Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will operate under the Skydance name once their roughly $110 billion merger closes, which is expected on October 6. The combined company will bring together Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, MTV and other networks, along with major franchises including The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, DC and Yellowstone.
Ellison said the Paramount and Warner Bros. brands will remain prominent. "We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one. Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. -- and all our extraordinary brands -- to remain in the spotlight."
The men were arrested on 20 September, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar
Two Iranian men have been charged in relation to an alleged terror plot targeting Manchester’s Jewish community.
Rahman Salehi, 35, and Salam Ahmadyan, 36, have been charged with preparing to commit an act of terrorism or assisting another to commit an act of terrorism.
And as we bring you the latest on how the jobs report stands to impact voter sentiment ahead of the November midterms, my colleagues have done all the hard work in mapping out the battle for Congress and the key states, candidates and districts that will ultimately decide the balance of power on Capitol Hill.
Many indicators of voter sentiment suggest the Democrats are favored to take back control of the House of Representatives, and potentially the Senate. Winning either would be a significant victory for the party and give it the power to block Trump’s legislative agenda and more aggressively investigate his administration.
Dr. Dan Theodorescu is Nancy C. and Craig M. Berge Chair and Director of the University of Arizona Cancer Center. (University Arizona Cancer Center via SWNS)
Senate Leadership Fund is redirecting ad spending from Michael Whatley’s campaign to support other candidates
A major Republican political action committee pulled the plug on financial support for its Senate candidate in North Carolina, Michael Whatley, according to multiple reports, as the party begins to triage resources amid increasingly dire midterm polling.
The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the campaign arm of the Senate majority leader, John Thune, has withdrawn its ad spending in North Carolina to redirect support to other candidates, Semafor reported on Friday. The New York Times, CNN and other publications have confirmed the report with sources close to the fund.
Ceremony will not be hosted at its traditional home for the first time since awards began in 1978
The Kennedy Center Honors will take place away from its traditional home this year for the first time in its history as the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts remains in jeopardy amid Donald Trump’s ongoing battle to have it named after himself.
The Capital One Arena in Washington DC is now set to host the ceremony on 7 December, a Kennedy Center spokespersonsaid. The list of honorees this year has not yet been announced.
University denies allegations, saying it is committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all laws
The Department of Justice said on Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles illegally considered race in admissions.
The announcement follows a similar accusation against the university’s medical school and comes as the Trump administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students.
Joshua Kerry, 28, of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, charged with one count of preparation of terrorist acts, say police
The man accused of murdering Ann Widdecombe has been charged with engaging in conduct in preparation of acts of terrorism including against Nigel Farage, police have said.
Joshua Kerry, 28, of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, was charged by the Crown Prosecution Service on Friday with one count of preparation of terrorist acts. The charge relates to activity alleged to have taken place between 31 May 2024 and 8 July this year, counter-terrorism police said.
Attorneys say hospital staff are working to clear pentobarbital she was administered from her system
Christa Pike remained hospitalized, unconscious and on a machine helping her breathe after her failed execution in Tennessee, her attorneys said in a court filing Friday.
The attorneys said hospital staff were working to save Pike’s life and clear the pentobarbital she was administered from her system as of late Thursday.
Buckingham Palace say the king will not ‘shy away’ from Britain’s role in slavery when he visits Commonwealth nations later this month
King Charles III will acknowledge the “darkest days” of colonial rule and slavery while touring Caribbean countries on a visit beginning this month, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson said on Friday.
The king will first visit the Bahamas and Guyana alone, followed by a trip to Antigua and Barbuda with Queen Camilla, where Charles will give a speech at a meeting of Commonwealth heads of government, the palace said.
AmiMoJo shares a report from heise online: Anyone buying used hardware for a gaming PC needs to be careful: not just whether the components are still in order but also what the previous owner did with them. A case on Reddit shows this. Someone installed a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, in their PC. Because the previous owner was caught cheating, the new owner cannot start several online games.
The problem was noticed in the first-person shooter "Valorant" from the development studio Riot. Right from the first start, the new owner was kicked out directly, according to their statement. Riot support confirmed that the previous owner had cheated. The processor is therefore on an internal blacklist -- and, with its installation in the PC, now apparently also some other components like the mainboard. Riot support does not remove such entries manually.
In addition to "Valorant," all other PC games from Riot are affected: the strategy game "League of Legends," the auto-battler "Teamfight Tactics," the card game "Legends of Runeterra," the fighting game "2XKO," and likely future titles as well. Riot's "Vanguard" anti-cheat system traditionally runs deep in the Windows kernel and starts with the PC, but a June 2026 update allows it to launch with a game if security features such as TPM and Secure Boot are enabled.
It's unclear how Riot uniquely identifies processors, though possibilities include hardware fingerprinting based on chip behavior or storing identification hashes in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which Vanguard accesses in the newer mode.
Leaders agree a coordinated drawdown after surge in prices and Donald Trump’s threat to cut off US supplies
Leaders of G7 nations are to release up to 100m barrels of their emergency diesel and crude oil stockpiles after Donald Trump threatened to cut off supplies of US diesel.
The French President, Emmanuel Macron, said ministers from some of world’s largest economies had agreed to release stocks from their strategic oil reserves after crisis talks on Friday.
CARLA, the Latin American High Performance Computing Conference, came to Córdoba, Argentina, for the first time this year. Between September 21 through 25, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC) hosted the exciting event on its beautiful campus.
While there, I saw a consistent focus on one point – how can the region get more out of the machines it already runs?
A Second Life for Helvetios
On the first official day of the conference, UNC formally inaugurated Helvetios. This is a CPU-only cluster donated by EPFL in Switzerland. According to EPFL, the system has 288 compute nodes, each with two 18-core Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processors, 10,368 cores, 54TB of RAM, and 763 teraflops of peak performance.
EPFL made the decision to retire it in favor of newer infrastructure, but judged the machine still had real scientific value. Instead of recycling it, EPFL shipped nearly four Metric tonnes of equipment by sea in eight boxes, with the UNC rectorate paying for the shipping.
CARLA 2026 took place September 21–25, 2026, in Córdoba, Argentina (Image courtesy Kevin Jackson)
Helvetios is set to triple UNC’s current computing capacity. Antonio Russo, who leads computing platforms at EPFL, helped to arrange the deal while Dante Paz, an astronomy researcher at UNC, oversaw the transport. UNC Rector Jhon Boretto and Swiss Ambassador Andrea Semandeni joined Russo for the launch. Russo said the project started with a conversation, and his message to the room was never to abandon conversations.
“Keep talking,” he said, “because conversations are where ideas come from, and ideas become projects.”
Nicolás Wolovick, who directs UNC’s HPC center and served as CARLA 2026 general chair, framed the stakes in EPFL’s announcement.
“Without new hardware, technical staff lose interest, scientists stop running computations, and a downward spiral begins,” he said. “I’ve seen this story play out dozens of times across Latin America.”
At the ceremony, Boretto tied the donation to what he called a very serious funding crisis in Argentina’s science system, and said cooperation agreements like this one let UNC keep growing its supercomputing capacity when the investments it would like to make aren’t possible. Adding to this, Wolovick made the case for why it matters.
“A computer is basically a universal machine,” he said. “From an open platform at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, we are giving teraflops and terabytes of storage to whoever needs them in Argentina and in Latin America.”
The Machine You Have
Florina Ciorba, an associate professor at the University of Basel, titled her keynote talk “The Machine You Have: What Performance Alone Cannot Tell Us.” She argued that the old answer to “can we go faster?” was to add hardware, and that the answer is not longer sufficient.
Much of her evidence came from SPH-EXA, the astrophysics simulation framework that her group builds with collaborators at the University of Zurich. Domain decomposition eats roughly 10 to 20 percent of every time step. Her team tried decomposing less often, and the program abstract puts the wall-clock savings around 23%.
On one test case the result drifted visibly away from the analytical solution.
“We’re computing the wrong result faster,” Ciorba said. “That is what performance alone doesn’t tell us.”
On sustainability, a subject Ciorba seems extremely passionate about, she argued that allocation quotas reward users for burning hours rather than saving joules. She urged centers to ask vendors for energy to solution in procurement benchmarks, not just time to solution.
Tying her talk back to Argentina, Ciorba discussed her tour of Helvetios two days prior.
Florina Ciorba, an associate professor at the University of Basel, during her talk at CARLA (Image courtesy Kevin Jackson)
“A machine that is no longer suitable for Switzerland is absolutely suitable for another university, and this is the case for Helvetios,” she said. “I hope this is not the last.”
Agriculture’s Missing Data Layer with AgroHPC
Tuesday’s AgroHPC workshop, the first International Workshop on Agriculture Empowered by Supercomputing, brought to Latin America a series that Nicolás Erdödy of Open Parallel has run at SC, ISC, and SCAsia.
Erdödy and Juan Manuel Baruffaldi co-chaired, and the lineup put Argentine agtech next to research computing. DK Panda of Ohio State opened with the NSF ICICLE AI institute’s tools for digital agriculture. Juan Ignacio Cornet of Rosario-based DeepAgro described a retrofit spot-spraying system that runs on more than 100 machines across Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and the U.S., has covered more than a million hectares, and averages about 70% herbicide savings.
Fernando Scaramuzza, a precision agriculture researcher at INTA for two decades, described a problem specific to the Argentine production model. In one season a farmer may use different contractors for planting, spraying, and harvest. This happens on machines from different manufacturers, leaving records that don’t line up.
He proposed an offline-first, edge-to-HPC architecture that keeps the field history intact and independent of any single vendor. Erdödy walked through failure modes for Listen to the Land, a nationwide sensor and analytics platform designed for New Zealand. Mary-Francis LaPorte of the University of Arizona covered HPC in plant breeding, including cases from Latin America.
My own talk, on who owns agriculture’s data layer, argued that compute isn’t the constraint. Intersect360 Research’s market model has 16 industry verticals, and agriculture isn’t one of them, so the sector falls outside vendor roadmaps and funding lines. The technology arrived anyway.
A camera-equipped sprayer is effectively an edge inference cluster, and Iowa State’s independent trials measured herbicide savings above John Deere’s own published figure. The region already owns the expensive layers, in machines like Argentina’s Clementina XXI and Brazil’s Santos Dumont. What’s missing is control of the data. The talk’s recommendation was to put that data layer under agricultural cooperatives, not vendors or ministries, running on public compute, with data portability as a condition of sale.
Nicolás Wolovick, Full Professor at Universidad Nacional de Cordoba and CARLA 2026 chair (Image courtesy Kevin Jackson)
Scaramuzza had made the same case for vendor-independent records from the field side earlier that morning.
Capacity Isn’t the Constraint
Wednesday’s session on energy, cooling, and the effective use of HPC and AI in Latin America and the Caribbean paired regional evidence with a global view. Esteban Hernández of SCALAC presented “Indicadores de Uso HPC LAC 2025,” SCALAC’s survey of how the region’s centers use their systems.
While Wolovick joined the session representing UNC, I brough Intersect360 Research’s global survey and market data.
The argument was that power and cooling explain what hardware a center can buy, but not why an installed machine sits underused. A point I harped on quite often was that Intersect360 Research’s data puts Latin America and the Caribbean in common company with the rest of the world’s computing issues. Based on our figures, hyperscale AI infrastructure spending was about four times all enterprise AI including HPC-AI, so measured against hyperscale capital, every single research center in the world looks small. What’s more, everyone is struggling with cooling and energy requirements.
Sovereignty Above the Silicon
Friday’s HPC and AI sovereignty panel, moderated by Hernández, stayed on the same track. Leandro Neumann Ciuffo of Brazil’s RNP described how rising memory prices and geopolitical pressure pushed Brazil’s AI plan toward several technology routes rather than one supplier. “We should not put all our eggs in the same basket,” he said.
I could just change the word Brazil for Mexico and it would sound almost like the same story,” said Isidoro Gitler of Mexico’s ABACUS-Cinvestav laboratory. He described new public infrastructure paired with upgrades at distributed research centers and large-scale training.
(Image courtesy Kevin Jackson)
Nayat Sánchez-Pi of Inria Chile warned against a “silicon obsession.” She argued that sovereignty covers the whole stack, including data, models, governance and people. On regulation, she said adapting the EU AI Act “is not a copy paste exercise,” because the region lacks Europe’s regulators and formal labor markets.
Rodrigo Durán of Chile’s CENIA was blunt about scale. “We can’t compete with Anthropic,” he said. “But what we can do is contribute to have better AI for people.” For him, the region’s edge is data, starting with the Spanish and Portuguese corpus that dozens of institutions built for a regional model. “We don’t want HPC for AI,” he said. “We want HPC for healthcare.”
On regional cooperation, Gitler pointed to 15 years of SCALAC history. “In good moments, they get strengthened and then maybe they become thin, but they don’t disappear,” he said of those ties. Neumann Ciuffo agreed. “We cannot live in an island,” he said. Hernández closed by urging the region to move past what he called “reggaeton AI,” where AI is a word dropped into every phrase.
Across five days in Córdoba, the region’s HPC community kept circling back to the same argument. For Latin America and the Carribean, the next gains won’t come from waiting on bigger machines, but from getting more out of the systems, data, and people already in place. That’s a harder case to make to funders than a new flagship, but it’s the more realistic one for most of the region.
CARLA 2027 heads to Bogotá, Colombia, and I’m sure the question will travel with it.
About the author: Kevin Jackson is an analyst at Intersect 360 Research, a market intelligence, research, and consulting advisory practice focused on HPC data center trends, AI, cloud, big data, and hyperscale. He is the former editor of AIwire.
Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor, saying she had lost faith in a county district attorney’s ability to oversee the case.
Greg Lui allegedly used false paperwork to smuggle export-controlled gear from US to third countries and then China
US authorities have arrested a man accused of smuggling more than $300m worth of computer servers to China, the Department of Justice announced.
Greg Lui, 38, of California, also known as “Yiu Kong Lui”, allegedly used false paperwork and shipments through third countries to smuggle the export-controlled computer servers to China, the justice department said in a statement on Thursday.
A decade after his infamous Access Hollywood tape, the gender divide is again shaping a pivotal midterm election
A decade ago, Donald Trump’s improbable presidential campaign was rocked – and nearly derailed – by the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, a 2005 recording in which the real estate developer turned reality TV star boasted about kissing and grabbing women without their consent.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said, a remark he later downplayed as “locker-room talk” before musing that the tape might be fake. (It wasn’t.)
NFL announces violation of personal conduct policy
York pleaded no contest after arrest at Ohio trailer park
The NFL suspended San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York for six games Friday after his arrest earlier this year in a prostitution sting in Ohio.
The league announced that York also was fined $500,000 for violating the league’s personal conduct policy. York has not attended any games or league meetings so far this season and was credited with three games served. He is eligible to return on 20 October, following the team’s game the previous night against Washington.
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority are now considering setting trained falcons on the urban birds
The mass transit authorities in the greater Boston region are clawing around for ways to mitigate the excessive local pigeon population – or more graphically, pigeon poo all over stations – and have swooped on the possibility of setting trained falcons on them.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), the public system commonly known as “the T”, issued a “request for information” (RFI) last month from falconry experts on the potential use of birds of prey, such as falcons, to control the crowds of urban birds widely considered a public nuisance.
The European Commission has rolled out Element Pro as a self-hosted "sovereign back-up" to Microsoft Teams and the reviews aren't great. Politico reported that several officials questioned its usefulness and usability, with one calling it "absolute shit." Politico reports: "I don't understand the added value here," one official wrote on an internal staff message board, seen by POLITICO. Another described the tool as "absolute shit." A third official said that, judging matters on how well Element Pro works compared to Teams, the U.S. would "instantly win the war" if it ever decided to switch off its technology. All the officials were granted anonymity to speak freely.
The Commission hosts the Element system on its own infrastructure rather than relying on Microsoft's cloud. That gives the institution greater control over its communications data and systems. "That is not the case with Teams, where all we have is a guarantee that Microslop will not peek inside," a fourth official wrote, presumably referring to Microsoft, in internal communications viewed by POLITICO.
Element is a U.K. company whose software is used by governments and public-sector organizations in Europe. The application works much like Teams, allowing staff to hold "audio and video calls with Commission colleagues, send and receive files, and create dedicated 'rooms' for projects and conversations, much like chats and channels in M365 Teams," according to the Commission memo. "Obviously there are going to be some teething issues," said Element CEO Matthew Hodgson, adding there will always be "cognitive dissonance" when switching to a new app, if only because the "buttons" are in a different place. He noted that the United Nations and NATO also use Element Pro.
"Change is always painful, particularly if it's a switch from a much-used program like Teams."
ARLINGTON, Va., Oct. 2, 2026 — JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has announced the release of JESD264: Silicon Photonics Qualification and Reliability Requirements, the first industry-wide standard designed to bring consistent qualification and reliability practices to silicon photonics devices. By establishing a common baseline for testing and manufacturing controls, the standard helps reduce deployment risk and supports broader adoption of silicon photonics in high-speed datacenter, telecommunications and AI networks. Download JESD264 from the JEDEC website.
Silicon photonics (SiPh) technology is transforming high-speed connectivity by integrating optical and electrical functions on a single chip. As the technology has moved from research environments into large-scale deployment across datacenter and telecommunications networks, the need for consistent reliability and qualification practices has grown. Unlike traditional CMOS technologies, silicon photonics has lacked a standardized, industry-wide framework for reliability ownership and validation, leading to uncertainty across the supply chain.
JESD264 addresses these challenges by offering a unified framework for qualification and reliability testing across the silicon photonics ecosystem. The standard will help manufacturers, integrators and end users reduce deployment risk while supporting the integration of complex photonic chipsets that include lasers, modulators, photodiodes and passive optical structures. It also establishes clearer reliability responsibilities among foundries, OSATs (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) and system developers, helping improve consistency throughout the silicon photonics ecosystem.
Key Features of JESD264:
Comprehensive reliability protocols for SiPh dies and integrated chipsets.
Guidelines for component-level qualification, including modulators, photodiodes, and waveguides.
Clear requirements for assembly processes and laser integration.
Manufacturing process control and traceability expectations.
Mian Quddus, Chairman of the JEDEC Board of Directors, said: “As AI, cloud computing and high-speed communications continue to drive demand for greater bandwidth and performance, industry standards become increasingly important. JESD264 helps establish the reliability foundation needed for broader silicon photonics adoption, accelerating innovation and strengthening alignment across the industry.”
About JEDEC
JEDEC is the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry. Thousands of volunteers representing nearly 400 member companies work together with more than 100 JEDEC technical committees and task groups to meet the needs of every segment of the industry, manufacturers and consumers alike. The publications and standards generated by JEDEC committees are accepted throughout the world. All JEDEC standards are available for download from the JEDEC website. For more information, visit www.jedec.org.
Amazon said it will invest $1 billion over five years to support job education, energy affordability and other priorities in communities where its data centers are located.
PARIS, Oct. 2, 2026 — Bull, a leader in advanced computing and AI, today opened its new production building in Angers, marking a major milestone in the complete reconstruction of its historic industrial site. The transformation, representing a total investment of €80 million, provides the company with a unique industrial facility in Europe capable of designing, integrating, assembling, testing and validating supercomputers, artificial intelligence infrastructures, enterprise servers and, in the future, quantum technologies.
Through this investment, Bull underscores its ambition to support the growth and infrastructure needs of sovereign computing and artificial intelligence.
An Investment Designed for the Decades Ahead
The inauguration of the new building marks a major milestone in a reconstruction and modernization project due for completion in 2028. Driven by a long-term industrial ambition, the project combines industrial excellence, competitiveness, environmental responsibility and an enhanced working environment.
Designed to address the evolution of next-generation digital infrastructures, the new site is based on Industry 5.0 concepts, enabling production areas to be reconfigured whenever necessary and allowing for greater automation, virtualization and the use of collaborative robots.
From an energy perspective, the new building incorporates more than 3,500 photovoltaic panels with a combined peak capacity of 1,500 kWp, power supplied from renewable energy sources, and a heat recovery system that captures waste heat produced by equipment that will ultimately provide enough energy to supply the equivalent of 600 households.
The project also aims to provide employees with facilities that foster collaboration and creativity in a more modern and attractive working environment.
The new site at a glance:
20,000 m² total surface area
10,700 m² dedicated to production
2x increase in production capacity
+30% productivity
-30% building maintenance costs
3,500 photovoltaic panels across 7,000 m², with a combined peak capacity of 1,500 kWp
Waste heat recovery target: 5 GWh/year injected into the district heating network
The overall redevelopment of the site is being carried out by Alter Cités, a local public development company serving the Anjou region and the Greater Angers metropolitan area. The project has benefited from €1.2 million in funding through the Ecological Transition Acceleration Fund for Local Authorities (known as the Green Fund), an additional €213,000 grant from ADEME through its Heat Fund, and €1.5 million in support from the Pays de la Loire Regional Council.
A Unique Factory in Europe at the Heart of Bull’s Transformation
As the only industrial site in Europe capable of assembling large-scale supercomputers, the Angers factory manufactures, integrates, tests and validates some of the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient digital infrastructures. The site has significantly contributed to major projects such as JUPITER, Europe’s first supercomputer capable of one quintillion calculations per second, as well as the three most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world according to the Green500 ranking.
Today, Bull brings unique expertise in supercomputers, enterprise servers and quantum technologies together within the site, while accelerating its capabilities in artificial intelligence. The Angers factory is set to play a central role in the development of future European AI infrastructures, combining the latest innovations of its 800 R&D engineers with an ecosystem of market-leading partners. In 2027, it will deliver Alice Recoque, the next European exascale supercomputer hosted in France, and LUMI-AI, the system at the heart of the LUMI AI Factory hosted in Finland.
An ‘Open Factory’ Program Serving European Reindustrialization
As part of the inauguration, Bull is launching its Open Factory program, designed to make its industrial capabilities available to companies developing strategic technologies in artificial intelligence, advanced computing and quantum technologies. The program pursues a dual objective: reshoring infrastructure manufacturing to Europe and helping technology players cross the industrialization threshold by moving from laboratory or R&D environments to large-scale production.
Building on its expertise in the design, integration and assembly of complex systems, Bull intends to support the development of future AI GigaFactories, neocloud providers and hybrid architectures combining high-performance computing and quantum technologies. The recently announced strategic partnership with Foxconn represents the first tangible outcome of this approach. The initiative aims to design and manufacture AI servers in Europe, based on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform, for AI Factories and cloud providers.
This first step further cements Bull’s Angers factory as a key industrial pillar of the European advanced computing and artificial intelligence ecosystem. Additional industrial partnerships enabling the industrialization of new AI and quantum technologies in Europe will be announced in early 2027 as part of the Open Factory program.
“Since opening in 1963, the Angers factory has been a key part of Bull’s history and major milestones,” said Bull CEO Emmanuel Le Roux. “Today, it embodies the company’s transformation: from a historic computing player to a leading industrial partner for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and sovereign digital infrastructures. This factory reflects our conviction that Europe must have the industrial capabilities required to produce tomorrow’s strategic digital infrastructures on its own territory. This new industrial facility will support the next generation of supercomputers, AI infrastructures and advanced computing technologies, helping nations and organisations strengthen their strategic autonomy.”
About Bull
Leveraging nearly a century of innovations, Bull is a global leader for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies with c.720m€ in revenue and 3,000 professionals operating in 32 countries. Built on an open, end-to-end and trusted approach, Bull designs, deploys and operates hardware, software and strategic services that unlock enterprise value, accelerate scientific research and advance society. Driven by world-class R&D, backed by 1,600 patents, manufacturing excellence and data sciences expertise, Bull enables nations and industries to fully control their AI and data and to drive progress for the benefit of the planet.
Oct. 2, 2026 — As artificial intelligence continues to advance rapidly, computing power has become an essential foundation for scientific research, technological innovation, and industrial development. The National Center for High-performance Computing, National Institutes of Applied Research (NCHC, NIAR) established the NCHC Cloud Compute Center at the Tainan Science Park. Officially launched in December 2025, the center serves as both a large-scale AI and high-performance computing (HPC) hub and an international telecommunications node, further expanding Taiwan’s national computing, storage, and network service capabilities.
Credit: NCHC
As the scale of AI and HPC continues to grow, power supply, cooling, and energy efficiency have become increasingly important considerations for computing infrastructure. Energy conservation, seismic resilience, and high-standard infrastructure requirements were therefore incorporated into the overall planning and construction of the NCHC Cloud Compute Center from the outset. The center has received the Green Building Label from Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior with a Silver rating under the EEWH green building evaluation system, reflecting its commitment to energy efficiency and environmental sustainability while maintaining high performance and reliability.
Integrated Energy-Efficient Design Across Building and Facility Systems
The NCHC Cloud Compute Center incorporates energy-saving measures across its building envelope, cooling systems, electrical systems, lighting, and renewable energy facilities. The building uses exterior wall insulation and reduced window areas to minimize heat gain from the outdoor environment. Its cooling systems incorporate magnetic-bearing chillers, hot- and cold-aisle configurations, and EC fans (Electronically Commutated Fans) to improve cooling efficiency. The electrical systems are equipped with high-efficiency transformers, an energy management system, and high-efficiency uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems to reduce energy loss.
The center also uses LED lighting and a two-wire lighting control system, while an on-site solar photovoltaic system provides renewable energy. Together, these measures improve energy efficiency across both the building and its mechanical and electrical systems.
The NCHC Cloud Compute Center maintains an annual average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) below 1.3. PUE is an important metric for measuring data center energy efficiency. The closer the value is to 1, the lower the relative energy consumption of supporting systems such as cooling and power distribution, and the greater the overall energy efficiency. By improving the efficiency of these supporting systems, the center can reduce the energy required to maintain data center operations and direct a greater proportion of its electricity toward actual computing workloads.
Advancing High-Performance Computing and Sustainability Together
Receiving a Silver rating under Taiwan’s Green Building Label system recognizes the energy-efficient design of the NCHC Cloud Compute Center and reflects NCHC’s continued commitment to balancing the expansion of national computing capacity with energy efficiency and sustainable development.
Looking ahead, NCHC will continue to improve building energy efficiency, optimize PUE, and expand the use of renewable energy, further enhancing overall energy performance and laying the foundation for more efficient and sustainable data center operations.
Five defendants accused of being part of ‘black team’ tasked with overcoming security at Israel-linked firm Elbit near Bristol
Palestine Action activists brandished whips, hammers and kebab skewers to intimidate security guards and keep them at bay during a break-in at an Israel-linked arms factory, a court has heard.
Five defendants are accused by prosecutors of being part of a “black team”, wearing black jumpsuits, whose role was to overwhelm security guards, so that a “red team”, wearing red jumpsuits, could break into the Elbit systems factory in Filton, near Bristol, and smash up equipment including drones.
Patrick McCabe’s herculean feat shows limits and possibilities of special educational needs and disabilities system
Patrick McCabe is instantly recognisable in the early autumn sunshine, his wheelchair surrounded by fellow pupils at Fallibroome Academy in Macclesfield, Cheshire as they move from lesson to lesson, chatting, laughing and joking around.
His extraordinary GCSE success this summer has become the stuff of legend. The 16-year-old has cerebral palsy and it took four months for him to complete his exams using eye-tracking technology. Now Patrick has started his A-levels – French, business and media studies – and fresh challenges lie ahead.
Oct. 2, 2026 — IBM has announced expansions of two long-standing research collaborations in India: one with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, and another with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to accelerate innovation in agentic AI, sovereign AI, quantum computing and next-generation computing systems.
Credit: Taljat David/Shutterstock
Building on a collaboration that began with IIT Bombay in 2018, IBM researchers will continue to work alongside faculty and students to explore sovereign and Indic language model adaption, multimodal AI, as well as AI infrastructure and knowledge retrieval. With IISc, IBM researchers will continue a collaboration that began in 2021, which covers agentic systems, AI for applications, and quantum computing algorithm development.
Strategic Focus Areas of the IBM-IIT Bombay Collaboration
Sovereign and Indic language model adaptation: Advancing sovereign AI and Indic language models to improve multilingual AI capabilities for Indian languages through more efficient model adaptation and optimization techniques.
Multimodal AI systems: The collaboration will also focus on developing multimodal AI systems that strengthen software programming education, human-AI collaboration and intelligent operations across hybrid cloud environments.
AI Infrastructure and Knowledge Retrieval: Enhancing intelligent knowledge retrieval by developing AI systems that deliver faster, more accurate and scalable access to enterprise knowledge. The effort will be to optimize AI runtimes and distributed inference to improve the performance, efficiency and scalability of large language models.
Key Pillars of the IBM-IISc Research Collaboration
Agentic Systems: Agentic AI workflows that improve orchestration across hybrid cloud environments, enabling more efficient management of AI applications while balancing performance, cost and operational complexity.
AI for Scientific and Industry Applications: Creating lightweight time-series foundation models based on the IBM Granite model family for energy analytics to support forecasting, anomaly detection, load disaggregation and energy optimization, while contributing benchmark datasets to accelerate broader AI research.
Quantum Computing: Exploring orchestration for quantum and high-performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery through more efficient quantum-centric supercomputing workflows and next-generation quantum-HPC algorithms. These algorithms would leverage approximation-tolerant classical diagonalization algorithms to improve quantum subspace iteration methods.
Speaking on the collaborations, Dr. Amith Singhee, Director, IBM Research India and CTO, IBM India and South Asia, said, “The next wave of computing will be shaped by advances in agentic AI, sovereign AI, and quantum computing. Our collaborations with IIT Bombay and IISc bring together world-class academic research and IBM’s scientific expertise to solve some of the most complex challenges in these areas. Together, we are advancing research that not only pushes the boundaries of computing but also creates practical technologies that can benefit enterprises, developers and society.”
Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay, said, “The power of AI is already being demonstrated in systems that can seamlessly understand and reason across languages, modalities and domains. Our joint efforts with IBM Research are laying the foundation for such intelligent systems through advances in multimodal AI models, knowledge retrieval, optimization techniques, agentic AI workflows, AI-assisted software engineering and education. By bringing together complementary strengths in AI, language, knowledge and intelligent computing, we envision trustworthy, inclusive and scalable AI technologies that can transform how people learn, work and access knowledge in India and across the world.”
Prof. Yogesh Simmhan, Professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, IISc, said, “The future of computing will be shaped by the convergence of hybrid cloud, AI agents and quantum technologies. IISc and IBM bring complementary research strengths to jointly explore intelligent, cloud-native platforms that can reason, adapt and orchestrate quantum-classical, edge AI and agentic workflows at scale, translating frontier ideas into trustworthy, sustainable technologies with real-world impact for India and the world.”
As IBM extends its collaborations with IIT Bombay and IISc into their next phases, the research agenda reflects the evolving needs of enterprise AI—from trusted and sovereign AI to quantum-centric supercomputing workflows and intelligent infrastructure. By bringing together IBM’s expertise in AI, hybrid cloud and quantum computing with the academic excellence of two of India’s leading research institutions, the collaborations aim to accelerate innovations that align with national goals, are scientifically rigorous, industry-relevant and designed for real-world impact.
Since the inception of these collaborations, IBM, IIT Bombay and IISc have worked together to advance research across artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, distributed systems and quantum computing, while creating opportunities for students and researchers to tackle industry-inspired challenges. As the collaborations enter their next phase, they will continue to foster interdisciplinary research, nurture the next generation of scientific talent and accelerate innovations that help shape the future of computing.
About IISc
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was established in 1909 by a visionary partnership between the industrialist Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, the Mysore royal family and the Government of India. Over the last 117 years, IISc has become India’s premier institute for advanced scientific and technological research and education. Its mandate is “to provide for advanced instruction and to conduct original investigations in all branches of knowledge as are likely to promote the material and industrial welfare of India.” In 2018, IISc was selected as an Institution of Eminence (IoE) by the Government of India, and it consistently figures among the top Indian institutions in world university rankings.
About IIT Bombay
The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, set up in 1958 as the second IIT, is recognised worldwide as a leader in the field of science and engineering education and research. The Institute was granted the status of ‘Institution of Eminence’ by the Ministry of Education (the then Ministry of Human Resources Development) on July 9, 2018. IIT Bombay is reputed for the quality of its faculty, cutting-edge research, industry relations, and the outstanding caliber of students graduating from its undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The Institute has 40 Academics Divisions, 29 Research Centres and 9 Section 8 Companies. Over the last six decades, more than 78,000 engineers and scientists have graduated from the Institute. It is served by 770 faculty, including 121 women faculty (plus 241 part-time faculty), considered not only amongst the best within the country but also highly recognised in the world for achievements in the field of education and research. On June 18, 2026, IIT Bombay was ranked 2nd in India and 134th in the world in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings for 2027.
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. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service.
A federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits from Chegg and Penske Media accusing Google of harming publishers by using their content in AI Overviews and other AI search features without compensating them or providing a meaningful opt-out. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuits were filed in 2025, and Google requested a dismissal earlier this year. Chegg, an education and learning platform, claimed in its lawsuit that Google illegally scraped its educational content. This allowed Gemini models to essentially recreate that content and reduce the site's traffic. Penske, which owns publications like Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a similar case that alleged lost traffic. Specifically, the publisher claimed it was unfair that sites indexed for organic search would also have their content harvested for AI answers, with no way to opt out.
These arguments did not sway the judge, who noted that Google's implicit agreement with websites is not legally relevant. "Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search "traffic if they make their content available for free," wrote Mehta. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."
Since Google never had a formal arrangement with either Chegg or Penske, antitrust law doesn't apply. And Mehta is aware of the legal issues surrounding search. He also heard the DOJ's long-running search antitrust case against Google, eventually finding that Google violated the law. However, the government didn't get the harsh penalties it wanted in that case.
Hochul, who appointed the state's attorney general, Letitia James, as special prosecutor in the case, criticized how the alleged assault was handled by the school and promised a thorough investigation
NFL analyst and network mutually agree to part ways
Ex-Dallas Cowboys star was on $180m contract
Tony Romo will not return as an NFL analyst for CBS Sports, the network announced Friday, after his July arrest for operating a vehicle while under the influence.
“CBS Sports and Tony Romo have mutually agreed to part ways,” the network said in a statement. “We thank Tony for his contributions over the past nine years and wish him the best moving forward.”
Guarantee will remain until 2030 but MPs will vote on changes during this parliament, government says
Andy Burnham will pass legislation to scrap the state pension triple lock in this parliament, even though the guarantee will remain until 2030, the government has said.
The prime minister used his conference speech to announce a change to the policy, which guarantees that the state pension rises by the highest of 2.5%, inflation or earnings growth.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) also called on legislators to tighten a law limiting the ability to prosecute sexual assault if a victim voluntarily became intoxicated.
Opposition lawmakers join forces to defeat proposals made by Socialist-led coalition after eviction of 87-year-old
Rightwing lawmakers in Spain have rejected emergency measures put forward to tackle the country’s housing crisis, pitting a fractured parliament against the widespread protest movement that has swelled in recent days.
On Friday Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist-led coalition put forward two decrees that included a range of measures aimed at improving access to housing, from a ban on evictions until 2030 to the regulation of temporary lettings and lettings by room.
Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, said on Friday that she would “ensure” that all the facts of the alleged gang-rape at a fraternity house at Cornell University “are brought into the light”, while harshly criticizing the elite institution for how it handled the 2024 case.
Hochul, a Democrat, said the woman in the case, was “failed” by people obligated to protect her, including the police and the county prosecutor.
This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here
Back to France, midday figures quoted by Le Figaro show that 564 schools and educational establishments have been disrupted by the ongoing unrest, and some 600 people have been arrested so far today as the high school protests continue.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced its annual funding opportunity of up to $400 million to advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge and lay the foundation for future technologies and innovation. The funding delivers on Executive Order Restoring Gold Standard Science by supporting rigorous, transparent, and mission-driven research across DOE’s Office of Science to strengthen America’s scientific and technological leadership.
“Foundational research is where the breakthroughs that shape America’s future begin,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “Through this investment, we are empowering our nation’s researchers to pursue bold ideas, push the boundaries of discovery, and build the scientific foundations for tomorrow’s technologies—strengthening America’s global leadership in science and innovation.”
The funding will support research across DOE’s Office of Science and its major programs to tackle some of the nation’s greatest scientific challenges and accelerate discoveries in areas critical to America’s future. Research will span Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, and Isotope R&D and Production.
The Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), informally known as the “Open Call,” is issued annually at the beginning of each Fiscal Year (FY). It provides a vehicle for DOE’s Office of Science to solicit applications from institutions for research support in areas not covered by more specific, topical NOFOs issued by the office in FY 2027.
More details about this Notice of Funding Opportunity can be found here.
DOE’s Office of Science is the nation’s largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences, funds research at hundreds of universities nationwide, and stewards 10 of DOE’s National Laboratories.
Bangor, ME — Police are investigating after a driver appeared to steer toward Maine Wire reporter Joe Sokol while he was filming outside a Bangor addiction treatment center, nearly striking him before knocking over his camera equipment.
Sokol was reporting from public property near the Bangor Comprehensive Treatment Center when a driver stopped and accused him of violating patients’ privacy by filming the facility. Sokol responded that he was standing in public and conducting a news report.
Video later showed what appeared to be the same vehicle crossing a grassy area toward Sokol. He moved away as the vehicle passed close by and struck his camera setup. The driver then left the scene. Sokol was not injured.
The Maine Wire later published audio of a phone call with a man it identified as the driver. He denied trying to run Sokol over but acknowledged that the reporter’s coverage had angered him and said there was “no good reason really” for driving across the grass.
Bangor police confirmed they are investigating but have not announced charges or publicly identified a suspect.
The incident raises broader concerns about journalist safety. Whatever one thinks of The Maine Wire’s conservative editorial perspective, reporters should be able to gather news from public property without facing physical intimidation or a vehicle being driven at them.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday, echoing rising concern and tighter scrutiny across the world. Companies running popular social platforms, including Meta, Snap, and TikTok, have faced thousands of lawsuits and paid large sums to settle claims that they harmed users. Governments, meanwhile, have sought foolproof ways to protect their citizens' privacy.
Australia has proposed rules to let users opt out of algorithmically recommended feeds, after becoming the first country to ban social media for children under 16. Pew's latest survey showed that 82% of Australian adults support the government's move to restrict social media access for children. A majority of respondents said social media informs people and gives them a voice in politics, but there was a broad rise in those who now see social media as a "bad thing" compared to 2022, according to the report.
People in wealthier countries, including the US, Canada and UK, are more inclined to believe that social media is harming democracy, versus their counterparts in economies with lower gross domestic product per capita -- such as Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. The US is among the most skeptical, with 64% of adult respondents saying social media harms democracy. The share of people who consider social media bad for democracy increased in 16 of 26 countries where older data was available. Pew Research said it surveyed more than 45,000 people in 37 countries, while polling an additional 5,511 US adults on American social media use.
Rolling stock companies, which also paid out nearly £400m to shareholders, accused of profiting at passengers’ expense
The chief executives of three firms that rent out trains to Britain’s railways were paid a combined £3.5m last year as they passed on almost £400m to shareholders in dividends.
Rail unions accused the rolling stock companies (Roscos) of raking in profits at passengers’ expense.
Experts sceptical flydubai co-pilot’s only motivation was to end his own life and say key question is means of radicalisation
At about 9.30 on Wednesday morning local time, Tali Manes was taking her six-year-old daughter, Nina, to the toilet on the regular flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv when she heard a series of heavy blows against the cockpit door.
Manes, an Israeli bank executive, immediately told a flight attendant seated nearby that something was wrong. When he did not react, she shouted at him: “Something is happening in there!” Seconds later, the man “simply went to the [cockpit] door and opened it”, Manes told Israel’s Channel 12 TV.
US says ship thought to be using common ‘dark fleet’ tactics was boarded and taken to Mexico as embargo continues
The US Coast Guard has announced that it intercepted a large cargo ship carrying fuel bound for Cuba, as the Trump administration’s crippling oil embargo against the island nation continued.
The vessel named Grace was stopped on 5 September in the Caribbean Sea between Cuba and Mexico while using tactics to evade authorities, the Coast Guard said. The New York Times reported that the ship was 91 metres (300ft) long.
Rhun ap Iorwerth tells Plaid Cymru conference he asked PM to ‘put Wales on equal footing with Scotland as bare minimum’
The Welsh first minister has formally called on Andy Burnham to deliver a “new deal” in his first address to a Plaid Cymru annual conference since taking office.
Rhun ap Iorwerth told party members during a keynote speech in Llandudno on Friday that his government had a “clear mandate” for devolving more powers from Westminster.
From pillboxes and boaters to bicornes and buckets, characterful hats are making their way from the catwalk to the high street
“Here goes – an order for a million hats,” wrote Jackie Kennedy to Bergdorf Goodman before moving into the White House in the early 1960s. It’s a line that could have been uttered by any number of people working in fashion today, because the hat – and not just the ubiquitous baseball cap – has been enjoying a very characterful resurgence.
This season at the turbo-high-end brand Loro Piana, whose clothes are beloved by tech bros and Kendall Roy, almost every model was wearing a hat. At Thom Browne, straw boaters came shrouded in colourful mesh. At Chloé there were see-through hats to match see-through trenchcoats and white sailor hats atop all-white outfits. Courrège’s hats were space-age, Burberry had big buckets, Bottega Veneta had hats brimming with charisma.
I first became “loud” when I was sitting in the dark, purple slide during recess in second grade, my hands pressed against the warm plastic, firmly keeping me from sliding down.
We were hiding. Recess was conjoined that day because it was a half day, and we were with the third graders. The older kids used to hide in the slide, a subtle act of rebellion typically reserved for them, but they let us join in that day, and I felt cool and filled with childish excitement.
It was a little bit too warm on the slide and a little bit wet and my hair was full of static, sticking to both the tunnel and my face, but I didn’t care. I was included, and I was cool, and a toothy smile stretched across my little face, flushed from the warmth of the slide.
When we heard the recess monitors approaching, we began to get giddy, and as any elementary schooler would do, I gave in to the laughter bubbling up in my stomach. The girls above me nudged me, warning me to stop, which, naturally, only made me laugh harder.
Though I was nowhere near full-grown at the ripe age of eight, someone made a comment that made me feel exceptionally small.
“God, Rachel, why are you always so loud?!”
At that moment, I no longer felt cool or excited or included. As laughter from the other girls flooded the slide, my smile began to deflate, along with my pride.
My face flushed, this time not with giddiness, but embarrassment, and the slide suddenly felt too small, too warm and too wet. I became hyperaware of the hair sticking to my cheeks and the cramped tunnel around me.
I eventually joined the laughter of the other kids, but my smile was no longer toothy, and even my little second-grade brain could comprehend that they weren’t laughing with me, but at me.
That day I learned that laughing along was easier; it’s what’s expected from the loud girl. It’s easier to smile too; loud girls don’t frown, they are always happy and they are always loud.
I could have tried after that to stop being my enthusiastic and extroverted self. I could have sunk into a minor role, hung back and kept my head down — laughing at the jokes of others but never making them. Even then, at a small school like mine, that wasn’t much of an option; a stereotype was attached to you in your youth and stuck with you.
I always knew that my label had its perks — I knew everyone and everyone knew me. People thought I was funny and approachable and were aware that if they needed someone to talk to, I would be there to support them.
But as with almost any personality trait, my loud nature had another side. The line between “loud” and “embarrassing” often became blurred. But loud girls are supposed to be unapologetically loud. The embarrassment wasn’t supposed to concern me. Sometimes my stomach sank and my palms got sweaty and my fingertips reached for something to ground me, but to anyone else, I didn’t dwell on embarrassment — I didn’t even notice it.
With my reputation, I was constantly committed to the persona that I embodied. I had to remember, loud girls don’t frown; they are always happy and they are always loud.
My title of “loud” was a constant throughout my adolescence but was officially renewed within my first two weeks of college. As an out-of-state student, I didn’t know anyone, so I knew how important it was to make a new home for myself. I made it a point to talk to everyone I met, be the kindest and bubbliest person I could and smile as often as my cheek muscles allowed me to. Of course, no one wants to befriend a dud, even on the tired days I smiled wider, laughed harder and talked more.
One day, I heard a new friend say something about me in a hushed voice behind a closed door.
She was the miserable type who talked about people just to talk, and one of the first-week-of-freshman-year friends that accompanies you to the frat parties and dining hall a few times in a group setting before you find your people. Yet, the fleeting nature of our friendship didn’t stop me from the sinking feeling I felt when I heard her laugh about me.
She called me loud; not in the general sense — as that was something I couldn’t really deny — but in the way that meant I made unnecessary noise in a volume that was too high and too much. Not only was I loud, but I was also “always too happy.” Suddenly, I felt like an embarrassed second-grader again, like I was trapped back in the dark, purple slide that felt too small, too warm and too wet.
She didn’t know about the nights that I broke down silently, tucked into my twin XL bed after the lights turned off with a tear-soaked pillow and a heavy heart tainted by homesickness. She didn’t know the overwhelming fear I held of growing apart from my home and never finding the solid community that I once had. Because, as far as everyone else is concerned, loud girls are always loud and always happy, and I was no exception.
Eventually, I formed the closest friendships. I found the friends who will be the bridesmaids in my wedding and honorary uncles to my children. My loud nature allowed me the opportunity to meet anyone and everyone. Now, on my walks to class, I leave a few minutes early for the times I inevitably stop and talk to people I know. Now, every time I enter a classroom, a party or even a store by campus, I’m surrounded by familiar faces.
Beyond my own benefits, I have granted countless people comfort by not being afraid to reach out to them, and many people have thanked me for bringing them out of their shells. Though I still get embarrassed at moments, and my palms get sweaty and my fingertips reach for something to ground me, I no longer feel like I have to hide it. I have found people who made me feel that even as the loud girl, I don’t always have to be happy, and I don’t always have to be loud.
I had to accept that not everyone is going to love that aspect of me, and it will never be possible to please everyone.
Now when people call me loud, I don’t hear it the same as the day I did on that dark, purple slide. It doesn’t shrink me. It doesn’t make the world feel too small. If anything, it reminds me of all of the rooms that I fill, of the space that I am able to take up — space that I no longer feel I have to apologize for.
In an op-ed for The Guardian, authors Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender argue that policymakers are focusing too heavily on hypothetical "superintelligence" while overlooking the more immediate danger of deploying unreliable AI in high-stakes settings. They point to an as-yet independently unverified CNN report claiming U.S. officials nearly intercepted a Chinese vessel after an AI-assisted intelligence report incorrectly said it was carrying nuclear-weapons components. From the article: While so many of us were focused on fictional superintelligent machines that we were told could hypothetically cause human extinction, however, there was a more serious story being reported. A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by "rogue, superintelligent AI," but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.
A CNN report published on September 18, which hasn't been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US "almost started a war" with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.
It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel's contents. Unlike the terminator, "rogue AI," scenario, this incident didn't galvanize lawmakers into announcing calls for regulation so as to avoid potential human extinction. Media outlet after media outlet didn't warn the public that we almost triggered a war against a nuclear superpower because of our military's reliance on error-prone chatbots.
This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here
Zack Polanski also insisted his authority as leader of the Green party of England and Wales does not depend on winning next week’s Holborn and St Pancras byelection, amid suggestions that the party’s popularity has peaked.
Polanski, who is trying to take Keir Starmer’s former seat from Labour, described the contest as “probably 50/50 right now” and “really on a knife edge”.
This will be our biggest and most exciting Green party conference ever, coming on the back of a year of unprecedented membership growth and extraordinary electoral success.
Greens have turned hope into electoral wins – in councils, boroughs, in mayoral elections and with our exciting breakthrough in Gorton and Denton.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko says Kyivans can no longer pretend it is ‘peacetime’ amid strikes on school, hospital and bridge
Valeriya Tkachenko was dropping her son off at school in central Kyiv when the air raid alert sounded. Staff hurried the children and parents into the shelter, where the frightened lawyer spent the next two hours with her son.
“I’m scared to death all day about what could happen to my son,” she said as she emerged from the shelter, already late for work.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2 percent while wages continued to lag behind inflation in the government’s final jobs report before the Nov. 3 midterm election.
Thousands gather in Mumbai with heavy police presence as concerns mount that millions will be denied voting rights
India’s youth-led Cockroach movement kicked off more nationwide protests on Friday as thousands of people gathered in Mumbai, amid mounting concerns that millions of citizens are being unfairly stripped of their vote.
The movement, which calls itself the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) and has massive support among the country’s gen Zs, returned to the streets to demand the resignation of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar.
A Joint R&D Project by NEC, Taiho Pharmaceutical, the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research, AIST, and Waseda University
Under this project, the five organizations will integrate their respective technologies and expertise in quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI), drug discovery, and immunology to establish a new computational and evaluation platform that enables the optimal design and immunological validation of neoantigen candidates , which are regarded as promising targets for cancer immunotherapy.
The Principal Investigator for Waseda University in this project is Professor Nozomu Togawa of the Faculty of Science and Engineering.
Background
Cancer immunotherapy, which harnesses the body’s own immune system to eliminate cancer cells, has made significant advances in recent years. Among the most widely used approaches are immune checkpoint inhibitors, which enhance the immune response against tumors. However, not all patients derive sufficient benefit from these therapies, highlighting the need for new forms of cancer immunotherapy. Cancer immunotherapy targeting neoantigens that are present exclusively in cancer cells has emerged as a promising next-generation therapeutic approach for addressing this challenge.
Neoantigens, which arise specifically in cancer cells, are presented on the cell surface by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules and can trigger antigen-specific immune responses. In particular, CD4-positive T-cell responses induced through MHC class II molecules are expected to play a pivotal role in activating other immune cells and sustaining immune responses, making them a key driver of potent and durable antitumor immunity.
However, the biological factors that govern MHC class II-mediated immune responses, including amino acid sequence characteristics, MHC class II binding, and cell surface presentation, remain highly complex and less understood. To date, no systematic methods have been established for designing and optimizing neoantigen sequences that induce CD4-positive T-cell responses via MHC class II while taking these multiple factors into account.
One of the key challenges lies in evaluating the vast number of possible amino acid sequence combinations, as well as the complex biological processes involved in antigen formation, presentation, and immune recognition. By applying quantum computing technology to this multifactorial sequence design and optimization challenge, the project aims to establish a new approach for exploring a broader design space and generating diverse neoantigen candidates with enhanced immunogenicity.
Project Overview
This project is scheduled to run from September 2026 to March 2029. It will serve as a drug discovery use case for applying quantum computing technology and AI to design and optimize neoantigen candidate sequences that induce CD4-positive T cell responses through MHC class II.
The project will utilize AI to predict and score immune responses to neoantigen candidates, and apply quantum computing technology to the design of amino acid sequences flanking the neoantigen core region. Researchers will evaluate the potential of methods for designing diverse and promising sequence candidates from a vast number of sequence combinations while taking multiple factors into account, and the immune response generated by these optimized neoantigen sequences will then be evaluated through immunological experiments. By incorporating insights gained from these immunological experiments into computational models and AI-based prediction and evaluation methods, the project aims to establish a new drug discovery pipeline that integrates feedback between computational candidate design and experimental validation.
This project will utilize the ABCI-Q computing infrastructure-which integrates quantum computing, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI) being developed by the Global Research and Development Center for Business by Quantum-AI Technology (G-QuAT), AIST. Looking ahead, the companies aim to accelerate research and development of drug discovery innovations using quantum technologies originating in Japan.
About NEC
The NEC Group leverages technology to create social value and promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. NEC Corporation was established in 1899. Today, the NEC Group’s approximately 110,000 employees utilize world-leading AI, security, and communications technologies to solve the most pressing needs of customers and society.
Photo: Governor Matt Meyer courtesy of the Governor’s Office.
Governor rejects four bills passed by General Assembly, including measures that drew overwhelming bipartisan support
DOVER, Del. — Gov. Matt Meyer vetoed four bills approved by the Delaware General Assembly, including a bipartisan measure that would have given lawmakers new authority to check a governor’s power during an extended state of emergency.
Meyer vetoed House Substitute 1 for House Bill 329, Senate Bill 231, Senate Bill 279 and House Bill 393 on Sept. 30.
The four vetoes put Meyer at odds with substantial majorities in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly. Two of the measures — the emergency-powers bill and a utility consumer-protection bill — passed both chambers without a single opposing vote.
A veto is part of the governor’s constitutional role in Delaware’s legislative process. The General Assembly can override a gubernatorial veto if it secures the votes required under the Delaware Constitution.
Lawmakers seek check on prolonged emergency power
HB 329 was specifically written to establish additional checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches during a prolonged state of emergency.
Under the final version, a governor could declare and maintain an emergency for the first 180 days without legislative approval.
After that point, the governor could continue renewing the emergency, but the General Assembly would gain explicit authority to amend or terminate the order. The administration also would have been required to report to lawmakers every 30 days during a continuing emergency.
The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Rich Collins, R-Millsboro, and Sen. Kyra Hoffner, D-Dover-area, and attracted sponsors from both parties.
It passed the House 39-0 and the Senate 20-0, with absences in both chambers.
Lawmakers also amended the legislation so its restrictions would not apply to Meyer during his current term. The new provisions would have taken effect only after the governor serving when the bill became law left office.
That meant the legislation was largely establishing rules for future governors rather than restricting Meyer’s own emergency authority.
The measure grew out of Delaware’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, when then-Gov. John Carney repeatedly renewed emergency orders while lawmakers had limited formal authority over whether those orders continued.
Supporters argued that a governor needs broad authority when a crisis begins but that an emergency lasting six months raises a separate question about the role of the legislative branch. Meyer stated that the bill would have unnecessarily constrained the executive branch’s ability to respond to emergencies and could create uncertainty during future crises.
Ramone criticizes veto
Mike Ramone, the Republican nominee for state treasurer, criticized Meyer’s action during two campaign events Thursday night.
Ramone, who served in the General Assembly from 2008 to 2024, including as House minority leader, said the veto reinforced his argument for greater transparency and stronger checks on state government.
“This is yet another reason transparency is critical in state government at all levels,” Ramone said. “Too much power left in one person’s hands, and inside a state government managed by one party, is a problem.”
Ramone pointed to the unanimous legislative support for HB 329.
“Republican and Democratic legislators understood that,” he said. “And yet, a reasonable bill was vetoed, leaving one person to leverage his power to impact life in our state indefinitely.”
Ramone’s comments reflect the argument made by supporters of HB 329 that long-running emergencies should eventually involve both the executive and legislative branches.
The veto leaves Delaware’s existing emergency-power structure in place.
Consumer protection bill also vetoed
Meyer also vetoed HB 393, a bipartisan consumer-protection measure involving third-party electricity suppliers.
The legislation passed the House 40-0 and the Senate 21-0.
The bill would have imposed additional disclosure, reporting and customer-notification requirements on companies selling electricity as alternatives to standard utility service.
Among other provisions, suppliers would have been required to notify customers before contracts renewed and before certain rate changes. Regulators also would have received additional pricing information allowing them to compare third-party rates with standard-offer electricity rates.
Rep. Debra Heffernan, D-Bellefonte, the bill’s prime sponsor, criticized the veto and disputed concerns that the measure could reduce competition or strengthen the position of a dominant electricity provider.
Heffernan said the bill was developed with the Meyer administration, the Public Advocate and Public Service Commission and was intended to address constituent complaints about customers being attracted by introductory offers before later paying significantly higher prices.
The governor’s legislative advisory identifies the veto but does not provide a detailed written explanation of his objections.
Two school compensation measures rejected
Meyer also vetoed two bills affecting school employee compensation.
SB 231 would have provided an additional salary supplement to school social workers who passed the Association of Social Work Boards National Clinical Examination and held a licensed clinical social worker license.
The bill passed the Senate and House without an opposing vote.
A fiscal analysis estimated the state cost at approximately $343,000 in fiscal 2027, increasing in subsequent years.
Meyer had previously signed separate legislation expanding salary supplements for several categories of school professionals, including social workers. The governor’s published veto notice does not state whether that overlap, the additional cost or another concern was the basis for rejecting SB 231.
SB 279 addressed salary placement for school-based occupational therapists.
Supporters said employees with comparable professional education can be placed on different salary levels because occupational therapy degree programs award credits differently.
The legislation would have established a more uniform method of recognizing master’s and doctoral-level occupational therapy education within the state salary schedule.
The bill passed the Senate 20-0 and the House 40-1.
Fiscal analysts estimated the state and local cost at roughly $224,000 in fiscal 2027, increasing in later years.
The governor’s published legislative advisory does not provide a detailed explanation for the SB 279 veto.
Four vetoes, different policy disputes
The measures covered different issues, but all four had substantial support in the General Assembly.
HB 329 and HB 393 passed without an opposing vote. SB 231 also passed without opposition among lawmakers voting, while only one House member voted against SB 279.
The vetoes do not negate the General Assembly’s votes. Under Delaware’s constitutional system, legislation approved by lawmakers is presented to the governor, who may sign it or veto it. Lawmakers may then consider whether to attempt an override.
HB 329 is unusual because the legislation itself dealt directly with that division of governmental power.
It would have preserved broad gubernatorial authority during the first six months of an emergency while creating a formal legislative role once the emergency became prolonged.
Meyer’s veto means that change will not take effect unless lawmakers override him or adopt similar legislation in the future.
TO GO BOX
What happened: Gov. Matt Meyer vetoed four bills Sept. 30.
Emergency powers: HS 1 for HB 329 would have given the General Assembly authority to amend or terminate a state of emergency after 180 days and required continuing reports to lawmakers.
Vote: HB 329 passed the House 39-0 and Senate 20-0.
Utility consumers: HB 393 imposed additional requirements on third-party electric suppliers. It passed 40-0 in the House and 21-0 in the Senate.
School social workers: SB 231 would have provided additional compensation for qualifying licensed clinical social workers working in schools.
Occupational therapists: SB 279 would have changed salary placement rules for qualifying school-based occupational therapists.
Political reaction: Republican state treasurer nominee Mike Ramone said the HB 329 veto demonstrated the need for greater transparency and checks on executive authority.
What happens next: The General Assembly may consider whether to attempt veto overrides.
Learn more: Bill texts, votes, fiscal notes and legislative histories are available through the Delaware General Assembly at legis.delaware.gov.
Does anyone know if the flared footpad from FM will work seamlessly? My footpad is having pressure issues and I was considering upgrading it along with the VESC conversion.
Government struggling to deal with worst crisis in months after being taken by surprise by massive demonstrations
As dozens of school pupils sat on top of a pile of wheelie bins blocking a high school entrance in north-eastern Paris, Sophia, 17, was on the frontline of the barricade, when she would normally have been attending Spanish class.
“We hope this grows into a massive youth protest movement,” said the final year baccalaureate student at Paris’s Lycée Voltaire, who did not want her real name published. She was on her second day of blocking the school entrance along with hundreds of others, ensuring all lessons were cancelled. “We just want to be listened to by the government. We’d rather stand here doing this than have to learn in poor conditions. It’s the only way to make ourselves heard.”
Final jobs report before the midterm elections also shows the US unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.2%
US employers added just 29,000 jobs in September, a sharp drop from last month’s gains, and unemployment rose slightly to 4.2%, a sign of a cooling labor market in the final jobs report before the midterm election.
The numbers were under half of economists’ expectations of just under 70,000 new jobs. Most job gains were concentrated in the healthcare industry, which added 17,000 new jobs, while the information, financial and professional industries saw losses, according to the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Exclusive: CrowdJustice platform says US firm Stripe, its payment processor, ‘cannot support accounts or transactions’ linked to group
An online crowdfunder to raise money for the UK supreme court challenge to the ban on Palestine Action has been blocked as a result of US sanctions against the direct action group.
CrowdJustice, a UK company, has declined to host a fundraiser for legal fees to fight proscription because the platform uses the US company Stripe as its payment processor.
As part of the Campus Champions program, Miami helps researchers leverage Ohio Supercomputer Center services
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 2, 2026 — At Miami University, faculty can access a wealth of high performance computing (HPC) resources, from the Miami Redhawk Cluster housed at the Oxford, Ohio, institution’s campus to state-supported resources at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and beyond.
Miami University Campus Champion Jens Mueller (right) and graduate student Ikponwmosa Obaseki from Miami’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (left) discuss computational workflows on OSCs Ascend and Pitzer clusters. Image courtesy of Miami University.
Miami has managed and expanded the capabilities of its own Redhawk Cluster for 20 years. During that time, the HPC team led by Jens Mueller has witnessed a steady evolution of Miami faculty embracing research computing to enhance classroom lessons and to advance their research initiatives—and not only in the traditional fields of science and engineering. Faculty in disciplines such as business, economics, and finance, as well as humanities fields such as English and history, are turning to HPC to handle massive data sets that desktop computers can’t process.
“It’s a very broad spectrum of researchers. The challenge for me is to properly communicate with everyone considering their different backgrounds,” said Mueller, director of HPC services in Miami’s Office of Research and Innovation.
Access to HPC infrastructure alone doesn’t guarantee that faculty will have a seamless experience with using advanced computing resources for teaching or research. Mueller and his colleagues work closely with faculty to ensure they are using the correct quantity of cores or nodes and the right software for a particular project. If they use too few HPC resources, faculty may not get the results they want, Mueller said. By using too many, faculty may incur extra expenses or tie up resources that others need.
“People may think, ‘Just throw a lot of resources at me and I’ll do big things,’ but a lot of thought needs to go into what type of resources are the right ones to use,” Mueller said. “You need to find the sweet spot between too few and too many resources.”
Another issue Mueller evaluates is whether faculty have HPC needs that exceed what the Miami Redhawk Cluster can accommodate. In those cases, Mueller works with faculty to acclimate them to resources at OSC, which can handle larger, more intensive computing jobs. Through his role as an OSC Campus Champion, a program that establishes and empowers an institutional liaison for faculty, Mueller trains them on how to use OSC portals such as OnDemand and may tap the expertise of OSC staff for tutorials on specialized software.
One example is Mueller’s work with Ohio Eminent Scholar and Miami Professor of Chemistry Michael Kennedy, who needed CryoSparc, a software package required for processing cryo-electron microscopy (CryoEm) data, for use in a spring 2026 special topics course. As Miami does not have the computing resources to run CryoSparc, Mueller helped Kennedy set up OSC accounts for the 13 undergraduate students and graduate student enrolled and helped them optimize their CPU usage and job queues on OSC’s computing cluster.
“In the end, all of the students and I were able to successfully use the CryoSparc software in the course,” Kennedy said. “This would not have been possible without Jens’ help and assistance. Jens came to the class three different times to help make sure that everyone had access to and could use the OSC resource. Overall, Jens provided excellent support for my course and acted as an excellent liaison for OSC resources.”
Mueller also helped Muhammad Jahan, associate professor of mechanical and manufacturing engineering, and his students transfer their computational workflows from Miami’s Redhawk Cluster to a cluster at OSC. He set up group accounts and project spaces and provided access to OSC’s Abaqus license, which the research team needs to simulate and improve various steps in the process of manufacturing composites.
“My students have benefited from using OSC,” Jahan said. “I have multiple graduate students who completed their master’s degrees using the simulation results obtained by using OSC facilities.”
OSC also has provided support to Miami for a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant application and has consulted with the Miami HPC team on local hardware purchases that would be compatible with OSC’s infrastructure, Mueller said.
In addition to his work with OSC, Mueller is part of the Campus Champions program for the NSF ACCESS program, which connects researchers to dozens of major HPC resources across the United States. (OSC is also a collaborator on the NSF ACCESS program, which has helped support the further development of OSC’s Open OnDemand web portal for global HPC users.) This role allows Mueller to support faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows who are skilled at navigating HPC infrastructure but require massive computational power to achieve their research goals.
Mueller appreciates having this trio of local, state, and national resources available to offer Miami faculty and students.
“The relationship has been mutually beneficial,” Mueller said. “Miami users get access to much bigger resources and we get to tap top state expertise and support at OSC that we can benefit from.”
About the Ohio Supercomputer Center
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.
Blue Hen offensive lineman Wahkeem Roman (65) gets ready to block during his first game as a Blue Hen. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
University of Delaware sixth year offensive lineman, Wahkeem Roman, played his first game as a Blue Hen on September 3 against Merrimack, returning to play after two missed seasons due to injury.
NEWARK, DE — UD’s opening game against Merrimack drew over 17,000 fans into Delaware Stadium. The venue was filled with life, excitement, and hope for a new football season after a successful first at the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) level. It’s an environment that any first time Blue Hen could admire while stepping between the white lines for the first time.
Wahkeem Roman had every reason to soak in his surroundings. He experienced multiple home openers stuck on the sidelines during his first two seasons in the blue and gold. This was his first opportunity to truly experience the environment while donning the pads and standing amongst his fellow lineman in the huddle.
Yet, all his focus was trained on one thing. Playing the game he loves for the first time in over 1,000 days.
“I was just so locked in on the game like at that point, I didn’t even realize like I was coming back from an injury,” Roman said.
Roman joined the University of Delaware football program before the 2024 season. His transfer was unique.
Roman attended Notre Dame College located in South Euclid, Ohio, before the former division two school was shut down in the spring of 2024. The other unique variable to Roman’s transfer, an injury to his right knee that affected his ACL, MCL and PCL.
The school closure left Roman without many other options other than entering the transfer portal and the injury made him unsure if any program would take a chance on him, but Roman said he received offers from programs at both the FBS and Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) levels.
The Blue Hens liked what they saw on the limited amount of film Roman had coming into the portal — Roman started four games for Notre Dame College during the 2023 season — said Blue Hen offensive line coach and run game coordinator, Chris Rogers. Rogers and the coaching staff felt like he fit their style of football and would be successful in their system. Off the field, coach Rogers knew that he had the character and fortitude to return from the injury.
“In this business you evaluate people as much or more than you evaluate people as players, and so on film he was a really good player, but also … I really liked the person,” Rogers said. “He said the right things. You could tell he wanted to be developed, you could tell football mattered to him, you could tell this was important, you could tell being successful in college was important, and so like a person who’s got all those traits, obviously, you know, they’re gonna battle they’re way back from an injury and be successful after that.”
Roman blocks against Virginia defensive end Evan Ward during the Blue Hens’ road game against the Cavaliers. Photo Credit: University of Delaware Football.
Roman said the program made him feel like family and accepted him from the moment he arrived. With that comfortability and access to better training resources, he began attacking the rehabilitation process alongside Delaware’s training staff. While his teammates were competing in summer workouts, Roman was in the training room working steadily to improve and strengthen his right leg.
“First we’ll be trying to get my quad to fire, and next week we’ll try to like get my extension all over there and then after all that, maybe I’ll get back walking [on] the treadmill,” Roman said. “It was just week by week, we had a plan and a progress, and it was good.”
Roman essentially had to start the rehab process from square one when he transferred in. The UD training staff discovered that while Roman thought he was ahead in his rehab, it turned out he was actually a little behind in the process.
“I had to catch all the way up and basically start from the beginning, and that was a real slow process, and it was like killer because, … you just want to get back on the field and want to be like a part of the team, you know,” Roman said.
Roman’s recovery cost him the full 2024 season — UD’s last in FCS football — and an injury to the same ACL in the spring of 2025 required him to miss the full 2025 season— UD’s first in FBS football.
“He walked in my office and, you know, I felt like I saw a tear fall down his cheek, and in 15 seconds, I watched that same tear roll back up his cheek and into his eye and it lit a fire under him,” Rogers said.
Roman started the rehab process again, this time with lessons learned from the first time around.
“That’s what I learned the second time around, to really just focus on getting my body back and not rush anything,” Roman said. “My footwork and everything always comes back, it’s just the strengthening that you gotta get back.”
Roman was cleared to play a week into the 2026 spring session. He learned to trust his body to perform at an elite level like it had before, a skill Roman credits to the work of UD’s athletic training staff and former football head athletic trainer, Annie Stock, who helped him rebuild that confidence in himself and his body.
“She would always instill confidence into me like, ‘you’ve done this before, it’s not anything you can’t do, I wouldn’t have you doing it if I didn’t believe in you to do it’ and you just sit back and think like, well, yeah, she doesn’t want me to get hurt again, so obviously I should be good enough to do this,” Roman said.
His first one on one rep in spring practice cemented his confidence in his body’s ability to return to its prior elite level.
“I anchored on a bull rush and I was like ‘oh yeah, this feels good. We’re good to go’,” Roman said.
The Elizabeth, New Jersey, native has played in two games for the Blue Hens this season. His last appearance came in the Blue Hen’s most recent game against Virginia that closed out their non-conference schedule. It was his first chance to play on a Power 4 field against Power 4 competition.
It’s a cool experience for a player whose career embarked on a whirlwind of a journey. A journey that saw him overcome adversity, achieve academic success (Wahkeem earned his bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Delaware in May) and become a leader for the younger players in the offensive line room.
Wahkeem Roman lines up on the left side of the offensive line against Merrimack. This was his first time playing for the Blue Hens since transferring into the program during the spring of 2024. Photo Credit: University of Delaware Football.
“Giving him a hug before the [Merrimack] game was a big moment and I think he deserves that. I tell him all the time I’m thankful I got in the car and drove to go see him and meet him and recruit him,” coach Rogers said. “I’m thankful to be his football coach.”
As Wahkeem completed his first drive as a Blue Hen and walked to the sideline, he said all he remembers is his teammates’ excitement for him. The reality of the moment still hadn’t settled in. There was still an opponent on the field, a game to win and a job to get done.
The Blue Hens defeated Merrimack, 42-7. The team was heading back into the locker room — celebrating — but Roman and his teammate Chandler Telfaire needed to return to the field. They forgot a pair of gloves.
It was at that moment, Wahkeem Roman looked around Delaware stadium and fully took in where his 1,076 day journey led him.
“I was just like wow, I really just came back and played in this stadium. It was a surreal feeling.”
Refugees from third countries are being sent to Equatorial Guinea, where they are often sent back to the very countries they fled
For nearly a year, the Hotel Bamy in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, has been Adam’s prison. He is confined alone to a hotel room, under constant watch by the security officers and soldiers of a notoriously oppressive regime who control his movements. Not long ago, they barged into his room, handcuffed and beat him, and warned him not to tell anyone. There is no cell to point to, no charges or formal sentence, and nothing on paper to document his plight.
Adam, 26, has chosen not to share his real name or even his country of origin out of fear for his safety. He fled indefinite, forced military conscription in his home country after enduring abuse during his military service.
Three years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the U.S. government is still targeting pro-Palestine student activists.
Even before federal immigration agents descended on communities around the country, killing immigrants and protesters, unmarked agents were abducting students who had voiced criticisms of Israel.
Mahmoud Khalil was the first. After federal agents detained him at his alma mater, Columbia University, he spent more than 100 days in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana. It’s been over a year since he was released and returned to live with his family in New York City. The Trump administration is still trying to deport him.
“Part of why I’m doing this right now rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience,” Khalil tells The Intercept Briefing. “I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.”
This week on the podcast, Khalil speaks with host Akela Lacy about what he’s learned about how he became President Donald Trump’s top target, the role Columbia University played in that campaign, and his new book, “No Land to Stand On,” which chronicles Khalil’s experience in ICE detention, missing the birth of his first child, his ongoing saga to stay in the U.S. with his family, and more.
“It’s been so difficult just to have that conversation with my wife Noor about what would happen,” Khalil says. “What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country.”
“It’s about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country. It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
It’s been almost three years since the October 7 attacks in Israel that preceded the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In that time, Israel has destroyed an entire region, killed more than 70,000 people and injured scores more, launched attacks on surrounding countries, and drawn the U.S. into a full-blown war with Iran.
Over the last three years, at home in the U.S., something else fundamentally shattered. If anything is different now, it’s the honesty of it all. Free speech, civil rights, and equal protection under the law — of course, with all the appropriate exceptions.
What started as a bipartisan commitment to suppressing criticism of Israel led to flagrant abductions of pro-Palestine students by unmarkedimmigration agents.
Since the crackdown on students escalated in the early months of Trump’s second term, ICE’s war has spread even further.
Since Trump reentered the White House, ICE has detained more than half a million people and says it’s deported almost twice that. More people are dying in ICE custody or at the hands of federal agents, who have killed at least eight people since January 2025, including two protesters in Minneapolis.
Our guest today lives at this nexus: how the siege on Gaza fueled a reckoning at home and fused America’s anti-immigrant push with its battle over speech on Palestine.
Mahmoud Khalil was the first person taken by ICE over student activism for Palestine last year. Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, fled the country at 18. He later moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leader during student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. After being released from ICE detention last year, Khalil returned to living in New York, where he continues to fight against the threat of deportation. He joins me now.
Mahmoud Khalil, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
MK: He’s a wonderful, wild 17-month-old. So he’s walking all over now, and it just feels so rewarding really to have him in our life right now, especially in a very difficult moment in our family.
I get so much inspiration from him and that pushes me to continue to work because this is not only about my family. It’s a story of so many families who this administration separated and inflicted violence upon them. It’s also a story of so many Palestinian families in Palestine whose fathers are in Israeli prisons [who] can’t meet their families, or even the ones in Gaza who are disappeared right now.
AL: I’m sure you and Noor talk about this, how you will tell Deen your story, and when. What are those conversations like?
MK: I try to push it as much as possible because usually you tell a story that already happened, but my story is still happening. Every day there’s something new.
And that’s what made writing the book difficult for me, because usually you write a memoir about a memory about something that has already happened to you. While, to me, I am now living it. So how would I write about it? That was like so difficult for me.
The same way about telling Deen about it: Would it be a happy story or a sad story? Would it be a story that, in fact, the legal system stood up for the unlawful detention of his father and the attempts to deport him — or it did not? Is it that the people in this country advocated for his father and the rights of so many other people in this country — or not? That’s still to be told, so I don’t want to really jump to conclusions at all.
Part of why I’m doing this right now, rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years, is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience. So is the Palestine exception: the fact that freedom of speech, rule of law, basic dignities are afforded to everyone except for Palestinians. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.
“I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now.”
AL: You were released from ICE detention last summer. What have the last 16 months in your life been like?
MK: It’s been a saga with courts but also just as a family, with a new family now, like trying to really live our life. Try to build our future in a country that at least promised me some sort of stability and safety after living in Syria and then in Lebanon. So it’s been difficult to find that stability and that permanence in our lives. It is a fight to me, like it’s been since then.
It’s been so difficult, of course, just to have that conversation with Noor, my wife Noor, about what would happen. What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just, like, leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country. It’s also about whether those speaking out for Palestine have the right to do so without being punished by the administration or by the government, whether it’s the Trump administration or another. So that’s why I feel like it’s a bigger fight than just about me or about our family.
But at the end of the day, we are people. I want to go to Bryant Park and just watch the movies there, but I can’t do that easily. There’s several precautions I have to do to be able to actually do this very normal activity that any couple would do on a normal day. But it is the cost, unfortunately, that was imposed upon me by ICE and the Trump administration.
“To me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country. It’s also about whether those speaking out for Palestine have the right to do so without being punished.”
AL: To your point, this is something that’s happening at multiple levels. And you write in the book that you were given the option to “self-deport” — to where, we don’t know. But you say that you felt like if you did that, you wouldn’t just be succumbing to this false smear campaign, but you would be giving the federal government the blueprint for how to silence dissent. You also talk about this being a story about the horrors of the broader immigration detention system in the United States.
As of early July, more than 65,000 people are currently being held in immigration detention. You write in your book about your experience in Louisiana at LaSalle and the relationships you built with other people being held there, trading noodles. What was that like for you? You talk a lot about the psychological effects of some of the things: constant bright lights so you can’t sleep, constant freezing cold air. Can you describe the conditions of the facility that you were in?
MK: As I’ve mentioned, what’s happening behind ICE detention walls is a stain on the U.S. conscience. The fact that you have over 65,000 people at any moment detained in what’s called civil detention. That’s what they call ICE detention. And there’s nothing civil about detention. Even if it was a five-star condition, it’s still detention. You’re still separated from your family.
But I met in ICE detention so many incredible fathers and workers who came here seeking safety only to be snatched off the street, only to be told that they are criminals and they do not belong here.
“They want to make these conditions so bad you don’t fight for your case.”
I remember, and I talk in my book about, Najib, a man who was snatched off his immigration hearing — leaving behind his wife battling cancer with four little kids. Or Alexander, who came here begging for safety, begging for a place to stay, only to be told, “No, you should be safe where you’re from.” And when he was deported, he got killed.
They want to make these conditions so bad you don’t fight for your case, because you can fight your case, but that could take six months to two years, three years.
AL: Even if you win.
MK: Even if you win. That’s the fact. That’s how they weaponize the immigration system against you. Even if you win, you lose. They can appeal multiple times — not once or twice. Because it’s a kangaroo court. The system is so favorable to the administration, and the administration can change at any time.
That’s why you rarely find now anyone who would win in the immigration system, because it’s fully controlled by this administration. To me, it doesn’t make sense that you call it courts, or an impartial system, or a neutral system. It’s a very partial system to the administration.
That’s why they keep the lights on all the time. That’s why the temperature is down; it’s always cold. The food is pretty bad. You only have a thin blanket. Because they don’t want you to feel comfortable or have the basics to fight your case.
“To me, it doesn’t make sense that you call it courts, or an impartial system, or a neutral system. It’s a very partial system to the administration.”
AL: You’re very much still in limbo. It’s been almost six months since the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final ruling in one of your cases ordering your removal. Last week, that same body denied a request to reopen your case.
I know your team is looking at bringing your case to the Supreme Court. What’s the latest there? And when will you know if you have to leave the country?
MK: So 18 months since my arrest, the Trump administration has never brought any piece of evidence that I committed any crime. They haven’t even charged me with any crime because they know they control the immigration system.
“What they’re trying to do now in immigration is the total opposite: You are guilty until you are proven innocent — but you might be deported before then.”
So now we’re appealing our case to the Supreme Court — an Article III court — to look into the matter. Because what the Trump administration’s trying until now is to prevent me from even looking into the merits of the case that they are bringing against me. What they are claiming is that this case is purely an immigration case, and only immigration judges should be able to look at it. Then if you want to go to a federal court, it should go to the 5th Circuit or the courts in Texas and Louisiana, who are pretty much favorable to the administration as well.
So they are trying to prevent a federal court from looking into this matter. We are now taking it to the Supreme Court because no government should have the power to detain someone without any independent judgment into it.
Usually, the basics in criminal law are that you are innocent until proven guilty. What they’re trying to do now in immigration is the total opposite: You are guilty until you are proven innocent — but you might be deported before then. So it is a long fight. But once again, this fight is not only about my ability to stay in this country. It’s more than this.
It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.
“If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.”
AL: You and your team have expressed concerns that any ruling at the Supreme Court could backfire and further curtail the rights of pro-Palestine students. I wonder if you can you talk more about that?
MK: For now, what we’re taking to the Supreme Court is only whether a federal court has jurisdiction to look into constitutional claims. For me, my constitutional claim is that the Trump administration wanted to deport me because of my activism on Palestine.
That’s what we’re bringing right now to the Supreme Court. This wouldn’t necessarily directly impact or have a larger impact on the movement as a whole. But already the government is doing everything in its power to chill the speech of whether students or citizens who are speaking out for Palestine. So what we’re trying is actually to prevent that.
But the other part is, we seek accountability also from the public themselves. You don’t get accountability only through courts. You get accountability through the people who are now voting in progressive candidates into Congress who may be able to change the law.
That’s how I get accountability. I get accountability when I see that my book is out and people are reading what this administration tried to silence — that they want to make an example out of me, but they failed. That’s how we seek accountability. It’s not only from the court itself, because at the end of the day, people who create the law actually push for the law.
Because everything we got right now, the rights that American citizens or anyone on this land have, it was a product of a fight. Whether it’s a fight during the civil rights movement or the anti-slavery movement before then. It did not happen because a judge woke up and decided to do what’s right. It’s because, actually, people pushed for that to happen, and that’s my part of the fight right now.
AL: Mahmoud, you were not a random target. We know now that ICE took names from the pro-Israel doxing group Canary Mission to create a list of targets. Far-right pro-Israel groups like Canary Mission and the USA chapter of the militant, ultra-Zionist group Betar — considered by even the Anti-Defamation League as an anti-Muslim hate group — targeted you.
Betar later claimed credit for ICE’s abduction of you and other students and said it shared “thousands” of — we know now it was about 5,000 — names of pro-Palestine students with the Trump administration for further action. In the lead-up to your abduction, Betar targeted you by name, as did actors at your alma mater, Columbia University: another group, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia, and a professor, Shai Davidai, who called specifically for the Trump administration to deport and arrest you in the days leading up to that abduction and tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
You write in the book: “What I did not anticipate was the U.S. government would one day consider the recommendation of hostile Zionist groups to target me, and then act on it.”
You sued for communications between these groups and the Trump administration. What more have you found out about how much they coordinated to target and arrest you and other students?
MK: The targeting of me and other pro-Palestine protesters was written in a document called Project Esther that was produced by the Heritage Foundation. In there, what they said [was], for this plan to work, we need a friendly administration that would listen to us and work with us to implement it.
That’s what happened after, because Stephen Miller was part of the Heritage Foundation or consulting for them, and then he became part of this administration, and actually worked on implementing this plan from A to Z.
From the discovery that the case in Massachusetts — AAUP v. Rubio—
AL: This is the American Association of University Professors lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“We’re hoping to really expose these networks that pushed anti-Palestinian bigotry to be institutionalized within the U.S. government itself.”
One of the ICE agents or one of the DHS agents testified that, “I’ve never seen something like this happen in our department, that such a request would come from really senior individuals in the administration.” So now what we are suing for is to see this communication between between these private actors, whether it is Canary Mission, the Heritage Foundation, Betar, and others as well, what we call Zionist hate groups, and these administrators, whether it’s Rubio, Stephen Miller, or DOJ, and the attorney general.
Because it was all in public. Betar went out and said, “We take credit for that. We actually communicated with the administration about that.” That’s what we know publicly. So now we’re asking for these communications. This case, we filed it in July, takes some time, but we’re hoping to really expose these networks that pushed anti-Palestinian bigotry to be institutionalized within the U.S. government itself.
I got used to smear campaigns and doxing before my arrest. To me, that was part of an intimidation campaign to terrorize me not to speak out about Palestine.
To me, back then, the thought process was, usually they target your employer, they target your university, your father’s employers. I’m like, “Why would I work for anyone who doesn’t agree with my views on Palestine or who sees them as extreme? I don’t want to work for them.”
You know, I never wore a mask [at Columbia] to hide my identity because the risk to me wasn’t that high. In Syria, I wore masks, because the risk back then was getting shot by [Bashar al] Assad forces or getting disappeared by mukhabarat, or intelligence officers.
I never imagined that what I fled from would happen to me in the U.S., the land of the free.
AL: After a quick break, more from Mahmoud Khalil, who has a new book, “No Land to Stand On.” We’ll be right back.
Welcome back. We’re speaking with Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Palestine student taken by ICE last year.
You’ve filed three other lawsuits against the federal government and Columbia, and you are waiting for a response from the most recent suit which alleges a historical pattern of discrimination and retaliation against Palestinian students and pro-Palestinian activists, as well as a failure to address “coordinated harassment” against pro-Palestine students at your alma mater, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
You’ve said that Columbia didn’t only ignore your concerns or documented harassment, but that the university facilitated your targeting and arrest by the Trump administration.
Of the suit, you said: “Columbia laid the groundwork for my targeting by the Trump administration through its deliberate indifference and discrimination aimed at intimidating Palestinian students.”
For listeners who might not be familiar with how Columbia handled protests against the genocide in Gaza, or its history trying to crush and later celebrate other student protest movements, against the Vietnam War or to divest from apartheid South Africa, can you tell us a little bit more about the role the school played here?
MK: When I applied to come to Columbia, I applied to come to an institution that had a long history of student activism, of standing up, at least the students of that institution standing up for human rights, whether it was during the ’60s and the civil rights movement or in the anti-apartheid South Africa, but also most recently, against private prisons, against fossil fuels. So it goes beyond that.
