 The Department of Elections will meet at 9:30 a.m. Friday inside its New Castle County office, located at 820 N. French St., Suite 400 in Wilmington. For more information, click here.
Public can comment on Delmarva rate hike
The public will get an opportunity Wednesday to comment on Delmarva Power’s latest rate hike request, which could raise an average monthly utility bill by nearly $7.
After months of political pressure over rising electric bills, Delaware energy regulators rebuffed Delmarva Power by approving only part of the utility’s scaled-back rate increase request on an interim basis.
All rate hikes for regulated utilities are reimbursed rather than front-funded, and requires a company to argue why it deserves to be reimbursed. Interim rates are used to support a utility while it makes its case, and, if it loses, then customers are reimbursed.
Delmarva has requested a $68.6 million annual rate increase, but it did voluntarily scale back how much of that increase it sought to collect while the case is pending. The Public Service Commission reduced that amount even further, authorizing an interim increase of about $34.3 million.
If ultimately successful though, ratepayers could see the full impact on their bills starting as soon as later this year.
The Public Service Commission will hear public comment on the Delmarva Power request at a public hearing starting at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Cannon Building, located at 861 Silver Lake Blvd. in Dover. For more information or the option to attend remotely, click here.
Dueling port oversight boards to meet
Both of Delaware’s oversight boards for the Port of Wilmington are set to meet today to receive operational updates and hear from members of the public.
The General Assembly’s Port of Wilmington Expansion Task Force will meet first at noon today.
The group, chaired by Sen. Darius Brown (D-New Castle) and Rep. Frank Cooke (D-Wilmington) is slated to hear updates from the interim executive director of the Diamond State Port Corporation as well as from Enstructure, the private terminal operator for the Port of Wilmington and its embattled Edgemoor expansion project.
The Diamond State Port Corporation’s board of directors will then hold its own meeting beginning at 2 p.m. today.
The board will go into a closed door session for the first hour of its meeting, then board members will also hear an update from Enstructure.
Both meetings also are set to include public comment sessions to receive input from attendees.
📍 The Port of Wilmington Expansion Task Force will meet at 12 p.m. Monday inside Buck Library, located at 661 South Dupont Hwy in New Castle. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
📍 The Diamond State Port Corporation board of directors will meet at 2 p.m. Monday, also inside Buck Library, located at 661 South Dupont Hwy in New Castle. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Interfaith Council to discuss immigration issues
The Delaware Interfaith Council’s Immigration Working Group will meet on Tuesday evening near Wilmington.
The council, created more than a decade ago to bridge state agencies and faith communities to tackle education, housing, and health challenges, will discuss emerging issues related to immigrants.
In many immigrant communities, especially Haitian and Hispanic communities, pastors play a leadership role in how to respond to state and federal initiatives. Delaware’s key refugee resettlement program is also led by a faith-based organization, Jewish Federation Services.
The Delaware Interfaith Council Immigration Working Group will meet from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Route 9 Library and Innovation Center, located at 3022 New Castle Ave. in New Castle. For more information or remote viewing, click here.
Hearing to discuss marijuana cultivation site
The Office of the Marijuana Commissioner will hold a public hearing Wednesday to discuss a proposed cultivation site and whether it should be permitted.
The site, located at 593 Gravesend Road near Smyrna, would be used to grow marijuana for sale in the state’s medicinal and recreational markets, but would not be a site of sales.
The hearing is the result of a local petition in opposition to the facility, but the discretion of whether to approve it falls to Marijuana Commissioner Joshua Sanderlin.
The hearing will be held at 1 p.m. Wednesday at the Office of the Marijuana Commissioner, located at 1128 S. Bradford St. in Dover. There is no remote viewing or commenting option for this meeting. For more information, click here.
President says he ‘gets along great’ with dictator but officials say Ukraine war is boosting North’s capabilities
Donald Trump has said he is scaling back joint US military drills with South Korea aimed at deterring North Korea, despite military officials from both countries warning that Kim Jong-un’s regime is learning new battlefield tactics from the Ukraine war.
The drills under Ulchi Freedom Shield, one of two main annual exercises held by South Korea and the US, start on Monday and run until 27 August.
The 12-time national title-winning coach discusses Connecticut’s time on top, his bond with Paige Bueckers, the Pat Summitt rivalry and why he isn’t retiring just yet
Let’s get one thing out of the way right from the jump: UConn Huskies coach Geno Auriemma says he isn’t retiring anytime in the “foreseeable future”.
That may come as a relief to fans of the program who have never known anyone else to be at its helm. Though he declined to promise an exact timeline, Auriemma made one thing clear while speaking to the Guardian last week: he’s going to be sticking around.
Atlas Preparatory Academy, a private school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Every student relies on taxpayer dollars from one of the state’s four voucher programs to pay all or part of their tuition. Caleb Alvarado for ProPublica
At some point, my reporting colleagues and I began referring to them as the “100% schools.”
We were following the money that flows from states’ public coffers into private schools through vouchers when we noticed a subset of educational facilities where tax dollars cover all or a big part of the tuition for every student.
In essence, these were schools that were funded like public schools but didn’t operate with the same oversight or transparency.
Our reporting found that these types of private schools exist throughout the country and that in Wisconsin — where I’m based — there were 39 that fell into that category during the most recent school year. Together, they were educating 7,923 children and taking in roughly $87 million from vouchers offered by the state.
Atlas Preparatory Academy in Milwaukee was a 100% school in my city that had low test scores and declining enrollment while also receiving more than $4.3 million in voucher money for 357 students in grades K-12. It was one of the first schools I dug into, and immediately some of the facts I unearthed in public documents made me curious.
There was, for instance, the money being made by its board chair, who also appeared to serve as a school administrator. His compensation was more than $150,000 in 2024.
This dual role would be prohibited at a traditional public school in Wisconsin, though there are no such rules for private schools.
In another transaction that would raise alarm in a public school setting, the same board chair’s accounting firm received tens of thousands of dollars from the school for accounting and consulting.
During my reporting, it became clear that the school’s operations were not only discordant with public school policies but with basic governing standards for nonprofits, experts told me.
More than a decade ago, a Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction research paper on what it called “choice schools” asked: “When is a private school really a public school?”
Though that question still resonates today, public officials supporting vouchers have yet to provide a clear answer.
Have you had trouble finding a school or using a voucher-style program? Do you have concerns about schools — public or private — in your area? Help us understand how families across the country are navigating their school options.
Nor has there been any progress in Wisconsin or elsewhere in lining up the standards of private and public schools on a range of issues, even with the spectacular growth of private schools funded by taxpayer dollars.
Voucher schools, for instance, are not required to serve all children with disabilities. Public schools are.
Another major difference is transparency. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, information about public schools — good, bad or mundane — can be gleaned through open meetings, district YouTube channels and robust websites with detailed agendas, minutes, reports, statistics and information about enrollment, curriculum, special education services and more.
Districts have to abide by Wisconsin’s open records law, meaning that reams of records are available to anyone who formally requests them. Not so for the private schools. Voucher schools must, by law, have at least two opportunities a year for parents to meet with the governing board. But the schools do not have to make those meetings accessible to the general public.
In many states, private schools also don’t have to administer standardized tests or report those scores — in sharp contrast to the mandates for public schools. Wisconsin is different because it does require both students using vouchers and public school students to be tested, though parents can and do opt out.
In recent years, Atlas Prep has fared poorly on the state’s report card for schools, garnering the lowest rating: “fails to meet expectations,” or one star out of a possible five.
Not far from Atlas, Bay View High School, a public school, also has earned only one star on the state report card. Its website connects the public to the school’s improvement plan — its strategy to reduce dropouts and improve school culture — as well as information about local school council meetings and discipline methods, and about its science, technology, engineering, arts and math programming.
The Atlas Prep website includes a tab labeled “Build Your Own Curriculum.” When you click on it, nothing loads.
Though every student at the 100% schools we looked at relies on public funds for tuition, the money does not necessarily make up the institution’s total budget. The schools can take in additional revenue from investments, fundraising, grants or other means, but they are heavily dependent on tax dollars to maintain operations.
“If the choice schools are really some kind of quasi-public schools, then in keeping with national efforts to turnaround struggling schools, it may be necessary to subject low-performing choice schools to financial sanctions, turnaround efforts or even closure,” the state Department of Public Instruction suggested in its research paper.
That was back in 2011. Those types of accountability measures still do not exist.
Some key financial documents are available, however, for Wisconsin voucher schools — if you know where to look.
Annual IRS information filings for many nonprofit schools are easily obtainable through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer page. And independent financial audits, required by the state, are available through the state Department of Public Instruction. I requested those for a handful of Wisconsin’s 100% schools, and I visited four.
One warm day in June, I stood in the lobby of one such school in Milwaukee, near a large fish tank. I’d sought days earlier to contact the woman running the school. An audit showed she was paying her own company rent for the building ($128,000 in one recent year). She put me off. “I’m not interested, ma’am,” she said via a phone in the foyer. “Please do not call us back again.”
On the other side of town, I rang the bell at Atlas Prep’s high school building and asked to speak to the executive director, Michelle Lukacs. I was informed she was headed to a meeting and could not speak with me.
By then, I was digging into Atlas’ finances, a process that would last several weeks and continue into July.
Over multiple emails, I shared with Lukacs what I was learning, including the compensation of the board chair, Steven E. Menden. A licensed certified public accountant, Menden had compiled the school’s IRS filing since its formation in 2001.
At times since then, Menden has been listed on the school’s website as “board advisor.” His daughter, Kaitlyn Menden, was also among the school’s most highly compensated employees in 2024. Her package was $127,674 in salary and benefits for a job in “business services.” (In an email to me, she described her role as wearing “many hats” beyond that, citing human resources duties, “oversight of the school’s technology hardware and cloud resources” and “special projects.”)
In the past couple of years, records show, Steven Menden has taken on the role of board chairman. The fiscal year 2025 IRS form showed Menden putting in a 40-hour workweek for Atlas and earning $132,505 in pay plus $19,916 in additional benefits. What’s more, his accounting firm, Menden & Associates, had an $87,250 contract.
Lukacs defended the school’s compensation practices, noting in an email: “Every person on our team, regardless of their role, earns their compensation and is not overpaid.”
She explained that Menden is not compensated for his board service but for “Executive Management Services.”
It would be forbidden for a public school board member in Wisconsin to also have a district management job under a legal doctrine regarding roles that are “incompatible.”
“In essence, one cannot supervise oneself, which would include hiring and firing and disciplining oneself,” said Dan Rossmiller, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
State law governing public officials also prohibits school board members from having a private interest in any contract over $15,000 that they bid for, vote on, negotiate or participate in. Violators can be charged with a low-level felony. There is no similar law that pertains to private school operators in Wisconsin.
In an email to me, Menden explained how the Atlas board handles potential conflicts of interest.
“Any conflicts of interest for either related or unrelated parties are resolved in favor of Atlas Preparatory Academy as outlined in our IRS mandated Conflict of Interest Policy,” he wrote. “This means that conflicted persons recuse themselves from the situation and do not vote or participate and the final decision that is made is strictly in the best financial interest of the school.”
This organizational structure does not comport with best practices for the governance of a nonprofit organization, experts told me.
“Board members are volunteers, and best practice is unambiguous that they should not simultaneously hold paid staff positions at the school they oversee — doing so collapses the separation between governance and management that gives a board its purpose in the first place,” said Chelsea Cross, a vice president at City Forward Collective in Milwaukee.
Atlas Prep’s IRS filing indicated that Lukacs, the full-time executive director, earned $175,000 in salary and benefits and also had a board position. A third board member is listed as working only one hour a week for no pay.
In a public school setting, Lukacs’ situation would be akin to a district superintendent also sitting on the school board — an arrangement that would raise issues over proper checks and balances since superintendents typically are hired by and report to the school board.
Said Cross: “With 2/3 of its governing board also on the payroll — including the very executive the board exists to evaluate — Atlas Prep’s board cannot meaningfully hold its own leadership accountable.”
Lukacs disagreed with that assessment. “This is a false statement,” she wrote in an email, saying that Atlas board members “model strong personal leadership showing integrity, confidence and consistency in their actions and decision making.”
She told me she does not vote to approve her own salary “or vote in any other situation where a conflict of interest exists.” And she noted that countless hours have been invested at Atlas Prep in improving curriculum and student support. “While our standardized test scores do not yet reflect the level of achievement we aspire to, our staff has remained steadfast in its commitment to continuous improvement,” she wrote.
I had asked Atlas Prep twice for a copy of the school’s conflict of interest policy, which Menden had mentioned. As of mid-August, I had not received it.
I also requested a copy of the school’s contract with Menden’s accounting firm. I did not receive that either.
At a public school, such contracts would be subject to open record laws. I easily found a link on the Milwaukee Public Schools website to a decade’s worth of contracts for school nurses, mental health services, fitness instructors, interpreters, color printers, portable toilets, busing, professional development and so on.
But Atlas does not post those records online. It doesn’t have to.
At Atlas Prep, the school’s executive director also serves on the board that oversees the director job. At a public school, these dual roles would not be allowed, but that restriction doesn’t apply to Atlas, even though it depends on public money.Caleb Alvarado for ProPublica
Amazon has "reintroduced a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits against the online retailer," reports Bloomberg, "inserting a legal buffer between itself and plaintiffs attorneys that it removed five years ago."
In an email sent to customers on Friday, the company said a new "arbitration agreement and class-action waiver" will require shoppers to resolve disputes outside the courts but said they could still file small claims, cases that typically limit damages to a few thousand dollars... The user-agreement update isn't necessarily binding in court. Plaintiffs attorneys could still seek class-action lawsuits against Amazon, and it would be up to a judge to determine if the user agreement prevents them from doing so.
Amazon was contacted for an explanation by Bloomberg, and provided a statement saying they continually update their wording "to better serve our customers."
Amazon said they'd "determined" that "reinstating the arbitration clause will offer customers a fast, cost-effective way to resolve disputes while still giving them the option of going to small claims court."
The leftwing commentator has been invited to appear on the Planet America program on Monday night
The ABC is set to air the return of its Planet America program on Monday night as the US midterm elections gain steam, with a new episode featuring the leftwing commentator Hasan Piker.
Host John Barron said the episode will focus on the “rise of Democratic socialists and the populist left”, with Piker speaking about “what it’s like in the eye of a political storm”. But the appearance quickly sparked the ire of conservatives in Australia.
lately I’ve run into a problem with my onewheel. I use an XRV power kit and for 2 years now it worked great but for some days now when wheeling, it vibrates strangely. I noticed, it does it mostly when leaning forwards to the inner side of my body. Sometimes, when it starts it may not stop until i stop the board, really odd behavior.
First, I tried loading the base xml files of Tony back into the vesc app and redoing the IMU calibration but nothing worked. Retightening thr screws also did not solve the problem as there is nothing loose. So, my settings are the same basic ones as those xml files. Sadly, this side does not allow me to upload those files but you can finde them here: https://pev.dev/t/gtv-xrv-pintv-power-kit-accidentally-reset-configs-motor-squeal-on-engagement-how-to-fix/1709
Could it have to do something with Floaty or Float Control? I use both as I have an Android and iPhone.
For now, there is nothing more I can tell so thanks for any advice and ride safely!
In today’s newsletter: The Spanish prime minister has remade himself as Europe’s leading leftwing standard-bearer. Could his success offer the UK’s PM a route forward?
Good morning. To international onlookers, Pedro Sánchez appears to have achieved the impossible. Where other European leftist and left-ish premiers have flopped and flailed, the Spanish PM has endured.
Since June 2018, Sánchez has ruled from Madrid, implementing a raft of progressive policies. More recently, he has emerged as a leading, and often lone, left-wing European voice on the global stage, striking a defiant tone on everything from the Trump administration’s war in Iran (“the smokescreen of war to hide their failure”) to Israel’s actions in Gaza (“exterminating a defenceless people”). The fact that the international press has nicknamed him El Guapo (the handsome one) can’t hurt.
UK economy | The UK should expect to see a new cost of living crisis, with official figures released this week by the ONS expected to show how soaring energy bills drove up inflation close to 3% in July.
Ceuta | Moroccan police arrested 111 people this weekend, who were trying to enter Spain’s north African territory of Ceuta, amid tightened security on both sides after social media posts called for another mass crossing.
Jason Arday | The University of Cambridge has defended its mental health support for the academic Jason Arday.
UK politics | Andy Burnham is being urged to protect 4 million gig economy workers, who thinktanks warn miss out on key statutory rights including: parental leave, redundancy pay and protection against unfair dismissal.
Indonesia | Rescue crews dug through collapsed buildings and landslide debris in eastern Indonesia on Sunday, searching for bodies after a powerful earthquake killed at least 51 people, and injured more than 100.
Sánchez understands that anchoring his party to the left … is where he can govern.
Monday | Nominations close for candidates seeking to replace Anas Sarwar as Scottish Labour leader.
Tuesday | Opening arguments expected to begin in a lawsuit brought by multiple US states against Meta about social media addiction.
Thursday | Students in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland will receive their GCSE results.
"Epic Games has confirmed that it is working on a Linux version of its storefront, potentially removing the need for third-party launchers on platforms such as Steam Deck," reports PC Guide:
The confirmation came during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the Epic Games Store's community Discord server. When a user asked whether Epic had any plans for a Linux version of its launcher, an Epic staff member confirmed that it is coming "soon(TM)" in emoji form. Of course, that is far from confirming any kind of date, but it is official confirmation of a Linux version nonetheless.
"On top of that, Nvidia's GeForce Now [cloud gaming] app for Linux is also official, having emerged from beta," writes TechRadar, calling it all part of "a rosier future for Linux gamers."
And while it's not related to gaming, OpenAI's ["preview"] release of a ChatGPT app for Linux is another milestone for the platform... OpenAI said: "Linux has been one of the most-requested platforms for the desktop app, and this launch extends ChatGPT and Codex across every major desktop operating system." The Epic Games Store arriving natively is great news for gamers running Linux — including SteamOS — as it means a much more convenient way of playing games from the store, as opposed to the current situation with fudging and workarounds (using a third-party app such as the Heroic Games Launcher)...
Epic's own Fortnite doesn't work on Linux (and that's down to Epic actively blocking the game from running due to issues around cheating, which remains a source of controversy). Given the apparent changing attitude here with its launcher being ported over, maybe Epic will reverse course on Fortnite eventually. Some gamers on Reddit are highly skeptical about that possibility though, and as one doubting Redditor put it: "I wouldn't hold my breath."
New signs in the City of Newark's downtown parking lots depict a cartoon rabbit holding a coffee cup – part of the way the city is promoting its new program that offers visitors free parking for up to 15 minutes…
ATLANTA, Georgia — Sen. Jon Ossoff escalated his criticism of President Donald Trump’s handling of the Iran war Sunday, accusing the administration of repeatedly misleading Americans about the conflict’s justification, progress and expected duration.
“There’s something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war, treating citizens as fools and those who serve as pawns,” the Georgia Democrat told supporters at an Atlanta rally.
Ossoff pointed to a series of administration declarations that he argued have not matched events on the ground. He noted that Trump previously said Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then later portrayed it as an imminent threat requiring renewed military action. Ossoff also contrasted early claims of rapid victory with a conflict now approaching six months.
His criticism comes as public support for the war remains weak. A June Marquette Law School Poll found just 33% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict, below his overall job approval at the time.
The war has also become an economic issue ahead of the midterms. Fighting and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have pushed gasoline prices sharply higher. The national average was about $4.07 per gallon Sunday, compared with roughly $3.14 a year earlier, according to AAA figures cited by The Hill.
Ossoff is seeking reelection in battleground Georgia, making his attack on Trump’s foreign policy part of a broader Democratic argument that the administration promised lower prices and peace but has instead delivered higher household costs and a prolonged Middle East conflict.