That’s the institution I came to. But I was surprised — even before October 7 — the level of the anti-Palestinian racism on campus. For example, when we tried to bring Human Rights Watch to our school [in 2023], the school put so many hurdles in front of us to be able to host a 70-person event. I was shocked. Why would you prevent us from hosting such a reputable human rights organization to come and talk about apartheid in South Africa? The same happened when we tried to bring BDS — the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — virtually on campus.
So on October 7, Columbia had a choice of being an example for other institutions around the country, of being a place where difficult conversations would be held, where they would stand up for human rights, where they would actually listen to their own students.
Instead, Columbia employed surveillance systems against their own students, brutalized them. They called in the police about four times or more than four times in less than two years. Provided that, the last time Columbia called the police on campus was during the ’60s — like 60, 70 years ago.
They couldn’t contain the movement; they established a Gestapo-like office called the Office of the Institutional Equity that investigated every single Palestinian advocacy on campus, going after them with investigations. They brought private investigators; I remember being called by a private investigator that Columbia hired just to intimidate us.
AL: I spoke to students who got those calls, too, and they’re like, “What is this?”
MK: Exactly. Instead of just listening to their students, to their own students. These students were, most of them, 17 to 20 years old, watching a genocide happening in real time.
So that was the climate at Columbia. At the same time, they harbored these actors who were doxing us. As a Palestinian, I pleaded so many times to get protection from the university up until the day of my arrest.
AL: Right. The day before.
MK: The day before my arrest, March 7, I emailed the president. I knew she wouldn’t answer. But I wanted to keep the record because I emailed her before then in January when the first wave of doxing happened, and they did not do anything.
A year later, when another student was kidnapped by ICE from Columbia, non-Palestinian, non-related-Palestinian student was detained by ICE — Columbia immediately issued a statement, immediately called lawyers, immediately called elected officials because that student did not have to do anything with Palestine.
But that’s again the Palestine exception in these institutions, where you have ideologues on the board of trustees of Columbia whose protection of Israel for them is much more important than protecting freedom of speech, than actually listening to their students, than the normal decency of just being board of trustees who have responsibility toward these institutions, but their loyalty was somewhere else.
AL: You’ve also mentioned future plans to sue other individuals at Columbia. In your suit against Trump, DHS, ICE and Rubio, your legal team cited reporting by me and my colleague Natasha Lennard on a network of faculty, alumni and other people at Columbia who were active in trying to target pro-Palestine students for deportation and arrest. You write in the book about coordination between Columbia students and faculty and some of these groups that smeared and doxed students. You write: “Those who fed our names to the machine continued to attend the school.”
What else have you learned about those people and those efforts?
MK: I will continue to seek accountability until everyone who actively participated in me missing the birth of my child and me losing 104 days of my life, until they are all held accountable.
I will not stop until I achieve that. I’m doing this up until now, with first suing the federal government, then the federal government and private actors. And the private actors also included some of the Columbia actors who were feeding our names to Canary Mission.
Because we have to think about this — Canary Mission and Betar, or the Heritage Foundation — they did not have people on the ground. The people on the ground were Columbia’s own students and faculty, who were not hiding that they were doxing us.
MK: Exactly. So we got records about communication between some of the students at Columbia and Leo Terrell, the chief of the antisemitism task force in the DOJ, pushing them to target us, but also providing talking points that we later saw on Terrell’s own social media.
“It was a very coordinated effort to demonize our movement.”
So that network goes beyond just random actors. It was a very coordinated effort to demonize our movement, to vilify the student movement that was rooted in human rights and equality and dignity. That’s why so many students joined this movement, not only Palestinians.
Palestinians at Columbia were barely 20, 30 students. But the movement that was built, it was built by Black students, by Asian students, by Jewish students. The coalition that was created as well, it had groups ranging from dancing groups, cultural groups, to the Young Democrats.
More than 100 groups joined together to call for Palestinian freedom, to call for the end of Columbia’s complicity in supporting Israel.
“Palestinians at Columbia were barely 20, 30 students. But the movement that was built, it was built by Black students, by Asian students, by Jewish students.”
AL: Mahmoud, you mentioned this already, the logic of exception regarding Palestine. You write in the book about the logic of exception regarding Palestine, the idea that only certain categories of Palestinians are deserving of rights. You talk about how you’ve internalized that in some ways as well.
This comes up in what I’ve noticed as attempts, even by well-meaning people, to paint you as “one of the good ones” among university students that have been portrayed otherwise, as an unruly mass of student protesters on a rampage in protesting this genocide. There was a similar effort around your Columbia colleague Mohsen Mahdawi, who was also targeted and abducted by ICE for his pro-Palestine activism.
During the Columbia encampments, you were active in the protests, and you also worked as a negotiator between protesters and university administrators, one of whom told the New Yorker that you stood out from other protesters for your levelheadedness, which I found very interesting.
What is the effect of trying to separate you from the rest of the pack as the “right” kind of protester”? How do you overcome that?
MK: That really enraged me that you have to be a perfect victim to be worthy of people’s sympathy, to be worthy of the rule of law. Because what we protested is a genocide. That’s what we protested, and that’s the right thing to do. It shouldn’t be criminalized. Unfortunately, we internalized that.
“That really enraged me that you have to be a perfect victim to be worthy of people’s sympathy, to be worthy of the rule of law. Because what we protested is a genocide.”
I talk a little bit about how I myself would highlight the numbers of women and children just to appeal to more people that like, “Look, young women and children are being killed by Israel.” But what about the men? Because that’s the level of the dehumanization of Palestinians in this country, that it only took the Trump administration to mention my name as “Mahmoud Khalil” and Palestinian for people to paint a certain image of me.
But in reality, I’m a Palestinian who believes in a free Palestine, where everyone from the river to the sea deserves safety, dignity, and freedom.
Just like the fact that I had to be that perfect victim. Because I’m not perfect. No one is perfect. Palestinians are, you know —
AL: Human.
MK: Humans, the same as any other, any other nation. We have our aspirations. We have our culture. We have our deficiencies. We’re not out of this planet. But yet the media insists on treating Palestinians on a different standard, when they ask me about condemning or not condemning all of that, I’m like, you’re not interested in my views about Hamas.
If you’re interested about my views about Hamas, you would ask me what are my views about Hamas, or a different question. But they use that question as a litmus test: If you say yes, then maybe you are a human worthy of talking to. If not, then you are that villain that this administration is talking about. That’s why we refuse the premise of the question as a whole. It’s not about the question itself. The whole premise of the question we refuse.
I think it’s for Americans to reckon with why we are here, why we are treating Palestinian stories differently from any other story. Whether it’s the Zionist lobby that for tens of years has fed this hate, whether it’s the media itself or Hollywood or just the institutions themselves that fed that hate and fed the image of the Palestinian as violent, rather than just a human being.
Or recently just how, it’s not only the Trump administration. It’s before them, the Biden administration, before them, the Obama administration. It goes back to every administration this country had dehumanizing Palestinians. Because Trump wouldn’t have had the power to do what he did with me were it not for what Colombia portrayed or said about the movement, or the Biden administration as well.
“It’s for Americans to reckon with why we are here, why we are treating Palestinian stories differently from any other story.”
AL: And as we’ve written about a lot at The Intercept the beginning of this crackdown on campuses started under Biden.
MK: Absolutely.
AL: I want to deviate quickly just because you mentioned this question, and I had written a question that I wasn’t sure we would have time to get to about being asked about Hamas because this comes up in The New Yorker article, and I was curious what you thought of how — I don’t know if you read the latest one from last month.
MK: The profile?
AL: Yeah. Because I was curious about how it was framed, because he says that you push back on the framing of the question, right? He asked you about your views on Hamas and that you protested the premise of the question. And then it said what your explanation was. But I thought it was interesting to print your defense of why you reject the premise, but still print your answer to the question.
But when they saw that Israel is undermining any prospects of a Palestinian state, a lot of Palestinians turned to Hamas as that resistance movement that may bring something.
And as I explain in my book, Palestinians supported Hamas not because of ideological reasons as much as because they wanted a way forward. For me, I’m against all Palestinian political factions because not one of them — whether it’s Hamas, Fatah, or PFLP — rose up to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, unfortunately.
“I’m against all Palestinian political factions because not one of them — whether it’s Hamas, Fatah, or PFLP — rose up to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, unfortunately.”
That’s why I’m a strong believer in international law. I’m a strong believer in the fact that Palestinians have the right of self-determination, have the right to resist under international law, and have the right to really tell the world what they want. That’s what I want my answer about such a questions to be.
AL: That’s not what people want to hear.
MK: Yeah, exactly. They want just a yes or no, it’s a black and white.
I can’t tell people how to resist. That’s from being in the United States. For someone who’s going through bombardment, who’s going through checkpoints, whose house is being raided at night by the Israeli army, who the drones are above their heads all the time — I can’t, from here, tell them how to resist.
But for me, I’m a firm believer of international law, and that’s how I see the way forward. Again, I’m a Palestinian. I believe in a free Palestine, where everyone, from the river to the sea, have the right to live with dignity, with justice, with freedom, with equality. That’s what we’re asking for.
AL: This fight, when it comes down to it, is fundamentally over First Amendment rights for you and everyone in this country and the fight for freedom in Palestine.
A new report from Uncivil, a consortium of scholars and researchers, audited five years, going back to 2020, of publicly listed grants to 77 university centers, initiatives, and nonprofits doing “civility” work to promote pluralism and viewpoint diversity. The group found that almost all of the top funders, responsible for $82 million in grants, were groups and foundations deeply invested in conservative and/or “pro-Israel” networks.
Unsurprisingly, these funders donated more to groups that mirrored and promoted their viewpoints over progressive groups by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. Just to underscore this point, the top five grantees who have received funding for “civility discourse” work include: Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council — which does model bills for state legislatures — the Anti-Defamation League, and Project Veritas. This is essentially a list of the most right-wing groups in the country at the moment. The top groups.
While many of those groups present this civility discourse as politically neutral, Uncivil found that 70 percent of the campuses they looked at had been accused of suppressing pro-Palestine speech. This is now roughly a $200-million-a-year industry.
In the book, you talk about how this movement at Columbia backfired: in trying to suspend or shut down pro-Palestine groups, it ended up creating a 100 or more new pro-Palestine groups.
But given how strong this “civility discourse” push still is, where do you see the student Palestine solidarity movement going from here?
MK: The fact that the president of the United States felt the need to go after a random student means that this movement changed the mainstream, means that we are winning. Otherwise, they would leave it to, I would say, covert racism and discrimination because it was always happening at Columbia, as I’ve mentioned these attacks against Palestine. But it wasn’t very obvious. Because they did not need to.
I don’t think there’s an amount of money that would stop the Palestine movement for freedom, because we can see that people now feel betrayed by their institutions, feel betrayed by their representatives, feel betrayed by the establishment that hid from them the endless support to Israel.
“The fact that the president of the United States felt the need to go after a random student means that this movement changed the mainstream.”
Because now if you’re a politician who’s supporting Palestine, that means you’re also good on other things. Because a lot of people, Palestine may not be their single issue or their first. But if you’re good on Palestine, that means you are good on other things.
That means that you are not bought by corporations and by AIPAC and by the oligarchs. That’s how it came right now. That’s why in Zohran’s race —
AL: Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor.
MK:Tens of millions were spent against him, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate, the Democratic candidate, also over $60 million were spent against him, and still he won [the primary]. But that doesn’t mean to me that we should stop. That means that we should continue until that dome breaks. And it will break. Sooner or later, it will break.
We need change. We need to stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, or any arms to Israel, or anything to Israel, really. Israel should be isolated, should be the pariah state that it is. That’s why I keep pushing now. I keep working on advocating for Palestine. That this did not stop. The genocide’s still happening. Every day there is a Palestinian getting killed by Israel, whether in Gaza or in the West Bank.
But also we must acknowledge the violence that was inflicted upon students, upon this movement in this country. It’s not only universities that suspended and expelled these students, not only that the police also brutalized their students, but you have a big attack on this movement that’s happening across the country, whether from the federal government itself. But you can see across the country, whether it is in the South or even small counties also still trying to attack this movement.
My position as a Palestinian is, how can we really face this level of violence or this level of coordinated and well-funded attacks against the movement?
AL: Though the Trump administration has claimed repeatedly that your case is not about free speech or the First Amendment, they have not necessarily been arguing that your speech wasn’t constitutionally protected or that you are here illegally. Just to be clear, for anyone who’s confused, you are a green card holder, a lawful permanent resident.
We’ve been talking about this New Yorker piece, as Andrew Marantz wrote last month. The government is arguing that none of those things — the legality of your actions, or your presence here — outweigh Trump’s power to detain you on whatever grounds it sees fit. In this case, claiming that your presence is a threat to American foreign policy interests.
You’ve talked about this fundamental contradiction in the American story of democracy and liberty, that the only real rights we have are those the government sees fit to enforce. You talk about the suspension of principles, depending on the circumstance. And this is a long-standing criticism of the American government, particularly if you’re a minority, a woman, a trans person, or if you’re poor.
You’ve shared your unique perspective on this issue, having lived under a dictatorship in Syria under Bashar al-Assad. You have said at least in Syria, the government wasn’t telling you it was upholding your rights. [laughs] They were open about it. And since your abduction, we’re seeing the government be in many ways more open about its intentions here. But what happens after that?
MK: It’s fascism. It is authoritarianism. What we’re seeing within my case or other cases is authoritarian practices. The government is trying their luck. For the government now, the worst thing that could happen is a court telling them, “No, maybe you shouldn’t do this.”
“For the government now, the worst thing that could happen is a court telling them, ‘No, maybe you shouldn’t do this.’”
But for me, I lost 104 days of my life. For others, they lost their entire lives. I’m not an expert on authoritarianism or dictatorships, but I lived under dictatorship. As I said, in Syria, I hid my face because I knew the risks. It wasn’t Assad was going out and saying, “We have freedom of speech, and we have all of that.” It wasn’t like that. You knew the consequences.
Here, they would gaslight you into “No, you have rights. You have all of this.” But you have rights because it’s convenient for them. As long as you’re not damaging or impacting the structures of power, you have freedom of speech, you have rule of law, the Constitution applies to you. But the moment that your speech or your actions threaten that structure of power, you would see the opposite — which is authoritarianism at the end of the day.
Trump is not hiding it. When they arrested me, they said, “This is a blueprint to go after everyone who’s speaking out for Palestine.” It’s not like they hid their intentions at all.
Part of me, like years from now, America would look back on ICE detention, on Palestine, and say, why did we let this happen? And that’s part of my fight. That’s why I’m doing this right now, because we need to stop it now. We can’t afford to wait 20 years from now because people are being killed. People are being disappeared. 65,000 at any moment are in ICE detention separated from their families.
“You have rights because it’s convenient for them. As long as you’re not damaging or impacting the structures of power, you have freedom of speech.”
AL: Mahmoud, are there any final thoughts you would like to leave our listeners with?
MK: I wrote this book to raise the alarm that we can’t afford to stay silent. That in our backyards, there are ICE detention centers. In our backyards, there are weapon manufacturers who are shipping weapons to Israel to kill people. We must act now, and we can’t just afford to wait.
AL: Mahmoud Khalil, we’re gonna leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.
MK: No, it’s my honor, Akela. Thank you so much.
AL: That does it for this episode.
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This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Video editing by Sean Turner. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. And a special thank you to our recording engineer David Herman at Good Studio. Slip Stream provided our theme music.
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Death toll of medical helicopter crash is now three people as two others continue to recover from injuries, authorities say
Police divers have found the body of a patient who went missing after a medical helicopter crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island near Los Angeles, bringing the death toll to three while two other people were recovering from their injuries, the authorities said on Friday.
Divers with the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department found the victim’s body Thursday in the wreckage of the helicopter after searching more than 156 sq miles (404 sq km) over 23 hours, the Coast Guard said in a statement.
Supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu call him “Mr. Security.” Critics said this week’s FlyDubai incident, a day after he warned of a possible attack against Israel, was another security lapse on his watch.
Why Should Delaware Care? For the past few years, Delaware has been discussing how to reform its generations-old statewide school funding to better serve a modern classroom. The key question that has yet to be answered though is how a new formula will ultimately impact each school in the state.
Within the last two years, education leaders have tried to reform Delaware’s archaic public education funding system so schools have the resources to meet all students’ needs.
Last year, those conversations led Delaware’s Public Education Funding Commission — the appointed group tasked with recommending changes to the state’s 85-year-old school funding system — to unanimously recommend that lawmakers approve a hybrid funding framework, which would shift education spending away from a strictly per-student basis to one that directs more dollars toward students with higher needs.
This past summer, two bills that lay the groundwork for that funding system reform were signed into law by Gov. Matt Meyer.
The commission has also worked on its first implementation phase since the two bills were signed into law.
The first phase does not include implementation of a new formula, though.
Instead, the Delaware Department of Education is working on system updates during this phase, along with communication and training materials for those who will have a “key role” in changing the formula, said Brian Ray, the associate secretary of the finance and operations team at the Department of Education, during a public meeting this week.
Ray also said the commission’s working group will also have to consolidate existing funding appropriations such as teacher positions or different block grants into three main categories: base, opportunity, and operational funding.
The commission’s working group also established four subgroups to move forward with phase two and focus on equalization, multilanguage learners, vocational and career technical education, and students from low-income backgrounds.
Ray said each of the subgroups have met at least once, and “they’re starting to identify the variables and the processes we need to to work through to then make recommendations to [the full Public Education Funding Commission] to then review, vote, and move forward with into that next phase.”
Any given school in Delaware is likely depending on a dozen funding streams or more, while leaders are seeking to streamline that to just three streams. | PHOTOS COURTESY OF DDOE
Why was school funding being questioned?
Delaware’s current funding formula was established in 1940, with the state and federal governments providing about 70% of the funding while 30% is generated through district-level property taxes that residents vote on during referendums.
Before the bill, Sussex County had not conducted a countywide property tax reassessment since 1974, while New Castle and Kent County last reassessed property in 1983 and 1987, respectively.
The lack of assessments meant properties were extremely misvalued; some homeowners paid more than what the updated market called for and others paid too little.
Because of communities’ differences in wealth and in their willingness to support public schools, some – particularly in rural Delaware – are at a disadvantage when trying to compete for high-quality educators.
And a failure to pass or even hold referendums only furthers a gap between wealthy districts and those that are more economically modest.
Those concerns are exacerbated in areas in Sussex County that face a combined disadvantage of relatively low property wealth and high student needs.
Advocacy groups like the Delaware NAACP and Delawareans for Educational Opportunity filed a lawsuit in 2018, stating that the state’s education system did not provide an adequate education to all students. After a preliminary ruling allowed the lawsuit to proceed, the state settled the case, promising to reassess property and review statewide school funding reform.
The American Institutes for Research completed its independent assessment of education funding in Delaware as part of the 2020 settlement.
The group recommended in late 2023 that Delaware increase spending on public education by upward of $1 billion.
After both Democratic and Republican members of the State Senate’s Education Committee raised concerns in a March 2024 meeting over how the sum would affect taxpayers, the legislature chose to create the Public Education Funding Commission to examine the recommendation.
What has the PEFC done?
The committee held its first meeting in September 2024, and eight months later it unveiled an example of what the group called a new “hybrid formula,” giving a glimpse of what an overhaul of the funding system could look like.
By the end of the May 2025 meeting, the example produced as many questions as answers.
During the meeting, commission members were shown how the example formula would affect seven individual schools.
Those schools were Brandywine High School, Delcastle Technical High School, Frederick Douglass Elementary School, Lulu M. Ross Elementary School, the Charter School of Wilmington, Stanton Middle School, and Warner Elementary School.
Each of those schools, except for Ross Elementary, would gain about $1.29 million if that version of the hybrid formula example were implemented.
Ross instead would have lost more than $181,000.
Multiple members expressed concerns about Ross losing money because of its high population of students from low-income backgrounds and English-language learners.
“I doubt anyone in this room would accept a model that didn’t increase the allocations to a school like Lulu Ross that serves the population they serve,” said Commission Chair State Sen. Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred), who is a retired Spanish teacher.
The commission voted unanimously to approve a recommendation to move forward with a new hybrid framework in June 2025. Details from the May model were not included in the recommendation.
The approved recommendation only pushed forward the idea of a hybrid framework, and did not provide details as to the specific funding model that will be used to calculate a school’s new state support.
Last October, commission members also unveiled three categories for the funding model: base, opportunity, and operational funding. The three categories allow Delaware to use resource-based funding, or funding based on the number of students, and combine it with flexible dollars that will flow toward students that are multilanguage learners or from low-income backgrounds, among other student groups.
The Public Education Funding Commission also held multiple community listening sessions throughout last winter, and in April voted in favor of five different recommendations that ultimately called for the state to move forward with the hybrid model and to include a hold harmless so that districts would not lose dollars during the first years of implementation, among other recommendations.
In May, Sturgeon introduced two bills that came directly from the PEFC. One bill enabled the Delaware Department of Education to begin implementing the hybrid school funding model. It also includes a provision to mandate that no school receive less money under the model than it would have under the previous funding model.
The other bill established the PEFC as a permanent body to continue studying and evaluating the state’s funding formula in the years to come.
Both bills have since been signed into law by Meyer.
Greensboro, NC — The Greensboro Police Department drew criticism after using its official social media account to joke that anyone arrested would be forced to listen to Taylor Swift’s newest songs repeatedly while being transported to jail.
The department posted Tuesday that people arrested that night “will be required to listen to Taylor Swift’s new songs on repeat,” apparently referencing tracks released with an expanded edition of Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl.
What might have passed as a routine attempt at humor quickly became a discussion about how police departments use official accounts. One commenter questioned whether an agency entrusted with arrests and criminal investigations should be joking about treatment of people in custody.
Greensboro police responded: “Relax. It’s called community outreach.”
That response generated additional criticism, with some users arguing that dismissing questions about professionalism was itself inappropriate for a law-enforcement agency. Others simply viewed the original post as harmless humor.
Police later added another tongue-in-cheek message apologizing for “stirring up the Taylor bots” and encouraging people to keep listening to Swift’s album.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez remains in custody after surgery to remove bullet supporters say was stuck close to his spine
The Venezuelan delivery driver who was shot and wounded by a federal immigration agent in Texas last month had surgery on Thursday to remove the bullet that had been lodged in his back for nearly two weeks.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, had appeared in court in a wheelchair on Wednesday, wearing a sling on his arm. He remains in custody on charges that he assaulted an officer while trying to evade arrest.
The Supreme Court has announced which cases and controversies it will consider during arguments from October to December 2026.
Two major cases to be heard in December focus on religious rights with a significant Second Amendment challenge also scheduled for argument that month. In addition, the question of voter ID laws will reach the Court this fall, along with controversies about climate change, and two Eighth Amendment challenges.
Energy giants Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil Corporation have appealed a divided ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court in favor of the City of Boulder and Boulder County, Colorado. Boulder sued over claims relating to the alleged local negative effects of greenhouse-gas emissions on their governments. Suncor Energy is arguing that federal precedents prevent Boulder from suing over damage caused by emissions from outside of the region.
Johnson v. United States Congress (25-735) will also be heard on the first Monday of October. In this dispute, the Court will consider whether the Veterans’ Judicial Review Act blocks district courts from hearing challenges about the constitutionality of acts of Congress affecting veterans’ benefits. The petitioners have asked the Supreme Court to decide whether its precedent in Johnson v. Robison (1974) allows district courts to consider such challenges.
Other cases in the first session include Beaird v. United States (25-5343), which considers whether the Court’s precedent in Stinson v. United Statesdefines the level of deference in criminal sentencing related to the Commentary of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. In this case, Beaird contested a sentence that he received for possession of a semiautomatic weapon with a large capacity magazine. Also, in Salazar v. Paramount Global (25-459), the Supreme Court will consider whether Paramount can be liable for sharing with Facebook “personally identifiable information” gathered from email campaigns promoting its own video products.
The Supreme Court has scheduled seven sets of arguments for early November 2026. The highest-profile case is St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy (25-581).
The petitioners, Catholic preschools in the Archdiocese of Denver, claim religious discrimination when they were denied state funding under a Colorado universal preschool program that pays for families to send their children to public or private preschools.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit agreed with a lower court ruling that the state could deny funding to the schools. It cited Supreme Court precedent in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), stating the Colorado program and law were generally applicable and did not target the preschools.
In accepting St. Mary Catholic Parish, the Supreme Court will not consider whether Employment Division v. Smith should be overturned. Instead, it will consider how Supreme Court precedents apply when lower courts consider if a government is explicitly excluding religious people and institutions from public benefits.
Also on the early November argument calendar is Nielsen v. Watanabe (25-417), where the respondent alleged that he suffered a fractured coccyx in a prison gang fight, causing chronic pain due to mistreatment. The question is whether the case should be considered as an Eighth Amendment claim of deliberate indifference to medical needs, as established in Carlson v. Green (1980).
Arguments running from Nov. 30, 2026, until Dec. 9, 2026, include several major cases. In Jouppi v. Alaska (25-246), the justices will consider a dispute from Alaska over the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause, where state police arrested pilot Ken Jouppi and his lone passenger on Jouppi’s local air-taxi transport plane. The plane was bound for a town that had banned the consumption of alcohol. The police spotted a six-pack of Budweiser on top of the passenger’s luggage and subsequently found three cases of beer.
Alaska has tried to seize Jouppi’s Cessna aircraft under a forfeiture statute. The question presented to the Supreme Court is “whether, in determining whether a fine contravenes the Excessive Fines Clause, courts may consider the gravity of the underlying offense purely in the abstract or should consider the gravity of the specific defendant's wrongdoing.”
In Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota (25-1017) the Supreme Court will turn to the National Voter Registration Act, which allows voters to register to vote at the same time they apply for a driver's license, whether by mail or in person. Arizona passed laws requiring new voter registrants to provide physical “documentary proof of citizenship” and for county recorders to conduct citizenship audits of voter registration rolls against state and federal databases. Mi Familia Vota and others have sued to block these laws from going into effect.
In Viramontes v. Cook County (25-238) and Grant v. Higgins (25-566), the Supreme Court will consider challenges to laws that place restrictions on the possession of assault rifles. The constitutional question is whether these laws conflict with the Second Amendment and 14th Amendment of the Constitution. In Viramontes, Cutberto Viramontes and others are appealing a Seventh Circuit ruling upholding Cook County’s ban on AR-15 rifles. Viramontes sought to acquire such a rifle. Cook County criminalizes the sale, transfer, or possession of any “assault weapon” including AR-15s.
The circuit court concluded that rifles like the semiautomatic AR-15 rifle “are not ‘Arms’ under the Second Amendment,” citing Bevis v. City of Naperville, another Seventh Circuit decision from 2023. The Bevis court undertook a Bruen-style analysis to decide the case, using a frame from the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). The Bruen test requires a court to look at history and tradition when considering appeals about laws that restrict firearms ownership.
In his appeal, Viramontes said the appeals court misapplied Bruen and did not consider another key Supreme Court precedent, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).
In Grand v. City of University Heights, Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jew, invited 15 of his friends over to pray with a “minyan,” in the privacy of his home in University Heights, Ohio. Grand was then contacted by the town’s mayor and its law director before the minyan. They told Grand that praying in a residential home constituted a “synagogue” under the University Heights zoning code, which required a special-use permit. Grand also received a cease-and-desist letter.
Grand sued the city, its mayor, and its law director in federal court. The district court ruled that Grand lacked standing to sue on First Amendment grounds and dismissed his case for lack of ripeness. It cited the Supreme Court’s precedent in Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City (1985), as requiring Grand to get a final zoning board decision before pursuing his claim. The Sixth Circuit upheld the lower court's decision.
The question accepted by the Supreme Court is whether “a credible government threat that deters the exercise of fundamental rights” is displaced by Williamson County’s land-use finality requirement when a plaintiff alleges that government threats both before and after a Planning Commission meeting chilled his religious exercise, worship, and assembly.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
As LeBron James and other NBA stars wholeheartedly embrace the murk of betting and prediction markets, the San Antonio Spurs’ 22-year-old cornerstone has drawn a refreshing line
If the song from LeBron James’s agonizing Polymarket ad is as stuck in your head as mine thanks to the commercial playing during every YouTube video and HBO show (all I wanted to do was rewatch The Leftovers), let Victor Wembanyama be your antidote. At the Spurs’ practice on Thursday, San Antonio Express-News columnist Mike Finger asked Wembanyama if he would ever partner with a sports betting firm. It couldn’t have been easier for the 22-year-old to say yes. The NBA displays ads for both FanDuel and DraftKings, in addition to hawking betting odds on its broadcasts. Until the streaming service met its end a few months ago, plenty of NBA games streamed exclusively on FanDuel Sports Network. Then there are Wembanyama’s legendary peers: James is the new face of Polymarket; Kevin Durant reads FanDuel odds and invests in Kalshi; Giannis Antetokounmpo is a Kalshi shareholder.
“Absolutely not,” Wembanyama said instead. “I will never do that. Honestly, I think it’s very sad to see some players promote it. Everybody does whatever they want, but without me.”
Burlington, NC — A Burlington nursing home has agreed to pay nearly $100,000 to resolve allegations that it employed an unlicensed woman as a nurse and billed Medicaid for services she provided to residents.
North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson announced Thursday that White Oak Manor of Burlington will pay $98,474 to the state, including $49,237 in Medicaid restitution. State officials said Nieasha Jones was hired despite having no nursing license, training or experience.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, Jones worked 54 shifts over three months, interacted with nursing-home residents and provided care while lacking the required qualifications. White Oak Manor subsequently billed Medicaid for resident services that included work performed by Jones.
The investigation began after the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Health Service Regulation referred the matter to the Attorney General’s Medicaid Investigations Division.
Jackson said health-care providers must ensure employees are qualified before allowing them to treat patients and bill taxpayers for that care.
The settlement resolves civil allegations and does not constitute an admission of liability or a judicial finding of wrongdoing against the facility. State investigators say the case is part of broader efforts to prevent Medicaid fraud and protect residents receiving care in publicly funded facilities.
A former Cornell student, identified as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit against the school and seven former fraternity brothers she accuses of rape and sexual assault.
The case of the Siders family illustrates major shortcomings among Ohio’s political and administrative authorities
In June 2025, Jody Walker stood in front of Ohio lawmakers at a senate finance committee meeting in Columbus. As the head of South Central Ohio Job and Family Services, he was desperate for help.
“I have been a county director since 1999, yet I have not seen such a challenging time in the child welfare system as I do today,” he said, “specifically in terms of the needs of our children.”
City on edge as police comb home of Raymond Horsch, pornographer who died last year, in grisly case involving disturbing pictures and film
A dilapidated house, burned out above the second story, may hold clues to dark tales and – potentially – the darkest of endings as the FBI and police in Philadelphia try to unpick what took place at 417 West Chew Avenue for more than three decades.
Last week, homicide investigators shifted their focus from examining an archive of a million photographs and film recovered from what is known locally as the “house of horrors” to excavating what is in or under the home of Raymond “RC” Horsch, a career criminal, local artist, author and snuff photographer who died last year aged 82, and his son Eugene, 44.
The UK arm of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants empire remained in the red last year despite sales topping £100m for the first time after a string of openings in a London tower.
The celebrity chef’s UK business, which has 34 outlets including the Savoy Grill, Pétrus and several Lucky Cat restaurants, narrowed losses to £5.8m from £9.4m the year before. Sales rose 3% to almost £101m.
These graphics explain what the Democrats would need to do to flip the Senate and House of Representatives
A turning point in Donald Trump’s second term will soon arrive. On 3 November, voters across the US will decide whether to keep the president’s Republican allies in control of Congress, or return Democrats to the majority.
Many indicators of voter sentiment suggest the Democrats are favored to take back control of the House of Representatives, and potentially the Senate. Winning either would be a significant victory for the party and give it the power to block Trump’s legislative agenda and more aggressively investigate his administration.
Zack Polanski has said his authority as leader of the Green party of England and Wales does not depend on winning next week’s Holborn and St Pancras byelection, amid suggestions the party’s popularity may have peaked.
Polanski, who is trying to take Keir Starmer’s former seat from Labour, described the contest as “probably 50/50 right now” and “really on a knife edge”.
British motorists face more pressure at the pumps after the average price of diesel climbed to a record £2 a litre.
The price of a litre at UK forecourts has risen 40.5% since late February, when the US-Israel war on Iran began disrupting supplies of crude and refined oil products from the Gulf, leading to cost increases across the economy.
Leaves can pile up faster than the yard gets cleared. These 17 soup and stew recipes keep dinner hearty with beef, chicken, sausage, pumpkin, lobster, vegetables, noodles, and plenty of broth.The post 17 warm fall soup and stew dishes worth…
Swiss glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026, bringing total losses since 2021 to 19.4%. Researchers say some glaciers are now collapsing from within as meltwater carves out large cavities. The Guardian reports: Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the report, said many people do not realize how fast glaciers are retreating, or that just one generation ago some now-barren sites used to sit beneath hundreds of meters of ice. The scientists have not yet compiled a formal tally of lost glaciers this year but said they had witnessed the death of a number of small ones. "I visited one last week and it's so impressive to stand in this moonlike landscape where there was a big layer of ice -- an extensive glacier -- just a few years ago," said Huss. "And now it's a rock desert where there's some scattered blocks of old ice still lying around and melting on the hot rocks."
The report, a collaboration between the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation, found the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 metres and 4 metres in 2026. Huss said scientists were increasingly seeing glaciers collapse from the inside -- the result of internal streams beneath the ice that excavate caverns -- rather than simply retreating from surface heat. [...] Analysis published by MeteoSwiss on Tuesday found the summer half-year from April to September was the hottest and driest it had been since records began in 1864. In that time, humanity has filled the atmosphere with 1.8tn tons of carbon dioxide and heated the planet by about 1.4C.
Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is surprising everyone, as polls have him leading his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, in the Republican-led state of Texas.
Jonathan Freedland speaks to James Henson, founder and executive director of the Texas Politics Project, about why a blue wave in the Lone Star state would be seismic
Failed attempt to execute 50-year-old prompts review of state’s execution practices. Plus the California woman who is allergic to cold
Good morning. Tennessee’s governor has suspended executions as Christa Pike’s lawyer says the state’s failed lethal injection execution attempt has left her in a critical condition. Bill Lee, the Republican state governor, has suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry.
Leading voices on the death penalty in the US have told the Guardian that the failed execution was such a violation of the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” that all judicial killings should be halted nationwide.
What have Pike’s lawyers said about her condition? Randy Spivey, one of her attorneys, said: “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care. She is in a critical condition.”
What did witnesses say took place during the execution attempt? Catherine Sweeney, a reporter at the Nashville Public Radio WPLN, said: “They went through two rounds, and she was still breathing at the end. She was very ragged. She lifted her head up and was looking around. At one point, she said … there was a spot that was burning and hurting, and asked if that was normal. None of it was normal.”
What was Pike convicted of? She was convicted of the brutal 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, alongside her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. Lee said he had not yet spoken to Slemmer’s family after the failed execution.
Why has the DNC issued a lawsuit against the administration? The Trump administration broke the law when it pushed through a last-minute change to the form overseas citizens use to register and request absentee ballots, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday. “Trump and Republicans are so desperate to hang on to power that they are trying to eliminate the way some American citizens abroad register to vote and request mail ballots,” said Ken Martin, the chair of the DNC.
Which states are leading the resistance to the Trump EPA’s repeal of emissions rules? Twenty-one states, led by New York, are challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, said the federal government was showing “callous disregard” for Americans’ health and the environment, and future generations would pay the price. Power plants that burn fossil fuels are a major source of planet-warming pollution.
According to the record, a student who had been at the Chi Phi house the night of the alleged assault told a Title IX investigator she got a call the next day from one of the accused men.
Pike is the first person to survive after being injected with lethal doses of execution drugs, the Death Penalty Information Center said. She remains in a critical condition.
The government has sought to avert panic at the pumps, insisting that the UK is not facing a diesel shortage after Donald Trump threatened to cut off US supplies of the fuel.
The transport minister Keir Mather said on Friday that the UK has a wide range of sources of the fuel and is in talks with other European countries over the potential release of emergency diesel stockpiles.
(Photo by Sebastian Willnow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: Does kindness become any less necessary simply because the person credited with praising it may never have said the words?
Deporting the Poor, Huddled Masses: The administration’s third-country deportation policy puts vulnerable people beyond the reach of justice.
What I Learned from the Cornell Rape Case: Whatever the legal outcome, a culture that cannot recognize intoxication, coercion, and human decency has failed its young people.
Quick Takes: Trump renames A.I., and a Republican senator makes a fool of himself while trying to get former counsel Jack Smith to commit perjury.
She Came to Me, directed by Rebecca Miller: Peter Dinklage leads a fantastic ensemble in a contemporary screwball comedy that offers the rare pleasure of wit, romance, and a welcome lift from the news.
Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”: A spare, haunting performance of Woody Guthrie’s song restores humanity to people a newspaper reduced to “deportees.”
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
attributed to Mark Twain (1835–1910), American writer
The first thing to say about this quote is that Mark Twain almost certainly never said it or wrote it. The Center for Mark Twain Studies, which has a section titled, “The Apocryphal Twain,” states, “The Occam’s Razor of Twain attribution is: If the aphorism in question indicates a sentimental, nostalgic, or otherwise optimistic attitude towards humanity, it probably didn’t come from Twain.” That site, which investigated the origin of the quote, says it appears to derive from an 1857 aphorism by New York writer Christian Nestell Bovee, although its wording evolved over time. It wasn't attributed to Twain until decades after his death. Finally, a Twitter user called @BPD Dude helped popularize the modern Twain attribution beginning in 2008.
So what does it mean when a quote that we think comes from a common source of unimpeachable wisdom like Mark Twain is instead given new life by @BPD Dude, who decides to lend his interpretation added gravity by saying it came from Twain? Does it make the sentiment itself any less valuable? The cynic in me wants to dismiss it. But if I look at the words themselves, I still like what they have to say.
We all recognize kindness when we experience it, and we all feel better about ourselves when we offer it. Kindness is a universal currency that is in short supply, and if I want to complete that metaphor (without mixing it), I would say it’s a currency we can all print ourselves, in our own metaphorical basements. In other words, being kind is a choice we’re free to make at any time. So why don’t we choose it more often? There are a lot of possible reasons: anger, impatience, embarrassment, discomfort, insecurity, immaturity—the list could go on for a long time.
Here’s another quote about kindness: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.” It’s often credited to Plato, Socrates, or Philo of Alexandria—sources of wisdom whose supposed attribution screams, “Take this quote seriously!” The actual source is a 19th-century Scottish minister named John Watson, pen name Ian MacLaren, whose 1897 Christmas message included an earlier version: “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.” Does the fact that Plato, Socrates, or Philo didn’t say it mean you shouldn’t be kind, or that everyone isn’t facing a hard battle? You decide.
Here’s a real one, for those in search of brand-name wisdom: “The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.” Mahatma Gandhi said that. Here’s another: “This is my simple religion: there is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” That one’s from the Dalai Lama. As lessons for living a good life, I don’t think the real ones are any better than the fakes. The words are all worth taking in, their challenges all worth taking up.
There’s so much unnecessary unkindness in the world: I’m writing about some of it today, and asking you to read about it. So I wanted to begin with some thoughts about kindness, a language the deaf can hear and the blind can see; an inspiration for our hardest battles; a religion more powerful than a thousand heads bowing in prayer. And a choice every one of us can make every day.
Artificial intelligence company OpenAI has disclosed another unauthorised hack on a government department in Australia.
In June, an OpenAI agent hacked into a New South Wales state government department and accessed historical non-public data on bushfires without authorisation.
Israel’s conduct in Gaza shows the danger of using AI in warfare. Humans must remain at the center of wartime decisions
As tech leaders warn about the threats of artificial intelligence, most conjure up images of AI agents running amok, such as hacking systems used to run our critical infrastructure, banks or even militaries. Yet one serious danger is mentioned less frequently – the threat posed by AI–empowered lethal weapons. Fully autonomous versions of these weapons are colloquially known as killer robots.
Israel’s conduct in Gaza shows that, in an important respect, such AI weapon systems are already here. An algorithm has been deciding who lives and who dies.
Why Should Delaware Care? In July, the state announced its first confirmed case of measles in more than a decade. The months following have proved to be relatively quiet on cases, but officials have warned residents to remain vigilant.
Delaware’s measles case count has increased to 23 since the state announced its outbreak earlier this summer, but those cases are still confined to Kent County, officials said Thursday.
State public health officials declared a measles outbreak after confirming four cases of the virus in Kent County on July 22. The announcement came just days after Delaware announced it had confirmed its first case of the virus in more than a decade.
At a Delaware Health Care Commission meeting on Thursday, officials said the state had “stabilized” at 23 cases, but that it is not “out of the woods yet.” Additionally, those cases all remain in Kent County.
For the most part, Delaware has remained isolated from some of the worst measles outbreaks across the country, like nearby Pennsylvania, which has reported multiple deaths tied to the virus.
Earlier this year, Delaware’s principal pediatric hospital, Nemours Children’s Health, reported a measles exposure, but no information about any confirmed cases was later released. The incident involved someone from out of state who sought care at the Wilmington-area hospital, officials said at the time.
Measles is highly contagious, and one person can infect multiple other people if those people are not vaccinated. Symptoms can take days, or even weeks, to show themselves, Delaware officials said.
Symptoms can include fever, cough, pink eye or a runny nose lasting for days prior to the onset of the widespread, splotchy rash associated with measles, state officials said.
If someone is exposed or begins showing symptoms, the state health department said they should call its Office of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. The state offers two phone numbers, one for business hours, as well as a 24-hour hotline:
Business hours line: 302-744-4990
24-hour hotline: 888-295-5156
The state recommends that people exposed to measles receive a dose of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine within three days. According to a press release, these vaccines can be found at primary care clinics and pharmacies, and residents should contact their preferred providers to find out more.
Two of the nation’s top pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens, both offer the MMR vaccine. Patients can schedule appointments online. Here are links to their MMR pages:
Children ages 1 through 12 are eligible for the vaccine and usually receive two doses. The first dose is usually administered after a child’s first birthday and then again after a few years.
According to the state, those who receive the vaccine are protected for life if they receive both doses, though like all vaccines, the state says there is still a nominal chance someone could contract the virus if they are vaccinated.
National outbreaks amid rise in vaccine skepticism
Delaware’s measles case count has remained relatively low during the ongoing outbreak, compared to nearby states.
Across the country, states have contended with worsening measles outbreaks. This year, there have been 3,659 confirmed cases in 47 states, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released last week.
Those figures have far surpassed 2025’s full-year count of 2,289 confirmed cases. More than 90% of cases in the past two years were confirmed among people who were not vaccinated.
One of the states with the worst outbreaks was South Carolina, which saw nearly 1,000 cases in one of its northern counties between October 2025 and April 2026. According to a state health dashboard, more than 900 of those confirmed cases occurred in individuals who were not vaccinated.
That same dashboard also said children were particularly impacted by the six-month outbreak. Close to 900 of the confirmed cases were among children under 18. Nearly 80% of those were children younger than 11.
In Texas, however, two children died during an outbreak last year. The state dealt with an eight-month outbreak from January to August in the western part of the state. A release from Texas health officials said it had confirmed 762 measles cases, and the outbreak hospitalized 99 people.
Neighboring states like Pennsylvania and Maryland have had to contend with outbreaks of their own. Maryland has confirmed 51 cases this year. In 2025, it had only three.
Pennsylvania has struggled to rein in a deepening outbreak, with one of the highest case counts in the mid-Atlantic. On Wednesday, it reported its fifth measles-associated death. Since the start of 2026, the state has confirmed 943 cases in more than half of its counties.
This summer, Delaware started its own Office of the Surgeon General in response to what it saw as a disconnect between state and federal health officials over vaccines.
In September 2025, as the federal government began revising vaccine recommendations, Delaware and other states publicly countered the new guidelines. When Delaware refuted the federal government, Gov. Matt Meyer issued a “standing order” to pharmacists to “ensure ease of access” for people seeking the vaccines in the state.
It mirrored efforts in other states like Massachusetts, whose governor ordered her state’s insurance carriers to continue to cover vaccines, even if they were not recommended by the federal government.
Delaware joined with Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island to collectively focus on “developing evidence-based recommendations on vaccinations, disease surveillance, emergency preparedness and supporting state public health labs.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Questions over what exactly transpired between the City of Dover’s mayor, police chief and police union have dominated the city’s political discourse over the past year. A partial release of findings from an outside investigation into the controversy provides some answers.
Despite Dover officials voting this week not to release the findings of a third-party investigation into the conflict between city leaders and the local police union, the city released a portion of the report on Thursday afternoon.
City council’s decisive vote at a meeting Tuesday night not to publicize the report was underpinned by concerns that sharing the findings could lead to a lawsuit.
Nonetheless, council leaders ultimately shared part of the report with Spotlight Delaware on Thursday, citing intense public interest in the investigation.
The nine pages of investigatory findings include different accounts by Mayor Robin Christiansen, Dover Police Chief Thomas Johnson and leaders of the local police union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Lodge #15, of an incident last fall in which Christiansen allegedly told FOP leadership to attack two city council members for being critical of the police department.
The report concludes that Christiansen’s requests for police union leadership to reveal details about the personal lives of Councilmen Brian Lewis and Roy Sudler may have been a “low blow and constitute nasty politics,” but his request did not violate any city or state ethical codes.
The released pages do not, however, include other findings from the investigation related to the union’s allegations about Johnson’s leadership and work behavior.
These allegations include that Johnson created a poor work environment for his officers, and had committed employment contract violations by driving a city-owned vehicle to family vacations and working a second job as an adjunct instructor at Penn State University while he was supposed to be on duty in Dover.
The new information also comes after Spotlight Delaware appealed the city’s denial of a Freedom of Information Act request for the full investigatory findings to the Delaware Department of Justice (DOJ), and after recent public division among city officials over how to proceed with the findings.
Dover City Council voted last fall to hire 21st Century Policing Solutions, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, to undertake a third-party investigation into the police union’s complaints.
The investigation cost the city $50,000 and was completed in mid-June, according to documents obtained by Spotlight Delaware.
Christiansen gave permission to release the full report during the Tuesday meeting because he said he has “nothing to hide.”
But Johnson did not consent to the city releasing the files. City council members told Spotlight Delaware they were worried that releasing the entire investigation, particularly the parts addressing Johnson’s personnel files, could open the city to a lawsuit. So, they only shared the portion of the investigation that addresses the allegations made against Christiansen.
City Council President Fred Neil said on Thursday afternoon the City Council decided it was “up to the mayor or the chief to decide whether to release it.”
Because Christiansen gave permission on Tuesday night to publish the section about him, Neil said, the council proceeded with making that section public.
While Dover City Attorney Dan Griffith has argued the portion of the report relating to Johnson is exempt because it contains law enforcement investigatory files, Spotlight Delaware still has a pending DOJ appeal for the full report. The DOJ will likely rule on the appeal by mid-October.
What was revealed?
The Dover City Council hired 21st Century Policing Solutions last year after the police union accused Mayor Christiansen of telling union members to “attack the integrity” of Lewis and Sudler, two Dover councilmen, because they had previously been critical of Johnson’s leadership of the police department.
The section of the report released on Thursday confirms that Christiansen did tell two police officers during a meeting in June 2025 to “publicly attack” Sudler and Lewis.
Various accounts of the situation, as told by Christiansen, Johnson and the two union leaders, Robert Roswell and Jordan Miller, differ in terms of how involved Johnson was in Christiansen’s request that the union target the councilmen.
The different recollections of the situation also appear to mirror the loyalties of the people involved: Christiansen and Johnson described Johnson as not having been involved in the discussion, while the officers interviewed said their chief seemed looped in on Christiansen’s suggestion.
The report also states that Christiansen held a separate meeting with Tim Mullaney, the union president, where Christiansen told him to “go public with unsavory details about Council members Lewis’s and Sudler’s personal lives.”
Regardless of the disputed details, the investigation concludes that Christiansen did not violate local or state ethical codes. Rather, the report concludes, he was engaging in “political speech,” protected by the First Amendment.
“Everyone involved in the meetings,” the report states, “all understood the Mayor’s requests as coming from one political actor, the Mayor, to another political actor, the FOP Lodge 15.”
Despite having said at a previous meeting that he was in favor of the report being published, Christiansen told Spotlight Delaware on Thursday afternoon that he wished city council had waited to release the full investigation, including the findings about Johnson’s alleged misconduct. He added that the full report “vindicates myself and the chief.”
Johnson did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday afternoon.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
ProPublica reporters Jennifer Smith Richards, center, and Jodi S. Cohen and Arkansas Times reporter Milo Strain research founding a private school in Little Rock. Brian Chilson/Arkansas Times
We have no business running a private school.
We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either.
Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.
In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.
We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.
And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.
We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.
And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.
For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.
This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.
Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.
All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?
Est. 2026
Arkansas: ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy
Inside a flag shop in Little Rock, we surveyed our options. There were handheld American flags on skinny sticks, midsize ones to display on a wall and majestic formal flags adorned with silky gold fringe.
State law in Arkansas doesn’t require much to open a private school, nothing about teacher skills or what kids learn. But it does require that all schools display an American flag, and we wanted to follow the rules. So, at the Arkansas Flag and Banner store, we decided on a smallish one that could fit in a circular base atop a newsroom cubicle. We also bought an Arkansas flag — even though only public schools are required to have those. Total cost: $49.45.
Picking the flags for our new school was the hardest part of an astoundingly easy process.
The only requirement to open a private school in Arkansas is displaying a flag and flagpole, so the team visited the local flag shop in Little Rock.Brian Chilson/Arkansas Times
Early in our reporting in Arkansas, we tried to figure out what steps we’d need to take to make a private school. We couldn’t find all the answers online, so we called the state.
“We don’t have rules for opening a private school,” Kaelin Clay, an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, told us earlier this year.
In fact, we didn’t even have to file anything with the Education Department. All it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website, where we registered the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC as a business, listed ourselves as agents and officers, and paid a fee.
“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.
The secretary of state’s office approved our new business the same day. We even got a certificate.
The Arkansas Department of Education does not regulate private schools once they’re open, and no one from the state inspected the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location we chose for our school. As far as we know, nobody checked our backgrounds, either.
The official certificate acknowledging our schoolSecretary of State/State of Arkansas
Arkansas adopted a private school funding plan in 2023, and back then there were fewer than 100 private schools on record. With the state in the fourth year of its Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides vouchers that can be spent on private schools, there are now more than 220.
In addition, 143 microschools, which are a different category in Arkansas, were approved this year to accept tax dollars. That’s up from about 100 last school year.
Establishing the Curiosity Academy was so simple — and, frankly, a bit anticlimactic — that reporters then applied to become eligible to receive public funds. (Again, we applied with our names, work email addresses and a note that this was a journalistic exercise. We had no intention of actually ever taking any public money.)
We wanted to see how far our curiosity could take us.
Accessing public funds as a microschool in Arkansas is easier than it is for other types of private schools, even though there is no limit to the number of students one can enroll. Unlike private schools, we didn’t need to seek accreditation or show proof of financial solvency to accept state funding.
It took about 10 minutes to fill out the required information in early September. Other than our contact information, we had to upload just two documents — one detailing our proposed tuition and fees, and the other with our refund policy.
We said that — “should we open a school” — our tuition and fees per student would not exceed $7,208 per school year, the exact amount of Education Freedom Account money that each student in Arkansas is eligible for this year. We said tuition “would be collected only if education is delivered, and it would be the policy of the school to refund all tuition payments for educational services that are not provided.”
After much deliberation, we chose small state and national flags.Brian Chilson/Arkansas Times
When more than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard back, we reached out to the state Education Department. An employee called back that afternoon and explained that the department had decided not to accept any more because the school year was underway.
But he didn’t reject us outright. He looked up our application and invited us to keep pursuing the public money. He said we still could apply to receive public money this school year, but as a vendor providing educational services such as tutoring. He also said we could apply as a microschool next year and even suggested a tweak to the language in our tuition policy should we decide to do that.
After we hung up, he emailed us the vendor application (which we will not pursue) and let us know the microschool application for next school year will open in the spring.
We asked the state Education Department whether it would be OK with us operating a publicly funded microschool. Clay, the spokesperson, said the agency’s role is to decide if schools meet state requirements. Microschool families, she said, “have the freedom to choose the educators and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs.”
Est. 2026
West Virginia: ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy
Henry Culvyhouse and Smith Richards, in Mountain State Spotlight’s newsroom, write their application to found a private middle school in West Virginia.Laura Bilson for ProPublica
Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook. We wrote that we would serve middle school students and listed our first day as TBD.
Leaving the crunchy, ragged edges on the paper, we stuffed our notice of intent into an envelope. We’d seen other new operators file similarly casual ones as they sought to register private schools in West Virginia.
Then we drove over to the state Education Department to deliver the request. Our group — two reporters, a photographer and a video journalist — went through security and, camera rolling, wound our way through the maze of the midcentury building. We got lost once, and our entourage received several perplexed glances from workers, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. The person we needed to deliver the letter to was out, but a friendly employee agreed to place it on his desk.
Dozens of new private and microschools have set up shop in the state in recent years, fueled by the roughly $5,400 the Hope Scholarship offers each student to pay tuition. New private schools all go through Dustin Lambert, a manager in the Office of Student Enrichment and Support at the West Virginia Department of Education.
We heard back from Lambert the next day. Our notice was received. (Hooray!) He said now we needed a letter from the fire marshal that our school building was safe for children. (Oh no.)
This was a problem. Our school would be housed in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom, which had not been inspected as a school site. We didn’t want to usurp public resources to undergo a new inspection. It felt like the end of our Mountain State school experiment.
Smith Richards and Culvyhouse go to the Capitol to hand-deliver their application.Laura Bilson for ProPublica
But it wasn’t.
After we followed up to ask whether all schools, including virtual schools, need safety clearance to register with the state, Lambert told us that though all brick-and-mortar private schools do, we “may want to consider the microschool route.”
In that case, we later learned, the department wouldn’t be involved because state law doesn’t include any mechanism for oversight.
West Virginia defines microschools as schools that charge tuition and are started by one or more teachers. In practice, there’s no real difference between a microschool and private school — neither has a limit on enrollment. (Yes, a micro can be macro.) He forwarded us the rules for starting a microschool, which involve providing proof of a high school diploma, at least. We notified the local school district of our new microschool venture and sent a college transcript.
The Kanawha County school district, in turn, notified the state of the existence of a new microschool.
And with that — bypassing the building health and safety requirements — we established the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. Officials at the Department of Education said they were aware that journalists were establishing a school. But they had to just watch us do so — they have no authority over the state’s microschools.
In an official statement, the department’s spokesperson said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.”
By law, should we open our microschool — and we won’t — we could enroll an unlimited number of students.
Culvyhouse seals the envelope of our hand-delivered application.Laura Bilson for ProPublica
Pending
North Carolina: ProPublica-Assembly Academy
On Friday evenings, hundreds of people gather at Ponysaurus Brewing Co., a trendy spot in Durham, North Carolina, to savor its craft beers and cocktails, hardly the place you’d expect a school to open. But why not?
On a recent Tuesday morning, the brewery was quiet and closed to customers. Behind the bar, yeast busily converted sugars into alcohol inside giant stainless steel fermentation tanks. Two journalists settled onto barstools beneath signs for pilsners and cherry sours. Icy cold glasses of Tell the Truth, a light and lemony ale, sat before them on a high-top table beside a stenographer’s notebook and a laptop.
The brewery created the craft ale in partnership with The Assembly, which also is ProPublica’s journalistic partner in this private school endeavor, so it all felt very symbiotic. Ponysaurus’s owners had agreed to let us use their building and its fire and sanitation inspections, which are required to open a private school in the Tar Heel State.
ProPublica reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes and Carli Brosseau, right, a reporter for The Assembly, apply to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, North Carolina.Kate Medley for ProPublica
Reporters from The Assembly and ProPublica scanned a state of North Carolina website that details how to file a notice of intent to open a private school.
First, it explained the state’s statutory requirements for opening a private school, things like reporting the school’s name and address. We also would have to administer a standardized test in certain grades, if we were going to open an actual school, and maintain annual records about student attendance and immunizations.
Then, we watched a four-minute, 39-second video explaining how to file the required notice of intent.
From there it seemed simple. We created a login, then filled in the address of our school (Ponysaurus’s building), noted its owner and chief administrator (our reporters), and named it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy. We’d hoped to include the word Curiosity in the name, but the field in the form didn’t allow enough characters. In North Carolina, our curiosity would have to be implied.
We filled in a few more fields, including the grades we would serve (high schoolers), whether we would open a religious school (no) and the dates of our academic year.
Then we needed to upload fire and sanitation inspection reports. This step is what brought us here, to Ponysaurus, filling out the online notice to the tune of a hissing compressor that kept clean air moving through the brewing system.
“You will need to secure inspections for the building where the school will be housed. You will need a fire inspection from the local fire marshal and a health and sanitation inspection from the local health department,” the video said.
Just that morning, a City of Durham Fire Department inspector had visited the brewery and provided Ponysaurus with a fresh business occupancy inspection. We uploaded the new report, along with the brewery’s current food establishment inspection (on which it received a 99, an excellent score, we felt, for a school).
The screen flashed a confirmation. “Thank you. We have received your request to open a private school.” If approved, the page said, we should receive a school identification number in three to five business days.
We hoped to join the at least 169 other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the 2021-22 school year, which marked the start of a series of expansions to the state’s publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition.
If we wanted our school to tap the voucher money, we’d have to go through some additional steps such as getting criminal background checks. We weren’t doing that.
The proposed school has outdoor space for students.Kate Medley for ProPublica
The following day, we hit a snag. It came in a brief and garbled email. It said only: “Good morning and thank you for submitting a Notice of Intent to operate a private school. To complete the process we need to fire and sanitation inspections to” and then ended abruptly like that, no explanation or period. We emailed back, asking for clarity and noting we had already uploaded the inspection reports.
An official from the state Division of Non-Public Education then called. The school’s name needs to be on the inspection reports, she said, something we had not seen in any of our research. We also had not found any state statutes or rules that would preclude us — or anyone else — from opening a private school wherever we saw fit, be that a church or a brewery, as long as it passed “reasonable fire, health and safety inspections.”
In a follow-up call, she clarified that her division checks only to be sure the building has passed inspections specifically for a school. A spokesperson for the agency later added that state statute does not allow them to deny a private school application, but they won’t process an incomplete application — notably one without the proper inspections.
We hadn’t expected we would need a school-specific inspection at this point. The video explainer referred to inspections only generally, and the state’s written guidance indicated only that this would need to happen before occupancy.
Given we had no intention of actually opening a school, we had decided ahead of time that we wouldn’t consume any additional public resources — such as fire or health inspectors’ time — in our journalistic pursuit.
Perhaps Ponysaurus could pass the school-specific inspections. But the ethical red line would be our stop sign. Our curiosity would have to end in North Carolina.
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.
Feeld, a UK-based dating app aimed at non-monogamous, queer and kinky users, has reported strong sales growth and paid its largest-ever dividend as it attracts users from more “vanilla” rivals.
Revenues jumped by 32% to £64m following a surge in interest from what it called “open-minded people exploring love, desire, and alternative relationships in a safe, inclusive space”.
Why the Houthis' Red Sea power play makes Iran even strongerAudiosseth.drupal@c…
On this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss what Houthi control of the Bab al-Mandab strait means for the wider region.
The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels’ capture of Yemen’s port city of Mocha means that Iran now effectively controls two crucial waterways in the region – the Bab al-Mandab Strait to the Red Sea and thus the Suez Canal, as well as the Hormuz Strait. Why has this simmering conflict exploded again? What do Iran and the Houthis want? How serious is this potential blockade for world trade and energy supply? And could the Houthis become a regional power, in economic terms even more powerful than Iran?
Bronwen Maddox is joined by director of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, Dr Sanam Vakil; Horn of Africa specialist Ahmed Soliman; and Yemen and Gulf specialist, Farea Al-Muslimi, who joins us from Jordan.
Ever imagine yourself as a private school operator? It’s not such a wild idea. Hundreds of new private schools have popped up all over the country in recent years, responding to a surge of public money for students to pay tuition.
A team of ProPublica journalists has spent this year documenting how the American education landscape is shifting with an increased push for school privatization.
Our reporting has identified big differences in how states regulate who can run a school, what they must teach and where they can hold class. While some require new private school operators to prove they’re on the up-and-up, others invite anyone with a dream and a heartbeat to get into the business. ProPublica even founded a couple this year.
I could write here about how almost a fifth of women surveyed by Durex said using a sex toy was the most dependable way for them to climax. Or I could point out how Kinsey Institute research suggests regular masturbation can help relieve and prevent symptoms of menopause, such as vaginal atrophy. I could even tell you that studies demonstrate a significant correlation between intimate toy ownership and greater satisfaction – not only with sex but also with life itself.
But the potted version is that orgasms and erotic pleasure are glorious, and top-class toys can help you savour more of both. So here are the best vibrators available. Scroll to the bottom to find out how I selected these vibrators from the 67 I tested for this piece.
Henry Ford’s 1926 policy held for decades before eroding into a 24/7 mindset. Here’s what we can do about it
It was a Saturday. In fact, the Saturday.
Almost exactly a century ago, on 25 September 1926, Henry Ford instituted a policy of weekends for his workforce. Although various labor campaigns had existed for decades to try to carve out what we now call the weekend, this was the first widespread adoption.
What happened to Pike was gruesome. No one deserves what she went through, not even those who commit horrible crimes
Botched executions are nothing new in US history. In the era when hangings were common, some condemned people were decapitated. Later, when the electric chair was in vogue, every now and again, someone would catch fire during an electrocution. And nitrogen hypoxia, the US’s newest execution method, has already proven notoriously unreliable.
But, of all of the ways we have tried to execute people, lethal injection has the worst track record. More than 8% of all lethal injection executions have been botched. Most of them resulted when those charged with carrying them out could not find a usable vein.
Andrea Bell, director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, at a groundbreaking ceremony in 2025 Oregon Housing and Community Services
As head of Oregon’s housing finance agency, Andrea Bell oversees a lot of taxpayer money.
Oregon Housing and Community Services has handed developers more than $1.4 billion in state funding to build rent-restricted apartments over the last five years — and even more counting federal tax credits the agency allocates.
Bell’s husband, Joshua Crites, works as a director for the consulting firm JH Brawner, which helps local housing authorities develop subsidized apartment projects that receive a lot of money from Bell’s agency.
The company lists offices in Oregon, Washington and Arizona and says it has played a role in creating 20,000 low-income housing units that cost $3 billion to develop. JH Brawner’s Oregon work includes consulting on two housing authority projects that applied for or were awarded tens of millions of dollars collectively from Bell’s agency since her husband started working for the company. (JH Brawner gets paid by the housing authority rather than the state.)
But Bell didn’t do either until ProPublica asked her about it.
A spokesperson for Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat whose predecessor appointed Bell in 2022, told ProPublica that the governor’s office had “not been notified of any potential or actual conflict of interest.”
The closest Bell came to a disclosure was in 2025 with this vague note with a misspelling: “Spouse serves in an advisory role for a developmen.” It did not name a company but instead showed a misspelled street address, with no suite number, for JH Brawner’s office in Issaquah, Washington, a commercial building with multiple tenants.
Bell filed amended economic disclosures for the last three years on Sept. 23, the day that ProPublica asked her why she did not disclose her husband’s employer. The new forms explicitly name the consulting firm.
“I take concerns about my statement of economic interests (SEI) seriously and am committed to transparency, accountability, and compliance with state law,” Bell said in a statement.
She did not respond when asked whether she had played any role in her agency’s decisions regarding projects the company worked on. A spokesperson said housing subsidies are approved first by an internal committee that does not include Bell and then are reviewed by another group, the Housing Stability Council, which Bell does not serve on.
The spokesperson, LeiLani Barney, told ProPublica to file a formal records request to learn who’s on the internal committee. Bell advises the housing council as it sets policy and makes funding decisions, according to the agency’s website.
Neither JH Brawner nor Crites, the firm’s director of strategic initiatives, responded to messages seeking comment.
Three former officials familiar with state ethics laws told ProPublica that Bell’s lack of disclosure was a problem that merited review to see whether she influenced any government decisions that benefited her husband’s company.
Russell Lehman, a retired administrative law judge who served on Washington’s Public Disclosure Commission from 2019 to 2021, said Bell appeared to have violated the law, even if she later corrected her mistake.
Lehman said he would want to know: “Why did it take a reporter asking you about it to have you file your reports?”
“In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need ProPublica for this kind of thing,” Lehman said.
Kotek’s spokesperson called for an evaluation by the state’s ethics commission.
“The Governor holds all agency leadership to consistent and high ethical standards and any question on conflict of interest should be referred to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission for thorough review,” Kotek’s spokesperson said in a statement.
Bell told ProPublica in a statement that she had sought an advisory opinion from the commission at the governor’s urging and that she had updated her ethics disclosures “to provide clarity.”
Money from Bell’s department plays an essential role in helping to build apartment projects intended to be affordable, channeling state funding and federal tax credits in order to reduce developers’ costs so they can charge lower rents.
JH Brawner, where Bell’s husband works, advises public housing authorities that are putting together subsidized housing deals.
The company’s responsibilities have included negotiating acquisitions, structuring deals, ensuring project appraisals are completed and collaborating with the state agency that Bell leads.
Crites joined JH Brawner in 2023 after jobs with local housing authorities in Oregon, Washington and Ohio. He and Bell own a home together in the Portland suburbs, records show.
JH Brawner says on its website that it worked in Oregon as a development and financial consultant on Park Place, a 200-unit project being built by the housing authority in Clackamas County with $36 million in state funding. Another project in Washington County, Aloha 209th, is awaiting a $17.5 million subsidy from the state.
A spokesperson for Clackamas County said the housing authority there “did not advocate or discuss the Park Place project or application with Andrea Bell” and that the county hired JH Brawner as a consultant before Crites joined the firm.
The company was involved in two other state-backed projects for Washington County that were well into the financing process before Crites started working for JH Brawner. Work continued on both as recently as last year, according to JH Brawner’s website.
Bell’s agency adopted a new policy in 2024 that effectively reduces its discretion over which projects get funded, moving from a competitive bidding model to one that gives money to eligible projects in the order that applications were received.
But at least one developer has asked Bell’s agency to exercise its discretion. The housing authority in Washington County in suburban Portland, which is using JH Brawner as a consultant on the Aloha 209th project, is not due to get its $17.5 million from the state until at least 2028.
Molly Rogers, executive director of the county’s housing authority, said in a June public meeting that she had contacted Bell about the project and the county’s desire to get state money sooner.
“She’s open to having a discussion, which is great,” Rogers said.
Rogers did not respond when asked, via a spokesperson, to comment about her public remarks, and Bell did not respond when asked to comment on Rogers’ account.
Pat Hearn, who served as the ethics commission’s director for nearly two decades, said he advised state leaders “to stay as far away from the line as possible, not to get as close as they can without crossing it.”
In Bell’s case, he said, “It’s just too close, especially since we know that the agency has approved funding for these projects that the husband’s company has advised on.”
Bell’s situation is the second conflict-of-interest issue Oregon housing officials have faced in the last year.
In December, a state investigation revealed that an appointee to Oregon’s Housing Stability Council, the body that approves housing subsidies, had violated a state conflict-of-interest law by voting to award money to projects designed by the architecture firm where she worked.
(The appointee, who later resigned, told an investigator she believed she had followed high ethical standards and had recused herself from voting on projects she worked on. The commission gave her a warning letter.)
Beijing aims to provide artificial intelligence education in all of the country’s schools by 2030, while demand for AI-themed study tours surged this summer.
The rightwing media mogul has lost ground to the likes of Pat McAfee and Joe Rogan. He’s hoping his new venture can recapture some headway
When Maga media blowhard Clay Travis offered $2m to Colin Kaepernick last week to appear on the daily talkshow he hosts with former CIA analyst Buck Sexton, it represented the culmination of a years-long obsession on the right with the onetime NFL star. In Travis’s telling of history, Kaepernick taking a knee during the 2016 NFL season was the event that catalyzed professional sports into the era of “woke” excess from which, he claims, it has been struggling to recover ever since.
But more than simply confirming the right’s longstanding villainization of Kaepernick, Travis’s offer was also a smarmy bid for publicity for his new media venture, Sport & State. Sport & State, which launched in August, is Travis’s bid to get back to his roots as a media mogul who sold the wildly popular Outkick to Fox Sports for a rumored $100m, and reclaim some of the cultural territory lost to fellow sports bros and Magagitators like Pat McAfee, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. But if there’s one thing Sport & State won’t be doing, it’s engaging with anyone beyond the Magaverse. There has been no response from Kaepernick since Travis made his “offer” of $2m to charity in exchange for an interview, which suggests he understands that it was extended more in a spirit of trolling buffoonery than sincerity. No one associated with the left or progressive politics ever appears on Travis’s shows, for the simple reason that they are designed purely for the right to talk to itself. (Some would say the same could be said of the left, although the disregard for dissenting perspectives in the Magasphere seems way more extreme.) More than it heralds a renewal of Travis’s career or an injection of fresh energy into the Trumpist mediasphere, Sport & State is a case study in the stagnation that has taken hold on the right as Donald Trump stares down the barrel of defeat in November’s midterm elections.
Pike alive but in critical condition as experts call ordeal that unfolded in Tennessee ‘unimaginably barbaric’
Top lawyers, doctors and members of the faith community are calling for a moratorium on the US death penalty after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike left the prisoner alive but in critical condition and receiving life-saving medical care.
The recent spate of harrowingly botched executions across US death penalty states reached a new low late on Wednesday when Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, called off the procedure after Pike had been injected with two full syringes of pentobarbital. She is the only person to have survived being administered 5g of the sedative – a massive dose that under normal circumstances is considered fatal.
Up to 300mm of rain could fall in places, while extreme downpours bring landslides and deaths in Nepal
Torrential rain and potentially damaging flooding are forecast in eastern Spain over the coming days, as cold upper air moves over the warm, humid surface air of the Mediterranean Sea, fuelling violent, slow-moving thunderstorms near Spain’s east coast. The weather pattern, known as a Dana, occurs most often in autumn.
Models show more than 100mm of rain could fall across the region on Friday, with 200-300mm possible in some areas. Cities including Valencia and Castelló de la Plana, are most at risk. Valencia has experienced several damaging floods in recent years. Catalonia has now put three towns under lockdown and Valencia has shut schools for nearly half a million children.
Artwork created in Tahrir Squarefor Chinese president’s state visit to Egypt is painted over amid allegations it revived Afrocentric claims about pharaohs’ origins
On the eve of the Chinese president Xi Jinping’s state visit to Cairo last month, the city authorities were busy removing a 66-metre-long mural from the esteemed guest’s line of sight.
Depicting the Pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertiti, the painting was among 40 murals commissioned to beautify the city for Xi’s arrival and was painted by a group of young volunteers, Rasmet Basma, in Tahrir Square.
Smit Machchhar says in video call with Indian PM that he realised if he did not get up ‘passengers would lose their lives’
The Indian pilot who helped thwart an apparent attempt to crash a flydubai flight to Tel Aviv said his faith and his desire to save his passengers allowed him to make a “last push” to open the cockpit door as he fought for his life.
Capt Smit Machchhar, who was recovering in an Abu Dhabi hospital, described to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, how he helped save the plane and its more than 170 passengers.
People describe their return to physical media – whether to protect data, support artists, or retain control of one’s choices
For some, it is the security of knowing they have a physical copy of their favourite films and music, free from algorithms, interruptions and the vagaries of streaming. For others, it is the sound of needle on vinyl, the click of a cassette player and the ability to interact with a physical format.
We asked people if they were moving back to CDs, DVDs, vinyl and older formats to escape algorithmically curated content. Here are some of their responses.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI has informed more than 100 organizations about incidents involving unauthorized activity tied to its AI agents, according to a blog post by the ChatGPT maker, as AI labs face mounting scrutiny over rogue AI agent activity. Here are some other details:
- The Sam Altman-led company has been conducting a broad review of the activities of its AI models after the accidental hacking of Hugging Face. - OpenAI is searching through roughly 50 petabytes of data as it works to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity. - A string of high-profile breaches globally by rogue AI agents in recent months has sparked widespread worries within the AI industry over its ability to control the more powerful AI models now under development. - "In some cases, models used internet access in unintended ways or, in retrospect, did not have the ideal restrictions applied. Over the last several months, we have been applying new technical and operational measures to avoid similar problems, or catch them very early, and will continue this work," OpenAI said. - OpenAI previously said the review would take months to complete given the scale of the work. - The Hugging Face incident remains the most severe rogue agent activity OpenAI has identified from its AI models so far.
In today’s newsletter: When a passenger plane plunges 17,000ft amid claims of terrorism, hijacking and geopolitical intrigue, Guardian journalists have to try and separate fact from fiction in real time
Good morning. Shocking news of a cockpit stabbing. Graphic footage of bloodied crew members. Mid-air testimony from terrified passengers.
This was the tenor of the heart-in-mouth reporting as the horrifying events unfolded onboard flight FZ 1073 to Tel Aviv: the early morning budget flight that plummeted 17,000ft in under two minutes before the courageous intervention of passengers and crew averted an apparent hijacking, potentially saving the lives of not just the 170+ passengers and crew on board, but many more.
UK politics | Ministers are working up sweeping plans for welfare changes including scrapping a key disability benefit for under-25s and replacing it with a multibillion-pound package of support to get into work.
Northern Ireland | Talks aimed at resolving the Drumcree parade dispute have broken up without agreement, with Northern Ireland secretary Chris Bryant describing the situation as being between a “rock and a hard place”.
US news | Tennessee’s governor has suspended all executions in the state and ordered an independent inquiry after a botched attempt to put a condemned inmate to death on Wednesday night.
AI | When prompted, AI chat bots will edit images to remove the hijabs from Muslim women, a violation of one of the world’s most common and visible expressions of faith.
Europe news | A fast-growing protest by high-school students over long hours, teacher shortages and decaying facilities has escalated into “urban violence”, the French government has warned.
Szmyt hits career-long kick with 10 seconds remaining
Cleveland improve to 3-1 after surviving Pittsburgh rally
Rodgers throws three TDs but two costly interceptions
Deshaun Watson passed for 268 yards and moved the Browns into position for Andre Szmyt’s career-long 56-yard field goal with 10 seconds remaining, giving Cleveland a 27-24 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Thursday night.
Watson, who completed 24 of 33 passes with a touchdown and an interception, went 4 of 5 for 46 yards as he led a go-ahead drive in the fourth quarter for the third straight week.
CBS News has examined hundreds of pages of transcripts from the Title IX investigation conducted by Cornell University into the allegations made by a former student who claims she was drugged and gang-raped at a fraternity house.
Los Angeles, CA — The Justice Department says UCLA School of Law illegally discriminated against white and Asian applicants by continuing to consider race in admissions after the Supreme Court restricted race-conscious college admissions in 2023.
The department’s Civil Rights Division said its investigation found that UCLA Law used what officials described as a “two-tiered admissions system” for incoming classes from 2023 through 2025. DOJ said applicants with similar LSAT scores were treated differently depending on race and alleged that essays and recruitment programs were used to encourage applicants to disclose racial backgrounds.
UCLA disputes that characterization. The law school says its admissions process is comprehensive, merit-based and compliant with federal law as well as California’s longstanding prohibition on racial preferences at public universities.
The finding is part of a broader Trump administration campaign targeting university diversity and admissions policies. The Justice Department has previously made similar accusations involving UCLA’s medical school and UC Berkeley Law, while launching investigations into additional universities.
DOJ says it will first seek a voluntary agreement requiring changes to UCLA Law’s admissions practices. If negotiations fail, the department says it could file a lawsuit to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Speculation that Flávio Bolsonaro will try to strip Our Lady of Aparecida of position could become deciding factor in run-up to Sunday
A row of Biblical proportions has erupted in the run-up to Brazil’s presidential election, with the country’s patron saint, Our Lady of Aparecida, emerging as an unlikely kingmaker in the deadlocked race.
Ahead of Sunday’s vote, the two frontrunners – the leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his far-right challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro – are level in the polls.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday said that she had lost faith in the county district attorney’s ability to fairly oversee the case and had appointed state Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor.
Michael Harris II hit a three-run homer in the first inning, Ray Kerr threw 3 1/3 scoreless innings and the Atlanta Braves beat the Philadelphia Phillies 6-2 on Thursday night in the decisive Game 3 of their National League wildcard series.
Ozzie Albies hit a two-run homer in the fourth and Matt Olson added a solo shot in the seventh for the Braves, who advance to a best-of-five Division Series against the two-time defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
fjo3 shares a report from The Guardian: Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called "Kelvin wave," a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline. The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October, as it crawls toward Alaska. Waters could rise by a foot along the California coast, according to scientists, who have warned that this could dramatically double the 8-12in rise in sea levels already caused by climate change over the last century.
The Kelvin wave doesn't climb and crash like a typical ocean wave; rather, it swells the tides from beneath the surface. It's effectively a massive slosh of warm water, driven by El Nino conditions, that moves across the Pacific before colliding with the South American coastline and surging north. It also won't transport water in the way a tsunami might, but creates conditions that enable higher sea levels to linger. On their own, Kelvin waves aren't always hazardous, according to Mike Jacox, a research oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service, though they can reduce the growth of phytoplankton that form the base of the marine food web. "But when there are very high tides or storm surges, their effects can be amplified," he said.
If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines, and submerge streets, homes and businesses. "This coming Kelvin wave is just the beginning," said Dr Jonathan Warrick, a research geologist at the US Geological Survey. "The thing to look out for is what will happen in January, February and March -- that's when we get the biggest storms, we get our largest waves and we have some very large tides." If these events align, their effects will compound, setting the stage for a tumultuous winter. Together, Warrick said, the systems will pack a far bigger punch. "When it comes to these storms and the tides," he said, "we really are kind of rolling the dice."
Four astronauts pulled up at International Space Station after eight-hour express flight led by Jessica Watkins
Four astronauts pulled up at the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday after launching on an eight-hour express that set a US speed record, and that created further history with the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit.
SpaceX launched commander Jessica Watkins and her crew for Nasa after a three-week delay to fix their Dragon capsule’s leaking fuel system. Thick clouds threatened all morning to halt the countdown but skies cleared enough to allow a safe liftoff from Cape Canaveral at 11.10am (1510 GMT).
Ithaca, NY — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has removed the Tompkins County district attorney from the investigation into an alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University, appointing Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor after saying she had lost confidence in the local handling of the case.
The case involves a former Cornell student identified as Jane Doe, who alleges she was drugged and sexually assaulted by multiple members of the Chi Phi fraternity in October 2024. No criminal charges were initially filed, although the woman later brought a civil lawsuit detailing allegations that prompted renewed scrutiny.
District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced this week that he would reopen the investigation, but Hochul said newly released information raised serious questions about both Cornell police and his office’s earlier decision not to prosecute.
James will now oversee the investigation independently and can present evidence to a grand jury if she determines charges are warranted. She said her office would follow the facts and law and conduct a process New Yorkers can trust.
Cornell has also retained outside attorneys to review how the university handled the allegations. Attorneys representing some of the accused men have denied wrongdoing.
The appointment effectively shifts control of one of New York’s highest-profile campus sexual-assault investigations from local prosecutors to the state attorney general.
Saleem Alzaq, a 45-year-old Gaza man who prosecutors allege is a longtime Hamas member, was charged with helping operate the fundraising campaign claiming to provide humanitarian aid, according to an indictment.
The closure comes after months of reporting from CBS California Investigates on allegations that Bee & Co. employees targeted vulnerable shoppers and pressured them into purchasing expensive skin care products and devices.
The White House has, again, blocked CNN from covering Donald Trump as part of the rotating press pool.
The outlet was scheduled to be a part of the group of media traveling to Texas and Oklahoma with the president today, but was removed from list of newsrooms in place for the trip, per the White House schedule.
Sacramento, CA — California has banned child marriage without exceptions, becoming the 18th state to completely prohibit minors from marrying after years of unsuccessful attempts to close one of the nation’s most permissive legal loopholes.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1267, which establishes 18 as the minimum age for both marriage and domestic partnerships. Previously, California had no statutory minimum marriage age, allowing minors to marry with parental consent and court approval. The legislation passed with bipartisan support and no opposition in the Legislature.
Advocates have argued that minors entering marriages face increased risks of coercion, abuse and financial dependence. California officials estimate roughly 35,000 minors were married in the state between 2000 and 2021.
Newsom signed the bill alongside survivors and advocates, including Courtney Stodden, who was 16 when she married 50-year-old actor Doug Hutchison in 2011. Stodden has since described the relationship as exploitative and advocated nationally for ending child marriage.
The new law contains no parental, judicial or pregnancy exceptions. Newsom called the prohibition “long overdue,” while advocates with Unchained At Last said they intend to continue pushing for similar bans in the remaining states.
EU Copernicus report shows surface air temperatures from June to August were 2.5C above decadal average
The scorching heat that persistently baked western Europe this summer was the worst on record, a report has found, with more than half the continent seared by “very strong” heat stress that felt hotter than 38C.
Surface air temperatures in western Europe from June to August were 2.5C above the recent decadal average, according to an update from the EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service on Friday, while milder but still deadly heat across the rest of the continent made the summer Europe’s third hottest on record.
Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips reports on this Sunday’s historic presidential elections in Brazil, as the son of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro hopes to take power
You would have been forgiven for thinking that when Jair Bolsonaro was convicted in September 2025 of attempting a coup, his political career was finished and his legacy forever tainted.
But in the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections this Sunday, another Bolsonaro has genuine hopes of victory – not Jair, but his son Flávio, who ialso campaigning to have his father released released.
Trustworthy AI-enabled scientific discovery depends on software, people, institutions and community action.
Oct. 1, 2026 — Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing scientific computing rapidly. AI systems can now generate and analyze code, synthesize information, assist with hypothesis generation and carry out complex reasoning tasks within scientific workflows. Alongside advances in computing architectures and data-intensive research, these capabilities are reshaping how scientific work is conducted.
Participants at the Toward Next-Generation Ecosystems for Scientific Computing workshop.
But the challenge for the scientific community is not simply to make research faster. It is to build scientific computing ecosystems that can harness these capabilities while preserving rigor, transparency, accountability and human judgment — and enabling new forms of collaboration and discovery.
That was the focus of the 2026 Toward Next-Generation Ecosystems for Scientific Computing workshop, held April 14–16 in Chicago. The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from universities, national laboratories, industry and other organizations to consider how scientific computing ecosystems should evolve as AI becomes a more active participant in research.
The workshop was the second in a three-year series organized by Lois Curfman McInnes and collaborators as part of her 2024 DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellowship. Building on the first workshop in 2025, this year’s discussions moved from identifying challenges toward developing strategic priorities and actions for the community.
The resulting report, “Toward Next-Generation Ecosystems for Scientific Computing: Harnessing Community, Software, and AI for Cross-Disciplinary Team Science,” identifies four interdependent strategic themes: software ecosystems for AI-enabled scientific discovery; trust, validation and traceability; human-AI teaming and paradigm shifts; and workforce, pedagogy and governance.
Four interdependent themes, their motivating drivers, and the anticipated outcomes.
Designing Ecosystems That Can Evolve
The report uses the term ecosystem in a broad sense, encompassing the technical, social and organizational structures that shape scientific computing — from hardware, software, data and workflows to people, institutions, incentives and community practices. The goal is to create an environment that can adapt as scientific needs and technologies change.
This perspective is important as AI evolves from being a tool used by researchers toward becoming an active participant in scientific workflows. As this happens, questions about validation, provenance, accountability and the role of human expertise become more pressing.
The workshop identified four areas where this evolution will be especially important.
Building Sustainable Software Ecosystems
Essential to the development of effective software ecosystems are shared research assets. These involve far more than providing access to computing facilities. Shared research assets include reusable software, datasets, metadata, workflows, benchmarks, validation examples and documentation. These assets capture knowledge, context, assumptions and computational approaches in forms that can be reused across projects and communities.