Guardian investigation finds apparent discrepancy between what tech company has said about its AI capacity – and the number of advanced chips it has in operation
The chips are quite small and some can be held in the palm of a hand. They are fundamental to the development of artificial intelligence models – and the world’s biggest technology companies need vast numbers of them to keep ahead.
Microsoft is one of them. And, on paper, it seems to have a problem. A Guardian investigation has found an apparent discrepancy between what the company has said about its AI capacity – and the number of advanced AI chips it has in operation.
Politico notes that over 20 local jurisdictions in America "either stopped using Flock cameras or began the process of doing so in July, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, an activist group that has been mapping the company. It's the highest amount in a single month since they began tracking in 2021."
Some local officials said the public safety promises weren't worth the cost. The cameras "didn't help us with anything. From a utility aspect, they were just kind of not useful," said Eric Couture, a Democratic first selectman in Killingworth, Connecticut, another city that recently canceled its contract with Flock. "I'd say it was a net negative."
And their article adds that it's a bipartisan pushback that "runs parallel to sprawling fights over the future of technology in American life, including the rise of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence tools and the construction of massive data centers needed to power them."
Salon even argues Flock's cameras "have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state... People are sick of tech billionaires trying to control our lives""
By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they're being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy...
According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type.
The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back... Along with protests against data centers, it's a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave.
Salon's writer also adds that "what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is," citing "a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals."
City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, "I'm not gonna waste your time; I'm kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will." He then walked off in triumph.
This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool."
Anthropic said it was implementing the watermark system in response to the European Union's landmark AI Act passed in 2024, which requires that AI companies mark content that's been generated or edited by their systems.
TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.")
But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it."
In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark."
Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said...
Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated.
Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either '100%' or 'Co-Authored/Created' by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!"
I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet).
On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
Although Forbes also reports that
Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."
Amid reports of burnout and poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, Adm. Brad Cooper acknowledged that long stretches at sea can be challenging but said some of the concerns were "old news."
China has established the first scheduled transit through the northern sea route, but questions remain over the environmental and political risks
When Marco Rubio suggested that the world should look to new shipping lanes to bypass the logjammed strait of Hormuz, it’s unlikely he had the Arctic’s northern sea route in mind.
And yet in recent months the promise of this 5,500km channel – cleaved through frozen seas by nuclear-powered icebreakers and illuminated by a sun that never dips below the Arctic horizon – has grown.
Linux Kernel 7.2 has just been officially released with a slew of new features, reports the blog 9to5Linux.
Highlights of Linux 7.2 "include cache-aware load-balancing support, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture."
Linux kernel 7.2 also introduces a "Fair(er)" GPU scheduler, support for the 'zerocopy' library to Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enables large folios by default for the Btrfs file system.
It also brings Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R processor series, improvements to the kernel's swap subsystem, support for multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) to the khugepaged kernel thread, and support for compressed files to the SMB filesystem.
On top of that, Linux 7.2 improves the new NTFS filesystem introduced in Linux kernel 7.1, adds devicetree updates for 64-bit NXP/Freescale and Qualcomm platforms, introduces MPTCP signaling support for IPv6 addresses, adds GRO/GSO support for PPPoE, and brings more SMP load-balancing updates... [T]he TCP authentication option has been implemented, and there are also some Thunderbolt networking improvements.
Also worth mentioning is that the KVM subsystem has received support for AMD's "guest-mode execution trap" and Intel's "mode-based execution control" (MBEC) features, the NFS file system's default block size was bumped to 4MB on systems with at least 16GB RAM, and support for the Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) feature has been added.
Thanks to Slashdot reader prisoninmate for bring the news.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea, citing their cost, his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Seoul’s refusal to support U.S. actions against Iran.
The directive came just before the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises were scheduled to begin Monday. The 11-day drills were expected to involve about 18,000 South Korean troops and are designed to improve readiness against North Korean military threats.
Trump said the exercises send an “inappropriate and hostile” signal toward North Korea, which he described as respectful and relatively unthreatening during his presidency. He also complained that South Korea declined his request to participate in efforts aimed at Iran.
North Korea has long denounced U.S.-South Korean exercises as rehearsals for invasion, while Washington and Seoul maintain they are defensive. Pyongyang recently launched ballistic missiles ahead of the drills and threatened unspecified countermeasures.
South Korea appeared to receive little advance warning of Trump’s announcement but said Monday it hopes the reduction could help restart dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang. Its government also stressed the importance of maintaining military readiness and close coordination with the United States.
Trump similarly suspended major exercises after meeting Kim in Singapore in 2018. Those diplomatic efforts ultimately failed to produce an agreement eliminating North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, which has expanded substantially since negotiations collapsed in 2019.
PAGE, Arizona — Lake Powell has fallen to the lowest level in its history, placing one of the West’s most important water and electricity sources dangerously close to losing its ability to generate hydropower.
The reservoir dropped to 3,519.91 feet above sea level Saturday, slightly below its previous record from April 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Lake Powell is now more than 20 feet lower than it was at the start of the year and roughly 30 feet above the level at which Glen Canyon Dam’s turbines can no longer produce electricity.
The milestone comes just over a week after Lake Mead also reached a record low. Together, the reservoirs are storing less water than at any point since 1957, before Lake Powell existed.
The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million people across seven states and supports major agricultural, tribal and urban economies. Persistent overuse has combined with a record-dry winter and rising temperatures to sharply reduce runoff into the system. Reuters reported this spring that April-to-July inflows into Lake Powell were projected at just 13% of average after historically poor Rocky Mountain snowpack.
Federal officials have already proposed a new 10-year management plan that could require significant reductions in Colorado River use by Arizona, California and Nevada after years of unsuccessful negotiations among the basin states.
The falling reservoir is also disrupting tourism, forcing marinas and boat ramps to relocate as shorelines continue retreating.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy sharply criticized President Donald Trump’s effort to reshape the childhood vaccine schedule Sunday, calling aspects of the policy “crazy” and “stupid” and arguing that such decisions are contributing to Trump’s declining poll numbers.
Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate health committee, specifically objected to Trump’s push to separate the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into individual shots. Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Cassidy said the change would turn two routine MMR injections into six separate shots and require additional medical visits.
“This is why the president’s poll numbers are going down,” Cassidy said. “Because people don’t perceive that he knows the reality of their life.”
Trump’s order also emphasizes further investigation of vaccines and autism, despite extensive scientific evidence finding no causal connection. Cassidy said Sunday there is “no evidence whatsoever” that vaccines cause autism.
Current CDC guidance recommends two MMR doses for children, with the first at 12 to 15 months and the second at ages 4 to 6.
Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already made substantial changes to federal vaccine policy. Earlier this year, the CDC revised its childhood schedule so several vaccines are no longer universally recommended, following a Trump directive to reassess U.S. practices.
Cassidy’s criticism is particularly notable because he provided a crucial Republican vote to confirm Kennedy as HHS secretary in 2025 after receiving assurances about vaccine policy.
Outgoing Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor, voted to confirm anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr as health secretary before speaking out
The Republican senator Bill Cassidy – a medical doctor who voted to confirm anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy as federal health secretary in early 2025 – on Sunday denounced Donald Trump’s “crazy, stupid” claims about the safety of the combined MMR vaccine for undermining faith in immunization.
When Trump recently ordered changes to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule, with Kennedy by his side, the president called for two shots of the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to be scrapped in favor of two doses of three separate vaccines, claiming that the MMR shots are “sort of like a nuclear weapon” that could be “quite lethal”.
Senator Ruben Gallego calls carrier’s months-long deployment a ‘deep problem’ as wellbeing concerns mount
Democrats on Sunday intensified their demands for answers from the Trump administration over conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as the aircraft carrier’s nearly nine-month deployment continued fueling concern over crew morale, mental health and living conditions.
Ruben Gallego, a Democratic senator from Arizona, said on Sunday that problems onboard the Lincoln had kept mounting – and he blamed the carrier’s prolonged deployment on the unresolved war that Donald Trump started in February with Iran as well as lackluster leadership in general from the Republican president’s administration.
As the Middle East crisis drags on into its sixth month, central banks sit in a tricky position. Oil prices remain at elevated levels, stoking inflationary pressures while also threatening to weigh on growth.
The US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are still smarting from the criticism of their inaction in 2022, when inflation soared above 10% in the UK and eurozone and over 9% in the US.
Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them to bypass studio giants and take more creative risks
Near the collonaded entrance to Sony Pictures’ historic Culver City film studio, a tech-powered rival has sprung up this summer. The artists at Promise, a new studio feeding off the potential of AI, can glimpse the lots where Singin’ in the Rain and Men in Black were shot, but no longer do they need to get beyond the studio’s high walls to make their visions come true.
From far more modest premises, they are making movies with rapidly accelerating AI models that create backgrounds, special effects and even “synthetic performers” – using US models but also driven by market-leading Chinese AI.
One of the Loco Beach Coconuts’ mascots, Peter Colada, interacts with a fan during the first Banana Ball game in Wilmington, Delaware. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The Texas Tailgaters and Loco Beach Coconuts of the Banana Ball Championship League played the first ever Banana Ball game in Delaware in front of a sold out crowd Thursday, August 13.
WILMINGTON, DE — “You’re going to see the most entertainment during a baseball game with tricks and being fans first [both] players and staff.”
That’s how Texas Tailgater Zach Watson said he’d sum up Banana Ball in a sentence to a new fan.
Watson got to meet with many new fans as Banana Ball took over Frawley Stadium, Thursday night, in the first ever Banana Ball game in Wilmington, Delaware. The game featured Watson’s team — the Texas Tailgaters — in a matchup against one of Banana Ball’s newest teams, the Loco Beach Coconuts.
Banana Ball isn’t a traditional baseball setting. For starters, the Coconuts were the home team but in this format they’re deemed the “headliners”. That’s because Banana Ball is geared to constantly entertain its fans with more than just the product on the field.
“I don’t think there’s ever a quiet moment,” Watson said.
Pregame
Fans lined up outside the front parking lot of Frawley Stadium around 3:00 p.m. waiting to enter the plaza area for the “rope drop” at 3:30. The plaza was themed in accordance with the weekend’s headliners. Beach themed signs, palm trees and surf boards transformed the parking lot into “Loco Beach”. The Coconuts’ players and staff greeted the fans under the Loco Beach Coconut themed archway and welcomed them into the plaza over three hours before the game was set to officially start.
The minute fans enter the plaza their Banana Ball experience begins.
Fans could check out the merchandise available for both teams at merchandise tents or grab free refresher samples at the Dunkin truck. Tropical Smoothie Cafe served smoothies out of a small tiki hut and a couple of food trucks were available for hungry patrons.
The real excitement of the plaza experience wasn’t any of that though. It was the players and cast members themselves.
The players spent over an hour outside meeting with fans, taking pictures and signing autographs. Each interaction was genuine. Players not only signed but had a conversation with each family or fan that approached. Cast members like the Hulagans and Loco Beach lifeguards did the same, creating an environment completely in line with the Banana Ball motto of “Fans First. Entertain Always.”
“Just going out there and making sure a fan has the best time of their life,” Watson said. “Even if it’s trying to influence one fan, hoping they’re having fun and introduce yourself and talk to them, so yeah, fans first.”
A member of the Hulagans poses for a picture while out in the plaza interacting with fans. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The players eventually left the plaza area, but some fans didn’t even notice, because a pregame party was erupting on the stage to the right of the stadium. The official band of the Coconuts — Sitting on Saturn — ushered in the start of the Loco Beach Live Show — a portion of the pregame festivities.
The Band
Sitting on Saturn is a band from California that found their way to Banana Ball through a direct message from Banana Ball creator Jesse Cole.
“I guess he saw like one of our TikToks and listened to like our album and was like ‘I’m starting up a team called the Coconuts and I would love if you guys would be like, you know, play some music for us’ and I’m like, ‘dude I’m so down’,” said lead singer Hoyt Yeatman.
The three person band includes guitar players and singers Yeatman and Kyle Hart as well as drummer Trevor Smith.
Yeatman and Hart said the band was thrown right into the action performing their first show with the Coconuts at Petco Park — the home of the San Diego Padres — in March of this year, becoming the official band of the Coconuts. The band travels with the team, plays pregame and postgame shows and are a part of the action during the game whether that be playing a song on the field or in the stands.
“We can’t like see what the players are doing behind us so we’re just playing our, what we normally do, and yeah, they’re dancing and stuff and we normally [don’t] see it until we watch the video after,” Hart said.
“We’ll be playing a song or something and then they have like a dance that they’re doing with us and it’s like you got the whole team, like it’s just like when two worlds collide kind of. I don’t think it’s ever really been done honestly. It’s cool,” Yeatman said.
Sitting on Saturn performs during the pregame Loco Beach Live Show. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
Yeatman and Hart said their experience in Banana Ball and playing live music in coordination with a live baseball game is still a little strange, but it’s an experience they’re thankful to be a part of.
“Honestly, it’s cool. We have like our own baseball card, Banana Ball card, and I’m like, I would never in a million years think that our band would have like a baseball trading card, but like here it is,” Yeatman said. “It’s so cool we’re very blessed, very fortunate.”
Game Time
The Loco Beach Live Show continued up until the gates to the field opened at 5:30 p.m. entertaining fans with the band’s music and interactive games coordinated by each team’s Banana Ball Host.
The entertainment didn’t stop once the fans entered the stadium.
Even as fans were finding their seats or grabbing concessions for the game there was a member of the Banana Ball cast interacting with a fan, hosting an activity or setting up for the next activity.
As fans entered the stadium, the excitement to see the actual on field product was palpable. First time viewers speculated on what they were about to witness while some fans that had seen clips or portions of Banana Ball before, speculated on what trick plays they’d get to see.
Once the clock hit 7:00 p.m. anticipation and speculation became reality.
Banana Ball is a fast-paced game that never lacks in action. Banana Ball rules like no mound visits, no bunting and no stepping out of the batter’s box keep the game moving to fit within the two hour time limit. The players on the field are always participating in something whether that be the game itself, cheering from outside the dugout or interacting with the audience from the field.
“I say to anybody that’s joining, it’s Crossfit baseball,” Watson said. “You got two hours of nonstop movement. You don’t sit down ever.”
Zach Watson turns toward second base after getting a hit against the Coconut pitcher. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
Some normal baseball rules still apply. There are nine defenders, one batter in the box and the pitcher still initiates the play with a pitch. The bases are the standard distance and when a runner crosses home it still counts as a run scored, though that doesn’t mean the team is up one to nothing.
In Banana Ball, the goal is to get the most points. Points are earned by winning an inning. The team that scores the most runs in an inning earns the point, making each frame its own mini game. The final inning is more traditional where every run that crosses the plate counts as a point.
On Thursday, the Tailgaters won the game 6-3, earning a point with wins in the second, sixth and seventh innings. The Tailgaters also won the equalizer point awarded to the team with the most trick plays going into the final inning. The Tailgaters pulled off 14 trick play outs sending hitters back to the dugout with tag team catches and grabs with a cowboy hat.
The trick plays are an exciting feature to what is still a competitive baseball game at its core.
There is still plenty of entertainment to the product on the field. Players have creative walk-up dances, skits and antics during play. For example, after a hit by pitch the Coconuts recreated the scene of Jack and Rose from “Titanic” and during one at-bat Coconut player, Kaden Bowler, took an at-bat while riding a hoverboard designed to look like a surfboard. Those creative entertainment features add spectacle to what is a high level baseball game played by high level athletes.
“It’s a completely different game than what you see on TikTok,” Watson said. “You just see the dances and everything mostly on TikTok so when you actually come to a game you’re like dang these boys are actually, we’re actually playing baseball. You don’t expect that.”
Coconut Kaden Bowler glides to first on a hoverboard designed to look like a surfboard. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
Postgame
After the game is over there is still more to experience.
Players from both teams returned to the plaza to sign autographs and talk with fans. Sitting on Saturn played more music and the entertainment continued until about 9:30 p.m. when the venue closed. The postgame plaza party ends a Banana Ball experience that begins over three hours before a pitch is even thrown.
“I’m excited for these fans, if they have never been, to experience Banana Ball in a different way,” Watson told Delaware Live before the game.
The Tailgaters and Coconuts wrapped up their three game series in Delaware, Saturday night, with a 4-3 win from the Tailgaters giving them the 2-1 series win. The Tailgaters have already secured their spot in the Banana Ball Championship League postseason, but the Coconuts are still fighting to claim one of the three remaining spots.
Fans that want to keep track of the rest of the 2026 Banana Ball World Tour can check the Banana Ball website for upcoming events and ways to watch the games.
This story was updated on August 17 to include pictures from gameday.
Zootopia 3, Coco 2, Percy Jackson season 3, Ice Age 6, live-action Rapunzel, Bluey and a Kingdom Hearts series were some of the major announcements out of Disney’s big event.
Border security tightened after social media posts call for another mass crossing into Spain’s north African territory
Moroccan police have arrested 111 people as they tried to enter Spain’s north African territory of Ceuta, amid tightened security on both sides after social media posts called for another mass crossing.
The attempted crossing on Saturday came two weeks after more than 72,000 migrants surged into Ceuta, causing tensions within the EU and prompting anti-immigration rhetoric among far-right parties worldwide. At least 96 people died trying to reach European soil.
London police force tells Telegraph incident was result of ‘human error’ and it is conducting an investigation
The Metropolitan police have apologised for accidentally exposing the email addresses of more than 140 victims of Mohamed Al Fayed.
In a group update about its investigation into the former Harrods owner, the force copied the email addresses of 143 victims of Fayed in a message that included about 12 other recipients, the Telegraph reported.
Studies have shown no connection between COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy and increased risk of miscarriage. Despite this, Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson resurrected a long-debunked claim of an astronomical rate of miscarriage after vaccination while also accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of deceiving the public about the safety of the shots during pregnancy.
On Aug. 10, the lawmakers released texts from the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s government-issued cell phone from January 2021.
“Privately over text, Fauci admitted concerns about COVID vaccine side effects ‘associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,’ yet told the public there was nothing to worry about,” Paul, of Kentucky, said in an Aug. 11 post on X. “Once again, we expose Fauci’s dishonesty.”
“The safety signals, the red flags, were screaming at these people, and you got Anthony Fauci there lying bold-faced to the American public,” Johnson, a senator from Wisconsin, said in an Aug. 12 Fox News appearance.
“We will never know how many babies were miscarried because of Fauci’s lies,” Johnson said in an X post the following day.
In a video accompanying Paul’s post and in an Aug. 10 press release, the senators juxtaposed a single text from Fauci about a theoretical concern about vaccination and miscarriage — which was not subsequently borne out by data — with a series of public comments from Fauci between Feb. 3, 2021 and Aug. 30, 2021.
The senators’ claims of deception are missing key context, both on what Fauci said and how information on maternal vaccine safety evolved in the months after the COVID-19 vaccines were first authorized, as we will explain.
“By January and February of 2021, we knew that COVID infection during pregnancy increased the risk of pregnancy loss and other pregnancy complications, such as pre-eclampsia,” Victoria Male, an associate professor of reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, told us in an email. “On the other hand, the limited evidence we had about the safety of COVID vaccination in pregnancy was reassuring, and evidence was accumulating rapidly.”
Paul and Johnson also resurfaced a claim that a study found an 82% rate of miscarriages after COVID-19 vaccination — a falsehood that some other Republican politicians amplified. We originally fact-checked this claim, based on an incorrect calculation from vaccine safety monitoring data, in 2021.
Meanwhile, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Martha MacCallum during an Aug. 11 Fox News interview that it is “certainly possible” that COVID-19 vaccines could have led to miscarriages. He also said that the debate about miscarriage and COVID-19 vaccines “rages on in the scientific literature.”