These shared assets can help researchers understand, extend and validate complex workflows, particularly as AI, accelerator-based computing and emerging technologies become increasingly interconnected. The report also emphasizes the importance of usability: helping researchers identify appropriate methods and their limitations for addressing a scientific problem.
Making Trust and Traceability Part of the Design
The report calls for trust-related capabilities — including verification, validation, uncertainty quantification, provenance, traceability, transparency and auditability — to become core design requirements.
As AI-enabled workflows move from exploratory use of AI to scientific analysis and decision-making, traditional approaches to verification, validation and uncertainty quantification may not be sufficient. These approaches must be extended with methods tailored to hybrid workflows that combine mechanistic models, numerical methods, AI systems, surrogate models and human judgment.
Scientific software presents special challenges regarding trust requirements. Such software can run without producing an obvious technical error and still generate scientifically misleading results. Conventional tests may not detect these situations, particularly when AI is rapidly generating or modifying software code. The workshop participants stressed the need for new mathematically and statistically grounded approaches to evaluating AI-enabled scientific workflows.
Moving from Taskwork to Teamwork
The report distinguishes between taskwork — the activities needed to accomplish a particular goal — and teamwork, which concerns how people and AI systems coordinate effectively toward that goal. As AI takes on more taskwork, effective teamwork becomes increasingly important.
Adding more agents to tasks does not automatically improve a workflow. Human researchers remain essential for framing scientific questions, combining domain and computational knowledge, evaluating evidence, managing uncertainty and interpreting unexpected results. The appropriate balance between automation and human involvement will depend on the task, with higher-risk or higher-consequence activities requiring greater transparency, validation and human judgment.
The workshop report also emphasizes the importance of giving early-career researchers practical experience with human-AI teamwork through fellowships, internships, apprenticeships and cross-sector research projects.
Preparing a Workforce for Continual Change
The skills needed for scientific computing are changing alongside the technology. Training therefore needs to extend beyond programming to include critical thinking, evaluation of evidence, reasoning under uncertainty, verification, reproducibility, communication and responsible use of AI-enabled tools.
The report’s workforce roadmap emphasizes multiple pathways for students, practitioners and institutional leaders, recognizing that people enter scientific computing at different stages and in different roles.
Training roadmap for AI-enabled scientific computing workforce.
Rather than preparing people for a particular generation of tools, the goal is to develop competencies that remain valuable as technologies evolve. The workshop also identified a need to understand how AI may change scientific roles, behavior, institutions and career pathways over time.
From Workshop Themes to Community Action
The central message of the workshop report is that the longstanding ecosystem challenges intensified by AI cannot be addressed by individual projects or organizations acting alone. Building effective scientific ecosystems will require coordination among researchers, universities, national laboratories, the private sector, funders and professional societies.
Based on the opportunities and needs presented under the four themes, the report identifies eight areas for community action. Near-term efforts should strengthen shared research assets, trust infrastructure, human-AI teaming practices and incentives for scientific software stewardship. Pilot projects should explore new approaches for coordinating multiple AI agents and multiple institutions while also investigating ways to help users make better-informed choices throughout research workflows. Longitudinal studies should examine how AI affects the workplace, professional roles and team behavior and should evaluate whether AI-enabled ecosystems improve scientific and engineering practice.
Building Better Science, Not Simply Faster Science
AI can accelerate parts of scientific work, but speed alone is not progress. The relevant question is whether AI-enabled ecosystems support valid, interpretable and creative discovery. Meeting that standard requires more than technical capability: software, data, people, institutions, incentives and community practices must evolve together through feedback, adaptation and stewardship.
As the report concludes, “Done well, these ecosystems can accelerate discovery and expand scientific inquiry while preserving the rigor, transparency, accountability and collaboration on which progress and public benefit depend.”
The complete workshop report, Toward Next-Generation Ecosystems for Scientific Computing: Harnessing Community, Software, and AI for Cross-Disciplinary Team Science, L. C. McInnes et al., is available for download: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.26519.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Christa Pike is critically ill in a Nashville hospital after surviving two attempts by Tennessee to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyers say. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s for a murder she committed as a teenager, with her lawyers saying she has a blood disorder that made it difficult to establish an intravenous line. Pike’s lawyer Randy Spivey says Tennessee has again demonstrated it is unable to carry out an execution with 'basic human dignity'
Officials in Wyoming had called notion to host game in Grand Teton national park ‘deeply unwelcome’
Major League Baseball (MLB) leadership is no longer considering holding a game inside a national park, according to a letter commissioner Robert Manfred sent to officials in Teton county, Wyoming, on Thursday in what could be the league’s biggest swing-and-a-miss off the diamond.
On 26 September, the Washington Post reported that MLB had reached out to the White House about staging a one-day game at Grand Teton national park in Wyoming. Teton county describes itself as a “a year-round resort community” and sits within the Jackson Hole valley. It’s also a habitat for grizzly bears, osprey, bison and more.
New York attorney general brought in by governor after recent questions raised over university’s 2024 investigation
Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, said on Thursday she is appointing Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, as special prosecutor to investigate the alleged gang-rape at Cornell University.
“The young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued,” Hochul said in a statement. “This action will ensure that the matter is fully and thoroughly investigated without conflict or bias, and handled independently with the rigor that this matter demands.”
Jay Clayton will likely be the White House's pick for AI czar, and the Trump administration has been discussing having him remain in his current role as director of national intelligence, according to sources briefed on the matter.
Nashville, TN — Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn is calling for Tennessee to restore the electric chair after the state failed to execute Christa Pike despite administering two doses of pentobarbital.
Pike, 50, remained alive after Wednesday’s lethal-injection attempt and was transported to a Nashville hospital in critical condition. Witnesses reported that she continued breathing, spoke about pain in her arm and at one point lifted her head after execution drugs had been administered.
Blackburn, the Republican nominee for governor, called the episode “tragic” and said it prolonged the suffering of the family of Colleen Slemmer, whom Pike murdered in 1995. Blackburn said Tennessee should conduct a full review but argued that the solution is to “bring back the electric chair.”
Gov. Bill Lee instead suspended remaining executions this year and ordered an independent investigation into what went wrong.
The failure is particularly significant because Tennessee already experienced another unsuccessful execution attempt this year. In May, officials abandoned the execution of Tony Carruthers after struggling to establish intravenous access.
Pike’s attorneys say Wednesday’s problems were predictable because they had previously warned about her medical conditions and difficult vein access. They are now seeking commutation of her death sentence.
The incident has renewed debate over whether Tennessee can reliably carry out executions under its current lethal-injection protocol.
Alongside a refreshed Kindle lineup, Amazon today introduced two accessories that bring physical buttons back to its touchscreen e-readers. The $34.99 Kindle Click is a Bluetooth remote that lets readers turn pages and adjust brightness without touching the device, while a new $79.99 magnetic cover is available for select Paperwhite and Colorsoft models. GeekWire reports: Amazon says [the Kindle Click is] meant for reading under the covers, on a treadmill, or on an airplane tray table. It's available for preorder and ships Oct. 28. It recharges over USB-C, includes side buttons for adjusting brightness, and works with Kindles released in 2024 or later. The company cited BookTok as an inspiration, Bloomberg reported, a reference to the community of readers on TikTok who post book recommendations, reviews and their reading setups. Kindle fans there have been showing off third-party clickers for years.
Amazon is also bringing back physical page-turn buttons, which disappeared when the company discontinued the Kindle Oasis in 2024. This time they come in a separate $79.99 magnetic cover, which works only with the new Signature Edition versions of the Paperwhite and Colorsoft. The new Kindles have screens that sit flush with the edges, colors that wrap around to the front, and optional aluminum housings. They also have user-replaceable batteries to comply with European Union rules, Amazon told The Verge.
The base Kindle starts at $149.99, or $189.99 in aluminum. The Paperwhite starts at $199.99 and the Colorsoft at $289.99, with Signature Editions at $249.99 and $319.99. Those prices match what Amazon has charged since August, when it raised Kindle prices by $40 to $50, citing memory and storage costs. The base Kindle is available now. The Paperwhite and Colorsoft ship Oct. 28.
As the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration draws pushback from some GOP lawmakers, White House border czar Tom Homan told CBS News critics should "educate themselves."
Attorneys for Christa Pike, who survived an attempt by the state of Tennessee to put her to death, say they warned that her execution could be botched in exactly the way it was.
New project supported by the National Science Foundation will create coast-to-coast infrastructure to address fundamental questions across the life sciences
Oct. 1, 2026 — Researchers at the University of California San Diego have received new research funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to design and build an observatory that will allow researchers to reveal some of life’s smallest structures in three dimensions, which will empower new discoveries in neuroscience and the basic biology of life.
The National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) at UC San Diego School of Medicine is an international resource for microscopy expertise. A recent $19 million award from the National Science Foundation will fund a new partnership between NCMIR, University of Vermont, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to create a national biological observatory. Credit: UC Dan Diego Health Sciences
The new initiative will establish a National Connectomics and Ultrastructure Volume Observatory (NCUVO), the goal of which is to make imaging capabilities — now concentrated in a handful of specialized laboratories — accessible to scientists across the country studying biology, medicine and the life sciences. The project will integrate advanced high-performance electron microscopy, artificial intelligence, advanced computing and powerful data networks to create a system that converts biological samples to usable scientific data, enabling researchers to study biological systems at larger scales and with greater completeness.
The five-year, $19 million facility construction project will be led and coordinated by neuroscientist Davi Bock, PhD, at the University of Vermont (UVM), with UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Neurosciences and Bioengineering Mark Ellisman, PhD, serving as co-principal investigator alongside Doug Taatjes, PhD, director of UVM’s Microscopy Imaging Center. Approximately $15.68 million of the new funding will directly support procurement of advanced tools and new staff recruitment for the project at UVM and $3.32 million will fund the utilization of shared advanced imaging and high-performance computing resources at UC San Diego.
Coordinated from UVM’s Larner College of Medicine, the effort will establish and integrate state-of-the-art high-throughput electron microscopy at UVM, expertise in sample preparation and complementary advanced microscopy techniques at UC San Diego’s National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR), and data management and processing in conjunction with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing.
“The NCUVO design is about transforming the latest sample preparation, multimodal imaging and computational technologies into a shared national capability rather than a specialty only available to a few,” said Ellisman, who directs the NCMIR. “At NCMIR, we will help to provide the means to turn raw microscopy image data into something that can be interpreted to advance our understanding of biological processes. By combining these capabilities with UVM’s new imaging instruments and SDSC’s resources for advanced cyberinfrastructure, we can empower scientists around the country to complete studies that compare many samples at different levels of detail.”
In addition to establishing the infrastructure for this next generation of imaging, the project will generate millions of gigabytes of data. Ilkay Altintas, PhD, chief data science officer at the SDSC and principal investigator of the NSF-funded National Data Platform, will guide the project’s data curation efforts. Her team will bring expertise in organizing, processing and sharing large scientific datasets, connecting the observatory’s images with NSF-supported national computing resources.
“We’re excited to help shape this important research infrastructure, which will make advanced biological imaging more accessible and open new windows into how living systems process information,” said Altintas. “Drawing on the expertise of the SDSC and the capabilities of the National Data Platform, UC San Diego will help the imaging community design and validate scalable, reproducible workflows that connect imaging data with the computing power needed to turn these remarkable images into new discoveries.”
Once the observatory is established, four pilot projects will test how well it will handle research using different organisms, sample sizes and scientific needs:
One project being used to shape the construction of the new observatory will examine how connections in the mouse hippocampus, a brain region important for memory, change following learning. Working with Ellisman’s team at UC San Diego and Anton Maximov’s laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, scientists will trace circuits involving neurons and their synapses marked as active in establishing a new memory.
Another pilot project will compare retinal circuitry across species to investigate how visual systems suit different environments. Bock points to sharks navigating murky versus clear water as an example of the questions such comparisons could address.
The third and fourth projects will focus on single-celled organisms, including one to study how the parasite Toxoplasma gondii crosses the blood-brain barrier to cause toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease spread through contaminated food and cat litter.
The five-year effort will culminate in a tested design, pilot datasets and an implementation plan for operation of the infrastructure as a facility for the nation – a true national observatory. Education is also a key part of the project, with undergraduate teaching materials and training opportunities planned around the pilot data to ensure that these new scientific resources are not just available, but that scientists know how to use them.
“There is so much about the natural world that we don’t fully understand, but to unlock those secrets research efforts must occur at a much greater scale,” said Bock. “That’s what the new observatory will do.”
While these pilot projects will produce more fundamental breakthroughs in biology, these discoveries also have the potential to reshape our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases and, eventually, help scientists discover tomorrow’s medicines.
“You can’t predict what we’ll find. And that’s the point,” added Bock. “Our country has historically invested in basic research for this reason, the unpredicted discoveries.”
This story was adapted from a press release originally published by the University of Vermont.
Rock band will still tour the UK, Europe and US over the next year but say decision to ‘fall dormant’ feels ‘liberating’
The British rock band Enter Shikari have announced they will go on hiatus at the end of 2027, a decision that may result in the band’s “extinction”.
The St Albans band, who formed in 1999 as Hybryd, are due to tour the UK in November, Europe and the US next year, and said they hoped to play some of their favourite places “one last time”.
After five years of work, 5,750 panels of toughened glass will help keep hundred of plants safe from Scottish winters – but more work needs to be done
In the early autumn sunlight, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s extensive plant collection appears safe in their glass enclosures. But danger lurks from above for the tropical ferns, cycads and rare alpine heathers.
Soon the September sunshine will give way to the storms and gales of the Scottish winter, which can bring hundreds of glass panels crashing to the greenhouse floor on the windiest days. Nobody is allowed inside when the wind is above 30mph.
Bruce66423 shares a report from The Telegraph: British police forces, including specialist units within the Metropolitan Police, have used Oxygen Forensics software to break into the phones of suspects during live investigations, public documents show. The Virginia-based company behind the software has been accused in the US of having hidden its Russian ownership to avoid sanctions, before it was awarded government contracts. Its American chief executive and a Russian national were arrested last week after a US investigation found the company had sought to hide its ownership in an alleged attempt to avoid sanctions and scrutiny.
[...] By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In December 2022, and in October 2023, Oxygen's chief executive told the US government that Oxygen Forensics had "no immediate or highest-level owner." By September 2024, the US Secret Service had awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its software. In March, Mr Reiber allegedly told the US government that there had been no Russians involved in developing the software and that no one in Russia had access to the environment in which it was built. US prosecutors say this was false. If convicted, both Mr Reiber and Mr Davydov could face a sentence of 20 years in prison.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced in July that President Trump had fired Roger Rogoff as the U.S. attorney in Seattle, less than an hour after he was sworn into the post.
New system captures fingerprints, facial images and ID information while connecting customers with remote agents for assistance
DOVER, Del. — Delawareans who need fingerprints for employment, licensing, background checks and other purposes will see a different process beginning Monday, Oct. 5, as the State Bureau of Identification moves to new SMART-E kiosks at its Dover and Georgetown offices.
The Delaware State Police said SBI will transition fingerprinting services to IDEMIA’s SMART-E Kiosk, replacing the traditional process in which an employee directly operates the fingerprint equipment.
SMART-E stands for Supervised Multi-Acquisition Remote Technology for Enrollment. The system does more than simply take fingerprints: It captures fingerprints, a facial image and identification documents and connects customers with trained remote agents who can supervise the process and provide assistance.
The “multi-acquisition” part of the name reflects the kiosk’s ability to collect several forms of identity information during a single enrollment.
Customers operate the kiosk themselves while a trained agent remotely monitors the process and can communicate through integrated audio and video technology.
What changes for customers
The kiosk guides customers through each step of enrollment, including capturing a full set of 10 fingerprints and a facial image, scanning government-issued identification and processing payment electronically.
IDEMIA says the system has demonstrated a fingerprint rejection rate below 2%, potentially reducing the need to repeat fingerprint submissions because of poor image quality.
Although the system is more automated, customers will not be left entirely on their own. A remote agent can communicate directly with the customer and provide guidance when necessary.
Potential savings in time and money
The new system also changes the economics of running a fingerprinting operation.
Under the traditional model, a trained employee typically works directly with one customer at a fingerprint station. SMART-E uses what IDEMIA describes as a “1-to-many” model, allowing a remote agent to oversee multiple kiosk enrollments rather than requiring a dedicated employee at every station.
IDEMIA says that model can lower labor costs, reduce facility and overhead expenses and make it easier to expand operating hours because remote agents do not have to be physically located at the fingerprinting site.
For customers, the potential time savings come from automating several steps at the same station — identification scanning, fingerprint and facial-image capture and electronic payment — while also checking fingerprint quality during the enrollment process.
The manufacturer describes the system as a way to provide faster and more efficient enrollment and to increase customer throughput. However, Delaware State Police has not released estimates showing how many minutes the new kiosks will save customers or how much money SBI expects to save after implementation.
That distinction matters: The technology is designed to reduce staffing and operating costs and potentially shorten waits, but the actual savings in Delaware will depend on customer volume, staffing and how the kiosks perform once they are in use.
Appointment still required
Customers should register and schedule their fingerprinting appointment through IdentoGO before going to an SBI office.
They also need to obtain the correct service code and any required paperwork from the employer, government agency, licensing organization or other entity requesting the background check.
Customers must bring an accepted form of government-issued identification and should have an electronic payment method available to complete the transaction at the kiosk.
The change is part of SBI’s continuing effort, in partnership with IDEMIA and IdentoGO, to modernize Delaware’s fingerprinting and background-check services.
To Go Box
What: SBI SMART-E fingerprinting kiosks
Begins: Monday, Oct. 5, 2026
Dover: State Bureau of Identification, 600 S. Bay Road, Suite 1, Dover
Georgetown: Thurman Adams Center, 546 S. Bedford St., Georgetown
Before you go: Schedule an appointment, obtain the correct service code and required documents, and bring an accepted government-issued ID and an electronic payment method.
Landlords can no longer refuse pit bulls, rottweilers, dobermans or other breeds considered ‘scary’
Landlords in Washington DC will no longer be able to refuse a tenant’s dog based on its breed, size or weight, nor can they impose special charges related to these factors.
At least, that’s what a new law that took effect on Thursday aims to achieve. Animal welfare organizations and animal shelters applauded the legislation, emphasizing the benefits of reducing barriers to pet ownership in the US capital.
Democratic-led coalition says gutting key protections will set US back decades and worsen climate crisis
States and cities sued the Trump administration on Thursday for repealing rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas.
Twenty-one states, led by New York, are challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rule. The Democratic-led coalition also includes Pennsylvania’s governor, the District of Columbia, New York City, Chicago and the city and county of Denver. They argue that “gutting one of the country’s most significant climate protections” will set the nation back decades and worsen the climate crisis.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service released guidance on the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, giving states more details on the rules and regulations intended to protect scholarship funds from fraud and…
The man allegedly contacted Katie Miller by phone and text over 40 times in around two months and left "disturbing messages about the victim and her husband," the Justice Department said.
Multiple videos shared on TikTok about a sexual assault accusation at a Cornell University fraternity house show dramatic footage of a woman being chased down a hallway and accosted, or dragged into a room. Others show a young male suspect in handcuffs.
But they are at odds with what’s publicly known about the case, including the alleged victim’s own account of the 2024 incident described in a civil lawsuit filed Sept. 16 in New York. There had been no arrests in the case as of Oct. 1, though the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office has reopened the investigation
PolitiFact identified these videos as part of TikTok’s efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.)
Videos such as these in an emotionally charged case lead to the spread of misinformation about what happened. So far, there hasn’t been any video of the assault released from officials or in credible news reports.
TikTok videos
Here’s what the TikTok videos show:
One TikTok video about the Cornell case shows a curly haired man being led down a hallway in handcuffs by two police officers. The man seen in the video is a 28-year-old man accused in 2024 of assaulting a teenage girl in San Antonio, Texas, news reports show.
Another TikTok video shows a man dragging a woman (whose face is blurred) across a front porch. That’s not from Cornell, but from a 2019 assault in California captured on a Ring doorbell surveillance video.
Several TikTok videos show a man chasing and attacking a woman in a hallway, or dragging a woman screaming and trying to escape from behind into a room. PolitiFact was unable to find the original videos in those cases, but did find that they have been used before on social media, some as early as November 2025.
The woman being chased in the hallway was used in a May TikTok video about an unrelated missing University of South Florida student. News accounts of that case do not mention videos of a woman being attacked in a hallway.
The video of the woman being dragged into a room from behind was seen in a November 2025 video about a woman killed on a cruise ship, allegedly by her brother. Newscoverage and information released by authorities in that case do not mention a video of that incident.
What the accuser has said
The woman, identified as Jane Doe in her lawsuit against seven Cornell students, said that after a night of drinking in October 2024, she went to the Chi Phi National’s Xi Chapter’s fraternity house, where she said she was led to an upstairs room and pressured into taking ketamine, before eventually being assaulted over several hours by the students.
She did not describe being physically chased down a hallway and attacked, or being dragged from behind into a room she was trying to flee.
The New York Times obtained documents from a university review of the case, and did not mention any video of the assault in the case in an Oct. 1 report.
What police have said
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said in a Sept. 28 news release that he had been asked by the community to review the decision not to file charges in the case.
That release also did not mention any video evidence of the assault or descriptions that match the TikTok videos.
Our ruling
Several TikTok videos about the Cornell University sexual assault case share dramatic videos of women being attacked or a suspect in handcuffs.
But the videos are from unrelated cases. They do not match descriptions of the Cornell incident by the accuser or police, and no one has been arrested in the case as of Oct. 1.
We rate them Pants on Fire!
Digital Research Program Manager Sara Swann and Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
A scene photograph included in the Delaware Department of Justice’s June 28, 2023 report on the Jan. 22, 2023 officer-involved shooting in New Castle County. The DOJ concluded the officers’ use of deadly force was legally justified and declined criminal charges.
State report says three officers reasonably believed deadly force was necessary after confronting armed suspects leaving a New Castle home
NEW CASTLE, Del. — Three New Castle County police officers were legally justified when they opened fire on suspects during a 2023 home invasion response, according to a Delaware Department of Justice investigation.
The Jan. 22, 2023, shooting was not fatal. Two suspects were wounded and survived.
The DOJ’s Division of Civil Rights and Public Trust concluded that Officers Sean Sweeney-Jones, Ryan Archangelo and Alejandro Guillen reasonably believed deadly force was necessary to protect themselves, other officers and nearby residents.
The department determined their actions did not constitute a criminal offense under Delaware law.
Home invasion reported
The incident began about 1:48 a.m. when a resident of 21 West Minuit Drive called 911 and reported that armed people had broken into the home and were attacking his roommates.
When New Castle County police arrived, officers encountered several suspects leaving or attempting to leave the residence.
According to the DOJ report, Alistair DiPasquale was carrying a black HK MP-5 .22-caliber firearm as he emerged from the house.
Body-worn camera footage reviewed by investigators showed Sweeney-Jones approaching the front door and ordering the suspects to show their hands and drop the weapon.
Sweeney-Jones and Archangelo then fired their service weapons.
DiPasquale and Evan Chandler were struck and suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Chandler was treated for gunshot wounds to his arm and both thighs, while DiPasquale was treated for a wound to his upper arm.
Third officer fired during backyard encounter
Two other suspects, identified by investigators as Michael Edgerton and David Salasky III, fled toward the rear of the property.
Guillen encountered Salasky after Salasky climbed over an approximately 6-foot wooden fence.
According to the report, Guillen saw something in Salasky’s hands and ordered him to stop. Guillen told investigators that Salasky turned toward him with his hand extended in a way that caused the officer to believe he was about to be shot.
Guillen fired once but did not strike Salasky.
Investigators later determined Salasky had been carrying a handgun.
DOJ reviewed video, interviews and evidence
The Division of Civil Rights and Public Trust reviewed body-worn camera footage, dispatch records, interviews with witnesses and police officers, photographs from the scene and medical records.
The DOJ said the central legal question was whether the officers reasonably believed deadly force was necessary to protect themselves or others from death or serious physical injury.
Investigators concluded that they did.
The report found that Sweeney-Jones and Archangelo confronted suspects emerging from a reported home invasion, including one carrying what appeared to officers to be a rifle.
Investigators also concluded Guillen reasonably believed he faced an immediate threat during his encounter behind the property.
“The use of force by police was justified as a matter of law in both self-defense and in the defense of others,” the DOJ report concluded.
No criminal charges warranted
The DOJ also found the officers were not reckless or negligent in creating a danger to other people in the residential neighborhood.
No bystanders were injured.
The department determined that the circumstances — an armed home invasion, suspects carrying firearms and the officers’ perception of immediate threats — supported the officers’ decisions to use deadly force.
As a result, no criminal charges were warranted against Sweeney-Jones, Archangelo or Guillen.
The report also noted that its review was limited to determining whether the officers’ actions violated criminal law. It did not determine whether the officers complied with New Castle County Police Department policies or procedures.
TO GO BOX
What: Delaware Department of Justice final use-of-force report
Incident: Jan. 22, 2023
Location: West Minuit Drive, New Castle
Officers: Sean Sweeney-Jones, Ryan Archangelo and Alejandro Guillen
Result: Two suspects suffered non-life-threatening gunshot wounds; no one was killed
Finding: DOJ determined the officers’ use of deadly force was legally justified and did not constitute a criminal offense
Learn more: The full report and body-worn camera footage are available through the Delaware Department of Justice’s police use-of-force investigations page.
State police say Smyrna man targeted retailers more than 25 times after failing to return to DOC supervision
NEW CASTLE COUNTY, Del. — A Smyrna man who failed to return to Delaware Department of Correction facility after leaving on an employment pass has been charged in a monthlong retail theft spree that state police say cost New Castle County businesses more than $48,000 in stolen merchandise.
Delaware State Police arrested Steven Pozzie, 40, following an investigation into more than 25 reported thefts at stores including Home Depot, Walmart, Lowe’s, Target, Kohl’s, Acme and Harbor Freight.
Police said Pozzie also caused more than $4,000 in damage, often using tools to defeat or damage merchandise security devices.
The charges are allegations. Pozzie is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
Investigation began at Home Depot
The investigation began in late August after Home Depot employees reported multiple thefts involving the same suspect, according to state police.
Detectives with the State Police Criminal Investigations Unit later connected similar incidents at several other retailers.
Police said Pozzie sometimes worked with accomplices and used multiple vehicles during the thefts.
Investigators ultimately identified Pozzie as a convicted offender who had failed to return to the Community Corrections Treatment Center after receiving an employment pass.
Delaware’s Level IV community corrections programs are designed to provide a structured transition between incarceration and full release. DOC says participants may be permitted to work in the community while remaining under correctional supervision. The Community Corrections Treatment Center also provides residential substance-use treatment as part of DOC’s reentry and rehabilitation system.
Caught after Newark theft
Police said the investigation came to a head Sept. 23 after Pozzie allegedly stole merchandise from a Lowe’s in Newark and fled in a Lexus SUV.
Detectives found the unoccupied vehicle near Vandever Avenue and Northeast Boulevard in Wilmington and searched the surrounding neighborhood.
Pozzie was located in a nearby alley and taken into custody, police said.
Investigators said he repeatedly provided a false identity while speaking with detectives.
Police said a search of Pozzie found drug paraphernalia and about 0.01 grams of suspected crack cocaine. Investigators also searched the Lexus and said they recovered tools believed to have been used during earlier thefts.
Pozzie requested medical treatment for an unrelated, non-life-threatening injury and was taken to a hospital. He was subsequently returned to DOC custody.
Extensive list of charges
Following his discharge from the hospital, Pozzie was formally charged Sept. 28.
The charges include 17 felony counts of possession of shoplifters’ tools, 13 felony counts of organized retail theft involving more than $1,500, five felony counts of second-degree conspiracy and additional shoplifting, theft, criminal mischief, drug and criminal impersonation charges.
He was arraigned by Justice of the Peace Court and remained in Department of Correction custody on a $44,200 cash bond.
The case comes as law enforcement agencies continue to focus on organized retail theft involving repeat offenders, accomplices and the resale of stolen merchandise. In a separate New Castle County investigation earlier this year, state police charged a Wilmington man after investigators said he recruited people to steal merchandise that was later resold.
To Go Box
What happened: Delaware State Police say Steven Pozzie, 40, stole more than $48,000 in merchandise during more than 25 thefts at New Castle County retailers.
Businesses involved: Home Depot, Walmart, Lowe’s, Target, Kohl’s, Acme, Harbor Freight and others.
Additional damage: Police estimate businesses sustained more than $4,000 in property damage.
Custody status: Pozzie remained in Department of Correction custody on a $44,200 cash bond following his Sept. 28 arraignment.
Learn more: Delaware State Police posts crime releases and case updates at dsp.delaware.gov.
(The Center Square) - A 51-year-old Department of Energy employee from Richland, Wash., was arrested Thursday and charged with attempting to provide material support and resources to the Houthis, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Cloudflare has launched two open-weight decision models, Clef and Clef-flash, designed for structured yes/no, multiple-choice, and ranking tasks while also supporting images, video, and up to a 64K context window. Cloudflare says its models outperform TypeSafe's Jev on several benchmarks and can run locally from Hugging Face. The Register reports: For starters, Clef has an LLM backbone. According to Cloudflare, Clef uses specially post-trained, frozen versions of Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B for Clef and Clef-flash, respectively, with the Qwen backbone performing a prefill-only pass during inference. Clef is still fast - faster than Jev, to be fair - and scores choices in parallel after that prefill-only pass. It's not clear what Jev's underlying architecture is, as TypeSafe has kept that a secret.
As for its speed and capability, Clef moves fast. Cloudflare ran it against Jev and some other open decision models using the Jev Decision Index available on Hugging Face, and the company's own ranking suggests Clef is slightly slower than other open models, but more accurate, with Clef-flash just as accurate as most of the others, but far faster.
To be fair to the competition, Cloudflare self-reported its own scores against the benchmark, and they have yet to be reproduced for ranking on the official Decision Index. Cloudflare also ran Clef against TypeSafe's own benchmarks, and claimed it beat Jev in three out of four areas, only losing out on agent trace observability. Even if it were a bit slower or less accurate, Clef has another major leg up on Jev: It's not limited to classifying text -- it can also handle images and video. Additionally, Clef supports a 64k context window. Jev can also handle up to 64k tokens across a request, although its state plus longest individual question is limited to 32k.
Planned rule change forms part of Burnham’s bid to crack down on the ‘little charges that add up’
Airlines will be blocked from charging parents extra to sit with their children on planes, according to government plans.
The new rule would require airlines to seat passengers aged under 14 next to their parents or an accompanying adult free of charge. Passengers will also no longer need to pay to tweak the name on their flight booking if they need to correct a mistake.
Oct. 1, 2026 — From Sept. 9-11, 2026, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), hosted the autumn hackathon of the Trillion Paramter Consortium. Organized by the EuroTPC, the hackathon gathered more than 30 researchers from leading European and US supercomputing centers and universities to turn ideas into practical solutions that make supercomputers more accessible and research projects more efficient.
Shaping AI: Participants at the TPC Autumn Hackathon at the LRZ discussed AI concepts and developed practical solutions. Image Credit: A. Schuffert/LRZ.
Participants represented Argonne National Laboratory, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland, CINECA in Italy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) / Munich Centre for Machine Learning (MCML), Leipzig University, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and LRZ. Working in four teams, they used the three days to plan projects, test approaches and share experiences directly with potential collaboration partners.
Participants organized themselves in four working groups:
WG1: Develop workflows and agentic systems, collaborate on various implementations for Pandemic Preparedness Engine (PPX), a project funded from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
WG2: Benchmark llama.cpp backends and GPU vendors for performance and energy efficiency across chat, reasoning, and vision-language models to find the most power-efficient hardware/software/model combinations.
WG3: Cost-aware LLM evolutionary algorithm design (multi-fidelity + Bayesian optimization + tiered model routing), benchmarked on GPU kernel-generation tasks on LRZ HPC infrastructure.
WG4: LLM-agent system that profiles HPC hardware, runs targeted micro-benchmarks, and suggests informed code optimizations grounded in real measurements.
Presentation by Dr. Nicolay J. Hammer, Head of LRZ Big Data & Artificial Intelligence Team
Agentic AI at the Center of the Hackathon
Agentic AI, in which large language models coordinate with other tools to process data and carry out actions, featured prominently throughout the hackathon. Contributions included:
Hypothesis generation for protein research: One team developed agentic workflows to support scientists in formulating new hypotheses.
Access to HPC systems: A working group from the Gauss Supercomputing Centre (GCS) Agentic AI Focus group created initial workflows that enable an AI agent to adapt code to various supercomputers, making a wide range of HPC systems easier to use.
Security and trust: In light of initial incidents and risky system attacks by AI agents, the risks and boundary violations associated with agent-based systems were also on the agenda. A second working group from GCS Agentic AI Focus group developed secure strategies for authentication and authorization workflows for AI agents, aiming to protect data and keep these digital assistants within defined boundaries.
Energy efficiency: Participants addressed the growing energy demand caused by inference calls in agentic systems and explored was to limit it. “The more Agentic AI is used, the more energy consumption increases due to inference calls,” notes LRZ researcher Ajay Navilarekal Rajgopal, “We need to limit that.”
Alongside the agentic AI focus, resources were dedicate to applying AI directly in research. A team from the Munich Centre for Machine Learning (MCML) investigated how researchers can use language models to formulate algorithms and develop them more quickly, while another group focused on risk prevention and pandemic preparedness.
Hackathon Outcomes
The four working groups pursued different objectives. “Some wanted to develop an initial, simple prototype that they could continue working on separately, whilst others arrived with code that they wanted to optimize and expand upon. In any case, working together has led to progress” observed Rajgopal.
The hackathon also provided inspiration beyond these individual initiatives. Prof. Charles Catlett, a Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and a member of the TPC Planning and Strategy Team, prompted participants to consider how AI agents could safeguard and enrich urban life by analyzing environmental data from cameras and sensors. In addition, the hands-on work helped build a network of contacts that AI specialists can turn to for practical advice in their day-to-day work.
LRZ leads the task of drawing up a roadmap for AI for science as part of the EuroTPC project. “To this end, we are currently gathering suggestions and topics from the EuroTPC’s advisory board and from researchers, and are using these to draft a strategy roadmap for the EU. LRZ has taken on the task of drawing up a roadmap for AI in science,” said Dr. Nicolay Hammer, head of the LRZ’s Big Data & AI (BDAI) team.
The constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment has shaped legal discourse around failed executions, but courts have not stopped states from attempting to execute the same person again.
Leaf peepers in Northeast Ohio can leave the car keys at home this fall and watch the color change from a vintage rail car. Cuyahoga Valley National Park is the only U.S. national park with a heritage railroad running through…
Shoppers and vendors in Aspen surprised by unusual customer as it stretched to sample stall offerings
Farmers’ market shoppers might not usually pay much attention to the local resident devouring fresh bread and pastries at one of the stalls with extra gusto – but some certainly did last weekend when they realized it was a hungry bear.
Onlookers on Saturday reached for their phones to take photos and videos of the bear in downtown Aspen, Colorado, after it wandered through the stalls and got up on to its hind legs to dig into the baked goods.
Florida’s governor race has a new battleground: offshore drilling.
In a new ad, GOP gubernatorial nominee U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds said Democratic nominee David Jolly lobbied for more offshore drilling in Florida waters after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“While Florida was still cleaning up, lobbyist David Jolly was already cashing in,” the ad’s narrator says. “Just months after the spill, Jolly was in Washington, pressuring Congress to expand drilling off the Florida coast, over $5 million in billings.”
Jolly, who was a lobbyist before he was elected to public office in 2014 as a Republican, says he is against drilling off Florida’s coast and as a former congressman advocated for keeping the practice away from the state. (After his stint in Congress, Jolly became an independent, then a Democrat in 2025 to run for Florida governor.)
So did he previously lobby for drilling?
Donalds’ campaign said yes, and pointed to a 2014 PolitiFact Florida fact-check from Jolly’s successful U.S. House race. Jolly said he “never” lobbied for offshore oil drilling, which we rated Mostly False.
Jolly’s campaign pointed to a different fact-check from his unsuccessful 2016 run against former Gov. Charlie Crist. Crist said Jolly “used money and power to try to … drill off our beaches,” which we rated Mostly False.
Here’s what’s accurate: As a lobbyist, Jolly once attended a meeting where offshore drilling legislation was a topic of discussion; experts say that’s technically lobbying. What’s misleading is that Donalds’ ad misattributes his firm’s overall billings exclusively to drilling and ignores Jolly’s efforts as a congressman to keep drilling away from Florida.
In 2014, we reported that a lobbyist disclosure form contradicted Jolly’s statement about never lobbying for offshore oil drilling. He later said that he attended the 2011 meeting but didn’t advocate for the bill. Crist in 2016 gave the impression that Jolly spent significant time and money lobbying for offshore drilling in Florida, ignoring Jolly’s efforts in Congress to block the practice off Florida’s coast.
In response to Donalds’ ad, Jolly’s campaign said that, as a lawmaker, Jolly consistently opposed drilling near Florida.
Donalds’ campaign said a failed bill that Jolly’s client, Free Enterprise Nation, supported in 2011 would have “fast-tracked” the federal offshore oil and gas leasing program and that Jolly wrote a blog post supporting it.
Jolly owned a lobbying firm, Three Bridges Advisors, from 2011 to late 2013.
A lobbyist disclosure form showed that Jolly’s firm did work for Free Enterprise Nation — a pro-business, anti-regulation advocacy group — in the first quarter of 2011. (The group is now inactive.)
Free Enterprise Nation supportedH.R. 909, a bill that would have expanded offshore oil and gas leasing and exploration by lifting restrictions in federal waters, including in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico. The legislation stalled in committee.
Jolly previously told PolitiFact that he listed H.R. 909 on his lobbyist disclosure form because he was at a meeting where Free Enterprise Nation discussed it, but said he “did not lobby on its behalf.” Jolly said he “had a practice of always overcomplying,” and that he supported offshore drilling outside the 230-mile Florida moratorium area.
Drilling off Florida’s coast was largely illegal when Jolly was a lobbyist. The federal law — the 2006 Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act — prohibited drilling within 230 miles of Tampa Bay and 125 miles from the Panhandle. It expired in 2022. In 2018, Florida voters approved a ballot amendment to ban offshore oil and gas drilling in state-controlled waters.
Lobbying experts said in 2014 they thought it was unlikely that Jolly would have listed the bill if he hadn’t discussed it, although there was no way to verify that.
It’s not unusual for lobbyists to overreport their activity out of an abundance of caution, said Kenneth Gross, a lawyer who advises clients on how to comply with political law, including lobbying.
In an April 2011 blog post,Jolly wrote that Free Enterprise Nation supported H.R. 909 and quoted an endorsement from founder and former CEO Jim MacDougald. In 2014, MacDougald, who was serving as Jolly’s House campaign finance co-chair, said Jolly “was never employed to advocate” for the bill on behalf of the company and represented the organization on different issues.
Federal law says lobbyists must report any issue in which they engage for their clients, including preparing information, communicating with government officials and participating in planning activities.
Donalds’ ad ignores Jolly’s efforts in Congress to block drilling in Florida
Donalds’ ad overstates Jolly’s lobbying for offshore drilling and omits that he opposed the practice near Florida.
The ad says Jolly took in over “$5 million” in billings to pressure Congress to drill off Florida’s coast. Public disclosure records show that the $5 million figure represents Three Bridges Advisors’ total billings across all clients and issues, rather than revenue tied exclusively to offshore drilling.
Jolly’s firm in 2011 reported $30,000 in income from Free Enterprise Nation. Our search of Three Bridges Advisors’ reports did not turn up additional income from Free Enterprise Nation.
As a Republican congressman in 2014, Jolly opposed expanding exploration off Florida’s Atlantic coast using sound waves, out of concern it could be used in the Gulf of Mexico and lead to another oil spill. He signed a bipartisan letter to then-President Barack Obama opposing so-called seismic testing. (The Atlantic drilling waslater called off.)
Jolly supported drilling for oil as a practice, just not in Florida. In a 2015 op-ed, he said Florida didn’t need to risk its beaches simply to increase oil production.
He told PolitiFact in 2016 that he supported drilling in the western and central Gulf, while strengthening the ban in the eastern Gulf.
Jolly’s gubernatorial campaign told us he no longer believes new drilling leaseholds are necessary amid emerging energy technologies. “We should eventually move away from offshore drilling altogether,” Jolly said in an emailed statement. “This must be done in a commercially practicable way, but should fully be our long-term national energy goal.”
Our ruling
Donalds’ ad said that months after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, “Jolly was in Washington, pressuring Congress to expand drilling off the Florida coast, over $5 million in billings.”
As a lobbyist, Jolly attended a 2011 meeting with a client who supported a bill that could have expanded offshore drilling in Florida; he listed the bill on a lobbyist disclosure form. He later said he did not actively lobby for the bill during the meeting. We don’t know the specifics of what was said in the meeting, but lobbying experts said attending a meeting during which a bill is discussed still counts as lobbying.
Donalds’ ad inaccurately linked Jolly’s firm’s total billings across all clients and issues exclusively to offshore drilling. The ad also ignores Jolly’s congressional efforts to keep drilling away from Florida’s shores; today he doesn’t support offshore drilling anywhere.
Two members of the Eugene, Oregon, Police Department in a photo posted to the department’s Facebook page on Aug. 26, 2026.Screenshot: Eugene Police Department via Facebook
How much does it cost to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face?
If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.
In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about police officer Justin Peckels, which focused on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Peckels has been the subject of community complaints, including for punching a resident in the face during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.
The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)
The open invoice by the City of Eugene, Ore. dated Aug. 1, 2026, in response to Double Sided Media’s request for public records relating to a police officer accused of misconduct.Screenshot: City of Eugene
“Once the City receives payment of $2,484,599.04 staff will continue processing your request,” the letter from the department’s public records division read. “If the actual cost of processing your request exceeds the amount you have paid the City, you will be required to pay the difference before the City will provide the records you have requested.”
Peckels’s file is either the largest in the world, or city officials have intentionally maintained their databases in such a way as to ensure fulfilling public records requests is prohibitively expensive. The city’s response points, at a minimum, to the latter. It justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it couldn’t narrow the custodians whose records it would need to search, despite the targeted nature of the request, and maintained it must search all records of all city employees, past and present.
By that logic, if someone ever worked in Eugene’s parks and recreation department, their records could contain responsive information about police misconduct, and must be manually pulled and reviewed, one by one.
This goes far beyond incompetence. It’s an intentional effort to make a response artificially voluminous — and cost prohibitive — to intimidate the journalist into dropping it entirely.
Normally, agencies are required to search the specific custodians most likely to possess responsive records, not every groundskeeper or clerk on the city payroll. If the city were acting in good faith, officials would have asked Double Sided Media to help them identify the most likely record-holders, not take it upon themselves to cast a citywide dragnet as its first step.
What makes Eugene’s money-grab particularly galling is its technology double standard. While it apparently can’t invest in efficient search software, the police department recently signed a two-year $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers. This project was so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue the city for records about how the cameras were being used and demonstrates, among other inclinations, the city’s eagerness to employ sophisticated software to deploy against residents.
Yet that technological sophistication disappears as soon as a journalist requests public records about the department’s internal accountability process, and simple keyword searches are suddenly cumbersome.
For small newsrooms, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry.
Troublingly, Eugene’s $2.5 million bill is not an anomaly.
In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.
The same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would cost $1.46 million for records about the DEA’s role in the search and capture of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
In 2019, the Army tried to charge $300,000 to release military base water test results for the presence of toxic chemicals. The Army agreed to waive the exorbitant fee after facing intense backlash.
Luckily, records requesters seeking federal documents have a defense against these capricious invoices. Recent FOIA amendments aim to ensure if an agency misses its response deadlines, it can’t charge most fees.
At the local level, however, these protections disintegrate. While Oregon grants agencies the discretion to reduce fees when the disclosure would benefit the public, agencies routinely ignore these provisions.
For small newsrooms like Double Sided Media, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry (all while Eugene Police Department launches its own “press” initiative to document its policing). It also sets the precedent for using this chilling tactic on any journalist or watchdog as it sees fit.
Double Sided Media is rightly appealing the fee estimate, and it should prevail. But cities like Eugene will continue these efforts unless lawmakers across the country force agencies to adopt fee caps, mandate public-interest fee waivers for journalists, and require agencies to procure software that allows them to respond to records requests in an efficient and timely manner.
Until then, police departments will likely continue to issue multimillion-dollar ransoms for their records — weaponizing the public’s right to know into another avenue for police to operate with impunity.
(The Center Square) – With Americans questioning the hundreds of thousands of AI-enhanced surveillance cameras across the country, one Republican lawmaker is introducing legislation to curb the worst abuses of the technology.
Released last Christmas Day, “Marty Supreme” follows Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, who is an aspiring ping-pong player with dreams of making it big in the world of ping-pong. Following the 2026 Oscars, the film, directed by Josh Safdie, unfortunately lost all nine of its nominations.
Chalamet was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the Oscars for his performance in “Marty Supreme,” which I think he deserved. Although he lost to Michael B. Jordan for “Sinners,” Chalamet’s performance does not go unnoticed. I have to respect the dedication he had when making and promoting this film. From “Marty Supreme” custom jackets to making an entire rap song, Chalamet clearly cared a lot about this film and its success.
Taking place in 1950s New York City, Mauser is working to achieve his dream of winning big at the table tennis world championship tournament that takes place in Japan. He quickly learns that Japan’s representative for ping-pong will be a challenge to beat.
I saw “Marty Supreme” over winter break back in January. I am a huge cinephile and Chalamet fan, so I was excited for his new movie. My expectations for this movie were mixed — I had heard some good reviews, but I also heard people saying it did not live up to the hype that Chalamet had promised.
Since then, this film has not left my mind. I have rewatched it countless times, each time better than the next. “Marty Supreme” will still be streaming in my house during summer break.
Long story short, I loved “Marty Supreme.” Chalamet has perfect comedic timing, the delivery of his lines is flawless and the plot is so chaotic, it will keep you on your toes. Although Mauser himself is a narcissistic prick and his actions are very questionable throughout the film, he’s an entertaining character. I found myself laughing hysterically throughout the movie just at Chalamet’s line delivery alone.
Despite taking place in the 1950s, the dialogue, especially Chalamet as Mauser, is surprisingly modern. This may seem weird to some, but for me, it added to the humor of the movie. Watching Chalamet deliver his lines in a modern tone with a full 1950s look to him was really entertaining to watch.
Something that stood out to me while watching was that “Marty Supreme” features a soundtrack of primarily music from the 1980s (including one of my favorite songs, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears) in a film set in the 1950s.
I thought this was an interesting approach to take. I love 80s music and it really added to the action of the movie. To me, it signified how Mauser himself is “out of place” in the time period he lives in, with the combination of modern dialogue and music not from the film’s era.
Aside from playing ping-pong, the film also follows Mauser desperately trying to earn enough money to fly to Japan so he can compete in the table tennis world championship and represent the United States. Since it’s an expensive trip, Mauser does anything he can to get money with his friend Wally, played by Tyler the Creator.
These two get into lots of trouble by accidentally stealing (and losing) a dog, entering to win money through a table tennis competition that takes place in a local bowling alley and, in the end, gambling all of their money away. I won’t go into too much detail about the action because I do not want to spoil all of their adventures, since that was one of the most entertaining parts for me.
I highly suggest that everyone give “Marty Supreme” a watch. It was definitely one of my favorites of the Best Picture nominations. Although I’m a bit biased because I love Chalamet, he always gives outstanding performances in every movie he is in.
Although its worldwide theatrical run has ended, “Marty Supreme” is available to stream on HBO Max. You can also rent or purchase the film through platforms like Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV. I hope everyone enjoys the entertaining film that “Marty Supreme” is and goes into watching it with an open mind.
Ryan Roslansky is leaving Microsoft and LinkedIn after nearly 18 years, triggering another leadership shuffle across Office and Teams. "Roslansky, who until recently was the CEO of LinkedIn, was promoted to the head of Office last year and then took control of Microsoft Teams earlier this year," notes The Verge. From the report: "Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an internal memo. "Over the past year, Ryan's team has done critical work bringing together the product, engineering, and design foundations that have made this next phase possible."
Roslansky is leaving a week after Microsoft announced its new Copilot, which the company is positioning as "the OS for work." He's also leaving around a month after calling fully AI-generated documents "a doom loop" for workers. "If we're not careful, we'll end up with a very expensive way to avoid writing and reading in an ocean of sameness, genericness," said Roslansky in his LinkedIn post.
Microsoft is now moving the teams behind Office and Microsoft Teams over to Charles Lamanna, as part of the Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization. [...] Microsoft's chief design officer, Jon Friedman, is also moving to report to Copilot chief Jacob Andreou. Microsoft appointed Dan Shapero as its LinkedIn CEO earlier this year, and he will continue in this role and report directly to Nadella.
In the Maine Senate race, ads from a Democratic super PAC misleadingly claim Republican Sen. Susan Collins cast a vote to “cover up the Epstein files” and received “$3 million to her super PAC” from “Jeffrey Epstein’s business partner.”
Collins supported an Epstein-files disclosure bill in November that required the Department of Justice to publicly release records related to the convicted sex offender. She had voted two months earlier against an amendment that called for the release of the files and was attached to a defense spending bill. Collins said she opposed adding the amendment to an unrelated bill.
Furthermore, the ad stretches the facts in claiming that “Epstein’s business partner” gave money to Collins. A political action committee supporting Collins received millions of dollars in contributions from a man who was reportedly a “founding member” of a private New York City club along with Epstein and many other wealthy people.
A spokesperson for the man told us he had no relationship with Epstein.
This is the third time this election cycle that we havewritten about Democratic ads misleadingly citing Republican senators’ votes to block the amendment and not mentioning that the full Senate later supported releasing the Epstein files. The ads also try to connect the Republican senators who blocked the amendment to people linked in some way to Epstein.
The ads against Collins were sponsored by WinSenate, a super PAC that works to elect Democrats to the Senate. Collins is facing Democrat Troy Jackson, a former Maine state Senate president, in a close race for her seat.
WinSenate released the first attack ad on Sept. 24. In it, a woman, identified as a retired teacher, says she is “horrified” and claims: “Susan Collins voted to cover up the Epstein files. She knew 14-year-old girls were raped. Turns out that Jeffrey Epstein’s business partner funneled $3 million to her super PAC. Susan Collins took the money and protected child predators.”
The second ad, which started airing Sept. 29, features the same woman saying Collins “voted with Trump to cover up the Epstein files” — but the ad leaves out the claim about donations from an alleged Epstein business partner.
For the Epstein files claim, the ad cites Senate roll call vote 512 on Sept. 10, 2025. That’s when Collins — and nearly all Republican senators — voted to table an amendment Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer tried to include in the annual bill that sets the budget and policies for the Defense Department. Schumer’s amendment called for the U.S. attorney general to release all unclassified material pertaining to Epstein, including documents about federal investigations of Epstein and his associates, as well as information about Epstein’s 2019 death that was ruled a suicide. At the time of his death, Epstein, a wealthy financier, was in jail and facing federal charges of sex trafficking minors.
According to the New York Times, Collins said of the failed amendment: “It does not belong on the Department of Defense policy bill.” The newspaper also reported that Collins “said she opposed Mr. Schumer’s measure because a similar amendment had been adopted on a spending bill that would fund the Justice Department.”
But the amendment that Collins supported in the July 2025 markup session by the Senate Appropriations Committee did not require the same level of disclosure.It required the attorney general to “retain, preserve, and compile” Epstein-related records or evidence and submit a report to Congress. While that DOJ spending bill had not yet passed in the Senate, “Ms. Collins said it was a more appropriate vehicle for a measure on the Epstein files,” the Times wrote.
In addition, when the Epstein Files Transparency Act — a standalone bill to release the Epstein documents — came up for consideration in the Senate in November, it passed by unanimous consent, which means the bill was not opposed by Collins or any other senator.
“I support the release of the Epstein files,” Collins said in a statement about the bill passing. “This is an important step for the survivors of these heinous crimes.”
As we have explained before, President Donald Trump initially opposed Congress’ attempts to release the files, but relented days before the Senate passed the bill in November.
The ‘Business Partner’ Claim
The first WinSenate ad that aired suggested Collins voted against Schumer’s amendment because of millions of dollars in donations from an Epstein associate.
Although the ad does not mention the alleged Epstein “business partner” by name, it does cite donations to a pro-Collins super PAC on June 27, 2025, and June 26, 2026. Federal Election Commission records show on those dates, Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the Blackstone investment management firm, made contributions totaling $3 million to Pine Tree Results PAC, a group supporting Collins in the 2026 midterms. (Maine is known as the Pine Tree State.)
Schwarzman’s first donation, which was $2 million, was made more than two months before the vote on Schumer’s amendment. But the second donation, which was $1 million, was made more than six months after the full Senate supported disclosing the files.
The “business partner” label was based on reporting that Schwarzman and Epstein were among the very first people who paid to join Core Club, a private club in New York City that was founded by Jennie Enterprise in 2005.
“Susan Collins blocked the release of the Epstein files and then her PAC accepted millions from a business associate of Epstein’s, an individual who belonged to the same exclusive business club,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for WinSenate, said in a statement to us. “As [has] been publicly reported, they ‘were founders and members of an exclusive social club for billionaires.'”
The “founders” language does appear in a July 21 MeidasTouch News story with the headline: “More Donations from Epstein Contacts to Susan Collins Uncovered.” The story from the left-leaning outlet went on to mention Schwarzman’s donations to Pine Tree Results PAC and said, “Schwarzman and Epstein were founders and members of an exclusive social club for billionaires in New York called the Core Club.”
But to call them “business partners” is a stretch.
We reached out to the Core Club’s press office for comment, but have not received a response.
The Real Deal, a real estate news publication, reported in February that Epstein “paid $100,000 as a founding member, alongside 150 other investors, according to a spokesperson for Core.” Its story said, “Epstein’s fellow founding members included Aby Rosen of RFR, Steven Roth of Vornado Realty Trust and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone Group.”
In 2011, the New York Times also referred to Schwarzman as among the “founding members” of the club, “who anted up an initial investment of $100,000 when the club was conceived.”
“Being founders of the same exclusive club inherently makes individuals partners in business,” French said in an earlier statement provided to PolitiFact and Quick Check, an election feature of the Bangor Daily News.
But other than paying money to join and get the club started, it’s not clear that Schwarzman and Epstein ever did business together as “partners,” which implies a close working relationship.
The men had no relationship, a spokesperson for Schwarzman told us.
“It would be categorically false and reckless to claim or imply that Steve had any relationship with this despicable individual,” the spokesperson said in an email.
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(The Center Square) - The U.S. Supreme Court will hear significant cases on climate change, consumer protection and discrimination in its upcoming term.
Request for Clancy, 36, to be acquitted turned down nearly a month after first trial ended with deadlocked jury
The judge in the Lindsay Clancy murder case on Thursday refused to declare her not guilty, turning down a defense motion that had argued there was not enough evidence to prove she was responsible for killing her three children.
On Tuesday, Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington tried to persuade Judge William Sullivan that prosecutors had not offered any proof that Clancy had killed her three children. Prosecutors argued there was plenty of evidence, calling Reddington’s claim “laughable”.
Court will review practice of indefinite detention for undocumented immigrants living in the US
The US supreme court agreed on Thursday to take up a case challenging the Trump administration’s practice of indefinite detention for undocumented immigrants living in the US and awaiting deportation proceedings.
Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune
A little-known effort to bring an artificial intelligence tool into Texas public schools began about a year ago, with the help of the state’s top education official, Mike Morath.
In September 2025, Morath responded to an email from associates of a private school chain called Alpha School who wanted to talk about using their AI program to educate kids in Texas classrooms.
“I’d love to schedule a follow-up discussion,” Morath replied.
The online platform wasn’t new to Morath, the state’s education commissioner. Just three months earlier, he had supported Alpha leaders’ bid to open a charter school in Texas that would use the same technology. Then the Texas State Board of Education, which has the final say on such charter decisions, voted it down 10 to 3. Board members cited concerns about the company’s use of AI to teach and students’ screen time, as well as lingering questions about the drastic student test improvements Alpha leaders presented.
But Morath and his agency leaders did not need the board’s approval to help get Alpha’s AI model into public schools.
Over the last year, Morath and his staff at the Texas Education Agency exchanged a flurry of emails with leaders of companies connected to Alpha about possible partnerships, visited their campuses several times, helped with a one-page explainer about the program to share with school districts and connected them with district leaders, according to communications obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through public information requests.
One email revealed that Morath offered to personally introduce an Alpha leader to the superintendent he appointed to lead the yearslong state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the largest in the state.
“I’d also like to set up another site visit to visit both your Austin secondary and primary with my team,” wrote Morath. “The Superintendent of H.I.S.D. would also like to do a site visit, so l’ll connect y’all separately. And hopefully we can schedule them to happen on the same day.”
The emails show that state education officials and Alpha affiliates approached at least 10 school districts about the AI program. After the coordination, at least three of those districts — Houston; Fort Davis, in West Texas; and Aldine, near Houston — launched pilot programs incorporating the AI tool.
The full extent of Morath and his agency’s involvement, as well as the number of public school districts using the AI program, remains unclear. The TEA has not responded to questions about its efforts for months, initially failed to provide some of Morath’s emails in response to public information requests and continues fighting the release of additional communications.
The TEA sent a written statement that said “there is no formal partnership between TEA and Alpha Schools.” But the agency continued that it “is always interested in promising ways to improve student outcomes in math and reading.” The statement said TEA officials connected district leaders who were interested in Alpha’s program but left the decision up to them on whether to use it.
Morath emailed MacKenzie Price, the co-founder of Alpha School, and her husband, Andy Price, last year.Obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Highlighted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Aldine and Fort Davis leaders told the newsrooms it was not unusual for the state agency to recommend potential partnerships and expressed excitement about the pilot. All three districts with pilot programs said they will use the AI software for supplemental learning rather than fully implementing the Alpha School model of using it to teach all students basic subjects in two hours a day while the human teachers, which Alpha calls guides, focus on motivation and emotional support.
Some education experts and State Board of Education members who voted against Alpha leaders’ attempt to open a charter school last year raised concerns with the state’s efforts to use the AI-led platform given its recent track record.
The newsrooms also found that students performed significantly worse on state-mandated exams than Alpha leaders predicted at the one charter school they got approved, in Arizona, and at an existing school in Texas where students used the AI program last year.
Morath’s agency knew about results in at least one of those charters, Texas Preparatory School in Austin. Last year, state test scores compiled by his agency showed just 21% of students passed. The TEA then gave the charter its third consecutive F rating, mostly based on those scores.
David DeMatthews, an education professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was “disheartening” and “painful” to learn that the TEA was promoting the product when the company has not yet publicly shown its success in public or charter schools, where there are likely to be more students who have learning barriers or struggle academically.
“That raises questions about whether TEA is serving its public interest and is being transparent and accountable to us,” DeMatthews said. “It’d be one thing if they were approved as a charter and they did have a track record and they could show evidence. We don’t have any of those sorts of things.”
The platform’s expansion into traditional public schools comes as government officials across the country, including in Texas, have taken an increasingly skeptical view of AI use in schools. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently banned generative AI for elementary and middle school students in the nation’s largest school district. Leaders in Los Angeles implemented a similar restriction. In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proposed further limiting screen time in public schools.
Abbott, who has received over $1.5 million in political donations from Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price, did not agree to an interview or directly answer whether he supports the AI platform in Texas schools.
“A great teacher in the classroom is the most important element of a quality education,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, wrote in a statement to the newsrooms. “Any tool a district deploys must keep teachers at the center of the classroom, limit unnecessary screen time, and prove results for students.”
Abbott’s Democratic opponent in the November governor’s race, Gina Hinojosa, recently had a press conference opposing the use of Alpha’s AI program in Houston ISD. That came after she’d already made a campaign promise to fire Morath if she is elected.
Alpha leaders did not agree to interviews or answer detailed questions for this story. Price has repeatedly told her social media followers that she wants to bring the AI model into public schools to make it accessible for all families. School leaders previously defended the model in interviewsand directly in response to Texas Education Board members’ concerns about the proposed charter. They maintained that teachers’ roles remain significant despite lessons delivered by the AI platform and that screen time at the school would comply with national recommendations, and they referred to a self-published paper summarizing that Alpha students learn twice as fast as their peers while earning test scores among the top echelon nationwide.
Pam Little, a Republican serving as vice chair of the elected State Board of Education, said she hopes Abbott’s proposal to limit screen time in public schools leads to the removal of screens in classrooms altogether. That includes eliminating pilot programs like those using Alpha’s AI platform.
“I don’t want anything AI in our schools, especially at the lower grades,” said Little, who last year voted against the proposed charter, which would use Alpha’s AI platform.
Gustavo Reveles, a Democratic Education Board member who voted against Alpha leaders’ charter application last summer, said he’s worried the TEA is ignoring the board’s apprehension by helping to bring Alpha’s AI tool into public schools.
“It certainly raises a red flag that perhaps there’s ways to circumvent that concern,” Reveles said.
Pilot Program Planning
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, Alpha School co-founder MacKenzie Price and Morath participated in a roundtable at an Alpha School campus in Austin in September 2025.Kaylee Greenlee for The Texas Tribune
Last fall, local television news cameras captured Morath alongside U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon as the pair visited an Alpha campus in Austin. Joining them was Price, the school’s co-founder. Morath said that day, “Our goal is to make sure that children have access to great schools,” regardless of who runs them.
He added, “There are lessons to be learned in a school like Alpha.“
That week, Morath emailed Price and her husband, Andy Price, who business filings show holds various roles at Alpha’s related companies, including chief financial officer.
Morath also connected with an employee from Studient, a company that uses Alpha’s AI technology, now often called TimeBack. Studient, which uses the tool for students struggling academically, is among the web of corporate entities connected to Alpha, according to its privacy policy and business filings with the Texas secretary of state.
In his emails, Morath said he would like to learn more about Studient’s intervention work with kids lagging academically. He also wanted to discuss 1882 partnerships, formal arrangements in which a public school contracts with an existing charter, university, nonprofit or state-approved entity to run the campus. Districts with consecutive failing ratings will sometimes use these partnerships to avoid possible state takeovers.
Morath’s staff set up a follow-up discussion with the Prices for October.
Emails show the commissioner visited Alpha’s campuses again with six other TEA leaders. His staff coordinated to go on the same day as Houston Superintendent Mike Miles. Not only had Morath chosen Miles to lead the Houston district in 2023, but the two had worked together at Dallas ISD when Morath was a school board member and Miles was the superintendent.
Morath follows up with Alpha associates to discuss how their AI learning program could be used in Texas public schools.Obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Redacted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
As of August, the TEA said it could not find any documentation of Alpha or its other companies applying for or running an 1882 partnership. But after the school visit, emails show, other state Education Agency leaders began communicating with Alpha and Studient associates about more informal pilot programs.
Andrew Hodge, associate commissioner of system innovation at the TEA, followed up last November to figure out how the state could test out Alpha’s AI model. Hodge emailed Joe Liemandt, the tech billionaire behind the software company Trilogy, who pioneered and invested $1 billion into Alpha’s AI-learning technology.
“It was great meeting you and learning about Alpha last Monday,” wrote Hodge on Nov. 5. “I’d like to schedule a follow up discussion with you/your team to talk through possibilities for piloting a few supplemental (you called this Tier 3 in your outline) instances in the state. What’s the best way to get 30-45 minutes to discuss?”
Hodge eventually had another member of his team, Michael Strange, tour Alpha’s private school in Fort Worth. Strange oversees the TEA’s blended learning programs.
“I’d like for him to be able to visit your school as we continue to improve our supports for TX districts and better understand the landscape of tech-enabled models in K-12,” emailed Hodge.
By April, emails show, Strange was regularly in contact with Andy Price and a Studient employee about helping to launch pilot programs in public schools. At one point, Strange sent them a to-do list with next steps, which included him drafting a one-page explainer of the pilot program to share with districts.
Andy Price, MacKenzie Price, Studient, Hodge, Liemandt and Strange did not respond to the newsrooms’ requests for comment.
One of Michael Strange’s emails to Alpha associates about launching pilot programs with its AI learning platform in public schools across TexasObtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Redacted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
In all, ProPublica and the Tribune identified at least five school districts — Ector County, Fort Bend, Irving, Pecos and Pflugerville — that confirmed they were approached about partnering with Alpha but did not pursue an agreement. Only Ector County provided a reason, stating the district “determined our school day is not currently structured to effectively implement or support the pilot.”
But Alpha and Studient officials had some successes. By mid-June, Strange applauded their progress securing pilots with Fort Davis and Aldine.
“Happy Friday!” wrote Strange ahead of a check-in. “Looking forward to seeing everyone today and excited to hear that districts are moving forward.”
Leaders at Fort Davis and Aldine told ProPublica and the Tribune they are using the AI platform this year to help students who are behind academically. Michelle Hartmann, deputy superintendent at Fort Davis, which enrolls around 800 students, said it will deploy the model in its K-8 classrooms for students who need additional help in reading and math.
“We’re excited because we see it as an opportunity to provide an extra layer of intervention,” Hartmann said. She later followed up with the newsrooms to say the district could not be happier after the first weeks of the pilot and that students are very engaged.
Aldine will deploy the online platform to roughly 300 students across four middle school campuses that require support in math. Ashley Brown, an Aldine spokesperson, said the Alpha intervention model aligned with the district’s mission “to provide a rigorous and enriching educational experience that prepares every student for success in college, career, and life.”
Kindergarten and first grade students participated in a workshop at an Alpha School in Austin last year while McMahon and Morath toured the campus.Kaylee Greenlee for The Texas Tribune
Houston ISD plans to use the Alpha technology for students with strong test scores “to evaluate whether this instructional approach can accelerate academic growth,” according to its press office.
The office said Houston ISD wasn’t paying Alpha for the pilot but did not provide more details. The district asked the Texas attorney general to withhold the contract from the newsrooms under the state’s public records act.
Tennessee’s governor on Thursday said it was “deeply disturbing” that his state botched the execution of a death row prisoner who remained alive and snoring 40 minutes after receiving a double dose of the lethal drug that should have quickly killed her.
Bill Lee, a Republican, has suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry after Wednesday night’s failed attempt to put to death Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder, at the execution chamber in Nashville.
Death row inmate Christa Pike survived her execution in Tennessee on Wednesday, reviving debate over a pattern of botched lethal injections in the United States.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it's "too early to say" if Iran was involved in the thwarted attempt to crash the commercial airliner.
Micron says the global RAM and storage shortage will tighten further through 2027 and 2028, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra saying the company has already sold most of next year's capacity. "In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply. In fact, we see greater tightness in the industry in 2027 and in 2028 versus 2026. Overall, supply-demand environment is only getting tighter," Mehrotra said. "We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance." As a result, the company is forecasting record revenue and an 86.25% gross margin. Tom's Hardware reports: The memory and storage industry is not holding back on increasing production, though, with Micron saying that NAND and DRAM shipments are expected to grow in the low-to-mid 20s percentage range for the next two years. However, it seems that this is not enough to match growing demand, as it expects "the industry to remain supply constrained in both years." Still, it seems that manufacturers are prioritizing HBM demand for AI data centers, with the company expecting shipments of these chips to grow faster than conventional DRAM.
Micron and other chip manufacturers are bringing new factories online to increase output, but it's going to take years before they can start producing chips. But even as we're amid an unprecedented multi-year memory chip shortage, Micron also announced record financial guidance. It forecasted a record $61.5 billion FQ1 revenue and a gross margin of 86.25%, implying a gross profit of more than $53 billion. After accounting for an estimated $2.06 billion in operating expenses and a tax rate of around 15.5%, the company said its earnings per share sit at $38.15, plus or minus $1.00, for approximately 1.15 billion shares.
NetApp this week rolled out Novus, a new class of storage architecture that it says can store zettabytes worth of data and deliver 100 TB/second of aggregate bandwidth over NFS and parallel NFS, enough to keep hundreds of thousands of GPUs productive simultaneously.
“AI Factory math is unforgiving,” writes Arindam Banerjee, the chief platform and technology officer for NetApp in a blog post. “A single GPU can demand as much as 2GB/s throughput to stay busy, and sustaining this across 50,000 GPUs requires 100TB/s cumulative bandwidth. Traditional storage arrays give you 40 to 80GB/s. So reaching 100TB/s with conventional arrays means deploying more than a hundred of them, each with its own namespace, failure domain, and management overhead.”
This situation is untenable for AI factory operators, who must spend every greater amounts of time and money simply to maintain the storage fleet. In the supercomputing world, storage typically consumes around 20% of the total system cost. With disparate namespaces, siloed systems, and stressed network connections, traditional storage architectures require AI factories to spend additional resources on storage just to keep expensive GPUs and other AI accelerators from sitting idle.
“AI teams should not have to become storage engineers to decide where data lives, which cluster to mount, how to rebalance workloads, or how to coordinate checkpoints across fragmented infrastructure,” NetApp says in its Novus solution brief.
The Novus architecture breaks off metadata traffic onto its own network (Image source: NetApp)
The solution arrived at by the engineers at NetApp was to rethink a core element of their distributed storage architecture. Instead of simply adding more controllers to the existing system, NetApp decided that it needed to consolidate one of the key abstractions preventing storage from scaling into the zettabyte realm: metadata.
The key breakthrough with Novus is the decoupling of the storage metadata layer from the storage layer. Instead of routing all metadata traffic through a given number of controllers, Novus enables each GPU client to read and write data directly to the underlying storage, eliminating traffic that can gum up large storage systems.
According to Banerjee, decoupling metadata from data breaks through the limits of traditional storage systems by allowing both metadata and data elements to scale at their own pace.
“Metadata is a bottleneck even before capacity or bandwidth throttles GPU activity,” he writes. “Every open, lookup, and layout request lands on the same controllers that are trying to serve data. A workspace import is millions of small file operations. A checkpoint is a sequential write at terabyte scale, issued by every node at once, arriving directly behind a burst of metadata traffic. When you scale the cluster, the metadata operations scale with it, until inevitably the file system slows or stalls.”
The first implementation of the Novus architecture will take place on the NetApp’s high-performance AFF A90 storage and utilize pNFS/NFS version 4.2, Linux clients, and its ONTAP storage operating system. NetApp has created a piece of software called the Novus Data Director that moves metadata traffic onto an independently scalable, software-defined control layer that runs on standard x86 compute, according to Banerjee.
“A client asks the Data Director where a file lives, receives a layout, and then talks directly to the storage,” he writes. “Neither plane waits on the other, and data runs at line rate.”
One of the big benefits of having a single massive namespace is scalability. Banerjee says that having a single zettabyte-scale namespace eliminates the work of keeping datasets, checkpoints, and model artifacts continuously addressable.
“Novus is architected to allow operators to add capacity and performance without forcing application changes, disruptive remounts, or tenant interruptions,” he writes. “Instead of making the storage topology visible to every workload, Novus presents one consistent data environment built for AI factory scale.”
NeApp is targeting AI factories, those massive data centers under construction that will house hundreds-of-thousands to millions of AI accelerators consuming hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of power. An architecture like Novus is needed to get ahead of looming storage crunch that these AI factories inevitably will run into using traditional storage architectures.
“The architectures that got us to the start of the AI era won’t be able to meet the demands we place on them as we continue to accelerate innovation,” Gary Grider, senior director for computing technologies at Los Alamos National Labs, said in Banerjee’s blog post.
“As AI Factories continue to scale, we’ll see hundreds of thousands of GPUs hitting a single namespace, creating a massive backlog of metadata operations that will slow or even stall the file system,” Grider said. “Novus is a first-of-its-kind architecture that delivers the independent scaling of both the metadata tier and the data tier so AI Factories can grow without being constrained by their ability to access data.”
NetApp made the announcement at NetApp INSIGHT 2026, its annual conference that runs through today in Las Vegas. The company made several other announcements at the show, including:
New hybrid multi-cloud capabilities in NetApp Platform that give customers better control over their hybrid storage fleets, autonomous operations, a new AI ChatOps interface, sovereignty-aware storage services, and integration with Nutanix’s virtualized environments;
New zero-copy data activation in NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE) that enables customers to access in-place data while maintaining governance, resiliency, and openness requirements;
Expanded partnerships and new capabilities with SAP, Oracle, and Supermicro.
With a final tally of 58%, Russia’s ruling party projects regime stability. But the effort invested in falsifications demonstrates discontent over the war.
Does anyone know or have a 3d printer file for the charging port plug/cover on a Pint X (idk if they differentiate across models) I would appreciate it if you could share it as I lost both mine and don’t feel like buying more from OneWheel dot com. Thank you in advance!
New photonic architecture will power AI inference for models exceeding 20 trillion parameters at up to 10,000 tokens per second per user
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1, 2026 — Volantis, a semiconductor company building a new category of AI inference system, today announced an $88 million Series A co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with participation from John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic and Susa Ventures. The round also includes angel investors Dwarkesh Patel, Naveen Rao and Sholto Douglas.
Volantis is building a new AI inference architecture that eliminates the tradeoff between memory capacity and bandwidth. Its first system, A-1, is being designed to run models exceeding 20 trillion parameters at up to 10,000 tokens per second per user, while reducing inference cost per token.
The company’s founding team includes semiconductor and photonics veterans from NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom and Ayar Labs. Their previous work includes the first CoWoS product, the first high-volume tunable VCSELs and early silicon photonics co-packaged optics systems.
“As AI agents take on more work, how fast they complete that work will increasingly determine how fast companies can operate,” said Tapa Ghosh, CEO and co-founder of Volantis. “Today’s hardware forces a tradeoff between running the largest, most sophisticated models and running them fast. We started Volantis to eliminate that tradeoff.”
Breaking Through the AI Memory Wall
Running large AI models at high speeds requires enormous memory capacity to hold the model and enormous bandwidth to continuously feed data into the compute engine. Existing architectures force a compromise between the two.
On-chip SRAM provides high bandwidth but limited capacity, constraining model size and context windows while increasing cost and energy consumption. GPUs and other HBM-based systems provide greater capacity, but bandwidth limits how quickly they can serve increasingly large models. Even newer approaches such as 3D DRAM remain on the same tradeoff curve.
Volantis is designing A-1 to increase memory capacity and bandwidth simultaneously by nearly two orders of magnitude, allowing increasingly large models to run at much higher inference speeds.
That performance could significantly accelerate AI agent workflows. A coding agent that completes a task in two minutes instead of 30 gives developers more opportunities to test ideas, ship software and iterate. As agents take on longer and more complex work, inference speed increasingly determines how quickly they can complete it.
A New Approach to Photonic Interconnects
Volantis is building a new category of photonic interconnect designed specifically to connect compute chips to memory.
Its optical fabric connects large numbers of memory chips into a unified pool, aggregating their bandwidth as memory is added. This allows A-1 to increase memory capacity and bandwidth together while using lower-cost off-chip memory.
While photonics is already used to move data inside data centers, existing technologies have largely focused on chip-to-chip connections. Chip-to-memory connections require more than 100 times as much data to travel over much shorter distances, creating different requirements for energy and cost.
Volantis developed a photonic platform specifically for this environment. Its architecture uses custom micro-VCSELs rather than external lasers, drawing on the existing gallium arsenide VCSEL supply chain and avoiding indium phosphide supply constraints. The micro-VCSELs are small, temperature-stable and low power, enabling end-to-end links consuming less than one picojoule per bit. Volantis plans to unveil additional innovations behind the architecture as A-1 moves toward commercialization.
Investment and Commercialization
Volantis plans to deliver its first integrated inference engines to customers in 2027.
The financing will support the development and commercialization of A-1 and its photonic memory architecture, including expanding the company’s engineering team and moving the system toward customer deployments.
About Volantis
Volantis is a semiconductor company building a new architecture for AI inference. The company combines photonics and semiconductor design to increase memory capacity and bandwidth, enabling larger AI models to run at significantly higher speeds. For more information, visit https://volantissemi.ai.
Donald Trump deflected responsibility for misleading Americans about the length of the Iran war, dismissed low poll ratings as “fake numbers” and refused to rule out the possibility of declaring a state of emergency before the midterms, in a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine.
OpenStack 2026.2 (Hibiscus), the latest OpenStack release, advances confidential computing and security while expanding support for accelerated, high-performance workloads and improving infrastructure efficiency at scale.
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1, 2026 — The OpenStack community has announced the release of OpenStack 2026.2 (Hibiscus), the 34th release of the world’s most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. OpenStack allows organizations to provide and control the infrastructure layer of the open source AI stack, turning heterogeneous hardware into programmable compute, storage and networking resources.
Hibiscus strengthens OpenStack as trusted infrastructure for increasingly demanding workloads, with advancements in confidential computing and security, expanded support for AI and HPC infrastructure, and improvements that help operators use resources more efficiently at scale.
The OpenStack Hibiscus release is available for download here.
Community Investment Grows Alongside Security Focus
OpenStack remains one of the world’s most active open source infrastructure projects, with trusted infrastructure backed by an open development process designed to continuously build, test and secure the software. Around 600 contributors collaborated during the six-month Hibiscus development cycle, a 21% increase from OpenStack 2026.1 Gazpacho, delivering 11,500 code changes, a 28% increase release over release.
Development across OpenStack is supported by extensive automated testing. During the Hibiscus development cycle, the OpenDev Zuul continuous integration system ran approximately 1.6 million jobs to build, test and publish software across the OpenStack ecosystem. Over the past five years, Zuul has run more than 14.2 million jobs supporting OpenStack development.
Security is similarly a community-wide effort. OpenStack, like many other open source projects, has had an influx of contributions from security researchers: 40 OpenStack Security Advisories (OSSAs) issued so far this year along with 13 OpenStack Security Notes (OSSNs). As always, the OpenStack Vulnerability Management team ensures that security issues are handled punctually and responsibly.
Together, continuous automated testing, open vulnerability management and human review provide multiple layers of accountability throughout the development process.
Hibiscus Release Highlights
The Hibiscus release includes enhancements across OpenStack services that strengthen security and trust, expand support for AI and other high-performance workloads, and improve infrastructure efficiency at scale. A key area of investment in Hibiscus is confidential computing, giving organizations new options to protect sensitive workloads even from privileged infrastructure software while maintaining greater control over where and how those workloads run.
Trusted & Secure Infrastructure:
Nova expands confidential computing support with AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX, providing hardware-backed memory encryption, stronger workload isolation and attestation for sensitive workloads.
Designate strengthens DNS security with enhanced cross-tenant isolation, stronger authentication and support for TLSA/DANE, while adding new tooling to help operators prepare for post-quantum cryptography.
Cyborg strengthens security and tenant isolation for accelerator resources, with tighter access controls and hardware management protections designed for multi-tenant environments.
Infrastructure for AI & Compute-Intensive Workloads:
Nova and Cyborg expand support for accelerated workloads by enabling OpenStack to manage mediated devices such as vGPUs, giving operators greater flexibility in how accelerator resources are provided and managed.
Manila adds support for Weka and Lustre parallel filesystems, expanding high-performance storage options for data-intensive AI, machine learning and HPC workloads.
Ironic and Nova improve bare-metal resource tracking, enabling more efficient management of the specialized and heterogeneous compute increasingly used for AI, HPC and other demanding workloads.
Efficient Infrastructure at Scale:
Watcher improves infrastructure utilization by making workload consolidation more responsive to both real-time usage and reserved capacity, while expanding automation options for managing unused resources.
Neutron significantly improves networking efficiency at scale, including a more than 15x reduction in the memory footprint of HA router monitoring.
Glance improves image distribution and management with parallel image imports, preferred-store downloads and expanded
For a more detailed list of Hibiscus release features, please see the release highlights here.
“AI is raising the requirements on the infrastructure that organizations need to run,” said Thierry Carrez, general manager, OpenInfra Foundation. “They need to be able to provide the specialized compute these workloads demand, while maintaining stronger control over how that infrastructure is operated, secured and trusted. OpenStack Hibiscus advances both sides of that equation, with stronger support for accelerated and high-performance workloads alongside improvements in confidential computing, workload isolation and security. For 17 years, the OpenStack community has continued to evolve the software as infrastructure requirements change, while giving organizations the control to run demanding workloads on their own terms.”
“What stands out in Hibiscus is that the OpenStack community is evolving both the infrastructure and how we build it,” said Goutham Pacha Ravi, Chair, OpenStack Technical Committee. “Investment in AI and HPC capabilities is happening alongside deeper security work that is strengthening not only our code, but the processes behind it. Contributors are also exploring how AI-assisted development can help us innovate faster while keeping human creativity and accountability at the center. We’re approaching these changes the way OpenStack always has: openly, collaboratively and by building community consensus.”
Simplifying Upgrades with the SLURP Process
OpenStack Hibiscus is a non-SLURP (Skip Level Upgrade Release Process) release. Introduced in 2022, the SLURP model enables operators to upgrade once per year rather than every six months, simplifying long-term operations while maintaining OpenStack’s predictable release cadence.
The previous SLURP release, 2026.1 Gazpacho, was issued in April 2026. Operators running that release can opt to skip the upgrade to Hibiscus and update directly to the next OpenStack release, 2027.1 (Indri), which is expected in March 2027.
About the OpenInfra Foundation
The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities who write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container-native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds. The OpenInfra Foundation is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. Join the OpenInfra movement: www.openinfra.org.
Was putting my XR back together when the footpad slip and when it fell it ripped the connector right off the wire. Is this able to be salvaged or will I need a new footpad w sensor?
CBS News New York has been combing through records that take us inside Cornell University's Title IX investigation into an alleged gang rape at a fraternity.
State attorney general issues subpoena to OpenAI as part of broader inquiry into potential security vulnerabilities
California’s attorney general has issued an investigative subpoena to OpenAI, starting an investigation into the startup as part of a broader inquiry into potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities and incidents related to its AI models, his office said on Thursday.
Last month, Rob Bonta announced that the Department of Justice was conducting a formal investigation into the “Hugging Face incident”, amid increasing scrutiny of the AI industry. AI agents developed by OpenAI hacked Hugging Face in July, gaining access to parts of the open-source platform’s infrastructure.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A company that makes phone hacking devices claims to have developed a solution that freezes iPhones in a state that lets cops more easily access sensitive data inside them, according to a video obtained by 404 Media. [...] The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video.
"This is an absolute game changer for iOS forensics and a function that I wish we had years ago," a Magnet employee says in the leaked video, specifically mentioning that the solution is targeted at the iPhone's inactivity reboot feature and the data it makes unavailable. GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data -- such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages -- after a certain number of days. "We're gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time."
[...] 404 Media shared a transcript of the video with Jiska Classen, a researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute who studies iPhone security. While Classen said that it's impossible to know for sure how Magnet's new feature works based on the video, she posited some theories and agreed that it is "quite a game changer" or "at least puts things back to where they were before inactivity reboot." She thinks Magnet has found a way to manipulate the iPhone's clock, effectively "slowing down time" or even "stopping the clock from ticking, even after a reboot." Most likely, according to her, the GrayKey may disable the iPhone tasks that set data to expire. The "inactivity reboot" feature mentioned above was added to iOS in November 2024 and automatically restarts iPhones that have not been unlocked for 72 hours, making them harder for police to access using forensic tools.
PM has praised Abu Dhabi group as ‘huge partner’ in reshaping Manchester, but critics say this ignores public cost of city’s transformation
In July 2016, the Manchester City player Yaya Touré ambled into a small bar near Beijing’s Workers’ Stadium and offered a bemused smile as dozens of Chinese fans rushed towards him.
Manchester City had just won their sixth trophy under the big-spending ownership of Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group and the blues were international megastars. They were also magnets for investment.
Oct. 1, 2026 — Researchers working with Earth science data often face a basic but time-consuming challenge: Determining what datasets exist, what they contain and whether they can be used together. Doug Fils, with the University of California San Diego Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing’s San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), is helping advance a metadata approach intended to make that process easier.