Those claims are unsupported. “The current data continue to show no increased risk of miscarriage (or any other pregnancy complication) associated with COVID-19 vaccination,” Male said.
We asked the NIH for more information on the literature Bhattacharya was referring to, but we did not receive a reply. Paul’s office did not reply to our request for comment.
Johnson’s communications director, Grace Carnathan, did not directly defend the 82% figure. “The question isn’t what the actual percentage of miscarriage risk is — we probably will never know because of grossly inadequate and negligent, if not corrupt, safety surveillance,” she said. “The question should be why federal health officials consistently withheld information on safety signals, thereby depriving the public of fully informed consent.”
Citing the testimony of a gynecologist who has made incorrect claims before, she maintained that “there is controversy over what the data shows” and that “Fauci withheld information from pregnant women that they had the right to know.”
What Fauci’s Early Texts and Interviews Show
Fauci’s January 2021 texts, which shared reassuring information alongside the theoretical concern Paul and Johnson highlighted, were sent the month after the first two COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorizations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical organizations at the time did not make a recommendation as to whether people should get vaccinated during pregnancy, citing a lack of data.
The posted exchange begins on Jan. 25, 2021, with then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy asking Fauci and then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky if they are “aware of any data or theoretical reason why vaccinating early vs late in pregnancy would be preferred.”
At first, Fauci replied that there was none. But a bit later that day, he said, “I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul prior to an Aug. 6 committee vote to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
High fever is associated with certain poor outcomes in pregnancy, as we will explain below, although it’s not clear it can cause miscarriage. The term cytokine storm isn’t strictly defined, although it generally refers to a level of severe inflammatory response that isn’t seen after COVID-19 vaccination, but can occur with severe COVID-19. Vaccination triggers an immune response that temporarily increases the levels of certain cytokines to coordinate that response, but not to the degree of a cytokine storm.
“In January 2021, when there was very little evidence about the safety of COVID vaccination in pregnancy, it was sensible to be cautious and consider the theoretical possibility that fever associated with vaccination might be harmful in pregnancy,” Male said.
“Subsequent evidence found no increased risk of pregnancy loss, or any other pregnancy problems that might be caused by fever, following vaccination,” she added.
The day after passing along the point about fever, Fauci shared his overall thoughts on COVID-19 vaccination and pregnancy in the text message thread.
“I would say that in any vaccine in which data are lacking in pregnant women one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits,” he said. “COVID-19 can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy. In the vaccine trials, pregnant women were not allowed but following the EUA, a large number (more than 10,000) pregnant women have been vaccinated. No issues have arisen.”
Fauci went on to acknowledge recommendations giving pregnant women a “choice” on whether to get vaccinated while adding that toxicity studies in animals “did not raise any red flags.”
Paul and Johnson portrayed Fauci’s private comments as contrasting with his public ones. But while he did not publicly mention risks of fever during pregnancy in the interviews we reviewed, his contemporaneous statements in fact hewed fairly closely to his Jan. 26 text message.
Fauci accurately shared on several occasions in late January and February that in the data on people vaccinated during pregnancy to date, therewereno “redflags” — comments the senators highlighted in their video and press release. He also repeatedly noted that the vaccines had not been tested in clinical trials on pregnant women and described the need to weigh the benefits versus potential risks, given the dangers of COVID-19 during pregnancy.
Male, who was tracking data on pregnancy and COVID-19 vaccination in early 2021, explained that data on the subject grew quickly. Originally, scientists knew that among the few dozen people who got pregnant while participating in the clinical trials, “there was no difference in the rate of miscarriage between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups,” she said.
As the vaccine rolled out after the original two EUAs in December 2020, U.S. health agencies tracked outcomes. As of Feb. 28, 2021, “35,691 people had been vaccinated during pregnancy and spontaneous reporting to VAERS did not suggest any safety concerns,” Male said, referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
A day later, a CDC scientist presented data to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from multiple vaccine safety monitoring systems, finding that thus far, miscarriage and other pregnancy outcomes did not appear to be elevated.
“So even by the end of February, we were beginning to have good, reassuring data on the safety of COVID vaccination in pregnancy – although of course we got lots more later,” Male said.
Fauci’s Comments Evolved With the Evidence
To give an impression of duplicity, Paul and Johnson misleadingly mixed Fauci’s comments from different time periods, following a pattern of deception Paul has used before. The video Paul posted sandwiched an abbreviated version of Fauci’s moretempered comments from early 2021 betweencomments from around six months later.
During this interval, the data supporting vaccination during pregnancy had continued to mount. By mid-August 2021, many medical organizations and the CDC had endorsed vaccination for pregnant people.
At the time, the U.S. was experiencing the Delta wave of the pandemic, and data would go on to show that this was a particularly dangerous phase of the pandemic for those who were pregnant and unvaccinated. Such people had higher rates of preterm birth and stillbirth than had been seen previously.
“It’s very, very clear that it is safe in pregnant women,” the video shows Fauci stating on the “Today” show on Aug. 12, the day after the CDC recommended that pregnant people get vaccinated. In that interview, Fauci cites “the extraordinary amount of data now that’s accumulated with pregnant women” demonstrating safety, as well as the harms of COVID-19 to the woman and the fetus.
“It’s pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated,” Fauci said during an interview posted Aug. 30, which was highlighted in both the video and press release.
The Facts on Fever in Pregnancy
Fauci’s January 2021 comment was also in keeping with longstanding general knowledge that fever can be associated with risks during pregnancy — a fact that prominent guidance on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy shared at the time.
“The complication of pregnancy that is most closely associated with fever is congenital abnormalities,” or birth defects, Male said. She explained that primarily because of this, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises that pregnant people take acetaminophen, or Tylenol, if they have a fever, in consultation with a doctor.
Since the beginning of the vaccine rollout, this recommendation has included pregnant people who get a fever following COVID-19 vaccination. “Pregnant women who experience fever following vaccination should be counseled to take acetaminophen, as fever has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes,” December 2020 guidancefrom ACOG and the CDC both said. Both the CDC and the medical organization continue to recommend treating fever in consultation with a doctor, including after COVID-19 vaccination.
That said, birth defects “are associated specifically with high fevers (higher than would be expected from vaccination) early in the first trimester,” Male said. And indeed, studies have not gone on to show COVID-19 vaccination in the first trimester is associated with an increased risk of birth defects, she added.
Male explained that when it comes to miscarriage, fever itself may not even be what increases the risk. “Some infections that cause fever also increase the risk of miscarriage, but it isn’t clear that the fever (or the cytokines that cause the fever) are causing miscarriage in these cases: it could well be other aspects of the infection,” she said.
Persistent, False Claim of High Miscarriage Rate
Despite datathat has failed to show that COVID-19 vaccination increases miscarriage risk, Johnson and Paul in their press release elevated a false claim of an 82% miscarriage rate after COVID-19 vaccination. The senators highlighted a January 2022 letter on the topic from Dr. James A. Thorp, an gynecologist whose erroneous and misleading claims we have written about before.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, repeated the false statistic on X on Aug. 12, while referring to an episode of his podcast titled in part, “Bombshell Data: Fauci Covered up that Covid Vaccine Produced 82% Miscarriage Rate.” The post and podcast were subsequently taken down, and Cruz noted a correction on his podcast, although he maintained that the broader point about Fauci was still true.
Rep. Lisa McClain, a Republican from Michigan, falsely claimed on Fox Business on Aug. 11 that “in fact, The New England Journal of Medicine said 82% of women who got the vaccine in their first or second trimester had a miscarriage.” (The next day, the host of the show followed up to “clarify” the segment.)
We first wrote about the 82% claim in July 2021, when it was circulating in multiple online posts. As we explained at the time, the statistic relies on distortion of CDC data in a New England Journal of Medicine study published in April 2021 that summarized early information on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.
The study tracked results for 827 people who got vaccinated during pregnancy between December 2020 and the end of February 2021 and had already completed their pregnancies by the end of March, preliminarily finding that 104 had miscarriages. The false claim of an 82% miscarriage rate comes from dividing the 104 miscarriages by the 127 people in the study who got vaccinated in the first or second trimester — a calculation that the paper did not present.
It’s an improper calculation because most people vaccinated during the first or second trimester would not have yet had time to complete their pregnancies unless their pregnancies ended early.
“It’s like calculating a school’s dropout rate in October by looking only at the students who have already left,” Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Medicine, said in an Aug. 11 X post explaining the claim.
Dr. Eve C. Feinberg, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told us in July 2021 that the 82% was “pure number manipulation and propaganda” and “a ridiculous claim and simply not observed clinically.”
A subsequent paper was published in September 2021, also based on the CDC data, showing a miscarriage rate of lower than 15%, which the researchers said was not higher than expected during pregnancy. Miscarriage is common, especially early in pregnancy.
A final analysis of CDC pregnancy monitoring data, published in February 2026, found a miscarriage rate of 10.79%. “It looked at the week-by-week risk of miscarriage in 12,097 people vaccinated before they were 20 weeks pregnant, finding that there was no increased risk,” Male said.
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Today, you can get low-quality knockoffs of just about any popular smartphone on sites like AliExpress or Temu, whether they be iPhones, Galaxy phones, or whatever else. They have terrible build quality, bottom-of-the-barrel components and specifications, and all run outdated versions of Android – badly. At the same time, various consumer electronics brands, once popular in a bygone era, sell the rights to their brand name to unknown companies, who then put these brands on generic hardware to give their products a sheen of legitimacy. That’s why today, you can still buy Nokia smartphones, Polaroid cameras, and low-effort Hi-Fi equipment from various once-respected brands.
None of this is new, however. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, companies were already doing the same thing. In fact, there’s one device from this era which combines both business practices – it’s both a cheap knockoff of a wildly successful device, and it carries a once-revered brand name. Also, just to add some juice, this story involves stolen source code.
Let’s take a look at the worst PDA of all time, the Olivetti daVinci.
€5000 incentive: Make me use Windows 11 for a month (the results were not great) > €10000: Video tour of my office and my computers/devices collection < €15000: Buy a Mac and use macOS for a month (and review it) €20000: I get an OSNews tattoo
In 1997, Palm launched the Palm Pilot, and it and its successors proved to be a massive hit. Where countless before it had failed, Palm found the magic formula to make pocket computing work. I wrote an in-depth article about Palm over 13 years ago which goes into much (much) more detail, but the reason the Palm Pilot succeeded where things like the Newton, PenPoint OS, and Windows for Pen Computing failed, is that Palm’s founder, Jeff Hawkins, realised that they were competing with paper, not with desktop computers. Instead of trying to shove the capabilities of a full personal computer into a (barely) pockatable device, a pocket computer had to be as fast and convenient as paper, and therefore extremely strict about which features to add, and which to omit.
To this day, the entirety of smartphone computing stands on the shoulders of Palm. Palm’s ideas, implementations, approaches, paradigms, and even people were absorbed by Apple and Google, where they shaped both iOS and Android. The phone you’re looking at right now has a ton of Palm DNA in it, still. After all, you’re still using the homescreen-with-apps paradigm Palm already perfected in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
The success of the Palm Pilot and its successors did not go unnoticed. Microsoft, most prominently, felt incredibly threatened by Palm’s success:
The success of Palm’s products got the attention of Microsoft, and the company pretty much announced it was going to crush Palm. According to Hawkins, Microsoft had a sales conference, where, at some point, a big target appeared on the projector screen, with the Palm logo dead in the centre of it: “we are going to crush and kill these guys”, was the central message. Hawkins recalls that he got condolence letters after that, stating things like “Sorry Jeff. Too bad.”
While Microsoft proved to be unable to “kill and crush” Palm, it did manage to build a relatively successful business selling PDAs running various incarnations of Windows CE. Together, Palm and Microsoft dominated the PDA market pretty much throughout its entire existence, and while the market was a mere fraction of the smartphone market of today, other companies still wanted a piece of this pie too. One of these companies was Olivetti, a storied Italian company with a long history making typewriters, computers, and other electronics.
I’m not going into detail about Olivetti’s history, but the company was renowned for its attention to design, creating iconic products like the Lexikon 80, Lettera 22, Elea 9003, Programma 101, and so, so many more. Olivetti also entered the personal computer market, first with a variety of custom machines featuring Z80 and later Motorola 68000 processors running a variety of custom operating systems developed by Olivetti (including its own UNIX variant, X/OS). After a few machines using MIPS and Alpha processors in the early ’90s, the company would eventually focus entirely on Intel-based PCs (including this amazing failure) running Windows. Like so many other computer makers from that era, Olivetti eventually left the PC business by selling it off in 1997.
To this day, Olivetti PCs tend to cost more on the used market than those from other brands, despite no technical merits dictating so.
At around this time, our current story begins. Seeing the success of the Palm Pilot and the emergence of copycat devices running Microsoft’s Windows CE, Olivetti wanted in on the action. And so, in the late ’90s, the company introduced the Olivetti daVinci, a line of PDAs whose software looked suspiciously like Palm OS. There’s not a ton of information out there about the development history, but it seems that while Olivetti designed the hardware, it contracted the development of the operating system out to a company from Hong Kong, Echolink Design.
And this is where things went horribly wrong for Olivetti. The software Echolink Design developed for the daVinci didn’t just look like Palm OS, it was Palm OS – at least, according to Palm. After being on the market for about a year, the Palm Pilot maker, then a subsidiary of 3Com, filed for an injunction, alleging that the daVinci operating system designed by Echolink Design contained actual Palm OS source code. In addition, Palm also filed suit against CompanionLink Software, the company that developed the Outlook synchronisation software for the daVinci. Palm won handily, and within a day of the filing, temporary restraining orders were put in place on both Olivetti and CompanionLink, stopping sales of the daVinci and its software dead in its tracks.
It seemed to have been a pretty clear-cut case. From The Wall Street Journal at the time:
U.S. District Judge James Ware ruled Olivetti’s Royal daVinci organizer contains software that appears to have been copied from the operating system for 3Com’s Palm organizers. Judge Ware said a review by a software expert found the daVinci software contains private Palm code and even grammatical mistakes that appear to have been “copied verbatim.”
It’s difficult to ascertain what code, exactly, was stolen, but my personal educated guess is that it probably involved Palm’s unique Graffiti handwriting recognition system. Graffiti actually predates the first Palm Pilot, and was available on a variety of non-Palm devices; it doesn’t seem entirely unlikely to me that the code for it escaped containment that way, eventually finding its way to Echolink Design. I’m just guessing here, though, as I can’t seem to find any of the original court documents concerning the case.
In a bind, Olivetti claimed the copied code represented less than 2% of the operating system’s code, and set about to release a new version of the software for the daVinci.
And so we end up at the device I have in my collection. Several years ago, I bought a boxed version of the Olivetti daVinci DV3, including all of its original accessories for a pittance on eBay, and I’ve been fascinated and repulsed by this device ever since. It looks like a cheap Palm knockoff, and it feels like one too; the hardware is made out a really unpleasant form of plastic, with buttons worse than what you find on the cheapest possible pack-in remote control. The case feels creaky and unrefined, like the cheapest possible children’s toy.
The display has a resolution of 128×99, much lower than the 160×160 of even the first Palm Pilot, and it’s incredibly dim and hard to read without the backlight on; even with the backlight on, it’s difficult to read anything. Worse yet, the various hardware tap targets on top of and at the bottom of the display are not backlit at all, making them unreadable in all but the most illuminated environments. Considering you need these buttons a lot, it’s a major stumbling block. Turning on the backlight is confusing, too, as it you need to hold down the on/off button (while the display is on) to engage it, something only mentioned in the manual.
The display is, of course, a resistive touchscreen, as was the norm at the time, but its precision seems much lower than anything Palm ever offered. The accompanying stylus, too, is plasticky and cheap, definitely worse than the plastic styluses Palm shipped with its earlier models, and obviously no match for the metal styluses that would accompany later models.
Finding out exactly what type of processor the daVinci DV3 uses is remarkably hard. A contemporary review by Smart Computing claims it’s using an unspecified Epson processor, without giving any further details. There’s only one source that specifically states what processor it has, and considering that source is the only person to have written a third-party application for the DV3, I’m inclined to believe they’re right (opening the device up is of no use, as the SoC is of the epoxy blob type). According to them, the DV3 runs on a Sharp SM6010 microprocessor, for which a datasheet and more detailed documentation exists. The SM6010 is a very basic 16bit single-chip microcomputer of an unspecified architecture (probably something custom and proprietary), running at 30Mhz.
The SM6010 is a 16-bit single-chip microcomputer incorporating a 16-bit CPU core, LCD controller, watchdog timer, serial interface (UART, SCI), SIR, PWM output, real time clock, A/D converter and bus controller.
The DV3 stores its operating system in flash memory – making it upgradable – and has 2MB of RAM, stated proudly all over the box and on a sticker on the device itself. Performance is actually not that bad, but it’s not quite as instant and responsive as Palm OS. The operating system and its user interface are rather inscrutable; there doesn’t seem to be a single home screen you can always go back to like on Palm OS, and closing/leaving applications/screens is done differently for each individual application/screen (tap the hardware “OK” button? An on-screen “OK” button? Press the cancel button? Tap one of the hardware application shortcuts atop the display? Who knows!).
The core tools of the DV3 are incredibly basic, and cover merely the bare necessities of a PDA in the late ’90s, with things like an address book, notes application, calendar, calculator, and a few others. There’s no consistency among any of these tools, and they all look, feel, and work just differently enough to be confusing. The daVinci is also Very Serious™, as there’s no games or even a simple drawing gimmick; in fact, while there is a button labeled “Apps.”, it doesn’t actually do anything (we’ll get back to that). There’s barely any preferences to fiddle with either.
Input is done via a terrible Graffiti ripoff called daVinci Script, which uses strokes much more cumbersome than its inspirator, not aided by the absolutely trash recognition algorithms. This input method is effectively unusable, as it’s impossible to predict which strokes will produce what character or action. Even something as simple as the right-to-left stroke to delete a character is entirely unreliable, ensuring this is more of a random character generator than a text input system. Luckily, there’s a tiny on-screen keyboard you can use to hunt and peck with the stylus, but this isn’t exactly a particularly fast input method either.
It’s hard to convey just how utterly terrible the software experience is, especially in 2026 when many people reading this lack the frame of reference of its time. This isn’t utter trash compared to what we’re used to today – this is utter trash compared to the competing devices running Palm OS and Windows Pocket PC of its time. Even in 2026, I love using Palm OS and Pocket PC, but I absolutely despise, dread, and hate using the daVinci. I’m struggling to find a comparison with something contemporary, but the best I can come up with is like comparing an Apple Watch or WearOS device with one of those cheap knock-off smartwatches that run some shitty custom low-res UI on an underpowered SoC, but honestly, even that does a disservice to these knock-off smartwatches.
The daVinci I have came with all of its original accessories. There’s a vinyl pouch, a dock, and an external, fold-up keyboard. The pouch has not withstood the test of time, and has shrunk, so much so the daVinci no longer fits inside of it. The dock is, well, a dock, and uses the connector at the bottom of the daVinci. This connector looks and feels exactly like a crunchy ISA slot from the ’80s, as if the PCB was cut off with a hacksaw. The keyboard is the most interesting, and can be connected straight to the device’s bottom connector, or to a passthrough port at the back of the dock. Unsurprisingly, this keyboard is really bad, with dome-shaped mushy rubber keys with very little stability and a featherlight base that moves at the slightest of touches, making it almost impossible to type on.
Thanks, I hate it.
I mentioned the mysterious, non-functional “Apps.” button earlier, and there’s actually a bit of history here. It turns out that Olivetti fully intended for people to write third-party applications for this thing, promising to release an SDK at some point in time. Of course, this never ended up happening as the daVinci is trash and nobody in their right mind bought one or would want to develop for it, but it does mean that somewhere out there, perhaps in an attic somewhere in Ivrea, Italy, there’s a dusty hard drive or CD-ROM carrying this unreleased official SDK.