Researchers like Karen Stocks at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography can now better understand—thanks to GeoCroissant providing easy access to fellow scientists’ data—what lies in the deep ocean (below 200 meters), which covers 66% of Earth’s surface. Credit: Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Fils is contributing to GeoCroissant, an extension of Croissant, the open MLCommons metadata standard for machine learning datasets. Rather than changing the underlying data, Croissant provides a machine-readable description of a dataset such as its contents, structure, provenance and conditions for use. This allows people and software tools to more easily find, understand and reuse it. Croissant builds on schema.org, a widely used web vocabulary for describing structured information.
GeoCroissant adds information that is especially important for geospatial and Earth science data, including details about location, time and spatial characteristics. Fils’s work connects GeoCroissant with geosemantic information and GeoSPARQL, an Open Geospatial Consortium standard that supports the representation and querying of geospatial information.
“Our goal is to improve the discoverability, accessibility and interoperability of Earth science datasets,” said Fils, who is an information technology specialist with SDSC’s Research Data Services Division.
The effort addresses a challenge common in data-intensive research. Earth science data may be distributed across many repositories, documented in different ways and collected at different spatial and temporal scales. Those differences can make it difficult for researchers to locate suitable data, assess whether it fits a research question and prepare it for analysis or machine learning workflows.
“Applied to geospatial data, GeoCroissant can help streamline the early stages of data discovery and preparation,” Fils said. “Instead of spending extensive time searching across databases with inconsistent metadata, researchers can more efficiently identify datasets that contain the spatial information most relevant to their models.”
The work has potential applications in areas such as environmental monitoring, geological research, oceanography and natural-hazard analysis. Better dataset descriptions can help researchers determine where data were collected, when observations were made, what resolution was used and how the data may be combined with other sources.
One application involves work with Karen Stocks, an oceanographer and data scientist at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Stocks’s work includes the documentation, discovery, access, integration and curation of oceanographic data.
Fils and Stocks are exploring how GeoCroissant can support the description and discovery of ocean-depth data.
“Even though depth is one of the most crucial factors in determining the ecosystem and environmental conditions of a particular point in the ocean, we are often missing information,” Stocks said. “By using standardized frameworks that focus on metadata about depth, we can discover relevant information to serve our models and predictions much more efficiently.”
Croissant was developed by MLCommons as a community-built standard for describing machine learning datasets and is designed to support dataset discovery, interoperability, documentation and reproducibility. The standard includes extensions for specialized domains, including geospatial data.
The GeoCroissant initiative is led by Rajat Shinde and Manil Maskey of NASA and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, with contributions from researchers and organizations across academia, government and industry. Fils said the project’s collaborative standards-development process is essential to making the approach useful across diverse Earth science and geospatial research communities.
Fils said that by improving how geospatial datasets are described, GeoCroissant could help researchers spend less time interpreting fragmented data documentation and more time using data to investigate the planet’s complex systems.
Exclusive: Plan under discussion involves intensive support to help young people into employment
Ministers are working up sweeping plans for welfare changes including scrapping a key disability benefit for under-25s and replacing it with a multibillion-pound package of support to get into work, the Guardian has learned.
Whitehall sources said the package of changes under debate was much bigger than previously thought, as Andy Burnham’s government hopes to persuade more people on benefits back into work.
The former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach took 12 years to build a city filled with stadiums, skyscrapers and bespoke homes. It is a marvel
We may finally have cracked the case as to why the Pittsburgh Steelers stagnated so much over the final years of Mike Tomlin’s tenure as head coach: he was focused on virtual urban planning.
I’m kidding, of course. It’s good when people in high-pressure jobs have creative hobbies. Count this writer (and his interior designer wife) among those who were gobsmacked on Wednesday night by Tomlin’s reveal of a 12-year-long project in Minecraft, the world-building game. Tomlin had teasedthat during his coaching career, he took up Minecraft city-building as a way to connect with his young children. We have now seen the fruits of that labor, and they are magnificent. Look my my works, Terry Bradshaw, and despair.
Jorge Messias calls Guardian report ‘an important alert for Brazilian sovereignty’ as nation prepares to go to polls
Brazil’s attorney general has said foreign meddling in his country’s institutions and democracy “cannot be tolerated” after a Guardian report revealed how the Trump administration was pushing to direct funds to a campaign against the Brazilian supreme court.
Writing on X, Jorge Messias called the report “an important alert for Brazilian sovereignty”. “The information is especially serious in light of Brazil’s electoral process and the recent episodes of external pressure on our institutions,” Messias added.
Chancellor faces global volatility and soaring energy costs as some insiders worry lack of clarity could trigger fresh market shock
Senior Labour figures are privately voicing unease about John Healey’s approach to his crucial first budget this month, against the backdrop of volatile global markets and soaring energy costs.
The chancellor’s work has been made significantly harder by the global bond sell-off, which continues to raise the cost of government borrowing, and ever increasing energy prices as Donald Trump continues the US war with Iran.
Three-quarters of nations have rightly abolished capital punishment in law or practice, but killing by the state has surged in the US
What is the kindest way to kill? That’s the question being asked once more following Tennessee’s failed attempts to execute Christa Pike for the brutal murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, when she was 18. The 50-year-old was taken to a medical facility, her condition unknown, with witnesses describing her snoring loudly around 40 minutes after receiving two injections of pentobarbital on Wednesday. It is the second botched killing in months, prompting Tennessee’s governor to order a halt to executions.
Lethal injection was supposed to be the humane alternative to firing squads and electric chairs. They in turn were seen as an improvement on hanging, which looked much like lynching in a system disproportionately handing the death penalty to black men. The age and ill health of those executed, and the ethical refusal of most medical staff to be involved, may contribute to botched injections. But analysis of autopsy results has provided compelling evidence that suffering is inherent; injections – especially those involving paralytic drugs – have merely disguised it. What is described as safeguarding the dignity of prisoners is really about reducing the discomfort of witnesses who would otherwise see their suffering.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Longtime Slashdot reader ThurstonMoore shares a report from Reuters: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced the creation of a new military command that would be dedicated to building and providing autonomous and robotic capabilities across the U.S. military. The command, which Hegseth said would be called "Autonomous Warfare Command," highlights the rapidly changing nature of warfare and the need to make progress on systems like drones and the use of artificial intelligence.
Speaking in front of hundreds of junior officers and enlisted personnel at Quantico, Virginia, in a speech peppered with attacks on the media, Hegseth said the command would be led by a four-star officer. "The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it," Hegseth said in a speech called the "State of the Force," in which he announced other changes, including the creation of the office of religious affairs. "Cheap compute, superintelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high-precision strike," Hegseth added.
[...] The United States has long relied on its vast military budget to field some of the world's most expensive weapons systems. But there is an increasing realization within the Pentagon that this is not sustainable. "Today we need both quality and quantity," Hegseth said.
The former marketing executive is expected to play a big role in promoting the UK and could be the most influential spouse in No 10 in years
Sarah Brown called Gordon her hero, Samantha Cameron insisted David was “incredibly funny”, while Akshata Murty said Rishi was her best friend. When Marie-France van Heel spoke about her husband, Andy Burnham, in a rare public interview a decade ago, she joked that she had noticed his “good looks … and monobrow”.
The spousal humanising of a party leader is a well-worn political tool, but van Heel is likely to be a very different prime ministerial partner. The former senior marketing executive is poised to play a more significant role in promoting Britain than any other spouse in the last two decades, stepping up her political engagements after stepping back from her own corporate career.
The global bond sell-off intensified on Thursday, driving 10-year US government borrowing costs to their highest level in 24 years in a frantic day’s trading.
The threat of a renewed round of inflation from the persistently high cost of oil has spooked investors on both sides of the Atlantic, with central banks expected to raise interest rates in the coming months to prevent price increases from becoming embedded.
Many men rape; many men giggle encouragingly, or shrug indifferently, when their friends rape. Many men rape, and few seem to think that it’s a very big deal
Maybe more than anything else, sexual violence is repetitive. Men commit it in patterns: mostly against women who are close by and vulnerable, just below them on some social hierarchy: their assistant, their date, their friend, their daughter, their student, their kid’s babysitter.
Men rape for opportunity – because they can – and for status – because it makes them feel good. They rape to impress other men, documenting it on phones for one another’s benefit. Men rape and do not always seem to register much of a difference between the sex they’ve had that was rape and the sex that they’ve had that wasn’t. They rape, often, without seeming to think about it, registering their victims’ unwillingness with vague contempt, if at all.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
About 900 demonstrations, blockades and related incidents under way outside high schools around the country
A fast-growing protest by high-school students over long hours, teacher shortages and decaying facilities has escalated into “urban violence”, the French government has warned, as it said many schools would switch to online classes to protect teachers and pupils.
The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, called a crisis cabinet meeting on Thursday and told ministers to cancel travel plans to deal with the demonstrations, which erupted in the Paris region last week but have snowballed across the country.
Wilmington institution will celebrate a half-century of its signature fundraiser Dec. 5, honoring longtime leader Skip Pennella and raising money for community arts programs
WILMINGTON, Del. — The Grand will mark a major milestone in Wilmington’s arts and social scene this December, celebrating the 50th anniversary of its annual Grand Gala with a performance by the Stray Cats, an elaborate after-party at the Hotel DuPont and a tribute to longtime Grand leader Skip Pennella.
The 50th annual Grand Gala is scheduled for Saturday, Dec. 5, with the Stray Cats taking the stage at The Grand Opera House’s Copeland Hall before guests move to the Hotel DuPont for what organizers bill as the “Ultimate After Party.”
The gala has grown into one of Wilmington’s signature annual fundraising and social events. Proceeds support The Grand’s Community Engagement and Outreach programs, which provide arts experiences for more than 20,000 students and residents. The Grand says gala support helps provide music and dance instruction, theater performances and other arts programming.
Rockabilly icons come to Wilmington
The Stray Cats — Brian Setzer, Lee Rocker and Slim Jim Phantom — helped bring rockabilly back into mainstream popular music in the early 1980s, combining a 1950s-inspired look and sound with the energy of contemporary rock.
Formed in 1979 on Long Island, the trio initially struggled to gain traction in the United States before heading to London in 1980, where a growing rockabilly revival helped launch the band’s career.
The group ultimately found major success on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming known for songs including “Rock This Town,” “Stray Cat Strut” and “(She’s) Sexy + 17.”
Following the concert, gala guests will head a few blocks up Market Street to the Hotel DuPont, where the celebration will continue with themed rooms, live music, gourmet food and signature cocktails.
Pennella to receive Grand Medal
The evening will also recognize Francis “Skip” Pennella with the 2026 Grand Medal for Excellence in the Performing Arts.
Pennella recently retired as executive director and transitioned to a senior advisory role. His relationship with The Grand, however, stretches well beyond his tenure as its top executive. He previously spent 11 years as chairman of The Grand’s board, helping lead the organization through a period of change and an expanded emphasis on community service.
“Skip answered the call when The Grand needed him most,” Board Chair Roger Kirtley said. “Through his steady leadership, unwavering commitment and deep care for this organization, he helped guide The Grand through an important period in its history and positioned us well for the future.”
Pennella called serving as executive director “one of the greatest privileges of my career.”
“I am incredibly proud of what our Board, staff, volunteers, donors, and community partners have accomplished together,” Pennella said. “We have a unique opportunity to build upon a proud history while ensuring The Grand continues to serve and inspire our community for generations to come.”
Leadership transition underway
The gala comes as The Grand moves through a leadership transition.
The Board of Directors has appointed Mike Woodin as interim executive director while conducting a national search for Pennella’s permanent successor. Woodin has served in senior leadership at The Grand and has worked on the organization’s finances and strategic planning.
“It is an honor to serve an organization that means so much to our community,” Woodin said. “Every day, our talented staff creates experiences that inspire audiences, educate young people, and strengthen Delaware through the performing arts.”
The Grand’s 50th gala also continues a tradition of bringing prominent performers to Wilmington for the fundraiser. Recent galas have featured Kool & the Gang in 2024 and Bruce Hornsby with the Delaware Symphony Orchestra in 2025.
More than a night out
While the gala has long been part of Wilmington’s social calendar, its primary purpose is fundraising.
The Grand says proceeds help make arts programming available to thousands of Delaware children and community members who might otherwise have limited opportunities to experience live theater, dance and music. The organization has described the gala as a major source of support for its community engagement, Stage of Discovery and arts education programs.
That gives this year’s celebration two milestones: 50 years of gala nights in downtown Wilmington and a changing of the guard for one of Delaware’s best-known performing arts organizations.
TO GO
What: 50th Annual Grand Gala featuring the Stray Cats
When: Saturday, Dec. 5, 2026
Where: Concert and presentation at The Grand Opera House, 818 N. Market St., Wilmington; Ultimate After Party at the Hotel DuPont
Tickets: $250 to $550. A $1,600 package includes two tickets, a hotel stay and additional benefits.
Benefits: The Grand’s Community Engagement and Outreach programs serving students and Wilmington residents
Team behind documentary push back against IDF attempt to discredit its exposure of military systems
The team behind the award-winning film NAZA, which details the Israeli military’s targeting policies in Gaza and its alleged acceptance of high numbers of civilian deaths, have revealed they spoke to more than 100 sources with knowledge of the military systems used in the war.
The disclosure came in response to an Israel Defense Forces statement seeking to discredit the documentary.
The case, one of the first the court has accepted since its summer recess ended, promises to be among the most consequential of the term that begins next week.
DNC accuses Pentagon of pushing through changes to how voters abroad request absentee ballots ahead of midterms
The Trump administration broke the law when it pushed through a last-minute change to the form overseas citizens use to register and request absentee ballots, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday.
Until recently, the form, the Federal Post Card Application (FPCA), gave overseas voters four options to choose from when describing their geographic location. Voters could say they needed an overseas ballot because they were on active military service, living outside the US with an intent to return, or living outside the US and uncertain about their return.
PARIS, Oct. 1, 2026 — Alice & Bob, a leader in fault-tolerant quantum computing, and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon have announced a new and faster approach to stabilizing cat-qubits in superconducting quantum systems enabling more compact designs that generate less heat.
Cat qubits, which store information in a microwave resonator, are stabilized by a process that dissipates photons from the resonator into the environment strictly in pairs. This process takes place in a component called a coupler. In Alice & Bob’s current cat qubits, the coupler is driven by a carefully engineered microwave signal, an approach the company has refined over many years.
In this new experiment, the researchers explored an alternative coupler. They drove the same kind of process using a steady voltage of about one millionth of a volt, with no microwave signal required. Key findings include:
Faster than any pumped coupler: The new coupler exchanged photons faster than any previous pumped-drive cat-qubit coupler (two-photon exchange rate of 3 MHz. The data suggests that the design could reach considerably higher rates.
Several operations, one chip: Changing only the voltage switched the device between exchanging photons one, two or four at a time (two-photon process at a bias of about 1.1 microvolts).
Suppression of unwanted nonlinearity: Usual cat stabilisation usually comes with an unwanted change of frequency with the number of photons, which is harmful to cat codes. This new strategy suppresses this parasitic effect.
Photons seen leaving in pairs: The team directly imaged the memory ‘s state using Wigner tomography and saw photons being dissipated in pairs.
Rather than replacing existing approaches, the new mechanism adds to the toolbox for building cat qubits, providing access to higher-order processes such as four-photon interactions. These could support the development of four-component cat qubits, which encode information across four coherent states. Four-photon processes are very difficult to achieve with existing methods, but with this approach it can be realistically achieved.
“This new approach could support the development of four-component cat qubits, which encode information across four coherent states. Four-to-one photon processes are very difficult to achieve with sufficient strength, but dc-biasing junctions seem to be a viable approach to that goal,” said Benjamin Huard, Scientific Advisor, Alice & Bob and Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon
The approach could also make future quantum computers simpler to build at scale. Voltage lines are compact, easy to wire, and produce little heat inside the ultra-cold refrigerators that quantum computers need.
The research was carried out at ENS Lyon in collaboration with Alice & Bob, with the findings published in a preprint in August 2026.
Technical Note
The device couples a high-quality “memory” resonator to a lossy “buffer” resonator through a SQUID biased with a dc voltage. A Cooper pair tunneling across the SQUID exchanges an energy 2eV with the circuit, so it is only allowed to tunnel if the SQUID’s environment can absorb or supply exactly that energy.
The bias voltage V is set to a value such that 2eV matches the energy difference between two memory photons and one buffer photon. Therefore, the tunneling of Cooper pairs makes the two-to-one photon swap between memory and buffer energetically allowed. Each tunneling event converts a pair of memory photons into a single buffer photon, which quickly leaks out of the buffer, resulting in an effective two-photon dissipation of the memory at a rate of up to 1.3 MHz.
On the same device, researchers showed that the same technique can be used to activate one-to-one and four-to-one photon swaps.
About Alice & Bob
Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has raised €180 million in funding and employs more than 250 people. Advised by Nobel Prize winning researchers, Alice & Bob specializes in cat qubits, a technology developed by the company’s founders. Demonstrating the power of its cat architecture, Alice & Bob recently showed that it could reduce the hardware requirements for building a useful large-scale quantum computer up to 200 times compared with competing approaches.
Installing tech billionaires Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to Pentagon defense board raises conflict of interest concerns
By installing the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to advisory roles in a Pentagon project about the future of warfare, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, bestowed extraordinary influence on two of Maga’s most significant campaign donors – and both men own companies that benefit from federal defense contracting.
The new project, which Hegseth dubbed “Project Meridian” in an event in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday, will be led by Pentagon official Emil Michael, a former Uber executive. As the Guardian has reported, Michael made millions in profits off non-public Musk company AI stock while in federal office – and while guiding the Department of Defense’s artificial intelligence efforts.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over potential consumer and safety risks posed by their products, with the agency reportedly preparing requests for documents and executive testimony. CNBC reports: OpenAI stunned the industry in July when it disclosed that its agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face. [...] Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models and calling for stronger government oversight. He published a three-step proposal aimed at tempering the pace of development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI."
CEO Jensen Huang, argued that individual companies should be responsible for ensuring the safety of their products. President Donald Trump convened top executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies on Tuesday to discuss the issue. The group signed a short voluntary, nonbinding accord, which says that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public."
Phil Mickelson sought treatment earlier this year for “family trauma and addiction”, his representatives confirmed to multiple outlets on Wednesday.
The 56-year-old golfer voluntarily entered a treatment facility and has since returned home. Mickelson’s representatives did not say when he sought treatment or how long he stayed at a facility.
(The Center Square) – A bill to enhance emergency preparedness in the wake of the July 4, 2025, Texas Hill Country floods heads to the president for his signature.
When then-Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio was running for reelection in 2024, the Republican-aligned Senate Leadership Fund aired an ad saying the Democrat supported sex change surgeries for minors.
Brown lost in 2024 but is a candidate again this year, and the Senate Leadership Fund political action committee has reprised its attack. Brown is challenging Republican Sen. Jon Husted, who was appointed to the seat in 2025 when it was vacated by Vice President JD Vance.
In a Sept. 16 ad — featuring images of kids, a surgical scalpel, a bearded man in a dress and several progressive Democratic politicians — the voice-over says, in part:
“Abused and exploited by an extremist agenda. Forcing childhood sex change surgery. But Sherrod Brown stands with these extremists. Brown supports sex change surgery for kids — permanent surgical decisions with devastating consequences. The extremists demand it. Sherrod Brown complies, and Ohio’s children pay the price.”
The same group is also airing otherads that attack Brown over the same issue. One says, “Sherrod Brown supports sex change surgery for minors and admitted he would never oppose it.”
Gender transition surgery for minors is exceedingly rare, and no medical guidelines support providing it for young children. Any medical care for transgender minors — which may include puberty blockers and hormone therapy — requires parental consent.
We found no evidence that Brown has ever said he supports forcing gender-transition surgery for children.
The Ohio ads are some of several focusing on transgender issues that have aired in competitive Senate races nationally.
What evidence does the ad cite?
Brown has long supported policies advocated by LGBTQ+ rights activists. In 2017, he introduced the Senate’s first Pride Month Resolution. The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ civil rights group, has endorsed him in bothof his recent campaigns. In 2020, he issued a statement supporting the “humanity of transgender people” in the face of what he called discriminatory housing policy.
But we found no evidence Brown has said he favors forcing minors to undergo gender-related surgery.
When contacted by PolitiFact about the 2026 ad, Senate Leadership Fund spokesperson Chris Gustafson cited Brown’s July 19, 2023, interview with WSYX-TV in Columbus, Ohio. That was also the sole source cited in the group’s 2024 ad, and in its other 2026 Ohio ads.
The segment discussed legislation backed by then-Sen. JD Vance, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which Brown opposed. The measure would have made it a felony for doctors to provide surgery or prescribe puberty blockers to anyone younger than 18.
In the interview, Brown said, “A child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors — not politicians. I will never agree with anybody that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care, period.’”
Gustafson said this means Brown “does not support any limitations on transgender or gender-affirming procedures on children.”
The wording of the 2026 ad goes further than the 2024 ad, which also mentioned “puberty blockers.”
Nothing in Brown’s remarks to WSYX shows that he would force surgery on anyone.
Brown has responded with an ad of his own in which supporters question the Republican focus on transgender policy versus the cost of living. The ad notes that in Ohio, the issue is moot because a 2024 state law bans physicians from performing gender-reassignment surgery on a minor.
Our ruling
A Senate Leadership Fund ad said Brown supports “forcing childhood sex change surgery.”
The ad cites a 2023 television interview when Brown said children’s healthcare decisions are “between them, their parents, their families, their doctors — not politicians.”
Brown did not say in the interview that he supports “forcing” any healthcare on children. We found no evidence he has ever made such a statement.
Fort Pierce, FL — Officials in St. Lucie County, Florida, have discovered 14 unauthorized Flock Safety license-plate readers installed along public roads, raising new questions about who placed the surveillance cameras there and who has access to the data they collected.
The cameras surfaced as the county reviewed 52 previously authorized automated license-plate readers ahead of their removal. The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office subsequently claimed ownership of three of the unpermitted devices, leaving 11 without a publicly identified owner. County officials have posted removal notices requiring the cameras to come down in October.
The discovery comes amid growing scrutiny of Flock systems in the region. Former Fort Pierce police officer Josepher Crutchfield was arrested in September after investigators said he searched Flock’s database 382 times for a vehicle registered to his former girlfriend, mostly while off duty and without a legitimate law-enforcement purpose.
The case prompted Fort Pierce police to tighten access to the system, while Florida transportation officials separately ordered automated license-plate readers removed from state highways.
Flock says permitting requirements vary by jurisdiction and that it is willing to assist St. Lucie County. The unexplained cameras nevertheless highlight a basic oversight problem: powerful surveillance equipment was operating on public property without county officials initially knowing who installed it.
A woman convicted of murdering a schoolmate 30 years ago has been taken to hospital after surviving two rounds of lethal injections in Tennessee. Christa Pike would have been the first woman to be executed in the state in 200 years. Pike, 50, has spent three decades on death row after she was convicted of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. A last-minute appeal to stop the lethal injection was overturned by the supreme court, but the state governor, Bill Lee, has suspended executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year. Lucy Hough speaks to the attorney and anti-capital punishment campaigner Clive Stafford Smith – watch on YouTube
My funwheel X7 long range displaying low duty cycle warning for most of the ride without being pushed hard. The LED shows yellow warning while accelerating most of the ride and not pushing any harder than normal. The ride ended and the charge showed to be higher than the start for a 9 km ride. Foot pads were active the whole time. I need help diagnosing what is going on.
Authorities were trying to determine how an Omani co-pilot nearly crashed a Tel Aviv-bound jet. An Israel official said the co-pilot had “the motive to kill Jews."
Ministers discuss drawing down EU countries’ reserves after Donald Trump threatens to cut off US supplies
Britain is in talks with European allies over releasing emergency diesel stockpiles after Donald Trump threatened to cut off US supplies of the fuel.
Ministers held calls with counterparts from the European Commission (EC), Germany, France, Italy and Ireland on Thursday to discuss whether to draw down reserves after the Trump administration told Germany and France to release their stockpiles to help ease soaring global energy prices or face a US export ban.
Tech company releases Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers
Google on Wednesday said it would withhold its most powerful artificial intelligence model from the public for now, releasing Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers.
“Safely releasing frontier capabilities at this level requires a phased approach,” wrote Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect, in a blogpost announcing the model.
The president said it was a warning if any countries were considering an attack on Russia
The EU Commission, France, Italy, Ireland and Britain are holding a call on the possible need to release diesel stocks, an EU official said, as reported by Reuters.
A Commission spokesperson had earlier declined direct comment on reports that the Trump administration has told Germany and France to draw down emergency diesel inventories to help to ease global fuel prices or face a potential US diesel export ban.
Jessica Watkins, the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit, is making her second trip to the space station
Four astronauts rocketed into orbit on Thursday on a space station mission that will stretch until spring, among them a Canadian whose wife will give birth while he is away.
SpaceX launched commander Jessica Watkins and her crew for Nasa after a three-week delay to fix the capsule’s leaking fuel system. Thick clouds threatened all morning to halt the countdown but in the end, the skies cleared enough to allow for a safe liftoff.
War has returned to Tigray. This time it may not stay in Ethiopia Expert commentLToremark
As fighting escalates in Tigray and neighbouring areas, there are fears that Ethiopia’s internal instability could spill over into the wider Horn of Africa region.
Conflict returned to Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray on 23 September, as the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces stormed three national airports in Tigray. In what the TPLF claimed was defensive combat, ground offensives were also expanded along Tigray’s southern and eastern borders with the neighbouring Amhara and Afar regions. The TPLF and its allies captured parts of Afar but lost several key areas in southern Tigray, including Alamata town.
Ethiopia’s federal government forces and the allied Tigray Peace Force (TPF) are now advancing towards Mekelle, the capital of Tigray. Meanwhile, reports of drone strikes in Addis Ababa and on government-controlled airbases alters the nature of the war.
Although Tigray has seen conflict before, this time there is a risk that hostilities could extend into Eritrea and Sudan.
The risk of renewed hostilities in Tigray had been clear for some time, given the steady decline in relations between the federal government and the TPLF. The failure to build on the Pretoria Agreement – the ceasefire deal that brought an end to the war in 2022 – was largely the result of a continued zero-sum approach by both sides, as well as weak implementation and oversight.
The agreement effectively unravelled in May, when the TPLF reinstated a pre-war legislative council, with its chairman Debretsion Gebremichael named regional president. This spelled the end of the Tigray Interim Regional Administration (TIRA) – a key outcome negotiated under Pretoria. The removal of interim president, General Tadesse Werede, formerly head of the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), followed the ouster of his predecessor Getachew Reda in late 2024.
The TPLF views the recent escalation as a return to full-scale war. To an extent, they have been pushed towards a response. There is continued containment of Tigray; a lack of implementation of the Pretoria Agreement or any dispute resolution mechanism; the absence of incentives for its leadership to return to the federal fold; a weakening of TPLF legitimacy in the region; and recent drone attacks by the government in the region.
But unlike in the 2020–22 war, the federal government has been more cautious and calculated in its actions as well as public messaging. The government frames the TPLF as a rogue administration that is colluding with internal opposition insurgencies and external actors to threaten Ethiopia’s territorial integrity and its own survival.
The key question now is whether the government will seek to contain the conflict within Tigray and other parts of northern Ethiopia, or whether it will consider it necessary to pursue bolder options. One such option could be targeting Eritrea, which it believes to be supporting anti-government movements – something Eritrea has repeatedly denied. In a message assigning culpability to its northern neighbour, Ethiopia closed its embassy in Eritrea and expelled Eritrean diplomats.
Now, much will depend on how the conflict evolves.
Internal division in Tigray and a new opposition alliance
The TPLF’s control over Tigrayan society has weakened significantly. Since the war ended in 2022, it has faced protests over crippling economic conditions, growing competition from rival parties and defections by leading members. In recent months, Tigrayan authorities have turned to forcibly recruiting young men into the defence forces and have cracked down on freedom of speech. For the people of Tigray, an already difficult humanitarian situation now looks set to worsen.
There is deep division within TPLF too. Following the start of the military offensive, there have been reports of senior TPLF officials being arrested or defecting to Addis Ababa.
Days before the fighting resumed, the TPLF and six other regional armed opposition groups – including Amhara’s Fano movement and the Oromia region’s Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) – announced a coalition called the Alliance for Survival. Their common goal is to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party from power and install a transitional government.
But it is not immediately clear that this uneasy tactical alliance – among groups with unresolved tensions and very different visions for Ethiopia – will result in functional cooperation. Senior leaders of Fano have publicly opposed the alliance; while a recently divided OLA may struggle with justification to its support base. There are also historical grievances between some of these groups. The TPLF have accused Fano and the Eritrean forces of grave human rights violations in Tigray four years ago, while Fano and OLA have been bitter and at times violent enemies.
Opposition to the Ethiopian government also comes from beyond the country’s borders. Tsimdo is a transnational alliance which reportedly links the TPLF, the Eritrean government and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
The TPLF is silently allied with its former foe, Eritrea, with supply lines chiefly secured through Tigray’s northern border. But the Eritrean government’s priority is to keep war away from its own territory, and its alleged support for opposition groups increases the risk of further regional escalation – especially with Ethiopia eyeing control over Eritrea’s Red Sea port of Assab.
Meanwhile, the conflicts in Ethiopia and Sudan have also become more intertwined. The Ethiopian government has accused the SAF of backing the TPLF – which they have denied – and is increasingly unsettled by the reported presence of Tigrayan fighters alongside the SAF in eastern Sudan. It fears that the SAF, in collaboration with Eritrea, could reinforce the TPLF from across the Sudanese border – including near strategic sites like the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
Sudan, in turn, has accused Ethiopia of providing support for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudan People’s Liberation-North (SPLM-N), including training, supplies and use of Ethiopian territory. Ethiopia’s close ally, the UAE, is also accused of supporting the RSF – although it refutes such allegations. Ethiopia’s calculus is seemingly to create a buffer on its border with Sudan. However, direct dialogue and de-escalation with the SAF would go further than retaliatory exchanges and mutual accusations of interference.
Limited options for de-escalation
The mediation landscape is very different from 2022. Members of the international community have called out the TPLF for their escalatory actions and urged a return to African Union (AU)-led talks. The Ethiopian government has so far controlled the narrative around this conflict, briefing foreign governments about the likely escalation ahead of the UN General Assembly.
The Pretoria Agreement did not produce the broader political settlement needed for durable peace and no longer seems tenable for either side. The TPLF has repeatedly discredited the only existing mediation effort under the AU. Hardening regional rivalries and the lack of US or wider Western interest to fully support the AU with the resources and leverage needed to create a viable platform, makes a sustainable resolution to this conflict seem a long way off.
Given these conditions, the conflict is likely to continue for a while. However, the danger of diplomatic inaction is that a protracted war in Tigray is likely to spill over beyond Ethiopia, into Eritrea and further into Sudan. Policymakers must find a way to take collective action to avert such a dangerous regional escalation.
In New Hampshire, raising taxes has been a political taboo for generations. In the state’s competitive U.S. Senate race, Republican John E. Sununu is painting his Democratic opponent Rep. Chris Pappas as an aggressive tax raiser.
“Chris Pappas voted to raise taxes 68 times,” Sununu, a former U.S. senator, said in his primary night victory speech Sept. 8. “Every tax vote he’s made was to raise taxes.”
When we asked Sununu’s campaign for a list of the 68 tax votes he was referring to, they sent us this document. When we went through it, we found that the 68-vote figure is padded by procedural votes. It also portrays votes misleadingly and includes votes in which Pappas was joined by an overwhelming majority of Republicans.
“Many of these claims go well beyond any reasonable view on what it means to vote to raise taxes,” said Joseph Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.
Here are some of the reasons why the 68-vote figure is wildly inflated.
Procedural votes account for most of those on the list
The Sununu campaign’s list included both final votes on passage and a variety of procedural votes. These procedural votes pushed the bill through the legislative process but did not, in a literal sense, “raise taxes.”
The list cites 16 distinct congressional bills but counts an average of more than three procedural votes per bill in its overall tally.
Many of the bills cited are only partly about taxes
Among other votes Sununu’s campaign cited were votes on the HEROES Act, a $3 trillion COVID-19 relief measure proposed in 2020 that Pappas voted for but didn’t become law. It would have included stimulus checks and other pandemic-related spending increases. To the extent that it would have changed tax law, some taxpayers would have benefited from expansions of tax credits and deductions, while others would not have.
Sununu’s campaign also included the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2022, known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This law allocated $1.2 trillion for transportation and infrastructure spending; Pappas voted for it. The Sununu campaign’s list cites a provision repealing a tax credit for businesses designed to help employers offset the costs of keeping employees during the pandemic. (The law covered a lot more than that.)
Another law on the list that Pappas voted for, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, can be fairly described as a tax-focused measure. It increased taxes on corporations, especially the biggest corporations, but it also enacted tax breaks for clean energy usage in homes and automobiles. The list cited a provision in the law to increase the number of IRS employees, but this increase — which was aimed at modernizing the IRS and increasing audits — would not have been a tax hike per se.
“These bills were not meant as revenue-raising bills,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “Some of them did have tax and revenue provisions in them, but you have to use an expansive definition of ‘tax increase.’”
The Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 is among the bills on the Sununu campaign’s list that Pappas voted against. This bill was intended as a vehicle to raise the debt limit, but it included a range of other Republican policy priorities, repealing many of the clean-energy tax credits that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act passed under former President Joe Biden.
In other words, the Sununu campaign is casting Pappas’ vote to lower certain taxes under this act as a vote to “raise taxes” — then labeling his vote against a bill that would repeal them as a separate vote to “raise taxes.”
In another instance, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 — which Pappas and a large majority of Democrats and Republicans voted for — “would have cut taxes for many Americans and businesses and was paid for by cutting off employee retention credits, a program ripe with questionable and fraudulent claims,” Rosenberg said. With the bill both cutting taxes and ending a tax break, any vote Pappas could have made — for or against — could have been framed as a vote to raise taxes.
Garrett Watson, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, said the inclusion of certain votes that are “narrow and not really about taxes” make the strongest case that the list portrays a misleading picture of Pappas’ record on taxes. This and other factors “suggest that this claim is overstated, at least,” Watson said.
The list cherry-picks some of Pappas’ votes
The list also dings Pappas for voting for a bill that ended employee retention tax credits, but it doesn’t give him credit for voting for the bill that created those tax credits in the first place, the CARES Act of 2022.
Some of the measures on the list were passed in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion
The list criticizes Pappas for certain votes without noting that virtually every House Republican also supported the measures.
Pappas voted against a measure “expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy.” The measure passed with mostly Republican support, but such measures are rhetorical and have no practical effect.
We asked the Sununu campaign for comment on PolitiFact’s findings, but we did not hear back.
Here are the strongest cases of Pappas voting to raise taxes
Pappas voted against President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending law — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — in 2025.
This was a bill that included far-reaching provisions on taxation that would affect many American taxpayers, including those who work overtime, collect tips or are 65 and older. The bill also extended tax cuts from Trump’s first term.
The Sununu campaign counts six total votes, including procedural votes, against the bill; one of those is Pappas’ vote against final passage. It also counts five votes involving a required precursor measure for the bill — a congressional budget resolution.
Pappas’ campaign told PolitiFact that his vote was premised on the bill’s cuts to Medicaid and its failure to extend health insurance subsidies, which could affect millions of Americans nationally. He also cited the bill’s rollbacks in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.
A few other bills on the list were primarily about taxation, but their reach was more limited. For instance, two measures involve the state and local tax deduction. This affects high-earning households, generally in Democratic states with relatively high levels of taxation.
The list also includes votes Pappas cast in the New Hampshire legislature more than two decades ago in favor of a state estate tax and against a property tax cut.
Pappas also voted to cut taxes
Sununu said, “Every tax vote he’s made was to raise taxes.” But that’s not accurate.
In addition to the examples of votes for tax cuts cited above, Pappas’ campaign pointed to a vote to repeal a tax on certain employer-sponsored health plans; an amendment to expand tax credits for small businesses that establish retirements plans; and his vote for the American Rescue Plan Act, which enacted expanded child tax credits.
Pappas also introduced legislation to ban states from taxing a nonresident’s income earned when they were not physically present in that state; sponsored legislation to provide a refundable tax credit for people struggling with high energy costs; and co-sponsored a bill to provide a 10% tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
Our ruling
Sununu said, “Chris Pappas voted to raise taxes 68 times. Every tax vote he’s made was to raise taxes.”
Pappas did vote against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and he voted for higher taxes or against lower taxes on three occasions as a state legislator more than two decades ago.
But the Sununu campaign’s list of congressional votes is inflated by counting procedural votes, and it includes a wide range of bills that aren’t clearly votes to raise taxes, including several measures that were largely about other issues. Several bills Sununu criticized Pappas for supporting also received overwhelming Republican support.
Pappas also voted on numerous other occasions to lower taxes, and he sponsored bills to cut taxes.
Alleged flydubai attacker interrogated by Saudi security services as investigation into apparent crash attempt opens
The Omani co-pilot who stabbed his captain in an apparent attempt to crash an Israel-bound flight from Dubai had previously undergone radical Islamist indoctrination and was suicidal, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has claimed.
Israeli passengers intervened to stop the attack on Wednesday, restraining the co-pilot, while a reserve crew in the plane was able to stabilise the plummeting plane and ultimately land it safely in Saudi Arabia.
Civil lawsuits are now filed against the federal government on behalf of the family of Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman fatally shot in January by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in south Minneapolis.
Rapper Rick Ross was arrested by Miami Beach police Thursday on felony battery by strangulation and misdemeanor battery charges involving domestic violence.
Tennessee canceled its remaining scheduled execution this year after Christa Pike, the only woman on its death row, survived two doses of a botched lethal injection. A witness said she was "clearly very alive."
The second is bafflement that such an earthly and proletarian problem should even be allowed to happen to you, titan of industry, pillar of society, master of man and beast alike.
HP is taking aim at Apple's MacBook Neo with the new OmniBook 5 14, a $699.99 Windows laptop that starts with an Intel Core 5 315 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage but includes an OLED display even on the base model. It's also slightly thinner and lighter than the Neo. The Verge reports: The OmniBook 5 14 can be configured much higher, with up to a Core 7 350 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, but all models include a 1080p webcam, dual speakers, HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack, and just two 10Gbps USB-C ports. And while the inclusion of OLED across the range is a major draw to the new OmniBook, the base config only has a passable 1920 x 1200 resolution and 300 nits of max brightness on its non-touch panel. A touchscreen version will be available when the OmniBook 5 launches in October, but a version with a 2560 x 1600 resolution OLED and 400 nits of brightness isn't coming until March 2027.
While the OmniBook 5 14 doesn't seem poised to best the MacBook Neo in raw processing power (based on our other reviews of Wildcat Lake laptops) or screen brightness, it's quite thin, light, and colorful. HP even gave it the nicer, sleeker lid logo usually reserved for pricier models. It starts at just 2.56 pounds, and it's as thin as 0.46 inches / 11.7mm. That's slightly lighter and thinner than a Neo. And I'd expect its Wildcat Lake chips to offer some good-to-great battery life. But we'll have to see how it delivers in actual testing. HP also announced a new ProBook 4 G2iS that is the company's "thinnest business notebook," measuring in at 0.47 inches / 12mm. It'll launch in December with Intel Wildcat Lake chips, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, though pricing hasn't been announced.
Lake Mead is at its lowest level since it was filled nearly 90 years ago, Lake Powell also at a historic low
It was 42C (108F) degrees as we motored across Nevada’s Lake Mead in our rented pontoon boat. Colby Pellegrino with the Southern Nevada Water Authority wanted to show us something we shouldn’t have been able to see. She pointed toward a rock island where a large metal pipe was sticking out of the water.
“That is the first intake that was built to bring municipal water into the valley in 1970,” Pellegrino said.
Alternative ways being used to move fuel out of Gulf region, but flows of refined products such as diesel still constrained
Exports of crude from the strait of Hormuz have largely returned to levels seen before the outbreak of the Iran war, as oil producers and the shipping industry have found alternative ways of transporting crucial fuel out of the Middle East.
Pipeline exports and ship-to-ship transfers are among the methods being used, according to analysts tracking the situation, while the US military continues to escort some vessels. However, flows of refined products such as diesel remain constrained, pushing prices higher.
In August, prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss Reflecting Pool vandalism charges against David Hearn because the damage had been caused by a contractor's "botched installation."
Supermodel was disqualified from role in 2024 after Charity Commission accused her of misusing funds and abdicating responsibilities
Naomi Campbell has won a legal challenge to overturn a five-year ban on being a charity trustee after judges found she was unaware of serious misconduct at the charity she set up and helped oversee for several years.
In 2024, the 56-year-old supermodel was disqualified from being a charity trustee for five years after the Charity Commission – which regulates charities in England and Wales – found mismanagement of funds at Fashion for Relief, which she founded.
Nigel Farage has claimed that Andy Burnham has given him “the biggest boost in my career” by reviving the Brexit debate, which the Reform UK leader said had reopened a “huge flank” to his party.
The prime minister’s pledges to the Labour conference and admission on Wednesday that rejoining the EU was among options the government would look at had put “put me back into the debate”, he said.
The gap between French and German government bond yields – a market gauge of the risk premium investors demand to hold French debt - was at 127.51 bps, after reaching 128.80 bps, its highest level since June 2012, Reuters reports.
Inflation, deficit and issuance concerns continue to weigh on the bond market.
There is also a buyers strike on the street as investors do not want to step in till we get some form of stability. Hedge Funds have suffered in the latest round of sell-off and do not have the risk appetite to fade the move. Real money, potentially has the risk appetite, but won’t step in till we get some stability.
Israel leader Benjamin Netanyahu says the FlyDubai co-pilot who allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to crash the plane had undergone "Islamist radical indoctrination."
Dan Rather anchored the ‘CBS Evening News’ for over 20 years, starting on March 9, 1981. But he always seemed more in his element as a reporter, and now as a news analyst on social media.
Just as a reminder of why prisoners are being released early, here is an explainer by Jamie Grierson which sets out how the scheme works, why it was introduced and the changes made by Burnham’s government:
Jamie writes:
The Labour government says it inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse, with fewer than 100 spaces left in the summer of 2024. No 10 says a lack of investment in the prison estate, with just 500 net places added over a decade, has led to a situation where adult male prisons are now at 98% capacity. It says the steps are necessary while it builds capacity.
Oct. 1, 2026 — HPSF is excited to welcome ClusterShell to the Foundation. ClusterShell is an event-driven, open source Python library designed to run local or remote commands in parallel on server farms and large Linux clusters, together with a set of command-line tools built on top of it. It handles the daily work of HPC cluster administration: operating on groups of nodes, executing distributed commands with optimized algorithms, and gathering and merging output across thousands of nodes.
ClusterShell leverages remote shell facilities already present on systems, such as SSH, and its primary goal is to improve the administration of high-performance clusters by offering a lightweight but scalable Python API for developers, as well as convenient command-line tools for shell scripts and interactive use.
A Project Born in Production
ClusterShell was created at CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission — an HPSF member organization — where it was first developed to administer some of the largest supercomputers in Europe. CEA provided the resources and the demanding production environment that shaped the project from its earliest days, and CEA engineers have contributed to its design and code throughout its history.
The project’s lead maintainer, Stéphane Thiell, later continued its development at Stanford Research Computing, which supported ClusterShell for over a decade — providing development hardware and the time to keep the project growing while it ran in production on Stanford’s research clusters, including Sherlock, the university’s flagship shared HPC cluster serving thousands of researchers. Today, ClusterShell is used at major HPC sites and research institutions worldwide, scaling from small clusters to systems with tens of thousands of nodes.
“ClusterShell exists because two great institutions gave it room to grow: CEA, where it was born to manage some of Europe’s largest supercomputers, and Stanford Research Computing, which supported its development for more than a decade,” said Thiell. “Joining the High Performance Software Foundation is the natural next step — a neutral, sustainable home where the whole HPC community can help shape what comes next.”
What Makes ClusterShell Different
What sets ClusterShell apart is its combination of a clean Python API and battle-tested command-line tools. The clush command lets admins run commands on arbitrarily complex node sets, with output gathering built right in: identical output is merged and formatted on the fly, and an integrated diff mode highlights the nodes that don’t match, often the fastest way to find the one misbehaving node in ten thousand. clush also doubles as an interactive parallel shell and can copy files to entire node sets or gather them back.
At the heart of ClusterShell is its node set engine, one of the project’s most beloved features, used as much through the Python API as on the command line. It lets you do math on your cluster: the nodeset command (also available as cluset) folds ten thousand hostnames into a single expression like node[0001-9999], expands it back in an instant, and combines sets with unions, intersections, and differences. Named node groups like @gpu or @rack12 add your cluster’s own vocabulary, defined in simple files or pulled live from sources like Slurm. A question that once meant a morning of scripting, “everything in @rack12 except the nodes down for maintenance”, collapses into one command that answers in milliseconds. It works so well that other HPC tools embed the ClusterShell library just for this.
ClusterShell supports multiple execution backends (SSH, pdsh, rsh, and local execution). For the largest systems, its tree propagation mode routes commands through gateway nodes, scaling parallel execution to tens of thousands of nodes.
ClusterShell is a community-driven open source project maintained on GitHub, with contributors spanning multiple HPC sites and institutions. Co-maintainer Aurélien Degrémont has helped steer the project’s design since its earliest days at CEA and continues to guide its evolution today. The project is governed by a Technical Charter and operates under LF Europe stewardship as an HPSF Established project.
“Every significant change in ClusterShell gets debated, reviewed, and weighed against years of production experience before it ships,” said Degrémont. “That discipline is why administrators trust it on their largest systems, and joining HPSF is how we make sure that trust outlives any single maintainer.”
What’s Next
As part of the High Performance Software Foundation, ClusterShell will keep its focus where it has always been: reliability at scale. Work is under way on significant performance improvements for operations on very large node sets — more on that soon — along with continued scalability work and making it easier for new contributors to get involved with the project.
“The open source community plays a critical role in advancing high performance computing,” said Todd Gamblin, HPSF Governing Board Chair. “Projects like ClusterShell help system administrators manage large clusters more efficiently and lower the barrier to parallel command execution at scale.”
ClusterShell is packaged in major Linux distributions — including Fedora, EPEL, Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE — and is available on PyPI (pip install ClusterShell).
Get Involved
The ClusterShell community welcomes contributors, users, and collaborators from across the HPC ecosystem. Whether you’re an HPC system administrator, a developer building cluster tooling, or a researcher who relies on parallel command execution, there’s a place for you: report issues or start a discussion at https://github.com/clustershell/clustershell/issues, or find the community in the HPSF Slack.
About the CEA
The CEA is a public research organization that supports public policy decision-making and equips French and European businesses and communities with the scientific and technological means to better navigate four major societal transitions: energy transition, digital transition, future healthcare, and national/global security. Its mission is to ensure France and Europe maintain scientific, technological, and industrial leadership, contributing to a more secure and controlled present and future for all. The CEA is guided by three core values: curiosity, cooperation, and a strong sense of responsibility. Learn more at www.cea.fr/english.
About Stanford Research Computing
Stanford Research Computing, a joint effort of the Stanford Dean of Research and University IT, delivers and supports comprehensive programs that advance computational and data-intensive research across Stanford University. Its team engineers, manages, and supports high-performance computing systems and services, including shared compute clusters and storage systems for modeling, simulation, and data analysis, hosted in an award-winning, energy-efficient research data center. Research Computing also provides training, consultation, and support to help researchers explore data and answer research questions at a scale not possible on desktops or departmental servers. Learn more at srcc.stanford.edu.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a long time, PC gamers could access many PlayStation 5 games only if the publisher invested in a bespoke port (something Sony has recently said it will be scaling back). Now, though, rapid advancements in PS5 emulators and other tools are making recent PlayStation titles increasingly playable on generic PCs. SharpEmu was the first of these emulators, advancing from a "very early alpha stage" in May to a current state that can "load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle GPU-related functionality." The most recent release boasts 10 tested games that reach a "playable" state, including six that developer CursedIfElse says are "fully playable at 60 fps." That includes simple 2D games like Tetris Forever but also 3D titles like Astro Bot and the PS5 Demon's Souls remaster running at playable frame rates.
[...] Amid that SharpEmu progress, fellow PS5 emulator KytyPS5 launched its first public version last week. The major expansion of PS4-focused emulator Kyty "can boot 2D games and a selection of 3D games, including titles built with Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and custom engines," according to its GitHub page. An extensive compatibility list for KytyPS5 already shows 134 titles with "controllable gameplay" on the new emulator, though many of those still include reports of persistent, game-breaking bugs. But you can already find YouTube footage of PS5 titles like Astro's Playroom and Demon's Souls running quite capably under the emulator.
On top of those more traditional emulators, AnyPS5 might be the most interesting effort to get PS5 games running on PC. The self-described "tool for automatic executables porting" works kind of like Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, relinking a PS5 game's original x86 game code directly to native executable instructions that can run on PC. That puts the effort somewhere between direct static decompilation of a game's source code and more complete emulation of the entire PS5 environment.
Meet Ron and Sally… They had been living in a 4,000-square-foot home, using only a fraction of the space, when they began seriously considering what the future might look like.
For many older adults, the decision to move into a senior living community is often viewed as something to consider only when a crisis occurs. But for Ron and his wife, Sally, making the move before it became necessary was one of the best decisions they ever made.
The couple, both in their late 80s, live comfortably in an Independent Living apartment in a Harmony senior living community that also offers Assisted Living and Memory Care neighborhoods. While Ron remains active and independent, his wife lives with multiple sclerosis. She is healthy and engaged, but mobility has become increasingly challenging.
Their story is one familiar to many aging couples: one spouse begins facing greater physical challenges than the other, caregiving responsibilities gradually increase, and adult children worry about their parents’ safety while trying to respect their independence.
Aging Together, but Differently
Photo provided by Harmony Senior Care
Rather than waiting until caregiving demands became overwhelming or a health emergency forced a decision, they chose to make a move while they still had options and independence.
“I think we were smart to move before we were in any kind of desperate situation,” Ron reflected. “We live independently, participate in activities, and enjoy an active social life, but we know help is here if we need it.”
That decision not only provided peace of mind for the couple but also allowed them to remain close to their daughter, who lives nearby, without relying on her to become a full-time caregiver. Ron and his wife wanted family visits to remain about spending time together, not managing daily responsibilities.
“My wife and I discussed this. We decided we would not put any kind of demands on our daughter except when we really needed to.”
Their daughter, son-on-law, and grandchildren visit frequently. They share dinners, enjoy family outings, and spend quality time together.
Protecting Family Relationships
Ron’s concern about protecting his daughter from becoming a full-time caregiver comes from his own experience. Years earlier, he faced a similar decision with his own parents.
Ron recalls helping his mother and father transition into senior living after his father was diagnosed with dementia. His mother struggled with the idea of leaving her home and giving up her independence.
“Dad was drifting into dementia, and Mom did not want to give up her independence,” Ron remembered.
Like many adult children, Ron faced the challenge of balancing his parents’ wishes with concerns for their safety and quality of life. Ultimately, the move proved beneficial, but it took time for his mother to fully embrace it.
“It took her about a year and a half to say, ‘Okay, I’m in the place where I should be.”
Ron found himself experiencing many of those same emotions.
“Even with making the choice to live in a senior living community, it took me about a year or so to adjust after spending so many years in our home” he admitted. “But I have no doubt that we’re exactly where we should be.”
The Hidden Burden on Spouses
One of the realities many families face is that spouses rarely age in exactly the same way.
One person may remain healthy and active while the other develops mobility challenges, memory concerns, or chronic health conditions. Over time, the healthier spouse often becomes a full-time caregiver.
“It’s a lot on the spouse who has to care for their partner who is aging differently than they are,” Ron said.
For many couples living at home, that burden grows steadily. The caregiver often becomes responsible for transportation, medications, household management, mobility assistance, appointments, and countless other daily needs.
Senior living offers practical support, but Ron says one of the most valuable benefits is something many people don’t anticipate.
“It’s not always direct help,” he explained. “You’re having dinner with people who have situations just like yours, and you talk about it.”
In other words, caregivers gain something just as valuable as assistance: understanding.”You get a lot of support.”
That support comes from neighbors who have walked the same path and understand the unique challenges that come with caring for a spouse.
Neighbors Who Look Out for One Another
Photo courtesy of Harmony Senior Care
When Ron describes life at Harmony, he talks less about services and more about people.
“We pay attention to the people who live near us in Independent Living,” he said. “We check on them. We run errands, pick up prescriptions, and help when needed.”
The support system extends throughout the community.
That culture of looking out for one another creates a sense of security that is difficult to replicate at home.
“You have a lot of neighbors, and they’re a few feet away,” Ron said. “They pay attention, and they pay attention in a way that’s not snooping. Everyone is looking out for each other.”
Residents notice when someone hasn’t come to dinner. They check in on neighbors. They help one another. It’s a network of support built through friendship and proximity.
“You get a lot more of that kind of help than you do at home.”
A Great Place to Be Before You Need More Care
Ron is also quick to point out that senior living is not only beneficial for couples dealing with different health needs.
Many residents in Independent Living remain largely self-sufficient but may be beginning to experience challenges that make living completely alone more difficult.
For someone living alone, that support system can provide peace of mind while helping preserve independence longer.
“If you’re a single person who is getting toward assisted living but not there yet, this is a great place to be because you’ve got people who are going to pay attention to you.”
A Richer Social Life
One of the biggest surprises for Ron was how dramatically his social life improved after moving.After losing four close friends within just a few months, he found himself increasingly isolated.
Today, life looks very different. “At Harmony, we have more activities than I have time and energy to do,” he laughed. The couple now enjoys a fuller social calendar than they had at home.
At first, Ron assumed the social opportunities would be more important for his wife. Instead, he discovered they were equally important for him.
“I really like the social interaction and the social life.”
For adults in their 80s and beyond, meaningful social connections can become increasingly difficult to maintain. At Harmony, friendship is built into daily life.
The Best Time Is Before You Have To
After watching his own parents navigate aging, serving as a caregiver to his wife, and ultimately making the transition himself, Ron has come to a simple conclusion.
Reluctance is normal.
Most people don’t want to leave a home filled with memories. Most worry about losing independence. Most wonder if they’re making the decision too soon.
But Ron believes waiting for a crisis often means waiting too long.
For couples where one spouse is experiencing health challenges, for caregivers carrying growing responsibilities, and for older adults who want to maintain control over their future, making the move proactively can make all the difference.
Today, Ron and his wife have support when they need it, a vibrant social life, neighbors who genuinely care about them, and a daughter who can focus on being family rather than a full-time caregiver.
“We’re exactly where we should be,” Ron said.
For more information…
To learn more about Independent Living and caregiving support at Harmony, reach out to one of our Delaware locations in Dover, Glasgow, or Hockessin. Each location offers Independent Living, Assisted Living, and Memory Care apartments long with beautiful amenities, on-site physical, occupational, and speech therapy, dining options, and a full calendar of social events.
Minneapolis, MN — The family of Renee Good has filed two lawsuits against the U.S. government and several current and former immigration officials over her fatal shooting by an ICE officer during a federal immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
Good, 37, was shot Jan. 7 while sitting in her vehicle during protests against Operation Metro Surge. Video reviewed by news organizations showed her briefly reversing and then turning away as ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired three shots into the vehicle. Federal officials said Ross acted in self-defense.
One lawsuit alleges wrongful death under Minnesota law, including claims of assault, battery, negligence and false imprisonment. A second alleges a conspiracy to violate civil rights and names Ross, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other officials.
Good’s death became a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign. Another U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, was fatally shot by immigration agents weeks later. AP reports that at least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration officers during Trump’s second term.
Hennepin County prosecutors continue investigating Good’s killing, while DHS maintains that federal agents acted lawfully.
The AI giant Anthropic has urged the Albanese government to consider giving “conditional approval” for big tech to train its models on Australian copyrighted works under an opt-out model, after conceding it won’t secure a blanket copyright exemption.
But Australia’s public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, have strongly criticised AI firms, calling on the government to enact strict new rules to compensate media organisations and protect public interest journalism.
Neoclouds are spending a fortune on GPUs, and they need to keep those GPUs doing useful work. Storage is a big part of that equation. A lot of that comes down to how quickly the storage system can get data in and out when the GPUs need it. In some AI clusters, storage is already becoming one of the constraints.
Hyperscalers have been dealing with similar storage challenges for years. VDURA now wants to bring some of those ideas to AI factories with V12. The update is generally available and qualified on Supermicro hardware.
A big part of V12 is about being more selective with expensive flash. Active training sets and other hot data may need NVMe performance, but older checkpoints and archived datasets often do not. VDURA wants operators to be able to use both without splitting their data across separate storage systems.
VDURA calls this Context-Aware Tiering. It moves data between flash and hard drives. Hot data stays on flash. Colder data can move to disk. The user still sees one storage pool. That way, companies do not have to pay for flash across the entire system.
It is clear that the multi-tenant features introduced with this latest update are written with neoclouds in mind. VDURA’s customers share infrastructure but come with different performance needs and security demands. Now with the V12, operators get to separate tenants with their own namespaces, quality-of-service (QOS) policies, encryption keys and even network controls.
(Shutterstock/Chaosamran_Studio)
In terms of features, VDURA has added Kubernetes CSI support, REST APIs and infrastructure-as-code tools. These tools give operators a few more ways to manage the storage. Perhaps even more importantly, these features allow the users to do it through tools they may already be using for the GPU side. The less separate work needed to keep the storage running the better it is for users.
Inference is another part of V12. A Kubernetes pod can stop. It can restart or crash. It can also be replaced. But what happens to the KV cache when that happens?
V12 is built to retain the context. Its KVCache Writeback feature writes the cache out. This means it has the ability to survive those pod changes and if needed, have the cache pulled back in later.
VDURA says that means the model does not have to rebuild as much context from scratch. The result is less time to first token and less GPU work. Conceptually it makes sense. However, how much that helps in a real deployment will depend on the workload.
What about Supermicro’s role? The qualification gives customers a hardware setup they already know will work with V12. They won’t have to put one together themselves. V12 runs on Supermicro Building Block systems with AMD EPYC processors, NVMe storage and higher-capacity hybrid configurations.
The company says the same architecture covers anything from a handful to 100,000 GPUs. Storage nodes talk to GPU servers over RDMA. This keeps data moving quickly. No need for a separate back-end storage network.
(Shutterstock/Aozorastock)
At around 20 PB, the flash mix starts to become important. According to VDURA, customers have flexibility. They can keep most of the system on cheaper capacity storage, go all-flash, or pick something in between depending on the workload
The company also claims more than twice the performance per watt and a total cost of ownership more than 60% lower than competing systems at similar data feed rates. Keep in mind that those are VDURA’s own figures. Real savings will swing with workload and configuration, and nobody outside the company has verified them yet.
CEO Ken Claffey framed the release as an answer to what operators keep asking for: keep the GPUs fed, isolate tenants, automate storage management, and add capacity without standing up a second system. He described V12 as a packaged version of the mixed-fleet, software-defined approach hyperscalers already run internally.
The wider shift is that storage is being judged less as a standalone product and more by how it affects the economics of the GPU cluster next to it. For neoclouds, the goal isn’t just more capacity. It’s keeping expensive accelerators busy without building an equally expensive storage layer around them. V12 is VDURA’s attempt to hit both targets, and the next few quarters of customer deployments will show whether it does.
The rapper was arrested in Miami Beach on Thursday, days after an ex-girlfriend accused him of physical abuse
Rick Ross has been arrested on domestic violence charges in Miami Beach, according to local police.
The rapper was booked at Turner Guilford Knight correctional center at 6.10am local time on Thursday and faces one felony count of battery by strangulation as well as a misdemeanor count of battery.
Leading commercial and research organizations gain early access to technology designed to deliver efficient quantum error correction
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 1, 2026 — D-Wave Quantum Inc. today launched its gate-model quantum computing simulator beta program, marking an important milestone in D-Wave’s gate-model development roadmap.
The beta program offers select customers early access to the simulator in advance of its general availability to experiment with error-aware programming and develop quantum applications in preparation for D-Wave’s forthcoming gate-model systems. The simulator is built around D-Wave’s dual-rail superconducting gate-model technology, which is designed to harness error detection to deliver efficient quantum error correction with significantly lower hardware overhead as systems scale. Participants in the simulator beta program include commercial and research organizations: BBVA, FirstQFM, Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).
“Quantum error correction is a defining challenge in the race to commercially useful gate-model quantum computing,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “By giving leading organizations early access to our simulator, we’re enabling them to explore a fundamentally more efficient approach to fault tolerance and the applications we expect it will unlock. The beta program marks a major step in the rapid execution of our roadmap and reinforces D-Wave’s leadership in advancing fault-tolerant gate-model quantum computing.”
A foundational element of the dual-rail architecture underpinning D-Wave’s simulator was recently validated in peer-reviewed research published in Nature. The research demonstrated a fast, high-fidelity two-qubit entangling gate that preserves the architecture’s inherent error-detection advantages. Beta customers will be able to explore this differentiated approach through the simulator, accessed via D-Wave’s Leap quantum cloud service and Ocean SDK. D-Wave also plans to offer flexible development bundles that combine access to the simulator and future gate-model systems with expert guidance to streamline onboarding and support research and development.
What Beta Customers Are Saying About D-Wave’s Gate-Model Simulator:
“Quantum computing could open new approaches to some of the financial services industry’s most complex computational challenges,” said Escolástico Sánchez Martínez, quantum principal manager at BBVA. “Through D-Wave’s beta program, we look forward to exploring how its error-aware simulator and forthcoming dual-rail gate-model systems could support applications such as portfolio optimization, fraud detection and derivatives valuation.”
“Error detection creates an opportunity to recover useful information that might otherwise be discarded,” said Vish Ramakrishnan, CEO of FirstQFM. “Through D-Wave’s beta program, we plan to apply our proprietary foundation models for quantum computing to explore how detected errors, mid-circuit error signals and real-time control can be used to improve the quality and reliability of quantum computations, while preparing these techniques for future testing on dual-rail gate-model hardware.”
“By beta testing quantum simulators early, D-Wave and FAU have given our students and faculty real, hands-on experience with the tools that will shape the industry,” said Robert Loredo, executive director of the FAU Center for Quantum Technologies. “This isn’t just about advancing research; it’s about preparing the people who will build and lead the quantum workforce of tomorrow.”
“Quantum machine learning models that perform well under ideal conditions may behave very differently when exposed to realistic hardware constraints,” said Dr. Arslan Munir, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at FAU. “D-Wave’s simulator will allow us to investigate how error-aware, qubit-efficient approaches could improve the robustness of quantum machine learning and help establish practical design guidelines for future gate-model quantum systems.”
“D-Wave’s simulator represents an important step forward in giving researchers practical tools to explore the potential of error-aware quantum computing,” said Dr. Kristel Michielsen, director of JSC. “We are excited to gain early access to this differentiated technology and contribute insights that can help advance the development of D-Wave’s future gate-model systems.”
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.
Collaboration advances Q/C Technologies’ optical processing unit initiative for AI inference through nanophotonics research at Sandia’s Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1, 2026 — Q/C Technologies, Inc., a developer of next-generation optical computing solutions, has announced a collaboration with the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) at Sandia National Laboratories to advance its proprietary optical processing unit (OPU) initiative for artificial intelligence inference. The Company is pioneering next-generation optical computing solutions designed to harness the properties of light to perform complex computations naturally via interference.
Sandia is one of the nation’s leading multi-mission science and engineering laboratories, operated for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With approximately 17,000 employees and an annual budget of approximately $5 billion, Sandia has deep capabilities spanning microelectronics, photonics, advanced materials, high-performance computing and systems engineering.
The Company’s collaboration with Sandia’s CINT focuses on joint research on nanophotonic components and the physical building blocks required for scalable optical AI processing. The project aims to establish and verify a defensible roadmap for optical AI hardware beyond incremental GPU scaling by identifying and prioritizing optical operations and device technologies for Q/C’s OPU architecture and addressing key challenges including nonlinear operations, memory, precision, optical loss and integration with electronic systems.
“Access to CINT’s scientific expertise and advanced research capabilities in photonics and nanoscale technologies represents an important step as we develop our proprietary optical computing platform,” said Joshua Silverman, Executive Chairman of Q/C Technologies. “As AI infrastructure faces increasing constraints in power consumption, bandwidth and scalability, we believe optical computing has the potential to fundamentally change how computationally intensive AI workloads are processed. This collaboration will help us evaluate key architectural concepts as we continue building the foundation for our next-generation optical computing solution.”
“This collaboration provides an opportunity to accelerate our work toward a practical, scalable optical computing architecture,” said Yossef Ehrlichman, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer at Q/C Technologies. “We believe this work with CINT will help us define the pathway from fundamental optical capabilities to an integrated OPU architecture.”
The new collaboration represents another milestone in Q/C Technologies’ OPU initiative. The Company recently established a 4,800-square-foot integrated photonics laboratory in San Francisco and continues to build its foundation of knowledge and engineering expertise in AI, photonics and computing to support development of its proprietary OPU architecture.
About Q/C Technologies, Inc.
Q/C Technologies believes the next leap in frontier computing is optical. The Company is pioneering next-generation optical computing solutions designed to harness the properties of light to perform complex computations naturally via interference. Overcoming key challenges posed by electronic GPUs, Q/C Technologies seeks to develop proprietary optical processing units with orders of magnitude faster clock speed and bandwidth and vastly improved energy efficiency relative to traditional computing architectures.
Police investigating reports of politicians’ homes being broken into in last year with nothing being stolen
The Finnish prime minister, Petteri Orpo, has said a foreign power could be responsible for a series of suspected break-ins at the homes of several members of parliament.
Police said on Thursday they were investigating multiple reports of MPs’ homes being broken into in the Helsinki area in the last year in which nothing was stolen but subtle signs of breaking and entering were left.
Photo: Brianna Busch is representing Delaware Park Casino at the 2026 G2E Dealer Championship at The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas.
New Castle native Brianna Busch is representing Delaware Park Casino this week against 49 other dealers from across North America
WILMINGTON, Del. — A New Castle native who learned to deal cards at Delaware Park Casino just four years ago is putting those skills to the test this week on one of the gaming industry’s biggest stages.
Brianna Busch is representing Delaware Park Casino at the 2026 G2E Dealer Championship at The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas.
The three-day competition, which began Tuesday and concludes Thursday, brings together 50 dealers representing casinos from across North America. For the first time, the championship includes dealers from Canada and Mexico as well as the United States.
Busch is the first dealer from Delaware Park to compete in the national event.
“It’s very exciting and shocking,” Busch said when she learned she had been selected. “I feel honored that Delaware Park is involved and that I get to represent them.”
From dealer school to Las Vegas
Photo: the Team in Delaware Park Casino sending Brianna off to Las Vegas for the G2E Dealer Competition.
Busch’s path to the competition began with a setback.
She first enrolled in dealer training in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced the classes to be canceled. She returned in 2022, completed Delaware Park’s dealer school and joined the casino’s table games staff that June.
Since then, Busch has learned every table game offered at Delaware Park and recently was promoted to supervisor.
Her chance to represent the casino came after an internal competition July 15. Busch advanced to a final group of five employees who demonstrated their dealing skills while working with actual guests on the casino floor.
Rather than treating it as a special performance, Busch said she relied on what she does every day.
“This is what I do, so it didn’t feel like a competition,” Busch said. “I just focused on being who I am and doing my job.”
Blackjack, roulette — and people skills
At G2E, Busch and the other competitors must demonstrate more than an ability to shuffle cards, calculate payouts or spin a roulette wheel.
Each contestant deals blackjack and traditional roulette for 15 minutes and is evaluated on technical skills, hospitality and game control. The tournament uses elimination rounds, culminating Thursday with the championship.
Busch’s favorite game is roulette.
Her preparation for blackjack, however, sometimes follows her home to Delaware.
While driving, Busch said she looks at numbers on Delaware license plates and uses them to practice the mental arithmetic required at a blackjack table, adding and calculating numbers toward 21.
“I like to work under pressure,” Busch said. “It’s controlled chaos, but I know what I’m doing.”
The gaming industry also runs in the family. Busch’s mother began working in the industry in the 1990s, including a stint at Delaware Park, and encouraged her daughter to consider becoming a dealer.
Busch previously attended culinary school and said she sees similarities between a busy restaurant kitchen and a crowded casino table: Both require employees to remain calm, accurate and personable while working quickly under pressure.
Delaware Park sends one of its own
Delaware Park officials said Busch’s advancement from dealer school graduate to supervisor and now national competitor illustrates the career opportunities available within casino operations.
“We, as a department, are very excited to be able to have Brianna represent us in Las Vegas,” said Kevin Gargin, director of table games. “Brianna shows the qualities we strive to make a standard. She takes pride in her work and focuses on making sure guests have a positive, memorable experience.”
Terry Glebocki, president and general manager of Delaware Park Casino, said Busch’s progress has been remarkable.
“In just four years, Brianna has grown tremendously — from a graduate of our dealer’s school to a floor supervisor,” Glebocki said. “She exemplifies the very best of Delaware Park through skill, confidence, an engaging personality and an undeniable rapport with our guests.”
The championship is part of the Global Gaming Expo, presented by the American Gaming Association and organized by RX. The competition debuted in 2025 with 34 U.S. dealers. This year’s expanded field includes 50 competitors from across North America.
For Busch, the trip also marks another milestone: her first visit to Las Vegas.
And despite competing against some of the continent’s top casino dealers, her strategy remains much the same as it was during Delaware Park’s internal competition.
Trust her training, engage the people at the table and do the job she already knows how to do.
TO GO BOX
What: 2026 G2E Dealer Championship
Who: Delaware Park Casino representative Brianna Busch and 49 other dealers from casinos across North America
When: Sept. 29-Oct. 1
Where: The Venetian Expo, Las Vegas
Competition: Dealers compete in blackjack and traditional roulette and are judged on technical skills, hospitality and game control.
Network was listed as primary TV pool covering Thursday’s presidential activities but then was abruptly removed
For a second time in a week, the White House has unilaterally removed CNN from its assignment as the primary television pool representative covering Donald Trump.
In a letter sent to Bafta members on Thursday, the organisation’s chair Sara Putt and CEO Jane Millichip said that, after an independent review, Bafta had “strengthened and centralised our safeguarding, risk assessment and compliance processes” and had made arrangements in consultation with “safeguarding and inclusion experts” for Davidson’s attendance at the awards ceremony organised by Bafta’s Scottish branch, which is due to take place in November.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump says he would consider issuing preemptive pardons to members of his administration before leaving office if they faced possible investigations under a future Democratic government.
Asked in a Time interview whether he would pardon officials who might later become targets of Democratic-led investigations, Trump replied, “Yeah, sure I’d do that.” He then pointed repeatedly to former President Joe Biden’s use of preemptive pardons before leaving office in January 2025.
Biden granted clemency to figures including Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley and members and staff of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. He said the pardons were intended to protect public servants from potential politically motivated prosecutions and were not acknowledgments of wrongdoing.
Biden also pardoned several family members before leaving office, a decision that drew criticism from Republicans and some Democrats.
Trump has made expansive use of presidential clemency himself. Shortly after returning to office, he pardoned roughly 1,500 people charged or convicted in connection with Jan. 6 and commuted several additional sentences.
Trump did not identify which current officials might receive pardons or say that any final decisions had been made. His comments nevertheless raise the possibility of another broad use of presidential clemency before his second term ends.
Witnesses in the chamber said Christa Pike was still breathing despite receiving injections intended to kill her
When the prison warden asked Christa Pike if she had any last words, she said she was going to leave this world “with love” for those on her side and also the ones angry with her.
What followed was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, after two doses of the lethal injection failed to produce the desired effect.
Administration says increased immigration enforcement led to fewer homicides, but they have been on the decline since Joe Biden’s term
Over the last year and a half, the US has seen a historic drop in homicides. Researchers and reporters are still puzzling through the complex set of reasons why - from the easing of pandemic-era stressors and the Biden administration’s investments in community-based violence prevention to policing and other factors.
But for the Trump administration, there’s one easy explanation: increased immigration enforcement. As the midterm elections approach, the White House has been doubling down on this message, saying its crackdown against immigrants is why US crime rates are now falling.
The animal welfare group has revived their runway-storming tactics from the naughts, now targeting the use of wool
Her walk was poised, her outfit – crop top, tailored trousers, high heels – so on point that when Josie Knowles strutted down a London Fashion Week catwalk last month she could have passed for a model. That is, had it not been for the sign the Peta protester held saying “H&M: Wool is Bloody Cruel.”
Still, as one social media commentator put it when praising her strut: “you cant tell me Peta didn’t know what they were doing when they hired this diva”.
With Laufey’s ever-growing success, she has no doubt pioneered the pop-jazz music genre in recent years. Her most recent deluxe album, “A Matter of Time: The Final Hour,” was released on April 10 and was highly anticipated by her fans.
The standard edition of the album is a masterclass in all the elements that set her apart from other artists, from her rich vocals to the exquisite use of classical blends. Some of my favorites from the standard edition include “Forget-Me-Not” (I adore heart-wrenching and overdramatic ballads, what can I say?), “Silver Lining” and “Too Little, Too Late.”
Last October, I had the privilege of attending her “A Matter of Time Tour” in Philadelphia. It truly was an out-of-body experience I’ll never forget, and being in the pit, I will always attest that Laufey and I definitely made eye contact at some point (source: trust me).
Speaking of her tour, she began teasing music during her show in Zurich in February, where she performed the song, “How I Get,” to a bewildered crowd. It would then officially be released on the 25th of that month, preceding the release of her deluxe album on April 10.
Thematically, the album tells tales of longing, love and the painful reality that time marches on. It delves into the many perplexities of a romantic relationship, something that Laufey has expertise in.
While the standard edition seems to tiptoe around the idea that the relationship is slowly failing, “The Final Hour” wholeheartedly admits that the relationship is over and it reminded me a lot of the five stages of grief. Think of the classic fairytale, “Cinderella,” — as soon as the clock strikes midnight, all the magic vanishes into thin air.
“Madwoman” is a jazzy and upbeat song that depicts Laufey battling her emotional inner turmoil. The way the production flows effortlessly and how her vocals keep up with the pace is nothing short of pleasing to the ear. While listening, I immediately thought about the story of “Alice in Wonderland.” Here, Laufey seems to metaphorically fall down the rabbit hole of wanting to be with someone who is not good for her and the emotional turmoil is too much to bear.
“How I Get,” as mentioned before, was the first and only song to come out prior to the deluxe’s release. It’s a dreary, slow-tempo song that is very reminiscent of Mitski and Suki Waterhouse’s music — with her own classic twist on it, of course. Continuing the themes of “Madwoman,” she acknowledges that her love interest is not healthy for her, but here, she talks about the bad habits she’s picked up as a result.
“I Wait, I Wait, I Wait” exudes a dream-like quality. The production is stripped down — carried by lullaby-esque melodies that could send you to sleep. Laufey sings about waiting for bad things to happen to her, from nightmares to more catastrophic events like earthquakes. Most of all, she waits for her romantic interest to fall out of love with her and somehow that’s worse. She searches for the little things, such as the lies that come from her lover as confirmation that he no longer has room for her in his heart.
The final song, “I’ll Forget About You (In Time),” sees Laufey accepting that the relationship is over. The production heavily consists of strings, evoking a bittersweet atmosphere. I love how she doesn’t sugarcoat the “getting over a relationship” process whatsoever. She revels in her despair, crying to her mother and taking her time in processing the relationship’s finality. Even though it causes her great pain, she tells herself that she will in fact let him wither in her memory, and that acts as her guiding light in navigating this newfound pain.
Listening to these tracks truly was an emotional rollercoaster. Laufey’s ability to tell stories through her music is beyond impeccable, and I love how these tracks truly feel like the closers to a story of love, loss and heartbreak. These emotions are essential to the human experience, and she does not shy away from that whatsoever with these new songs.
Pakistan says airstrikes in Afghanistan killed 22 terrorists, but Afghanistan's Taliban regime and the U.N. mission in the country say mostly children were killed.
In Michigan’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Mike Rogers criticized Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s response to a March synagogue attack in their state.
In a Sept. 24 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Rogers said El-Sayed failed to condemn the man who drove his truck into a synagogue where children were attending preschool. The assailant died from what police said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound; no one else was killed.
“(El-Sayed) could not condemn the terrorist who tried to attack and kill 140 Jewish children right here in Michigan,” said Rogers, a former Republican congressman, referring to Ayman Mohamad Ghazali’s attack on a synagogue in the Detroit area’s West Bloomfield Township. “‘Hurt people hurt people’ is all he could come up with.”
The day of the attack, before many details were known about the attacker and his motives, El-Sayed issued an initial statement denouncing antisemitism and saying he was “standing in solidarity with all of us who value our right to pray how we choose to pray against antisemitism and hate in all its forms.”
In a separate video statement the next day, after the attacker had been identified, El-Sayed twice condemned the attack and said “there is no justification for what (Ghazali) did.” But he also said “hurt people hurt people,” comments that drew criticism from people who said El-Sayed was seeking to justify the attack by also pointing to how Ghazali’s family was affected by violence in the Middle East prior to Ghazali targeting the synagogue.
In August, El-Sayed apologized and said he should have ended his comments at condemnation.
When we asked Rogers’ campaign for information to support the statement, his campaign spokesperson called El-Sayed’s apology inauthentic.
“The only reason he issued a fake apology five months later is because the polling told him to,” Rogers spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said, calling it “an insult” to Michigan’s Jewish community.
Ghazali was armed with arifle March 12 when police say he drove a truck filled with fireworks and gasoline into the Temple Israel synagogue. About 140 people, mostly children, were in the building. Ghazali and security guards shot at each other before police said he shot himself. The FBI described it as a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism deliberately targeting Michigan’s largest Jewish synagogue.
El-Sayed’s statement at the time of the attack
In his first statement on March 12 about the incident, El-Sayed said, “To my Jewish sisters and brothers, you have a right to worship in peace. You have a right to send your kids to the synagogue in the morning and know they’ll come home safely at night. And you have a right to know that your religious identity and faith practice are respected.”
In a longer video statement released the next day, he noted that the investigation found Ghazali was Arab-American and Muslim.
“I condemn what he did,” El-Sayed said. “There is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship. Never.”
He called it a “heinous attack” for which there was no justification and said “antisemitism has no place in our communities.” He described the attack as part of a cycle of violence, saying Ghazali’s family members, including children, had been killed in an air strike in Lebanon the week before the Michigan attack.
“As an epidemiologist, I’ve spent my career studying the worst things that happen to people to understand how to stop them from happening, and I’ll never forget one of the simplest lessons I learned while on my psychiatry rotation in medical school: hurt people hurt people,” El-Sayed said in the video.
“Violence is a cycle,” he continued. After Ghazali’s family members were killed in Lebanon, El-Sayed said, Ghazali acted “in an evil act of displaced rage.”
“He tried to take it out on innocent children, who had nothing to do with the loss of the innocent children he lost, except that they share a faith,” El-Sayed said before referring to Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.”
El-Sayed’s campaign pointed us to multiple instances after the March incident in which he called the attack “horrific” and said he condemned it. In those interviews, he made the same comments about Israel’s conduct, a cycle of violence and the attacker’s anger being directed at innocent people.
Addressing Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus in August, El-Sayed apologized in response to a question about the statement. He said his comments were meant to “offer broader context,” The New York Times reported. “If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry,” El-Sayed said.
“I should have issued a statement, of course condemning it, and it just should have been the full stop,” he said, according to the Times.
Jewish voters’ reactions to the apology have been split, according to reporting from NPR and local outlets. Other issues have caused division between El-Sayed’s candidacy and the Jewish community; El-Sayed has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide, called to end U.S. military aid to Israel and declined to affirm Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state.
Our ruling
Rogers said El-Sayed “could not condemn the terrorist who tried to attack and kill” children in a Michigan synagogue in March.
El-Sayed said on the day of the attack “there is no room for antisemitism in America” and he stood with Jewish people.
The next day, he released a video statement in which he said of the attacker, “I condemn what he did.” He also said “hurt people hurt people,” drawing criticism for appearing to justify or excuse the attack by connecting it to the attacker’s family members killed in the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah war.
The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
CAMBRIDGE, England and GENEVA, Oct. 1, 2026 — British computing company Signaloid has joined CERN openlab, the public-private partnership through which CERN evaluates emerging information technologies for scientific computing. As part of the collaboration, CERN and Signaloid will evaluate Signaloid’s distribution-extended compute hardware (UxHw) technology within the CERN openlab Heterogeneous Architectures Testbed, which explores new processor technologies for future scientific computing infrastructures.
The collaboration comes as research organizations worldwide are increasingly adopting heterogeneous computing architectures that combine CPUs, GPUs and specialized accelerators to tackle demanding workloads more efficiently. As the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HiLumi LHC) approaches, CERN is evaluating a range of emerging computing technologies that could help address its rapidly growing computational requirements.
“Heterogeneous architectures are becoming essential for the HiLumi LHC and CERN openlab is pioneering a model for evaluating next-generation computing technologies such as Signaloid’s distribution-extended compute hardware technology. The upcoming deployment of Signaloid’s hardware and software stack at CERN openlab illustrates the kind of architectural innovation openlab was created to evaluate,” says Maria Girone, CTO CERN openlab.
Preparing for the High-Luminosity LHC
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest particle accelerator. By colliding protons at nearly the speed of light, CERN’s scientists investigate the fundamental building blocks of matter and seek answers to some of the biggest questions in physics.
Much of this research depends on Monte Carlo simulation, which allows physicists to compare experimental measurements with millions of simulated particle collisions. Generating these simulations requires repeatedly calculating the same physical processes using different random inputs, making Monte Carlo event generation one of the most computationally-demanding workloads in particle physics.
When the HiLumi LHC begins operation later this decade, the number of recorded collisions will increase dramatically. While this promises unprecedented scientific opportunities, it will also place enormous pressure on CERN’s computing infrastructure, with projected computing demand expected to outpace available resources.
UxHw: Beyond the Capabilities of Classical Computers, Available in Production Today
Rather than replacing conventional processors, Signaloid’s UxHw technology is designed to extend heterogeneous computing systems with native support computation directly on digital representations of continuous probability distributions. With this capability, instead of repeatedly executing the same kernel millions of times with different random inputs (so-called sampling), software running on UxHw can perform calculations directly on probability distributions, in a single execution pass, while requiring minimal changes to existing software.
In benchmarking against today’s high-performance server platforms, UxHw has demonstrated speed-ups of up to 2,000× for representative workloads ranging from high-energy physics, to regulatory risk modeling for banks, to simulations used in chip design, to robotics. Additional efficiency gains are expected from Signaloid’s recently custom ASIC implementations, the first of which taped out in May 2026 using a low-power TSMC fabrication process.
Evaluating a New Computing Architecture
As part of the CERN openlab Heterogeneous Architectures Testbed, CERN and Signaloid will evaluate a representative Monte Carlo event generation workflow based on the Pepper framework for proton-proton collisions producing multiple gluons. The project will assess computational performance, numerical accuracy, and integration effort, helping determine where distribution-extended computing technologies like UxHw can complement existing CPU- and GPU-based scientific computing infrastructure. The joint project is designed to identify where distribution-extended computing adds value within the Monte Carlo event generation pipeline and what practical considerations are involved in integrating the technology into existing high-energy physics software.
“The future of high-performance computing will not be defined by a single processor architecture, but by heterogeneous systems that combine specialised hardware for different classes of computation,” said Prof. Phillip Stanley-Marbell, Founder and CEO of Signaloid. “We’re excited that CERN openlab is evaluating UxHw alongside other emerging computing technologies. Experimental particle physics represents one of the most demanding and exciting environments in which to demonstrate its potential.”
Dr. Stefan Roiser, Senior Computing Engineer at CERN, said, “The largest share of LHC computing resources is spent simulating particle collisions. We will explore Signaloid’s technology in Monte Carlo event generation, the first step in the simulation chain expected to see substantial cost increases during CERN’s upcoming High Luminosity data-taking period. Because event generation relies heavily on multi-dimensional distributions, Signaloid’s UxHw technology has strong potential to accelerate this software, helping to meet the forecasted computing budgets during HiLumi LHC, starting in 2030.”
The collaboration reflects a broader trend across high-performance computing. Around the world, governments and research organisations are investing in heterogeneous computing systems capable of combining multiple processor architectures for increasingly complex scientific and AI workloads, including the UK’s planned £750 million AI Research Resource (AIRR) heterogeneous supercomputer.
About Signaloid
Signaloid develops a computing platform that dramatically reduces the runtime and compute infrastructure requirements of workloads ranging from engineering simulations, to robotics and physical AI. Founded by Prof. Phillip Stanley-Marbell, former Professor of Physical Computation at the University of Cambridge, the Signaloid’s compute platforms enable software to operate directly on probability distributions through its distribution-extended compute hardware (UxHw) architecture. Signaloid’s technology is available through cloud, on-premises and edge computing platforms and is used by more than 3,000 developers worldwide.
Oct. 1, 2026 — Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) recently received its first NVIDIA Vera CPU systems, installing the components in the Laboratory’s Darwin testbed. The deployment is an important milestone in a long partnership on deep codesign with NVIDIA on high-performance CPU technologies and will enable the Laboratory’s work on software stack and application readiness for the forthcoming Mission, Vision and Veritas supercomputers.
Los Alamos team members inspect the system at its testbed location. From left, David Rich, Ben Santos and Galen Shipman.
“Los Alamos National Laboratory will be one of the first institutions to receive the Vera CPU technology during an ongoing, rigorous collaboration between the Laboratory and NVIDIA,” said Gary Grider, senior director for computing technology at Los Alamos.
The air-cooled MGX Vera CPU node combines two Vera CPUs with 88 high-bandwidth Olympus cores each in a two-socket server interconnected with the high-bandwidth NVLink Chip-to-Chip interface. The deployment of the Vera CPU node represents an important step in a deep hardware‑software co‑design initiative that has spanned more than a decade and builds upon the successful codesign of the Grace CPU that currently powers the Lab’s Venado supercomputer built by NVIDIA and HPE.
All three supercomputers — Mission, Vision and Veritas — will be powered by Vera CPUs and NVIDIA Rubin GPUs. Mission and Veritas will include Vera CPU partitions integrated with NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL-4 and NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL-72 partitions to support high-complexity modeling and simulation workloads and agentic AI.
The MGX Vera CPU server was delivered to Los Alamos in August and the Darwin team (supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program) quickly installed and configured the system in the Darwin testbed. Software stack deployment was rapidly followed by performance and stability testing. The system is currently up and running, supporting benchmarking and application readiness activities.
Rigorous Codesign Leads to Better Performance
Reflecting the rapid diversification of computing technology to deliver performance improvements in the post–Moore’s law era, the forthcoming Mission system is the first NNSA Advanced Technology System with diverse, purpose-built technologies to support the NNSA’s most pressing workloads. Rather than a single, general-purpose architecture, Mission will be composed of three purpose-built partitions — Ranger (Vera CPU), Sandstone (Vera Rubin NVL-4) and Starlight (Vera Rubin NVL-72) — integrated with a flexible software environment and shared high‑performance storage optimized for AI-enabled modeling and simulation. In addition to the Mission Ranger partition, the Vera CPU nodes are also bound for the Veritas system.
“In its eventual deployment in Mission’s Ranger partition, the Vera CPU will support the NNSA’s highest complexity 3D multi-physics simulations and provide the technology foundation for Agentic AI powered workloads” said Galen Shipman, chief architect of advanced technology systems at Los Alamos. “Having collaborated with ARM, NVIDIA and HPE over many years on architectural specification and requirements definition, we are excited to have this Vera CPU in our testbed to further validate our codesign decisions and to continue to inform choices we make for our future systems.”
“The next era of scientific discovery will be powered by supercomputers that bring AI and simulation together,” said Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA. “Through our long partnership with Los Alamos, Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs will power Mission, Vision and Veritas, creating a purpose-built foundation for the Laboratory’s goal of accelerating the combination of agentic AI with their most complex modeling and simulation workloads.”
The Ranger partition delivers high-frequency, high-bandwidth cores with large aggregate and per-core memory. The full, final Ranger partition will be installed in Mission in 2027 alongside the Sandstone partition. (The Mission-Starlight and Vision-Transformer partitions may be delivered as soon as late 2026 to the Laboratory.)
“At the Laboratory, we’ve concentrated on tailoring hardware technologies in Mission to address simulation characteristics that are not well represented in the broader cloud- and AI-driven market,” said Ben Santos, HPC Platforms program director at Los Alamos. “This focus on the unique characteristics of Laboratory applications has allowed our technology partners to address these unique needs with the latest highly impactful enhancements to their base technology portfolio. We work together through design, testing and evaluation to understand what applications require, what technologies are available, what optimal performance looks like, how workloads can be made scalable, and more.”
Indian government issued with warning it would be in contempt of court if it failed to release Jagtar Singh Johal
The British Sikh activist Jagtar Singh Johal has been released from a Delhi prison after the Indian high court warned the government it would be found in contempt of court if it continued to attempt to keep him in jail despite an 18 September court order releasing him on bail. Johal has been incarcerated for nine years without any full trial.
The court order was issued after Johal’s lawyers issued a writ of habeas corpus alleging he was being detained against the express direction of the court.
Xbox, PC (version tested); The Coalition/Xbox Game Studios E-Day boasts the best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing
Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery. In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off. You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags. Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide. With guns. Lots of ’em.
Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles. Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference. This is a thing that I have seen.”
Washington, DC — The Trump administration has expanded its controversial taxpayer-funded advertising campaign with a new television spot celebrating President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war against Iran, just weeks before the midterm elections.
The one-minute advertisement aired Wednesday on Fox News and carries the disclosure “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” It features Trump’s February announcement of military operations, battlefield imagery, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praising the president’s willingness to use force against threats to Americans. The ad concludes with Trump urging Iranians to take control of their government.
The spot is part of a broader series of government-funded advertisements centered heavily on Trump’s leadership and political themes. Previous ads have highlighted his tax policies, attacked political enemies, and reused language and footage resembling his campaign material. The White House calls them patriotic public-service announcements rather than political advertising.
That explanation has drawn criticism from both parties. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether taxpayer funds should fund campaign-style messaging immediately before an election, while legal experts have raised concerns about potential violations of federal restrictions on government-funded propaganda.
The Iran ad arrives as the conflict enters its seventh month and remains politically contentious at home.
As the midterms approach, Americans’ digestive health has become a bizarre talking point
Donald Trump seems to spend an unusual amount of time thinking about toilets.
Back in 2019, he bizarrely claimed: “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once.” He repeated this claim at a Michigan rally the following year. “Ten times, right, 10 times,” Trump complained. “Not me, of course not me, but you,” he added while pointing at an unfortunate audience member.
Successful proof-of-concept chiller delivers over 3.5 MW of cooling capacity while demonstrating potential for up to 2% higher efficiency, freeing power for computing
SWORDS, Ireland, Oct. 1, 2026 — Trane Technologies, a global climate innovator, has announced the successful laboratory demonstration of the industry’s first 800-volt direct current (800 VDC) cooling architecture designed to support the mission-critical energy and thermal demands of next-generation AI factories and gigawatt-scale data centers. First validated on a high-efficiency chiller platform, the proof-of-concept demonstrates the performance, efficiency and design advantages of direct current (DC) power distribution in mission-critical cooling plants.
Trane Technologies, in collaboration with Eaton Corporation and Danfoss, modified an existing high-efficiency chiller to operate with an 800 VDC feed and validated the potential for up to 2% improvement in system efficiency over conventional AC counterparts while delivering over 1,000 tons (3.5 MW) of cooling capacity.
Unlocking Energy Efficiency and Power Demand Reduction
Traditional AC-powered cooling systems rely on multiple stages of power conversion to operate compressor drives, pumps and fans, with each step introducing energy losses. By accepting direct 800 VDC input, power conversion losses are reduced and overall efficiency is improved.
For gigawatt-scale AI data centers, even modest efficiency gains can translate into meaningful power capacity to support additional server racks and compute workloads, improving performance per megawatt. In a typical 200 MW data center, this efficiency gain could unlock up to 1.8 MW of additional compute capacity, enough to support up to fifteen 120 kW racks or up to three 600 kW racks.
With broad applicability across thermal management technologies, this successful demonstration paves the way for a fully DC-powered mechanical cooling infrastructure and integrated chiller plants to deliver further optimization and efficiency improvements.
“As AI workloads push data center power densities to higher levels, optimizing every link in the energy chain is vital,” said Mauro J. Atalla, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology and Sustainability Officer, Trane Technologies. “This demonstration marks an important step forward in rethinking how cooling infrastructure can integrate with emerging DC power architectures. By eliminating conversion losses and designing for higher DC voltage architectures, we are helping data center operators reduce the power needed by non-IT equipment and maximize compute capacity per megawatt.”
Leading the Future of Data Center Thermal Management
The 800 VDC demonstration builds on Trane Technologies’ continued investments in comprehensive data center thermal management solutions. The company’s portfolio spans high-capacity air- and water-cooled chillers, modular and liquid cooling infrastructure, Coolant Distribution Units (CDUs), Computer Room Air Handlers (CRAHs), fan coil walls, digital twin architectures, automated chiller plant controls and reference designs.
As customer needs evolve, Trane Technologies sees long-term opportunity to apply advanced power and controls innovation across multiple cooling solutions, helping data center operators balance efficiency, flexibility and scalability in increasingly demanding AI environments.
About Trane Technologies
Trane Technologies (NYSE: TT) 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 tranetechnologies.com.
HOBOKEN, N.J., Oct. 1, 2026 — Quantum Computing Inc. (QCi), a vertically integrated quantum systems company pioneering photonics and semiconductor manufacturing, today announced Dirac-3S, the next-generation of its Dirac-3 quantum optimization machine, marking a significant step toward commercial deployment of QCi’s quantum optimization technology.
Dirac-3S advances the platform across three areas – Speed, Scale and Solutions – with faster performance, improved solution quality, increased computing capacity and a modular architecture designed to support customers as their requirements grow. The first customer shipment of Dirac-3S is expected in November 2026.
Speed. Scale. Solutions
Speed: Dirac-3S is engineered to efficiently solve increasingly complex optimization problems, with practical computation times demonstrated on problems involving up to 9,980 variables while consistently finding the optimal solution. This enables customers to tackle larger problems and explore more possibilities in less time.
Scale: Dirac-3S features a modular architecture designed to scale with customer requirements. The compact 5U base system can be extended with Expansion Modules to support larger and more complex optimization problems, with QCi demonstrating configurations supporting up to 9,980 variables with one Expansion Module. The architecture is designed to accommodate additional Expansion Modules, enabling customers to expand their system as their optimization needs grow. QCi has also advanced the Dirac-3S hardware architecture, manufacturing processes and supply chain to support increased production volumes, consistent product quality and broader commercial deployment. These improvements include enhanced error correction, component control and operational reliability.
Solutions: Dirac-3S is designed to address a broad range of real-world optimization problems on a single platform, through multiple optimization approaches including continuous, integer and higher-order optimization. QCi’s latest error-correction techniques are designed to improve solution quality across applications in financial services, logistics and supply chains, manufacturing, energy, telecommunications, scientific research, and aerospace and defense.
The platform can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and integrated into AI/ML pipelines, enabling organizations to incorporate quantum optimization into existing computational workflows.
“Dirac-3S takes our quantum optimization platform from demonstrating what is possible to delivering a system built for practical commercial use,” said Yong Meng Sua, Chief Technology Officer of QCi. “We have increased performance and computing capacity, expanded the size and complexity of problems the system can address through a modular architecture, and advanced the hardware and manufacturing architecture needed to support broader deployment. This gives customers a flexible path to adopt quantum optimization and scale their computing capacity as their needs grow.”
Building on the Dirac-3 Foundation
Dirac-3S builds on QCi’s first-generation Dirac-3 quantum optimization machine, which has been used by academic researchers exploring quantum optimization algorithms and applications.
“Our experience with the first-generation Dirac-3 quantum optimization machine validated its potential as a powerful tool for solving meaningful optimization problems. QCi’s continued innovation with the Dirac-3S, including its expanded computational capabilities, enables us to pursue significantly larger and more complex optimization challenges. We look forward to exploring new research directions and accelerating the development of practical, high-impact applications,” said Professor Paul Griffin, Associate Professor, Singapore Management University.
QCi has published a new Technical Review evaluating Dirac-3S across synthetic, graph-based and industry-standard optimization benchmarks, including comparisons with Projected Gradient Descent and commercial classical solver Hexaly. On synthetic problems with known global optima ranging from 2,000 to 9,980 variables, Dirac-3S was the only evaluated solver to achieve the optimal solution across all tested instances, while solution times increased only modestly as problem size approached 9,980 variables. On industry-standard DIMACS maximum-clique benchmarks, Dirac-3S more frequently identified the highest-quality solutions than the other evaluated methods.
QCi has also published a survey paper demonstrating how NP-hard problems can be mapped to simplex formulations native to Dirac-3S, expanding its potential applications across continuous, discrete and combinatorial optimization. The Technical Review, along with the detailed benchmarking methodology and results is available in QCi’s Dirac-3S Technical Reference at: https://quantumcomputinginc.com/learn/module/dirac-3s-technical-reference.
Quantum Computing Inc. (Nasdaq: QUBT) is a vertically integrated quantum systems company pioneering photonics and semiconductor manufacturing, and delivering accessible, scalable, and cost-effective quantum machines, photonics products, and advanced packaging. The Company provides foundry services for photonic chips and semiconductor manufacturing and offers a vertically integrated portfolio spanning photonics and electronic components, subsystems, and full-stack systems.
Designed to operate at room-temperature with low-power requirements, QCi’s technologies enable practical deployment across high-growth markets, including high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, aerospace and defense, and advanced sensing and imaging.
Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, QCi also has operations in Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Virginia. By combining advanced materials, device engineering, and scalable manufacturing, QCi delivers integrated quantum, photonics, and semiconductor technologies, accelerating commercialization and real-world adoption.
Ukraine is pressing on with strikes on Russian oil refineries, defying Donald Trump, who blames the attacks for exacerbating a global diesel shortage and pushing up fuel prices.
Kyiv struck an oil facility in Russia’s southern Samara region overnight, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday in a statement on social media. The Ukrainian president added that a Russian vessel in the Black Sea was hit, as well as a launch and storage site for attack drones in the Oryol region.
A former Northern Arizona University fraternity leader, Carter Eslick, was sentenced to two months in jail for his role in a hazing that led to the death of a pledge.
One person remains missing after medical helicopter crashed off Catalina Island near Los Angeles, officials say
A medical helicopter crashed off Catalina Island near Los Angeles, killing two people and leaving two hospitalized, authorities said.
Rescuers early on Thursday searched for a fifth person who was reported to be in the aircraft and was missing, the Los Angeles county fire department said in a social media post.
The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an effort to force them to hand over their unredacted voter rolls containing voters' sensitive information.
The US is poised to host the first Women’s Club World Cup in January 2028, becoming the latest in a series of major Fifa tournaments staged in North America. Discussions to take the competition to the US are at an advanced stage, with Los Angeles and San Diego among the favoured host cities.
Parents can help protect kids from the dangers of tobacco by not smoking themselves. Fortunately, in Florida, you can get help quitting, says Lacoadia Burkes, Acting Bureau Chief, Tobacco Free Florida.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated to CBS News that the motive of the Flydubai co-pilot accused of stabbing his fellow pilot on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv is still unknown.
President’s outlandish and extensive conspiracy theories endanger US freedoms, health and science, experts say
Since the start of his second presidency, Donald Trump has often launched outlandish conspiratorial attacks on critics and foes that mock them and label their views as hoaxes, prompting scholars and legal experts to say Trump’s attacks endanger US freedoms, public health and science.
Trump’s extensive use of conspiracy theories is the hallmark of an authoritarian leader that has weakened trust in the coming midterm elections, dangerously ignored scientific evidence, and often pushed for prosecutions of his political enemies in ways that seriously erode civil liberties, say critics.
These men’s actions aren’t just morally loathsome; they’re politically stupid. Social science may explain the phenomenon
Israel’s supporters keep proving its detractors right. Over the last couple of years, Americans from across the ideological spectrum – from Bernie Sanders to Tucker Carlson – have grown increasingly enraged by the way pro-Israel billionaires restrict Americans’ free speech. So, last month, along comes the New York England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, allegedly in tandem with other stadium owners, and pushes Ed Sheeran to drop Macklemore from his US tour because the rapper uttered “Free Palestine” on stage. It’s hard to imagine anything more likely to intensify fury towards the Aipac class.
Then Benjamin Netanyahu does something equally self-defeating. Since 2018, Israel’s favorability rating among Americans has dropped by an astonishing 67 points. A plurality of Democrats with views on the subject consider Israel to be “a state with segregation similar to apartheid” rather than a democracy. Yet faced with an American public that increasingly rejects Israel’s self-presentation as a bastion of freedom, Benjamin Netanyahu’s party has pushed to ban Arab parties, undercutting claims about Israel being a democracy for its Palestinian citizens. He’s undermining his own hasbara.
Critics noted that the plan does not discuss Israel; others praised it for not conflating Jews with the state of Israel
When the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, announced the city’s first-ever municipal strategy to address antisemitism – a nuanced, multi-pronged approach ranging from greater security measures for synagogues to an increased focus on Jewish history in public school education – critics were quick to note what the 33-page document does not mention at all: Israel.
Israel has played an outsized role in Mamdani’s campaign and since his election, with the mayor standing by his years-long support for Palestinians, and frequently describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and it’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a war criminal.
The England striker appeared at Westminster magistrates court, standing in the dock to confirm his name and date of birth before entering a plea of not guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
Most of my life as a songwriter has been about saying things that cannot be said in conversation. Sometimes it’s about wishing you’d been given things you know you’ll never have.
Yesterday I held him in my arms as though he had come back to life, like I had one chance to hold him before he disappeared from this earth.
Gavin Newsom says Trump is a ‘gift’ to the climate cause for dispelling notions of fossil fuel energy security
Of all the epithets hurled at Donald Trump since he became US president, perhaps the most unusual was delivered last week – that he is, in fact, some sort of environmentalist.
Trump is the “greatest gift” to the environmental movement, argued Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, due to the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran.
A Venezuelan delivery driver who was shot in his car by an ICE agent in Texas will remain in custody on charges that he assaulted an officer while trying to evade arrest, a federal judge ruled.
Good morning. Benjamin Netanyahu has said it is too early to tell who was behind the apparent attempt to crash a Tel Aviv-bound flydubai flight, even as Israel’s ambassador to the UN called the incident a “terror attack”. Flydubai said its flights to and from Israel would be suspended while an investigation takes place.
What is believed to have taken place in the cockpit? Pilot Smit Machchhar, an Indian citizen from Mumbai, has been hailed as a hero after releasing the cockpit door to allow passengers in to wrestle back control of the plane, after his co-pilot – reportedly an Omani national – stabbed him and sent the jet plunging nearly 14,000ft (4,267 metres) in less than 30 seconds.
What happened next?One passenger said: “There were two spare pilots who were supposed to operate the next flight. The relief pilots … entered [the cockpit] and pulled the aircraft up, pulled the yoke, stabilised the plane and landed us in Saudi Arabia.”
How has Donald Trump responded? The president said: “It seems as though the co-pilot was perhaps a terrorist, or perhaps a whack-job, and he stabbed the pilot.”
Why has the death sentence for Pike been so controversial?As Ed Pilkington reported for the Guardian last month, at the time of the crime she was 18, and her co-accused was 17. That age difference meant he was spared the death penalty. Pike, at that age, had already been subjected to serious abuse, including multiple rapes by three separate men and beatings by numerous relatives.
Content provider part-owned by Ladbrokes, William Hill and Betfred owner signed deal with Santeda network, Casino Secrets leak reveals
Three UK bookmakers that have repeatedly warned of the dangers of the illicit market have also benefited from a lucrative deal with one of the world’s largest offshore casinos, the Guardian can reveal.
Details of the arrangement emerged as a result of last week’s Casino Secrets leak, which saw the release of thousands of confidential files held by the gambling regulator on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, a haven for offshore betting sites.
Six lawmakers demand information on childcare center closures, cost changes, Head Start and government grants
Democratic senators have accused Donald Trump’s administration of worsening the country’s childcare crisis, warning that rising costs and daycare closures are leaving families with fewer affordable options.
In a letter seen by the Guardian and addressed to Alex Adams, assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), senators led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts argue that federal cuts and changes to childcare programs like Head Start are destabilising an already fragile system.
Now a $15bn industry, astrology is more mainstream in the US than ever. But its practitioners are still debating: who gets to have authority on the celestial bodies?
“The dwarf planets change everything,” said the woman with the smart haircut as she made a mind blown gesture with her fingertips, temples to air.
I am at the United Astrology Conference, the largest professional gathering of astrologers in the world, in downtown Chicago. Around me, vendors are hoping to excite the 1,500 attenders, flogging books, tracts, affiliations, proprietary apps and various software programs that have replaced the laborious chart-drawing of yore.
Hostile states could access cameras, microphones or GPS, says intelligence agency amid concerns over Chinese imports
Drivers have been warned that the smart features built into modern cars such as microphones, cameras and GPS trackers could be used by hostile states to spy on them.
The Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) called for “awareness of espionage risks around modern vehicles”, including microphones that can by switched on remotely to listen to conversations.
Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, three decades ago, survived Tennessee's effort to execute her by means of an unprecedented two lethal injections, prison officials said. This was the state's first attempted execution of a woman in 200 years. 'At one point … she said, "my arm feels like it's about to burst open",' said Tori Gessner, a news anchor for ABC affiliate WKRN, who witnessed the attempted execution, before adding 'then she smiles really big'. Other journalists present described Pike snoring, exhaling loudly and gasping. The WPLN health reporter Catherine Sweeney said the state's protocol had no rules for what should happen should a dose fail to work a second time. Pike was taken to an off-site medical facility for treatment and is still alive
Cornell University has agreed to hire outside counsel to conduct an independent investigation into the 2024 alleged gang rape case, Gov. Kathy Hochul says.
Says social media claims are ‘nonsense’ and ‘idiocy’
Coach sees ‘no reason to pay attention to these people’
Jürgen Klopp has reacted with disgust to a social media debate questioning whether the Germany team he is in the process of forming are “white enough”. Klopp said he believed there was no point in giving room to “such people and their utterances”, dismissing them as “complete nonsense”.
Asked to respond to the debate as to whether the national team were “not German enough” or “not white enough”, he said: “There is absolutely no reason to pay attention to these people. You won’t get my thoughts on this. I have little time in everyday life for idiocy – and even less on social media.
Credible threats appear to have been overlooked as administration focuses on unverified claims of voter fraud
The Trump administration has abandoned key security bodies meant to investigate direct threats to US elections by foreign actors and domestic terrorists, according to former officials and a recent report.
While administration officials have been actively focused on unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens, other credible election threats appear to have been overlooked, the officials say.
ICE-watchers get creative after the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, as Trump’s immigration crackdown takes a more secretive approach
Most of the time, the scene outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the small, coastal town of Scarborough, Maine, could be confused for a nature watch in “Vacationland”, the slogan on state license plates.
People sitting in lawn chairs under a tent. Birds chirping. The sound of the breeze moving through the trees.
News reports that next year’s U.S. military budget will top out at $1.5 trillion if President Donald Trump gets his way are misleading at best. The true total, if Trump’s proposal passes, could be at least $1 trillion higher.
Long before Trump took office, U.S. taxpayers have spent far more on the Pentagon — and its wars — than most know. For decades, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon have hidden the military’s true cost through little-known bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. Journalists, academics, and think tank experts have, with rare exceptions, perpetuated the problem by repeating “official” numbers that don’t come close to telling the full story.
Data shows that the budget was already between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion in the last full fiscal year, 2025, as detailed by a recent Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, report I co-authored. Trump’s requests would add another $781 billion, bringing the potential total to at least $2.581 trillion in 2027.
The troubling revelation that the government is misleading the public and effectively hiding hundreds of billions in military spending reflects the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon budget. It’s also the only sector of government spending that seems largely insulated from public scrutiny: Imagine the outrage if news broke that the government was hiding hundreds of billions in spending for public housing, Medicaid, or hunger prevention programs.
If Congress passes Trump’s full budget proposal, military spending will eat up around 75 percent of the discretionary budget Congress controls.
People have a right to know how much tax money goes to military spending. This is critical to debating the proper size of the military budget both on its own and compared to other spending priorities, particularly any program related to education or the social safety net. Understanding the military’s true cost means understanding where and how the government has been hiding the money.
Spending Hidden in Other Budgets
It’s difficult to untangle how much the country actually spends on the military in part because Congress pays for the armed forces and wars from many budgets rather than one. Beyond the agency controlling the military branches that Trump calls the “Department of War” (the official name is still the Department of Defense), hundreds of billions of dollars are effectively hidden in the budgets of at least 17 other government agencies and entities. In total, each of these additional sums are larger than what Congress appropriates for every non-military agency.
The newest of the five methodologies provides the easiest way for anyone to see the hidden spending. The methodology uses data from a government website, USAspending.gov, the product of a 2006 law https://www.usaspending.gov/aboutrequiring the government “to give the American public access to information on how their tax dollars are being spent.” The site includes the closest thing to actual spending receipts, making it easier to identify military spending beyond the Department of War’s budget.
Let’s take a look at where the money’s hiding.
Hidden Nuclear Weapons Costs: $33.8 Billion
The most obvious place where Congress and the executive branch hide military spending is in the Department of Energy’s budget. That’s where taxpayers can find the bill for the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, which cost around $33.5 billion in 2025.
The Department of War controls and deploys these weapons, and their costs should properly be part of its budget, not rolled into the Department of Energy. While the Energy Department plays a role in overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, putting nuclear weapons spending in the DOE’s budget is like a city putting the costs of its police department’s bullets in its transportation department budget rather than in the police budget.
Another $300 million in nuclear weapons spending hides in the budgets of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and the Army Corps of Engineers, bringing the total to nearly $34 billion.
Hidden Military Personnel (Veterans) Costs: $393.3 Billion
Taxpayers spend huge sums on the military in the Department of Veterans Affairs and related budgets. The existence of a separate veterans’ agency is a sleight of hand that leads the public to believe this is not military spending. It is. The only difference is the appropriation of money to still another agency.
To recruit and maintain armed forces, any government needs to pay its troops and offer sufficient long-term benefits (such as pensions, medical care in retirement, and survivor benefits) to encourage people to join and stay in a dangerous job that involves the risk of killing and being killed. These forms of long-term compensation are personnel costs, just as much as basic pay, and they should be counted as military spending. If a military fails to spend money to support vets, it’s unlikely to function for long. The Bureau of Pensions for veterans was originally part of the War Department (which was the name until 1947, long before Trump’s rebranding) and its budget until 1849 when Congress https://department.va.gov/history/history-overview/transferred the bureau to the Department of the Interior.
Funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs adds another $389.8 billion to the USAspending.gov methodology total. Almost $4 billion more in long-term spending on personnel hides in the budgets of the departments of Labor, Justice, and several others. All told, these sums reach a staggering $393.3 billion.
Coast Guard and Other “Homeland Security” Costs: $16.8 billion
Spending for an entire branch of the military, the Coast Guard, is concealed in the budget of the Department of Homeland Security rather than the Department of War. While DHS controls the Coast Guard during peacetime and the branch plays some non-military functions, the Coast Guard is one of the armed forces and is controlled by the Pentagon in wartime.
Excluding non-military activities (such as improving boat safety and cleaning up oil spills), Coast Guard spending adds nearly $14 billion to the total military budget. Additional DHS expenses for programs to counter weapons of mass destruction, radiological preparedness, cybersecurity, and other military spending add just under $3 billion, bringing this total to $16.8 billion.
The True Cost of the Department of War: $1.3 Trillion
The bulk of military expenditures still appear in the Department of War’s budget, which pays for the armed forces and the rest of the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy, including all the weapons, salaries, some benefits, military construction, fuel, maintenance, operational expenses, and much more. USAspending.gov receipts show the Department of War alone spent $1.273 trillion in 2025. The Pentagon controlled another $480 million in spending that hid in the budgets of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Transportation.
Combined with the $444.8 billion tallied previously, total military spending hits $1.718 trillion. That’s more than double the military budget usually reported for 2025: the $850 billion Congress https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/appropriated to the Department of War.
Total Military Spending by Agency (FY2025)
Agency Name
Net Outlays ($)
Department of Defense
1,273,158,423,924
Department of Veterans Affairs
389,755,646,022
Department of Energy
33,538,322,898
Department of Homeland Security
16,798,958,047
Department of Labor
3,277,521,935
Department of State
461,862,025
Department of Justice
385,060,843
Army Corps of Engineers
260,017,630
Armed Forces Retirement Home
137,519,390
American Battle Monuments Commission
103,483,062
U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims
49,662,873
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
43,703,554
Agency for International Development
15,504,280
Department of Transportation
2,604,283
U.S. Chemical Safety Board
958,374
Social Security Administration
260,504
Department of Agriculture
0*
Executive Office of the President
0*
TOTAL
1,717,989,509,643
*No FY2025 spending. However, there was a $1 billion budget appropriation to the ExecutiveOffice of the President for “Submarine Security Activities, National Security Council.” The government also funded account line items in the Department of Agriculture budget to support the Air Force and Army.
Still Other Costs
The $1.7 trillion estimate for last year is conservative and still may be too low. While the War Department budget contains classified funding for the CIA, National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies, the government https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627791694/basenationmayhttps://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627791694/basenationhide more intelligence spending elsewhere. NASA space research involves considerable military work, which could add another $10.5 billion, according to USAspending.gov data. Some would also count $1.9 billion in FBI salaries and expenses found in the Department of Justice budget.
Other experts consider much larger expenditures in the DHS budget to be military spending, given that department’s role in protecting the “homeland” and the increasingly militarized nature of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Border Patrol. This would add at least $216.9 billion after excluding DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency spending. Alternate methodologies also include $211.9 billion in interest payments on the more than $40 trillion in national debt stemming from past military spending and wars.
You can add and subtract forms of spending that you think belong or don’t belong in the true total, thanks to the transparency of the POGO report’s methodologies. In total, these excluded sums could add another $441.2 billion to the USAspending.gov method’s prior total of $1.718 trillion for 2025.
Growing Opposition to Unchecked Pentagon Spending
POGO report’s conservative estimates of the FY2025 budget being $1.5 trillion to $1.8 trillion reveal that the true military budget for 2027 could hit $2.6 trillion if Congress gives Trump what he wants. This includes requested increases totaling $781 billion for just the Department of War ($500 billion), the Iran war ($70 billion), veterans ($144.9 billion), nuclear weapons ($53.9 billion), and the Coast Guard ($12.5 billion), let alone other smaller forms of hidden Pentagon spending.
When mind-numbing numbers like these reach the trillions, it can be tempting to think, What does it matter if it’s $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion or $2.6 trillion?
It helps me to remember that every single dollar spent on the Pentagon is a dollar not spent on our children, on healthcare, on affordable housing, on efforts to slow catastrophic climate change, and much more.
Advocates for increased military spending will likely insist that more money is always needed, no matter today’s true total. That these Pentagon boosters have cited incorrect figures and helped mislead the public for decades raises serious questions about their credibility and the basis for their seemingly endless demands for more money.
The public needs a full, accurate accounting of the military. Congress could provide an annual True Total Military Budget that tallies all of the Pentagon’s spending in one place and stop hiding funding in other agencies’ budgets. Until this happens, journalists and analysts can help by explaining the full scale of spending and no longer repeating incomplete totals.
As Trump asks for the highest military budget in the history of the world and people continue to suffer the effects of his war with Iran — which has killed and injured thousands, increased the price of gas and groceries, and risks even greater catastrophic harm globally — it’s time to have an informed debate about how much the country really needs to spend on its military.
Weekend Spotlight is a round-up of the five best events to check out in Delaware over the coming weekend, curated by Arts + Culture Editor Cannon Taylor. This edition covers Oct. 2-4, 2026. What should be on our radar for future editions? Let us know!
House Shows
Porchfest celebrates local music
Saturday, Oct. 3. Cool Spring and Trolley Square neighborhoods. Wilmington. Noon to 8 p.m. Free.
Who needs a music venue when you can host a musician at your home? The Original Music Association of Delaware is hosting its second annual Wilmington Porchfest, highlighting our local scene with a full day of free concerts in front yards.
Beyond the music, Porchfest is an excellent way to get outside and make some friends. Who knew porches were the ultimate antidote to social isolation?
The party begins in the Cool Spring neighborhood, noon to 4 p.m., and continues in Trolley Square, 4-8 p.m.
St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church opens its doors for the Egyptian Festival Oct. 3-4. | PHOTO COURTESY OF ST. MARY COPTIC ORTHODOX CHURCH
Saturday, Oct. 3 and Sunday, Oct. 4. St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church of Delaware. 1644 Otts Chapel Road, Newark. 11 a.m.to 6 p.m. Free.
The Coptic Orthodox Church dates back to 1st century Egypt. Delaware’s congregation is a bit more recent. The St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church of Delaware was founded by seven immigrant families in 1979 and within a decade had grown its numbers enough to build its own church building.
This weekend, the church is opening its doors to the hungry public for its bi-annual Egyptian Festival, featuring a wide array of Egyptian and Mediterranean cuisine for sale: shawarma, moussaka, kofta and more. You may even see someone dressed as a pharaoh.
Roger Daltrey comes to the Freeman Arts Pavilion on Oct. 3. | PHOTO COURTESY OF FREEMAN ARTS PAVILION
Saturday, Oct. 3, Freeman Arts Pavilion, 31806 Lake View Drive, Selbyville. 7 p.m. General Admission: $92.
Last year, English rock band The Who wrapped up their final North American tour. “The Song Is Over” was the tour’s name and the band’s promise — but vocalist Roger Daltrey just keeps on singing. The iconic voice of ‘60s and ‘70s rock continues to tour as a solo act and, this weekend, will come from across the pond to The First State.
Daltrey’s powerful, raspy cadence will be backed by his acoustic strumming rather than a rock band as he performs solo material, covers and The Who hits in an intimate performance at the Freeman Arts Pavilion.
Delaware City Day honors the town’s bicentennial on Oct. 3. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DELAWARE CITY DAY
Saturday, Oct. 3. Battery Park. Clinton Street, Delaware City. 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free.
Delaware City has celebrated its annual Delaware City Day since 1980 but is aiming to make this one particularly special in honor of its bicentennial. Volunteers are hard at work readying the fireworks, constructing parade floats and practicing their regal waves.
The day also features boat rides, live music and children’s activities, but the true appeal of the event can be found by wandering into local shops and restaurants and experiencing the small town hospitality that makes this port town of less than 2,000 people so special.
Cannibis, music and art festival Weedstock returns to Delaware Oct. 2-4. | PHOTO COURTESY OF WEEDSTOCK
Friday, Oct. 2 through Sunday, Oct. 4. G & R Campground. 4075 Gun and Rod Club Road, Houston. Hours vary. Tickets: $53 per day, $105 weekend pass. 21+.
While Weedstock brands itself as a “Music & Arts Festival,” it’d be hard to walk away without getting high. That’s in no small part because of the industrial-grade “Kush Cannon” the organizers fire off at 4:20 p.m.
The festival began in 2017 to advocate for marijuana destigmatization and legalization. Now that recreational use is legal in Delaware, Weedstock has become more like a three-day party.
Whether that’s your vibe or a nasal nightmare is up to individual discretion. Either way, the characters who come to Weedstock are bound to be amusing to watch.
Why Should Delaware Care? The Department of Homeland Security has planned a surge of arrests of immigrants in certain “sanctuary cities.” Volunteer groups stationed in each of Delaware’s three counties are banding together to help the First State families left behind to cover rising costs while also searching for loved ones who have been detained.
Her phone buzzed with several missed calls from her husband one morning in March: an unusual sign that something was wrong. Moments later, the Venezuelan mother of two from northern Delaware received a text.
Her son had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She doesn’t remember how she got home from work that day, she said.
The mother, who requested anonymity due to concerns about immigration enforcement, spent three weeks apart from her teenage son while he was detained.
For nearly a month, that Delawarean’s mother, father and sibling — who had all lived in the state for almost a decade — were left with many unanswered questions: Where is he right now? Where will he be taken after? Who can I call?
“I remember there was a day I went without hearing from him for 25 hours,” his mother said. “And I felt like I wanted to die.”
While they searched for answers and their loved one, regular expenses continued to pile up. Through word of mouth, the family connected with New Castle HELP, a volunteer group that assists Delaware’s immigrant families impacted by deportation or detention.
The grassroots group provided the family a one-time, $800 stipend to cover rent so they could focus on finding their son.
Since the beginning of 2026, Delaware has seen a marked increase in ICE arrests, too. Arrests resulting in detention peaked in May, with 74 people taken into custody. That’s just four fewer than the highest number of detentions recorded in Delaware — 78 detentions in June 2025 — since President Donald Trump started his second term.
The latest figure shows 64 people in Delaware were detained in July, according to the Deportation Data Project.
New Castle HELP, in addition to Kent HELP and Sussex HELP, have already worked with hundreds of impacted families over the past year. They’re relying on private donations and small grants in a race to meet community needs.
“But every family that regains their footing, it seems like it’s being replaced by three or four or five,” Sussex HELP volunteer Jack Dixon said.
A ‘pretty sobering’ reality statewide
The young man from Delaware who was recently detained did not have a warrant for his arrest.
His family did not expect ICE to come for them, either.
Dixon says these local instances of warrantless and unexpected searches are “pretty sobering.” Such instances are exactly what prompted him to join the grassroots effort that expanded beyond locals offering educational workshops to the immigrant community about their legal rights when being arrested.
He said those “know your rights” workshops could only work “if their rights were actually being respected.”
“And they weren’t,” he added.
Beth Anne Gluck, a founding volunteer of New Castle HELP, said she has seen firsthand how immigration operations in Delaware are not targeting the “worst of the worst,” as the Trump administration has claimed.
This spring, the retired dual-language teacher from New Castle volunteered to drive three hours from northern Delaware to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center to pick up a Wilmington father who had been detained by ICE.
When she arrived, the man did not even know where he was being held.
“You’re in Pennsylvania,” she remembered telling him. “We’re going to take you home.”
Since then, Gluck has assisted nine more families and is working on building trust among those who fear reaching out.
Across the counties
Sussex HELP was founded in October 2025 with a pot of private donations and small community grants. Thirty volunteers worked to assess family needs, taking note of any household bills that could no longer be paid if a family member was detained and working with lawyers to file habeas corpus, or wrongful imprisonment, petitions.
Now they have over 50 volunteers and have raised over $100,000 in funds to support 159 families and 352 children.
A few months after the Sussex Group formed, Gluck helped launch New Castle HELP. They knew they had to focus on providing financial and legal assistance for families unexpectedly encountering ICE. Since launching in February, volunteers in northern Delaware partnered with Wilmington’s Latin American Community Center for fiscal assistance.
It was only a matter of time before a similar group of allies gathered in Kent County.
Kent HELP is the newest. One of the first volunteers was Ed Bejzak, who is now working to build relationships with families, particularly Haitian community members who recently lost their immigration status.
“As a white male, I’m the least affected group of all the things going on currently,” he said. “I would like to, if not be a voice, at least be an ally for the people that need it the most.”
What happens after an arrest?
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would ramp up operations in “sanctuary cities” that limited cooperation with ICE. Delaware is among the states identified as a target.
But Delaware has no immigration court. The nearest is in Philadelphia.
That means every second counts when trying to pinpoint which detention center someone is being held at, said Thomas Crowley, a volunteer attorney with Sussex HELP.
Usually, he said, a person who has been detained in Delaware is first taken to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Dover for initial processing. It can take a few hours for federal officials there to verify their identity and collect biometrics — like fingerprints, photos and facial recognition — and issue the detainee an “Alien Registration Number,” if they don’t already have one.
That number can be used as a case number to help find out where a person is being held.
After being processed, individuals are taken to federal detention centers, like the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania. But Crowley said he has worked with people who were living in Delaware and have been sent to detention centers as far away as Washington state.
“It’s just chance,” he said.
It is not always simple to find out where people are being held. Earlier this month, ICE stopped providing the location of thousands of detainees with final deportation orders.
Filing a legal habeas corpus petition is the best bet to reunite detainees with their family, Crowley said, especially when they’re being held far from home.
The petition challenges the detention itself instead of focusing on the government’s efforts to deport someone, a process that can take months. Filing petitions can become costly, though, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, Crowley said.
This is where the three Delaware-based HELP organizations work to connect families with pro-bono or low-cost lawyers.
Navigating complications
Even the best legal assistance is not always a sure thing.
Once a habeas corpus petition has been filed, a federal circuit court judge decides whether to grant the request. But not all the courts agree on whether detained immigrants have the right to a hearing that would allow their release from detention.
Two of the country’s 13 federal circuit courts — the fifth and eighth circuits covering states like Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota and Missouri — have required mandatory detention of immigrants.
If a Delawarean is taken to a detention center in one of those areas, the chance of being released through a habeas corpus petition is slim. People detained in other circuit court districts, like those overseeing cases in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, are more likely to be released.
The geographic-based obstacles and working against a federal mandate to increase arrest numbers has made these legal battles increasingly difficult, Crowley said.
“All the lawyers in the immigration field are really maxed out,” Crowley said. “It’s very hard to get people to take cases, not because they don’t want to, but because they just don’t have the bandwidth.”
Dixon also said he wished more policies addressed the obstacles undocumented immigrants face in obtaining legal representation to “try to even the playing field a little bit, so human beings would have a fighting chance against the federal government on this issue.”
While it is a federal mandate for public defenders to be available for those who cannot afford a lawyer for a criminal court proceeding, it is not a requirement for immigration or deportation cases.
But the Venezuelan mother says ICE activity and enforcement remains the same.
Dixon also questions how Delaware’s Office of New Americans is being funded to help alleviate the financial burden on immigration families.
In a press conference last week, the governor said the new office has made headway in informing immigrant communities about their rights and answering questions regarding the ending of TPS. or temporary protected status, which granted protection from deportation.
“It does need more. Certainly, with the urgent concerns, that office is overwhelmed right now, and we got to make sure they get the support,” Meyer said last Wednesday.
Life after detainment
Before the Venezuelan mother sat down with Spotlight Delaware for an interview, she received messages from another mother whose husband was detained by ICE.
It was one of many similar messages she has received since her son was detained, she said.
Even for those who are released from detention, their cases continue.
That is part of the reason New Castle HELP is keeping in touch.
“This individual was not the ‘worst of the worst,’” said Gluck, referring to the terminology often employed by ICE officials and President Trump. “[A] family person raising a family, contributing to the community, owning a business, paying taxes, paying taxes into things that they don’t see any benefit from, just trying to provide a good life for their family.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Sussex County residents continue to debate how and where to allow new development, particularly near Delaware’s popular beaches, where both traffic and housing affordability have become major concerns. Milton’s growth — and the concerns surrounding it — is a prime example of that trend.
The Milton area is booming, with housing developments currently under construction set to double the town’s population in the coming years.
And now, a new proposal to build nearly 1,400 homes on a 230-acre parcel along the northwest corner of Milton — just outside town limits — could lead to the local population tripling.
Representatives from state agencies discussed the new proposal, named Coastal Passage, on Wednesday at the state’s Preliminary Land Use Service meeting.
During the PLUS meeting, in which developers can get feedback from many different state agencies at once, nearby residents raised larger concerns about whether the local schools, roads and medical facilities could handle the amount of new residents to come.
“You [are] putting the cart before the horse and building this mega development without increasing the infrastructure first,” Milton resident Patricia Tuggle said.
Milton Mayor John Collier said there are three housing developments under construction that are being annexed into the town. The largest project is The Granary at Draper Farms, a master-planned community surrounding the Dogfish Head brewery.
Those approved projects will likely double the town’s current population, which was 3,300 people at the time of the 2020 census.
And while Coastal Passage will not be annexed into the town, it would bring nearly the same amount of residents as The Granary. Together, the housing developments could triple the area’s population.
Collier pointed out that construction for the approved housing developments will happen in phases over the next two decades, meaning the population increase won’t happen all at once. Coastal Passage, if approved, would also be built in phases, the developer’s attorney said at the PLUS meeting.
Collier attended the PLUS meeting, and said the residents who spoke had “valid concerns,” but there is not much he can do to address them since the project is outside town limits.
He said he thinks the town may have to provide emergency services to the area, though, and worries the town will not receive additional funding to do so.
What’s planned for Coastal Passage?
The plan for Coastal Passage includes a mix of 253 single-family homes, 524 apartments and 610 duplexes or townhouses. It also includes a clubhouse, a pool and a dog park, but does not have any shops.
The development does not appear to have any income-restricted homes, meaning they will be rented or sold at market rate.
Still, Cole Shultz with Delaware’s housing agency said he supports the plan because it gives people in Sussex County more housing options beyond the single-family home.
“The scale of the current housing crisis necessitates a solution of massive ambition, and this proposal provides precisely that,” Shultz said.
The land is zoned for high-density residential, and located in an area where the Delaware State Strategies map anticipates development.
County spokesman Chip Guy said the county has not yet received the application for the development, so he could not confirm whether it is a by-right proposal.
Residents at the PLUS meeting were primarily concerned about the 9,000 additional vehicle trips the housing development would bring. Milton resident Robert Moore called Route 16, the main road next to the land, a “disaster.”
Route 16 is part of the Delaware transportation department’s ongoing Coastal Corridors study. All of the recent proposals included building a bypass around a section of the route that Milton officials plan to turn into a pedestrian- and bike-friendly “Main Street.”
About 3% of the existing 3 acres of forest on the site would be removed to make room for a stormwater management pond, project engineer Zachary Crouch said at the PLUS meeting.
The nontidal wetlands on the property would not be disturbed.
Guardian tested chatbots after French far-right politician stripped a Muslim woman of her hijab in a photo
When prompted, AI chatbots will edit images to remove the hijabs from Muslim women, a violation of one of the world’s most common and visible expressions of faith.
The Guardian asked ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and Claude to take the veil off an AI-generated image of a woman wearing a hijab. Both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok bots complied with the prompt. Anthropic’s Claude responded that it does not have an image-editing or -generating feature but that it would not alter a photo to remove someone’s hijab.
Why Should Delaware Care? Dover’s city government has become increasingly acrimonious and litigious over the past 18 months. Some of those disagreements among city leaders were borne from a controversy last summer over the conduct of police department leaders and elected officials. The City Council is now discussing how to respond to an investigation into the controversy — and how to balance transparency with possible legal repercussions.
More than a year since controversy erupted between Dover officials and the local police union over Police Chief Thomas Johnson’s leadership, city leaders are divided over how to proceed with the findings of a third-party investigation into the situation.
But the investigatory findings at the heart of that debate remain unclear, as the city of Dover has not released the contents of the third-party inquiry, citing exemptions to the state’s open records laws.
Spotlight Delaware has appealed Dover’s denial to release the records, but the debate has simultaneously spilled over into public discussions among leaders at a recent city council meeting.
The Dover City Council voted last fall to hire 21st Century Policing Solutions, a Washington D.C.-based consulting firm, to launch a third-party investigation into police union complaints about alleged conduct violations by Johnson, including driving his work vehicle to family vacations, as well as Mayor Robin Christiansen’s subsequent handling of the situation.
Council members received a final report about the investigation’s findings on June 18, but a City Council Legislative and Finance Committee meeting this week marked the first time city leaders publicly discussed what should come next.
The committee, which includes all nine city council members and two additional appointed residents, was divided over whether it should release the full investigation or implement a series of policy changes based on the findings without actually sharing them publicly.
Despite the lack of consensus about how to move forward, the discussion marked a public rise in tension among elected officials over the police union allegations, which the council has not discussed in open session since they initiated the investigation last fall.
The revamped debate over the investigation also comes one week after Spotlight Delaware submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petition to the Delaware Department of Justice for the full investigation report. City officials denied Spotlight Delaware’s initial request for the file in late May, arguing it is not a public record because it constitutes a personnel file and contains law enforcement investigatory files.
Despite the city’s initial denial, Christiansen said during the meeting he supports the public release of the investigation because he has “nothing to hide.”
Johnson, however, did not weigh in during the meeting, though city council members said he has an attorney, and they are concerned he might sue the city if the report is released.
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware on Wednesday, Johnson said the City Council has recognized there is “more preparatory work to accomplish” before making a decision about how to proceed with the findings.
In turn, he said it would be “premature” for him to comment on the investigation before elected officials decide how they want to move forward.
To release, or not to release
City leaders did not begin discussing the investigation until nearly 11 p.m. Tuesday night, at the tail end of a marathon six-hour meeting.
Councilman Brian Lewis brought up the possibility of releasing the full report, and both Christiansen and Councilman Gerald Rocha said they agreed.
Christiansen said he had gotten “the advice of my attorney,” and believes publishing the report would prove he did not do anything wrong.
But other council members said they were hesitant to circulate the report because Dan Griffith, the city’s attorney, told them in a private meeting not to. They also said Johnson has not given them his permission to disseminate the findings.
Griffith, who was not present at Tuesday night’s meeting, declined to comment about the discussion.
In a written response to Spotlight Delaware’s FOIA, Griffith argued that it constitutes an “internal affairs investigation” about specific complaints levied against Johnson. He said the state has upheld in the past that internal affairs investigations are not public records.
Griffith also wrote that the original contract between the city and 21st Century Policing established that investigators would provide the city with a “confidential detailed report,” only to be discussed in a private council session, not publicly.
A handful of residents have also called for the city to distribute the report publicly, both in online articles and at city council meetings.
“We paid for an independent investigation, and now we’re being handed roughly one and three-quarter pages of proposed resolutions,” community activist Vonda Smack said Tuesday night. “We should not have to read between the lines to understand an investigation we funded.”
The investigation cost the city $50,000, according to documents obtained by Spotlight Delaware.
The committee ultimately voted 6-2 against releasing the report, but said they would consider reintroducing the possibility after further considering the legal ramifications.
Considering policy recommendations
While the debate over whether to release the full report became the focal point of Tuesday’s discussion, the committee also considered approving a set of changes to the city employee handbook based on the investigation’s findings.
Councilman David Anderson introduced the idea, which he said is the council’s “right and duty” since they now know the findings.
The recommendations he proposed include creating more “rigid parameters” around when an officer is allowed to use a city police vehicle, adopting a written policy for when city employees can work at a second job and prohibiting “meetings about political matters” between city officials and members of the Dover Police Department while the officers are on duty.
These suggestions seem to respond directly to the allegations made by the police union against Johnson last summer, including that he drove a city-owned vehicle to family vacations and to a second job as an adjunct instructor at Penn State University, and that he was doing work for Penn State during standard work hours in Dover.
The union also accused Johnson and Christiansen of telling members to attack city councilmen Roy Sudler and Brian Lewis for their comments criticizing policing in Dover, seemingly referenced in the recommendation prohibiting political meetings with on duty officers.
The Dover Fraternal Order of Police, in a show of mutiny against the chief, commissioned a mobile billboard to drive around the city and park at different government buildings last summer. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
It is not clear whether the third-party investigation substantiated the union’s claims about Johnson and Christiansen’s behavior.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware after Tuesday’s meeting, Christiansen said neither he nor the chief did anything “unethical,” but he thinks the proposed recommendations are “punitive” and not the appropriate response to the situation.
In an interview in May, Johnson said he and Christiansen have thoroughly discussed all terms of his employment throughout his tenure with the city, and that he has always acted “with permission, not forgiveness.”
Like the proposal to release the investigatory report, the committee also voted to table consideration of the policy recommendations until a future meeting. The City Council is next scheduled to meet at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 12.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
Christa Pike, sentenced to death over 1995 murder, was heard snoring after lethal doses administered, say witnesses
A Tennessee woman convicted of murdering a schoolmate 30 years ago has been taken to hospital after surviving two attempts to execute her with lethal injections.
Witnesses reported that Christa Pike was still breathing despite the injections intended to kill her late on Wednesday. It was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year.
Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their autumn encounters with nature
Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.
The article needs to be about a recent encounter they’ve had with nature – whether it’s a hedge full of berries, a beetle on the move, or a nervous deer.
Diehard Hugo Chávez supporters struggle to comprehend ideological U-turn being executed by Delcy Rodríguez’s interim administration
He was one of the most passionate propagandists for Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution: a feisty leftist TV personality who spent more than two decades singing the movement’s praises on his state-funded show, The Razorblade.
Mario Silva’s devotion was such that he often hosted his programme with Chávez’s portrait behind him and he had El Comandante’s curly signature tattooed on to his left wrist.
World Cup setbacks have renewed concern over America’s costly, fragmented youth system. The real test is whether the urgency survives the next news cycle
A few years ago, the idea that the US soccer community at large was neglecting youth soccer was met with silence or ridicule.
At a May 2022 conference call announcing a new collective bargaining agreement that effectively ended the “equal pay” saga, players were asked how they would build bridges with grassroots organizers who, in a fit of anger over perceived slights, nearly restored Carlos Cordeiro to US Soccer’s presidency not long after he resigned under heavy pressure. They could have offered any vague platitudes about how they valued youth and amateur soccer. They fell silent.
Nearly identical headstones mark the burial of brothers from Owyhee County, Idaho, who died in 2022, 2024 and 2025. Each died before his first birthday. Their graves are in the same cemetery as Emma Joyce and her three siblings, whose parents, like those of the brothers memorialized here, belong to a faith-healing sect. Sarah Miller for ProPublica. Last names on headstones redacted by ProPublica to protect children’s identities.
Emma Joyce was sick and vomiting for days until she stopped breathing in her parents’ arms, in a small gray farmhouse in rural Idaho. It was August 2009, and she was 3 years old.
The following summer, Emma Joyce’s little sister got sick. Ava Joan wouldn’t eat or drink anything but a few grapes and some Sprite in a sippy cup. She was breathing hard and fast. And when she vomited, it came out black, the hallmark of internal bleeding. She died in her mother’s arms in July 2010 from a complication of untreated diabetes.
Less than two years later, the girls’ toddler brother died from the same complication of untreated diabetes that killed Ava Joan.
And nine years after that, another sibling died: a 4-year-old boy who’d suffered for weeks with similar symptoms.
The parents told officers that they hadn’t taken the four children who died to the doctor because of their religion, the Followers of Christ, which considers the use of modern medicine a sinful lapse of faith in God. And Idaho exempts parents from faith-healing sects like the Followers from the legal duty to give their children lifesaving medical care.
The sect had at least 15 avoidable deaths among children from 2015 through 2025, according to healthcare professionals who reviewed their records for ProPublica.
Among them were children in five families, including Emma Joyce’s, who had a combined total of two, three or four losses in this period or earlier.
Most of the siblings died of similar ailments, following similar patterns, that experts said could have been resolved with interventions as simple as insulin, antibiotics or a supply of oxygen. Experts were uncertain on only two of the sibling deaths, saying the death records lacked enough information to determine if the children’s lives could have been saved.
Eloise, wrapped in a blanket above, died in 2018 in Caldwell, Idaho, after struggling to breathe for seven hours. She died from meconium aspiration syndrome, a condition that rarely kills babies in modern America. Her parents did not seek medical attention because of the tenets of their religion, and she became her parents’ fourth baby to die since 2007.Obtained by ProPublica via Canyon County Sheriff
Idaho’s child abuse laws contain such broad religious exemptions that authorities did not intervene — either before or after the deaths.
The exemptions don’t just shield faith-healing parents from criminal prosecution for conduct that otherwise would be charged as neglect. They also keep police and social workers from stepping in to protect a dead child’s surviving siblings from suffering a similar fate, no matter how many of them die.
It is a sharp contrast to neighboring Oregon, which in 1999 began to roll back its own exemptions. Not only did the possibility of prosecution in Oregon prove a powerful incentive for parents to seek medical care when their child’s life was at risk, the change in law also gave the state legal leverage to order medical care for surviving and future children — which happened in one Oregon case, days before Emma Joyce died in Idaho.
According to backers of Oregon’s law, the goal isn’t to punish parents for allowing the avoidable death of a child; the goal is to prevent more deaths.
“If you don’t do anything, kids are going to die,” said John Foote, a former district attorney in Oregon who prosecuted several parents in his local Followers of Christ congregation after their children died from treatable ailments. Keeping more children from dying is “the whole point,” he said.
The graves of Emma Joyce and her sister and brothers are clustered near one another at Peaceful Valley Cemetery, a hilltop graveyard that belongs to the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect with at least four churches in Idaho. All four children’s headstones are made from the same light gray stone, bear the words “beloved daughter” or “beloved son” in the same font and design, and have their mother’s and father’s names etched into the back.
Throughout the cemetery are more of the same: siblings buried in child-sized plots with matching headstones.
In addition to the plots belonging to Emma Joyce’s family, there are two newborn siblings who died from treatable birth complications, four infant siblings who died from various causes, and three brothers whose death records prompted doctors to speculate that an immune deficiency ran in the family.
Two babies in a single Followers family succumbed to meconium aspiration, despite how rare it is for a newborn to inhale the tarry stool known as meconium and then die from it. A study of more than 160,000 full-term births found less than 2% of newborns had meconium aspiration syndrome, and only 1.2% of those died, because healthcare providers know how to manage and treat it.
The living room in the home of Eloise’s family, on the morning after she diedObtained by ProPublica via Canyon County Sheriff
When a child dies unexpectedly in Idaho or elsewhere in the U.S., it almost always triggers close scrutiny from police and social workers. That investigation might find the parents committed a crime, such as beating or starving them, but it can also identify other risks to surviving siblings, such as a health condition that would otherwise go unnoticed — something that doctors who reviewed records for ProPublica suspected in several deaths within faith-healing families.
Surviving siblings aren’t automatically shunted into foster care in such cases, but social workers do visit the home and lay eyes on the children to make sure they are safe and healthy. If they’re not, prosecutors can seek a court order for medical care or other needs.
Earlier this year, in response to the death of a newborn whose parents were flagged as high risk, Idaho lawmakers passed Benji’s Law. When such a parent has a new baby, the state now must do an expedited safety check to make sure the new baby isn’t in danger.
Surviving children may be temporarily removed from their parents’ custody. Idaho authorities in 2024, for example, took in eight children after the death of a medically fragile teenage boy in a home where police said they found “deplorable, unsafe” living conditions. Idaho also took a newborn from a mother’s custody this year when the mother was indicted in the deaths of her twin toddlers; she pleaded not guilty to murder charges and is scheduled to go to trial in January.
But it’s a different story when Idaho police or social workers find that the child’s death was a consequence of choosing faith over medicine.
According to Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue, the law’s exclusion of faith-healing practice from the definition of “neglect” means child protection laws for neglect don’t apply, so unless there is evidence of a crime, his deputies can’t take action and don’t notify child welfare agencies.
Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue said he believes the Followers of Christ church has “indoctrinated” and “conditioned” its members out of the impulse most parents would have to seek help for their dying children.Sarah Miller for ProPublica
“If you were saying that your child broke their femur and you were praying to resolve this medical issue, the Department of Health and Welfare cannot say that you are a neglectful parent because you are not seeking medical treatment,” Mary Jo Beig told the legislators.
The department doesn’t track how many of the reports it receives about medical neglect are related to faith healing. Among all 318 investigations it conducted over the past seven years into reports of medical neglect by itself, the department said it found actual neglect in 28. Most of the time, the agency said, it worked with the family to address root causes so that children could safely remain in their homes; in 10 of the 28 cases, though, kids had to be placed in state custody.
There is one way to mandate medical care without a parent’s blessing: an obscure law that says a doctor can try to persuade a judge that without treatment, the child’s life “would be greatly endangered.” There was a case in recent years where school staff noticed a student from a faith-healing family having up to 13 seizures a day, which ultimately led to a doctor going to court to say the girl needed emergency medical attention.
But use of the emergency care statute is unusual. The law says a judge must still consider any spiritual treatment the child is receiving before ordering lifesaving treatment. And, as Beig pointedly told legislators in the 2016 hearing, “someone needs to know about the child” and notice the ailment before they die from it.
That rarely happens with Idaho’s insular faith-healing communities. Many families homeschool. Few socialize outside the sect. Some families don’t even register their child’s birth with the state until much later, when they need a birth certificate to navigate through society.
Ultimately, because doctors seldom see children in faith-healing families, they typically don’t get a chance to discover ticking medical time bombs — much less witness moments of extreme medical distress when they’d have the strongest legal grounds for advocating compulsory care.
Rather, the first doctor to see the child’s grave illness is often the pathologist who performs their autopsy.
None of the parents of children in this story responded to inquiries from a reporter. ProPublica is not identifying them or using the children’s full names out of respect for the families’ privacy.
Nathan Kangas, an unordained elder in one of Idaho’s Followers churches, said few people are willing to speak because of past news coverage that they felt mischaracterized them. He said parents in his roughly 500-member church keep their children away from the doctor to teach them to avoid the curse of turning to medicine as adults.
Donahue, the Canyon County sheriff and one of the most vocal opponents of Idaho’s concessions to parents who practice faith healing, said he believes they want their children to survive. Other law enforcement officers and former members of the sect echoed that, saying members of the faith are good parents, except when it comes to medical care for their families.
“There’s no doubt in my mind, they love their kids just like you or I would love our kids,” Donahue said. But their church has erased the impulse most parents would have to call 911 for an ambulance or to rush their child to an emergency room, he said.
“They’re indoctrinated, they’re conditioned,” he said.
The social media posts of a mother from the Idaho Followers who lost three boys hint at her grief. A family photo from 2022 shows a baby with the family’s three other children. The next family photo in 2024 shows the same three older children, but with a different baby — one who, like the baby before, is now dead. There’s no updated family photo to document the addition of another baby boy in mid-2025, who died at 2 months old from an untreated infection.
The mother shared a meme that references a Bible verse from the story of Job, whose loyalty God tested by allowing Satan to destroy all the blessings in his life, including his 10 children.
Among those who reacted to the mother’s social media posts was another grieving parent: the mother of Emma Joyce and her three dead siblings.
The risks of AI aren’t what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals
Amid a barrage of news stories warning about superintelligent machines rendering humanity extinct, a CNN story describing the opposite scenario – one in which the US military’s reliance on brittle chatbots almost brought the US into war with China – went mostly unnoticed by the public.
The biggest international AI news of the past three weeks was the Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon’s resignation. According to him, OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. Coxon’s description of a “terminator” scenario, a machine becoming much smarter than humanity and deciding to wipe us out, captured the public’s, journalists’ and politicians’ attention, stirring waves of fear-inducing, credulous reporting, and policy actions.
Maladaptive daydreaming, obsessional jealousy and misophonia are now topics of study as social media trends force psychiatrists to rethink their diagnostic “bible.”
It’s still early in the 2026 season but a number of teams and players have found unexpected levels of success in the last few weeks
Last season ended with a Super Bowl in which neither team – the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots – had been expected to participate. Before that, we had a 44-year-old grandfather returning from a four-season layoff to give the Indianapolis Colts unexpected cheer in an otherwise miserable season, while the Chicago Bears and Jacksonville Jaguars rebounded from bad 2024 seasons to win their divisions.
It’s early to state which surprises will be the most fun to recall this time around, but here are four to watch as things progress.
Annual house price growth halved in the UK last month, as economic uncertainty caused by conflict in the Middle East continued to deter homebuyers.
The average price of a British home rose 0.8% in the year to September to £274,251, according to Nationwide. That was half the rate recorded in August, when house prices grew 1.6% year on year. It also marked the slowest pace of home price growth since December last year.
Ukraine, Iran, Palestine and Sudan: it has so many problems to confront and fails to do so. Seen up close, it is a study in stasis and decline
UN general assembly meetings are not usually riveting occasions. But this year’s encapsulated a world in flux and crisis, an international law and organisation structure that is falling apart, and a humanitarian order machine running hot. What unfolded was less a gathering for resolution and resolve than a display of showboating, frustration and fractiousness.
It was a snapshot for the history books of four huge destabilising conflicts for which there seems to be no means of, or interest in, resolution – Ukraine, Iran, Palestine and Sudan. Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered an account of five years of Russian aggression: the staggering loss of life – hundreds of thousands killed on both sides – the porousness of the sanctions on Russia, the “madness” of it all. Donald Trump once again threatened to “annihilate” Iran if it did not make a deal, a promise that has now been made so many times its restating only reveals its hollowness. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, responded in his own speech by saying that Iran has been the victim of US terrorism and aggression, and would defend itself with the “utmost strength”. The sole US delegation representative in the room walked out.
Estonian completed first of two attempts to navigate narrow ribbon, 160 metres long and 120 metres high, near the city’s famous Gyeongbokgung palace on Thursday
The lunchtime crowds drifted slowly back to their offices along central Seoul’s main boulevard, heads up and phones raised to the sky.
High above, a narrow ribbon ran between the Koreana hotel and the Dong-A Media Center, a few hundred metres from the capital’s famous Gyeongbokgung palace and Gwanghwamun square.
My brother accidentally bought a Onewheel + thinking it was an xr. It seems to be in fine working order and he’s getting around 7 miles of riding with the original battery. Thinking it was an XR I told him not to use the fm app in case we wanted to do any mods to the board. Now that we know it’s a plus there any significant downside to just using the fm app? I know there are alternatives but they’re a pita to use and can’t change ride modes etc…
GUANGZHOU, China, Oct. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- XPeng Inc. ("XPENG" or the "Company," NYSE: XPEV and HKEX: 9868), a leading global Physical AI company, today announced its vehicle delivery results for September and the third quarter of 2026.
The Senate confirmed Keith Sonderling to lead the Department of Labor on Wednesday, officially installing the nominee who has been leading in an acting capacity since Lori Chavez-DeRemer's exit in April.
The candidates running to replace Gavin Newsom sparred over taxes, immigration and regulating AI
Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton, the candidates running to be California’s next governor, clashed on Wednesday over taxes, immigration and regulating artificial intelligence in a testy debate held days before voters begin receiving their ballots in the heavily Democratic state.
Hilton, the former Fox News host endorsed by Donald Trump, used the hourlong matchup, hosted by CNN in its studio in Burbank, California, to argue that Becerra, a former congressman who served as the US health and human services secretary during the Biden administration, was not actively campaigning and instead taking voters for granted.
Satellite imagery shows further destruction of homes, businesses and places of worship since fragile ceasefire
An update to Google Maps has revealed the extent of devastation during the three-year Gaza war and the severity of the continuing humanitarian crisis faced by the territory’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
The images were taken in June this year and show further destruction of homes, businesses, places of worship and infrastructure since a fragile ceasefire came into effect almost 12 months ago.
Some on streets of Jerusalem pledge their support to prime minister while others hope for change
On the streets of Jerusalem, crowded with secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews, religious nationalists, settlers, Palestinians, and soldiers returning from deployments, uncertainty hangs over an election less than a month away that could mark a turning point for a country profoundly changed after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 and nearly three years of war in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
Alpine regions in Europe experiencing extreme glacier collapse due to heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel pollution
Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say.
Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%.
Austin, TX — Texas authorities say they disrupted a planned violent attack on the state Capitol after receiving a credible tip and arresting the alleged main suspect within hours.
The Texas Department of Public Safety identified the suspect as 40-year-old Benny Caldera Jr. of Converse, near San Antonio. DPS said investigators learned Tuesday evening of a planned attack scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 1, and worked with the FBI and local law enforcement to locate Caldera.
DPS SWAT officers arrested him at his home around 3 a.m. Wednesday. He was initially booked into the Bexar County Jail on a felony charge of making a terroristic threat against a public servant. Authorities later said he was transferred to federal custody as the investigation continued.
A memo sent to Texas senators described Caldera as the “main suspect” and referenced suspected co-conspirators, although state authorities have not announced additional arrests. Officials also have not publicly identified a motive.
The Capitol remained open during regular hours Wednesday, with an enhanced DPS presence around the building. Gov. Greg Abbott praised state and federal authorities for acting quickly against the alleged threat.
Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932 — but this year, the party hopes Adam Hamilton, former Republican who serves as pastor of a massive church, could flip the seat.
Some experts fear AI could be weaponised in south-east Asia, home to nations with predominately young and hyper-connected populations
Years ago it would have been an elaborate operation involving an army of cyber troops creating fake news websites, social media accounts and forged dossiers, all deployed to spread disinformation en masse.
I did indeed contact them about the controller and they okayed it! I believe the order is in the data sheet right? Also am I correct that I would need to solder? Thank you for helping and I will certainly need more help! Sounds like I wait now though.
A Republican-led effort to approve a House-passed stock trading bill fell short in the Senate, with Democrats saying the restrictions don't go far enough and pushing back against a voter ID provision.
Was riding my xr in the rain last night and was fine and dandy. Stopped at a light and got every warning in the book ( low battery, overcharged cell, start in starting position, etc). Weired, so got home and it wouldnt turn off. Was thinking i blew it but popping off the rear and back covers very minor damage. Some intrusion but nothing that would lead me to think the bms fired, so i went for the next best thing...the unprotected owie chip. Connected and oh boy the voltages are all over the place. Removed it and dryed everything up (made sure around the 5v and neutral heads was not shorted on the bms that feeds the owie) and now as soon as the bms is plugged into the harness it powers up and refuses to turn off. Tried plugging it in after all was dry and nothing, stays green and stays on. Replacing the button as a precaution but has anyone seen this problem? The bms is sending volts out the controller side and no visible damage, in fact the controller side is pristiene for being over 7 years old (not a spec of dust, was really impressive). Battery and samples all showing good ranges, only thing it can be if not the button is the bms. I have so many donors but dont know where to begin with this issue. Stm chip is clean, coating came in handy. Will update when the button is in. But throught i would get some imput since this is my first big issue with the xr and most posts here lean towrds a bad bms and that scares me😂.
The Chicago White Sox used a big first inning and a three-run homer from Chase Meidroth to propel them to a 7-3 win over the Houston Astros on Wednesday and sweep their American League wildcard series.
It’s the first time Chicago have won a playoff series since beating Houston in the World Series in 2005. Under the direction of second-year skipper Will Venable and with a letter of support from Pope Leo XIV, the White Sox advanced to face AL Central champion Cleveland in the AL Division Series beginning Saturday in Cleveland.
Once again, it is time for HPC Career Notes, our monthly feature that’s designed to keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the HPC community, including promotion, new company hires, and accolade. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!
Sudip Dosanjh
Sudip Dosanjh, the director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is stepping down from the position in January, the organization announced recently.
When Sudip Dosanjh took the helm as NERSC director in 2012, manycore technologies were the hot new technology in HPC, NERSC’s Elizabeth Ball writes. When he retires in a few months, three supercomputers and several paradigm shifts later, the center will be actively engaging with pervasive AI and on the brink of deploying quantum computing, technologies considered faraway dreams at the time.
NERSC Staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Sudip Dosanjh is in the front row, second from the right (Image courtesy NERSC)
“Sudip leaves behind big shoes to fill,” said Jonathan Carter, associate laboratory director of Computing Sciences. “I’ve watched him navigate NERSC through the deployment of world-class supercomputers and major facility upgrades, all while keeping the center at the forefront of scientific computing. He has a rare ability to anticipate where the field is headed and positioning NERSC to lead rather than follow. I’m very grateful for the foundation he’s built for whoever comes next.”
Since joining NERSC in 2012, Dosanjh has overseen the deployment of the Edison, Cori, and Perlmutter supercomputers and successfully managed the center’s transition from Oakland to its current home in Shyh Wang Hall at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). More recently, he has served as the executive sponsor and then as the executive project director for the NERSC-10 project, guiding the procurement of NERSC’s next supercomputer through numerous critical stages and paving the way for the Doudna system.
Dosanjh also expanded NERSC’s mission from modeling and simulation to include complex scientific workflows and guided the community through the shift to GPU-accelerated computing. Dosanjh helped launch the NERSC Exascale Science Applications Program (NESAP), fostering deep partnerships between application teams and vendors. He was also instrumental in establishing NERSC’s position within the Exascale Computing Project and the DOE’s Genesis Mission project. He also founded the Monterey Data Conference.
Prior to his time at NERSC, Dosanjh headed extreme-scale computing at Sandia National Laboratories, serving as co-director of the Los Alamos/Sandia Alliance for Computing at the Extreme Scale from 2008 to 2012 and on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Initiative Steering Committee for several years. Dosanjh also played a pivotal role in establishing co-design as a core methodology for reaching exascale-scale computing. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering physics in 1982 and his master’s degree (1984) and Ph.D. (1986) in mechanical engineering, all from the University of California, Berkeley.
Chirantan “CJ” Desai
Chirantan “CJ” Desai
Facebook’s parent company this month hired Chirantan “CJ” Desai to be its new Chief Enterprise Platform Officer, a new role created specifically to lead its new Meta Enterprise Platform. He will report directly to CEO Mark Zuckerbuerg.
“Meta has a rare advantage in this transition: advanced AI models, large-scale infrastructure, and agents paired with an ecosystem that already helps millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses grow and succeed,” Desai said in a LinkedIn post. “Bringing those strengths together creates the opportunity to build an entirely new enterprise platform.”
Desai formerly was the CEO of NoSQL database company MongoDB, a job he took just 10 months ago. Prior to that, he was the president of product and engineering at CloudFlare and the president and COO at ServiceNow.
“CJ is an experienced enterprise leader with a track record of building full-stack software and delivering results in AI, infrastructure, business applications, and security,” Zuckerberg said in a post. “I’m excited about beginning this new chapter for Meta and looking forward to working closely with CJ.
Dev Ittycheria
Former MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria has been called back to fill the vacancy at the top of the NoSQL database company caused by the sudden departure of CJ Desai to Meta to head its new Meta Enterprise Platform. He was appointed to the role of interim CEO while the board seeks a permanent replacement.
Dev Ittycheria
Ittycheria held the CEO position at MongoDB from 2014 to 2025, a period that saw the New York City company’s annual revenues grow from $35 million to more than $2.0 billion. He also oversaw a successful 2017 IPO and helped grow MongoDB’s market cap to $30 billion. Ittycheria left in November 2025 when he couldn’t commit to being the CEO for another five years.
“No company has meant more to me professionally than MongoDB,” Ittycheria said in a post on LinkedIn. “I spent more than 11 years as CEO, and even after stepping down last year, I never really left. Serving on the board kept me close to our people, our customers and the business, and only strengthened my conviction in MongoDB’s future.”
Ittycheria has the support of the board, according to MongoDB Chairman Tom Killalea. “MongoDB’s business is strong, and there is no better person to take on the role of President and CEO in the interim than Dev Ittycheria,” said Tom Killalea, Chairman of the Board of Directors. “He knows this company deeply, has remained an involved and active executive board member over the past year, and will step in immediately to ensure a seamless transition.”
Avinash Kumar Maurya
Avinash Kumar Maurya, a postdoctoral appointee at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, was one of 11 recipients of the Outstanding Postdoctoral Performance Award in a ceremony at ANL today.
Avinash Kumar Maurya
The awards given to Maurya and others demonstrate “significant contributions” to their research field, including ingenuity in problem solving, collaborative and leadership ability, making a significant impact on Argonne and DOE missions, and demonstrating Argonne’s core values.
“I am honored to receive this award for my work at Argonne,” Maurya said. “The laboratory has provided an exceptional environment and access to leadership-class supercomputers to tackle challenging problems at the intersection of AI and HPC. I’m grateful to collaborators across Argonne, universities, and industry, and I look forward to working on more such interesting problems.”
Maurya earned his PhD in computer science from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2024 and joined Argonne as a postdoctoral appointee in the Mathematics and Computer Science division, ANL’s Gail Pieper writes. In his research, he develops scalable AI runtime optimizations, large-scale I/O acceleration and memory management techniques that make HPC more resilient and speed up the training and inferencing of AI.
According to ANL, one of Maurya’s signature contributions is DataStates-LLM, a system that lets LLMs frequently and transparently save their progress with minimal overheads. His key insight was that a model’s parameters stay unchanged during the computation-heavy passes of each training step, creating a safe window to copy them in the background, thereby speeding up training runs by more than 2x with near-zero overhead. The work won the Best Paper Award at HPDC 2024 and is featured in DeepSpeed, an open-source AI-training library.
Nishit Sahay
Nishit Sahay
FPGA maker Altera this month appointed Nishit Sahay to be its new chief information officer. The former Marvell CIO will be tasked with leading Altera’s global technology strategy, with a focus on strengthening cybersecurity, expanding the use of data, and advancing enterprise AI. He will also oversee the company’s IT organization, reinforcing the secure, scalable technology foundation that supports Altera’s long-term growth.
Sahay joins Altera from Marvell Technology, where he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. In that role, he led the company’s corporate IT organization, Data Office and Enterprise AI initiatives. His experience spans large-scale digital transformation, business process optimization and technology integration. Throughout his career, he has helped major companies modernize how they operate and align technology investments with business priorities.
“Nishit is an accomplished technology leader who understands how to turn digital strategy into meaningful results,” stated Raghib Hussain, president and CEO of Altera. “His experience leading enterprise transformation and AI initiatives will be invaluable as we strengthen our infrastructure, simplify the way we work and equip our teams with better tools. I’m delighted to welcome him to Altera.”
Mike Gittings, Christopher Morris, Bob Weaver
Los Alamos National Laboratory will give its highest honor, the Los Alamos Medal, to three of its premier staff members– Mike Gittings, Christopher Morris, and Bob Weaver–for their contributions to science and the laboratory’s mission.
(l to r) Mike Gittings, Bob Weaver, and Christopher Morris
Morris was nominated for his field-defining contributions to stockpile stewardship and modernization physics, while Weaver and Gittings were nominated jointly for their contributions to HPC and stockpile stewardship and weapon modernization, enabling Los Alamos and the Nuclear Security Enterprise to accomplish its mission.
Gittings is a guest scientist in the Integrated Design and Assessment group at Los Alamos, according to a writeup by LANL. Before his distinguished tenure at the Laboratory, Gittings earned recognition as a uniquely talented code architect. With a background in mechanical engineering, Gittings demonstrated exceptional skill in developing robust computational methods for modeling multiphysics systems.
Morris, who is a Laboratory Fellow and scientist in the Dynamic Imaging and Radiography group, received the Los Alamos Medal for his contributions to stockpile stewardship and modernization. Morris has made transformative advances in basic science and global security. His research has had a lasting impact on areas including pion physics, proton radiography, fundamental neutron physics and muon tomography.
Weaver is a Laboratory Fellow in the Integrated Design and Assessment group at Los Alamos. Weaver has made foundational contributions to science and the nuclear weapons program. His highly cited journal articles span topics including astrophysics, radiative transfer and computational physics. He has authored many seminal publications that are essential to thermonuclear design physics.
“Mike, Christopher and Bob have dedicated their careers to improving national security,” stated LANL Director Thom Mason. “Their work played a vital role in ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and they pioneered methods used to certify its continued performance. I congratulate them on this well-deserved recognition.”
Deirdre Hanford
Deirdre Hanford
Micron Technology has appointed Deirdre Hanford to lead Micron Research Labs, the new long-horizon research institution that Micron launched in August 2026 to accelerate memory research. Hanford brings extensive semiconductor industry experience to Micron, including 36 years at Synopsys and as advisory board member to several engineering schools including UC Berkely and MIT.
Her appointment comes following a comprehensive search and marks the transition of Micron Research Labs from launch toward execution. The company is hoping to build on the company’s research momentum and reinforce the company’s position at the forefront of long-horizon memory and AI innovation.
“Micron Research Labs has both scale and long-term commitment,” stated Hanford. “We look forward to fostering innovation by enabling experienced and next-generation researchers whose ideas will shape future technologies and markets.”
Don Dama
NoSQL database company Aerospike appointed IT industry veteran Don Dama to be its new CEO. He takes the reins of the company from Srini Srinivasan, Aerospike’s co-founder and its CTO, who had been leading the company.
Don Dama
Dama brings more than 25 years of executive experience working with enterprise technology companies, at SingleStore, Mirantis, Oracle, Infor and i2 Technologies, as well as other enterprise data, cloud and application companies. Dama is charged with charting a new path for Aerospike as the operational infrastructure powering AI.
“A model may reason brilliantly. Compute may run quickly. And applications and agents can execute. But none of it operates correctly unless it is continuously grounded in the changing reality of the enterprise it serves,” stated Dama. “You need to operationalize intelligence against the continuously changing state of the enterprise. That’s the infrastructure challenge of the AI era. And it’s not only the opportunity that Aerospike was built to address, but also what it’s delivered for years in some of the world’s most demanding applications and most successful AI and ML initiatives.”
Frank Slootman and Adam Rosman
British neocloud Nscale announced the appointment IT industry veteran Frank Slootman to the board of directors and Adam Rosman as its new chief legal officer
Slootman is currently the chairman at Snowflake, where he was CEO from 2019 until 2024. He led the company through its 2020 initial public offering, the largest software IPO on record at the time. He was previously CEO of ServiceNow from 2011, taking the company public in 2012 and expanding it from a help-desk provider into a broader enterprise platform. Prior to that, he was CEO of Data Domain, which he took public in 2007 and which was subsequently acquired by EMC, where he went on to serve as President of the Backup Recovery Systems Division.
(l to r) Adam Rosman and Frank Slootman
Rosman joins Nscale from banking software provider Fiserv, where he serves as chief legal and administrative officer, and will report directly to Nscale CEO Josh Payne.
“We’re excited to welcome Frank and Adam to Nscale,” Payne stated. “Frank built three companies into category leaders, took them public, and raised the standard of execution at every one, and Adam has spent his career guiding companies through transactions that shape industries. We’re proud to be building a team with that depth of experience.”
Multiple IEEE Award Winners
The IEEE handed out the 2027 IEEE Technical Field Awards to 37 IEEE Fellows across 31 awards this month. The awards span several fields, from wireless protocols and neural network theory to advanced CMOX process technology and multidimensional data analysis.
Democratic governor sharply critical of Donald Trump for not passing comprehensive federal AI regulations
Governor Gavin Newsom signed laws on Wednesday aimed at protecting California workers from the threats of artificial intelligence , including potential job losses and workplace surveillance.
The laws ban employers from using the technology to predict a worker’s emotional state by using their biometric data, require employers to send written notices to workers if AI is responsible for mass layoffs and ban employers from relying on AI to decide to fire someone.
Suspect Benny Caldera Jr held on bond as officials say they received ‘credible’ information about Austin threat
A 40-year-old man was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of plotting to attack the Texas state capitol, authorities said.
The Texas department of public safety said in a statement that it received “credible information about an individual planning a violent attack” for Thursday in Austin.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a speech on Wednesday that the Pentagon is eliminating roughly 1 in 5 generals and admirals during the second Trump administration through firing or position cuts.
Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton reportedly told donors that "everybody's numbers are down" after a midterm convention in Dallas that touted both Paxton's campaign and President Trump's record.
Noem cites irreconcilable differences in filing that comes after husband Bryon Noem involved in tabloid scandal
Kristi Noem, who was fired by Donald Trump after a rumbustious stint as homeland security secretary, is divorcing her husband, Bryon Noem, after 34 years of marriage, citing “irreconcilable differences”.
The divorce claim “for settlement purposes only” was disclosed in court records filed in Hamlin county, South Dakota, the state of which Noem was previously governor.
Community-funded archaeological excavations of ‘really important’ sixth-century monastery also rewrite story of Lismore
To the residents of the Scottish island of Lismore, population 190, history is never very far away. The tiny island near Oban in Argyll has no row of shops or even a pub – if islanders want to meet for a coffee, the only place to do so is in the lively Gaelic heritage centre that records the many centuries of community life on the island.