SDK or no, there’s always someone crazy, skilled, and determined enough to develop something for any computer, and for the daVinci DV3, that person was Alex Zwiesele. Zwiesele figured out that while the official SDK was never released, the CD-ROM that came with the daVinci DV3 contained the entire operating system of the DV3 and a loader program. This was enough for Zwiesele and a few other people to start disassembling the operating system and inject their own custom code into the binary file, reassemble it, and load it onto the DV3 using the loader program.
This was not a walk in the park. Zwiesele documented the entire process on their website, and it involved Zwiesele and several others writing their own disassembler and assembler (still available from their website!) based on the available Sharp SM6010 documentation, as well as learning how to actually program for the device’s hardware. In the end, they managed to develop an actual game for the daVinci DV3, a Breakout clone. You load the game onto your DV3 in the same way you’d load the operating system; as such, the game will replace the entire operating system and load automatically on power-on. That’s as far as they got back in 2003, as efforts seem to have stalled after that.
Back when I bought my daVinci, about 6-7 years ago, I mentioned online that I had bought the worst PDA of all time, without mentioning it by name. Immediately, fellow hardcore PDA enthusiasts (we exist) knew I was talking about the daVinci. This thing is just plain trash, e-waste before the term had been popularised, a waste of everyone’s time, effort, and money. Not even its one redeeming quality – its low price of just $99 compared to the cheapest Palm device at $249 – could make anyone want to use it.
Still, I’m glad I have it in my collection, if only to serve as a reminder that shitty e-waste devices aren’t something exclusive to our current smartphone era. It also serves to underline just how great Palm OS and Windows Pocket PC (yes, I will fight you on this) really were, and how many things they each got right out of the gate. So much so that especially Palm OS laid the foundations for every smartphone we use today.
Now that I’ve finally written and published this article, I can put this abomination back in its box, and never take it out again.
With a feel for physics, AI models simulate a wider range of real-world scenarios
Aug. 14, 2026 — Artificial intelligence models are jacks of many trades, including writing, generating images, and creating 3D models. But they aren’t as helpful when it comes to testing robots or designs for vehicles in diverse environments, since they don’t understand physics as well as they do pixels or text.
The GeoPT model could be “extremely helpful for engineers hoping to test out blueprints for vehicles without needing to run so many physical experiments,” says Haixu Wu, an MIT postdoc and CSAIL researcher. Image credit: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL, using GeoPT model and assets from Adobe Stock
To build an AI system that can reliably simulate a variety of physical scenarios, engineers need a range of physics data at a scale that isn’t yet feasible. That’s because it’s very time-consuming to get neural networks just a few data points they can understand. They rely on algorithms called “numerical solvers” to calculate physical properties at different points of a 3D shape. It’s a thorough process, but it takes so long that it limits how much data you’ll have to, say, test if your plane designs are safe and aerodynamic.
A new pre-training approach known as “GeoPT,” deveoped by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Tsinghua University, gives simulation models a chance to learn physics in a broader, more efficient way. It virtually reenacts everyday mechanical interactions in 3D, showing how particles stop when reaching some part of an object. These simulations give the models a sense of how physics works, helping them model the real world more accurately, reach peak performance twice as fast, and train on up to 60 percent less data compared to leading models.
Soon, the project could help engineers predict how vehicles (like cars and planes), everyday items (including chairs and containers), and robots respond to various physical elements, such as wind, water, and collisions. The researchers believe their work could also be a step toward a physics foundation model, a backbone system trained on lots of data that can help AI tools generalize to different tasks.
“We believe physics is the third modality for AI models, after text and pixels,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Minghao Guo, a co-lead author on a paper introducing GeoPT. “Our general-purpose model has the versatility to help build a world model for physics. Many models, such as those that generate robotics data and videos, are already well-versed in textual and visual data, but with physical accuracy, they’ll get more-realistic results.”
Easy to Use
To use GeoPT, users simply upload 3D models of objects like battleships, passenger airplanes, and trucks, and specify the direction and speed of the force they want to simulate. The result is a kind of heat map showing how the object will be affected in different places. If you know the speed and direction (velocity) of the force you’re looking to simulate, you can capture it in GeoPT. This comes in handy when you want to simulate things like how a car would look after crashing into a wall, the ways light bounces around objects, and whether a boat stays afloat over turbulent waves.
But how does GeoPT “get” physics so well? Its knowledge comes from “synthetic dynamics,” a series of interactions between small particles and complex 3D shapes. GeoPT studied 1.3 million samples of synthetic dynamics, in which tiny spheres moved at various speeds and angles until stopping at a certain point on the object.
These particles basically “stick” to an object once they make contact, instead of moving through or bouncing off. Picture learning about physical interactions using marbles and action figures — similarly, simulation models can use synthetic dynamics to gain a feel for physics before they train on labeled data.
Industry Success
The researchers found that GeoPT was particularly skilled at simulating industrial scenarios, as it outperformed state-of-the-art simulation models across benchmarks. The common thread: It reached peak performance faster than other tools, while needing significantly fewer labeled data.
On a dataset of complex 3D shapes and their responses to wind currents and surface pressure, for example, GeoPT surpassed state-of-the-art models in speed, accuracy, and efficiency. It had similar triumphs in speed and accuracy in capturing how fighter jets responded to wind. When GeoPT tested how the hull of a boat handled both air and waves, it required 60 percent fewer labeled data to capture both physical forces and reached peak accuracy four times faster than top baselines.
The system even succeeded at simulating how different types of cars look after colliding with another object. It correctly predicted how 3D vehicles would deform while using less data than state-of-the-art baselines. Likewise, its simulations of how light would pass through what was essentially a toy rabbit were accurate, despite never training on that 3D model or light physics beforehand.
“If your model performs well on industrial benchmarks, that means it can solve the hardest physics tasks,” says co-lead author Haixu Wu, an MIT postdoc and CSAIL researcher. “GeoPT was making high-fidelity simulations with over 100 million mesh points in seconds. This could make the tool extremely helpful for engineers hoping to test out blueprints for vehicles without needing to run so many physical experiments.”
The researchers add that their system is only a preview of the kind of physics world model they’ve been working toward. The team hopes to scale up their system, training on even more shapes and simulating more complex physical phenomena. For example, a more in-depth approach could help model weather patterns, test out different materials, and generate realistic videos.
“Using synthetic dynamics data is an exciting paradigm for imbuing physics into foundation models,” says Fei Sha, AI research scientist at Meta, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It challenges the traditional wisdom that physics and geometry are necessarily entangled in computation, and one must acquire costly and specialized data. The demonstrated success in a wide range of application domains leads us to this important juncture: We are ready to build physics foundation models, now and fast.”
Wu and Guo wrote the paper with MIT CSAIL colleagues including Zongyi Li, a postdoc in the lab; Zhiyang (Frank) Dou, a CSAIL affiliate and MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS); Kaiming He, a principal investigator in the lab, associate professor of EECS, and a distinguished scientist at Google DeepMind; and senior author Wojciech Matusik, the Joan and Irwin M. (1957) Jacobs Professor of EECS and a CSAIL principal investigator. Tsinghua University Associate Professor Mingsheng Long was also a co-author. The team presented the paper at the International Conference on Machine Learning in July.
The researchers’ work was supported, in part, by Neural Modular Physics Twin for Robotics.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 14, 2026 — Cerebras has announced that it is powering Ultrafast mode, a new service tier in the OpenAI API for GPT-5.6 Sol. Available initially in limited preview to OpenAI customers, Ultrafast runs GPT-5.6 Sol at up to 750 output tokens per second and up to 14× faster than Standard processing.
GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast powered by Cerebras runs with the same intelligence as GPT-5.6 Sol Standard, according to the company, combining GPT-5.6 Sol’s capabilities with higher inference speeds.
“GPT-5.6 Sol on Ultrafast is proof that speed and intelligence are no longer mutually exclusive,” said Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder, Cerebras. “Together with OpenAI, we’re putting frontier intelligence in the hands of users at unprecedented speed and changing what’s possible with AI.”
“By combining GPT-5.6 Sol with Cerebras’ inference technology, we’re exploring what becomes possible when customers can get the intelligence of our most capable models with significantly lower latency. We’re starting with a small group of customers to learn where that speed creates meaningful value, and we’ll use those learnings to inform how we expand the service over time,” said Sachin Katti, VP Compute Strategy & GPT-Infra at OpenAI.
A New Speed-Intelligence Frontier
Until now, organizations needed to choose between the capabilities of larger models and the faster response times of smaller models. Ultrafast powered by Cerebras offers access to the full intelligence of GPT-5.6 Sol at higher inference speeds. Based on output speeds for Anthropic models reported by Artificial Analysis, Ultrafast is 5x faster than Claude Opus 4.8 in Fast mode, and 11x faster than Claude Fable 5. The company said the results combine frontier-model capabilities with higher inference speeds.
Benchmarks focused on economically valuable work, from programming to drafting legal documents, illustrate how faster token generation can affect completion times for various tasks.
On Humanity’s Last Exam, a 2,500-question benchmark spanning graduate-level chemistry, economics and literature, GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast answered the full question set in just over 11 hours. This compares to more than three days of continuous compute for Claude Fable 5, with GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast reaching comparable accuracy nearly 7x faster. On GDP-Val, a benchmark of economically valuable knowledge-work tasks such as legal briefs, financial models, and engineering reports, Ultrafast delivered a 5.6x end-to-end speedup with no loss in quality.
Ultrafast’s speed comes from Cerebras’ Wafer-Scale Engine architecture, which keeps model weights on-chip — 44 GB of SRAM on each wafer-sized chip — rather than shuttling them between on-chip memory and off-chip storage as GPU-based inference must. This eliminates the memory-bandwidth bottleneck that constrains frontier-model inference speed on conventional hardware.
To get notified when capacity expands to more customers, please visit the Cerebras website.
About Cerebras Systems
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) builds the world’s fastest AI infrastructure. The Cerebras team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers of all types came together to make AI blisteringly fast through innovation and invention. We believe that when AI is fast, it will change the world. Leading global corporations, research institutes, and governments choose Cerebras to run their AI workloads. Cerebras solutions are available on premises and in the cloud.
The accelerator does not simply improve permitting for every business, developer and organization. It creates a priority lane, with the Governor’s Office deciding which applicants receive expedited attention and which remain in the regular bureaucratic process. Image created with AI on 8/14
JobsFirst promises permitting decisions within 120 business days, but leaves government deciding which projects move first — and which applicants must continue to wait
WILMINGTON, Del. — Delaware will fast-track three broadband and health care projects through a state permitting system designed to produce decisions within 120 business days, but the announcement is also raising a broader question: If state government can move quickly for selected applicants, why can’t it do so for everyone?
Gov. Matt Meyer announced Thursday that a rural broadband expansion and two ChristianaCare health campuses have been accepted into the JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator.
The program gives designated projects a single government contact, coordinates reviews across state agencies and creates a process for escalating unresolved problems. Reviews that might otherwise take 18 to 24 months are targeted for completion in about six months.
“JobsFirst is about tackling Delaware’s biggest challenges with urgency, not bureaucracy,” Meyer said. “Whether it’s expanding access to health care, closing the digital divide or building the infrastructure our communities need, Delawareans shouldn’t have to wait years for projects that people need now.”
That argument makes a strong case for faster permitting. It also highlights the unequal treatment built into the program.
The government chooses who moves first
The accelerator does not simply improve permitting for every business, developer and organization. It creates a priority lane, with the Governor’s Office deciding which applicants receive expedited attention and which remain in the regular bureaucratic process.
Executive Order 18 establishes eligibility categories covering housing, broadband, energy, water and sewer, and mixed-use development. However, meeting an eligibility definition does not guarantee admission. The order says the governor or the governor’s designee “may designate” a nominated project as a priority.
The state’s published process says the Governor’s Office considers eligibility, readiness and permitting constraints. It does not provide a public scoring system explaining how competing qualified projects are ranked or why one applicant moves ahead of another.
That distinction matters. Without clearly published selection standards, the accelerator gives state officials significant discretion over who receives a dedicated coordinator, enforced deadlines and direct access to an expedited review.
The administration’s announcement did not say how many projects applied, whether any were rejected or why these three were selected over other potentially eligible projects. It also did not identify the category under which the two ChristianaCare health campuses qualified. Health care is not listed among the program’s five initial project categories.
Projects promise public benefits
The projects themselves promise substantial public benefits.
Talkie Communications plans to install buried fiber within existing roadway rights-of-way, bringing gigabit-speed internet service to 1,448 unserved homes and businesses in Kent and Sussex counties. The project is supported by the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.
ChristianaCare’s planned Georgetown campus would combine a health center and neighborhood hospital. It would provide primary, specialty, behavioral health and outpatient services, along with an eight-bed emergency department and eight inpatient beds.
A similar campus planned for Camden would expand health care and community-based hospital capacity in Kent County.
Accelerating those projects does not mean environmental or public safety requirements will be waived. The administration says JobsFirst changes the speed and coordination of reviews, not the standards applicants must meet. The 120-business-day target also promises a decision, not necessarily an approval.
Those safeguards make the faster process easier to defend. But they also support extending it to other applicants.
Why shouldn’t every applicant receive faster service?
If agencies can review applications simultaneously instead of sequentially, provide applicants with a single checklist and hold employees accountable for missed deadlines, those practices should become the normal permitting system — not a special service reserved for projects selected by the executive branch.
There is also a question of agency capacity. Unless the state has added staff or eliminated unnecessary work, moving priority projects ahead could divert attention from businesses and organizations already waiting.
The administration has not disclosed whether the accelerator is reducing the overall permitting backlog or rearranging the order in which applications are processed.
Small businesses could be especially disadvantaged. Large institutions often have attorneys, engineers and government-relations professionals to help navigate state processes. Smaller applicants are more likely to need the coordination and accountability provided by JobsFirst, but they may be less likely to propose projects large enough to receive priority status.
Transparency should begin with selection
The state has created a public dashboard to track designated projects, participating agencies, required permits and approaching deadlines. That is a meaningful transparency measure once a project is accepted.
Transparency should also cover the selection process. The public should be able to see all applications, the standards used to evaluate them, the reasons projects were accepted or rejected, and whether giving one project priority caused delays for others.
The administration says JobsFirst is being introduced in stages and could eventually lead to a coordinated permitting system covering the full range of state approvals.
That should be the objective.
Everyone should have access to the fast lane
Broadband service and health care facilities should not remain trapped in government bureaucracy. Neither should a housing project, a new employer or a small Delaware business simply because the Governor’s Office did not put it in the priority lane.
The real measure of JobsFirst will not be whether government can move three selected projects faster. It will be whether Delaware uses what it learns to give every qualified applicant a clear, accountable and timely decision.
To Go Box
Program: JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator
New priority projects: Talkie Communications broadband expansion and ChristianaCare campuses in Georgetown and Camden
Target: State permitting decisions within 120 business days after applications are complete
Central question: Why aren’t the same coordination, deadlines and accountability available to every applicant?
AI models are getting better at a rapid pace. They are now able to reason, code and work through long problems better than ever before. However, an agent needs more than a good brain. It has to remember what happened five steps ago. It has to call the right tool, work with files and outside systems, and actually do something with the answer. And then it has to keep a record of all of it.
DeepSeek has been working on that problem, and this week it opened up some of the machinery. Harness is the new open-source framework from the company. It is designed for building agents. The interesting bit is how little DeepSeek insists on controlling. The models can be changed. Tools are plugins. So are the storage and sandboxes, along with other pieces developers may want to replace or modify. It’s closer to an agent-building kit than a finished agent.
If you remember DeepSeek from early last year, you’ll know this isn’t the first time the Chinese lab has suddenly found itself at the center of the AI conversation. Early last year, DeepSeek’s models arrived with performance that caught people off guard, particularly given the economics behind them.
(Shutterstock_WHYFRAME)
The reaction went well beyond AI circles. Yes, there was some skepticism, but there was no lack of hype. Markets rattled, chip stocks were hammered and industry observers began to doubt whether the money pouring into AI models was warranted. Almost overnight, DeepSeek went from a relatively unfamiliar Chinese lab to a company the entire industry was watching.
Now DeepSeek is back with a rather different proposition. This time there is no headline-grabbing new foundation model at the center of Harness. In fact, the model is deliberately just one part of it. What DeepSeek is putting out there is the layer around the model. A sort of collection of software that determines whether an AI agent can actually get a job done.
There are some hard numbers behind the release, too. Harness arrived alongside DeepSeek V4-Pro-0813, the latest version of the company’s flagship model, with much of the attention this time going to its agent capabilities. DeepSeek puts V4-Pro-0813 at 87.9 on Terminal Bench 2.1. It scored 74.1 on Toolathlon-Verified, 71.1 on DSBench-FullStack, and 67.2 on DSBench-Hard.
These are DeepSeek’s own benchmark results, of course. One detail makes them particularly relevant here: for some of the public coding-agent tests, V4-Pro was running inside Harness in its minimal mode. So Harness isn’t just something DeepSeek released alongside the model. It was already part of how the company tested what the model could do as an agent.
Harness is still pretty raw. DeepSeek calls it a developer preview. It is worth noting that the company has released the code under the MIT license, which gives companies considerable freedom to modify Harness and use it inside commercial products without having to open up their own code.
(Shutterstock/Bangla-press)
The company also gives developers a fairly blunt warning that compatibility-breaking changes are coming.
No details have been shared on when that would happen. However, for now there is plenty to play with. Harness can open a repository, edit files and run shell commands. It also allows for users to search the web, make an executable plan and send pieces of a job to other agents.
It also has the ability to record the steps. The tool calls, results and model interactions are kept with the session, so a developer can come back later and see what happened. An old session can be picked up again or split off at an earlier point. That’s quite useful when an agent has been working for a while and suddenly takes a wrong turn.
You don’t actually need to use a DeepSeek model with Harness. Models are plugins too. That leaves DeepSeek in the slightly unusual position of releasing an agent framework that can just as easily have a rival’s model sitting inside it. That’s quite a change of direction for a company more known for causing a stir with its models.
Newark’s Shop Take 15 shows how business coaching and grant support can help entrepreneurs expand
DOVER, Del. — Applications are now being accepted for the Business on Main Street Accelerator, an eight-week program designed to help Delaware entrepreneurs strengthen their operations, pursue funding and prepare for growth.
The program’s potential impact can be seen in Shop Take 15, a Newark self-care business led by founder and CEO Asia Coleman.
Coleman began working with the Delaware Division of Small Business while Shop Take 15 was primarily an online business. Through the Main Street program, she received help structuring the company, developing marketing ideas and updating its business plan.
The improved plan helped Coleman position the business to pursue funding and qualify for grant support. That grant had a tangible impact: Shop Take 15 grew from a virtual business into one with a physical Newark location.
Coleman also expanded the company’s product offerings and began providing courses. She said the business continues to grow.
Shop Take 15 sells handmade self-care products, including body butters, scrubs, soaps, oils and home fragrances. Its mission encourages people to devote at least 15 minutes each day to their mental and physical well-being.
Coleman’s experience provides a practical example of how technical assistance and access to funding can translate into measurable growth for a small business.
The Business on Main Street Accelerator is a joint initiative of the Delaware Division of Small Business and Launcher. It includes six virtual sessions and two in-person sessions in Dover.
Participants receive assistance with preparing a comprehensive business plan, examining their companies’ financial health, developing compelling pitch decks and using modern marketing strategies. Individualized coaching is also included.