This quiet place, documentary evidence records, was home to a monastic settlement in the sixth century AD, when missionaries from Ireland were first moving into northern Britain to spread Christianity. But apart from a few fragments of an early carved cross, there was almost nothing to see from this period of history.
Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier AI model that it says leads or ties rivals on 13 of 18 disclosed benchmarks. The model is initially being released only to trusted cyber defenders and select pre-release testers, with broader availability planned later. VentureBeat reports: Google is not claiming that Gemini 4 Argon wins every benchmark. But across the benchmark table disclosed in the company's embargoed materials, Argon posts the highest score, or ties for the highest score, in more categories than GPT-6 Astra or Claude Opus 5.5. Across the 18 benchmarks Google disclosed, Argon leads outright on 12 and ties for first on one. GPT-6 Astra leads outright on three and ties Argon on one. Claude Opus 5.5 leads outright on two. That makes Argon the leading frontier model by total number of benchmark leads or top scores in Google's comparison set, even though the results show a still-close race in which OpenAI and Anthropic retain advantages in several important technical categories.
[...] The result is a more nuanced claim than "best model across the board." Argon appears to have the broadest top-score profile among the three frontier models in Google's disclosed comparison, but GPT-6 Astra remains ahead in several software, science-terminal and computer-use tasks, while Claude Opus 5.5 remains ahead in terminal-agent and post-training workflows. For enterprise buyers, that means model choice is still workload-dependent, even if Argon now gives Google its strongest claim yet to overall frontier leadership by benchmark count. [...] Argon also expands Google's output ceiling. The company says the model supports an industry-leading 1 million output tokens, up from a previous 64,000-token limit. That is a notable distinction for agentic software engineering, audit, migration and legal-review workloads where the value of a model often depends on how long it can sustain a chain of work before handing control back to a human.
Dry winters and a warming climate are taking a toll on centuries-old ice in the Alps, researchers say, with about 20 percent of Swiss glacial ice melting since 2021.
This marks the second time in three days President Trump has sought to highlight planned foreign investments in states where GOP Senate candidates are in tight election campaigns
Why Should Delaware Care? The state chamber of commerce is the most influential business advocacy organization in Delaware and, as its next leader, Rep. Mike Smith will shape its future work and impact. His departure from the General Assembly will be a blow to the future prospects of the state Republican Party, which has struggled for a decade to make advancements in the state.
State Rep. Mike Smith (R-Pike Creek), who was announced Wednesday morning as the next president of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, told Spotlight Delaware he would not run for reelection in 2028.
While the 41-year-old Smith has long been seen as a rising future leader in the Delaware Republican Party, the lawmaker said he also will not seek any office come 2028.
Smith is one of the youngest members of the state’s Republican caucus and the last incumbent Republican lawmaker from New Castle County. He represents the Pike Creek and Hockessin area in House District 22, where he has defied a Democratic voter registration advantage since taking office in 2018 by fewer than 200 votes.
Despite running against the odds, Smith has easily won re-election twice, in part by building a personal brand grounded on constituent conversations, small business and entrepreneurial support, and raising a young family.
He called the decision to transition to the private sector after a decade as a state representative, should he win his reelection bid next month, “a commitment” he made to both himself and his family.
Smith said the 10-year number has long been on his mind. It is indicative of his broader political ideology. He has served his constituents well and been able to accomplish an agenda in that time, he said.
“It’s going to be hard to walk away from that,” Smith said. “But I think that’s something that’s important in the political process. These elected positions were not built for people to stay in the same position for years upon years upon years.”
The General Assembly also has changed a lot since he was first elected, Smith said. Changes that have not necessarily been for the better.
“I’m not someone who believes in the party apparatus or the party fiefdoms, and I guess what comes with that,” Smith said. “I also don’t think the General Assembly has that makeup anymore. I think the General Assembly has generally been made up of advocacy organizations and really been kind of pillaged by the rise in outside [political action committee] spending.”
Leading the state chamber
Shortly before he spoke with Spotlight Delaware on Wednesday afternoon, Smith was announced as the next president of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, the state’s most influential business advocacy organization.
A press release announcing Smith’s new role said he was chosen after a national search “based on his experience in public policy, higher education, economic development, and community engagement.”
He succeeds Michael Quaranta, a former chief of staff to the late Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Castle who has led the state chamber since 2018. Quaranta has overseen a growth in membership of the chamber while leading it through a period in which complete Democratic control of state government has sometimes led to a particularly adversarial relationship, such as around the minimum wage increase and the passage of paid leave.
Smith said the role represents a natural progression for his career; he currently serves as strategic initiatives director for the University of Delaware’s College of Health Sciences. He hopes to work at the intersection of business innovation and government to build a Delaware economy that can thrive for future generations.
John Gooden, chair of the state chamber’s board of directors, said Smith’s background made him a natural fit for the role.
“He’s got a history, actually a passion, for being able to reach across the aisle, understanding public policy and how it ties into business, how it affects the business community,” Gooden said.
A brewing conflict of interest?
But the appointment also raises questions about a potential conflict of interest, should Smith win his reelection bid this November, as he would sit at the helm of an organization that often lobbies lawmakers in favor of business-friendly legislation.
John Flaherty, a spokesman for the Delaware Coalition for Open Government, an advocacy group focused on increasing government transparency and accountability, said Smith’s new role “is clearly a conflict.”
“You can’t serve two masters,” Flaherty said. “You can’t be a legislator and pretend that the chamber’s lobbyist who is testifying on a bill or bills doesn’t impact you.”
Flaherty said Smith should, at a minimum, ask the House Ethics Committee to issue an advisory opinion on his new role, since the General Assembly is not beholden to any outside public integrity group. Asking for an advisory opinion, Flaherty said, would “dispel any appearance of impropriety this might have.”
The General Assembly does have a legislative conflict of interest policy, which requires members to disclose a potential conflict and refrain from voting on a measure that where one has “a personal or private interest.”
That is defined as “an interest which tends to impair a legislator’s independence of judgment in the performance of the legislator’s legislative duties with respect to that measure or bill.” Whether his chamber leadership would impair his independence or simply reflect a well-known support for business measures may be difficult to prove.
Similarly, a one-year prohibition between public service and lobbying the legislature may also not apply to Smith, since it only refers to former legislators. Currently, Quaranta is a registered lobbyist in the state, but the chamber also employs other lobbyists as well, which could give Smith a degree of legal separation.
And while Smith said questions about a potential conflict of interest are fair, he also rebuffed the idea that one would exist.
The role of the chamber president is much bigger than government lobbying, Smith said. He pointed to other facets of the role including membership, education and fundraising as areas where his attention will be focused.
Gooden, the state chamber’s board chair, also dismissed the idea of a conflict. He said the topic was discussed by the chamber’s search committee during their process of evaluating candidates, but he does not anticipate it being a problem.
Smith also noted candidates in other legislative races who have ties to advocacy organizations have already been supported by voters, as well as current lawmakers who are presidents or CEOs of organizations that also do direct lobbying to the legislature.
Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang, both 77, charged days before Jonathan McKinsey and wife were set for hearing in divorce case
A couple in their 70s was charged with murder on Wednesday after allegedly gunning down their son-in-law at a bustling California park.
Authorities allege Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, took turns firing at Jonathan McKinsey, who was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce from their daughter, Candice Jang.
Rep. Jamie Flick announced a press conference, Judiciary hearing and panel for Oct. 5 at the State Capitol focused on House Bill 1499 child custody reform.
One of the pilots of a plane flying from the United Arab Emirates to Israel stabbed his co-pilot and appeared to tryto crash the aircraft, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said, as Israeli officials said they were investigating whether the incident was an attempted terror attack on Israelis.
Eyewitnesses reported chaos onboard the flydubai flight, as the attacker tried to barricade himself and the wounded co-pilot in the cockpit, and then attempted to disable the controls, forcing the plane to descend 17,000 feet in just two minutes.
The Federal Reserve inspector general also did not find fault with features the White House had complained were "ostentatious" and not compliant with the approved plans.
Google launched its Googlebooks platform a week ago, and a lot of people were wondering what this meant for Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Since Googlebooks and its Android-based Googlebook OS lack the management frameworks markets like schools require, Chromebooks will continue to be available for now, until such time Googlebooks catch up in that regard. However, in a support document, Google states that update support for all Chromebook devices will end in 2034:
ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths.
Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it’s now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line. Sadly, we live in a world where corporations are free to make and break whatever promises they want virtually free of consequences, and as society we’re so used to it that anti-consumer behaviour like this barely elicits a shrug.
Google does state that “many newer commercial Chromebook models will be capable of upgrading to Googlebook OS”, but that, too, is just another promise – and a vague, one at that – so who knows how many devices will actually be capable of upgrading out in the real world. On top of that, we have no idea if Googlebooks will just be yet another in a long line of quickly abandoned Google tablet/laptop projects, further adding to the uncertainty.
Boston, MA — A sweeping Massachusetts investigation has found that more than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester over several decades, while church leaders repeatedly failed to stop the abuse.
The attorney general’s office said the investigation, launched in 2019, reviewed more than 300,000 pages of records and interviewed more than 100 people. Most of the documented abuse occurred before 2002, when reporting by The Boston Globe exposed widespread clergy abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston and triggered investigations worldwide.
Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said church officials in all three dioceses knew for years that children were being abused but often failed to take effective action or confront institutional failures that allowed misconduct to continue.
The investigation did not produce broad new criminal charges. Prosecutors said some conduct was not criminal under Massachusetts law when it occurred, while statutes of limitations barred other cases. Three matters were referred to local district attorneys, with one resulting in charges.
The report calls for stronger child-protection policies, improved responses to survivors and greater institutional transparency. The Worcester Diocese said it would review the findings for additional reforms and pointed to an earlier apology from Bishop Robert McManus.
Campbell said legal barriers do not lessen the seriousness of the abuse or the state’s responsibility to document what happened.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Microsoft has no plans to sell the gaming business, telling The New York Times that "Xbox is not for sale" and that the company intends to take a long-term view. Windows Central reports: Microsoft's vast layoffs across the summer have hit Xbox in their thousands, with studios like Ninja Theory on the path to being closed, and others like Double Fine being divested completely. Microsoft has effectively shut down Halo Studios itself and handed off the franchise to Call of Duty showrunners instead, as Xbox aggressively seeks to restructure for its next decade.
[...] The NYT interviewed (paywall) Sharma recently covering the Xbox layoffs generally. The outlet said that Asha "did not stall" in declaring Xbox not-for-sale. "Xbox is not for sale. [...] We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that. [...] We've got a long way to go with Microsoft and we're going to take the long-term view."
The NYT quite patronizingly called the comment a "bob and weave" seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea of divestiture. It's great shareholder bait; Xbox has long been an aspirational type of product, and it has been a loss leader in some regards. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has remarked in the past about how, despite the fact Xbox isn't a huge profit generator, fandom of the brand has led to lucrative deals for Azure on the business side of things. Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead...
In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have “no new features”. Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system.
18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year’s Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and “a more responsive and delightful experience”.
Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I’ve encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks.
I’m getting some real Windows 11 vibes from this long list of bugs and issues, further underlining my perception that Apple completely lost the plot when it comes to Mac OS X (in the past) and MacOS (today). These are not the kind of things you’d find in the heydays of Mac OS X, back when I was a devout user, and makes me glad I abandoned ship long, long ago (around the time of the Intel transition). I don’t see stuff like this in GNOME or KDE, and while not nearly as bad as Windows 11, the cracks are obvious.
I am by no means an expert at how Apple is run and how it organises itself, but as a layperson I do wonder if the company is simply trying to do too much – too many different platforms, too many different crucial components it all develops internally, too many different markets to please. Things are going to fall through the cracks when you try to keep this many plates spinning.
A brand new Tcl/Tk release, in the form of Tcl/Tk 9.1. The new features in Tcl are a bit difficult for me to properly parse as a non-developer, but Tk’s improvements are easy to understand: it brings supports for screen readers, initial supports for bidirectional and RTL scripts, improved listbox selection colours, and more. It also happens to drop support for Windows XP appearances, if that’s something that matters to you.
Microsoft has announced WSL containers for developers who aren’t already using Docker, Podman, or Rancher on their Windows workstations.
WSL containers is now generally available! Check out this blog post to learn more about this overall feature enabling seamless access to Linux containers on Windows via the new “wslc.exe” command. This new Linux container platform comes with multiple architectures changes compared to WSL, which we’ll detail in this post.
(The Center Square) - Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is suing the federal government as part of a second legal battle against the construction of immigrant detention centers in the state.
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2026 — CoreWeave Inc. today announced the availability of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave, with Cognition as the first customer anywhere running production workloads on the system. Customers, like Cognition, run the system under the same operating model and tooling as their existing NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and GB300 NVL72 fleets, with performance engineering from CoreWeave’s team. The news was shared during Fully Connected, CoreWeave’s AI cloud conference, which brings together more than 4,500 customers, partners, developers and AI leaders to share how they are building and running AI in production.
NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems deployed on CoreWeave Cloud for production AI workloads.
“Bringing up NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 so quickly, and having a customer already seeing performance gains within days, is the payoff from years of engineering our platform across GPU generations,” said Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of product & engineering at CoreWeave. “With customers like Cognition, that investment shows up in the ability to get production workloads running within days. When it comes to agentic tasks, long contexts, repeated model calls and thousands of concurrent tasks put pressure on the entire platform. Our job is to make compute, networking and software work as a single system, so customers can build increasingly complex agents without taking on the infrastructure complexity themselves.”
Cognition Is the First Customer in Production with Vera Rubin NVL72
Cognition, the applied AI lab behind Devin, runs training, reinforcement learning and production inference for Devin on CoreWeave. The company scaled from bridge capacity to thousands of GPUs for training and inference in less than nine months. Cognition worked with CoreWeave to stand up a Vera Rubin NVL72 cluster in early September, and Cognition’s own engineers ran the first customer-executed Vera Rubin inference benchmark, measured against a GB200 NVL72 cluster baseline.
“Agentic coding is an unforgiving workload that requires long contexts, high concurrency and rapid reasoning,” said Silas Alberti, SVP research & founding team at Cognition. “By deploying the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave, our engineers are seeing up to a 4.8 times increase in total token throughput for SWE-2 inference workloads. For an agentic workload where every step waits on the last one, that compounds into real work Devin gets done. CoreWeave continues to deliver the bleeding-edge rack-scale acceleration we need to push the boundaries of AI.”
Cognition’s Engineers Benchmarked Vera Rubin
In independent benchmarks run on CoreWeave Cloud, Cognition measured a 4.8 times increase in total token throughput for its SWE-2 inference workloads on NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 compared to a GB200 NVL72 baseline. Additionally, the team recorded a 3.8 times boost in output token throughput for reinforcement learning workloads. For Cognition, that translates to more concurrent Devin sessions per GPU, drastically accelerated research loops and lower cost per session, with no loss in generation speed.
Proven Across Every NVIDIA Generation
The relationship between CoreWeave and NVIDIA dates to 2017, beginning with the NVIDIA Volta generation, which is still in commercial service today on CoreWeave Cloud, demonstrating the long useful life of NVIDIA compute and the value CoreWeave’s platform can continue to draw from it. CoreWeave’s full-stack software platform—including CoreWeave Kubernetes Service, SUNK, CoreWeave Mission Control, CoreWeave Sandboxes and serverless inference—gives customers a consistent way to deploy and manage workloads across GPU generations. Customers can match each workload to appropriate capacity, keep using existing infrastructure as needs evolve and adopt new NVIDIA architectures through a familiar operating environment.
“CoreWeave has consistently demonstrated the infrastructure expertise required to bring each new generation of NVIDIA accelerated computing into production,” said Ian Buck, vice president of Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing at NVIDIA. “Its full-stack expertise across multiple generations of NVIDIA infrastructure is helping AI innovators like Cognition quickly put NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 to work on demanding production workloads.”
CoreWeave, in collaboration with Dell Technologies, was among the first cloud providers to deploy Dell PowerRack systems featuring NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 NVL72, and is one of the first to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin. CoreWeave has also published the industry’s first measured silicon performance numbers on the platform, showing 10 times the token throughput per megawatt over NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 on the DeepSeek R1 reasoning model at matched interactivity.
CoreWeave consistently delivers industry-leading performance, demonstrated by record-breaking MLPerf benchmark results in inference and training and its position as the only AI cloud to earn the top Platinum ranking in SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX three times in a row.
About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a fully integrated platform of technology and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Trusted by 9 of the 10 leading foundation model providers, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate human discovery. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025.
Return of the iMac G4 design? The hub could feature a round base and positioning arm supporting the screen, like the company’s short-lived but friendlier iMac design.
ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland and Labrador, Sept. 30, 2026 — CoLab today revealed its vision for generative engineering, announcing the release of a new capability called generative artifacts and setting a date for the launch of a generative CAD product in H1 2027.
“There is a lot of excitement about generative CAD accelerating design iterations and allowing engineering teams to explore more concepts,” said Adam Keating, Co-founder and CEO of CoLab. “It’s an important piece of the puzzle, but if all you do is speed up CAD operations, you’re not really solving for program speed. The question engineering leaders should be asking is not ‘how can I adopt generative CAD?’ but ‘how can our organization shift toward generative engineering?’”
Generative artifacts, a new capability from CoLab, provides one example of what generative engineering could look like in practice. Beyond CAD, there are dozens of other artifacts that engineering teams must mature and approve for release. Using CoLab, engineering teams will be able to generate and refine these artifacts – for example, a Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) or a root cause analysis – retaining critical program context, alongside the history of each design.
CoLab also revealed plans to release a generative CAD product in H1 2027. With model capability advancing rapidly, CoLab is focused on providing guardrails that will help AI produce outputs engineers can trust.
“Our customers are designing complex products that must be manufactured at scale,” said Keating. “AI is getting better at generating geometry, so we’re focused on the last mile: fine-tuning the outputs using an organization’s historical designs, standards and guidelines, and expert knowhow.”
CoLab’s generative CAD offering will address two different needs. First, CoLab will offer the ability to generate new concepts, leveraging historical program data and integrations with leading CAD and topology optimization tools, including nTop. Second, CoLab is developing the ability to “AutoFix” a design, based on a specific annotation or requirement. What’s unique about CoLab’s approach is the emphasis on using engineering knowledge and documentation to justify each design decision.
“Now that AI can use CAD, engineering teams have to consider what that means for how they make design decisions,” said Jeremy Andrews, CTO and Co-founder of CoLab. “Your competitive advantage is based on the knowledge only you have. So AI should leverage internal data and standards, there should be a human in the loop, and design changes should be paired with rationale as part of an auditable design history.”
CoLab is uniquely suited to offer exactly this kind of AI context. Hundreds of engineering organizations already use CoLab’s Design Engagement System to run virtual design reviews, capturing expert feedback as they go. This design rationale, which is rarely documented otherwise, can help AI make better decisions, forming the backbone for reliable generative CAD.
Beyond that implicit knowledge, CoLab is investing in providing explicit guidelines for AI as well. Companies can upload their internal standards and guidelines to the platform, and CoLab will license trusted third party standards. Earlier this year, CoLab announced a licensing agreement for ISO standards, which allows AutoReview, CoLab’s AI Peer Checker, to review designs for compliance, providing citation-backed annotations.
The announcement comes as several major players, including PTC and Autodesk, recently announced Model Context Protocol (MCP) offerings, which allow AI agents and large language models to use some functionality within OnShape and Fusion. MCP gives agents a standard way to access CAD. According to CoLab, this is not only a sign that AI for CAD is accelerating, but also a building block for comprehensive AI for engineering:
“Soon, AI agents will be able to use any CAD tool,” said Andrews. “But what will ultimately accelerate program speed is when you can combine agentic CAD with the engineering knowledge, reviews, and validation data to mature designs. That’s where CoLab is going long term.”
About CoLab
CoLab builds AI-powered software for mechanical engineering and hardware development teams. Its EngineeringOS platform helps engineers make better, faster design decisions by connecting people, data, and AI in one collaborative workspace—capturing expert knowledge as a natural part of day-to-day work.
With AI agents built into the platform, CoLab enables teams to apply that knowledge automatically to improve design quality and accelerate product development. Founded in 2017, CoLab is trusted by leading global manufacturers to drive decision velocity and bring better products to market, faster.
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has confirmed plans to cut 20% of generals and admirals and declared “no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps” would be tolerated inside the country’s military.
Delivering his latest extraordinary attack on diversity, and dismissing reports of low morale within the US armed forces as “false claims”, Hegseth also suggested they were retaining service personnel at “record” rates.
A year after his explosive tenure at Doge, the SpaceX CEO is back in the Trump administration’s good graces
Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that Elon Musk will co-lead a government project to study the future of warfare, marking the SpaceX CEO’s first return to government since he ran the chaotic, so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge. Musk will be joined by Palmer Luckey, CEO of the defense tech company Anduril, and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House.
A defense department press release on the effort, called Project Meridian, described its goal as “identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield”. The project will run for 120 days and culminate in an unclassified public report of its recommendations.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 30, 2026 — CScale today exited stealth, announcing $145 million in Series C funding to accelerate development and commercialization of optical interconnect for AI scale-up, the high-bandwidth, ultra-low-latency connections that let accelerators work together like a single, much larger computer. The round brings the company’s total funding to $188 million.
The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Premji Invest. Sutter Hill Ventures, which has backed CScale since its inception, continued its support alongside existing investor Maverick Silicon. NVIDIA and Intel Capital joined as CScale’s first strategic investors.
In the gigawatt-class AI data centers expected by the end of the decade, a single scale-up domain will span thousands of tightly coupled accelerators across dozens of racks. These systems demand high bandwidth, predictable low latency, and continuous communication. Across hundreds of thousands of accelerators, failures that are rare on any individual link become a continuous fleet-level condition, degrading portions of the AI factory unless they can be contained. CScale is architecting its interconnect to contain optical failures without interrupting compute.
“As AI scale-up domains extend across dozens of racks, optical interconnect becomes essential,” said Martin Lund, CEO of CScale. “At that scale, reliable, predictable communication is fundamental to system economics. Easier part replacement improves serviceability, not continuity. We’re designing the interconnect for continuity. Lasers will fail. Compute shouldn’t.”
“AI infrastructure is no longer just a compute problem. It is a systems problem,” said Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Atreides Management. “As scale-up systems move toward gigawatt-class deployments, interconnect bandwidth means nothing without system reliability. Every optical failure is a compute failure. At this scale, failures are not hypothetical—they are inevitable. CScale is designing reliable scale-up optics for next-generation AI factories, unlocking the full performance of optics without trade-offs.”
“CScale’s strength is its architectural judgment: understanding which technical choices create value for the entire system. The team combines deep expertise across photonics, electronics, and software with the deployment experience to turn optical capability into dependable AI infrastructure,” said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest. “At Premji Invest, we partner with teams that think big and have the discipline to build enduring companies, and CScale is exactly that. We are proud to co-lead this financing and support CScale as they bring transformative solutions to market.”
Lund previously built Broadcom’s switching business into a billion-dollar franchise and held senior executive roles at Microsoft and Cadence. Most recently, he led Cisco’s Common Hardware Group, responsible for silicon, hardware systems, and optics, including Silicon One.
CScale was founded in 2023 by CTO Sanjai Kohli, who co-founded SiRF, helping bring GPS to the mass market and earning the 2010 European Inventor Award, and later founded Inovi, acquired by Facebook in 2014.
About CScale
CScale is building an integrated light engine to deliver reliable optical connectivity for AI infrastructure at gigawatt scale. It was founded in 2023 and is led by CEO Martin Lund, who brings three decades of silicon and network engineering leadership from Cisco, Microsoft, Cadence, Broadcom, and Intel. Founder/CTO Sanjai Kohli has built and successfully exited multiple startups in the communications industry. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., CScale has approximately 85 employees globally.
(The Center Square) – Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman defended her previous use of the word "genocide" to describe Israel's actions in Gaza during a debate Tuesday night with Mayor Karen Bass.
V12 delivers multi-tenancy, API-first automation, Context-Aware Tiering and 2x+ performance per watt, now qualified on Supermicro building blocks.
PITTSBURGH and ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Sept. 30, 2026 — VDURA, provider of high-performance data storage infrastructure for AI factories and neoclouds, today announced the general availability of the VDURA Data Platform V12, the release that turns the platform into a multi-tenant, API-driven storage service for GPU clouds and AI factories. V12 ships as a qualified solution on Supermicro Building Block Solutions, scaling from 8 to 100,000 GPUs on one software stack. VDURA will showcase V12 at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, Oct. 6-7 at ADNEC Centre, Booth H3-D45.
Neoclouds and AI factories exist to rent and run GPUs, and storage determines how much of that GPU capacity turns into revenue. Every accelerator waiting on a checkpoint, a model load, or a cold read is margin lost. Every tenant that cannot be isolated is a contract that cannot be signed. Every kilowatt spent on storage is a kilowatt not spent on compute. V12 was engineered for that operating model: keep every GPU fed, keep every tenant isolated, keep every cluster online, and do it on hardware operators already standardize on.
“Neocloud and AI factory operators told us exactly what they need from storage: keep the GPUs fed, isolate the tenants, automate everything, expand capacity for cold data without a second system, and move that data back to flash the moment it warms up for extended context,” said Ken Claffey, CEO of VDURA. “V12 is that list, shipped. It is the same mixed-fleet, software-defined model the hyperscalers run inside their own clouds, delivered on Supermicro systems our customers already buy. Every watt and every rack unit we give back is another GPU the operator can put into service.”
What is new in V12
V12 extends the HYDRA architecture, VDURA’s High-performance, Yield-optimized, Distributed, Resilient Architecture, with the capabilities multi-tenant GPU infrastructure requires:
Multi-tenant by design. Per-tenant quality of service, namespaces, encryption keys and VLAN isolation on one shared fleet, so a provider can carve a single storage pool into hard-walled tenant services with capacity and performance guarantees.
API-first automation. REST APIs, Kubernetes CSI and infrastructure-as-code tenant provisioning, so storage is deployed, provisioned and billed through the same pipelines as the rest of the GPU cloud.
Context-Aware Tiering. Data lands on the right media automatically as access patterns shift between training and inference. Roughly 90% of files stay on flash while roughly 90% of capacity settles on HDD, in one platform with no stub files, no rehydration steps and no manual tuning.
Persistent context for inference. A KV cache that outlives the pod. Sessions resume instead of prefilling again, delivering faster first tokens and more concurrent users on the same GPUs, at flash cost rather than recompute cost.
RDMA data paths. Direct GPU-to-storage transfers with the CPU out of the path. The DirectFlow parallel client takes roughly 191 MB of DRAM and zero cores from the GPU node.
Elastic Metadata Engine. VeLO metadata acceleration of up to 20x improvement, 225,000 creates and deletes per second per Director, and billions of metadata operations per second in aggregate.
File and S3 in one platform. An S3 object is a file in the volume, not a copy of one. No staging copies between ingest, training, inference and archive.
Snapshots and SMR HDD optimization. Instantaneous, space-efficient snapshots for checkpoints and operational recovery, and SMR HDD unlocking 25 to 30% more capacity per rack.
End-to-end encryption.AES-256 at rest and in flight, with KMIP key management per tenant.
Self-healing resiliency and VDURA Sentinel. Failure domains as small as a single VPOD, no manual rebuilds and no downtime windows, backed by VDURA Sentinel proactive support that opens the service request, with the diagnosis attached, before the customer sees a fault.
Qualified on Supermicro
V12 is qualified on 100% Supermicro Building Block Solutions. The qualified configuration uses the Supermicro AS-1116CS-TN, a 1U system with a single AMD EPYC 9005 series processor and 12 NVMe bays, as both the VeLO Director node and the all-flash F-Node, alongside the AS-2015HS-TNR hybrid storage node and the CSE-947HE2C 4U 90-bay JBOD for the mixed-fleet data plane. Every node connects with RDMA straight to the GPU nodes and no dedicated back-end storage fabric.
Built for GPU economics
Clusters grow online from three nodes to thousands, and flash share is a dial rather than a fork. A single platform at roughly 20 PB usable spans a 35x performance range, from a capacity-optimized mixed fleet at 2% flash and 18 kW to an all-flash configuration at 1,000 MB/s per TB, so operators size storage to the workload instead of standing up a second system when the workload changes. The result is 2x+ performance per watt and more than 60% lower total cost of ownership than competitive architectures at the same feed rate, which returns power, rack space and capital to the operator for more GPUs.
Proven at scale
V12 builds on 25 years of parallel file system engineering, from PanFS to VDURA, with more than 1,000 production deployments in over 50 countries and namespaces of more than 1,500 nodes. VDURA Data Platform V12 was named AI Data Management Solution of the Year in the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards.
Availability
VDURA Data Platform V12 is generally available today for all V5000 class systems and as an upgrade for V11 customers. VDURA Sentinel is included with V12; proactive service requests and parts dispatch are delivered through VDURACare Premier, VDURA’s 10-year support offering covering hardware, software and 24×7 expert response under a single contract. Learn more at vdura.com/data-platform.
About VDURA
VDURA is the high performance data storage infrastructure for AI factories and Neoclouds. Powered by HYDRA, its software-defined, mixed-fleet architecture keeps every GPU fed, every tenant isolated, and every cluster online, delivering hyperscale-class durability and economics with up to 8 nines of durability and a heritage of more than 1,000 production deployments. Visit vdura.com for more information.
Quantico, VA — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has launched Project Meridian, a 120-day Pentagon initiative tasked with identifying the weapons, technologies and battlefields likely to define future conflicts.
Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will co-lead the effort under Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael. Hegseth said the project is intended to look beyond traditional military planning and determine what capabilities the United States will need to maintain technological superiority.
The group is expected to examine artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, robotics and other emerging technologies, then submit recommendations within 120 days. A public report is expected, along with a classified annex covering sensitive findings.
The initiative also places executives with major Pentagon business interests directly inside a process examining future military technology. Musk’s SpaceX and Luckey’s Anduril already hold substantial U.S. defense contracts.
Project Meridian was one of six initiatives Hegseth announced during his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. Others include a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command designed to accelerate deployment of drones and robotic systems.
A months-long breach of the Defense Manpower Data Center exposed personal information belonging to roughly 2.8 million living current and former U.S. military personnel and staff, plus records for nearly 300,000 deceased people. Attackers reportedly exploited a file-sharing vulnerability between October 2025 and July 2026, accessing unencrypted records that included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, demographic information, and military service details. TechCrunch reports: The DMDC may not be widely known to the general public, but serves as one of the Department of Defense's records-keeping units. The DMDC maintains over 60 million records for U.S. military and civilian staff and their family members to help determine benefits and entitlements, such as healthcare and retirement. The unit also provides a critical service as the military's "leading identity management provider," which links active service members, employees, and contractors to credentials, such as smart cards and passwords. These are used to access Pentagon computer systems, buildings, and bases.
"We make sure that the right people get access and the wrong people don't: security of identity information is paramount," the DMDC's website reads. The Department of Defense, which oversees the DMDC, said it does not have any indication that the information was misused, but did not say how it reached that conclusion. TechCrunch contacted a Pentagon spokesperson to ask if officials had any communications from the hackers, whose identities are not known, but we did not hear back.
New vendor-neutral initiative brings together an initial community of 17 organizations to connect industry needs with open source AI projects and turn shared expertise into practical guidance for greater choice and control.
BRUSSELS, Sept. 30, 2026 — The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open source software foundations, today announced the formation of the Sovereign AI Foundation, a vendor-neutral initiative that will help member organizations understand their AI dependencies, evaluate open source alternatives, and make more informed decisions about the technologies on which they rely.
As AI moves from experimentation into critical operations and decision-making, control over the underlying technology is becoming a strategic business concern. Many organizations rely on models, platforms, and services they cannot fully inspect, adapt, or govern. That dependence can limit their ability to control where data is processed, choose which technologies to use, or change direction as costs, requirements, and provider terms evolve.
“AI sovereignty is about preserving meaningful choice and control over the systems on which organizations depend,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The Eclipse Foundation already hosts open source technologies that give organizations practical alternatives across the AI stack. The Sovereign AI Foundation will connect those projects with real industry requirements while giving members a neutral forum to compare experience, identify shared priorities, and accelerate adoption.”
AI sovereignty does not mean isolation, complete self-sufficiency, or rejecting proprietary technology. It means retaining the ability to understand, choose, adapt, and govern critical AI systems while preserving viable alternatives and the freedom to change direction.
Open source is central to achieving that goal. It can provide greater visibility into technology dependencies, more flexibility to adapt systems, and more choice in how AI is deployed. Combined with portability, operational expertise, and vendor-neutral governance, open technologies can help organizations reduce unnecessary dependency and retain greater control over their AI systems.
The Eclipse Foundation advances these goals in two complementary ways. Independently governed open source projects develop and maintain the technologies. The Sovereign AI Foundation brings member organizations together to identify shared requirements, evaluate relevant projects, contribute experience and expertise, and support adoption and community growth.
The initiative launches with 17 participating organizations spanning technology, industry, research, and the open source community: CEA LIST, EclipseSource, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Ericsson, Eurotech, Infosys, Kentyou, KU Leuven, Open Elements, Red Hat, Renesas Electronics, Robert Bosch, Thales, The IO Foundation, TypeFox, the University of York, and Vector Informatik. Additional organizations are in the process of joining, and all Eclipse Foundation member organizations are invited to participate.
Connecting Industry Needs with Open Source AI Projects
The Sovereign AI Foundation will connect member priorities and real-world use cases with relevant projects across the Eclipse Foundation ecosystem. Members will be able to identify and evaluate technologies that address their needs, bring operational requirements and feedback to project communities, contribute expertise, and help drive adoption.
Relevant projects include Eclipse Theia and Theia AI for AI-enabled developer tools; Eclipse Enclave for running AI coding agents in isolated, policy-controlled environments; Eclipse PanEval for evaluating model capability, safety, and cybersecurity; and Eclipse LMOS for developing and managing multi-agent systems. The Open VSX Registry provides vendor-neutral extension infrastructure for open source and AI-enabled development tools, with downloads approaching one billion per month. The Eclipse Foundation is also exploring a broader AI Registry for emerging components such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, agent skills, and plugins.
Each project retains independent governance and control over its technical roadmap. By connecting organizations deploying AI with the communities building these technologies, the Sovereign AI Foundation will support a modular ecosystem in which projects can address different requirements, evolve independently, and work together where appropriate.
From Shared Experience to Practical Guidance
The Sovereign AI Foundation focuses on six areas:
Mapping real-world needs and use cases: Building a shared view of how members are deploying, evaluating, and piloting open source AI.
Assessing technologies and dependencies: Examining developments across models, evaluation frameworks, infrastructure, and agentic systems, as well as the dependencies they can create.
Evaluating relevant open source projects: Assessing how projects align with member requirements and identifying opportunities for adoption, contribution, and collaboration.
Sharing experience and identifying common requirements: Comparing lessons from real-world deployments and identifying needs that members and project communities can address together.
Developing practical resources: Producing whitepapers, blueprints, landscape analyses, and reference materials that support better-informed AI decisions.
Translating research into action: Turning findings from Eclipse Foundation research initiatives, including EU-funded projects, into insights that members can apply.
The Sovereign AI Foundation will focus on knowledge sharing, technology assessment, project evaluation, ecosystem coordination, and practical guidance. It will not develop software or specifications. Technical development will continue within Eclipse Foundation-governed projects, creating a feedback loop between the organizations deploying AI and the communities building the technologies they need.
Supporting a Broader Open AI Ecosystem
The Sovereign AI Foundation is the member forum within the Eclipse Foundation’s broader AI ecosystem. Beyond the projects named above, the Eclipse Foundation’s AI project portfolio spans deep learning, data and numerical computing, simulation, observability, cloud infrastructure, edge applications, and other areas. These projects benefit from established governance and shared legal, operational, security, and community support.
The Eclipse Foundation also supports practical skills development through its AI Coding Workshop series, which helps developers and engineering teams apply disciplined, cross-tool approaches to AI-assisted software development. Visit the workshop website for the latest schedule and registration information.
Together, these activities connect open technologies with the knowledge, experience, and practical skills organizations need to adopt and develop AI while preserving choice and control.
Eclipse Foundation member organizations are invited to join the Sovereign AI Foundation, share their requirements and experience, identify common priorities, and help build its first practical resources. Other organizations can explore Eclipse Foundation membership and participation at sovereign-ai-foundation.org.
About the Eclipse Foundation
The Eclipse Foundation provides a global community of individuals and organizations with a vendor-neutral, business-friendly environment for open source collaboration and innovation. We host Adoptium, the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, Open VSX, Software Defined Vehicle, and more than 450 high-impact open source projects. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, we are an international non-profit association supported by over 300 members. Our events, including Open Community Experience (OCX), bring together developers, industry leaders, and researchers from around the world.
Some families with more than one "affected person" could receive multiple payments via check or direct deposit, an administration official told CBS News.
No one was injured at Children’s World Early Learning Center and parents will appear in court, police said
The parents of a Detroit-area toddler who pulled a loaded pistol out of his backpack at a daycare will face charges in the case, police said on Wednesday.
In a statement, police in Canton Township said the parents would make an initial court appearance on Thursday. The Wayne county prosecutor’s office declined to offer details or additional comment, saying it would wait until a judge signs off on the charges.
Democrats block measure they say didn’t go far enough – and was bundled with ‘poison pill’ voter ID rules
The US Senate on Wednesday blocked a Republican bill restricting stock trading by members of Congress, after Democrats refused to advance a measure they said would let lawmakers keep their portfolios and was bundled with voter ID rules they called a “poison pill”.
The 53-47 vote fell seven short of the 60 needed to open debate on the Stop Insider Trading Act, which the Republican-controlled House passed in July. Every Democrat and independent voted no, and the failure comes five weeks before the 3 November midterms.
If fossil fuel companies misled the public about the dangers of their products, should they be required to pay for damages from climate-related disasters?
Measles outbreak in the state has now reached 39 counties, with 943 confirmed cases and 176 hospitalizations
Pennsylvania has reported its fifth measles-associated death of 2026 as the state’s ongoing outbreak climbs to 943 confirmed cases across 39 counties.
The Pennsylvania department of health said on Wednesday that an unvaccinated Lancaster county resident who tested positive for measles had died. Health officials did not release further information about the individual, citing privacy protections.
The US Department of Justice indicted another 10 individuals on noncitizen voting-related charges on Wednesday as Donald Trump’s administration continues to pursue allegations of voter fraud raised by the president.
In the sixth announcement of its kind this month, the attorney general, Todd Blanche, and homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said 10 people in Minnesota were charged with making false claims about citizenship to vote, or voting as a noncitizen.
Designer showcases wool alternatives and ocean-inspired clothes and says ‘kindness requires real work’
Stella McCartney has been talking about animal rights at fashion week for 30 years. She is usually a lone voice, but the issue is back in the headlines this season. Outcry over the physical restraining of a Peta protester at a catwalk show by Steven Kolb, the president of New York fashion week’s governing body, has put cruelty in wool production – previously considered niche compared to the hot button topic of fur – on the news agenda.
“There is no wool on the runway this season, and I’m proud of that,” McCartney said after her show. She has been working on wool alternatives, including Brewed Protein, a fermented alternative to cashmere and wool developed in collaboration with the Japanese biotech firm Spiber, which was first used in her collections a year ago.
The Fed’s watchdog found cost overruns but no evidence of criminal violations after the Justice Department dropped an investigation into the renovations earlier this year.
(The Center Square) – After the Department of Justice announced charges against 10 foreign nationals for unlawful voting and registration offenses in Minnesota, an Illinois state senator said it’s hard to know about election integrity issues in the Land of…
Google is reportedly testing a program that pays around 100 publishers based on how much their content contributes to its AI-powered search features. According to The Information, one publisher earned more than $1 million over a year, while another has received roughly $50,000 to $60,000." Digiday reports: Once a publisher joins the "AI contribution pilot," they receive an extra AI earnings widget via their Search Console dashboard. This displays a monthly earnings number (with some history), though no other detailed information on how payouts are calculated currently. Payments are based more on value than raw usage, meaning Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response. Publishers can opt out at any time.
[...] Digiday has learned that at least dozens of publishers have been approached by Google for the AI contribution pilot, though the program has been more appealing to small and mid-sized, rather than large publishers and has widened far beyond news publishers. Digiday couldn't get final confirmation of the number. Screenshots from Google Search Console, seen by Digiday, show an "AI contribution" panel that appears once a publisher opts into the program. The interface lists the program name and a monthly payout figure.
"It's quite black box," as one exec with knowledge of the matter told Digiday. "Do I wish they were more transparent? Definitely," said one publisher exec who is in the program. "But I'm hopeful that the fact that they're setting a precedent for exploring paying publishers directly for content through this is meaningful," they added.
No new indictments from eight-year investigation as state attorney general says church knew about abuse
More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over several decades, according to a report released by the state’s attorney general’s office on Wednesday.
The eight-year-long investigation did not result in new indictments, the office said, claiming that some conduct identified was not a crime under Massachusetts law at the time it occurred, and that in other cases the applicable statute of limitations had expired.
In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
Support such as for white Afrikaners and anti-communism reveals how US is redefining what qualifies as human rights
With hours left before the funding expires, the Trump administration is pushing to direct more than $175m of the state department’s flagship human rights fund to a slate of awards that includes a huge $40m grant for an anti-communism fund, support for a group advancing white Afrikaner rights in South Africa, a campaign against Brazil’s supreme court and programs that would reward ideological allies in Europe who protect “western civilizational norms”.
On Wednesday, the state department obligated the funds to the grantees hours before the deadline despite congressional concerns and requests not to do so, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The state department declined to comment on questions from the Guardian specifically on whether it had obligated the funds and had “blown” holds from Congress due to concerns about the money’s use.
Sept. 30, 2026 — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used the world’s fastest supercomputer for open science to develop a quantum algorithm that could lead to more advanced models in fluid dynamics and other scientific fields.
Frontier has a peak performance of 2 exaflops per second — meaning it can perform more than a billion-billion calculations per second — and is currently ranked No. 2 on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The innovation received a 2026 R&D 100 Award from science and technology media group R&D World, one of a record 22 of the annual awards for ORNL.
“We wanted to find a smarter approach to dealing with a major computational bottleneck in quantum modeling of fluid dynamics,” said Chao Lu, an ORNL postdoctoral researcher who led the study presented at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering. “Now we’re interested to see what kind of acceleration it can enable for other applications.”
Speeding Up Simulations
The team’s findings build on those of a previous ORNL study examining potential quantum approaches to solve the Hele-Shaw flow equation — a scenario of two flat, parallel plates extremely close to each other and the flow of liquids and gases between them — using the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm, a quantum algorithm for solving a set of linear equations.
Modeling fluid flow plays an essential role across industrial design in fields from aerodynamics to oil refining. The unsteady flow of air, other gases and liquids over machinery parts can lead to turbulence that holds back performance.
Traditional approaches to modeling flow rely on complex sets of approximated equations that can fail to account for finer details. Simulating flow captures more of the physics but can require huge amounts of computing time. A recent 3D simulation of oceanographic flow using ORNL’s Summit supercomputer, for example, required modeling trillions of grid points.
A 2023 simulation on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer used trillions of grid points to model turbulence in ocean water. LuGo, a quantum algorithm developed by ORNL researchers, could open new possibilities for such quantum studies of turbulence. Credit: Miles Couchman.
The binary bits used in classical computing simulations allow only one possible value to be assigned per bit. Quantum computing, which relies on quantum bits, or qubits, to store information, allows combinations of values to be encoded on a single bit. That dynamic enables a wider range of possible values that could open new avenues to solving complex problems such as predicting fluid flow.
Making the most of that advantage requires holding down the relatively high error rate caused by the delicate nature of qubits. Researchers have tested various solutions, but the industry hasn’t settled on a standard protocol. The final medium for encoding qubits also remains a moving target, with various systems employing neutral atoms, trapped ions, superconductors and other materials.
The current generation of quantum computers, known as noisy intermediate-scale quantum, relies mostly on running small-scale problems to be calculated on a limited number of qubits.
Clearing the Chokepoint
The team’s quantum approaches to the Hele-Shaw problem hit a roadblock: converting the equation to quantum form, known as quantum phase estimation (QPE), consumed more than 90 percent of the computational effort. The primary bottleneck lay in the required number of logic gates, the basic building blocks of quantum circuits.
“We needed 2 million gates to perform the necessary calculations,” said Murali Gopalakrishnan Meena, an ORNL computational scientist and co-author of the study. “These gates are like switches between functions or like intersections on a busy highway. Just as more intersections mean more traffic, more gates mean more potential for error, or noise. That’s especially true in quantum computing, because the volatile nature of qubits causes them to degrade quickly and introduces a high degree of noise already.”
The team obtained allocations of time on Frontier, the OLCF’s 1.4-exaflop flagship supercomputer capable of up to 1.4 quintillion calculations per second, and Perlmutter, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s 113-petaflop supercomputer, capable of more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second.
“For these kinds of calculations, we needed machines with lightning speeds,” Gopalakrishnan Meena said.
The team used those resources to develop LuGo, a QPE algorithm that streamlines the process and cuts computational demand. The team validated the algorithm by conducting classical simulations of the quantum circuits.
The team also obtained allocations of time on Quantinuum’s H-1 quantum computer, IBM’s Marrakesh and Sherbrooke quantum computers and IQM’s Garnet and Sirius quantum computers via QCUP, part of the DOE’s Quantum User Expansion for Science and Technology Initiative, which awards time on cloud-based commercial quantum processors around the country to support research projects. The IBM and IQM computers rely on superconducting qubits, while Quantinuum’s H-1 relies on trapped ions.
The team used those machines to evaluate the algorithm’s quantum capabilities.
LuGo delays quantum conversion by performing more initial calculations, known as preprocessing, on the classical side before encoding the data as quantum circuits.
“With LuGo, we reduced the computational effort tremendously and observed better overall performance,” Lu said.
LuGo enabled the team to cut the number of quantum gates from 2 million to 91,000 – a reduction of more than 95 percent in computational demand. The improvement required just one of Frontier’s nearly 10,000 nodes.
“What LuGo does is extend the HHL solution’s capability to new levels of detail in much less time,” said Kalyan Gottiparthi, an ORNL computational scientist and co-author of the study. “As quantum computing grows as a field and as we move toward a fault-tolerant generation of quantum computers, we expect we’ll find more of these kinds of approaches that allow us to leverage established classical solutions in new ways adapted for a quantum advantage.”
This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program. The OLCF and NERSC are ASCR-funded Office of Science user facilities.
Related publication: Chao Lu, Muralikrishnan Gopalakrishnan Meena, and Kalyan Gottiparthi. “LuGo: An enhanced quantum phase estimation implementation.” Future Generation Computer Systems 178:
108270 (2026). DOI: https://doi-org.ornl.idm.oclc.org/10.1016/j.future.2025.108270
Our politics and foreign policy reporters will answer your questions live in a Q&A on Tuesday 6 October
The war with Iran has had major implications for Americans’ wallets, government spending and US foreign policy. It’s also been key in reshaping the political landscape as it enters its seventh month before the 2026 US midterms.
We’ll be hosting a live midterm election Q&A on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at 12pm EDT on the Guardian US site, with a panel of our politics and foreign policy reporters to help readers understand the costs of the war and political consequences for Trump and candidates running in November.
Bear 89, an adult brown bear nicknamed Backpack, is crowned the champion of 2026's Fat Bear Week. The tournament is held annually by Alaska's Katmai national park to celebrate the animals' preparation for winter hibernation.
The famously fact-averse president rolled out a new AI tool – but its answers don’t conform to his version of reality
Donald Trump, in a development that could almost be from a Greek tragedy, appears to have invented something that is willing to do what no one in his orbit will: tell him the truth.
The president launched America.gov on Tuesday, an AI platform which the White House says will make it easier for Americans to interact with the federal government and eventually complete services like renewing passports and enrolling in Medicare.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the Justice Department had filed a judicial misconduct complaint against federal judges in Minnesota after they spoke with the New York Times.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amid a number of updates for moderators and developers announced Wednesday comes bad news for supporters of a more open web: Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds. Reddit says RSS has now become a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse," which is why it's made the decision to wind down RSS feeds on its platform. "We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we're grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit," the company noted in its announcement, where it also shared a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API. Reddit said RSS support will cease on November 13.
[...] The RSS change was one of several updates issued on Wednesday by the company. Another big change will be the end of its public API. Public API access will also end by March 2027, which will impact any tools that used it for programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, those used by researchers, and AI products, such as AI assistants. Today, those assistants can use Reddit to answer questions, but after closing public API access, they will need to forgo commercial deals with Reddit for its data.
In addition, Reddit provided an update on its Rules Hub progress and auto-mod changes, and said it was "adding safeguards" to its classic, text-heavy version of its site known as Old Reddit. The latter will include limiting access to logged-in moderators and recent users -- changes Reddit also said were required because of "abusive scraping and automated traffic." Reddit said in the next few months it will limit access for logged-in users to those who have used Old Reddit in the last 90 days. The company also reminded developers building approved third-party apps and bots to register them with the company before January 12, 2027, to avoid disruption. After that date, Reddit will remove API access for any developer that hasn't registered.
FBI accuses Chloe Freeman of federal misdemeanor in case of undocumented Mexican migrant arrested in Michigan
The federal government is charging a Michigan nurse accused of illegally helping an undocumented immigrant, who was being treated in a hospital, escape from immigration officials, court records unsealed this week show.
An FBI agent’s declaration submitted in a federal court accuses Chloe Renae Freeman, 33, of “instigating or assisting escape”, a federal misdemeanor, by helping a patient leave an Ann Arbor hospital while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in May. The patient, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, had been arrested about two hours earlier by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) border patrol agents.
Arizona State have placed hockey coach Greg Powers on administrative leave as the school investigates the collapse of a player during an outdoor workout.
Arizona State’s Matthew Mayich collapsed during an outdoor workout in August. He suffered from external heat stroke that reduced flow of oxygen to his brain and is unlikely to recover, according to family attorney Rob Carey. Carey said the 21-year-old Mayich had shown signs of distress before his collapse at the workout, which took place in 89F heat. Carey also said there was no cold water tub available, which is often used to treat overheating. The Green Beret in charge of the practice, Tim Ziesel, did not have a contract with the university.
Twelve years after US mission against IS began, Trump hails ‘great day for America’ and calls Iraq war ‘a quagmire’
The Pentagon has announced it has formally completed its withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, two years after the withdrawal was agreed to and 12 years since the US mission to fight the Islamic State started.
After the announcement, Iran and its allies celebrated the departure as a victory, while Iraqi security experts worry that the withdrawal could give IS and others a chance to recover.
FTC move is first official US enforcement action on rogue AI agents, following surge in incidents first reported in July
The US’s main trade regulator is conducting an industry-wide investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers.
The investigation by the Federal Trade Commission is the first official US enforcement action that delves into rogue AI agents, following a surge in incidents first reported in July that have stoked fears among the public that uncontrolled AI could one day harm humans.
Senior Downing Street officials reach out to thinktanks and pollsters as they look to test backing for reversing Brexit
Senior Downing Street officials have been reaching out to thinktanks and pollsters as they look to test public support for the UK rejoining the EU.
Aides to Andy Burnham have been talking to EU experts in a range of organisations about how the public would view a promise to rejoin, as momentum builds behind including such a pledge in the next Labour manifesto.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Senate failed to advance a bill Wednesday that would have banned congressional stock trading after every Democrat voted against it.
Russell Hall, one of the freshman dorms on East Campus, is not housing any students for the 2026 fall semester. Russell Dining Hall is also out of commission, though the closures of both significant university buildings flew under the radar of most students upon entering the 2026-27 school year.
As the first couple of weeks of classes elapsed, news of the closures began to circulate, surprising many students who were completely unaware.
“I just heard people talk about it,” Noelle Chaing, a junior political science major, said. “First I heard that Russell Dining Fall was closed. I was like, ‘Oh interesting,’ I don’t know. And then I realized it was, like, the whole building.”
The only word released by the university can be found on the Resident Life and Housing page of the university’s website.
“Russell Hall is closed for fall 2026 to support university renovation opportunities,” the website states. “We are still in the reviewing and planning phase; however, strategic renovations are anticipated, and the closure allows for full review of space and building systems without disrupting students.”
With very little information about the abrupt closure, students have inevitably spread broken pieces of the truth and varying rumors about the quiet decision made by the university.
“I heard it was because of mold,” Chaing said. “That could be a rumor, I don’t know.”
Black mold was a common variable in many of these rumors, some even claiming to have experienced it when living in Russell their freshman year.
“In the first month or two of school, I got black mold poisoning,” Derrick Phillips, a senior sports management and business major, said. “And that was from drinking out of the water fountain.”
Aside from whispers of an alleged health code violation that the university may or may not be trying to keep on the down-low, the fact remains that a large dormitory that previously housed hundreds of students is now lying out of use.
When freshman biology major Chase Garrison moved in this past August, he quickly realized that he had been assigned to a forced triple — a situation where three students are assigned a room that was designed to only fit two.
“I had never had a roommate before, but from what I have heard from other people, our room is a lot smaller than what other people experience,” Garrison said.
Living in a triple is complicated enough, but Garrison found himself in a much more difficult situation. One of his two roommates dropped out after only a few days, leaving the fate of their tiny dorm room in the hands of the university.
“Since our third roommate, Jake, left, we have a vacant spot, which the university can basically put anybody in that dorm, and we have to live with them,” Garrison said. “Like it could be anybody.”
Only in their third week of college, Garrison and his remaining roommate are left feeling “panicky” as they anxiously await the arrival of a random third roommate in the too-small room. During a normal school year, situations like Garrison’s still occur, but with the recent Russell closure, buzz about an excess of forced triples is floating around campus.
Above all else, former Russell residents are frankly upset about the uncertain future looming over the place that harbored their very first college memories and friends. Many are expressing concerns that Russell will be closed permanently.
“They could renovate it, but I don’t think they should tear it down because it’s a pretty staple part of being a freshman,” Phillips said.
Chaing agrees.
“It makes me sad because I signed my name on the top of the door,” Chaing said. “I would probably pick it again if I could pick anywhere to live.”
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Mashable: Singapore's government is trying its hand at matchmaking again. The country's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) has launched FirstDate, a pilot dating service for singles aged 21 to 35. For now, it's open only to public officers, according to the service's website. Applications close Oct. 5. FirstDate is designed as an alternative to endless swiping.
Instead of browsing a stream of profiles, users fill out a questionnaire about their interests, habits, values, and preferences. The service then sends them one match per cycle (the time it takes to mutually accept and presumably meet up). Each match includes a compatibility score, a brief description of the person, and a personal note. [...]
The pilot arrives as Singapore's birth rate hits a new low, according to the Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times. The country's total fertility rate fell to 0.87 children per woman in 2025, down from 1.24 a decade earlier. In April, the government announced a new workgroup tasked with addressing falling birth rates, which is expected to report its findings by early 2027, The Straits Times reported. The service relies on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, a well-known mathematical method that solves the stable matching problem by pairing two sets of participants based on their ranked preferences.
Once matched, users have 72 hours to mutually accept before contact details are shared, with optional "Date Quests" and post-date surveys designed to encourage and assess in-person meetups. Accounts are verified through Singapore's Singpass digital ID system to reduce fake profiles, and profiles are only visible to assigned matches. GovTech says user data is protected under government security standards, is not sold to third parties, and can be deleted upon request.
Does anyone have suggestions for a convenient way to carry my GT around on campus? I got the official backpack from FM, but it sucks. Plus I also need to carry my school books with me and having 2 backpacks is inconvenient. I need a set up that doesn't inhibit my ability to ride to campus, and isn't overly rediculous to walk around with once there.
One idea that I haven't tried out yet is a kind of rolling cart set up (think custom hand truck for the GT). I'm capable of building one but I'm concerned about stowage while I'm riding.
EDIT
Thank you all for the replies and suggestions. I think what I'm going to try and do is crack open the old CAD software and try to design a sleek rolling caddy that kind of shoots the gap between the mounted wheels from makerworld some of you suggested and the mini hand truck shared in the comments. My goal is for it to be semi collapsible and lightweight such that it can be strapped to my backpack.
Meanwhile, does anyone have a 3d model of the GT or know where I might be able to find one?
When one track failed, Trump administration rushed immigration case of Palestine rights advocate Salah Sarsour
An immigration judge has ruled that the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque can be deported under a controversial, cold-war era law the Trump administration has sought to wield against foreign nationals who have been outspoken about Palestinian rights.
Salah Sarsour, a US permanent resident for nearly three decades, was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March. He was released after a federal judge found he had probably been detained in retaliation of his advocacy for Palestinian rights, which the federal judge said would render his detention unlawful.
Senate Democrats blocked a GOP-led effort to approve a bill aimed at shielding Americans from energy costs attributed to data centers, arguing it doesn't go far enough.
Trump criticized $2.4bn rehab amid attempts to pressure then Fed chair Jerome Powell into lowering interest rates
An internal watchdog said the Federal Reserve mismanaged costs associated with a $2.4bn renovation of its Washington DC headquarters, but noted that no criminal violations occurred, according to a report released on Wednesday.
For over a year, Donald Trump has centered his attacks against the Fed and former chair Jerome Powell around the renovations, including a months-long Department of Justice criminal investigation that was dropped in April.
Republicans supported legislation although Democrats said it wouldn’t effectively address energy consumption
Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked legislation intended to offset the impact of datacenters on consumer electricity bills, calling it a “toothless” attempt to address a top voter concern ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The Ratepayer Protection Act failed by a 57-to-43 vote, falling just shy of the 60 votes necessary to advance through the Republican-controlled chamber. Four Democrats – Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and both Georgia senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – joined Republicans in support of the measure.
As flight FZ 1073 soared west over the waters of the Gulf towards Israel, its passengers may have bemoaned a 20-minute delay at takeoff. For a low-cost airline route, flydubai’s daily service to Tel Aviv is usually convenient and reliable. The nonstop flight takes about three and a half hours and departs early enough from Dubai that it usually lands at Ben Gurion airport at about 9am local time.
That was not the case for Wednesday’s catastrophic flight. The passenger jet never made it to its scheduled destination. Instead, it dropped thousands of feet in seconds before limping down to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia – perhaps miraculously, since photos suggested a large part of the tail of the aircraft was missing.
Vultr will deploy first AMD Helios AI Rack by HPE systems featuring new purpose-built HPE Networking scale-up switching at its U.S. data centers
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 30, 2026 — HPE today announced a $1.2 billion order from Vultr to deploy AMD Helios AI Rack by HPE systems at Vultr’s cloud data center locations in the United States. It is HPE’s first order for the new AMD Helios system, which features purpose-built HPE Networking scale-up switching and software. HPE and AMD will support Vultr’s effort to meet service provider and enterprise demand for model training and inferencing workloads in their AI data centers.
“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in history and together with AMD and Vultr, we are building an open foundation to accelerate the next phase of AI,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “AMD Helios by HPE demonstrates HPE’s unique ability to engineer the complete AI architecture with rack-scale compute, scale-up networking, and direct liquid cooling, all delivered by our global services.”
The new order builds on nearly three years of collaboration between Vultr and Juniper Networks that continues to grow now that Juniper Networks is a part of HPE.
“Demand for high-performance AI infrastructure continues to outpace available capacity, and our work with AMD and HPE enables us to bring Helios rack-scale compute and scale-up networking online for customers faster. Together, we’re delivering the memory capacity, interconnect performance, and energy efficiency customers need to run the largest and most demanding AI training and inference workloads,” said J.J. Kardwell, CEO of Vultr.
The AMD Helios AI Rack by HPE is part of the HPE AI Data Center Solutions portfolio, a deeply integrated, production-ready infrastructure stack with AMD that is designed using open standards and optimized for the demanding economics and scale of the AI lifecycle.
Scale AI with an Open Architecture
AMD designed Helios as a high-density system for trillion-parameter model training and high-volume inference.
Each rack integrates 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs with AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, AMD Pensando Vulcano AI NICs networking, and AMD ROCm software. The unified design is optimized for power, cooling, and serviceability, while supporting open, interoperable rack-scale fabrics such as UALink over Ethernet (UALoE).
HPE Networking purpose-built for Helios, including six HPE Juniper Networking QFX5252 scale-up Ethernet switch trays per rack, connect all 72 GPUs with high-bandwidth, low-latency, standards-based Ethernet.
HPE Services reduces project and operational risk through expertise in end-to-end deployment and liquid-cooling for large AI clusters.
The AMD Helios by HPE order with Vultr delivers a tangible example of HPE’s integrated strategy that combines HPE Juniper Networking technologies with HPE compute, exascale liquid cooling, and rack-scale engineering to deliver an integrated, open Ethernet-based scale-up AI solution.
About HPE
HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE.
The first signs that an aging parent is struggling can be easy to miss. Knowing what to watch for can help families find support before a crisis forces the decision.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News
HOCKESSIN Del. – For many adult children, there isn’t a single moment when they realize Mom may need more help.
Instead, it happens slowly.
She asks the same question again. The refrigerator seems a little emptier. A bill gets paid late. She stops going to an activity she once enjoyed. Maybe she hesitates on the stairs or seems less comfortable driving at night.
Individually, those changes may not seem alarming. Together, however, they can signal that an aging parent is beginning to have difficulty managing life independently.
Recognizing those changes early can give families something particularly valuable: time and choices.
That is the focus of the first installment of Delaware LIVE’s series for adult caregivers — helping families recognize when a parent may need additional support and understand where to turn before an emergency makes the decision for them.
Why the person closest to Mom may miss it
One of the challenges is that aging usually happens gradually.
An adult child who sees a parent every day or every week naturally adjusts to small changes. A little more forgetfulness becomes familiar. Someone begins bringing Mom dinner more often. Another family member quietly starts paying a bill, driving her to appointments or handling something on the computer.
Without realizing it, the family may gradually be doing more and more.
Meanwhile, a sibling, grandchild or friend who has not seen Mom for several months may walk through the door and immediately notice something different.
“She seems slower.”
“She repeated that story three times.”
“The house doesn’t look like it used to.”
“That’s just not like Mom.”
Those observations shouldn’t automatically be treated as proof that something is wrong. Someone visiting for a few hours may see only a snapshot.
But they shouldn’t be dismissed either.
A useful question is: “What specifically did you notice?”
Specific observations — rather than general impressions — can help families determine whether a pattern is developing.
Watch for changes in everyday life
Memory loss is one possible warning sign, but it isn’t the only one.
Caregivers should pay attention to whether Mom is still managing the everyday activities she handled six months or a year ago.
Possible signs include:
Repeating questions or stories frequently.
Missing appointments or forgetting medications.
Unopened mail or unpaid bills piling up.
Difficulty preparing meals or forgetting to eat.
Expired food accumulating in the refrigerator.
Wearing the same clothes repeatedly or declining personal hygiene.
Increased clutter or an unusually messy home.
Trouble using appliances that were once familiar.
More falls, near-falls or difficulty getting out of a chair.
Unexplained weight loss or increased fatigue.
Withdrawing from friends, church, hobbies or social activities.
Becoming unusually anxious, irritable or suspicious.
Getting confused while driving or walking familiar routes.
Financial changes can be particularly important.
Late bills, duplicate payments, confusion about accounts or falling for scams may indicate that Mom is having more difficulty with judgment or organization even when casual conversation and memory still seem relatively normal.
The central question may be less about whether Mom occasionally forgets something and more about this:
Can she still function independently the way she did a year ago?
Listen to the people around her
Caregiving works best when one person doesn’t have to make every judgment alone.
Brothers and sisters, grandchildren, longtime friends, neighbors and others who know Mom well may notice changes the primary caregiver has gradually become accustomed to.
Families can periodically ask:
“Have you noticed anything different about Mom during the past six months?”
Then listen for examples.
If several people independently notice similar changes — problems with memory, mobility, organization, judgment or social engagement — it may be worth taking a closer look.
Writing down specific examples and approximate dates can also be useful when talking with Mom’s physician.
Why waiting can make things harder
Avoiding the conversation can feel easier, particularly when Mom values her independence and family members don’t want her to feel that decisions are being made for her.
But waiting until something happens can dramatically reduce the family’s choices.
Small problems can become larger ones: missed medications, poor nutrition, unpaid bills, falls, scams, driving problems or worsening health conditions.
And instead of making decisions gradually, the family may suddenly be making them in a hospital room after a fall or medical emergency.
Addressing concerns early doesn’t necessarily mean moving Mom into assisted living.
In fact, modest support may help her remain at home longer.
That support could include meal delivery, transportation, medication reminders, homemaker services, companion visits, an adult day program or a few hours of in-home care each week.
The better question may not be, “Does Mom need assisted living?”
It may be:
“What support would help Mom remain safe and independent?”
Start with a medical conversation
When noticeable changes begin occurring, Mom’s primary care physician or a geriatric specialist can be an important first stop.
Changes in memory, mood, balance or behavior can have many potential causes, including medications, hearing or vision problems, depression, illness, cognitive impairment or other medical conditions.
A medical evaluation can help families better understand what may be occurring and establish a baseline to compare against future changes.
Going into the appointment with specific examples is more useful than simply saying, “Mom seems different.”
Delaware caregivers don’t have to figure it out alone
Families also have Delaware organizations that can help them understand what assistance may be available.
Delaware Aging and Disability Resource Center: The state’s Aging and Disability Resource Center can help families learn about in-home care, transportation, meal programs, respite care, adult day programs, benefits and long-term care options. Phone: 800-223-9074
Easterseals Delaware Caregiver Resource Center: Easterseals provides caregiver education, support and guidance for families trying to understand aging and caregiving options. Its resources can also help caregivers develop plans and address the stress that often accompanies caring for a parent.
Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Valley Chapter: When memory or cognitive changes are part of the concern, the Alzheimer’s Association offers education, support groups, care consultations and guidance about evaluation and safety. Its 24-hour helpline is 800-272-3900.
Pay attention before the crisis
There is an important middle ground between doing nothing and moving a parent into assisted living.
For some families, the answer may simply be additional help around the house. For others, it may eventually involve home care, an adult day program, assisted living or another level of support.
The advantage of noticing changes early is that Mom can be part of those decisions.
Families have time to ask what she wants, understand the options, review finances and determine what level of assistance makes sense.
Sometimes the first indication is nothing more specific than a feeling shared by adult children everywhere:
Mom just doesn’t seem quite like herself anymore.
That feeling shouldn’t automatically lead to a conclusion.
But it may be a good reason to start paying closer attention.
CAREGIVER CHECK: THREE QUESTIONS TO ASK
Is Mom safe?
Look at falls, driving, medications, cooking and whether she can respond appropriately in an emergency.
Is Mom managing?
Look at bills, meals, housekeeping, appointments and other everyday responsibilities.
Is Mom different than she was a year ago?
Consider memory, judgment, personality, mobility, and social engagement.
If the answer to one of those questions is “I’m not sure,” it may be time to gather more information rather than wait for a crisis.
TO GO BOX
Easterseals Delaware Caregiver Resource Center New Castle: 302-221-2076 Milford: 302-253-1129 Website:Easterseals Caregiver Support
Provides caregiver education, support groups, planning assistance, respite resources and help connecting families with local services. Easterseals DE & MD Eastern Shore
Alzheimer’s Association 24/7 Helpline Phone: 800-272-3900 Website:Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Valley Chapter
Help for families concerned about memory loss, cognitive changes, dementia, safety and getting a loved one evaluated.
Delaware Aging and Disability Resource Center Phone: 800-223-9074 Website:DelawareADRC.com
A statewide starting point for information about in-home care, transportation, meals, respite programs, benefits and long-term care options. Delaware Health and Social Services
Editor’s Note: This is part of Delaware LIVE’s series for Adult Caregivers. The series is made possible by support from Easter Seals of Delaware and Eastern Maryland and Harmony Senior Living. To see all stories Delaware LIVE has developed as part of the special series, visit our Health & Wellness Page;
Platform innovations give enterprises governed access to their data and predictable AI costs as they move AI from pilot to production.
LONDON, Sept. 30, 2026 — Everpure today announced new platform capabilities designed to simplify enterprise data management, advancing its Data Primacy vision. Introduced at Pure//Accelerate in June, Data Primacy is the principle that data—not applications—must be the core driver of enterprise architecture in the AI era. Today’s updates continue to advance the modern data management capabilities required to solve bottlenecks stalling enterprise AI at scale: fragmented context, unpredictable inference costs, and slow, complex deployments.
“Enterprise AI is hitting a wall not because the models are lacking, but because data is not ready for real-time, autonomous agents,” said Prakash Darji, General Manager, Data & Digital Experience at Everpure. “We are eliminating that friction. By making enterprise data continuously governed, automated, and instantly accessible, we’re giving organizations the foundation to move AI out of the lab and into production with the necessary confidence.”
Making Enterprise Data Management Simple and Secure
Enterprises deploying AI agents often struggle to give them reliable, governed access to data across the business, limiting how much those agents can actually achieve. Everpure Data Intelligence solves this by discovering, classifying, and contextualizing enterprise information at its source—spanning the Everpure Platform, public clouds, SaaS applications, and third-party storage. Building on this, new capabilities give autonomous agents and administrators direct, secure access to live enterprise context without custom API work:
Native MCP Integration: Implements the open Model Context Protocol (MCP) so AI agents and security tools can query live data catalogs using natural language. Agents can now find relevant data and understand its sensitivity class as an input to AI, Agent Workflows, and Analytics.
Turn-Key Deployment: Streamlines deployment without complicated professional services engagements through the existing Pure1 console and accelerates time-to-value without the operational overhead of setting up separate management servers.
Privacy-First File Intelligence: Shows who can access each file share and how stale it is, without ever reading file content, so teams can fix exposure and reclaim capacity before opening shares to AI agents.
Delivering AI Performance, Next-Gen Efficiency, & Cost Predictability
In order to support growing workloads from archive to AI, Everpure is expanding the bounds of performance and capacity efficiency in a non-disruptive way. The new capabilities bring high-performance AI execution directly to data at the source and deliver production speed without ever moving data from its system of record:
Accelerated LLM Inference via PureKVA (Key-Value Accelerator): Everpure FlashBlade now pre-stages context directly into GPU memory to deliver up to 20x faster Time to First Token (TTFT). Supports enterprise multi-tenancy with zero dataset relocation, eliminating GPU idle time, increasing token throughput, and decreasing response lag for real-time apps.
Always-On DeepReduce Data Compression: Scans storage blocks continuously across FlashBlade systems to find sub-block data similarities that traditional deduplication misses, even on pre-compressed content. Usable storage capacity expands automatically without impacting write performance or requiring manual scheduling, significantly reducing hardware footprint and cross-cloud expenses.
Intelligent Token Optimization Reference Architecture: Given the need for enterprises to own their own data and optimize AI spend, Everpure now delivers a reference architecture using open weight models. This allows more control over data and predictable AI costs, cutting overall API token usage from external providers.
Individually, these capabilities close specific gaps in simplicity, security, performance, and cost. Together, they give enterprises a single, continuously updated foundation for managing their data and running AI in production, built to keep pace as agentic workflows scale. Because these capabilities classify what data is sensitive and who touches it, they also strengthen cyber resilience, since the same context that makes data safe for AI to use is what determines how it gets protected and what gets recovered first. The new capabilities announced today will be available this October.
Everpure (NYSE: P) allows organizations to take control of their data with an industry-leading, ever-evolving storage and data management platform. We help companies unleash the power of their data by ensuring it is accessible, intelligent, and ready to perform in the AI era. We make data management effortless while simultaneously scaling performance and significantly reducing energy consumption. With one of the highest Net Promoter Scores for over a decade, Everpure is the choice of the world’s most innovative organizations. For more information, visit www.everpuredata.com.
Met calls move ‘milestone’ moment that paves way for ‘very best possible evidence for charging decisions’
Police investigating the Grenfell Tower fire have asked prosecutors to consider charges including manslaughter and fraud against a range of companies and individuals.
The Metropolitan police announced they had given prosecutors evidence relating to 20 companies and organisations and 54 individuals ahead of charging decisions, in what the force described as a “milestone moment”.
Detention staff broke with safe standards of medical care for at least six detainees who died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in 2025, according to internal reviews posted on — and later removed from — ICE’s website.
The reviews found that staff across multiple ICE detention centers mismanaged medication, skipped physical exams, ignored lab orders, and delayed treatments for sick detainees. Detention staff often failed to properly document or communicate the status of their deteriorating patients. In several cases, they failed to provide timely or appropriate life-saving care during emergencies.
“Rampant systemic medical abuse is a core feature of the immigration detention system.”
“It’s very clear that the rampant systemic medical abuse is a core feature of the immigration detention system,” said Stacy Suh, program director of the Detention Watch Network, upon reviewing the topline findings. “You can’t get well in a detention center.”
At least 56 people have died in ICE custody under the second Trump administration. ICE’s own Health Services Corps conducts a “mortality review” following an in-custody death to assess whether appropriate medical care was provided. The findings of this report are based on medical records and staff testimony. (ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
A total of eight such reviews related to detainee deaths from 2025 were published in a trove of 25-plus documents on ICE’s public records library on September 25. Four days later, a little after a lawyer representing this reporter in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit noticed these documents, ICE appeared to have pulled them offline and de-indexed them.
While they were no longer available through internet searches, the records remained live on internet archives of the webpage. The larger trove of mortality reviews was first reported on by The American Prospect and the San Francisco Chronicle.
The eight reports contain granular details of the medical events leading up to 2025 deaths in custody of Johnny Noviello, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Marie Ange Blaise, Nhon Nguyen, Oscar Duarte Rascon, Santos Reyes Banegas, Tien Xuan Phan, and Chaofeng Ge. They provide the most comprehensive view yet into the escalating death toll in detention during President Donald Trump’s second term.
“Egregiously Managed Care”
The mortality review for Vargas, a 32-year-old from Mexico, found several clear examples of what ICE’s reviews called “inappropriate” care.
Vargas had complained of dizziness and blurred vision upon arrival at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona on August 4 last year. His labs also showed signs of uncontrolled diabetes. Ten days later, Vargas tested positive for Covid and was moved to a medical unit for isolation. His symptoms were treated with just a one-time dose of acetaminophen.
When Vargas’s chest X-rays later showed signs of pneumonia, he was treated with antibiotics that “did not align” with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, his ICE mortality review concluded. On August 30, a few days after being released from isolation, Vargas reported having trouble breathing. He was treated with albuterol, an asthma inhaler.
This was “not the right or sufficient treatment for someone at this level of respiratory distress,” said Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who reviewed the reports for The Intercept.
A day later, the symptoms worsened. He was complaining of shoulder pain, but wasn’t checked for oxygen levels. An employee found Vargas unresponsive later that day.
“This is a case of pretty egregiously managed care,” Peeler said. “Waiting for an emergency is not a way to treat people who are sick.”
The findings appear consistent with a new report by the advocacy group the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project surveying 64 detainees at Arizona ICE facilities.
“With essentially no oversight,” Liz Casey, a social worker and author of the report, said in a statement about the report, “it is nearly impossible for individuals in detention to get any assistance for urgent issues like medical neglect or abuse.”
Preventable Death
Another mortality review uncovered fresh information in the death of Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian national, on June 23, 2025, at ICE’s Federal Detention Center in Miami. Noviello’s autopsy ruled that his cause of death was a preventable form of kidney failure.
When Noviello entered the ICE facility, he had a documented history of seizures and high blood pressure, for which he was medicated. The intake nurse at this facility ordered labs and allowed Noviello to continue taking his prescription medications himself.
The labs were never completed, according to the new documents. Noviello was referred to a behavioral health specialist because he reported using one of his anti-seizure medications, a benzodiazepine, for anxiety.
On May 29, a corrections employee flagged Noviello for “a possible hunger strike” and medical staff started logging an increase in depression, disorientation, and poor hygiene. By June 20, detention staff put Noviello in solitary confinement “for increased observation” and confiscated his medicine to administer at the officer’s station.
Three days later, a behavioral specialist documented that Noviello had not received his medication and referred him to a psychiatrist.
The ICE death review found that the provider in charge “did not place pill line orders, obtain vital signs, conduct a physical examination, or document a follow-up plan.” When Noviello was found unresponsive on the floor later, the staff did not “provide effective CPR or secure his body to the gurney during transportation,” the auditors concluded.
Botched Emergency Responses
Botched emergency responses were noted in two other cases.
Blaise, a Haitian national and the only woman who has died in ICE custody so far during Trump’s current term, entered the Broward Transitional Center in Florida with elevated blood pressure in April 2025. Twenty days later, she collapsed.
Her mortality review found that health staff didn’t give her rescue breaths and “failed to initiate” CPR “despite Ms. Blaise’s pulselessness.”
“Between 8:45 p.m. and 8:58 p.m., health staff monitored Ms. Blaise pending EMS personnel’s arrival,” the report notes, instead of actively trying to resuscitate her. They also did not record her vital signs during the response.
Ge’s transfer summary had mentioned a past suicide attempt, a mood disorder, and use of antidepressants, but the provider in charge of his care “did not take appropriate action,” according to the review.
Four days in, guards found him hanging in a bathroom stall at around 5:20 a.m. Instead of immediately cutting him down, they left the scene to first call for help and thus “delayed life-saving measures” by 5 minutes, the report said. Staff “lacked knowledge” of basic life-saving measures, the report found, noting they did chest compressions too fast and delivered rescue breaths inconsistently.
Revelatory Reports
The reviews of Nguyen and Rascon, in which ICE auditors determined that medical care met adequate standards, were nevertheless revelatory. Both men entered ICE custody extremely unwell. Nguyen’s diagnoses included dementia; Rascon, 59, appeared to have late-stage Alzheimer’s, multi-organ failure, and several infections. Both volleyed back and forth between detention and local hospitals.
In Nguyen’s case, ICE’s own medical staff noted that it did not have the resources to care for Nguyen, who was 55, or assist him with his daily life — and requested his release from custody.
As the Trump administration undertook its deportation blitz, the number of people in immigration detention ballooned, from 40,000 people in January 2025 to nearly 66,000 by December 2025, according to the American Immigration Council.
At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security gutted oversight and transparency mechanisms.
“We’re seeing record numbers of people, including elderly people, people who are pregnant, people who have serious medical issues,” said Suh, of Detention Watch Network. “All of those folks are now being funneled into detention into a system that does not provide adequate health care — and has never provided adequate health care.”
fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief. The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration.
The administration's new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people's interactions with the federal government.
Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job -- the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site -- or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government's vast umbrella.
"Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service," said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government's National Design Studio. But the reality is that the most advanced actions won't be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government's websites. The current version of America.gov can only do "answers." U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said the new chatbot is powered by Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. "We have great partners behind the scenes," Gebbia told CNBC's "Squawk Box" shortly before the site, America.gov, went live around 10 a.m. ET.
"Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease," the company said in a blog post. "By supporting the administration's vision for digital modernization, we are committed to making these everyday public services seamless, accessible, and responsive for all Americans."
The Traitors and big film shoots help boost economy but some highlight lack of opportunities for local talent
Scotland’s striking Ardross Castle, the oldest star of The Celebrity Traitors, which kicks off on Thursday night, is just one of the stops on the Scottish tourist board’s “screen tourism” trail. From Outlander and The Odyssey filming in the Highlands and islands, to Glasgow city centre standing in for New York and Gotham City in the latest instalments of Indiana Jones and Batman respectively, film and TV is increasingly big business in Scotland.
The country’s screen sector, growing year on year, is projected to be worth £1bn to the economy by 2030. But while some have celebrated the upsides of a booming production sector, others highlight a lack of opportunities for Scottish talent and the challenges of excessive tourism in areas featured on screen.
Houston announce crowd of 34,011 for playoff opener
Players criticize boos during 6-3 defeat by White Sox
Astros are first division winner with .500 or worse mark
The crowd at Daikin Park was surprisingly sparse as the Houston Astros – baseball’s first division winner with a .500 or worse record – opened their AL wildcard series with a 6-3 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday.
Large swaths of seats, especially in the upper deck, sat empty while right-hander AJ Blumbaugh delivered the game’s first pitch at 4.10pm. The bottom two levels were much fuller than the upper deck, but many seats in the lower two decks were also empty.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has reacted warmly to Andy Burnham’s suggestion that the UK could rejoin the EU.
“Welcome back,” the French leader said in English with a smile at a news conference in Madrid on Wednesday. Macron continued in French: “If the British want to come back and if the prime minister is moving in that direction, I think that is very good news, both for his country and for the Europeans.”
Republican lawmaker will succeed Michael Quaranta in December, bringing experience in business policy, education and economic development to Delaware’s largest business organization
WILMINGTON, Del. — State Rep. Michael F. Smith, a Republican lawmaker whose legislative work has included economic development, taxes, education and state capital spending, has been selected as the next president of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce.
Smith will succeed Michael J. Quaranta, who plans to retire in mid-December after eight years leading the organization.
The State Chamber’s board selected Smith following a national search, according to an announcement Wednesday.
“Michael Smith brings strong advocacy experience, a deep understanding of Delaware, and a proven ability to build relationships across sectors,” John Gooden, chairman of the State Chamber’s board of directors, said in announcing the appointment.
The move will put a sitting state legislator at the helm of one of Delaware’s most influential business advocacy organizations at a time when employers and lawmakers are debating taxes, state spending, workforce development, health care, energy costs and Delaware’s overall competitiveness.
From Legislative Hall to business advocacy
Smith was first elected to the Delaware House in 2018 and represents the 22nd District, covering Pike Creek Valley and portions of Hockessin and Newark. The Delaware General Assembly currently lists Smith as a Republican representing the district.
His committee assignments have given him a role in several issues directly affecting Delaware employers. Smith serves on the House Revenue and Finance Committee and the Economic Development, Banking, Insurance and Commerce Committee, as well as the Education and Health and Human Development committees.
He also serves on the Joint Capital Improvement Committee, commonly known as the Bond Committee, which develops Delaware’s annual capital spending bill.
Outside Legislative Hall, Smith has worked at the University of Delaware since 2014 and currently serves as director of strategic initiatives and partnerships in the College of Health Sciences. His work there has involved partnerships connecting higher education, health, workforce development and outside organizations.
“I am grateful for the confidence the Board has placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce,” Smith said. “The State Chamber has a proud history of advocating for Delaware employers and ensuring the business community has a voice on the issues that affect them.”
Smith said he also sees the Chamber as an organization capable of bringing different groups together to address shared challenges.
“I look forward to building on that work on behalf of employers and employees across Delaware,” he said.
A potentially significant voice in Dover
The appointment could give Smith an unusually direct perspective on the intersection of government and business policy.
The State Chamber, founded in 1837 as the Wilmington Board of Trade, advocates for employers on public policy and economic issues and regularly participates in debates in Dover involving taxation, regulation, workforce policy, economic development and the cost of doing business.
Smith’s legislative background means he arrives with firsthand knowledge of the General Assembly and its budget and committee processes.
The Chamber did not address in Wednesday’s announcement how Smith’s new position will affect his service in the Delaware House. Any change in his legislative status would be a separate matter from his appointment to the Chamber.
Quaranta leaves after eight years
Smith will take over an organization that changed significantly during Quaranta’s eight-year tenure.
According to the Chamber, Quaranta expanded member participation in policy committees, updated conferences and other programming and oversaw development of the organization’s 2025-27 strategic plan.
The Chamber also created the Delaware Employers and Employees Education Fund, a 501(c)(4) organization focused on voter education, and rebranded its charitable organization as the Delaware State Chamber Foundation.
It introduced additional policy and advocacy resources, including its “How They Voted” legislative scorecard and “Delaware Competitiveness Bluebook.”
The Chamber said its annual budget nearly doubled during Quaranta’s tenure despite more than two years of disruption associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Mike Quaranta has led the State Chamber through a period of meaningful change and growth,” Gooden said. “He has helped modernize the organization, strengthen its connection with members, and expand the ways the State Chamber serves Delaware’s business community.”