“The feedback that I’ve gotten on the program, which began June 9, 2025, is incredibly positive,” said Anastasia Jackson, coordinator for Delaware on Main Street. “Participants are telling me that the financial reviews and personalized coaching are invaluable to them as business owners.”
The accelerator has graduated 37 small-business owners since it began last year.
Applications for the next class will be accepted through Aug. 31.
To Go Box
What: Business on Main Street Accelerator
Program: Eight weeks, including six virtual sessions and two in-person sessions in Dover
Who: Delaware small-business owners and entrepreneurs seeking assistance with planning, finances, marketing, funding and growth
The Aug. 13 program was hosted by Yvonne Johnson of First State Educate, a Delaware nonprofit working to strengthen school governance and increase public participation in education, focused on the new funding model for our schools.
Discretionary funding could rise from about 8% to more than 30%, increasing local responsibility and accountability
By George Rotsch, Editor, Delaware LIVE
WILMINGTON, Del – First State Educate brought state and local education leaders together Thursday night to explain how Delaware’s new funding model will give school boards significantly more control over spending — and greater responsibility for the results.
During the organization’s monthly “Board Matters” webcast, panelists said school boards could soon have discretion over more than 30% of their districts’ funding, up from about 8% today.
The change means boards will need to better understand student needs, establish clear priorities and make informed choices about where resources can produce the greatest results. They will also face greater accountability for explaining those decisions and demonstrating whether the spending improves student outcomes.
The Aug. 13 program was hosted by Yvonne Johnson of First State Educate, a Delaware nonprofit working to strengthen school governance and increase public participation in education.
Johnson led a discussion featuring Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten; Emily Falcon, chief operating and financial officer for the Colonial School District; and Brittany Mumford, an Appoquinimink School Board member.
First State Educate organized the forum to help school board members, families and community leaders understand how the new formula will work and how local governance responsibilities will change.
“With greater flexibility comes greater responsibility,” Mumford said. “The buck literally stops with us.”
Although superintendents, financial officers and instructional leaders will develop many spending recommendations, school boards have final responsibility for approving district budgets.
Moving beyond restricted funding
Delaware’s traditional unit system provides districts with state-funded positions and money based on enrollment and student demographics. Much of that funding is assigned to specific positions or purposes, limiting districts’ ability to move resources when local needs differ from state categories.
The new hybrid model retains parts of the unit system while adding weighted funding based more directly on student needs. Additional resources will be directed toward multilingual learners, students from low-income households, vocational students and students receiving special education services.
Falcon said approximately 32 separate appropriations or funding categories will be consolidated into three broader tiers.
The first will provide base funding for teachers, paraprofessionals, principals and other essential employees. The second will expand opportunity funding for multilingual learners and students from low-income households. Falcon said that investment is expected to be about four times its current level.
A third tier will provide flexible operational funding based on enrollment and student characteristics, including special education and vocational education needs.
Federal and state special education requirements will remain in place. The primary funding changes are expected to begin in fiscal 2028, which starts July 1, 2027.
Decisions move closer to students
First State Educate’s discussion focused heavily on what greater local flexibility will mean in practice.
A school struggling with early literacy could invest in reading specialists or intervention programs. Another with a growing multilingual population could expand language services, while a school facing chronic absenteeism could add attendance or mental health support.
Marten said those decisions are often best made closer to students rather than through a statewide, one-size-fits-all system.
“If you’re treating every school identically at the board level and just sending out a common treatment to everybody, that does not create equity,” she said.
But flexibility does not mean every school can spend independently without a districtwide strategy.
“Flexibility is not freedom from accountability,” Marten said. “It means people closest to the students have more ability to solve the problems in front of them.”
Boards must connect budgets to results
Marten urged school boards to begin with student needs and a clear strategic plan rather than starting with the amount of money available.
Before approving an investment, boards should ask what student problem the district is trying to solve, what results it expects and how progress will be measured.
“A budget is an expression of the strategy,” Marten said. “It’s not a separate document.”
She said boards should establish priorities and define the results they expect without becoming involved in daily management decisions.
“Know your lane. Own your lane,” Marten said.
The board determines what the district should accomplish and why it matters. The superintendent and administrative team determine how the work will be done, who will be responsible and when it will happen.
Marten also warned boards against assuming their oversight work is finished once a budget is approved or a clean financial report is received.
“A board can receive a perfect financial report and still fail at governance,” she said.
Following spending rules does not necessarily mean the spending helped students. Boards should regularly determine whether programs are being implemented as promised and producing measurable results.
Marten described the process as a continuing cycle: identify a need, select a strategy, make the investment, implement the plan, examine the evidence and adjust when necessary.
“If your superintendent doesn’t have a plan, ask for one,” she told board members.
State and community oversight
Marten said the Delaware Department of Education will not consider its work finished after distributing the money.
The department intends to examine the strategies districts select, whether those strategies reach classrooms and whether early indicators show students improving. It also wants to identify successful approaches that could be replicated elsewhere.
Marten said that accountability system must be built as the new formula is implemented rather than added years later if questions arise about how districts spent the money.
First State Educate also used the webcast to encourage families and community members to follow district budgets, attend school board meetings and ask how spending decisions are connected to student outcomes.
The organization provides school governance information through its Knowledge Hub and Delaware School Board Index. The resources are intended to help residents learn about their school boards, district priorities and education issues.
Marten said families, educators and community organizations should participate before district priorities and budgets are finalized.
“If a decision is essentially finished before people enter the room, that’s not engagement,” she said.
Districts should explain the student problems they are trying to solve, share relevant data and identify the choices and trade-offs involved, she said.
Equalization reform remains ahead
One significant part of Delaware’s education funding system remains under review.
Equalization funding is intended to offset differences in property wealth and local tax-generating capacity among districts. Falcon said statewide property reassessment produced data that requires additional review, particularly in New Castle County.
Officials hope to develop an equalization proposal during the next legislative session and implement changes in fiscal 2029, she said.
That means the full effect of the funding overhaul will vary among districts depending on student needs, property values, local revenue and state funding.
Marten said the ultimate test will not be whether Delaware successfully reorganizes its funding formula. Success will be determined by whether students can read, receive support when they struggle and graduate prepared for college, careers, military service or other opportunities.
“The formula is a means to the end,” she said. “The accomplishment is what changes for students.”
To Go Box:
What: Delaware is moving to a hybrid school funding model that combines the existing unit system with weighted funding tied more closely to student needs.
Local control: School boards could have discretion over more than 30% of district funding, up from about 8% today.
Accountability: Boards will be expected to establish priorities, connect spending to student needs and measure whether investments improve outcomes.
When: Major funding changes are expected to begin July 1, 2027, with fiscal 2028.
Who hosted the discussion: First State Educate presented the Aug. 13 program as part of its monthly “Board Matters” webcast series.
Panelists: Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten; Colonial School District Chief Operating and Financial Officer Emily Falcon; and Appoquinimink School Board member Brittany Mumford.
What remains: Equalization funding reforms are expected to be considered separately, with possible implementation in fiscal 2029.
Learn more: First State Educate offers school governance information through its Knowledge Hub and Delaware School Board Index.
Should Egypt join the Mecca Pact?Expert commentthilton.drupal
Egypt may yet join Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan in their mutual defence pact. But for now, Cairo is continuing its cautious approach as it seeks to avoid taking sides.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, known as the ‘Mecca Pact’, on 7 August. The pact states that any armed attack on one member will be considered an attack on all members. It sends a message to both Iran and Israel, while diversifying regional security away from the US.
However, the pact leaves two key questions unanswered: can regional countries build deterrence without the US? And why hasn’t Egypt joined the pact, at least for now, given it has worked closely with all three members?
Not a Middle Eastern NATO
The Mecca Pact builds upon the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan last September. However, it is a separate deal. The new agreement includes Turkey and leaves space for other states to join.
The pact has been compared to NATO; Indeed, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described the pact’s mutual defence element as being ‘technically the same’ as NATO’s Article 5 collective defence clause.
However, comparisons to NATO are overblown. Once they are put aside, the pact looks relatively modest.
Saudi officials have played down the scope of the agreement, presenting it as an exercise in ‘sustainable capabilities’ rather than a joint defence front against any country. Turkey has likewise emphasized that the pact is not directed against Iran or any other country. Pakistan described the agreement as ‘purely defensive in nature.’
While Pakistan is a nuclear power, the agreement does not mention Turkey and Saudi Arabia coming under its nuclear umbrella. And while mutual defence featured in the September 2025 agreement between Riyadh and Islamabad, the latter has continued to engage Tehran as a mediator amid Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia.
The Mecca Pact should therefore best be understood as an experiment in regional self-reliance rather than a joint defence front or war-fighting alliance.
Wider regional impact
Yet while the agreement is modest in scope, it has deeper implications for the regional order.
The pact provides Saudi Arabia with another means of diversifying and strengthening its security and defence architecture. It gives Riyadh leverage in any future engagement with Tehran over regional security, and reduces its dependency on the US.
For Ankara, the deal could lead to financial support and a huge market for its defence industrial technology, while Islamabad could benefit from Saudi economic backing and position itself as an active and responsible player in the Middle East.
Tehran and its proxies are likely to test the agreement in the near future, potentially by attacking Saudi Arabia via the Houthis or Iraqi militias. The three signatories’ response to that first stress test will tell the region far more about this pact than official statements.
Why Egypt hasn’t joined
Egypt is not a signatory of the Mecca Pact, despite working closely with all three countries as part of an informal four-country grouping that has been referred to as ‘STEP’ or ‘the quad’.
Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, said on Friday that Cairo is studying the pact ‘very seriously’ and that deciding whether to join ‘requires deep studies in the light of Egypt’s constitution and legal commitments.’
Turkey’s Fidan previously said he believed that Egypt would join the pact ‘at the next stage’ once ‘a few technical issues’ were implemented.
Regardless of whether it eventually joins the pact, Egypt’s absence is in line with the country’s strategic hesitancy since Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi became president in 2024.
Egypt views itself more as a mediator, which requires maintaining positive relations and open channels with all actors.
For decades, Egypt’s leaders have taken a cautious approach, embracing non-alignment and avoiding military blocs to prevent entrapment. But joining the Mecca Pact could signal that Egypt is choosing sides to the three members’ various geopolitical rivals – which together could be seen as including Iran and the Houthis, Israel, the UAE, Greece, Cyprus and India. This perceived alignment could negatively impact Cairo’s relationships with these actors without delivering a significant payoff.
This reflects the pact being more about political signalling than military value. The pact is short on public details but could potentially include air and missile defence cooperation, intelligence sharing, expanded maritime security and defence-industrial cooperation. However, Cairo already cooperates with the three countries on many of these areas through the quad grouping and its support for the Saudi-led maritime coalition in the Red Sea.
Under Sisi, Egypt views itself more as a mediator, which requires maintaining positive relations and open channels with all actors. It seeks to avoid being entangled in military alliances that would complicate this role or escalate regional tensions.
Israel and the US
Egypt may share the alliance’s security concerns around non-state actors, maritime security, and Sudan. But for many Egyptian policymakers, a potential conflict with Israel will remain the greatest future security threat, despite the two countries’ peace treaty and security coordination.
Given Israel’s status as the US’s key regional ally, there is no other security alliance that can conceivably provide Egypt with sufficient protection in a potential conflict with Israel.
Therefore, while joining the Mecca Pact may help confront Egypt’s immediate concerns in Sudan, Libya or the Horn of Africa, it won’t solve its long-term security priorities. For now, the US remains Egypt’s most important security partner.
Cairo is also concerned about its sovereignty. Integration in Saudi-led security arrangements would boost Riyadh’s pursuit of Arab leadership. From Cairo’s perspective, this risks creating a patron-client relationship with Riyadh.
The case for joining, eventually
For Egypt, the risks of joining the pact likely currently outweigh the rewards. But this assessment may change with time.
The Mecca Pact is less a military alliance than a statement of intent about the shape of the next regional order. While Washington remains the most important partner for most regional powers, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, they are seeking to reduce their reliance on the US. This trend is likely to accelerate.
The pact also allows its members to hedge against Iran and Israel’s regional ambitions and test a new balance of power anchored in middle powers. Egypt has every interest in taking the initiative by participating in these arrangements.
There is no harm in waiting.
Egypt will be more motivated to join the pact if the agreement’s binding mutual defence obligations are not implemented in practice. This flexibility would ensure that Cairo could join without surrendering its ability to mediate or deepen coordination with the pact’s rivals, even as it would raise questions about the alliance’s credibility.
This room for manoeuvre matters, as Egypt needs diversification and partnerships across the region’s fault lines due to its chronic economic plight and its declining standing in the Arab world. At the same time, joining the pact would enhance Cairo’s ability to assert influence by being central in regional security arrangements.
Wait, watch and keep options open
Egypt should be patient, but not hesitant. The pact is appealing in principle but not yet a pressing priority for Egypt. There is no harm in waiting.
The new accord is less sophisticated than NATO. But it is more serious than previous regional coalitions. The pact may converge into a more focused, issue-based partnership rather than a binding bloc. This would be the best-case scenario for Egypt.
The real test of any alliance lies in its implementation, especially in wartime. With uncertainty around the Iran war’s end and periodic escalation in the Red Sea, Egypt should watch and evaluate the alliance’s reaction when a member is threatened.
For now, Cairo should take its time to observe the pact’s structure, military commitments and operational integration. It should reserve judgement on membership until all these aspects are more certain.
Why Should Delaware Care? Spending by Delawareans on the cost of healthcare has exploded in recent years, with the total spend rising more than 5% annually. Taxpayers are hit twice by those rising costs, because they cover the insurance costs of state employees who make up the single largest bloc of patients in the state.
A state board that has long faced challenges from the state’s health systems voted on Tuesday to finalize regulations meant to increase oversight of hospital spending.
But as those board members finalized their regulations, they changed some language to accommodate concerns raised by the state’s hospital lobby.
While the board held firm on many of its draft regulations, it ultimately agreed to change some provisions the hospitals argued revealed too much about their business dealings.
Overall, the board will require hospitals to present and be able to explain their financials annually, as the state has seen hospital spending grow year over year. This would include some data about their workforce development, revenues, and other spending details that have, until now, gone without oversight.
Brian Frazee, who runs the state’s hospital lobby, also sits on the cost review board as a non-voting member. And on Tuesday, he defended many of the changes his organization proposed.
He argued that requirements to break down financial data for each commercial insurer that deals with a hospital would violate contractual agreements between the hospitals and carriers.
Additionally, his organization had raised concerns about communications between hospitals and auditors prior to final determinations made about their finances.
Ultimately, the passing of these regulations represents the board’s first major step toward hospital oversight. The regulations, at least in the short-term, will guide how Delaware aims to tackle rising healthcare costs that not only burden patients, but the state, too.
What happened during the meeting?
Board members opened the meeting with discussion of the regulations, as well as feedback from the state’s hospital lobby, the Delaware Healthcare Association. Discussion of the regulations took up most of the meeting.
Hospitals will still be required to share much of the information they would have been before. However, the board will allow healthcare systems to aggregate much of data, instead of breaking down costs more specifically.
One of the key concerns raised by the hospitals was a requirement for them to break down cost data by individual insurance carriers, something the hospital lobby requested the board remove entirely.
Brian Frazee, executive director of the Delaware Healthcare Association. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
Frazee argued during the meeting the revenue information about insurance carriers “is considered proprietary and very confidential.”
Ultimately, the board kept the provision, but allowed the hospitals to aggregate commercial-carrier-specific revenues under one tab, without naming the insurers. The data would also show separate revenues from federal payers like Medicaid and Medicare.
Another provision the hospital association raised concerns over was a requirement for hospitals to submit “reports in connection” with their annual audited financials.
Hospitals are audited annually and information about their financials are released annually to bond authorities, who will typically lend them money for large capital projects like new facilities.
An audit will usually be conducted by a major firm like KPMG or Deloitte, and in those audits, sometimes the firms will find deficiencies with the hospital’s finances.
Similar to the information about insurance carriers, Frazee’s organization argued some of those documents would be considered confidential, like communications between auditors and a hospital.
One board member, the former state Secretary of Finance Rick Geisenberger, said the board did not need to see communications throughout the process of an audit because there is not yet a concrete finding.
However, Geisenberger said during the meeting that if a hospital’s board of directors are made aware of financial issues during an audit, the state should see those communications.
“If ultimately there’s a communication from the auditor that says that there’s a weakness, that goes to the board, we need to see,” Geisenberger said during the meeting.
The board tweaked the language to remove the phrase “in connection” from the regulations, meaning hospitals wouldn’t be on the hook for the more sensitive preliminary financial communications. But the board would still be able to see final audit letters that are shared with hospital leadership.
How did we get here?
In 2024, the Delaware legislature passed House Bill 350, which established 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.
Following an attempt by the state to dismiss the lawsuit, a judge in Delaware’s Court of Chancery allowed the lawsuit to continue.
Touching on Delaware’s corporate-friendly ethos, the judge said the question of whether the state board’s authority over hospital budgets unconstitutionally usurps a hospital board of directors has merit.
“In Delaware, the managerial power of boards of directors is sacrosanct,” said the judge, Vice Chancellor Lori Will.
Delaware Finance Secretary Rick Geisenberger was one of the five appointments to the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board. | PHOTO COURTESY OF GOVERNOR’S OFFCE
One of those Carney-appointed members, Geisenberger, stepped down as chair after a spat with Meyer.
In a letter sent to Meyer on June 7, 2025, Geisenberger recounted how he had declined the governor’s request to cancel meetings of the board, saying instead that the public body was “duly authorized” by the legislature and had a responsibility to perform its business “impartially and free from undue influence.”
“You have stated to me that holding any further meetings of the Board at this time would be a waste of State resources in light of recent developments and uncertainties,” Geisenberger said in a reference to the ongoing lawsuit.
Soon after, the state and ChristianaCare agreed to pause proceedings on the lawsuit until Sept. 30, 2025, in “the interests of the parties and the public.” In October, the state and the hospital announced a proposed settlement agreement.
In the months that followed, lawmakers introduced legislation amending the charter of the hospital cost review board, removing its power to modify and veto excessive budgets.
Since then, the hospital review board has also been tasked with monitoring how the state’s nonprofit hospitals offer federally mandated free and discounted care to low-income patients.
Why Should Delaware Care? More than 121,000 Delawareans are immigrants – around 12% of Delaware’s population. As ICE arrests increase this summer, legislation that could prevent some of those enforcement actions remain unsigned by the governor more than six weeks after they were approved by legisaltors.
Gov. Matt Meyer recently joined a bipartisan task force of U.S. governors working to present new immigration policies to Congress, but a slate of three bills aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants here in Delaware remain unsigned.
Meyer, who has publicly opposed the Trump administration’s increased ICE activity through previous executive action, did not give a specific reason for not yet signing the bills.
“When hundreds of bills are passed, I am not going to rush through and do shoddy work,” he said. “I am reviewing every piece of legislation for the people of Delaware. We’re going to review every law, and we’ll make a decision.”
Ingrid Ocampo, a community advocate, said that because an official signing date has not been confirmed, she is worried. She showed Spotlight Delaware a post she wrote for a local Latino community Facebook page raising concerns about the bills not yet being signed.
“We respectfully request to know if there exists a reason or circumstance that has delayed the signing of these bills,” Ocampo wrote in Spanish. “Additionally, we would greatly appreciate knowing if there is a set date for your signature.”
Meyer, along with bill sponsors Reps. Sean Lynn (D-Dover) and Mara Gorman (D-Newark), were tagged in the post.
Ocampo said she has not received further information or a reply since she originally posted on Aug. 2.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, Ocampo said the current political climate has inspired Latino Delawareans to urge Meyer to act.
“Esto es algo que urge a la comunidad porque estamos en un momento político que lo requiere.” she said. “This is something that urges the community because we are in a political moment that requires it.”
Ocampo was referring to the uptick in ICE arrests made in Delaware. From January 2024 to January 2025, ICE arrests more than doubled, rising from 224 to 695, according to the Deportation Data Project.
Governors’ immigration task force
While it remains unclear if and when Meyer plans to sign the Delaware immigration bills, it is also unclear what exactly the governor plans to do on the new interstate task force.
A spokesperson for Meyer’s office declined to comment on details regarding what exactly the governor plans to do with his new position.
He joined Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-Oklahoma), Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah) and Gov. Wes Moore (D-Maryland) in a Bloomberg News interview earlier this month to debut the new group.
“Common ground is not being found right now in Washington, and we can come together — find solutions,” Meyer said during the interview. “Solutions that we think ultimately involve governors in the lead and state governments in the lead in identifying the economic and workforce imperatives.”
Under the U.S. Constitution, immigration laws are a federal responsibility, meaning states cannot pass legislation to reform the immigration system. They can only propose laws to Congress.
Recent reform attempts, however, have been unsuccessful. In 2013, the “Gang of Eight” — a group of bipartisan senators — attempted to provide a legal path to citizenship for millions of immigrants and increase work-related visas. Their bill ultimately died in Congress.
Residents of District 23 will have a chance later this month to learn more about the four candidates running in the hotly contested race for state representative.
The refinery argues that the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control changed the way it interprets the refinery’s air permit. Image created with AI on 8/13
Company says state regulators changed how they interpret its air permit and failed to consider efforts to reduce emissions
By George D. Rotsch, Editor, Delaware LIVE
DELAWARE CITY, Del – Delaware City Refining Company is appealing a $960,000 state penalty tied to an equipment outage in May.
The refinery argues that the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control changed the way it interprets the refinery’s air permit. It also says DNREC failed to give enough weight to the company’s efforts to reduce emissions and safely complete repairs.
The appeal was filed July 30 with the Delaware Environmental Appeals Board. The board can uphold, change or reverse DNREC’s decision.
The case involves the refinery’s fluid coking unit, commonly called a coker, and a boiler that is part of the unit’s main pollution-control system.
The boiler was taken offline from May 7 through May 30 after workers found a leak. The refinery continued operating the coker while replacing the damaged equipment. Exhaust was sent through a backup incinerator during the repairs.
DNREC said the event released about 745 tons of sulfur dioxide and 50.5 tons of nitrogen oxides.
The department fined the refinery $40,000 for each of 24 days, the maximum daily penalty allowed under state law.
Dispute centers on permit language
The refinery does not appear to dispute the amount of pollution released. The disagreement is over whether the emissions violated the refinery’s permit.
DNREC says the coker has an annual sulfur dioxide limit of 182.3 tons. The department says that limit includes emissions released through the backup incinerator.
Under that interpretation, the 745 tons released during the May outage far exceeded the annual limit.
The refinery argues that the annual limit applies only during normal operations, when exhaust passes through the main boiler and a wet-gas scrubber. The scrubber removes sulfur dioxide from the exhaust before it is released.
The backup incinerator controls carbon monoxide and particulate matter, but it does not control sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides.
The refinery says its permit has separate rules for operating during periods when the main boiler and scrubber are unavailable. Those rules limit the coker’s production rate, the sulfur content of its feedstock and its hourly sulfur dioxide emissions.
The company argues that those backup rules would serve little purpose if the refinery were required to shut down the coker every time the main pollution controls went offline.
DNREC’s record is mixed
DNREC has previously said the refinery violated its permit by continuing to operate the coker when the main pollution controls were unavailable.
A 2016 violation notice covered two similar outages in 2015. DNREC said continued coker operations without the boiler and scrubber violated the refinery’s operating requirements.
In that respect, DNREC’s current position is consistent with its earlier enforcement.
However, the 2016 notice did not accuse the refinery of violating the 182.3-ton annual sulfur dioxide limit. That was true even though the two outages released a combined total of more than 570 tons of sulfur dioxide.
DNREC clearly applied the annual limit to backup-incinerator emissions in a September 2025 violation notice. It applied the same interpretation again in the current case.
The refinery says DNREC issued about 12 earlier violation notices involving similar outages without applying the annual limit in this way.
That suggests DNREC has been consistent in questioning continued coker operations without the main pollution controls. But counting backup-incinerator emissions against the annual limit appears to be a newer or expanded enforcement position.
The appeals board will have to decide whether DNREC properly applied the permit or changed its interpretation without enough explanation.
Refinery points to safety concerns
DNREC argues that the refinery should not have continued operating the coker while the main pollution equipment was offline.
The refinery says an immediate shutdown could have created other environmental and safety problems.
According to the appeal, an emergency shutdown could increase flaring, damage equipment and place workers at risk. Because the coker is connected to several other refinery systems, shutting it down could also force other parts of the refinery to reduce or stop operations.
The company says it can take about six weeks to return the coker to normal operations after a long shutdown.
Those claims are the refinery’s arguments and have not yet been tested during a hearing.
Company says it reduced emissions
The refinery says it informed DNREC, elected officials, Delaware City representatives and community members before beginning the work.
The company also says it:
Reduced the coker’s operating rate.
Reduced activity in another major refinery unit.
Used material with a lower sulfur content.
Stopped certain processing work.
Added sulfur dioxide monitoring.
Published real-time air-monitoring information.
Finished the repairs eight days earlier than expected.
The refinery estimates that reducing its operations cost the company about $4.3 million.
It also says air readings around the refinery remained within public-health standards during the repairs.
Those air readings do not prove the refinery complied with its permit. Air-quality readings in the surrounding community and emissions limits at the refinery are separate regulatory measurements.
Monitoring showed no reported community harm
No injuries, illnesses or known exposures were reported during the release, according to the refinery’s appeal.
Air monitors at the refinery’s property line and nearby state monitoring stations showed ground-level sulfur dioxide concentrations remained below federal public-health standards throughout the repairs. DNREC had also told the public before the work began that emissions could increase at the refinery while air quality at ground level remained in the “good” range.
The refinery argues that those readings show the release did not reach levels expected to harm the surrounding community.
The monitoring results do not settle the permit dispute. Public-health standards measure the air people breathe at ground level, while the refinery’s permit limits the amount of pollution released from its equipment. DNREC can therefore allege a permit violation even when nearby air readings remain below levels considered harmful to the public.
Maximum penalty questioned
DNREC said the large amount of sulfur dioxide released, the refinery’s history of violations and the economic benefit of continuing production justified the $960,000 penalty.
The department also said the refinery had not done enough to prevent repeated boiler outages.
The refinery disputes those findings. It says it ordered a replacement part after a 2025 outage and installed it in May rather than making another temporary repair.
The company also argues that DNREC did not adequately explain why the maximum penalty was appropriate. It says the state failed to fully consider the reduced production, extra monitoring, repair costs and safety risks of an immediate shutdown.
DNREC has a duty to enforce environmental laws and protect nearby communities. The refinery, however, is entitled to clear permit requirements, consistent enforcement and a penalty that reflects all the facts.
The Environmental Appeals Board will decide whether DNREC reached the proper balance.
To Go Box:
Case: Environmental Appeals Board No. 2026-06 Company: Delaware City Refining Company LLC Penalty: $960,000 Outage: May 7-30 Reported emissions: 745 tons of sulfur dioxide and 50.5 tons of nitrogen oxides Refinery’s request: Reverse DNREC’s findings and penalty Status: Appeal pending
A century-old youth organization is attracting new interest as Delaware families seek outdoor adventure, leadership, service and more face-to-face experiences for their children.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Scouting is finding renewed momentum in Delaware as families look for structured activities that get children outdoors, build confidence and create stronger face-to-face connections.
Ray Teat, Scout Executive for the Del-Mar-Va Council, said the organization is seeing families return to Scouting following the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The number of scouts, scouting units and families involved with Scouting is once again growing following a challenging time for the program coming out of COVID,” Teat said. “But the number of young people, both boys and girls, is growing.”
The growth comes after a period in which Scouting America experienced significant national membership losses, including a sharp decline following 2019. In Delaware, however, local leaders say the focus has shifted to renewed family interest and the reasons parents are taking another look at Scouting.
“We’re seeing strong interest across Delaware because families want exciting programs with hands-on experiences that promote life skills — from Cub Scouts through high-adventure crews — and plenty of chances for parents to get involved,” Teat said.
Parents are looking for connection
Tim Holly, Executive Board President of the Del-Mar-Va Council, said the renewed interest reflects broader changes affecting children and families.
After the isolation and disruption of the pandemic, Holly said many parents are deliberately looking for structured activities that put children together in person and give them opportunities to build friendships, confidence and independence.
“Parents are looking for ways to reconnect their children with other kids and with their communities,” Holly said. “They want them outside, interacting face to face, learning how to work with other people and building confidence through real experiences.”
That desire for connection comes as families continue to wrestle with concerns about youth mental health, social isolation and the amount of time children spend online.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about 40% of U.S. high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023.
The statistic does not establish a direct connection between mental health concerns and Scouting enrollment, but it provides context for parents seeking activities that emphasize friendship, physical activity, adult mentorship, responsibility and belonging.
Holly said Scouting offers a setting where children can step away from some of the pressures of an increasingly digital childhood.
“Families are increasingly concerned about how much of childhood is happening on a screen,” Holly said. “Scouting gives young people a reason to put the phone down, go outside, solve a problem, make friends and discover that they can do things they may not have thought they could do.”
An old idea fits a new concern
That may be giving one of Scouting’s oldest ideas new relevance.
Scouts camp, hike, cook, build, navigate, volunteer and work together. As they get older, Scouts gradually take greater responsibility for planning activities, solving problems and leading other young people.
“Scouting has always been about learning by doing,” Holly said. “What has changed is that parents now see even more value in experiences where kids have to interact with one another, solve problems together and learn how to lead.”
Holly said parents also are attracted to the resilience that can develop when children are allowed to encounter manageable challenges.
“You learn something about yourself when the weather changes on a camping trip, when something doesn’t go according to plan or when your patrol has to figure out what to do next,” Holly said. “Those are small challenges, but they teach independence, perseverance and leadership.”
More than camping
Modern Scouting reaches well beyond the traditional image of tents, campfires and knots.
Scouts can pursue interests involving science, technology, robotics, environmental conservation, public safety, communications, fitness and dozens of other subjects.
Holly said that combination of traditional outdoor experiences and contemporary skills has broadened the program’s appeal.
“Families don’t have to choose between outdoor adventure and the skills young people will need in the future,” Holly said. “Scouting can expose a child to conservation, technology, engineering, leadership and public service while still getting them outside and away from a screen.”
That flexibility also allows young people with different interests to find their own paths through Scouting.
Delaware is well suited for Scouting
Delaware’s geography gives local Scouting programs another advantage.
Families in New Castle County are within easy reach of state parks, trails, waterways, historic sites and camping opportunities. Farther south, Scouts have access to forests, coastal environments and Scout reservations across the Delmarva Peninsula.
Holly said Delaware’s compact size makes those experiences unusually accessible.
“One of the strengths of Scouting in Delaware is that adventure is not very far away,” Holly said. “Families can live in Wilmington or Newark and still be on a trail, near the water or at a campsite without spending half the day getting there.”
That accessibility allows local units to combine outdoor recreation with conservation, history and community service.
A broader Scouting organization
Scouting also looks different than it did for many of today’s parents and grandparents, although boys and girls participating together is not new to several of its older-youth programs.
Girls began joining Cub Scout programs in 2018, followed by the expansion of Scouts BSA to girls in 2019.
Young women, however, had already participated in other Scouting programs for decades. Exploring and Sea Exploring, now Sea Scouts, began welcoming young women in 1971. Venturing has included both young men and young women since the program was created in 1998.
Those programs continue to offer different paths for older youth, including high-adventure activities, maritime programs and career-focused experiences.
“Families and society have changed over time and Scouting has evolved,” Holly said. “We are reaching more young people, including girls, while remaining steadfast in teaching the things that have always made Scouting valuable — things like leadership, service, outdoor adventure and character.”
The organization has also adopted the Scouting America name as part of an effort to better communicate its broader mission to today’s families.
New Castle County shows momentum
Some of the most visible growth has come in New Castle County, where local units have expanded recruitment and held Join Scouting Nights designed to introduce parents and children to nearby packs and troops.
Teat said the growth is giving the council reason for optimism and reinforcing the relevance of Scouting for today’s families.
The experience also suggests Scouting may be benefiting from a broader shift in what parents value.
For earlier generations, playing outside, exploring a neighborhood and spending long stretches of time away from a screen were ordinary parts of childhood.
Today, Holly said, parents may have to create those experiences more intentionally.
“The things Scouting provides are not really new,” Holly said. “What may be new is how much families value them today. Being outdoors, having real friendships, serving other people and learning to take responsibility have become increasingly important in a world where so much of life is virtual.”
More than a century in Delaware
Scouting has deep roots in the First State.
The Wilmington Council was founded in 1914, became the Wilmington Area Council in 1931 and was renamed the Del-Mar-Va Council in 1936.
More than a century later, Scouting has changed considerably, but much of its fundamental proposition remains familiar.
Young people still go outside. They learn skills. They work in teams. They serve their communities. And gradually, they are expected to assume more responsibility for themselves and others.
For Teat and Holly, that combination may help explain why a century-old youth organization is finding renewed momentum.
In a childhood increasingly filled with screens, schedules and virtual connections, Scouting offers something decidedly different: a chance to get outside, build friendships, overcome challenges and learn how to lead.
To Go Box:
What: Scouting America programs in Delaware and throughout the Del-Mar-Va Council
Who can participate: Programs serve boys and girls, with opportunities based on age and interests. Several older-youth Scouting programs have been coed for decades.
What Scouts do: Camping, hiking, community service, leadership development, STEM activities, conservation, public safety programs and other hands-on experiences.
Local leadership: Ray Teat, Scout Executive of the Del-Mar-Va Council; Tim Holly, Executive Board President of the Del-Mar-Va Council
Where: Scout units operate throughout Delaware, with parks, waterways, historic sites and Scout camps providing opportunities for outdoor and educational programs.
How to learn more: Visit www.beascout.org to find a nearby pack or troop, email the Del-Mar-Va Council at info@dmvc.org or call 302-622-3300.
Photo Courtey of Volunteer Engagement Accelerator. Created with AI on 8/13
For nonprofits, volunteers can expand capacity, relieve pressure on staff and help organizations serve more people. For volunteers, Williamson believes the rewards can be equally significant.
By John Riddle
For Angela Williamson, volunteering is about much more than filling an empty shift, helping at an event or adding another name to a nonprofit’s roster.
It is about belonging.
Williamson, founder of Volunteer Engagement Accelerator (VEA), has spent nearly two decades working in volunteer engagement and nonprofit leadership. Today, she helps mission-driven organizations develop stronger systems for attracting, supporting and retaining volunteers, while helping those volunteers find meaningful ways to contribute.
“As a consultant, I help nonprofits create places where people belong, and I focus on volunteer engagement,” Williamson said. “Volunteer engagement is where people give of their time, their talents, their heart, their passion and their donations because they want to make their world and the nonprofit a better place to be.”
Williamson holds the Certified in Volunteer Administration credential, or CVA. She is a past president of the Delaware Association of Volunteer Administrators and received the AL!VE Impact Award in 2022. She has presented at conferences, appeared on podcasts and serves as an instructor for NOVAA 101, helping volunteer administrators develop stronger leadership skills.
Her passion for volunteering, however, began long before it became her profession.
As a child, Williamson watched her parents volunteer in many different capacities. One of her earliest memories involves volunteering at the Delaware State Fair, where she helped pick up litter and received concert tickets in return.
“I thought that was the best, most amazing thing ever as a kid,” she recalled.
Those childhood experiences also taught her something about the importance of making people feel included.
“I’ve always had that heart, I think, of helping the ones that don’t feel belonging, because I have felt left out before,” Williamson said. “As a kid, feeling left out, I think my heart grew for those people who did also feel left out.”
That desire to create connections remains at the heart of her work.
“I love volunteering because it helps people. It helps the community,” she said. “I get to grow, others get to grow, and it just builds a better world, a better community and better people along the way.”
Volunteering Is Changing
While the desire to help remains strong, Williamson says the way people volunteer has changed.
“I think volunteering has changed in what and how and when, but the passion and the desire to help others of volunteers is still deep-seated,” she said.
One challenge is that people are busy and often reluctant to make long-term commitments. Some prefer to decide at the last minute whether they are available, while nonprofits may need to know well in advance if someone will fill a particular shift.
Williamson believes organizations need to adapt by reconsidering what volunteers can do, how much time they need to give and even where the work takes place.
“We do need to, as a nonprofit field, adapt and change and create different volunteer roles and responsibilities and times and places,” she said.
That could include shorter assignments, one-time opportunities, virtual volunteering and skills-based projects.
Williamson also believes volunteering can help address another challenge facing many people today: a need for greater human connection.
“By volunteering and getting out into the world, doing things that are good for the world and connecting with people, people’s mental well-being can be supported and encouraged toward a more positive view,” she said.
Finding the Right Fit
For someone interested in volunteering, Williamson recommends starting by understanding what kind of experience best matches his or her personality.
“Know your personality,” she said.
Do you prefer working behind the scenes or interacting with people? Do you like structure or flexibility? Would you rather work independently or as part of a team?
“There are so many options,” Williamson said. “Sometimes a bad fit isn’t great. Even though you want to help, maybe it’s not the best fit for you. So, find the best-fit volunteer role for you, and you will flourish and do great, and the nonprofit will appreciate it.”
Opportunities can include one-time events, ongoing assignments, direct service, behind-the-scenes work, skills-based volunteering, leadership positions and board service.
And not having much free time does not necessarily rule out volunteering.
“You might not think you have time to volunteer, but sometimes it’s just an hour,” Williamson said.
Virtual and at-home opportunities can provide additional flexibility.
Once someone finds the right opportunity, Williamson emphasizes some basics that can make a big difference: Show up when promised, communicate if plans change, ask questions and speak up if something is not working.
When the Nonprofit Doesn’t Call Back
What happens when someone wants to volunteer, contacts an organization and never hears back?
Williamson says not to give up too quickly.
“If you’ve had a ‘bad’ experience or an organization did not get back to you, please be patient and ask them again,” she said. “Maybe give them three tries. Three strikes and you’re out, maybe. But not all volunteering is like that.”
Ironically, the reason a nonprofit does not respond may be the same reason it needs volunteers.
Staff members are often juggling numerous responsibilities with limited time and resources. An organization may desperately need additional help while lacking an effective system for recruiting and onboarding the people offering it.
That is one of the problems Williamson created Volunteer Engagement Accelerator to address.
“That’s where, as a consultant, I go in and help nonprofits organize themselves better so that they can respond more quickly and in more efficient ways,” she said. “I like helping nonprofits build that bridge toward volunteers and understanding to get people more involved.”
For nonprofits, volunteers can expand capacity, relieve pressure on staff and help organizations serve more people. For volunteers, Williamson believes the rewards can be equally significant.
“When you volunteer, you feel great because you’re making a difference in a cause, a movement, somebody’s life, a pet’s life, whatever that is, whatever the nonprofit mission is,” she said.
People looking for opportunities can contact nonprofits directly or explore resources such as AARP Create the Good and Idealist. In Delaware, Williamson points potential volunteers toward Volunteer Delaware, United Way of Delaware and Delaware Difference Makers.
And for anyone who thinks volunteering is simply about giving away valuable time, Williamson offers another way to look at it.
“It can be a résumé builder. It can be the reason and purpose to get out of bed in the morning,” she said. “It can be all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but it’s all beneficial.”
In the competitive world of youth sports, few organizations have a reach as vast as the Amateur Athletic Union.