Smith and Quaranta are expected to work together during a transition period before Quaranta’s departure in December.
To Go Box
What: Delaware State Chamber of Commerce leadership transition
Incoming president: Michael F. Smith, state representative for Delaware’s 22nd District and director of strategic initiatives and partnerships at the University of Delaware College of Health Sciences
Outgoing president: Michael J. Quaranta
Transition: Smith and Quaranta will work together before Quaranta retires in mid-December.
Learn more: Visit the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce for information about the organization, its advocacy work and programs.
This blog is now closed, you can read our full report on this story here
Netanyahu said one of the FlyDubai pilots stabbed his fellow pilot and intended to crash the plane.
He added that one of the passengers on the flight managed to break into the cockpit with one of the crew members, and together they “neutralised” the attacking pilot.
Almost all the passengers on the flight were Israelis. During the flight, as they were approaching Israel, one of the pilots stabbed the other pilot, and it appears he was attempting to crash the plane with everyone on board.”
Developing North Sea fields does not contradict net zero goals, according to Simone Rossi
New oil and gas projects are a “no-brainer” that pose “no contradiction” to the net zero agenda, according to the head of EDF Energy.
Simone Rossi has joined a string of renewables leaders in making the case for more North Sea production as the government prepares to decide on two projects there.
Donald Trump and six tech executives voluntarily signed the document, which included a misspelling, committing to safely developing AI
The White House misspelled “United States” under the signature of Donald Trump on an accord he signed with AI executives on Tuesday.
At the bottom of the accord on “Super Intelligence”, the term Trump has used to rebrand artificial intelligence, the president’s signature appeared as “President of the Unites States”.
Same thing happened with my first pint s , I was able to switch it to the single sensor mode and that sort of settled it.
New board (GT) same problem sensors not picking up my foot, switch it to single and not having as much luck as with the pint, thinking cause the larger frame and slightly more ridge to the edge of the foot area. If i grip the the board with my hand left and right sensors respond well.
Looked it up and I have seen other having similar issues but they are mostly older posts. Curious if others are having these issues lately and what possible fixes there are. Tired of playing titter totter whenever im trying to start riding
Settler violence in West Bank makes everyday life ‘untenable’ for Palestinians, says ICRC after assault on family trying to return home in Jalud
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said Israeli settler violence in the West Bank has made everyday life for Palestinians “untenable”, as a mob attack on Palestinians trying to return home prompted one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rivals to warn of a campaign of settler terror.
More than 100 militant settlers overwhelmed Israeli security forces early on Tuesday to attack a Palestinian family as they attempted to reclaim their homes which had been seized by settlers in the West Bank village of Jalud. Three Israeli security officials were injured and houses were set on fire.
The “espionage alert” issued by MI5 is part of an extraordinary shift by the British government to raise public alarms about the scale and threat of Chinese espionage.
Washington, DC — A White House agreement promoting “super intelligence” drew unexpected attention Wednesday after official images published by President Donald Trump and the White House misspelled the name of the country beneath the president’s signature.
The “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities,” produced following Trump’s meeting with leading artificial intelligence executives, identified him as “President of the Unites States.” The erroneous image appeared in posts on both X and Trump’s Truth Social account, quickly generating ridicule online.
The mistake was particularly conspicuous because the agreement focuses on managing increasingly sophisticated technology. Trump has also pushed companies and federal officials to replace the term “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence,” arguing the new description better reflects the technology’s capabilities.
Beyond the typo, the accord establishes four voluntary safety principles for companies developing advanced AI. They include stronger internal cybersecurity controls, dedicated monitoring teams, independent outside audits and committees responsible for reviewing safety findings.
Executives associated with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and Nvidia signed the agreement. Trump has generally favored industry self-regulation rather than extensive federal restrictions, even as several participating technology leaders have publicly warned about risks from increasingly powerful AI systems.
The White House had not publicly explained how the spelling error made it into the released document.
Washington, DC — The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged in federal court that its program for identifying alleged noncitizen voters can mistakenly flag American citizens, adding to concerns over the Trump administration’s expanded voter-fraud enforcement effort.
The admission came in litigation challenging DHS’s Unlawful Voter Initiative. According to court filings cited by Reason, officials identified “potential inaccuracies” in the system and acknowledged that, in rare circumstances, U.S. citizens could be incorrectly classified as noncitizens.
The problem is not theoretical. DHS initially told Nevada that 15,903 possible noncitizens appeared on the state’s voter rolls. That number was later reduced to 185 names, and subsequent review found all 185 were U.S. citizens.
The initiative compares voter records against immigration databases and can generate investigative leads entered into TECS, a federal law-enforcement system used by Customs and Border Protection and other agencies. DHS documents describe TECS as a platform used to share law-enforcement and inspection information among federal, state, local, tribal and international partners.
DHS says safeguards exist to prevent agents from mistakenly contacting citizens, but the filings leave unanswered what happens to Americans already entered into TECS because of erroneous matches.
The case adds to broader questions about an administration effort aimed at a form of illegal voting that research and past election audits have repeatedly found to be rare.
Picking a Caribbean island usually starts with beaches, flight prices or hotel deals. New travel data suggests a faster way to narrow the list. Start with who's coming with you.
hcs_$reboot writes: Trump hosted executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia, and other tech companies at the White House. They agreed to voluntary AI-safety standards, including independent audits and safeguards aimed at preventing AI systems from accessing or hacking technical systems in unintended ways. Trump also strongly backed the continued rapid expansion of AI data centers, despite concerns over their electricity demand, utility costs, and other impacts on local communities. He said he is considering creating a 10-member board to oversee AI safety and plans to appoint a new White House official to lead AI policy.
The meeting comes amid growing concerns about the risks posed by advanced AI, including reports from OpenAI and Anthropic that their AI agents had gone rogue and hacked into other companies' systems. A nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted September 17-20 found that 73% of respondents worried AI companies had not done enough to prevent AI from causing serious harm to society. During the meeting, Trump also directed government agencies to use the term "super intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence" when referring to the technology.
PM also defends decision to release suspects on bail and expresses ‘complete confidence’ in security services
There are “strong indications” that Iran played a role in events in which five men were arrested near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire as part of a terror investigation, Andy Burnham has said.
Speaking to the media at the end of the Labour party conference in Liverpool, Burnham said he could not give any more details amid a police investigation, but that Iran was believed to be involved.
Seven others found guilty of lesser charges in connection to incident in 2021 when inflatable dinghy sank killing at least 27 people with four more still missing
A Paris court has jailed six men for manslaughter over the deaths of at least 27 people in the worst mass drowning on record from a small-boat crossing in the Channel.
Seven other men were found guilty of lesser smuggling charges with varying degrees of seriousness, including facilitating illegal immigration as part of an organised gang and criminal conspiracy.
Women say nothing has changed since Delhi’s infamous Nirbhaya bus rape case 14 years ago
The posters, just like the women holding them, were taking no prisoners. “Girls don’t need curfews, rapists need consequences,” read one. “Lock your dicks rather than your women at home,” read another.
As hundreds of women walked from the gates of their university campus into the streets of Delhi – where sexual harassment, assault, catcalling and molestation are a constant, daily threat – they shouted together in a chorus of rage and defiance: “We want justice.”
Late-night hosts weighed in on Trump’s relationship with tech leaders and the White House’s new AI-powered site
On Tuesday night, late-night hosts discussed a Maha summit in Washington DC, the White House’s new AI-powered website and Donald Trump once again falling asleep on live TV.
Independent commission accuses country of failing Indigenous people, amid rising tensions over land rights
An independent commission set up by the Swedish state has called on the country’s government to apologise for the “harm and injustice inflicted upon the Sami people” and to start a national process for “redress and reconciliation”.
The Truth Commission for the Sami People also called for a special apology to be issued urgently to elderly Sami people who were forced as children to attend segregated so-called “nomad school” and other boarding schools where they were “subjected to violations or abuse”.
Traders see about a 35% chance of an October rate hike, down from about 45% following White House pressure
Good economic news boosted Wall Street’s main indexes on Wednesday, as a softer-than-anticipated inflation reading buoyed up hopes that the Federal Reserve might not hike rates as soon as next month.
A commerce department report showed the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index stood at 3.4% on an annual basis in August against estimates of 3.7%, per economists polled by Reuters.
Prime minister’s pure political argument marks new era for party as he sets out his plans and priorities
The hottest ticket at Labour conference – after Andy Burnham’s speech – was an afterparty in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle, headlined with a set by the noughties girlband Sugababes. As Labour activists and ministers belted out the lyrics under pink spotlights, it was hard not to draw some parallels with the party’s recent history.
There have been painful lineup changes and a lot of internal division, but this week onstage in Liverpool the originals are back together and they only played the hits. The fans can’t get enough.
Five specimens from the Cloverly Formation assemblage after destructive sampling for isotopic composition and laser ablation analysis. (Idaho Museum of Natural History via SWNS)
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s total war costs will reach $155bn this year and the government is struggling to close a $27bn funding gap to ensure it can still conduct combat operations at the start of 2027,prime minister Sergii Koretskyi said.
Koretskyi said the government planned to cover $7bn of the gap by postponing expenditure, reallocating money from other parts of the budget and cutting some costs, and was in talks with partners on how to cover the remaining $20bn, Reuters reported.
Across advertisements and interviews, U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, has repeatedly criticized Iowa Rep. Josh Turek, D-Council Bluffs, for missing a substantial number of Iowa House votes during the 2026 legislative session.
“Josh Turek skipped 58% of the votes at the Statehouse this year,” Hinson said in one ad, posted Sept. 2 on Facebook.
Hinson, who represents Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, is running against Turek for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat, currently held by retiring Republican Sen. Joni Ernst.
It’s accurate that Turek missed a substantial number of votes in the Iowa House this session. Some experts said they don’t consider the absences to be unusual for a candidate who is on the campaign trail, but they also noted that Turek’s number of absences still far outpaces others.
Turek’s missed votes
Politifact Iowa did the math. According to the Iowa House Journals, of the 445 votes held on the House floor during the Jan. 12 to April 2 legislative session, Turek missed 261 — which is roughly 58%. The numbers align with findings from KCRG and KTIV.
In a statement to PolitiFact Iowa, the Hinson campaign said, “The bottom line is that Josh Turek skips votes to support farmers, veterans, and rural communities but votes like a liberal when he does show up.”
Kedron Bardwell, Simpson College professor of political science, told PolitiFact Iowa its analysis is accurate, based on the tracking of legislative votes.
The number, though, only applies to House floor votes. It does not take committee or subcommittee votes into consideration.
Turek had the second-most absences of any member in the Iowa House during the 2026 session. Only Rep. Jerome Amos Jr., D-Waterloo, missed more votes, according to KTIV.
Bardwell said it is not uncommon for representatives to be absent on occasion, but the large volume of missed votes is what stands out in Turek’s case.
“Even going back a few years, there’s very few candidates that I can find that ran for higher office and missed as many [votes] as he did,” he said.
Bardwell said his research of legislative votes this year shows the percentage of missed votes for representatives rarely exceeded 20 to 30% — a stark contrast to Turek’s figure, which is nearly double that.
Jack Hunt, editor and publisher of the Iowa Legislative News Service who has 30 years of experience covering the Statehouse, said a large number of absences are not unexpected in this case.
“Any legislator running for another office tends to miss days out at the Capitol,” Hunt said.
Hunt said in Iowa, a bill doesn’t reach the floor unless the majority party expects it to pass, and he couldn’t recall a single instance this session when a bill was decided by a single vote.
Because of this, Hunt said, in his opinion, floor votes are “simply performance,” and Turek’s absence is not as significant as his opponent says.
“When I see the ads, ‘Oh, [Turek] missed 58% of the votes,’ my honest thought is ‘So what?’ Hunt said. “It’s probably absolutely true, and it is utterly meaningless.”
When contacted by PolitiFact Iowa , the Turek campaign said, “Josh Turek is one of Iowa’s most effective and bipartisan legislators, voting with Republicans more than 700 times to lower costs, cut taxes, and keep Iowans safe.”
Turek’s longer voting track record
The 58% figure stands out among Turek’s career voting record. As Iowa Capital Dispatch reported, Turek has had an 81% attendance record since taking office in January 2023, according to Legiscan data.
In 2025, the Iowa House recorded 379 House floor votes. Turek missed 37, or 9.8%.
In 2024 and 2023, Turek missed 12.2% and 5.4% of votes, respectively.
Our ruling
Hinson said Turek “skipped 58% of the votes at the Statehouse this year.”
Of the 445 votes held on the House floor during the Jan. 12 to April 2 legislative session, Turek missed 261, or roughly 58%.
Some experts said absences aren’t unusual for someone campaigning, but they also noted that Turek’s number of absences still far outpaces others.
The governor of the Bank of England has called for the “right to intervene” in the AI industry amid growing fears that rogue models could take the financial system hostage.
Andrew Bailey said the risks posed by frontier AI models – a number of which have gone rogue in recent months – were “real and increasingly significant”. Meanwhile, it was becoming harder for the public to have proper oversight of powerful AI models that were “functioning within a self-reinforcing loop”.
Glass art takes over Seattle Oct. 15–18, 2026 for Refract, bringing 80+ events, live demos, artist studio tours and hands-on experiences across the city.
Unprecedented university donation from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin will go toward building a new Miami campus
Carnegie Mellon University will receive an unprecedented $3bn donation from the billionaire investor Ken Griffin, making it the largest single donation in the history of US education.
Griffin, 57, is the founder and CEO of Citadel, described as the most profitable hedge fund in history. The money is going toward a new Miami campus as well as big investments at the university’s longtime home in Pittsburgh.
Plane made emergency landing after pilot tried to crash aircraft, Israeli PM says, as officials investigate whether it was an attempted terror attack
One of the pilots of a plane flying from the UAE to Israel stabbed his co-pilot and appeared to tryto crash the plane, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, as Israeli officials said they were investigating whether the incident was an attempted terror attack on Israelis. Here is what we know so far:
A commercial plane travelling from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to Israel was forced to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, after an apparent brawl between its pilots prompted distress signals that briefly raised fears of an attempted hijacking. The flydubai flight was over Jordan when it diverted to Saudi Arabia, transmitting three emergency signals, one of which indicated a possible unlawful interference.
The plane dipped dramatically during the reported fight, descending about 16,000ft in just two minutes. Israeli officials scrambled fighter jets, fearful of a possible hijacking attempt on a plane containing dozens of Israelis, and the plane landed at Tabuk airport in north-western Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu said one of the flydubai pilots stabbed his co-pilot and appeared to be intending to crash the plane. He added that a passenger managed to break into the cockpit with one of the crew members, and together they “neutralised” the attacking pilot.
Netanyahu described it as “an extremely severe security incident”. Other officials, including the defence minister, Israel Katz, have called it an attempted terrorist attack. Netanyahu thanked the passengers and crew who helped to stop the attack, saying they “showed exceptional resourcefulness and courage”.
An Israeli official has identified the attacker as an Omani national, Reuters reported.
The Boeing 737 plane, which Israeli officials said had between 160 and 180 passengers onboard, transmitted a general emergency signal about two and a half hours after leaving Dubai, according to the flight-tracking website Flightradar24.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect's arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p. According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between 1.5 million euros and 2.7 million euros.
At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle "Umbreon" to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group. Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended). Van der Stap had publicly presented himself as a "reformed hacker" after serving prison time for data theft and extortion. In a Sept. 9 interview, KrebsOnSecurity said he claimed he was trying "to turn his life around and make a positive contribution to society," while working in offensive security and attempting to make amends to former victims.
A condiment worthy of compliments, or one that gets a dressing down? Consumer advocacy group Choice has taste tested 29 store-bought mayonnaises, and found the cheapest product is also the best.
Aldi’s Colway Real Mayonnaise placed equal first with a score of 80%. A jar costs $2.79, or 61c per 100g – the lowest price per unit of the product spread. Judges relished its “mild” and “pleasant” aroma and “traditional mayonnaise appearance”, while noting its “creamy, smooth texture with balanced citrus acidity, subtle sweetness, mustard and whole-egg flavour”.
Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia criticizes immigration crackdown as ranchers’ associations condemn ICE activity
A close political ally of Donald Trump has broken from the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda and recommended it “step back” to evaluate what it could do better.
“To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you’re doing something wrong,” Jim Justice, a Republican senator of West Virginia, told Politico. “And in this situation, with all that’s going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say: ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that.”
Tens of thousands of people have formally demanded NHS England blocks the Palantir-powered national medical data platform from handling their personal information.
More than 44,000 people have filed legal objections to their health data being shared with, stored in or used by the nationwide Federated Data Platform (FDP) operated using the US company’s AI technology.
As soaring rents and house prices across Europe feed into the political discourse, campaigners believe they have a rare opportunity to force housing to the top of the agenda
It was billed as one of the largest real-estate events in Europe, attracting as many as 15,000 people ranging from investment firms to developers. But as the District trade show and summit got under way last week in Madrid, housing campaigners from 140 organisations across the globe turned up, intent on holding their own “counter-summit” to push back against the idea of housing as a financial asset.
Many of the campaigners arrived in the Spanish capital as Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman who uses a wheelchair, was being evicted from the apartment where she had lived for seven decades. As anger over the eviction gave way to days of protests and an encampment in the heart of Madrid, the presence of campaigners from Italy to Ireland was a poignant reminder of the global dimension of the crisis.
TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 30, 2026 — Classiq today announced its Fault Tolerance Engine, a new product capability that translates optimized logical quantum programs into fault-tolerant execution plans, and measures from those same plans the physical resources and reliability required to run the application on a real machine.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing introduces a fundamentally different software challenge. A logical quantum operation cannot simply be passed directly to hardware. It may need to be implemented across many physical qubits, protected through repeated quantum error-correction cycles, and coordinated with layout, routing, scheduling, classical feedback and specialized resources.
Classiq’s Fault Tolerance Engine performs that translation. It carries the logical quantum program built in Classiq’s high-level modeling and synthesis environment through to a concrete fault-tolerant implementation: how the protected qubits are laid out, how their interactions are routed, and the schedule that runs them.
The engine can produce an architecture-aware execution plan and resource estimates covering factors including physical qubit requirements, error-correction cycles, code distance, runtime, routing, scheduling, and accumulated error. It can also account for particularly expensive fault-tolerant operations, including T gates and the magic-state resources commonly required to implement them. Because these figures are measured from the plan the engine actually produced, rather than calculated from formulas, they describe the implementation a machine would run.
This allows users to move beyond asking whether an algorithm is logically correct or whether a circuit can be optimized. They can begin asking whether a target application is physically implementable on a specific machine, based on that machine’s measured noise characteristics, which resources dominate its cost, and what would need to be improved to make the application practical.
“Fault tolerance changes the question quantum software has to answer,” said Nir Minerbi, co-founder and CEO of Classiq. “It is no longer enough to create an efficient logical circuit. You need to understand what that program becomes when every logical operation has to be protected, routed, scheduled and realized using physical hardware. Our Fault Tolerance Engine extends the Classiq approach into that layer, so users can work from the application they want to build all the way toward understanding what it will take to implement it reliably.”
Optimizing Before Physical Costs Multiply
Classiq’s model-first approach is particularly important in fault-tolerant computing because the most efficient logical circuit is not necessarily the most efficient fault-tolerant implementation.
Physical cost can depend on factors including T-gate requirements, routing, parallelism, code distance and the amount of fault-tolerant infrastructure needed to support a computation. Choices that appear similar at the logical level can therefore produce very different requirements once mapped to a protected physical architecture.
Classiq begins earlier in the development process. Users describe algorithmic intent in Qmod, Classiq’s high-level quantum programming language, and the synthesis engine determines an optimized logical implementation under the relevant constraints. The Fault Tolerance Engine extends that workflow by translating the logical program into the requirements of fault-tolerant execution.
The engine’s routing is an optimization that decides how protected qubits are laid out and how their interactions are routed so the implementation uses as few physical qubits as possible, which is usually the largest single cost in a fault-tolerant computation.
That architecture creates a path to evaluating implementation choices before their cost is multiplied across potentially large numbers of physical qubits and error-correction cycles.
For Classiq users, the result is a broader development workflow. The platform can support not only the design and optimization of quantum algorithms, but also the study of their physical feasibility. Reducing what a workload requires, and predicting it realistically, is what moves a first useful fault-tolerant run earlier in the roadmap.
From Resource Estimates to Implementability
The Fault Tolerance Engine goes beyond resource estimation alone: it both analyzes the requirements of a fault-tolerant computation and generates an architecture-aware execution plan for carrying it out on the target hardware.
A fault-tolerant computation is both a spatial and temporal problem. Protected logical qubits must be positioned, interactions must be routed, error-correction procedures must run continuously, costly auxiliary resources must be available when needed, and the full computation must meet a target reliability level.
By bringing these factors together, the Fault Tolerance Engine can help users examine questions such as:
How many physical qubits could an application require?
How many error-correction cycles are needed?
What runtime could the resulting fault-tolerant computation require?
Which operations or resources represent the main bottleneck?
How do layout, routing and scheduling affect the performance?
What level of protection is needed to reach a target failure probability?
Which aspects of the hardware or software would need to improve for the workload to become practical?
These capabilities are relevant to application developers evaluating future quantum workloads, enterprises planning quantum programs, and research organizations comparing algorithms and architectures. They matter equally to hardware teams: a complete fault-tolerant execution plan tied to a specific machine gives a software vendor and a hardware builder the same concrete artifact to work against when planning a joint roadmap.
“Fault-tolerant computing makes the software stack more important, not less,” Minerbi said. “The gap between an algorithm and its physical realization becomes much larger once quantum error correction is introduced. Our goal is to give users a way to reason across that gap, while continuing to work at the high level of abstraction where meaningful applications can actually be designed.”
The Fault Tolerance Engine extends Classiq’s existing architecture rather than creating a separate development environment for fault-tolerant computing. Classiq’s platform already separates application intent from low-level implementation, allowing its synthesis technology to explore implementation alternatives and optimize quantum programs under hardware and resource constraints.
By extending that approach into fault-tolerant compilation and execution planning, Classiq is broadening the platform from designing hardware-ready quantum circuits to producing fault-tolerant implementations and the resource and reliability picture that comes with them.
Classiq, a leading quantum computing software company, provides enterprise-grade technology that makes it practical to develop scalable, efficient quantum applications. Used by dozens of global enterprises, the Classiq platform combines AI agents, a high-level quantum programming language and design automation to accelerate the development of optimized, hardware-ready quantum software. The platform also supports hardware benchmarking, cost and performance optimization, and execution across quantum hardware platforms.
National inquiry will conduct local investigations and look at wider picture of sexual abuse and exploitation of children
Birmingham and Wales will be investigated as part of an independent inquiry into grooming gangs, it was announced on Wednesday.
The inquiry, chaired by the former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, will have the power to compel witnesses and obtain documents to interrogate what individuals and agencies “did or did not do to protect children from being sexually abused”.
In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
Photo: Images provided by the Delaware Historical & Cultural Affaires office. Graphic created with AI on 9/30.
New permanent exhibit expands the Plantation’s story to include enslaved people, Indigenous communities and others who lived on the property
DOVER, Del. — Delaware is preparing to open a new permanent exhibit at the John Dickinson Plantation that broadens the story traditionally associated with one of the state’s most important Founding Fathers.
The exhibit, “One Land Many Voices,” will debut Oct. 10 inside the plantation’s new 14,000-square-foot visitor center, part of a $14.5 million state capital project.
Gov. Matt Meyer has proclaimed Oct. 10 “One Land Many Voices Day,” saying the exhibit reflects an effort to tell the stories of all of the people who shaped the historic property.
“Delaware’s history belongs to all of us, and telling it honestly means telling the stories of everyone who shaped it,” Meyer said. “The only way we can learn from our past is by refusing to hide from it, including the chapters that are difficult to confront.”
A broader interpretation of Dickinson
John Dickinson remains central to the site.
Known as the “Penman of the Revolution,” Dickinson was one of Delaware’s most influential political figures of the founding era. His Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania made him nationally prominent in the years before the Revolution, and he later played important roles in the Continental Congress, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention.
The new exhibit intentionally places that political legacy alongside the stories of Indigenous people, tenant farmers, indentured servants, free Black residents and enslaved men, women and children who lived and worked on the property.
Dickinson enslaved people for much of his adult life. According to the state, he ultimately unconditionally freed all 59 people enslaved on the property in 1786.
The result is an exhibit designed to put Dickinson’s life within the larger social and economic world surrounding the plantation.
Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said the goal is to acknowledge that complexity.
“Delaware’s colonial history is a complex one,” she said. “By honoring all who once lived here, we give voice to those whose work and sacrifice contributed to the legacy of this historic site.”
What the announcement leaves largely unexplored
While the state’s announcement emphasizes slavery and the broader communities connected to the plantation, it gives less attention to several parts of Dickinson’s political and constitutional legacy.
Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania were among the most influential colonial arguments against British taxation. The National Archives also identifies Dickinson as the principal writer of the first draft of the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first governing framework.
His record during the Revolution was complicated.
Dickinson opposed declaring independence in 1776 because he believed the colonies were not yet sufficiently unified or prepared for separation from Britain. After independence was approved, however, he served in the Delaware militia and later returned to national public life.
He later served as president of Delaware and Pennsylvania, chaired the 1786 Annapolis Convention that helped lead to the Constitutional Convention and represented Delaware at the 1787 convention. Dickinson left Philadelphia because of illness before the Constitution was formally signed and authorized fellow Delaware delegate George Read to sign his name.
Dickinson also argued at the Constitutional Convention for ending the slave trade. His own relationship with slavery changed over time, creating one of the contradictions that continues to shape interpretations of his life.
Those facts do not diminish the significance of slavery at the plantation or the experiences of the people enslaved there. They do illustrate why Dickinson remains a difficult figure to summarize neatly: He argued for colonial liberty while enslaving people himself, opposed independence before later serving the new nation and eventually freed the people he held in bondage.
The press release does not indicate how much of the permanent exhibit is devoted to Dickinson’s political writings, constitutional ideas and role in establishing the new American government compared with its treatment of slavery and other communities associated with the property.
That does not necessarily mean those subjects are absent from the exhibit. Visitors will be able to judge that balance once One Land Many Voices opens.
Broader approach predates Meyer administration
The broader interpretation of the plantation is not solely an initiative of the current administration.
The project and its emphasis on presenting the lives of people beyond the Dickinson family were developed before Meyer became governor.
That distinction is important because the exhibit arrives during a continuing national debate about how museums, schools and public institutions should interpret the founding era.
Supporters of broader historical interpretation argue that understanding the period requires examining not only prominent political leaders but also slavery, labor and the experiences of people who historically received less attention.
Others have argued that an increased focus on slavery and social history can sometimes come at the expense of explaining the political philosophy, institutions and achievements of the founding generation.
The state describes One Land Many Voices as an effort to provide a more comprehensive account of the property through artifacts, historical documents, photographs, narrative text and visual media.
$14.5 million investment
Beyond the historical interpretation, the visitor center represents a significant state investment in the plantation as an educational and cultural destination.
The new 14,000-square-foot building includes exhibition, educational and meeting space, along with a 1,400-square-foot screened pavilion designed for school groups, community meetings and other programs.
HCA Director Suzanne Savery said the expanded facility provides an opportunity to offer greater context to visitors.
“This expanded Visitor Center represents an important step forward in how we share Delaware’s history, allowing us to provide deeper context and a more meaningful experience for every visitor,” Savery said.
Visitors will continue to be able to tour the historic 18th-century mansion and reproduction structures elsewhere on the 450-acre property.
Admission, exhibits and programming will remain free. Fees will apply for some private uses of the multipurpose room and pavilion.
Opening Oct. 10
The permanent exhibit will be unveiled during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 10, at the John Dickinson Plantation, 250 Kitts Hummock Road near Dover.
TO GO
What: Opening of One Land Many Voices permanent exhibit
Where: John Dickinson Plantation, 250 Kitts Hummock Road, Dover
When: Saturday, Oct. 10; ribbon-cutting at 10 a.m.
Cost: Free
About: The new visitor center is part of a $14.5 million state investment and expands exhibition, educational and meeting space at the historic property.
President announces measures amid anger at authorities over recent murders of women
South Africa’s president has called on men to take more responsibility for violence against women as he announced measures to tackle the problem, amid anger at authorities over a recent wave of murders.
Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that not enough had been done to protect women. He said police would be reviewing unsolved murders, attempted murders and serious sexual offences against women and children, as well as producing a funded plan to reduce the forensic backlog for such cases, both within 60 days.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten says he never saw a transcript of a conversation between an alleged rape victim and investigators showing what she told Cornell University campus police before his office decided not to bring charges.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee advanced President Trump's pick for the next surgeon general, sending Nicole Saphier's nomination to the full Senate.
UK household income grew at a stronger pace than previously estimated during the first six months of the year, according to revisions of official data.
The rise in income per head to 1.1% between January and June followed an increase in the level of economic growth that illustrated the resilience of the UK economy since the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East more than seven months ago.
You don’t have to live in the American deep south to feel the effects of humidity. At home, just breathing makes the air more humid, let alone cooking or showering.
And when it gets too humid, it’s bad for our health as well as our homes. In fact, the two are connected: humidity lets mould and dust mites flourish – and they, in turn, can trigger asthma and allergies.
There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game
I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.
On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!
Steve Hilton’s long-shot campaign for governor is courting Golden state voters with unapologetically populist message
Steve Hilton stands almost no chance of becoming California’s next governor, but that isn’t stopping him from campaigning as though he was just one step away from pulling off the impossible.
The former Downing Street political adviser and Fox News host refuses to be daunted by the rancid political environment for Republican candidates this year, or by opinion polls that tell him he is lagging 20 percentage points or more behind his Democratic rival, Xavier Becerra.
‘The era of writing blank checks to international bureaucracies is over,’ state department spokesperson says
The Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body, arguing that paying to belong to the multilateral group no longer serves US interests.
The US formally notified the Strasbourg-based organization on Monday that it was leaving the Group of States against Corruption, known as Greco – the latest step in a broader effort by the administration to pull back from international bodies it regards as inefficient, overreaching or out of step with its priorities.
Multi-year, $1B+ agreement marks the expansion of Synopsys’ silicon IP business to serve increasing demand for application-optimized IP while evolving to a license-plus-royalty business model that aims to deliver value to both companies as production volumes grow.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 30, 2026 — Synopsys, Inc. today announced a strategic agreement with Amazon to accelerate Amazon’s custom silicon innovation and advance the development of increasingly complex AI-powered products and cloud infrastructure. The multi-year agreement marks the expansion of Synopsys’ silicon IP business to serve increasing demand for application-optimized IP with Amazon as its lead customer.
Synopsys engineering will also adopt Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Bedrock to accelerate its product development.
Amazon continues to build on its leadership and longstanding investment in a broad portfolio of purpose-built chips, including Nitro for cloud security, network and storage, Graviton for general-purpose computing, and Trainium for AI training and inference workloads. Building on more than 15 years of collaboration, the agreement expands Amazon’s use of Synopsys’ IP to include application-optimized silicon IP. The agreement also expands Amazon’s use of Synopsys EDA, simulation and analysis (S&A), and agentic AI technologies. Synopsys and Amazon will work to accelerate multiphysics solutions on Trainium and Graviton.
In addition, the companies plan to collaborate on applying AI across silicon-to-system engineering workflows. This includes deploying Synopsys’ AI-powered EDA, physics-based simulation and agentic AI solutions, as well as developing custom agentic AI capabilities to help Amazon’s engineering teams design, analyze, optimize, and validate complex chips and systems more efficiently.
“Amazon has invested in custom silicon for more than a decade, and it has fundamentally changed what’s possible for AWS and our customers,” said Peter DeSantis, SVP, foundational AI, custom silicon, quantum computing at Amazon. “From Graviton to Trainium, purpose-built chips deliver better performance at lower cost because they’re designed for exactly what customers need. As our chip designs grow more ambitious and AI reshapes the engineering process itself, Synopsys helps us move faster across the design cycle, helping us deliver more capable, efficient computing for customers worldwide.”
To accelerate its own IP and EDA tools development, Synopsys is adopting Amazon EC2 and cloud storage services, as well as Amazon Bedrock to build and deploy AI applications and agents to help innovate faster and scale its product offerings.
“Special purpose silicon is at the heart of AWS innovation. As we expand into application-optimized IP solutions, we’re proud to have Amazon as our lead customer for this next phase of growth,” said Sassine Ghazi, president and CEO of Synopsys. “More broadly, by combining Amazon’s leadership in AI infrastructure and custom silicon with Synopsys’ leadership in silicon IP, EDA and Multiphysics solutions, we can dramatically increase the productivity of our teams and shape the future of AI-native engineering.”
About Synopsys
Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) is the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, enabling customers to rapidly innovate AI-powered products. We deliver industry-leading silicon design, IP, simulation and analysis solutions, and design services. We partner closely with our customers across a wide range of industries to maximize their R&D capability and productivity, powering innovation today that ignites the ingenuity of tomorrow. Learn more at www.synopsys.com.
Everpure today rolled out several new data management capabilities designed to help customers improve their data estates and, hopefully, improve the odds that their AI projects are a success. The announcements, made at its Pure//Accelerate event in London, builds on the data pivot Everpure made at its annual user conference in Las Vegas in June.
Many AI failures today are actually data management failures in disguise. AI is both a product of data and a way to process and consume data, so the better the data–for both training and inference–the better the AI results should be.
Improving data management is a lot easier said than done, of course. Getting visibility into all of the aspects of data that make a difference–its quality, availability, security, privacy, and provenance–is not a simple matter. Many failed projects from the big data, business intelligence, and data lake eras attest to the difficulty of perfecting data management.
Data is constantly changing, which makes perfect data management practically impossible. But there’s plenty of room for improvement, and that is what’s motivating Everpure to build better data management capabilities into its products.
At its Pure//Accelerate conference in June, Everpure launched Everpure Data Intelligence, the linchpin of the company’s ambitious new “data-primacy” architecture. The new offering, which is based data discovery and classification technology it obtained with its 1touch.io acquisition in early 2026, gives users greater contextual understanding of their data. It does this by scanning metadata of data stored in Everpure storage offerings as well as third-party storage products, and using it to create a semantic knowledge graph of a user’s entire data estate.
Source: Everpure
Today, the company bolstered that initial launch of Everpure Data Intelligence with several new capabilities, including a lightweight file edition, native MCP integration, and simpler deployment. It also made several other enhancements its Universal Data Plane designed to improve storage efficiency, drive down costs, and accelerate AI workloads. Its Intelligent Control Plane also saw some enhancements.
One of the major enhancements in Universal Data Intelligence is the new capability to do file-based Data Intelligence File Edition. According to Ashish Gupta, general manager of the Everpure Data Management business unit, the new Data Intelligence File Edition offering lets users discover data using only metadata, as opposed to performing the full spectrum of classification and contextualization techniques, which the existing product–now called Data Intelligence Context Edition–brings to bear.
“Context Edition is the full product which has discovery classifier and contextualization. It comes with the knowledge graph that starts to build relationships between the data,” Gupta said. “File Edition is essentially taking the physical layer of the file, looking at all the metadata around that file, and classifying the file as being sensitive or not sensitive.”
Some data may not require the full treatment that Data Intelligence Context Edition can bring. There is a lot of ROT (redundant, obsolete, trivial) data, Gupta said, and doing a deeper analysis of it would be wasting time and resources.
Once the data has been classified using one of those two methods, users can easily ask questions about it using the new Model Context Protocol (MCP) API layer that Everpure has added to the Universal Data Intelligence product. This works for both data residing on Everpure storage as well as data that has been mapped on cloud storage or other on-prem storage.
“It’s a native MCP server that we’ve built right into Data Intelligence so that you can say ‘Tell me where my GDPR data is sitting’ and ‘Tell me which areas are not in compliance with the GDPR rules,’” Gupta said. “I just don’t have an understanding of where my data estate is, not only on Everpure storage but across any storage, even in certain cloud environments or even on mainframe. All that unstructured data gets, if you will, understood a lot better with this mapping of the data state.”
Unified Data Plane Enhancements
Source: Everpure
Everpure also has launched several new capabilities in Unified Data Plane, its software layer for actively managing file, block, and object data across Everpure and third-party storage offerings.
For starters, Everpure has bolstered DeepReduce, its similarity-based data reduction technology that works on already compressed data stored on Everpure hardware (it does not work on third-party storage). According to Bishwajit Mishra, Everpure director of product marketing, it’s been enhanced to deliver about a two-to-one reduction in data. “You get that without some of the performance overhead,” he said.
Enhancements to the Key-Value Accelerator (KVA) technology should enhance AI inference workloads. The company says that by pre-staging context directly into GPU memory, it can deliver up to 20x faster time to first token (TTFT). “You get better, faster inferencing results, more inferencing per GPU,” Mishra said.
The company has also rolled out new service level agreements (SLAs) for Evergreen//One, its storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offering that unifies on-premises, colocation, and public cloud data storage into a single subscription model. “You double the performance on the minimum guaranteed performance for all three tiers,” Mishra said.
A new token optimization reference architecture from Everpure should help customers get even more performance out of their AI investments. The architecture is based on open weight models and gives customers more control over data and more predictable costs from external AI providers, the company says.
More new reference architectures are being made available for Everpure customers adopting the Red Hat AI Factory. These architectures (one of which is available at launch and two that will become available later) were created with assistance from Red Hat and Nvidia, Mishra said.
Everpure is also rolling out an intelligent token optimization architecture that’s designed to help customers maximize their token usage. It will also be available by the end of the year, Mishra said. The company had several other product updates to the Unified Data Plane, including support for Red Hat Open Shift on Azure; support for flexible storage for AI workloads with Portworx; and better file protection and performance controls.
Intelligent Control Plane Enhancements
Source: Everpure
The third leg of Everpure’s data management stool is the Intelligent Control Plane, which allows users to manage their storage fleets, whether they’re running on Everpure hardware or not. Everpure has made several enhancements here too.
For starters, it has rolled out a beta of the new Pure1 Configuration Advisor, which will help customers roll out tested storage configurations to their Everpure fleet. Currently, the typical Everpure customer will have hundreds of different configurations, each of which is optimized and must be managed at an individual level.
“Now imagine a scenario where you can consolidate these hundreds of configs based on specific requirements,” Gupta told HPCwire. “That might be your security requirement or your QoS requirements, [consolidated] into a set of five or six policy groups or presets that really meet most of your workload profile.”
The advantage of the Pure1 Config Advisor is the customer gets control over that customization and automatically all of their configs are mapped into a finite set. The customer can move them or migrate them non-destructively for penetration testing or performance testing. “It reduces the management overhead and really optimizes your environment,” Gupta said.
Everpure also unveiled a beta of an automation workflow for Data Intelligence. According to Mishra, this capability will leverage the insights gleaned from Data Intelligence to impact the actual management of the storage from the Intelligent Control Plane using Fusion, the company’s self-service storage management platform than spans Everpure and non-Everpure storage.
“In this Mythos world that we live in right now, imagine you can go in, and take those insights and identify storage classes and execute them using Fusion to build secure enclave,” Mishra said. “We’ll be looking to announce that over the next second half of the year.”
Finally, Everpure also announced Portworx observability. Portworx is Everpure’s Kubernetes environment.
Bear known for sitting in solitude won tournament celebrating the animals’ ability to eat large amounts of fish
A chunky ursine called Backpack has out gobbled a challenge from an outsized female nicknamed the Dancing Queen to waltz – or rather waddle – off with the Fat Bear Week title at Alaska’s Katmai national park.
Backpack, a 20-year-old quiet giant known for sitting in solitude for long periods on his rock on the Brooks river, won by barely 5,000 votes in the public tournament celebrating the brown bears’ ability to eat as many fish, Alaska rangers announced.
The security alert issued by MI5 regarding a Chinese state-owned conglomerate accused of conducting espionage in the UK reveals the extent to which British intelligence remains concerned about Beijing’s influence, and risks casting a shadow over UK-China cooperation at a time when the bilateral relationship is enjoying a revival.
The UK’s domestic security service on Wednesday warned researchers and academics to cease work with the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT), an organisation MI5 described as a “significant threat”.
For those employed in arduous solitary work such as cab driving, a marathon phone call is the perfect place to navigate the dislocations of immigrant life
The question of the week is: “who are Uber drivers always talking to on the phone?” It’s one that regularly surfaces on Reddit threads and social media and even, on a couple of occasions, in the office. It’s not my question (I know who they are talking to), but I think the fact that many people are so baffled by it tells us a lot about the separate worlds we occupy.
When you get a cab on a ride-hailing app, the chances that your driver will be on the phone is high. The conversation is almost always quiet, containing pauses so long that it often seems they are actually no longer on a call. But then comes a rejoinder, a laugh, an interjection, and the marathon continues.
The US tried to forcibly assimilate the Lenape in brutal boarding schools, but a new exhibit proves their modern-day culture is vibrant and alive
During the 19th century, the US government funded more than 500 “Indian boarding schools” aimed at forcibly assimilating Native American children into western culture. Students were taken from their families, frequently by force, and forced to cut their hair. They were stripped of their original names, and taught to feel shame regarding their heritage and customs. Run like military academies, these institutions required children to wear uniforms and subjected them to severe physical punishment, such as solitary confinement and flogging. Richard Henry Pratt, who established the first of these schools, declared that their explicit purpose was to “kill the Indian, save the man”.
These assimilation practices persisted for decades, during which numerous children endured physical and sexual abuse. At least 1,000 children lost their lives, though the actual casualty count is believed to be significantly higher. The US government issued no formal apology for these atrocities until 2024, when former president Joe Biden described the boarding school system as “one of the most horrific chapters in American history”.
MI5 has issued a rare public warning to UK universities that China’s intelligence service is using a front company to pay for research by UK academics and steal the secrets of hi-tech projects.
Britain’s domestic security service said researchers and academics should cease work with the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI), sometimes also known as the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT).
The UK government’s “one in one out” deal with France, which was supposed to help deter small boat arrivals, is expected to expire on Thursday, government sources have said.
Negotiations to extend the deal have stalled over French demands for a Europe-wide deal instead, and a reluctance to scale up the numbers of people exchanged between the two countries.
However, Burundi will only accept those not accused of crime or terrorism links, said Nancy Ninette Mutoni, a spokesperson for the country’s president, Évariste Ndayishimiye. Tuesday’s announcement gave no details of numbers, timing or financial details.
Working platform delivers memory-semantic access with writes up to 100x faster than NAND-based solid-state storage and is ready for customer workload testing
CHANDLER, Ariz., Sept. 30, 2026 — Everspin Technologies, Inc., a leading developer and manufacturer of MRAM persistent memory solutions, has announced the successful demonstration of the world’s first Compute Express Link (CXL)-connected MRAM platform at SNIA Developer Conference (SDC) 2026. The demo added a fast persistent memory tier between DRAM and NAND storage that can reduce the time processors and accelerators spend waiting for data and help AI systems run at higher utilization.
The working system connects Everspin PERSYST MRAM to CXL-enabled platforms as persistent memory with memory semantics, combining CXL’s standard high-speed connectivity with MRAM’s ability to retain data without power. It creates a fast persistent buffer and cache tier with cache-line-level, nanosecond-class access and writes up to 100x faster than NAND-based solid-state storage. Data remains available through a power interruption or system restart without relying on battery-backed DRAM or having to first flush data to an SSD.
The demo uses a Supermicro AS-1116CS-TN server with an AMD EPYC 9355 32-core processor, an AMD Alveo U250 FPGA platform with a Wolley CXL controller and Everspin PERSYST 1GB DDR4 MRAM UDIMMs. The configuration provides an open standards-based platform for demonstrating coherent access to persistent MRAM through CXL. It also enables memory resources to be pooled and shared across hosts, allowing persistent memory capacity to be allocated where workloads need it. For AI systems, that creates opportunities for applications such as checkpointing and persistent key-value (KV) cache.
“Everspin has been working with data center customers for 15 years, and we continue to innovate as AI changes the memory needs of systems,” said Sanjeev Aggarwal, president and CEO of Everspin Technologies. “CXL gives us a standard way to bring persistent MRAM to a much broader range of compute platforms. We now have a working system so customers can run their own workloads and measure the benefit for their specific applications.”
At SDC, Everspin and Wolley demonstrated read and write access to MRAM through the CXL interface under demanding test conditions.
“Wolley enables memory and storage connectivity through CXL, and this demonstration with Everspin shows how persistent MRAM can be brought into that environment with memory semantics,” said Dr. Bernard Shung, CEO of Wolley. “Together, we are demonstrating a practical way to connect persistent memory through CXL and make it available to today’s compute platforms.”
The SDC demonstration builds on Everspin’s work to extend MRAM into new memory architectures, including persistent caching, write buffering and metadata applications. To learn more about Everspin MRAM for data center applications, visit the Everspin Data Centers page.
About Everspin Technologies
Everspin Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRAM) is the world’s leading provider of Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM). Everspin MRAM delivers the industry’s most robust, highest-performance, non-volatile memory for Industrial IoT, Data Centers, and other mission-critical applications where data persistence is paramount. Headquartered in Chandler, Arizona, Everspin provides commercially available MRAM solutions to a large and diverse customer base. For more information, visit www.everspin.com.
Photo: A biomass power plant surrounded by piles of low-quality wood used to efficiently generate electricity without CO2.
Caesar Rodney Institute says biomass could provide a local energy source while supporting Delaware forests and forestry businesses, but regulatory and environmental questions remain
DOVER, Del. — As Delaware looks for ways to produce more of its own electricity and reduce dependence on energy imported from outside the state, the Caesar Rodney Institute is urging policymakers to consider a resource already growing across roughly a quarter of Delaware: wood.
The free-market policy organization says sustainably harvested wood and other forms of biomass should be considered alongside solar, offshore wind, nuclear power and battery storage as Delaware develops what Gov. Matt Meyer has described as an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.
Michelle Parsons, a physician and chair of the Caesar Rodney Institute board, made the case in a recent article arguing that wood energy could create a market for lower-value timber, support Delaware’s declining forest-products industry and provide another source of locally produced energy.
The idea is not entirely new to state policymakers.
Delaware’s own Statewide Forest Strategy calls for developing markets for low-quality wood for biofuels and specifically recommends examining restrictions imposed by Delaware’s incinerator law. The strategy also suggests exploring wood-energy systems at schools or other state-owned buildings.
Delaware looks for more homegrown energy
Meyer has made increasing electricity generation inside Delaware a significant part of his energy policy.
In his State of the State address, Meyer called for Delaware to generate more power “of multiple types,” and he has since described his broader strategy as “all of the above,” including solar, offshore wind, nuclear energy, battery storage and other technologies.
Delaware currently produces substantially less electricity than its residents and businesses consume, with natural gas serving as the state’s primary fuel for electricity generation.
CRI argues wood could provide another locally available resource.
“There is another energy resource Delaware already has in abundance,” Parsons wrote. “Wood.”
Forests cover about a quarter of Delaware
The Delaware Forest Service estimates forests cover roughly 352,000 acres, or about one-fourth of Delaware, with approximately 78% of that forestland privately owned.
State forestry documents describe those forests as renewable resources that can produce wood products while continuing to grow another generation of trees when managed sustainably.
Delaware forestry officials also have identified an opportunity involving lower-value hardwood trees.
The state’s forest strategy notes that Delmarva has significantly fewer sawmills than it did several decades ago, reducing the number of markets available for locally harvested timber. It identifies bioenergy as one potential market for lower-value wood.
A 2012 U.S. Forest Service analysis estimated that approximately 125,000 green tons of woody biomass could be available annually in the greater Delaware area without depleting the resource, including about 50,000 tons from Sussex County, 47,000 from Kent County and 28,000 from New Castle County.
Could schools be an option?
Other states have used wood for institutional heating. Vermont has used wood heating in public schools for decades, with modern systems designed to operate more efficiently and with greater emissions controls than traditional wood-burning systems.
Delaware’s own forest strategy includes a recommendation to explore a “Fuels for Schools” concept and consider converting a school or other state-owned facility to wood-based heating or cooling.
PJM also recognizes biomass, including wood, as a fuel that can be used to generate electricity within the regional grid.
State law presents a complication
One of the more significant questions involves Delaware law.
The state’s Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards Act recognizes sustainably harvested biomass as a renewable energy source.
But Delaware’s incinerator law imposes strict siting restrictions on facilities classified as incinerators, including requirements that generally keep them at least three miles from residences, residential communities, churches, schools, parks and hospitals.
CRI argues those restrictions could unintentionally block modern wood-energy projects, particularly smaller institutional systems that burn clean wood rather than municipal solid waste.
The organization is calling on lawmakers to determine whether clean wood-energy systems fall under those restrictions and, if so, amend or repeal the provisions that prevent them from being developed.
Delaware’s own forest strategy has previously called for examining those legal barriers.
Environmental questions remain
Using wood as an energy source also raises broader questions involving emissions, forest management and carbon impacts.
Modern biomass equipment can use advanced combustion systems and pollution controls that are substantially different from older wood-burning systems.
Still, the environmental impact of biomass depends on several factors, including what type of wood is burned, how forests are managed, how quickly harvested trees are replaced and what fuel source the wood displaces.
Delaware forestry officials have previously supported exploring the concept. The Delaware Forest Service’s 2020 forest strategy said the state has ample low-value wood available for bioenergy projects and said such projects could improve forest health. At the same time, PJM executive Michael Bryson recently cautioned that constructing a new biomass power plant can be costly and may make the most economic sense where wood waste is already generated as part of another business.
Air-quality concerns would also be part of any debate over expanded wood energy. DNREC has previously identified wood and biomass burning as sources of fine-particle pollution in Delaware. In regional haze planning documents, the agency said residential wood combustion represented about 23% of Delaware’s PM2.5 emissions in the 2011 emissions inventory used for that analysis. Modern commercial biomass systems can use substantially different combustion technology and emissions controls than residential wood stoves, but any Delaware proposal would still be subject to air-quality permitting and emissions standards.
Those questions would likely become part of any future Delaware regulatory or legislative debate.
Could markets help preserve forests?
CRI also connects the energy issue to Delaware’s continuing loss of forestland.
State environmental officials estimate Delaware is losing more than 1,000 acres of forest each year, largely because of development.
CRI argues that creating additional markets for sustainably harvested wood could give private landowners another financial reason to retain working forests rather than sell the property for development.
That argument also appears in state forestry policy, which calls for developing stronger markets for lower-quality timber while maintaining sustainable forest management.
No specific Delaware wood-energy facility has been proposed as part of CRI’s initiative.
Instead, the organization is asking lawmakers and state officials to include biomass in the broader discussion over how Delaware generates more electricity and thermal energy within its borders.
“If Delaware really means ‘all of the above,’ wood belongs in the conversation,” Parsons wrote.
Whether wood ultimately becomes a larger part of Delaware’s energy portfolio would depend on economics, emissions standards, sustainable forestry requirements and whether state law allows modern wood-energy projects to move forward.
To Go Box
What: Caesar Rodney Institute is urging Delaware policymakers to include sustainably harvested wood and biomass in the state’s “all-of-the-above” energy discussion.
Why it matters: Delaware’s Statewide Forest Strategy already identifies bioenergy as a potential market for lower-value timber and calls for examining legal restrictions on wood-energy facilities.
Learn more: Delaware residents can review the Delaware Forest Service’s Forest Action Plan and Statewide Forest Strategy through the Delaware Department of Agriculture.
A Familiar Voice, a Helping Hand: Delaware Hospice’s Care Goes Beyond the Bedside
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
A favorite story read aloud. A quiet conversation. Someone willing to sit beside a patient and simply be present.
At Delaware Hospice, those gestures are part of a broader effort to support people facing serious illness and the families walking through that experience with them. Medical care is central to the organization’s work, but its services also address the emotional, spiritual and practical needs that can accompany a difficult diagnosis.
Founded in 1982, the nonprofit, community-based healthcare organization serves people throughout Delaware and in southern Chester and Delaware counties in Pennsylvania. According to its website, more than 175,000 patients and families have turned to Delaware Hospice over the years.
Its mission reflects a commitment to caring for people as well as treating illness.
“Our mission is to support every individual, family, and community with compassionate and expert care for serious illness,” the Delaware Hospice website states.
For families, serious illness can bring questions that extend well beyond medical treatment. Daily responsibilities continue, caregivers need support, and children may need help understanding what is happening to someone they love.
Delaware Hospice’s services include grief support, community education, and assistance for children and caregivers. The organization describes its approach as one that recognizes the needs of the whole family, including help coping with loss and navigating everyday challenges.
Financial circumstances are also part of that picture. Delaware Hospice says it provides care and support regardless of the person’s ability to pay. Donor contributions help sustain services when insurance does not cover all costs.
The organization also outlines several measures intended to maintain and improve the quality of its care. These include a dedicated quality and compliance team, patient and family satisfaction surveys, and an in-house Education and Learning department.
Feedback from patients and relatives helps inform that work, while staff education supports continued learning about care practices. Delaware Hospice also identifies a partnership with Healthcentric Advisors as a source of outside oversight.
According to its website, the organization is licensed in Delaware and southern Pennsylvania, approved by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and accredited by the Joint Commission.
Its recognition as a We Honor Veterans Level 4 Partner reflects attention to the needs of veterans at the end of life. Delaware Hospice also reports receiving Four Rings in the National Alliance for Care at Home’s Quality Connections Program for four consecutive years across its four locations.
Alongside its professional care team, volunteers contribute time, companionship and practical assistance.
“Your time and talents also fuel vital behind-the-scenes roles in administrative support and community outreach,” the organization’s website states.
For someone interested in volunteering, there are several ways to participate. Direct patient support can include providing companionship, reading aloud or helping with daily activities. These roles offer opportunities to bring personal attention and human connection to patients and their families.
Other volunteers assist with administrative work, community outreach and special events. Those assignments allow people to contribute different skills while supporting the organization’s services.
The range of opportunities means participation can take different forms. A volunteer who enjoys conversation might provide companionship. Someone drawn to organizational tasks might find a role helping behind the scenes.
Together, those contributions support an organization whose work has reached Delaware families for more than four decades.
For residents seeking assistance or considering volunteering, Delaware Hospice’s website provides information about its services and opportunities to get involved. Whether through professional care, caregiver support or a volunteer’s visit, the organization’s approach emphasizes the people experiencing serious illness and the loved ones beside them. Sometimes, that support begins with a helping hand. Sometimes, it begins with someone willing to listen and stay awhile.
A woman, identified only as Jane Doe, alleges she was gang-raped by seven fraternity members in 2024 and accuses Cornell University of failing to protect her.
The Pentagon says U.S. forces and equipment in Iraq have been withdrawn, declaring ISIS defeated "as an organized military threat in Iraq and across the region."
The data suggest Burnham may be able to win the argument with the public amid lobbying efforts
Andy Burnham has suggested that it would not be legitimate for a party to form a majority government with less than 30% of the vote.
In his Today interview, asked why he wanted electoral reform and a move towards proportional representation, Burnham replied:
I found it better being elected under a different system as mayor of Greater Manchester, where people had one or two, they could put that on the ballot paper.
Because you had a reason to stop on every doorstep and chat to people who might not always support your party and try and get their second preference.
No, it could happen with any political party. It’s whether that would be a legitimate government.
I think you’ve got it completely wrong really, if you don’t mind me saying, to put it like that, because I have put out … a vision for a national care service.
There are pensioners out there who watch your programme who are paying for care costs from their basic state pension. Now, is that right or fair?
The six-justice conservative majority of the high court temporarily lifted a decision by a lower court that required the administration to provide immigrants sufficient notice and the opportunity to claim fear of torture or persecution in the countries where they were being sent.
What has the administration asked the supreme court to rule on about trans prisoners? The administration asked the justices to allow it to deny gender-affirming care to transgender people in federal prisons. The solicitor general, D John Sauer, wrote that gender-reassignment surgeries, hormone therapy and social accommodations such as undergarments, makeup, padding and wigs “could no longer be justified.”
Why is the EPA union suing the administration? The union, which represents more than 8,000 workers at the Environmental Protection Agency, has filed a lawsuit against the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, alleging it illegally terminated a collective bargaining agreement.
Which legal battle has Trump appeared to have conceded? The president has agreed to stop fighting the disbursement of E Jean Carroll’s $5m verdict in her 2023 sexual abuse and defamation civil trial against him, a procedural development as the funds had already been distributed to her.
What new product has OpenAI announced? Less than 24 hours after OpenAI said it would scrap the launch of a model over safety concerns, the company debuted a whole new suite of artificial intelligence tools, including “dots”, agents it said were “more ambitious” than ChatGPT and a “whole new way to work with AI.”
Iranian court upholds sentence against 29-year-old star Parastoo Ahmadi and other musicians in crackdown on women flouting hijab law
An Iranian court’s decision to uphold a sentence of 74 lashes against the popular singer Parastoo Ahmadi for performing without a hijab has sparked outrage among rights groups, who described it as “a form of torture”.
In June, Ahmadi, 29, and eight members of her production team, including musicians, were sentenced by a court in the city of Qom over a concert that was streamed online in 2024, which went viral and racked up millions of views. The court said the group had violated the country’s “legal and cultural norms” and called the performance “obscene and vulgar”.
Kenjiro Tsuda wins case against TikTok account in landmark Japanese verdict to protect publicity rights
A court in Japan has ruled that the human voice has legal protection after a landmark case involving a well-known actor and a TikTok account that he claimed had cloned his “lustrous” baritone voice in its AI-generated videos.
Tokyo district court said on Wednesday that voices should enjoy the same protection as publicity rights, at the end of a closely watched legal action brought against TikTok by Kenjiro Tsuda – best known for voicing the character Kento Nanami in the anime Jujutsu Kaisen.
Wave nearing southern California expected to reach San Francisco Bay Area by October as it crawls toward Alaska
Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called “Kelvin wave”, a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline.
The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October, as it crawls toward Alaska. Waters could rise by a foot along the California coast, according to scientists, who have warned that this could dramatically double the 8-12in rise in sea levels already caused by climate change over the last century.
Brisk days call for dinner with a little more staying power. These 17 comfort food recipes cover creamy soups, cheesy sandwiches, slow-cooker beef and chicken, potatoes, casseroles, ramen, and more.The post 17 comfort food recipes tasting like a warm hug…
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Nanoparticles could someday provide a new way to help soldiers fight back against deadly nerve agents on the front lines. In a new study, Northwestern University scientists developed a nanoparticle-based compound that, when mixed into clothing dyes, could limit the impact of chemicals commonly found in pesticides, insecticides and nerve agents. Manufacturers could potentially add the nanoparticles to clothing used by those most at risk, such as farmers' masks and gloves or soldiers' uniforms and tactical gear. Or, if someone is exposed to a potentially deadly chemical, they could spray their clothing with water mixed with the compound to deactivate the chemical before its damaging effects take hold. The study has been published in the journal ACS Nano.
Sen. Josh Hawley is unveiling legislation to establish guardrails for Flock cameras and other artificial intelligence-powered surveillance technology, CBS News has learned.
Escaping the Hormuz trap: What should an agreement to reopen the Strait look like?Expert commentjon.wallace
A detailed, reciprocal, and verifiable process is essential to ensure that any agreement holds.
The war between the United States and Iran has entered an uncertain phase between escalation and diplomacy. At the UN General Assembly, Iran offered a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume nuclear talks – if various conditions were met. That has apparently been rejected by President Donald Trump.
Subsequent reports claimed the president was considering new strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, attacks on ships from the Iran-backed Houthis have extended the conflict into the Red Sea.
Given the scope of disagreement between Washington and Tehran, and the global impact of the Strait’s prolonged closure, any settlement will likely need to begin with an unwinding of the Hormuz situation. Can that be achieved?
It is possible. But a successful agreement on Hormuz requires above all a technically precise, reciprocal, and verifiable process that focuses on restoring freedom of navigation. It is unlikely to be effectively addressed through another vague Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), or as part of a wider grand bargain.
Status of the Strait
Tehran has enforced its declared ‘closure’ of the Strait of Hormuz by demanding that ships transit through Iranian waters, charging tolls, and striking vessels it claims have violated its policies. This has resulted in 85 maritime incidents and 24 seafarer deaths reported across the Gulf region.
The US has responded by imposing a blockade on all ships linked to Iran. As of 28 September, US forces have redirected 122 commercial vessels, disabled three, and boarded two. US forces have also created their own route along the southern side of the Strait. The result is an unstable standoff and recurrent clashes. Meanwhile, hundreds of ships remain stranded in the Gulf.
Shipping data shows only 16 vessels crossed the Strait on Monday. That compares to about 138 per day before the start of the war. Most of this traffic along the northern (Iranian) route has been dominated by Iranian, Russian and Chinese-linked vessels. (China purchases over 90 per cent of Iranian exported oil). A large share of US-assisted transits along the southern route are from UAE-flagged vessels.
A durable arrangement will need to create an operating procedure that specifies routes and coordinates, vessel eligibility, communications protocols…and more.
In August, Iran and Oman moved toward an arrangement for jointly managing maritime traffic in the Strait. Oman’s foreign ministry said the proposed framework would establish a temporary navigational corridor, create a joint project to clear mines, and eventually provide arrangements for information-sharing.
Leaders from Oman, Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were expected to meet in Muscat to finalize the agreement. But the meeting was postponed in September following US pressure and escalations in the Red Sea.
The initiative demonstrates that reopening Hormuz does not necessarily require the US and Iran to resolve all their other disputes first. It does, however, require the parties to establish a workable system for commercial navigation.
For that to happen there will need to be a path toward de-escalation that separates deterrence from punishment. Each side will have to stop trying to inflict excessive ‘punishment’ in response to perceived hostile acts, which merely incentivizes the other to escalate again.
Make the agreement technically credible
The MOU agreed in June was a first attempt at a diplomatic off-ramp. However, it was riddled with ambiguity. The ceasefire did not hold, and no wider settlement was agreed in the 60-day timeline the MOU set.
Crucial to the MOU’s failure was the lack of technical detail regarding Hormuz. An effective Strait agreement cannot simply say that traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start. It must define which vessels can transit along which routes and what happens if a vessel deviates from its agreed route. It must state who will provide navigational information and communicate with commercial operators. And it must specify how Iranian, Omani, American, and international maritime authorities will interact.
The MOU anticipated some of these issues. But a durable arrangement will need to create an operating procedure that specifies routes and coordinates, vessel eligibility, communications protocols, rules for navigation and inspection, notification requirements and more.
Most importantly, any agreement must distinguish between commercial and military activity. Commercial vessels need predictable rules as part of a protected commercial-navigation regime – one that does not require the US or Iran to recognize the other’s broader claims beyond Hormuz.
De-escalation must be reciprocal, gradual, and verifiable
The reopening of the Strait should be treated as a process. The Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, much disparaged by President Trump, was a multi-year process. Expert working groups on both sides fed technical agreements into the political process, ensuring the deal was technically achievable as well as politically viable. A process for Hormuz need not be as complex or drawn out. But it will require technical expertise.
Initial efforts at reopening the Strait of Hormuz should focus on stabilizing the maritime environment. Both Iran and the US would need to commit to a progressive and reciprocal pause in hostilities in the Strait.
For example, Iran could reduce interference with commercial shipping and establish agreed communication procedures. In response, the US and its partners might reduce some blockade operations and provide limited sanctions relief tied to Iran reaching behavioural benchmarks.
Agreement on mine clearance and navigation will also be needed. Technical teams must conduct mine-clearance under a jointly agreed safety protocol, with the locations of cleared and un-cleared areas communicated to commercial operators.
The parties should establish a common incident-reporting mechanism and require vessels to follow temporary traffic lanes until authorities certify lanes as safe.
Independent maritime organizations could help verify the status of cleared areas without becoming responsible for the political settlement itself.
Repeated, predictable action at sea could build trust between the US, Iran, and other regional actors. The key to success is sequencing and verification. No concession can depend entirely on trust or the kind of broad commitments made in the MOU.
Include multilateral enforcement and monitoring mechanisms
Multilateral engagement could play an important role in creating a lasting deal. Over the course of the conflict, Oman, Qatar and Pakistan have played central mediating roles. And Gulf states have sought arrangements to restore commercial shipping. The UK and France have also organized a multinational coalition to help restore shipping through the Strait.
Such countries can help implement a reopening by monitoring compliance with an agreement and providing reassurance. The presence of reinforcing powers can also create an ecosystem in which a political agreement is easier for the US and Iran to implement than undermine.
A monitoring mechanism could include representatives from Oman and other Gulf states, international maritime authorities, and neutral technical experts. Its mandate should be narrow and operational. For example, to monitor agreed routes, document incidents and report violations.
Implementation, not a Grand Bargain
Perhaps the most important element to any agreement is that it allows both sides to describe the outcome as protecting their interests – making each concession conditional on the other side’s behaviour. That makes cooperation less politically risky for both countries.
The way out of the Hormuz trap must therefore be a carefully constructed bargain in which both sides are given a practical, verifiable, and politically survivable way to stop fighting.
The June MOU demonstrated that the basic elements of a US–Iran agreement are conceivable. Its collapse illustrated that political commitments without robust implementation mechanisms and authorities are unlikely to hold. The next agreement must learn from that experience.
Approaching elections in the US and Israel may interfere with progress on reopening the Strait. Some issues, such as Iran’s charging of tolls, could remain a significant political obstacle. But, until the parties establish a durable mechanism for managing traffic in the Strait, the risk of renewed confrontation will remain.
Talks to break the deadlock over the controversial Drumcree parade will continue with the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Bryant, on Wednesday as nationalist protesters declare the prospect of mediation with unionists “dead in the water”.
The nationalist Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition has at the same time launched a fresh legal challenge to reimpose the almost 30-year ban on the Orange Order marching down their road, mounting fresh arguments that the Parades Commission has “materially misdirected itself”.
Insects provide protection, sanitation and even shelter to vertebrates, making them a priority for conservation efforts
For many vertebrates, insects are more than a food source. As “little things that run the world”, insects provide critical functions such as protection, sanitation and shelter across ecosystems, according to a new study.
The study, published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity on Wednesday, sheds light on the various ways insects support vertebrates, ranging from birds and bats to reptiles, amphibians and mammals.
The Texas Senate candidate rose to power as a culture warrior. His record is a marriage of hypocrisy and cynicism
Ken Paxton’s political career, more than that of any other Republican candidate campaigning in this cycle, charts the arc of the religious right. The most influential of its activists and donors engineered his rise as a culture warrior at each of its phases from his creation through every disgrace. His race for the Senate, the culmination of his ambition, has become not only his last stand, but also the Alamo for Christian nationalists in Texas.
Paxton’s rap sheet explains his Christian identity politics as a shield to distract from the liability of his own record of financial and sexual scandals scrolling back decades. The 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton, adopted by the Republican-controlled Texas house of representatives in May 2023, were double the Ten Commandments that Paxton insists should be displayed in every Texas classroom.
After switching tactics, federal agents are detaining and deporting record numbers of people from the US
When federal agents fatally shot US citizen protesters Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January during the nation’s largest immigration-enforcement operation ever, it marked a turning point for the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Donald Trump in his second term had sparked outrage and huge protests with federal immigration officers descending en masse to one Democratic-run city after another in what some leaders called militarized “invasions”. Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, then Minneapolis saw lines of masked and armored officers swaggering into town to conduct street arrests, ambushes of day workers waiting in Home Depot car parks for hire, and neighborhood sweeps. Adults and kids were whisked off to detention and protests met with aggressive deployment of chemical spray, teargas, fists and batons. The killings in Minneapolis were the culmination of what appeared to many to be a federal shock force increasingly out of control while being defended by federal leaders – and public opinion broadly turned against this violence.
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware has the lowest-lying average elevation in the contiguous United States and is in a global hotspot for sea-level rise. Flooding near the Indian River Inlet and along bay communities during storms like the recent nor’easter signals a growing problem that may have limited immediate solutions.
For several hours this past Saturday, residents in southeastern Sussex County were diverted 45-plus minutes as floodwaters washed over and subsequently closed Route 1 south of Dewey Beach.
The National Weather Service recorded major flooding Saturday morning in Lewes and Dewey Beach, as well as near the Indian River Inlet and at Rosedale Beach east of Millsboro. Several of those areas experienced tide levels near record highs.
The storm passed without any reported injuries and minimal property damage in Delaware, state officials said. But flooding poses a challenge for coastal communities that has only grown over the decades despite millions spent on roadway improvements and beach replenishment.
Local officials agree that flooding from storms is not a problem that can be fully stopped — and is likely to get worse in years to come.
“Really, there’s not a whole lot we could do to prevent flooding,” said Christophe Tulou, a former state environmental secretary and now the executive director at the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, a nonprofit that works to protect Sussex County’s three freshwater bays.
The beach in Bethany Beach was closed days after a late September nor’easter damaged dunes and swept away sand. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
He said flooding in these areas is inevitable, noting that sea-level rise and stronger storms fueled by climate change are causing flooding events to happen more frequently. Heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere by human activities like burning fossil fuels have caused land and ocean temperatures to rise, leading to rising sea levels and more intense storm patterns.
Delaware officials work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop the worst flooding. They create manmade dunes, replenish beaches and build pumping stations to clear roads of floodwater.
At a press conference in Bethany Beach on Tuesday, Gov. Matt Meyer said he and the state’s Congressional representatives will work to secure funding for any necessary projects in the upcoming federal budget negotiations.
“This is a national treasure, and I know that in the past the federal government has treated it as such,” he said.
How to reduce flooding
Meyer pointed to flood mitigation measures as the reason why the storm damage was not worse.
Manmade dunes at the beaches protected much of the state’s coastal properties — at the cost of being severely eroded. Meyer estimated that only about a quarter of Bethany Beach’s dunes remain.
Gov. Matt Meyer talks about the need for collaboration with federal officials to address current and future storm-driven flood solutions for coastal communities. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
“While it’s pretty disheartening to stand and look at the dunes, they did their job,” Meyer said.
Sussex County Administrator Todd Lawson agreed, saying the lack of property damage “proves beach replenishment works for protecting property.”
But previous delays in beach replenishment projects have caused concerns that restoring those coastal barriers could be a long way off.
“We’re at the mercy of the federal government in terms of funding,” added Bill Stevens, the mayor of Dewey Beach, the small peninsula town that is less than a mile wide.
The storm eroded about a third of Dewey Beach’s dunes, Stevens said.
Steve Rochette, a spokesman for the Philadelphia District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the corps is focused on evaluating the damage from the storm.
“Any potential outcomes of that would be too early for us to tell at this point,” he said.
As for road flooding, state Transportation Secretary Shanté Hastings said the agency is once again considering raising the pavement on parts of coastal Route 1 to reduce flooding. A stretch of the highway just south of Dewey Beach was raised some 6 inches in late 2017.
Floodwaters washed over a main evacuation route in Lewes during Saturday’s storm. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NICK STONESIFER
Delaware’s transportation department is also applying for federal funds to continue its study of how to further protect Route 1 between Dewey Beach and the Indian River Inlet.
Tulou said he thinks beach replenishment and raising roads can be helpful. But he said investing more in protecting wild areas like forests, meadows and wetlands that can absorb floodwaters could help ease the impact of rising tides on Delaware’s coastal towns and cities.
“If we just allow nature to do its work, it will continue to do the billion-dollar protection job that it’s already doing,” he said.
Meyer said at the press conference that he agrees, and pointed to a recently signed wetlands protection law as progress in protecting natural sources of flood protection.
The African nation refused to make an agreement with the Trump administration, which has sought to slash foreign assistance and impose new terms on recipients.
Cross-partisan support in Washington on issues like pesticides and food additives pose a threat to the industry’s bottom line
Some of the biggest food and agriculture corporations in the US are funding a campaign that pays social media influencers to combat elements of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again platform, according to an investigation by the Guardian and Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project.
The ascension of RFK Jr to secretary of health and human services has boosted his putative campaign to end chronic illness in the US, which he believes is primarily caused by processed foods and dyes, exposure to certain chemicals, and poor farming practices, along with an overuse of what he falsely claims are dangerous vaccines. The “Maha” movement blends long-running mainstream concerns about food and farm safety with conspiracy theories about everything from medicine to milk. A Maha “summit” in Washington this week will feature JD Vance and several members of Trump’s cabinet.
White House has labeled ads ‘public service announcements’ and has responded defiantly to criticism
Federal regulators have been urged to stop the broadcast of White House advertisements promoting Donald Trump that critics say amount to government propaganda and violate laws against using public money to promote partisan causes.
Public Citizen, an advocacy group, called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to intervene and block further airing of three ads it said were “designed to boost the image and character of Donald Trump” as part of the Republicans’ campaign for November’s midterm elections.
The Vibe Check Concept: Aegean Coast-inspired appetizers and plates perfect for pairs and group Average dish price: $24, ranging from $7 to $60 Kids’ Menu? No Alcohol? Yes Vegetarian-Friendly? Yes Gluten-Friendly? Yes Live music? No Hours: Sun-Mon closed, Tues-Thurs 4-9 p.m., Fri-Sat 4-10 p.m. Website:ezmewilmington.com
When acclaimed Wilmington chef Antimo DiMeo was brainstorming the name for Bardea Restaurant Group’s new Mediterranean eatery, he retreated to a cozy memory of sipping rosé and gazing out a window overlooking a river at a restaurant in Istanbul.
Out of all the dishes he ate there, the simplest — ezme, a base of crushed tomatoes and roasted peppers served with crackers and pitas — stuck out the most.
“I’ll never forget. We took a bite, and it was just such an impact. It was bright. It was fresh. It was clean. The hospitality was so warm and cozy,” DiMeo said. “It wasn’t anything crazy. It was just perfectly executed.”
Those qualities served as DiMeo’s culinary ethos when he returned to Wilmington after his two-week research and development trip to Turkey and Greece and crafted the menu for Ezme.
The bar and dining room of Ezme. | PHOTO BY NEIL SANTOS, COURTESY OF BARDEA RESTAURANT GROUP
He was surprised to find that Turkey had much more of an impact on the menu than Greece.
“Turkey was eye-opening. … There were flavors and things that I had never seen before,” DiMeo said. “Istanbul almost felt like New York — a lot of amazing food options, dense population, a lot of culture, all the different spice markets. It was magical.”
Ezme Executive Chef Antimo DiMeo plates himachi. | PHOTO COURTESY OF BARDEA RESTAURANT GROUP
Menu-crafting ended up being a lot of work for DiMeo, even more so than it was for many of his other restaurants.
“I put my head down and worked on different variations, even one dish, just trying it 10 different ways — which is crazy because, at its core, the soul of Ezme is very bright, green, simple. It’s fresh flavors over a live fire, a lot of olive oils, citrus, fresh herbs,” he said.
Ezme opened on Market Street in May. The restaurant sits across the street from Bardea Food & Drink and Bardea Steak and is only a few blocks away from DiMeo’s Casa Nonna, Roost Pub & Kitchen and DE.CO Food Hall.
But DiMeo, who has been a semifinalist twice for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef award in the Mid-Atlantic region, isn’t worried about competing with himself. In his view, every one of his restaurants offers a different experience to draw new crowds to downtown Wilmington.
What Ezme offers is an intimate, 50-seat space — the smallest of DiMeo’s restaurants — and a more casual atmosphere than, say, Bardea Steak.
Patrons on a Thursday evening wore attire ranging from aloha shirts to sundresses, matching the coastal vibes of the photography lining the walls and the blue-and-white striped T-shirts of the staff.
More casual attire is to be expected for a dining experience that requires so much eating with your hands. The restaurant’s central concept is “mezze,” sharing several smaller plates with a group instead of ordering an entrée for each person.
We noticed a few families when we visited, though none with young children. Ezme is definitely a high-end restaurant, despite its somewhat laid-back atmosphere.
The exterior of Ezme on Market Street. | PHOTO BY NEIL SANTOS, COURTESY OF BARDEA RESTAURANT GROUP
“We want to make sure we’re still … ‘fine dining,’ but not so stuffy. A little bit more like you’re at somebody’s house,” DiMeo said. “Like if I was going to my nonna’s house, and she’s taking care of me. That’s sitting at the table, sharing mezze, more of a free-flow style of food hitting the table rather than a rigid tasting menu where it’s course after course after course.”
The Chef’s Tasting — a revolving door of colorful, refreshing dishes, perfect for a pair — certainly offered that experience.
The White Garden cocktail is a concoction of gin, mastiha, cucumber, artichoke and dill. | PHOTO COURTESY OF BARDEA RESTAURANT GROUP
The tasting began with consommé as a palette cleanser, which had a salty taste that brought the seaside to mind.
The same could be said for the White Garden cocktail of gin, mastiha, cucumber, artichoke and dill, which was not included in the cost.
The Chef’s Tasting was $110 but included several items that quickly added up to the price of admission.
For example, melt-in-your-mouth beef tartare with tart pomegranate-ver’jus is $20 on its own but was included in the Chef’s Tasting. It came alongside six dishes from each section of the menu, including two entrées — lamb kefta and chicken kebab — albeit as smaller portions than if they were to be ordered on their own.
Surprisingly, the cheapest item on the menu was also one of the standouts: the $7 simit, a Turkish bread that was chewy on the outside, pillowy on the inside and paired with honey-tahini butter.
Ezme’s labneh tabat are made from strained yogurt and olive oil, along with apricot mostarda, pistachio and sweet onion marmellata. | PHOTO COURTESY OF BARDEA RESTAURANT GROUP
For DiMeo, one of the highlights of his trip to Turkey was seeing all the variations of simit being sold by street vendors, then coming home to make his own. His “first love in the kitchen was fermentation and dough,” in no small part because his parents opened DiMeo’s Pizza on Market Street in 2012.
Ezme’s menu is full of complex dishes — from scallops served with a squid ink-infused black hummus to grilled prawn coated in chickpeas and served with pomegranate and horseradish sauce — but simple ingredients are at the heart of the menu.
For example, the labneh tabat is essentially “a yogurt ball with dried fruits and pistachio and caramelized onion,” as DiMeo put it.
“We got those simple ingredients, and we were able to turn it into something that, when you eat it, you’re like, ‘Why is this so freaking good? Why is this hitting the spot? Why is this leaving a memory?’” he said. “In Turkey, for me, it was inspiring just eating. I love when I eat something simple, and it makes an impact.”
Deepfakes and misinformation driven by artificial intelligence have become a point of deep concern for legislators, advocates and the public
An image of Bianca Motley Broom, the mayor of College Park, Georgia, kissing a man who was not her husband in a bar spread far and wide on Facebook. The fact that it was fake is spreading faster, now, but only after it had been seen by thousands of people.
“I think this is a sad commentary about where we are in our democracy, and where we are in our political discourse,” Motley Broom said. “It also seeks to reinforce really tired stereotypes about women in leadership.”
Why Should Delaware Care? As the leader of the Delaware Department of Education, it is the Delaware Secretary of Education’s role to set policy and funding initiatives for the state’s 19 school districts and 26 charter schools. Cindy Marten, currently two years into her tenure at the helm of DDOE, has worked to combat disappointing test scores, including through a controversial new proposal, while also pushing forward a new public education funding formula.
As Delaware schools continue to be bogged down by low standardized test scores and high rates of chronic absenteeism, Education Secretary Cindy Marten — two years into her tenure as the state’s top education official — has unveiled an ambitious and controversial plan to breathe new life into the state’s struggling educational landscape.
But Marten’s plan to create a five-tiered system to identify, support and, in some cases, take over low-performing schools has already drawn criticism from some educators and lawmakers.
The proposal, meant to improve standardized testing scores and improve educational outcomes, also comes amid a host of other sweeping reforms that will change the way Delaware schools are funded and could see districts begin the process of consolidation.
And while the ultimate impact of these reforms, if fully implemented, remains unclear, the slate of initiatives could represent a monumental turning point for both Marten’s tenure and for K-12 education in Delaware.
“We have a real shot to get this right, but only if this stops being my plan and becomes our collective work,” Marten said.
Spotlight Delaware sat down with Marten one week after she unveiled the draft framework of her tiered accountability system to discuss the plan, the criticism surrounding it and other major changes that could be coming to Delaware’s classrooms.
Proposing an accountability framework
Earlier this month, Marten released a draft of a tiered system that she says answers questions about how Delaware will move forward to improve test scores.
Marten’s draft consists of five tiers, ranging in support and accountability measures for district schools and charter schools. The universal expectation is for schools to be in tier one, which has the lowest level of intervention.
Additional support is introduced at tiers two and three. State intervention begins at tier four and is carried into tier five, where the Delaware Department of Education would take over the operation of a school and appoint new leadership until conditions improve.
Schools with little to no progress that are placed into tier four would see “state-directed instructional and operational actions, leadership or staffing supports and decisions [that] need to be made when they’re needed,” Marten said during a Sept. 17 State Board of Education meeting.
If none of those state-implemented supports work, the school would be placed into tier five, the Department of Education receivership.
Separately, Marten also announced the possibility of holding back third-grade students who cannot read at grade level, a tactic that Mississippi has used to dramatically increase proficiency scores but also has come under criticism as a manipulation of its test scores.
Holding students back would be a last resort, Marten said. The state must first focus on early intervention screenings to address learning disabilities and monitor students’ progress over time.
If students are not improving after receiving individualized support, then whether they should begin fourth grade will be evaluated based on individual data, she added.
Although Marten’s goal for the Sept. 17 state board meeting was to present a concrete draft, there are still elements that need to be finalized.
The department must determine how long a school can remain in a specific tier and establish criteria for where schools should initially be placed if the framework is implemented, among other details.
Marten also said “some” of the framework would require legislative action before it could be implemented. She plans to have draft legislation ready for the start of the new General Assembly in January.
Marten said her philosophy behind the accountability framework is that the plan should not just be created by her — it is the entire state’s responsibility to contribute.
“This isn’t the secretary’s plan, [who] sits in an office and writes something or hires a consultant to come and do,” she said.
But some education advocates and state lawmakers have already begun expressing concerns.
Lawmakers, leaders react
Delaware education leaders have shown mixed reactions to Marten’s draft framework in the days since it was released.
Sen. Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred), a retired teacher and the chair of the Senate Education Committee, who has been a champion for education reform throughout her tenure in the legislature, said she feared the framework could create “unintended harm” for educators.
“This proposal signals a disconnect between the Department of Education and the realities our teachers face, echoing top-down policies of past eras … that demoralized educators, stressed students, and drained the joy from teaching and learning,” she said.
Marten said she agreed with many of Sturgeon’s remarks, but said she did not hear sentiments about educators feeling unheard or undervalued as a result of the draft announcement.
Tameka Mays, president of the Delaware State Education Association, wrote in a statement to Spotlight Delaware earlier this month that the state’s educators’ union is committed to having conversations with government leaders about plans for improving student academic performance.
But Mays said she and her organization have mixed feelings about Marten’s plan.
“There are aspects we favor, such as additional instructional support for struggling students, and aspects that raise serious concern for our members and our communities, including the process leading up to a possible state takeover of our local schools and the potential for 8- and 9-year-olds to be held back a grade,” Mays said in her statement.
Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer has not been shy about shaking up the status quo in education, and nominated a partner in Cindy Marten to carry out that work. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
When asked last week if he agreed with Marten’s plan, Gov. Matt Meyer said there must be “some dramatic action taken in those small numbers of schools that are well-funded, that are well-resourced, that are not producing the outcomes that kids and families need.”
Meyer also told Spotlight Delaware he believes it is “generally true” that if a student is not proficient according to their grade-level standards, they should not move on to the next grade. Though he noted there are “other factors that come into play,” without elaborating specifically on those other factors.
Lake Forest Superintendent Steven Lucas, who is also the president of the Delaware Chief School Officer’s Association, said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware that his organization looks forward to working with Marten’s department to ensure the accountability framework “accurately assesses the needs and output of the public school districts, supports the work of our public school teachers, and helps to increase the college and career readiness of our graduates.”
Criticisms linking back to past plans
Some Delawareans on social media have linked the proposed accountability tiers to distrust between educators and the state’s Department of Education that dates back to more than a decade ago.