With 760,000 athletes and coaches nationwide, the AAU hosts competitions in dozens of sports across the country. This summer alone, hundreds of thousands of children competed in AAU events for elite young athletes: a staggering 100,000 at the world’s largest volleyball championship in Orlando, Florida; 8,000 at its storied basketball championships at Disney World; more than 15,000 at the Junior Olympics in Iowa.
To the hundreds of thousands of parents whose children play under the red, white and blue AAU badge, the organization offers more than a place to compete. The AAU promises their children will be safe — that its coaches are vetted, monitored and trained; that strict rules govern how adults interact with children; and that it responds effectively to allegations of abuse within its ranks.
But that trust is misplaced, according to an investigation from ProPublica and The Washington Post. The AAU is failing on nearly every level to adequately protect the hundreds of thousands of children in its care from sexual abuse, the investigation found, misleading the public about its prevention measures and suppressing allegations of sexual misconduct.
In doing so, the AAU is breaking many of the pledges it made in the wake of a 2011 sex abuse scandal involving its CEO and young basketball players. AAU leaders at the time said they would build a “new culture in which the overarching priority” was protecting young athletes, committing the organization to sweeping safety reforms. But they did not implement the majority of those reforms, ProPublica and The Post found, putting many children at risk. Some AAU athletes have had devastating experiences.
The AAU does not offer child abuse prevention training, though it claims to the public that it does. It does not verify whether coaches take the training it does offer, though it calls the course “mandatory” on its webpage for parents.
The AAU has become a haven for coaches suspected of abuse, ProPublica and The Post found, based on a review of public disciplinary lists and interviews with current and former executives from six national sports governing bodies and other key stakeholders. Those sports officials say the AAU has earned a reputation as a place where coaches can escape discipline and are not bound by strict safety laws, making it more difficult to protect young athletes. ProPublica and The Post identified eight coaches who continued to work with children under the AAU in the last five years after being banned or suspended by other youth sports organizations — even though the AAU pledged in 2012 that it would ban such coaches.
Serious allegations of sexual misconduct against coaches in the AAU are handled by its Board of Review, a group of four elected AAU members and a chair whose names are not made public. Asked about written guidelines for when to ban coaches, one former member who sat on the board for nearly 25 years said the group “just decided on our feelings.”
The abuse reporting hotline AAU promised to create as part of the reforms redirects to the AAU’s general office line with no option to report abuse, though callers can press 5 to reach a department for “medal orders.”
Instead of protecting children, the AAU has prioritized building an ever-bigger footprint across youth sports through cheap and easy team registrations, ProPublica and The Post found, allowing it to dramatically grow its revenue in recent years.
The scope of the consequences for young athletes nationwide is impossible to quantify, ProPublica and The Post found, because the AAU operates with a secrecy that is unusual for a nonprofit that serves children.
The AAU declined to answer questions from ProPublica and The Post over the course of more than a year, including whether the organization trains its coaches, how it investigates abuse claims, and how it enforces policies and safety rules. It would not verify if specific coaches overseeing AAU-registered teams had been authorized and background-checked by the AAU, as its rules require. While other youth sports organizations post public lists of coaches found to have abused children, the AAU does not.
In a statement, the AAU said it is “committed to protecting its athletes through comprehensive protection policies overseen by our Compliance Department.”
Athlete protection “is at the forefront of our safety measures such as a verified identity check and mandatory background screenings for all non-athlete AAU members, including coaches,” it said. The statement also cited “supplemental medical benefits” and “mandatory concussion protocols” as measures that it said prioritized the “physical well-being of its members.”
“These safety measures reflect our ongoing commitment to providing a safe, secure, supportive, and trusted environment where athletes can thrive,” the statement said.
The AAU also took action on one point raised by the news organizations. After ProPublica and The Post asked the AAU last year whether it actually mandated training for coaches, as its website claims, the organization quietly changed its website to say the training was “encouraged.”
For the first time, using thousands of pages of internal, legal and court records and interviews with key stakeholders, ProPublica and The Post were able to document how the AAU handled some child sex abuse claims in the years after it promised reform. Several years after allegations were made against a former AAU president, ProPublica and The Post found, its review board exonerated another top AAU executive accused of sexual abuse by a former player without interviewing a single witness or considering a past allegation from a different player, court records show. A current AAU official, Jim Fox, said he believed the AAU’s handling of the case was an attempt to “cover it up.”
The AAU has taken other steps that have had the effect of keeping sexual abuse claims out of the public eye, ProPublica and The Post found. Clauses in AAU registration forms require all claims against the AAU to be resolved through confidential arbitration hearings instead of jury trials in open court. The AAU uses those agreements to quash lawsuits over child sex abuse claims — arguing in court that children who say they were victimized by their coaches had signed away their right to sue when they registered for an AAU team, records show. That practice is extremely rare in sex abuse cases at other major youth sports organizations, according to attorneys, court records and sports groups, and was mostly banned by a Biden-era law in 2022.
ProPublica and The Post found that the AAU has attempted to force sex abuse claims into arbitration as recently as 2024, in the case of a lawsuit filed by a teenage girl in Florida who said she had been abused by her AAU volleyball coach. The case was settled out of court last year.
The AAU declined to comment on this practice or any of these cases, saying it could not comment on “legal matters.”
The AAU’s use of arbitration agreements meant that even in a high-profile case in which an AAU coach was convicted of decades of prolific abuse, the AAU itself escaped scrutiny.
The co-director of an influential basketball club in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Greg Stephen, was accused of sexually exploiting more than 400 of his young basketball players in 2018 and sentenced to 180 years in prison on multiple charges. But arbitration clauses prevented his former players from suing the AAU, ProPublica and The Post learned, even though boys’ families initially argued that the AAU was partly responsible because it had failed to enforce its 2012 safety policies, including a ban on coaches sharing bedrooms with players.
A judge sided with the AAU and ruled that the victims could not sue the wealthier parent organization, allowing the AAU not to respond to the claims in court. The club, Barnstormers Basketball, denied the claims.
The Barnstormers’ AAU-provided insurance limited payouts for sexual abuse claims to $1 million, said Guy Cook, the families’ lawyer, the equivalent of a few thousand dollars for each young victim.
Cook said the AAU had grown “sophisticated” in its attempts to suppress child sex abuse lawsuits: “It’s not unlike what the Catholic Church has done.”
In 2018, in the wake of revelations about sexual abuse by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and other powerful figures in Olympic sports, Congress created a new oversight system to prevent sexual abuse. The law charged the U.S. Center for SafeSport with investigating allegations of sexual abuse in sports overseen by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee — made up of national sports governing bodies like USA Gymnastics — and enforced strict new rules about safety and training.
But the AAU exists outside of that system, allowing it to benefit from a gap in the law. Because it is not a sanctioned national sports governing body, the AAU is not overseen by SafeSport and does not have to follow its rules or mandate that coaches take its trainings. ProPublica and The Post found that it does not abide by SafeSport suspensions or bans.
“It should scare parents,” said former Florida state Sen. Lauren Book, a child sex abuse survivor and prevention advocate who was a member of a task force established by AAU to reform its abuse prevention practices in 2011. Along with most other members of the task force, she said she has since lost faith in the organization.
“What AAU does is protect institution over children,” Book said. “They have never done the right thing when it comes to child protection.”
Broken Promises
Before he was caught at the center of a scandal, Bobby Dodd saved the AAU. When the former youth basketball coach took the helm of the nonprofit in 1992, it was struggling. It had been founded in the 19th century to oversee amateur sports, but Congress had given that role to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and its national sports governing bodies in 1978. The AAU’s relevance had been declining since.
Dodd saw youth sports for what they would soon become: a booming business. He built the AAU of the 1990s and 2000s into the juggernaut of youth basketball, the home of virtually every future NBA star; invested in a Junior Olympics brand that brought in thousands of children from across track and field; and moved the organization’s headquarters to the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex inside Disney World.
Under Dodd, there were few barriers to becoming an AAU coach: Anyone who paid a $16 membership fee could start a team, no background check required. By joining the AAU, basketball and other sports clubs got perks like cheap and easy liability insurance. More importantly, they got access to a circuit of organized tournaments, from local weekend events to major national championships.
But along with Dodd’s stewardship of AAU came criticism that the fast-growing organization was becoming a free-for-all.
After a 2004 Seattle Times investigation found dozens of people with felony convictions were coaching AAU-sanctioned teams in Washington and Idaho, including a coach who was a convicted murderer, Dodd pledged to consider background checks for AAU’s 65,000 coaches. “We are going to try to ensure more integrity in the process,” Dodd told the paper.
The AAU still had not introduced those background checks when, in 2011, ESPN reported that two men had accused Dodd of molesting them as youths in the 1980s, when he was their basketball coach. Dodd denied the allegations but stepped down as president, collecting a $1.5 million payout from the organization and putting the AAU back in an uncomfortable spotlight. He was not charged with a crime, andhe could not be reached for comment.
Again, the organization promised change.
Under a new president, Louis Stout, the organization convened a task force of child safety experts. It vowed in June 2012 to implement all of the task force’s recommendations, which it called “historic child protection measures.”
The AAU rolled out mandatory background checks. It also pledged to train all adults in child sex abuse prevention and create policies that would “prevent adults from being alone with children.” Participation was a privilege, AAU vowed, not a right: “Anyone who is prohibited from participating in an organization that serves youth or who violates the AAU’s child protection policies should be barred.”
The most important change, the AAU said, would be cultural. Child safety would now be “an overarching priority.”
Within a matter of months, there were signs that little was actually changing.
That year, the AAU gave a 2012 leadership award to a man named Rick Butler, one of the country’s most prominent girls’ volleyball coaches at the time. Butler had been instrumental in building AAU volleyball into a powerhouse.
But he had also been banned by USA Volleyball from coaching girls since 1995, after the sport’s governing body concluded that he had had sexual intercourse with three teenage players years earlier, when he was in his late 20s to mid-30s. Butler’s attorney called them “legal, consensual relationships in the 1980s,” noting that there was no law or rule against coach-player relationships at the time.
Months before giving Butler the award, the AAU had promised it would bar anyone “banned by other youth-serving organizations” from coaching children.
But Butler continued coaching girls under the AAU until 2018. That year, USA Volleyball pulled its affiliation with the AAU over Butler’s membership, and the AAU subsequently banned Butler, according to a letter reviewed by ProPublica and The Post. Butler’s attorney said he has not been accused of more recent misconduct.
Stout died unexpectedly in September 2012, just a few months after he committed the AAU to the list of reforms. (After an interim period, Roger Goudy, who had run the AAU’s volleyball program for decades, was elected president in 2014.)
When the AAU published its first youth protection handbook in December 2012, there was no rule barring coaches banned by other groups. The handbook did say it was following another key reform: All AAU coaches were now taking an “educational course.”
The organization had repurposed training it had used since before the Dodd scandal — an online seminar called “Double Goal Coach” from the nonprofit Positive Coaching Alliance. The course was focused on sports psychology and coaching techniques, not sexual abuse prevention training. The AAU claimed that “all registered non-athletes” were taking the course, even though no one verified whether they did, according to officials, stakeholders and a person directly familiar with the training.
“It’s never been mandatory,” said Peg Adams, a longtime regional official at the AAU who spent more than two decades reviewing abuse claims against AAU coaches as part of its Board of Review. “It should be, but that’s something they [AAU] have to work out.”
When they were first announced, the AAU’s child safety rules, if implemented, would have put the organization at the vanguard of youth sports. But in 2018, Congress passed a landmark new sports safety law, known as the Safe Sport Act, that forced much of the rest of the sports world to make sweeping changes.
Under the new law, the U.S. Center for SafeSport was charged with investigating sexual abuse allegations in all 50 national sports governing bodies, the organizations that oversee and set rules for specific sports. SafeSport could ban or suspend accused coaches in these groups, placing their names in a searchable public database known as the SafeSport list. It required adult coaches and volunteers to take SafeSport-provided child abuse prevention training annually and follow strict new safety rules governing how they interacted with athletes.
But because the independent AAU is not a national governing body, SafeSport could not require the AAU to follow its disciplinary list, rules or training. Only a few provisions tucked at the end of the 2018 bill applied to the AAU — including a requirement that all sports groups “offer and provide consistent training … regarding prevention and reporting of child abuse.” Only Congress, not SafeSport, could enforce that provision.
The new Center for SafeSport was far from perfect. Underfunded and understaffed, the center quickly racked up a backlog of unresolved complaints and closed many others without findings or with what critics said were inadequate investigations.
SafeSport has since resolved many of those issues, improving its process to resolve cases more quickly and cut down its backlog, the organization said. In a statement, the center’s new CEO, Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, an Olympic gold medalist, said the organization “acknowledges the challenges we have met as the first national sport safeguarding organization in the world. We are on surer footing today.”
SafeSport also drove up costs for the governing bodies, who were required to help fund the center’s investigations and often pay for expensive background checks and compliance staff. That meant higher membership fees for their athletes.
The AAU was not required to pay for any of that. So while governing bodies and SafeSport inched toward reform, ProPublica and The Post found, the AAU did not.
Ashlee Orndorff
“People Tried to Cover It Up”
In 2018, the year that the Safe Sport Act took effect, the AAU faced a test of its most significant promise: to remake its culture to protect children.
That January, a woman named Ashlee Orndorff claimed on social media that she had been groomed and sexually abused as a teenager by an AAU executive, its second vice president, Matt Williams, who was also a paid employee of the organization at the time.
Orndorff had been a teenage basketball phenom in the tiny unincorporated town of Hawthorne, Nevada, two hours outside of Reno. She won three state titles and was named the state Gatorade player of the year during her senior year of high school in 2000, setting records that she still holds. But for many of the years that she excelled on the court, Orndorff said, she had carried a terrible secret: Williams, her AAU club coach, had been sexually assaulting her. The abuse began when she was 15, she said, and carried well into her adulthood, resulting in the birth of a child she gave up for adoption at 19.
Williams was more than just a storied coach. He founded the Western region’s most prominent AAU basketball brand, Jam On It, which generated revenue for the AAU through the enormous tournaments it hosted every year.
After Orndorff’s allegations, the AAU pledged to investigate, saying Williams had “volunteered” to be placed on administrative leave. Orndorff’s allegations went before the AAU’s Board of Review a month later. The small group of AAU members, one elected to represent each region, had no training in law, investigation or child sexual abuse, according to Adams, the former board member.
Transcripts reviewed by ProPublica and The Post show the hearing frequently resembled a contentious criminal trial. Williams had a lawyer, but Orndorff said she had not been able to afford one at the time.
In a statement to the AAU, Williams denied sexually abusing Orndorff as a minor. But he admitted that he fathered Orndorff’s child, who was born when she was 19 and he was over 30 and just a year out of coaching her — a violation of the organization’s policy against having sexual relationships with former players, which was part of the 2012 reforms. The attorney asked Orndorff if her “anger” at Williams “is what has prompted this complaint.”
“No, sir,” she responded. “Being fingered by my coach at 15 in a gym and him making me think that that is all that I was good for, was to be his sexual satisfaction, that is where my fucking anger comes from. Next question.”
The board did not interview any witnesses or introduce records that could corroborate Orndorff’s account. Orndorff had submitted a 34-page narrative of the alleged abuse that included dates, locations and names of potential witnesses, 10 of whom later corroborated aspects of her story in depositions for a 2019 lawsuit she filed against Williams and Jam On It, according to a review of thousands of pages of court records. (Williams and Jam On It denied wrongdoing. Orndorff settled the case in 2023, and Williams died from cancer the following year. An attorney for Williams’ estate did not respond to a request for comment.)
An altered photo, left, shows Orndorff when she was one of the country’s best teenage basketball players. Now 44, Orndorff says she still carries the trauma of abuse but is almost nine years sober and rebuilding her life.
Adams, who is a former Georgia gymnastics coach and gym owner, sat on the board during the Williams case. She said board members did not interview any witnesses because Orndorff had not provided a separate list of their names and phone numbers.
The hearing also did not consider an accusation of sexual abuse against Williams by a different player in 2005, the case records show. Rod Seaford, the board chair and the attorney running the hearing, had personally responded to the allegations in 2005, court records show. But Seaford did not mention them at the hearing, and Adams said Seaford had not told her they existed. (The girl who made the accusation declined to speak to police or the AAU at the time, records show, and that case did not proceed. Now an adult, she did not respond to an interview request from ProPublica and The Post.) Seaford declined multiple requests for comment.
By May 2018, within six months of learning of Orndorff’s allegations, the Board of Review cleared Williams of wrongdoing and reinstated him to his $84,000 position as an AAU officer. He was free to coach at Jam On It.
Internal records show that the board cited a lack of evidence and questioned Orndorff’s credibility because of an admitted history of drug use and what the board called “disturbing” discrepancies in her story. She had alternately claimed, for example, that Williams had “taken her virginity” at 15 but that they had first had sex when she was 16. In the hearing, Orndorff tried to explain that she had been referring to Williams digitally penetrating her when she was 15.
Adams spent more than two decades on the Board of Review before leaving in 2024. She was never aware, she said, of any written rules used to decide whether a coach should be allowed to return to working with children.
“I think we just decided on our feelings,” Adams said of the board’s process.
She told ProPublica and The Post that the board had not considered sanctioning Williams for having a relationship with Orndorff because there was no regulation against having relationships with former players at the time. The AAU said in 2012 it had implemented that rule.
“It certainly would be [a violation] now,” Adams said. “And after, well — it was not a very pleasant — that was one of my unhappiest decisions.”
Orndorff said she still carries with her the trauma of Williams’ abuse. She left college during her freshman year as a result of the relationship with Williams, she said, eventually turning to drinking and drugs for much of her adult life. She is now 44 and says she has been sober since 2017.
But the AAU’s handling of the case when she was finally ready to step forward has made it much more difficult for her to heal. “I tried so hard to get the truth out, and I don’t know why I couldn’t do it,” Orndorff said, her voice choked with emotion.
Jim Fox, a youth basketball executive who records indicate joined the AAU Board of Directors after the case was resolved, said he believed the “old boys’ network” of the AAU had worked to suppress Orndorff’s allegations to avoid “embarrassment.” Fox tried to convince the board again to ban Williams in 2022, internal AAU records revealed in the court case show, citing new evidence in Orndorff’s civil suit, but it refused to even consider the case.
“Anybody could look at it and see that it was true,” Fox, a former probation officer, said of Orndorff’s allegations. “People tried to cover it up.”
Goudy, the president, died in 2020. Fox told ProPublica and The Post that Williams was stripped of his membership shortly after a new president, Jo Mirza, was elected in October 2022. Mirza, who court records show also advocated to terminate Williams’ membership in 2022, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“Short, Fast, Easy and Quick”
Something did change inside the AAU in 2021: It started making money.
Since 2015, the nonprofit had been spending more than the $20 million it took in annually, losing money each year.
But that year, the AAU’s revenue jumped to $24 million, and two years later, the number had grown to $34 million. In 2024, the most recent year the AAU’s nonprofit tax returns are public, the organization brought in nearly $44 million. It reported cash and investment reserves of around $30 million — triple what it held in 2019.
The organization’s momentum wasn’t in basketball. It was everywhere else. In boys’ volleyball, the AAU had become the dominant force, and in sports like martial arts, gymnastics and flag football, it was staking out a growing presence. The expansion meant that the AAU was increasingly competing with national sports governing bodies overseen by SafeSport.
In swimming, some large clubs joined the AAU, where they could register less serious swimmers for $20 apiece instead of the more than $70 cost of USA Swimming. In 2023, USA Swimming’s registrations fell by almost 5%.
AAU meets are “short, fast, easy and quick,” said Chris Davis, whose juggernaut Georgia swimming club, SwimAtlanta, has moved hundreds of kids to the AAU. “I could theoretically have a senior in high school run the meet. I don’t have to have an official.” Davis said he opts to use officials, and all of his coaches take SafeSport training because they are also members of USA Swimming.
The AAU’s cheaper fees weren’t the only selling point. On one swimming website’s list of reasons for clubs to switch to the “easier” AAU, the top of the list was a lack of “mandatory training hoops.”
By 2023, five years after the SafeSport Act’s passage, the AAU was publicly acknowledging that the law required all organizations to offer some form of child sex abuse prevention training, even if it isn’t created by SafeSport. Its new youth protection handbook cited the law — and said that the AAU’s mandatory course, offered through the Positive Coaching Alliance, now included “child abuse prevention training.”
Jason Sacks, the CEO of the Positive Coaching Alliance, told ProPublica and The Post in a statement that the material “was not an official training by any stretch.” It constituted “a few slides with resources.”
The links to those resources from AAU’s website are currently broken.
As an organization, Sacks said, PCA’s focus is not sexual abuse prevention but youth sports culture, with trainings that emphasize positivity and character development. He noted its courses can play a role in preventing emotional and physical abuse by discouraging coaches from mistreating athletes. But Sacks said they “are not currently built to satisfy the Safe Sport Act requirements.”
Though some 20,000 AAU coaches took the PCA course in its earliest days, Sacks’ statement said, those numbers have declined steadily in the decade since. In 2024, AAU reported more than 100,000 adult volunteers.
On Nov. 10, 2025, ProPublica and The Post reached out to the AAU with questions about whether the organization offered sexual abuse prevention training and if the PCA course was mandatory for all coaches.
Eight days later, the AAU approached PCA, Sacks said in his statement. Officials had two requests: “They wanted to incorporate more abuse prevention material in the PCA online coach course training, and make it mandatory for all coaches.”
Aleesa Bravata
“SafeSport Does Not Apply”
SafeSport’s public disciplinary list quickly became a central part of the sports landscape. By 2025, there were more than 2,500 coaches on the list — some temporarily suspended during investigations and hundreds more banned permanently from any sport that fell under the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
Though they were not required to do so by law, many independent organizations, including Pop Warner and Little League, implemented rules to keep coaches on the list out of their programs, too. In 2012, the AAU had said it would bar anyone “banned by other youth-serving organizations.” But it never adopted the rule, according to a review of its written policies.
Instead, ProPublica and The Post found, the organization has become known as a refuge for coaches who are suspended or banned by SafeSport and national governing bodies.
“The AAU has absolutely developed a reputation that they are the place to go if you are banned from our world,” said the president of one national governing body, who asked not to be named because he still works with the AAU.
The issue has been raised repeatedly to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, top governing body officials, attorneys and former SafeSport executives told The Post.
ProPublica and The Post identified eight people who coached AAU-affiliated teams within the last five years despite being banned by SafeSport or national governing bodies. The AAU’s director of compliance, Aaron Oandasan, would not verify if any of them were registered with the AAU, but ProPublica and The Post confirmed they were coaching teams registered with the organization through interviews with parents, administrators or the coaches themselves, as well as online records and social media posts.
Among them were three elite gymnastics coaches who had been suspended by either USA Gymnastics or SafeSport over emotional and physical abuse allegations in the wake of the Nassar revelations but continued working with AAU athletes. Another was a fencing club owner who started advertising his gym as affiliated with AAU while SafeSport investigated allegations of sexual misconduct against him that it eventually substantiated. And a Georgia basketball coach who was suspended for three years by SafeSport over allegations that were not publicly disclosed even took his team of boys to AAU nationals.
Last year, a regional governing body official said he reached out to the AAU to warn it about a local volleyball club owner who had told parents he planned to join the AAU to evade a SafeSport suspension for alleged sexual misconduct.
The AAU’s response to the official was curt, the official told ProPublica and The Post: “SafeSport does not apply.”
Adams, the former review board member, said that the AAU does not check the SafeSport list unless it receives a report about a coach. The AAU then conducts its own investigation, she said, because it does not trust SafeSport. That is because SafeSport is prohibited from sharing confidential details of cases, she said, but also out of concern that the center punishes coaches for frivolous reasons.
“At times, SafeSport hasn’t liked the way somebody dressed or they drank in college,” she said, without providing examples. SafeSport’s vice president, Hilary Nemchik, called Adams’ characterization “not accurate” and “concerning.”
“SafeSport’s cases are proven through evidence, and our process allows for appeals by the accused,” Nemchik said.
Adams said the AAU board does sometimes ban coaches who have been barred by SafeSport.
She recalled one case in which the board ruled that a coach banned by SafeSport should be allowed to continue working with the AAU. That coach was later seen acting inappropriately with an AAU athlete, Adams said, and the AAU banned him at that time. She declined to name the coach, and because the AAU does not make a public list of banned members, the claim is not verifiable.
One of the coaches who was still working with children under AAU following a SafeSport suspensionwas Elias Perez in Southern California.
Aleesa Bravata told SafeSport last year that Perez, her former volleyball coach, had groomed and inappropriately touched her while she was in high school.
But a few weeks after his name appeared on SafeSport’s disciplinary list, temporarily suspending him, Bravata saw Perez’s truck in the parking lot of the local volleyball gym. Perez was still coaching.
Bravata had met Perez when he began coaching the girls’ volleyball team at her high school in Huntington Beach, California. He was 33; she was 16, a junior. As her senior season began, she said, Perez began to isolate her from her teammates and text her with increasing frequency about things other than volleyball, including making comments about her appearance.
ProPublica and The Post reviewed interviews and records that were part of SafeSport’s investigation, including text messages between Bravata and Perez, and corroborated parts of her story with a former coach in whom Bravata confided while she was still in high school.
In September 2024, around the time Bravata turned 18, Bravata said Perez asked her for a ride home from training because his car was broken down. Parked outside Perez’s apartment, Bravata said her coach told her, “You know how I feel about you.”
She asked him what he meant. Bravata said she remembers his reply word-for-word: “I’m going to put this in a way you understand. I have a crush on you, I like you, I want to hold your hand and take you on dates.”
“I froze,” Bravata told ProPublica and The Post. “It scared me.”
An altered photo, left, shows Bravata when she played volleyball in high school. Now 19, she is a sophomore in college.
Perez went inside, Bravata said, but a few days later, he asked her to come to his apartment to drop off a set of keys to the high school gym. Parked outside his apartment, Bravata recalled that she sat in the passenger seat of her truck and, with the door open, Perez came to stand close to her, his body between her legs.
Bravata told Perez that she didn’t want to have sex, she said, and Perez said he would never do anything that made her uncomfortable.Then, she said, Perez began to touch her, rubbing his fingers under her bra strap and touching the waistband of her pajama pants.
Perez tried to kiss her, Bravata said, and Bravata turned her head. He then took her wrist, she said, and pressed her hand against his clothed penis, which was erect under his loose pants. When he let go, Bravata said, her hand dropped loosely into her lap.
Bravata got out of the passenger seat to return to the driver’s side, she said, and Perez asked her, “Hey, if anyone asks, Eli accidentally touched your ass, right?”
With the volleyball season over, Bravata and Perez stopped spending time together. Later in her senior year, her confused feelings turned to something else: “It took me till the end of the school year to realize that he had been grooming me, basically brainwashing me,” she said.
Bravata confided in a former coach, SafeSport records show, who escalated the issue to school administration and the school resource officer. By then, Perez had left the high school. Bravata said Huntington Beach police told her that because it was possible the incidents had occurred when she was no longer a minor, the district attorney was unlikely to prosecute. (The police declined to release any records to ProPublica and The Post because the case is still open.)
In August 2025, when Bravata learned Perez was coaching a team of 14- to 15-year-old girls at Balboa Bay, a prestigious local volleyball club, she called SafeSport’s reporting hotline.
Within weeks, SafeSport issued a temporary suspension against Perez while it finished its investigation — a measure it typically takes only in limited cases where allegations are serious and recent.
Perez did not respond to requests for comment. But in an interview with a SafeSport investigator, a transcript of which was reviewed by ProPublica and The Post, he denied any inappropriate contact with Bravata, saying that they had rarely texted and had not been close.
Balboa Bay was a member of two organizations: USA Volleyball, which is legally bound by SafeSport, and the AAU, which is not. So while Balboa Bay eventually stopped Perez from coaching girls on its USA Volleyball teams, it allowed him to continue coaching teenage boys on its AAU-affiliated teams for several months.
The club director, Travis Turner, said he initially decided to keep Perez because AAU rules did not forbid it and the alleged misconduct had not taken place at Balboa Bay. After ProPublica and The Post reached out to him in November, Turner said, he decided to fire Perez. He said he had not initially understood the severity of SafeSport suspensions.
This April, SafeSport issued a permanent ban against Perez for sexual misconduct and an intimate relationship “involving a power imbalance,” its online database shows.
But Bravata said she fears that there is nothing to prevent Perez from finding another AAU club — and another chance to coach children.
Sen. Susan Collins was one of three Republican senators who voted against passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, and she cited the legislation’s many changes to Medicaid as the main reason. But an ad from a Democratic outside group falsely claims she “voted to support Donald Trump on the largest Medicaid cut in history.”
Democrats have criticized Collins, who is running for reelection in Maine, for her earlier procedural vote on a motion to advance the OBBBA to the Senate floor for consideration. But the ad ignores the fact that she ultimately voted against the bill instead of supporting it.
The nearly 30-second ad is sponsored by a group called Affordable Maine, which, as of Aug. 12, had spent more than $473,000 to air the TV and digital ad, according to AdImpact.
Collins is facing Democrat Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president, in the toss-up race.
The ad features an intensive care unit nurse who says she has “seen patients being bankrupted by the cost of care.” She then says, “This didn’t just happen. Susan Collins voted to support Donald Trump on the largest Medicaid cut in history.” At the end, the nurse says, “Healthcare is getting even more expensive. People are losing coverage, labor and delivery centers are closing, hospitals are closing. We need to tell Susan Collins to stop siding with Donald Trump. We can’t afford it.”
We reached out to Affordable Maine about its ad, but we have not yet received a response. (Update, Aug. 18: We received a response after publication and have included it at the end of this story.)
The ad only cites a May 21, 2025, post from Partners in Health that said the OBBBA included the “Largest Medicaid Cut in U.S. History.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office later estimated that the law — which makes several changes to the Medicaid program, including eligibility requirements — will reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade. The Medicaid provisions in the law will increase the number of uninsured people by 7.5 million, CBO also estimated.
But, as we said, Collins didn’t “support” the legislation, as the ad claims.
On July 1, 2025, when the Senate voted on whether to pass the bill, Collins joined the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus and Republican Sens. Thom Tillis and Rand Paul in voting against the OBBBA.
In a statement issued that day, Collins said while she “strongly” supported the legislation’s extension of tax relief for families and small businesses, her vote opposing it was “primarily” because of the impact the legislation would have on Medicaid.
“The Medicaid program has been an important health care safety net for nearly 60 years that has helped people in difficult financial circumstances, including people with disabilities, children, seniors, and low-income families. Approximately 400,000 Mainers – nearly a third of the state’s population – depend on this program,” her statement said. “Certainly, there are improvements that should be made to the Medicaid system. For example, I support work requirements for able-bodied adults who are not raising young children, who are not caregivers, or attending school. However, a dramatic reduction in future Medicaid funding, an estimated $5.9 billion in Maine over the next 10 years, could threaten not only Mainers’ access to health care, but also the very existence of several of our state’s rural hospitals.”
“While I continue to support the tax relief I voted for in 2017, I could not support these Medicaid changes and other issues,” which included the elimination of certain energy-saving incentives and tax credits for businesses and individuals, she said.
In the end, the reconciliation bill — which only required majority support to advance — passed when Vice President JD Vance, as president of the Senate, cast the “yea” vote that broke the 50-50 tie. Then, after the House of Representatives passed the amended Senate version of the bill, President Donald Trump signed it into law on July 4.
Collins’ Procedural Vote
On June 28, a few days before that vote, Collins did join 50 other Republican senators in voting to proceed with debate on the OBBBA. That debate ended with the vote on passage.
Collins later told Maine Public that she voted in favor of the motion to move forward on consideration of the bill because “the majority leader, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican, always has the right to determine which bills come to the floor, except under very few circumstances.” And she had also told reporters that her vote on passage would “depend on whether the bill is substantially changed.”
The Maine Democratic Party has criticized Collins for her procedural vote, which it called “a decisive vote to greenlight Medicaid cuts.” But while Collins could have voted not to advance the bill, that likely would not have stopped the OBBBA in its tracks.
Without Collins, the vote on the motion would have been 50-50. The vice president was present and prepared to make the tie-breaking vote to move the bill forward anyway.
Update, Aug. 18: On Aug. 18, Phoebe Kilgour, a spokesperson for Affordable Maine, provided the following statement to us in defense of the ad: “The largest Medicaid cuts in American history would not have passed without the vote Susan Collins took to advance the bill. Collins was a ‘pivotal’ and ‘key’ vote in advancing Trump-backed legislation to strip health care from people across Maine. Collins is intentionally misleading Mainers about her record. The fact is, she voted to advance a bill that included massive cuts to health care knowing that it would ultimately pass. Collins had the chance to stop this bill from becoming law and chose not to.”
Kilgour’s statement linked to news articles that said Collins “cast a pivotal vote to begin debating the bill” and was “a key vote in advancing the bill” for consideration. As we noted in our article, a “no” vote from Collins would have made the vote on the motion to advance the OBBBA 50-50. Vice President Vance would have then been able to vote “yea,” breaking the tie and advancing the bill.
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The Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition will hold its 17th annual Monster Mile Walk for a Cause & 5K from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11, turning one of Delaware’s best-known sports venues into a gathering place for breast cancer survivors, families, supporters and runners from across the state.
Oct. 11 event adds a distinctly Delaware experience to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, giving families and survivors the chance to walk or race on the famed Dover Motor Speedway track
DOVER, Del. — Breast Cancer Awareness Month is recognized across the country each October, from community walks and fundraising campaigns to highly visible displays of pink throughout professional sports.
This year, Delaware will add an experience with a distinctly First State twist: the chance to walk or run on the Monster Mile at Dover Motor Speedway.
The Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition will hold its 17th annual Monster Mile Walk for a Cause & 5K from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11, turning one of Delaware’s best-known sports venues into a gathering place for breast cancer survivors, families, supporters and runners from across the state.
The event comes during a month when breast cancer awareness receives national attention, including throughout the sports world. The NFL and its teams have long used the October football season to highlight cancer awareness, screening and early detection, helping make the month one of the most recognizable health-awareness campaigns in the country.
Against that national backdrop, the Monster Mile event gives Delawareans their own unusual way to participate — by stepping directly onto the same concrete oval where some of the biggest names in auto racing have competed.
From Race Cars to Runners
Instead of watching race cars circle the one-mile track, participants will take to the racing surface themselves.
The traditional one-mile walk returns this year, while DBCC is adding a timed 5K for the first time, opening the event to more serious runners as well as families and casual walkers.
“The Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition is delighted to bring the 2026 Monster Mile Walk for a Cause & 5K back to the iconic Dover Motor Speedway, where our community will unite to honor, remember and support those impacted by breast cancer,” DBCC CEO Francesca Vogel said.
“Whether you choose to participate in our traditional 1-mile walk or take on our new timed 5K race, every step you take helps fuel DBCC’s life-saving mission,” she said.
For families, the event offers an opportunity to participate in one of October’s signature causes while experiencing a Delaware landmark from a perspective normally unavailable to race fans.
A Community Celebration
The day will extend beyond the walk and race, with music, face painting, food vendors, family activities and local vendor booths planned around the speedway.
Participants are encouraged to form teams, raise money and bring some personality to the track.
Awards will recognize the highest team fundraiser, highest individual fundraiser, best team costume and best dog costume. Special Monster Mile medals also will be presented.
DBCC also is seeking businesses, corporations and community organizations to sponsor the event. Sponsorship packages include event visibility, participant registrations and opportunities for company branding on event shirts and signage.
Every Step Supports Delaware Programs
Money raised through the Monster Mile directly supports DBCC programs throughout Delaware, including breast health education, access to screenings, personalized patient navigation, survivorship services and emergency financial assistance for people and families facing a breast cancer diagnosis.
The coalition also works to reduce financial, cultural and other barriers that can prevent Delawareans from receiving screenings and treatment.
Headquartered in Wilmington with offices serving Kent and Sussex counties, DBCC provides breast health education and support programs throughout the state.
Its programs include community health fairs, breast health presentations and a Peer Mentor Program that helps connect patients and survivors with support and resources.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month brings the issue to national attention every October. On Oct. 11, Delawareans will have the opportunity to make that observance local — and do it on one of the most recognizable tracks in American auto racing.
To Go
What: 17th Annual Monster Mile Walk for a Cause & 5K
When: Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Where: Dover Motor Speedway, Dover
Why it’s different: Participants get to walk or run on the famed Monster Mile racing surface as part of Delaware’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month activities.
What to expect: One-mile walk, new timed 5K, music, food vendors, family activities, face painting and community vendors.
Who benefits: Proceeds support Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition screening, education, patient navigation, survivorship and emergency assistance programs.
Register, form a team or become a sponsor: give.debreastcancer.org/ge/monstermile2026
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A picture of the Monster Monument outside of Dover Motor Speedway. Photo Courtesy of Dave Reeder.
Dover Motor Speedway announced that it will hold its 109th NASCAR Cup Series event on May 16, 2027, as well as host the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race on May 15.
Dover Motor Speedway announced that The Monster Mile will hold a 400-mile points race on Sunday, May 16, 2027, as a part of NASCAR’s 2027 regular season, according to a news release on the Dover Motor Speedway website.
Dover returns to being a points race after hosting NASCAR All-Star Race Weekend this past season. Denny Hamlin won the 2026 NASCAR All-Star race during Dover Motor Speedway’s first All-Star Race weekend, but said after that he’d rather have the venue host a points race.
“There’s no other track like this on our schedule, and it is so unique, and it requires such a unique style of driving, far different than any oval that we go to, that it just can’t lose tracks like this in our points schedule,” Hamlin said after winning the 2026 NASCAR All-Star race. “I just think it’s too valuable, and the fans really, really are passionate here.”
Hamlin will get to compete for his fourth consecutive win at The Monster Mile in a points race next May. No driver has ever won four consecutive races at Dover Motor Speedway, according to the release.
The 2027 race weekend will also feature the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series BetRivers 200 on Saturday, May 15, and the return of Dover Motor Speedway’s fan zone.
(To see pictures of the Fan Zone during last year’s All-Star weekend click here)
“Whether it’s a points race, an All-Star Race or a Chase race, one thing never changes—we work for the fans,” said president and general manager of Dover Motor Speedway, Mike Tatoian, via the news release. “They are the heart of everything we do, and we’re constantly looking for ways to make every visit to The Monster Mile more entertaining than the last. Our goal is to create memories that last a lifetime, and we can’t wait to welcome everyone back next spring for another outstanding weekend on and off the track.”
The start time for the races have not been announced yet. The NASCAR Cup Series race will be televised on FOX Sports and the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series will be televised on The CW, according to an article on NASCAR’s website.
To learn more about acquiring tickets check out Dover Motor Speedway’s website here.
The Christina School Board on Tuesday approved a plan to phase out school resource officers in the district’s middle schools and replace them with constables.
Errors
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On Aug. 13, 2026, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) spoke at the National Association of Black Journalists conference about the various changes he felt were needed at the Court. Jeffries was upset with the Court’s April 2026 decision in 
A century-old youth organization is attracting new interest as Delaware families seek outdoor adventure, leadership, service and more face-to-face experiences for their children.
Instead of watching race cars circle the one-mile track, participants will take to the racing surface themselves.