Tensions were heightened between late 2014 and early 2015 when the Department of Education announced a “Priority Schools Plan” to improve six high-poverty schools in Wilmington, which had some of the state’s lowest test scores, according to reporting by The News Journal.
At the time, the Department of Education called for the Christina and Red Clay Consolidated school districts to fire the schools’ principals and make all teachers reapply for their jobs.
In December 2014, the Red Clay Consolidated Board of Education voted to move forward with then-Gov. Jack Markell’s Priority Schools push while rejecting some of the state’s requirements, such as having every teacher reapply for their job.
Christina also fought back against the requirements, and the district recommended the then-principals of Bayard Middle School and Bancroft and Stubbs Elementary schools stay after what it called a “thorough and professional vetting process.”
Tension between educators and the Department of Education ultimately resulted in the Delaware State Education Association voting “no confidence” in then-Delaware Secretary of Education Mark Murphy. He announced his resignation just five months later.
Marten told Spotlight Delaware she was aware of that history when she presented the draft framework.
“People are trying to give me a history lesson right now because they think I don’t know the pain, the trauma, the heartbreak, what didn’t work,” Marten said. “I’m not asking anybody to forget 2014.”
The argument that her framework feels like 2014 is a “legitimate starting point” for conversations, she said. But that does not mean the discussion surrounding the plan can end there.
Marten also said there are key differences between the 2014 plan and her current draft. The current proposal does not call for educator dismissals or entire staffs to reapply for their jobs.
She deliberately presented a draft that was “something concrete and real,” she said, so the community could provide meaningful feedback.
The Delaware Department of Education will also continue to seek feedback from stakeholders in the coming months.
The drafted framework could be implemented alongside other major changes to Delaware’s classrooms.
Earlier this month, the Department of Education announced the state was awarded a five-year, $16 million federal grant to expand access to charter school options and promote accountability.
At least 90% of the award will fund “competitive subgrants for the planning, implementation, replication, and expansion of charter schools,” while addressing student and community needs, according to the department’s announcement. The awardees supported by the grant have a five-year target of increasing statewide charter enrollment capacity by 10%.
Kendall Massett, executive director of the Charter School Network, a nonprofit advocacy organization for Delaware’s charter schools, said the grant application leaned into work-based learning, career and technical education, educational opportunities in rural areas, among other programs.
According to the announcement, Delaware applied for the funding “as one part of its broader work to expand educational opportunities and improve outcomes across the state’s public education system.”
Neither Lucas, head of the superintendents’ association, nor Mays, president of the state’s educators’ union, commented on the charter school grant award. The growth of Delaware’s charter schools over the past 30 years has been a point of contention within the public school system though.
Marten said in a statement that “Delaware should organize public education around what students need, not around protecting one model of schooling over another.”
She also said she understands districts’ concerns that charter schools may pull potential students — and therefore funding, resources and tax dollars — from their districts.
Delaware’s public education funding currently follows what officials call a unit-count system, which distributes money to districts based on the number of students enrolled.
When students attend charter schools rather than their local district school, school district leaders are obligated to pass tax revenues on to the charter school to cover their costs. That allocation is based on the number of students enrolled in the charter school.
Still, Marten said the $16 million federal charter grant does not answer broader questions about the relationship between shifting enrollment and its impact on costs for buildings, transportation, and staffing.
But changes coming to the state’s public education funding formula could help level the playing field.
Delaware’s Public Education Funding Commission — a group tasked with recommending reforms to the state’s 85-year-old school funding system — unanimously recommended that lawmakers approve their hybrid funding framework last year, which would shift education spending away from a per-student basis to one that directs more dollars toward students with higher needs.
This past summer, two bills that would lay the groundwork for Delaware to begin implementing that new funding system were signed into law by Meyer.
Sen. Laura Sturgeon sponsored two bills that would set Delaware up for a new school funding system. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NICK STONESIFER
On top of these impending funding changes, a state task force charged with drawing plans to redistrict Wilmington schools recommended combining Delaware’s four northernmost school districts last winter, which would represent a seismic shift in Delaware’s public education ecosystem, if ultimately approved.
The affected districts would include the Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, and Red Clay Consolidated school districts. Those consolidation plans, however, are far from set in stone. They would need to be approved by state lawmakers and would take years to implement.
But Marten, who sits at the helm of the state agency that would ultimately undertake these generational reforms, is confident the Department of Education is up for the task.
“It needs to be connected, otherwise, people are going to experience continued fragmentation of a system that is all chasing the same problem, but they’re all running down different tracks,” Marten said.
Smoke and soot from Russian airstrikes left particles in the air that combined with moisture to create a dense blanket of gray over Ukraine's war-ravaged capital.
Greggs has announced plans to close four of its factories, in a move that could result in 740 job losses over the next two and a half years.
The bakery chain said it was consulting on the closures, which would initially cost £60m when including disruption costs and redundancy payments but then could create £20m of savings each year by 2028.
Washington, DC — Public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen to its lowest level in Gallup’s decades-long tracking as the justices prepare to begin a new term filled with politically consequential cases.
Gallup’s September survey found that 54% of Americans have little or no trust in the federal judicial branch, while Supreme Court disapproval stands at 61%, tying the record high reached in July. Fewer than 35% approve of the court’s job performance.
The decline has accelerated since 2022, when the court overturned Roe v. Wade. Democratic confidence has fallen especially sharply, while independents have also become significantly less trusting. A plurality of Americans now describes the court as too conservative.
The court’s 6-3 conservative majority has also played a major role in determining how far President Donald Trump can push executive authority. Justices have recently allowed several administration policies to proceed while rejecting others, producing criticism from both the left and Trump himself.
The new term begins October 5, with cases involving climate litigation and other major federal disputes already scheduled. The court enters those arguments facing an unusually skeptical public after years of declining institutional confidence.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump launched America.gov on Tuesday, an artificial intelligence-powered portal intended to give Americans a single place to find federal information and eventually complete government transactions.
The site allows users to ask questions in conversational language and receive answers drawn from official government sources. Each response is designed to direct users back to the underlying federal information rather than forcing them to search through thousands of agency pages and forms.
Trump described the project as a way to make government simpler and more responsive, saying America.gov would serve as a single “front door” for interacting with federal agencies. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who leads the National Design Studio and serves as U.S. chief design officer, helped oversee its development.
The administration says conversations are not permanently stored and personal information is not collected through basic searches. Beginning in 2027, the government plans to expand the platform so users can complete applications and renewals, including passport and Medicare-related services.
Trump also signed an executive order directing federal agencies to integrate eligible public-facing services with America.gov and Login.gov. Certain services, including IRS tax filing and Defense Department systems, are excluded from the order.
The quarterback is widely adored on and off the field. Whether he deserves the public spotlight is another question
Throughout the NFL’s history, we’ve had our fair share of clown princes. Not too long ago, Rob Gronkowski was the league’s court jester. That history extends back, through Pat McAfee and Chad Ochocinco, past Jared Allen and John Randle to Jim McMahon, Steve McMichael, John Riggins, Alex Karras and Billy “White Shoes” Johnson.
There’s probably something deeply insightful to say about the need for goofballs in a sport characterized by militarized order and a seriousness that borders on self-parody, but what’s important now is how we reflect on these chosen merrymakers.
Kimya Holmes’ police report over a news segment on a real-estate transaction invokes law that no longer exists
A New Orleans state court judge filed a police complaint against a local CBS affiliate after it aired a segment scrutinizing a real-estate transaction in which she was involved, with the jurist invoking a section of law that no longer carries criminal penalties, according to the journalist who reported the story.
The situation centering on New Orleans criminal court judge Kimya Holmes and investigative reporter David Hammer was only the latest in a series of high-profile matters pitting Louisiana journalists against members of the state’s court system.
While Democratic congressional candidates are floating the restoration of federal Affordable Care Act subsidies and Medicaid funding, Oregon officials are crafting a more ambitious plan to implement universal coverage in their state.
Sitting in a pediatric intensive care unit last year, watching a ventilator keep her 17-month-old daughter alive, Emily Marris scoured the contents of her phone for evidence to give to California health and food safety investigators.
She had bought raw goat milk from a farm recommended to her in a Facebook group run by her chiropractor. Marris had hoped the milk, unprocessed and natural, would help with her daughter Brooklyn’s constipation. But doctors now suspected the unpasteurized milk, which hadn’t been heated to kill off pathogens, was the source of the toddler’s severe E. coli infection.
To the regulators who’d reached out to Marris, the case was a top priority. The farm appeared to be defying state law to sell unregulated raw milk to unsuspecting families; soon, another child, a 6-year-old girl who’d drunk milk from the same farm, would wind up in the same San Diego hospital, with the same potentially fatal illness, needing blood transfusions.
Similar cases were popping up across the country as social media influencers and President Donald Trump’s White House kept touting the unproven benefits of raw milk and downplaying its risks. In the past two years alone, hundreds had fallen ill across nine states from drinking raw milk or eating products made with it.
Recognizing that people still want the freedom to buy it, California had struck a balance: It licenses farms that sell raw milk for human consumption, inspects them for sanitation and requires them to regularly test batches for pathogens.
The system hadn’t prevented outbreaks, as ProPublica previously reported. But it aimed to ensure that customers, at the very least, knew what they were getting into; milk legally sold in the state had to be clearly labeled with warnings.
Which is what troubled regulators even more about this particular outbreak.
The milk suspected to have sickened the girls didn’t come from one of the state’s dozen licensed farms. The dairy was totally off the radar, selling unknown quantities of unlabeled gallons.
And inside Marris’ phone was even more alarming information. Months of text messages showed the farm’s owner knew from the start that a toddler was drinking her milk. Then after the farmer learned that Brooklyn had contracted a serious foodborne infection, which doctors attributed to the milk, she continued to advertise on Facebook: “raw goat milk from a clean tested herd.”
After many sleepless nights, Marris screengrabbed the messages and sent them to the investigators, hoping to quell the outbreak before it grew.
Amid a flurry of emails involving at least four state and county agencies, investigators with the California Department of Food and Agriculture took the lead. They needed to confirm that the farm was indeed selling milk for human consumption. In California, doing so without a license is a violation of state law and can lead to fines of up to $10,000 and jail time of up to a year.
On the evening of June 17, 2025, an undercover investigator messaged the farm’s Facebook account:
“Would like to buy like a gallon ”
Someone from the farm replied that they sold goat milk by the gallon, explained that they were temporarily out of jugs and said they would message as soon as their shipment arrived.
Regulators now had a rare opportunity.
They had strong evidence: two cooperating families, direct text admissions and access to hospital records documenting the destruction wrought on two young bodies.
They had a clear reason to act. Raw-milk consumption was a growing hazard, and their state, like others, was teeming with black-market dairies, propped up by consumer demand fueled by misinformation.
They could have pursued penalties under a law enacted to prevent this very conduct, sending a message to other sellers about what the state would not tolerate.
But that’s not what would happen.
Emily Marris in her homeSarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
Marris was breastfeeding her daughter in her southern California home one afternoon that previous January when a post on Facebook caught her eye.
In a private group of backyard farmers, her chiropractor, Chris Boman, had shared a photo of a refrigerator, filled with gallons of freshly collected milk. In the years Marris had been visiting his office, she’d seen him selling raw milk from his own cow in his clinic’s waiting room.
She had never thought to try it herself, but milk was on her mind lately. She was trying to wean Brooklyn, and so far it wasn’t going well.
Brooklyn was her “miracle baby.” Marris had become pregnant with her — a desperately wanted third child — at age 48. Then she arrived seven weeks premature, her low birth weight and underdeveloped lungs confining her to the intensive care unit for her first month.
The traumatic birth sent Marris’ protective instincts into overdrive. Already a self-described “crunchy” mom, she’d detoxified their home in suburban Winchester, a small inland community in Riverside County; stripped it of harmful chemicals and synthetic materials; and limited her family’s intake of ultraprocessed food. A trained birth doula and former teacher, she spent much of her days caring for her kids while her husband ran a sports technology startup company. As she had with her other two children, she was determined to breastfeed Brooklyn for as long as needed.
Josh and Emily Marris with their two daughters before Brooklyn fell ill with E. coliCourtesy of Emily Marris
But when her daughter was barely a year old, Marris started a new medication for her chronic hip pain that could pass through breastmilk. She tried organic infant formula, but the number of additives alarmed her, and store-bought cow milk left Brooklyn severely constipated. Marris considered stopping her medication, but then she couldn’t walk without pain.
Desperate for an alternative, she commented on her chiropractor’s Facebook post, “Would this be a good milk for baby Brookie?”
The group’s members quickly chimed in. “I had to put my baby on raw goats milk,” one mother wrote. “Healed her right up. … Goats milk is easier digested than cow.” While sales of raw milk are prohibited on Facebook’s Marketplace, and such ads are removed when flagged, discussions of raw milk are still allowed, said a Meta spokesperson.
The commenter recommended a farm called Moonlight Ridge, and Marris clicked over to its Facebook page, which was filled with pictures of velvety Nubian goats. The farm milked its animals twice daily, it said, so the dairy was “always the freshest and best quality.” It was only 10 miles away. Marris arranged a visit that afternoon.
There were no signs marking the farm, but Marris turned down a dirt road and spotted its 23-year-old owner, Courtney Baker, with long blond hair and a tan, standing by a metal gate near a white pickup truck. Baker and her husband had become interested in raising goats during the pandemic. They started selling raw milk to help animal rescues and breeders, Baker would later say, and got most of their customers by word of mouth.
Baker greeted Marris and handed over an unlabeled jug of raw goat milk, still warm to the touch.
Marris pointed to her daughter, asleep in the back seat of her SUV, and explained Brooklyn’s digestion struggles. “This is the sweet girl you’re helping,” she recalled telling the farmer.
Once home, Marris filled up a baby bottle and nervously handed it to Brooklyn. Her daughter didn’t hesitate.
“She is gobbling it down! ” Marris texted Baker.
“Yay!! I’m glad she likes it!” Baker responded, then later that day asked, “How’s her tummy handling the milk?”
By the next morning, Brooklyn’s problems seemed to ease. “She has had two great and more normal poops!!!!” Marris texted Baker.
Marris believed she had done her due diligence. She had researched raw milk, whose benefits were readily promoted by the local farmers and wellness influencers she followed. Shortly after that first pickup, she and her husband, Josh, visited Moonlight Ridge to inspect the herd. The goats appeared well-kept. And when they asked Baker about her safety practices, they recalled, the farmer repeatedly assured them her herd and milk were “clean and tested.” Marris trusted Baker and thought the farmer was doing everything possible to keep the milk safe.
For six months, Marris gave Brooklyn raw milk without incident.
Then, on June 2, it all began to unravel. On the way home from swim lessons, Brooklyn vomited all over the back seat.
That same day, another couple, Navy veterans Iris and David Galindo, drove to Moonlight Ridge to pick up their first order of goat milk.
They had also been looking for alternatives for their 6-year-old daughter, Victoria, whose doctor recommended limiting dairy products from cows. They began to consider goat milk, which Iris drank as a child in Guatemala. She contacted Baker, who had tutored their son in math years earlier and was now advertising raw goat milk in a local Facebook group. “There was trust there,” Galindo said.
As Baker handed over an unlabeled jug that day, the Galindos said they made it explicitly clear the milk was for their young daughter.
That evening, Victoria drank her first cup.
Left photo: Brooklyn, in her car seat, is transported to Rady Children’s Hospital. Right photo: Brooklyn is intubated after arriving at the hospital.Courtesy of Emily Marris
The days after Brooklyn first threw up were a hellish blur: vomit that turned bilious yellow, then a tarry blackish-green, then bloodwork that so alarmed emergency room doctors that they called for transport to a pediatric intensive care unit 70 miles away.
Stunned and helpless, Marris and her husband waited as doctors at Rady Children’s Hospital fastened a web of wires to their barely conscious daughter: a tube down her trachea to help her breathe, dialysis lines into her blood vessels to support her failing kidneys.
Brooklyn had developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a rare condition in which microscopic blood clots clog small vessels and destroy vital organs. Infectious disease doctors suspected it had been caused by a strain of E. coli and had Marris walk them through Brooklyn’s recent diet.
When she mentioned the raw milk, she said, they looked at her uneasily and told her that was the likely culprit. E. coli can thrive in animal intestines. As few as 10 cells, hidden in an infinitesimal fleck of feces, can contaminate raw milk and trigger a fatal infection.
Marris was terrified for her daughter and furious with herself. She had searched online for the benefits of raw milk and gotten the confirmation she needed from raw-milk proponents.
She wasn’t aware of the medical consensus that raw milk has no proven nutritional benefits compared with its pasteurized counterpart, or that it carries over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness. “I’m the one that gave it to her,” she thought. “Just how stupid could I be?”
From her daughter’s bedside, on June 5, Marris texted Baker. “They think Brookie got a strain of e-coli possibly from a bad batch of the milk … I just wanted to let you know in case you want to alert anyone that had milk from the week before this.”
“I am so incredibly sorry to hear she is going through this!!” Baker quickly responded. “None of my milk testing results have showed anything abnormal.”
Later that day, though, Marris learned while texting with Baker that the farmer hadn’t tested for E. coli; it seemed like she didn’t know how to. “All the tests I’m finding looks like it mainly comes from meat,” Baker wrote.
Marris was taken aback. How did Baker not know how to test for a common foodborne pathogen like E. coli? Still, Marris remained polite. “Please don’t beat yourself up either. You are a sweet kind person and I don’t want you or me to go there.”
Two days after Brooklyn arrived at the hospital, on June 6, doctors took her off the ventilator, but she struggled to wake up. For hours, as she continued on dialysis, her eyes drifted back into her head, her body occasionally convulsed and her breathing grew heavy and rapid.
That evening, her blood grew so acidic that it disrupted the electrical signals of her heart, which struggled to pump enough blood and oxygen to her brain. For hours, the medical team tried to stabilize her spiking pulse. Her parents didn’t know if she would survive the night.
As they awaited an update, a stool sample confirmed that Brooklyn had contracted E. coli O157:H7, one of the most dangerous strains. When Marris texted Baker about the diagnosis, the farmer detailed her equipment-cleaning process and said she would send a sample to a lab in Colorado.
After a couple of days, Brooklyn finally turned a corner. But in suburban Murrieta, not far from the Marris family home, Victoria was just starting to decline.
She’d grown lethargic over the past week, with bouts of bloody diarrhea. After two unhelpful urgent care visits, the Galindos drove her to Rady on June 13. Bloodwork revealed she had the same disorder as Brooklyn, brought on by the same E. coli strain; she was rushed into intensive care. “My world just dropped,” Iris Galindo said.
On June 14, after Marris learned that another child had fallen sick after drinking raw milk, she texted Baker again: “Maybe hold off on selling any until we know if there is a common thread.”
Baker didn’t reply.
The next day, however, Marris saw that Baker had recently responded to someone in the Facebook group looking for raw goat milk: “I have raw goat milk from a clean tested herd in wine country … We milk 2x a day so it is always super fresh.”
Marris was aghast, squeezing the sides of her phone to capture what was on the screen.
“Out of respect, I’m giving you a heads up,” she texted Baker. “I wasn’t going to EVER post anything, but I’m appalled that you’re advertising the milk as tested and safe when you haven’t been able to test for that deadly strain of e-coli.”
Marris then typed up a detailed description of what had happened to her daughter.
“My 17 month old almost died this week,” she wrote. “I NEVER WANTED TO have to call her out on this, but it’s prudent that she take a break, make sure she tests for THIS SPECIFIC strain and ensure the milk is safe before resuming sales.”
She hit the post button, heaved a sigh of relief and watched the responses roll in.
“Praying for your sweet baby.”
“Omg I almost bought milk from her a couple weeks ago.”
“Thank you for protecting the rest of us.”
And then her phone buzzed. Baker had finally replied.
At first, she apologized for the slow response, explaining that she’d also been hospitalized with an unrelated illness. She said that, despite her Facebook comment, she had stopped selling milk while she waited for test results.
And then she asked Marris to take down her post. “As much as I hate and feel bad for what happened to Brooke [sic] I really really do,” she said, “I really don’t appreciate my name being thrown out there like that.”
Reluctantly, Marris deleted what she wrote.
She’d already spoken with state regulators about the outbreak and handed over her text messages.
Surely, she believed, they would do something.
Marris shows a photo on her phone of one of her daughters playing with baby goats at Moonlight Ridge farm.Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
On June 20, three regulators paid an unannounced visit to Moonlight Ridge, according to internal records from the investigation obtained by ProPublica.
The farm was located within a larger horse ranch, and they didn’t see anyone at the entrance. They walked along the fenceline until they spotted Baker’s husband, who asked if they were there because of the goat milk. Baker showed up 20 minutes later.
She told them something she hadn’t said to the parents or the undercover investigator: The milk was for pets only and advertised as such on Facebook.
“Of course, she insisted that she only sells the goat milk for pet food,” Jill Soares, a regional supervisor with the Food and Agriculture Department, later wrote in an email to the team.
Although California requires licenses to sell raw milk for human consumption, unlicensed farms can sell it as long as they label it as pet food. Sellers have seized on the loophole to avoid scrutiny and prosecution, a health official familiar with Baker’s case told ProPublica, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly. “There is a gap in regulation,” the official said.
The gap is magnified in 13 other states, where raw milk can be sold only as pet food, but regulators know people are still drinking it. Outbreaks this year in Louisiana and last year in Florida sickened multiple children, including at least one who developed the same life-changing kidney condition as Brooklyn. No dairy got in trouble. State officials said the milk was legally sold and clearly labeled.
In Baker’s case, the investigative report makes no mention of California regulators interrogating her about the pet food defense, despite the text messages they’d read. “She clearly knew the milk was going to a child,” Soares wrote to her team.
With such evidence in hand, they could have referred the case to local prosecutors. Instead, before the site visit, supervising special investigator Jeffrey Eggert wrote in an email to the team that pursuing charges was not the priority.
“The immediate goal here is to get the goat farm to stop all milk related-product manufacturing, and keep the community safe,” he wrote. His unit “typically pursues the criminal route; however, the legal process is lengthy.”
That decision appeared to inform how the regulators approached their visit to Baker’s farm.
They handed Baker a cease-and-desist order and a violation notice for operating as a food facility without a valid permit; neither carried penalties, but both threatened consequences if she didn’t comply.
Then, they told Baker they would return the next morning to collect a milk sample for testing, as the families whose children had fallen sick did not have any leftover milk.
The next day, they met Baker at the gate and accepted a half-gallon jug of raw milk she assured them had been collected the previous night from 11 goats.
Department officials told ProPublica that California law does not permit investigators to enter unlicensed properties, even when they receive reports of unlicensed activity.
At licensed farms, California investigators have collected the milk themselves. And because newer batches might not have the same contaminant that sickened consumers, they have also combed the farmland for the pathogen, sampling dirt, groundwater and animal droppings. In some cases when they haven’t found a pathogen strain in the milk, they have found it in the surroundings.
Eleven days after regulators left with the sample Baker collected, the state’s limited test results came back negative for several pathogens, including E. coli.
Regulators then pivoted to helping Baker get approval to start selling her milk again — still without a license, inspections or testing — so long as she labeled and registered it as pet food.
Baker soon wrote back to the undercover investigator to see whether they were still interested. “I have gotten confirmation from CDFA that I’m in full compliance for pet consumption milk!”
On Aug. 1, the Food and Agriculture Department closed its case, finding that Baker had “promoted raw milk for sale and sold unapproved milk products in commerce without a CDFA license.” She was given no penalty.
An Official Notice of Violation document from the Riverside County Department of Environmental Health issued to Courtney Baker for operating a food facility without a valid health permitCounty of Riverside
“I was unable to show that she sold milk intended for human consumption,” wrote special investigator Nancy Del Cid. “If this had been proven, the case would have been referred to the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office for potential prosecution.”
The department didn’t respond to ProPublica’s specific questions about the investigation, including why officials had come to this conclusion despite evidence that had made at least one supervisor remark that Baker “clearly knew the milk was going to a child.”
Officials told ProPublica that seeking criminal charges would have slowed down their effort to stop Baker from selling more milk.
“Issuing a cease-and-desist order almost always results in a product being removed from the market more rapidly than a criminal referral,” said Devon Keeler, a spokesperson for the department, in an emailed statement. “In this case, CDFA acted to protect public health as quickly as possible by taking steps to stop this product’s distribution based on the evidence and information investigators collected and confirmed.”
In response to questions about why it did not pursue prosecution in parallel to its attempt to enforce a cease-and-desist, department officials told ProPublica that local law enforcement often does not pursue criminal charges unless a cease-and-desist order has been violated.
Earlier this year, Baker moved out of California and reopened her farm in Arizona. But before she left town, I visited Moonlight Ridge.
Heading down the same road the inspectors did months before, I came upon the same gate. This time, it was open, so I drove through it, past the sprawling estate of horse corrals and stables. I parked near a grove of peeling eucalyptus trees where I saw a small pen with a large herd of goats protected by a barking farm dog. About 30 yards away was an aging trailer. I climbed the dusty stairs and knocked.
Baker opened the door, in leggings and a tank top, her hair held back with sunglasses. After I explained why I was there — regulators had connected her farm with a recent outbreak — she told me that the case had been dismissed and urged me to call the state’s Food and Agriculture Department. “Everything was negative,” she said. “There were no pathogens.” She added that the results from her own private lab test had also come back clean.
Baker touted the resolution of the case as a total vindication, and the negative test results — from samples she had gathered unsupervised, weeks after the infections started — as proof that her milk had not caused the outbreak.
If her animals had carried E. coli, she said, she and her husband would have been infected at some point. “Quite frankly, we don’t care if we’ve cleaned the pen and then go grab a sandwich,” she told me. “We’ll eat with our hands filthy.”
She said she tested her herd for some goat diseases, but said she never claimed to have tested the milk for foodborne pathogens.
She also stressed that families had knowingly bought milk that was not for human consumption. “Everything is sold as pet milk,” she said. “What they choose to do with it is not my business.” She added that Marris made a poor decision and was “trying to find someone to take the blame for it.”
She suggested she didn’t know the Galindo family well, or that they were drinking the milk. It was just a coincidence, she maintained, that the two families, who hadn’t met each other, both had children who fell ill with the same rare strain of E. coli — one strongly associated with raw-milk consumption — after drinking her product.
Regardless, she said, she stopped selling it after Marris’ daughter fell ill.
“I was nice to Emily,” Baker told me in a sharp tone, describing how she gave the family special privileges by allowing them to visit her farm. “She has completely ruined it.”
Several of her assertions didn’t line up with what the families had shared with me, or what I had read in their text messages and the state’s internal records. When I followed up this summer and asked her about what I had learned, she refused to respond to my questions.
Through Facebook Messenger, Baker said she “vehemently” disagreed with ProPublica’s “distortion and mischaracterization of the facts,” but did not point out any specific errors.
Brooklyn in pediatric intensive care at Rady Children’s HospitalCourtesy of Emily Marris
When Brooklyn came home from the hospital, she barely resembled the active toddler who had started to cruise and speak simple words before falling ill. The disease had substantially interrupted her development. “It just all sort of stopped and stalled,” Marris said.
Brooklyn began physical therapy right away, but she walked with a slight limp and couldn’t sleep through the night without terrors. Doctors also warned that she would likely face long-term kidney issues. She would need to be seen every six months by a nephrologist and would not ever be able to drink alcohol.
Victoria, too, will require ongoing medical monitoring.
Not long after both girls had been discharged, a mutual acquaintance connected their two families, who gathered in Marris’ backyard. Sitting over a spread of cheese, crackers and blueberry jam, they compared the text messages that Baker had sent them.
It became evident, recalled Marris, that Baker had known that both children had become sick after drinking her raw milk, but had not informed the hospital or told the families that they weren’t alone. Together, they decided to file a lawsuit against Baker and her farm in Riverside County Superior Court, alleging they had negligently sold the families contaminated raw milk that was presented as “fit for human consumption.” The case is ongoing. Baker told ProPublica that the farm will “fully defend against the allegations by Plaintiffs.”
Marris said she felt she needed to hold Baker accountable for what she’d done, given that regulators had squandered their chance to do so. But she also carries her own heavy burden of guilt.
“I’m going to hate myself to the day I die for having allowed that to happen,” she said. Now more fearful of harming her children, she agonizes over whether meat is undercooked or pasteurized milk has been sitting out on the counter too long.
Hoping to spare other families the same pain, Marris posted another warning when she saw someone else advertising raw milk in her chiropractor’s Facebook group that summer.
“Just PLEASE PLEASE educate yourself and make choices about raw milk carefully. My 17 month old baby and one other little girl almost died last month from raw goats milk,” she began. “I’m posting this so you know what can truly happen if the milk has bacteria….know the risks, and make your own personal choices.”
When she later logged back in to see whether people had responded, she saw a notification at the top of the feed: “Your profile is suspended from this group.”
She texted the office of her chiropractor, Boman, one of the group’s three administrators. “I’m now banned from the group Chris runs, despite knowing what has happened,” she wrote. “I’m pretty disappointed.”
Boman texted back with his condolences but said he wasn’t a mediator. “You shared your story, we appreciate it, and people can read it and decide for themselves if they want to assume the risks or not,” he said. “Are you wanting anything else from the group?”
I visited Boman this January at his office in a Murrieta strip mall where he specializes in pediatric and prenatal chiropractics. I found him leaning on the front desk of his waiting room, wearing a sweatshirt that said “PRAY” across the chest. His neatly clipped facial hair framed a welcoming smile. He agreed to speak outside.
After Marris was suspended from the group, Boman said, he hoped it would calm down the conversation. She was “just drumming up a bunch of fear,” he said. “She’s coming out of this traumatic experience. … People need to see all perspectives.”
Boman said he had spoken with Baker to understand hers. “I don’t want someone in the group that’s doing shady things,” he told me. “People have been kicked out for selling bad cows.” But Baker assuaged his concerns. “From everything I understand, her standards are super high,” he said, citing her negative pathogen results. “Her milk came back squeaky clean.”
Boman said he connected Baker with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that assists raw-dairy sellers, which Baker said last January was representing her. Boman said the referral wasn’t, “You did something wrong, make sure you lawyer up,” adding that he has a membership that allows him to access the fund’s services. “If something arises, it’s nice to have someone in that corner.” The organization said it is not representing Baker in the lawsuit.
Boman still believed in raw milk, he told me. He’d only stopped selling it in his office because he had dried up his cow. He said he was supportive of what Marris had been through, but “I don’t want a product to get blamed if it wasn’t that.” Boman did not respond to follow-up questions sent by email.
For Marris, his response was a betrayal. But the experience didn’t keep her away from Facebook groups where people continue to spread misinformation about raw milk and advertise it for sale. At night, after tucking her children into bed, Marris scrolls through them, tracking the posts.
From time to time, she steps back into the comments and shares her story, hoping to prevent other mothers from making the worst mistake of their lives. Sometimes, she is attacked and accused of lying by raw-milk absolutists. And sometimes, the groups delete her posts.
Marris helps Brooklyn balance while playing at a gym in Murrieta.Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica
Ex-Asda boss Andy Bond linked to plan, with buyout team understood to be negotiating with financial backer
Poundland’s management team are in “advanced talks” to lead a bid for the ailing cut-price retailer that could save up to 11,000 jobs.
The former Asda boss Andy Bond, who ran Poundland for a number of years from 2016 then stepped up to its former parent Pepco before leaving in 2025, is understood to be part of the negotiations to take on the business.
Blast during search operation near border fuels political tensions amid attempts to revive diplomatic channels
South Korea has demanded an apology from North Korea over a landmine blast that injured three soldiers, saying they were hurt by North Korean mines on the southern side of the border.
Kang Hyun-woo, the director of operations at South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff, demanded an apology and “responsible measures” from Pyongyang over the blast, which occurred on 21 September during a search operation south of the border.
Minister tells Guardian of trade-offs Kyiv facing as it tries to keep normal life moving amid Russian strikes
Missile alerts are costing Ukraine an estimated $45m (£34m) for every hour they bring business to a halt, according to the country’s economy minister, as Kyiv searches for ways to keep the economy running under an intensifying Russian bombardment.
Russia has increasingly targeted the infrastructure underpinning Ukraine’s economy, striking industrial sites, warehouses, logistics hubs and datacentres in what Oleksandr Kravchenko, the minister for economy and the environment, described as an effort to “destroy pretty much the entire economy”.
Andy Burnham has opened the door to the UK rejoining the EU, saying Britain could “go all the way”, as he prepares to reconsider Labour’s post-Brexit red lines.
The prime minister used a series of interviews after his emotional Labour conference speech to spell out how wide-ranging his consideration of Britain’s future with Brussels could be because Brexit had caused “more harm than good”.
fjo3 quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Tove Danovich: Every year, the night sky is becoming 10% brighter. Eighty percent of people live under light-polluted skies. And while the UN declared a healthy environment -- clean air, clean water -- to be a human right, I believe we also all have a right to darkness as well. This doesn't mean turning off every streetlamp. But do we really need bright white floodlights at the front of every garage? Replacing lights with ones that are bright enough to do the job -- and no brighter -- might make it so I wouldn't have to get in my car and drive for hours to see the night sky as it actually shines above us. To preserve the darkness would mean rules and enforcement around the warmth of the lights, where they point, and how bright they can be. It would mean not putting in three lights when one would do. If we recognized that darkness is something we need, we'd become more careful about chasing it away.
[...] Access to darkness is about more than stargazing. The night is its own habitat. Artificial lights confuse animals who use the moon to navigate, whether they're baby sea turtles navigating toward a parking lot instead of the ocean or moths who fly in circles around a lightbulb. Lightning bugs and frogs need darkness to complete their courtship rituals. Migrating birds get thrown off course by the bright lights of big cities. But the effects of light pollution linger even after it's daylight again, becoming visible. Research has shown light pollution is breaking the relationship between plants and pollinators, changing the time of year trees break into flower, and disrupting circadian rhythms for all living creatures. This includes humans. Whether it's artificial lights indoors or creeping in through the window at night, studies have found that we need darkness in order to rest, recover and stay healthy.
Kuala Lumpur plans to send a total of 5,000 Myanmar nationals back to the war-torn country despite persecution concerns
Malaysia began sending back about 1,500 Myanmar nationals on Tuesday, the government confirmed, as it launched a scheme that rights groups say may endanger migrants and asylum seekers by returning them to the war-torn country.
The group is the first of 5,000 Myanmar citizens that Kuala Lumpur says agreed to “voluntary” repatriation from detention centres amid a huge uptick in anti-migrant sentiment in Malaysia.
The injection of thermal energy comes amid an increasing rise in sea levels and continuing acidification
A record-breaking 23 zettajoules of heat was sunk into the world’s seas last year, leaving ocean waters hotter, higher and less hospitable, a report has found.
The explosive addition of thermal energy, which was almost 40 times greater than all the energy humanity used that year, comes amid far-reaching changes to the deep water bodies fundamental to life on Earth.
When I come to a stop, the board sometimes starts rolling backward instead of staying stationary. Even when I lift my heel to disengage the footpad, the motor can continue driving backward. I’ve also had a few instances where the board suddenly powers down or disengages and the nose drops first.
It feels like the board is not consistently detecting the stop/disengage condition correctly. I’m concerned this could be related to the footpad sensors, motor control settings, or a configuration issue.
Indonesia’s prisons have long faced allegations that well-connected inmates can obtain preferential treatment through bribery
Five Indonesian prison officials have been suspended after investigators found an apartment-style compound complete with airconditioners, big-screen televisions and expensive cars allegedly used by inmates at a prison near Jakarta.
“We found strong indications that certain prisoners had access to special facilities unavailable to ordinary prisoners,” said Syafrida Rachmawati Rasahan, a member of Indonesia’s ombudsman, on Tuesday. “We encountered prisoners inside the residential compound and discovered facilities resembling home stays, apartments and villas rather than prison housing.”
Relatives of Hollywood legend say her doppelganger could now be used for more glamorous roles
She shimmered in Hollywood’s silent movie era and lit up the first talkies – now Greta Garbo may be about to star in cinema’s new AI age.
More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role.
A Sierra Leonean nurse detained, handcuffed and flown to Ghana. An Iranian dissident sent to Central African Republic. A Cameroonian deported to Equatorial Guinea.
This is the face of the Trump administration’s policy since 2025 – striking deals with 35 countries and sending up to 25,000 migrants in the US across the world, often to places they have no connection to at all.
The Guardian investigations correspondent Louisa Loveluck – as part of a consortium of journalists organised by Forbidden Stories – uncovers some of the human stories behind these deals.
Today in Focus host Annie Kelly asks whether this is even legal and what happens to people once they are banished.
Exclusive: Culture secretary says UK will crack down further and be ‘pioneer of tech as a force for good’
Lisa Nandy has warned technology firms that the government’s online safety crackdown is not finished, saying that banning under-16s from social media platforms is only a “staging post”.
Earlier this year the government announced that teenagers under the age of 16 would be banned from accessing “high-risk” social media apps, while safer platforms would be subjected to restrictions.
This article was amended on 30 September 2026. An earlier version said the UK’s upcoming social media ban would include “restrictions for 16- and 17-year-olds on websites that allow infinite scrolling and algorithmic content”; in fact, these restrictions are planned but do not yet have a determined date.
Every Democratic senator except Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman voted on Tuesday for a measure seeking to hold accountable Israeli soldiers and settlers who have killed U.S. citizens in the West Bank. The vote stood as a sign of how much the party’s position on Israel has shifted in the last two years.
Fetterman, who takes a hard pro-Israel line, was the lone holdout in his party, despite one of his constituents being the most recent Palestinian American killed in the West Bank by Israeli settlers.
Near unanimous Democratic support, however, was not enough to secure passage of the measure, with the Senate voting 51–47 against advancing the resolution. The measure would have required the State Department to report on whether it is investigating the killings of nine U.S. citizens by Israeli security forces or settlers since 2022.
Although the resolution was crafted to focus on victims most sympathetic to U.S. elected officials — American citizens slain at the hands of the right-wing Jewish settlement movement — it still drew nearly universal opposition from Senate Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only member of the GOP to vote in favor of it.
The most recent U.S. citizen killed by settlers in the West Bank was a 19-year-old from Philadelphia. Though local Pennsylvania officials called for an investigation, neither Fetterman nor his Republican counterpart from Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick, voted for the Senate measure.
The resolution’s sponsor, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said last week that he has struggled to get information from both the Biden and Trump administrations about whether they are pursuing justice for U.S. citizens killed in the West Bank.
“The Biden administration did not do enough to secure justice, and the Trump administration has not done enough,” he said. “And if we can’t get accountability and justice for American citizens, imagine how hard it is for Palestinian families who don’t have a U.S. passport to get justice and accountability when they are killed or their villages get razed.”
Setting Up an Embargo
Van Hollen’s measure would have required the State Department to report on whether it or the Justice Department are investigating the killings of U.S. citizens in the West Bank, including that of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was slain by the Israeli military while reporting on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in 2022.
Van Hollen’s resolution also directed the State Department to report on the status of U.S. citizens held in Israeli prisons or military detention, pointing to the lengthy incarceration of a Palestinian American 16-year-old boy from Florida.
Advocates hoped the resolution would help them accomplish much larger aims, however. Under U.S. law, the government is forbidden from selling arms to countries that engage in “a consistent pattern of gross violations” of human rights. Van Hollen’s resolution asks whether Israel’s actions fit that pattern.
In a policy paper published earlier this month, the pro-Palestine nonprofit IMEU Policy Project argued that abiding by foreign assistance law “would require halting all arms exports to Israel, whether from private U.S. companies or the U.S. government, irrespective of whether purchases are paid for with U.S. or foreign funds.”
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mt., pointed to that larger aim when he argued against the resolution on the Senate floor.
“Make no mistake: The sole objective here is not justice or accountability for Americans,” Daines said. “It is to cut off security aid to our ally Israel in its time of need.”
“Of course, any loss, all loss of American life is a tragedy,” Daines continued, adding that he was “very confident this administration will get to the bottom of this issue.”
Growing Support
Tuesday’s vote centered on whether to discharge the resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Resolutions such as the one Van Hollen offered are privileged, meaning that they are the rare type of measure where any senator can force a full floor vote.
Van Hollen said last week in a briefing hosted by IMEU Policy Project that his resolution had drawn far more support, in the form of co-sponsorships by other Senate Democrats, than a similar push sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2024. That measure, brought weeks after the October 7 attacks, drew the support of Paul and just 10 members of the Democratic caucus.
Since then, Democratic voters have soured on Israel and increasingly support Palestine, according to public opinion polls. Mainstream Democrats are also facing off against a Republican in the White House rather than Biden, who generally got a free hand from his own party when it came Israel.
“While I was pleased that so many of my Democratic colleagues joined this effort, it’s clear the United States must do more,” Van Hollen said in a statement after the vote on Tuesday. “It is our responsibility to ensure recipients of U.S. taxpayer dollars act in line with our laws and our values — this resolution was an opportunity to shed light on a reality that flies in the face of that principle.”
Over the last half millennium, societies around the globe competed to divide up the world’s land. Nearly every square inch of soil outside Antarctica is now owned and tucked within national borders. But the oceans have largely been spared that fate. There were times throughout history when countries tried to gate and regulate the seas, but they were too vast to be controlled for long periods. During the Cold War, as technology made it far easier to imagine partitioning the world’s waterways and seabeds, great powers avoided an unrestrained race to grab the oceans. Most governments agreed to deal with them through a patchwork of treaties and multilateral bodies that sought to guarantee freedom of navigation in international waters and assign coastal seabeds to adjacent littoral states.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some tech workers in San Francisco hooked up ChatGPT to a Toyota Corolla and got it to drive around a parking lot. This may not sound impressive in the age of the self-driving car until you realize that the LLM driving the car was a general purpose chatbot running on a laptop and not the purpose-built driving system based on millions of hours of training data used by Waymo or Tesla.
The people behind the stunt call themselves DrivingBench and they've posted their code, their prompts, and videos of the experiment online. In the experiment, DrivingBench hooked up GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and GPT-5.6 Sol to a Toyota Corolla and gave the LLMs control over the car's steering, accelerator, and brakes. Then they set up a small cone course in a public parking lot and prompted the chatbots to navigate the space.
The goal, they said, was to find out if untrained, off-the-shelf frontier AIs can drive a real car. The results were mixed. Grok, Sol, and Fable only drove a few meters and didn't finish the course. GPT-6 Astra, however, did eventually learn to navigate the course and complete it. But not without a lot of troubleshooting.
"It's an interesting demonstration of potential emergent capabilities," said Mahns. "It can fail a turn, and then the next turn, next try, it will be able to do that turn and other turns that it hasn't seen before. Not necessarily saying LLMs are gonna put Waymo out of business or something, just an interesting demonstration of where things are, and things are just moving fast."
"Most people that are familiar with ChatGPT have used it in this white collar, kind of like in the computer, and it's definitely imminent to the point that this capability will start having more impact in the physical world. So I think seeing the sparks of this happening, the shift of this utility coming into the physical world, is also somewhat exciting."
Jonquel Jones had 21 points and 13 rebounds and the No 8 seed New York Liberty beat the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx 87-71 in Game 2 of their WNBA playoff series on Tuesday night to advance to the semi-finals.
Breanna Stewart added 21 points and Sabrina Ionescu had 18 to help the Liberty become the first No 8 seed to eliminate a No 1 seed in the league’s 30-year history. The WNBA has undergone a number of different playoff formats, and in many of them, it wasn’t possible for those seeds to match up. However, in 2022 the league changed to the current iteration in which the top-eight teams play in the quarter-finals.
Wilson assessed technical foul after confrontation
All Caitlin Clark wanted was one more chance to play this season. She delivered a masterpiece. The All-Star guard scored 27 points, had 15 assists, reached another milestone and provided the energy on both ends of the court to help keep the sixth-seeded Indiana Fever’s postseason alive with a 99-89 victory over the defending WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces. Kelsey Mitchell added 26 points as the crowd chanted “M-V-P” throughout the game.
Indiana evened the best-of-three series at 1-1. Game 3 will be played Thursday at Las Vegas.
In a surprising turn in Lindsay Clancy's first hearing since her mistrial in early September, her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, argued that there was no evidence she killed her kids.
Julian Hall, Mathis Albert set records for youngest scorers
Riding goals from Sebastian Berhalter, Julian Hall, Chris Richards and 17-year-old newcomer Mathis Albert, the US men’s national team beat Chile in St Louis on Tuesday night 4-2. The US were shaky at times but used a blend of regulars and newcomers to get the job done, with Albert becoming the youngest-ever goalscorer for the US men with his insurance goal in stoppage time, and Hall becoming the youngest US men’s player to score in each of his first two games.
The game ended with an example of the collective identity a young US group has managed to forge in their first World Cup window, minus major figures like Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, and Folarin Balogun. When goalkeeper Brian Schwake fell on the ball as stoppage time ticked over, Chile forward Leandro Hernández left a kick in on the Nashville SC goalkeeper. Richards took exception, confronting Hernández, setting off a group confrontation that cleared both benches and saw US manager Mauricio Pochettino jump in to the middle of the fray to try and calm things down.
Group of officers known as ‘riders’ in 2000s prompted longest arrangement of its kind in US history
After 23 years, a district judge has released the Oakland police department (OPD) from federal oversight, marking the end of the longest arrangement of this kind in US history.
In the early 2000s, a group of police officers known as the “riders” were exposed for offenses like planting evidence, falsifying reports and using excessive force against primarily young Black men. These actions led victims to file more than 100 civil lawsuits against the department. In 2003, as a part of the settlement of these cases, OPD was put on a federal court-ordered reform program.
For some context, it’s worth remembering that Smith had a two-volume report of his findings as a result of his criminal investigations – that resulted in two indictments against the president after his first term. The first focused on Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, while the second on the president’s retention of classified documents.
However, in February, a Trump-appointed federal judge permanently barred the justice department from releasing the second volume of Smith’s report.
Curtis Wilkie Beasley executed for 1995 killing of Carolyn Monfort, after US supreme court declines to intervene
A 77-year-old Florida man was put to death on Tuesday for his conviction in a deadly hammer attack on a woman decades ago, becoming the 16th person executed this year in the nation’s busiest death chamber.
Curtis Wilkie Beasley was pronounced dead at 6.12pm following a lethal injection at the Florida state prison near Starke, authorities said. He was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery and grand theft auto in the 1995 hammer attack on Carolyn Monfort at her home south of Orlando.
Voters were split between bear 910 and 89 Backpack in the final round of the weeklong contest to see who is the chunkiest bear at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bureau of Prisons to reinstate a collective bargaining agreement with the agency's union after the bureau's director abruptly terminated it last year.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered institutions like the Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy in Annapolis to stop granting tenure to civilian faculty, in his latest change to military higher education.
Tallahassee, FL — Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet have approved designating more than 100 organizations as domestic or foreign terrorist organizations under a new state law that gives Florida officials broad authority to impose penalties on designated groups and their supporters.
The list includes antifa, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR-Florida and the Muslim Brotherhood. Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass said the organizations met the statutory criteria, and DeSantis said he approved the recommendations without objection from Cabinet members.
The designations stem from HB 1471, which took effect July 1. The law authorizes Florida’s chief of domestic security to make terrorism designations, subject to approval by the governor and Cabinet. It also creates penalties involving material support, organizational membership, state funding and participation in public education.
CAIR and CAIR-Florida have challenged the law in federal court, arguing that it violates First Amendment protections and provides inadequate safeguards before an organization can receive a designation carrying serious legal consequences.
The ACLU said CAIR was denied a meaningful opportunity to address the Cabinet before Tuesday’s vote. Florida officials argue that the law includes notice and an appeals process. The designations are scheduled to take effect Nov. 5 unless a court intervenes.
Nine American citizens have been killed by Israeli settlers or security forces in occupied West Bank since 2022
The US Senate on Tuesday evening rejected along mostly party lines a Democratic resolution that would have forced the state department to report to Congress on violence in the occupied West Bank, including the killings of nine American citizens by Israeli settlers or security forces over the last few years.
The resolution, led by the Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen, would have given the state department 30 days to report to Congress on those deaths and on wider human rights conditions in the territory, including Israel’s detention of Palestinian children.
The FAA is investigating a software glitch in some Boeing 737 Max jets that could prompt an automated flight guidance system to disengage during an aborted landing.
‘Yellow 2120’ has been driven out of other Altadena neighborhood crawlspaces, but he just keeps coming back
He’s back: the 550lb bear made famous after he took up residence under an Altadena home in November 2025 is wandering the Los Angeles neighborhood again after he moved in and out of the crawlspace of another home.
“Yellow 2120”, as the black bear has been tagged, was spotted in the crawlspace of a home on Minoru Drive on Monday.
Rubio claims a possible terror plot against a U.K. air base used by U.S. forces "clearly involved" a foreign actor, but there are few facts to support that.
More than 400 detained as police and students clash over class sizes, exhausting timetables and staff shortages
More than 400 people, most of them children, have been detained in France on Tuesday after teenagers across the country blockaded their schools in protest at class sizes, teacher shortages and long timetables.
Interior minister Laurent Nunez told BFM TV: “440 were detained across national territory. We don’t have the final tally yet, but I’m told two-thirds led to police custody.”
US president also issued executive order officially rebranding ‘artificial intelligence’ as ‘superintelligence’
Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that the heads of the largest US tech and AI companies had signed onto a “morally binding” agreement to put controls on artificial intelligence. He announced the deal, called the “Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities,” following a White House luncheon with top tech executives.
“It’s almost like a constitution in a way, and the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president, and it really is a form of protection,” Trump said.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump says he will spend the final 32 days before the November midterms campaigning across the country as Republicans fight to retain control of both chambers of Congress.
Trump said Tuesday that candidates across multiple states are asking him to appear with them and named Texas and Ohio among his upcoming stops. His campaign push arrives later than some advisers initially expected, after the White House spent much of the summer focused on foreign policy and the continuing conflict with Iran.
The political environment has become increasingly difficult for Republicans. Democrats are competitive in a growing number of House districts, while several Senate races that once appeared safer for the GOP have tightened. High gasoline prices, inflation and public dissatisfaction with the Iran war are among the issues shaping the campaign.
Trump remains a powerful turnout driver among Republican voters, but his involvement presents different calculations depending on the district. Some GOP candidates are embracing him directly, while others have emphasized local issues or distanced themselves from parts of his agenda.
The stakes extend beyond individual races. Control of Congress will determine which party sets the legislative agenda during Trump’s final two years in office and whether Democrats gain committee and investigative powers if they capture either chamber.
Firefox 157 is rolling out a major redesign across desktop and mobile, bringing rounded "bubble" tabs, a curved address bar, refreshed icons and colors, and a more consistent visual language across devices. Mozilla is also adding more themes and wallpapers while bringing back Compact Mode, which the company says "reduces the size of your tabs and toolbar to give more of your screen to the web, with an auto-compact option for smaller screens." The Verge reports: According to Mozilla, the design changes will have "no cost to your browser performance." Mozilla says the overhauled design is a "renewal" for Firefox, following major updates over the last year, like homepage widgets, Split View, a built-in VPN, and controls for disabling the browser's AI features.
Garcés Pérez, who was shot in his car by agents, is accused of striking officer with side mirror while trying to drive away
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday announced an assault charge against a Venezuelan delivery driver who was shot in his car by a federal immigration agent in Texas, accusing the man of striking an officer with his side mirror while trying to drive away.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was charged with one count of assaulting, resisting and impeding a federal officer, according to a criminal complaint. Garcés Pérez, whose attorney has said still has a bullet lodged in his back from the 20 September shooting, made an initial court appearance in an Austin federal court on Tuesday, according to the US attorney’s office in the western district of Texas.
Des Moines, IA — President Donald Trump dismissed unfavorable Iowa polling as “fake” while farmers and other business owners across the state confront sharply higher costs, including several pressures tied directly to his administration’s policies.
Speaking during an Oval Office announcement for a planned $15 billion Iowa steel plant, Trump blamed Democrats for economic difficulties and insisted he remains more popular than during the 2024 election. Republicans, however, are pouring money and campaign resources into Iowa as traditionally safe races have become unexpectedly competitive.
Farmers face problems that predate Trump, including consolidation, high borrowing costs and volatile commodity markets. But his tariffs have increased prices for equipment and agricultural inputs, while the U.S.-Iran conflict has disrupted energy markets and driven diesel prices to record levels. Nationwide diesel recently reached roughly $6.50 per gallon, with agriculture and trucking among the industries feeling the greatest impact.
One Iowa farmer described farmers and trucking companies as “bleeding money,” reflecting broader concerns across the state’s agricultural sector.
The political challenge is particularly notable because Iowa’s rural communities strongly supported Trump in 2024. Republican candidates are now confronting the possibility that economic frustration may reduce turnout among voters who helped return him to the White House.
A royal decree issued by Morocco’s King Muhammed VI tasked Fatima Zahra El Mansouri with forming a new cabinet, probably a coalition government with other political groups.
The non-pro version of the next iPhone isn’t likely to arrive until 2027. I retested the iPhone 17 to see if it’s still the “best iPhone for most people.”
BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Microsoft has made WSL Containers generally available, giving Windows 11 developers a built-in way to build, run, and deploy Linux containers through Windows Subsystem for Linux. The release includes wslc.exe for managing containers, GPU support, networking improvements, health checks, storage mounts, and integration with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Intune. Microsoft also claims up to twice the performance when Linux environments access files stored on Windows. Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, and Rancher Desktop are not going anywhere, but developers who only need basic container functionality now have another option built around WSL. One notable feature is still missing: Compose support. Microsoft says adding it is now a priority.
The White House has defended three taxpayer-funded advertisements featuring President Donald Trump by comparing them to ads that were paid for by past presidential administrations. But some legal experts have said the Trump White House commercials are political messages intended to influence the 2026 midterms and may violate U.S. laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds for propaganda.
The White House described its ads as “public service announcements” in a Sept. 25 press release pushing back on criticism. It said, “The announcements are very clearly not campaign ads; President Trump is not on the ballot and there is no call to action. Instead, the announcements are a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending — at home, at the border, and abroad.”
The release went on to say that “[a]dministrations of both parties have used public service announcements to explain policy and make the case for the nation’s direction,” citing examples of ads from the George W. Bush, Obama and Biden administrations, among others.
A legal expert we consulted did not see a correlation.
“I just think you’re not going to find any comparison at all,” Richard Painter, a corporate law professor and former White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, told us in an interview. Painter said the Trump White House ads are “so clearly propaganda,” which generally refers to government communications intended to manipulate or influence public opinion.
John G. Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and author of “In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns,” also told us, “I just think that the ads are different enough so that I personally don’t buy the argument” that the ads from the Trump administration and recent presidents are all the same. He said his perception is that the Trump White House ads are more political. “We’ll see what the courts say,” he said — if a lawsuit brings the matter to the judiciary.
Later, we’ll go over the cited examples of federally funded ads that were run under Presidents Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The first Trump White House message to air includes images of Trump as he says, “Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America. America will never be a communist country.” Viewers repeatedly hear the words “love me,” which are lyrics from a JMSN song of the same name. Near the end of that 30-second spot, Dana White, the UFC CEO, compliments Trump and talks about him “fighting so hard for the country he loves.”
A screen capture from the 2026 black-and-white White House ad that is almost exactly the same as an ad released by Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The third ad, in black and white, shows Trump walking and staring into the camera as he says in a voiceover, “we will demolish the deep state,” “expel the warmongers from our government,” “drive out the globalists,” and “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists.” The ad ends with: “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.” The video is almost identical to an ad from Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
The second ad, a minute long, features video and audio from Trump’s July 3 speech from a site near Mount Rushmore, as the president says, “We are the freest people on Earth, and by the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.” The ad ends with him saying, “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”
All three ads were released on or after Sept. 23 and include a “Paid for by the U.S. Government” disclaimer. The ads have aired on broadcast and/or streaming platforms, including during Sunday political talk shows and college and NFL football games.
“Our tax dollars are hard at work. And, we believe, probably illegally so,” Painter and three other ethics experts wrote in a Sept. 28 piece in the online publication the Contrarian. For the post, Painter was joined in criticizing the Trump White House ads by Norman L. Eisen, former White House special counsel to Obama; Virginia R. Canter, former White House associate counsel to Obama and President Bill Clinton; and Christopher J. Swartz, who worked for the Office of Government Ethics across multiple administrations and was briefly acting chief of the Ethics Law and Policy Branch in 2025, during Trump’s second term.
“These videos are not ‘public service announcements’ as the White House claims,” the authors wrote. “They are clear attempts to boost Republicans’ chances in the impending midterm elections given their sagging poll numbers. The timing, content, and format of the videos all suggest they are covert attempts directed at the success of the Republican party.”
The White House said “Trump is not on the ballot” this November, but the president has told wavering Republican voters to pretend he is. The legal experts also noted in their piece that two of the White House ads highlighting Trump include references to defeating communism or communists, which is what Trump regularlycalls democratic socialists running for Congress. (We’ve written that democratic socialists and communists do not have the same political or economic ideology, and democratic socialists make up a small minority of congressional candidates.)
“Even during the height of the McCarthy era and the Cold War, the United States government never came anywhere close to making an ad like this,” the experts said, adding that under the Hatch Act, a federal employee other than the president or vice president “may not use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” The statute would apply to other federal employees who participated in making or disseminating the ads, the experts said.
Also, annual appropriations bills passed by Congress have long included language prohibiting taxpayer funds from being used for “publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States.”
A few Republicans have spoken out against the Trump White House ads as well. “I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters about the ads on Sept. 28. The day prior, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said, “I don’t think any public official, including President Trump … should spend public money on private ads for themselves.”
A federal worker who violates the Hatch Act could face penalties such as “removal from federal service, reduction in grade, debarment from federal employment for a period not to exceed 5 years, suspension, reprimand, or a civil penalty not to exceed $1,000,” according to the U.S. Office of General Counsel.
Painter told us that Congress could also ask to be reimbursed for an improper use of taxpayer funds. The ads combined have cost at least $2.5 million, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.
Obama Administration Ads/Outreach
One of the examples the White House cited under Obama sparked controversy, and the Government Accountability Office determined the public outreach campaign had violated federal laws. The other example is similar to ads run under Trump, promoting the open enrollment period for Affordable Care Act insurance plans.
Under Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2014 and 2015 used a public outreach campaign through social media to encourage support for its proposed rule on clean drinking water. The New York Times called it “a campaign that tests the limits of federal lobbying law.” The effort was aimed at ginning up support during a public comment period on the proposed rule, which concerned EPA regulation of water sources.
The EPA argued that it wasn’t violating the Anti-Lobbying Law because its outreach didn’t tell the public to contact or lobby Congress.
But in December 2015, the GAO concluded that the EPA had violated federal laws prohibiting the agency from spending federal dollars for “publicity or propaganda purposes” and prohibiting the use of federal appropriations for “indirect or grassroots lobbying in support of or opposition to pending legislation.”
In particular, the GAO faulted the EPA for using a social media tool that resulted in some messages not identifying the EPA as the source of the information. Instead, to some members of the public, “it appeared that their friend independently shared a message of his or her support for EPA and clean water,” GAO said, calling this “covert propaganda.” (The messages shared through people’s social media accounts said, “Clean water is important to me. I support EPA’s efforts to protect it for my health, my family and my community.”)
GAO said that the violation of grassroots lobbying occurred when the EPA’s blog posts linked to outside groups, whose pages included prompts to contact Congress in support of EPA’s proposed rule.
The Trump White House also pointed to the Obama administration running TV ads about HealthCare.gov, the website people use to sign up for Affordable Care Act health plans, during the open enrollment periods in 2015 and 2016. The ads didn’t feature the president, but rather everyday people talking about how they had signed up for low-cost insurance.
In one spot, run in November 2015, a woman who’s going for a run says that her premium was $22 a month and that signing up was “very easy.” A guy who appears to be going to a university says he got “exactly the kind of coverage I wanted at the price I wanted,” with the words “$57/month” on screen. A woman and her child are shown with the words “$405/month family of 4.” The ad then says that “most people who sign up on HealthCare.gov qualify for financial help to make coverage more affordable.” It ends by encouraging people to “sign up by Dec. 15.” The ad says at the bottom that it is “sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.”
Another example from 2015 similarly says that most people can get financial help with their premiums.
The Obama administration also ran ads in the run up to the 2016 open enrollment period, which began Nov. 1 — meaning that those ads ran shortly before and after that year’s presidential election. One example from November 2016 is similar to the 2015 ads, showing various people and saying that most people signing up “can find plans for $50-$100/mo. with financial help.”
One could argue that Obama, who signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, had a vested political interest in getting people to sign up and having the program succeed. But the Trump administration also has run ads to inform the public about the open enrollment periods. Like the Obama-era ads, thesethreeexamples from late 2025 featured people talking about how they easily enrolled in an insurance plan, and the ads said that “4 out of 5 customers can find a health plan for $21 or less per month with financial help.”
Biden Administration Ads
As the Trump administration pointed out, the Biden administration also used taxpayer dollars for an ad campaign using television, digital, radio and print spots to encourage people in early 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic to get vaccinated.
The Trump press release said the Biden administration “poured hundreds of millions of dollars” into an ad campaign “to drive a nationwide public health message.”
But as the Washington Post story the press release links to explains, the campaign used a $250 million contract that the Trump administration signed with consultancy Fors Marsh the previous year. According to the article, “Officials have said they held the campaign until vaccines were widely available to maximize its impact.”
Ironically, numerousDemocrats expressed concern in September 2020 after the Trump administration hired Fors Marsh for a campaign from HHS that sought to “defeat despair, inspire hope and achieve national recovery” amid the pandemic.
In a Sept. 11, 2020, letter to HHS, Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone, then chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote, “Among other things, the Committee is concerned that HHS may use more than a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer funds on private communications consultants charged with distorting the facts and misleading the public about the Trump Administration’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
A letter from three other Democratic leaders in the Senate similarly stated, “We have grave concerns that, rather than focus on planning and executing a national strategy to contain the coronavirus, the Trump Administration is using a quarter of a billion dollars in taxpayer money to fund what appears to be a political propaganda campaign just two months before a presidential election.”
Under Biden, the “We Can Do This” campaign directed by Fors Marsh sought to appeal to “a group known as the ‘movable middle’ — people who were hesitant but not necessarily opposed to getting vaccinated — with highly customized, science-based communications and messages of empowerment,” according to the consultancy.
The ads featured images of Americans and encouraged people to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website or vaccines.gov for more information.
At the time, Trump was also encouraging people to get vaccinated. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 28, 2021, Trump boasted that his administration had helped deliver the vaccine in “record time” and later said, “So, everybody go get your shot.”
“I encourage them to take it,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in April 2021.
The TV ad and flyers claimed the law, which passed largely along partisan lines, provided the same Medicare with “more benefits.”
At the time, Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg criticized the ad as “a propaganda effort with taxpayer dollars.”
At least one network, CBS, pulled the ad while the General Accounting Office (later renamed the Government Accountability Office) — at the request of Lautenberg and other Democrats — investigated whether it violated prohibitions on federal funds being used for “publicity or propaganda” purposes. Democrats argued the ad was inaccurate and was intended to promote the reelection of Bush that year.
The GAO concluded that while the TV ad and accompanying flyers contained “notable omissions and other weaknesses,” they were “not so partisan as to be unlawful.”
By way of omissions, Anthony H. Gamboa, general counsel of the GAO, said that the ad failed to note that people might be charged $30 for the new drug discount cards “and that savings may vary across covered drugs.” He further criticized the flyer’s indication that beneficiaries would pay a premium of “about $35 a month” for the prescription drug benefit, when in fact that was an estimated average.
“The omissions notwithstanding, we do not find the content of the flyer and its cover letter or the advertisements to be purely partisan in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition,” Gamboa wrote.
“This is not to say that the content is totally free of political tone,” he added. “Without a doubt, the future of the Medicare program is the subject of ongoing and highly spirited discussion and debate at the national level. In this context, the references in the flyer and print and television advertisements to ‘Same Medicare. More Benefits’ and ‘preserve and strengthen’ may appear to some as an attempt to persuade the public to the Administration’s point of view regarding the newly enacted benefit.”
Nonetheless, he wrote, the “publicity or propaganda prohibition, however, does not bar materials that may have some political content or express support for a particular view. … The content of these publications does not constitute a purely partisan message.”
Two months later, however, GAO said during the course of its investigation, “we learned that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services … had prepared as part of this campaign video news releases or VNRs, including a news story for television broadcast, to provide information to the television medium.” Because the prepackaged stories did not note they had been prepared by CMS, the GAO concluded their use ”violated the restriction on using appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda purposes.”
The White House further noted that in 2002, the Bush administration paid more than $3 million for two Super Bowl ads that said buying illegal drugs could help support terrorists; it also created anti-drug YouTube ads in 2006.
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Caleb Flynn convicted of aggravated murder in shooting of Ashley Flynn, a schoolteacher and volleyball coach
Caleb Flynn, the former Ohio music pastor and one-time American Idol contestant accused of killing his wife to pursue a lover, was convicted of her murder on Tuesday.
As a judge read the guilty verdict, 40-year-old Flynn cried, shaking his head and closing his eyes at times. He faces up to life in prison.
Company’s product comes weeks after Meta introduced its own artificial intelligence agent Muse
Less than 24 hours after OpenAI announced it would scrap the launch of an artificial intelligence model over safety concerns, the company debuted a whole new suite of AI tools.
During its annual showcase for developers in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, enthusiastically unveiled an AI agent called “dots” that he said was “more ambitious” than ChatGPT and a “whole new way to work with AI”.
The verdict stems from Carroll’s 2023 sexual abuse and defamation civil trial against Trump
Donald Trump has agreed to stop fighting in court the disbursement of E Jean Carroll’s $5m verdict in her 2023 sexual abuse and defamation civil trial against him, a procedural development as the funds had already been distributed to her.
While the decision does not change anything about Carroll’s receipt of the payout, its revelation effectively means that Trump will no longer oppose the monetary outcome he had long fought.
(The Center Square) – The 10-year Treasury note closed at 5.26% Tuesday, more than a point above the 4.1% the Congressional Budget Office projected it would average this year, a gap that could raise taxpayers' borrowing costs as federal debt…
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case on Monday that could "rewrite" the future of American energy production, legal analysts said.
The high court will later hear arguments and make a final ruling on the Trump administration’s controversial policy of sending migrants to countries where they are not citizens.
Nvidia may be buying Hugging Face, but AMD will soon have an AI software company of its own following the chipmaker’s announcement this week that it’s acquiring World Labs, the spatial AI company founded two years ago by renown AI expert Fei-Fei Li.
Li has been called the “Godmother of AI” for her contributions to the field of AI. She is best known for ImageNet, a large dataset comprised of more than 14 million images used for training and validating visual machine learning algorithms.
ImageNet, which Li started building in 2007, holds an annual contest to see which computer vision algorithm can most accurately identify images. Geoff Hinton (who is often dubbed one of three “Godfathers of AI”) and his students at the University of Toronto leveled the ImageNet field in 2012 with their groundbreaking GPU-based neural network AlexNet. The moment helped kick off a rapid cycle of deep learning development, which Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang termed the Cambrian Explosion of AI, which still reverberates today.
Li was born in China in 1976 and immigrated to New Jersey when she was 12. After graduating from Princeton University with a physics degree and getting her doctorate in electrical engineering from Caltech, she returned to Princeton as an assistant professor from 2007 to 2009, during which time she founded ImageNet.
In 2013, Li joined Stanford University as co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She joined Google Cloud as its Chief Scientist of AI/ML while on sabbatical from Stanford in 2017 and 2018, and returned to Stanford in 2018, where she established the RAISE-Health (Responsible AI for Safe and Equitable Health) program in 2023.
Li founded World Labs in 2024 to push the state of the art in computer vision, deep learning, and robotics. The physical AI startup, which received more than $1.2 billion in funding, developed the Marble line of foundation world models that could be used for 3D simulation and spatial reasoning.
“We built the company guided by the foundational belief that language alone isn’t sufficient for model development,” Li wrote in a September 28 Substack post. “The universe isn’t made up of words; it’s made of real things. So many of the most important problems for AI to solve, from science to entertainment to robotics, require models to reason over the structure and behavior of the physical world.”
In 2025, World Labs inked a technical partnership with AMD, with a goal of optimizing its model training and inference workloads on AMD’s GPUs. “As our teams worked together, we realized it would be a natural fit to bring together our AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models, and applications,” Li wrote in the Substack.
“Just like I knew it was time to do a startup to jumpstart the work of creating foundation models beyond LLMs and achieve the most impact in AI, it’s again very clear that the right path for myself and World Labs is to continue our mission as a part of AMD,” she wrote.
Li, who was named an AIwire2026 Person to Watch, will join AMD as Chief Scientist when the acquisition is complete, which is expected to happen by the end of 2026 subject to standard closing conditions. Li will report directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su, who was also named an AIwire 2026 Person to Watch.
“Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise,” Su stated. “Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.”
AMD has benefited handsomely from the AI boom, which has driven demand for its Instinct GPUs and Epyc CPUs. The company enjoyed a 50% revenue increase during the most recent quarter, and is on track to record more than $40 billion in revenue for the year. The company has a market capitalization of just under $1 trillion, making it the 15th most valuable company in the world.
More than 100 people have said they were injured by the ride in California, which reached speeds up to 76mph
Six Flags has permanently shut down its embattled X2 rollercoaster in Valencia, California, the company announced on Tuesday, as numerous past riders have come forward with allegations of serious injuries.
X2, a Magic Mountain park favorite, which reaches up to 76mph (about 122km/h) and has seats that can rotate 360 degrees, had been closed since mid-July.
Douglas Carter, 71, who has spent more than four decades on death row, released on bail until new trial begins
A Utah man who has spent more than four decades on death row was released from jail after newly analyzed DNA evidence showed that he was not connected to a 1985 homicide.
Douglas Stewart Carter, now 71, walked out of the Utah county jail late on Monday night after a judge ordered his release on bail. He will have to wear a GPS monitoring device until a new trial begins.
McDonald's is reportedly using AI-powered pricing tools to recommend menu prices based on what customers near individual restaurants are willing to pay. Franchisees technically retain control over final prices, but some told Reuters they feel pressured to follow the algorithm's recommendations. "A corporate document reviewed by the publication shows that McDonald's tracks adherence to the platform, and notes any deviations from the algorithm's price recommendations," reports Engadget. From the report: Reuters got a look at the interface that franchisees use to access this technology and it's pretty creepy. Messages show stuff like "your restaurant is showing MEDIUM SENSITIVITY to price" based on "customer willingness to pay in your area." Cost differences at nearby locations can be stark. Researchers found that a Big Mac at a Fresno, California store cost $5.69, but the same burger cost $6.89 at another branch two miles down the road. That's a 21 percent difference.
The company acknowledges that using this dynamic pricing system could open up franchisees to legal hurdles, all while continuing to push the platform. The pricing portal's terms of service reportedly warns that owners "may be competitors of each other" and "it is particularly important for all Users of the Tool to understand and comply fully with antitrust and competition laws." The document also reiterates that franchisees are "always free to determine the final price," thus potentially absolving corporate from any antitrust concerns.
McDonald's has decried Reuters' reporting as "speculative and uninformed." The company says the pricing portal is "a tool, not a mandate, designed to provide restaurant-specific recommendations to help franchisees deliver value for customers and make informed business decisions." The company has been using some version of this technology since at least 2019, according to Reuters. In 2023, however, CEO Kempczinski boasted to investors that it had developed proprietary tools to evaluate pricing at individual restaurants.
Sept. 29, 2026 — When Nathan Bell and Michael Garland presented their work on sparse matrix-vector multiplication at SC09, general-purpose GPU computing was still relatively young. CUDA had been introduced only a few years earlier, and researchers were still learning which problems could take advantage of the highly parallel architecture of GPUs, and how.
Seventeen years later, their paper, “Implementing Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on Throughput-Oriented Processors,” has been selected for the SC26 Test of Time Award.
The award recognizes research published at SC that has continued to influence the field well beyond its original appearance. Bell and Garland’s work addressed a problem that remains familiar today: how do you get highly parallel hardware to perform efficiently when the problem itself is irregular?
Finding Structure in Sparsity
Sparse matrix-vector multiplication, or SpMV, is an important operation in computational science. It appears repeatedly in methods for solving large-scale linear systems and eigenvalue problems across scientific and engineering applications.
Nathan Bell, Google
However, sparse matrices present a challenge for parallel hardware.
Unlike dense matrices, where data and computation tend to follow predictable patterns, sparse matrices can range from highly regular to highly irregular. For GPUs at the time, extracting performance meant exposing enough fine-grained parallelism while keeping execution and memory access sufficiently regular.
Bell and Garland explored how different sparse matrix representations could help achieve that balance. Rather than treating all sparse matrices in the same way, their work considered different sparsity patterns and the data formats best suited to them. The paper examined formats including DIA, ELL, CSR and COO, and showed how computation could be organized to reduce the execution and memory divergence caused by irregular matrix structures.
Michael Garland, NVIDIA
The results demonstrated that sparse computation could be mapped successfully onto GPU architectures. On the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 used in the study, the proposed techniques achieved high levels of memory bandwidth utilization and substantial performance improvements over the comparison systems available at the time.
But the lasting contribution went beyond a set of benchmark results. The work demonstrated something more fundamental: understanding the problem’s structure could be just as important as the hardware used to solve it.
Twenty Years of Sparsity on GPUs
At SC26, Garland will look back at that work and what has happened since in “Twenty Years of Sparsity on GPUs.”
Garland joined NVIDIA in 2006 as one of the founding members of NVIDIA Research. He is now Senior Director of Programming Research, leading a group whose work spans parallel algorithms, programming languages, compilers and runtime systems, and low-level hardware/software interfaces.
Sparse matrix-vector multiplication was among the first CUDA kernels he attempted to write.
The SIMT execution model made it relatively straightforward to produce a working implementation. Achieving genuinely high performance, however, was a different challenge. A few years later, Garland and Bell set out to develop kernels that delivered high throughput while making effective use of the memory bandwidth GPUs could provide.
That work became their SC09 paper.
Looking back, Garland highlights two ideas that emerged from the research: selecting the right data structure to take advantage of known matrix structure can make high performance much easier to achieve, and irregularity can be managed effectively when it is relatively rare.
Those ideas would continue to matter as GPU computing matured.
In the years since SC09, sparse computation and GPU linear algebra have developed considerably, alongside dramatic changes in GPU hardware and the surrounding software ecosystem. Garland’s SC26 talk will revisit lessons from the original work, explore notable developments along the way and consider the challenges that remain.
From Early CUDA to Today
Both authors went on to contribute to GPU computing well beyond the original paper. Bell is now a Principal Engineer at Google, focused on Search. Previously a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research, he specialized in sparse linear algebra and parallel programming models and co-developed the Thrust and Cusp libraries.
Garland and his team have worked across the GPU software stack, producing high-performance sparse matrix methods; algorithm libraries, including Thrust and CUB; Python frameworks for programming large numbers of GPUs; new approaches to tensor layouts; and methods for scheduling AI kernels. Many of these innovations have become foundational components of the CUDA ecosystem.
The hardware Bell and Garland used in 2009 belongs to another generation of computing. The questions raised by their work do not. How should data be represented? Where is the regularity in an irregular problem? How should work be organized to make effective use of increasingly parallel hardware? These questions have followed GPU computing from its early years into today’s HPC and AI systems.
And that is what makes research stand the test of time.
Congratulations to Nathan Bell and Michael Garland, recipients of the SC26 Test of Time Award.
Read the Original Paper
N. Bell and M. Garland, “Implementing sparse matrix-vector multiplication on throughput-oriented processors,” Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis, Portland, OR, USA, 2009, pp. 1-11, doi: 10.1145/1654059.1654078
Source: Lori Diachin, SC26 Test of Time Award Chair
Energy giants Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil Corporation have appealed a divided ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court in favor of the City of Boulder and Boulder County, Colorado. Boulder sued under state common law over claims relating to the local negative effects of greenhouse-gas emissions on their governments. Suncor Energy is arguing that federal precedents prevent Boulder from suing over damage caused by emissions from outside of the region.
The justices are considering two questions. First, whether the Court has statutory and Article III standing to consider the case. And second, whether federal law precludes state-law claims seeking relief for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate.
The arguments will be closely watched with numerous similar environmental lawsuits in progress against energy producers from state and local governments making similar claims. Suncor stated that at least 60 state and local governments had brought similar lawsuits as of August 2025.
The Lawsuits from Boulder and the State Supreme Court
The legal fight from Boulder started in 2018 when Boulder brought various claims under Colorado law, alleging that Suncor’s worldwide conduct led to global climate change, which also caused a variety of negative effects in Colorado. Suncorp countered that the federal Clean Air Act (CAA) and federal common law precluded Boulder’s claims.
The case first went through the federal legal system. In 2021, the Supreme Court remanded the case to settle jurisdictional questions, and it then denied the case in 2023 over the objections of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, allowing it to proceed in state court.
On May 12, 2025, the divided Colorado state supreme court ruled in favor of Boulder. Judge Richard L. Gabriel wrote for the five-justice majority that Boulder could pursue its damages claims at state district court.
“Boulder asserts claims for public and private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy, and it seeks damages for the role that defendants’ production, promotion, refining, marketing, and sale of fossil fuels has allegedly played in exacerbating climate change, which, in turn, has purportedly caused harm to Boulder’s property and residents,” Gabriel wrote. “Boulder’s claims are not preempted by either federal common law or the CAA. In so concluding, we are not persuaded by defendants’ myriad arguments to the contrary.”
Judge Carlos Samour, joined by Judge Brian Boatright, dissented. “Because state law remains incompetent to regulate interstate and international air pollution, I disagree that Boulder can prosecute its claims. Unlike the Blue Fairy that brought Pinocchio to life, the CAA did not magically breathe life into state-law tort claims that had been as lifeless as a wooden puppet,” he said. “I’m concerned that this decision will contribute to a patchwork of inconsistent local standards that will beget regulatory chaos.”
The Arguments at the Supreme Court
In its petition to the Supreme Court, Suncorp made several basic arguments under the Constitution’s Supremacy Cause, Article VI, Clause 2, which states, in releqant part, “[T]his Constitution, and the laws of the United States … shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”
“The {Supreme} Court has recognized for over a century, the structure of our constitutional system does not permit a State to provide relief under state law for injuries allegedly caused by pollution emanating from outside the State,” Suncorp said.
Suncorp also asked the Court to consider the widespread impact of the case. “There are few, if any, more consequential questions pending in the lower courts concerning the relationship between state and federal law,” it argued. Upholding the Colorado supreme court ruling would allow “state-law claims asserted by dozens of States and municipalities can [to] proceed—and to do so before the energy industry is threatened with potentially enormous judgments.”
Suncorp also cited the state court decision as affecting the federal government’s foreign-policy powers, and that the Supreme Court had final jurisdiction over the case.
In its initial response brief, Boulder supported the Colorado supreme court ruling and made several counterarguments. It pointed out the state court’s decision was correct and that the Supreme Court’s precedents barred the Clean Air Act from pre-empting the state’s legal jurisdiction over the dispute.
Boulder also argued that because courts had once created federal common law to regulate interstate air pollution, the Constitution required questions to be governed “exclusively” by a uniform rule of federal law. But none of their cases cited by Suncorp addressed what happened when Congress displaced a federal common law with a statute, as it did with the Clean Air Act, Boulder claimed.
After the Supreme Court accepted the case, Boulder made several other arguments and insisted the case should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. “How to allocate the cost of climate alteration is a matter of genuine debate. The structure of our Constitution assigns responsibility for resolving that debate to the states and the political branches of the federal government,” it reasoned, and not the Supreme Court at this time.
Boulder also said the case was not at the Court at the right time: “The Colorado Supreme Court has yet to resolve petitioners’ contention that respondents fail to state a claim, or even which state’s law answers that question.”
In its final brief to the Court, Suncorp insisted that state supreme court’s decision represented an overreach of powers and the Supreme Court had the power to hear arguments under Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn (1975).
Suncorp also labeled the Boulder lawsuit as novel: “This litigation is unlike any other in American history—with climate-change advocates seeking to bypass the political process and achieve sweeping policy objectives through state-law causes of action against arbitrary groups of defendants in handpicked forums.”
Deputy Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris also filed a brief in support of Suncorp and will take part in arguments. Harris argues that “state-law claims contravene the Constitution’s territorial limits on state authority and the federal government’s exclusive role over foreign affairs.”
Given the large financial stakes and the broad constitutional questions involved, Suncorp Energy v. Boulder should receive considerable attention as the first arguments in another active Supreme Court term.
On Sept. 28, 2026, Scott S. Harris, the clerk of the Supreme Court, said Justice Samuel Alito would not participate in the case.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Federal prosecutors in Texas have charged a Venezuelan delivery driver who was shot by an ICE agent earlier this month with assaulting a federal officer.
Washington, DC — Former special counsel Jack Smith defended his investigations of President Donald Trump before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, saying the evidence supported both federal prosecutions and that he would make the same charging decisions again.
Smith told senators that his team acted without regard to Trump’s political affiliation or 2024 candidacy. He said investigators had developed evidence they believed proved serious crimes related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election and Trump’s handling of classified documents. Both cases were later dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election, consistent with Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
Republicans focused heavily on Smith’s collection of phone records and other communications involving GOP lawmakers. Sen. Chuck Grassley called the investigation a partisan abuse of power, while Rep. Jim Jordan has referred Smith to the Justice Department over allegations that he misled Congress about subpoenas.
Smith said obtaining call logs was necessary because investigators had evidence Trump and allies contacted senators during the Jan. 6 attack while seeking to delay certification of the election. Democrats, including Sen. Dick Durbin, defended Smith and accused Republicans of using the hearing to distract from Trump’s conduct.
Smith also said he would not be silenced by threats of prosecution from Trump or administration allies.
With the midterms looming, and after the Epstein files and the war on Iran, Trump superfans are losing faith in their lame duck president
It took a dead child sex offender and a disastrous war to do it, but it looks as though the Maga faithful are slowly beginning to lose confidence in their dear leader. As Donald Trump’s approval ratings drop to record lows, some of his most fervent supporters are turning on him.
See, as exhibit one, Trisha Hope, who was once a proud member of the Front Row Joes, a group of Trump superfans who follow the president to rallies around the country. They have custom-made T-shirts! They have branded baseball caps! They even have the attention of Trump himself, who frequently shouts out the group. He did once accidentally call them the “front row Jacks and Joes”, but who can expect a man of his calibre to pay attention to the plebs, eh?
Alvarado, TX — The Intercept is suing the city of Alvarado and its police department, accusing officials of withholding public records connected to the violent 2025 confrontation outside the Prairieland immigration detention facility.
The dispute centers on police communications surrounding a July 4, 2025 protest that escalated into an armed confrontation in which an Alvarado police officer suffered non-life-threatening injuries. More than a dozen protesters were subsequently arrested, leading to a closely watched federal prosecution.
Freelance journalist C. Frances requested police emails from the period surrounding the incident under the Texas Public Information Act. After negotiations narrowed the request, Alvarado officials estimated that producing and redacting the records would cost $854.17.
According to The Intercept’s lawsuit, the outlet agreed to pay the full amount, but city officials have neither provided the records nor completed the payment process. Attorney Terry Mutchler, representing The Intercept, characterized the situation as extraordinary obstruction of public access.
The records could provide additional insight into police communications before and after the confrontation. Defendant Benjamin Song was ultimately sentenced to 100 years for attempted murder and other offenses, while he and other defendants are preparing appeals.
Alvarado officials had not responded publicly to The Intercept’s latest allegations.
Des Moines, IA — Iowa farmers are confronting mounting financial pressure as tariffs, higher fuel costs and rising borrowing expenses threaten an agricultural economy already struggling with consolidation, foreign competition and years of elevated production costs.
Axios reports that two of the sharpest new pressures are directly connected to President Donald Trump’s policies. His tariffs have increased costs for fertilizer, pesticides and farm machinery while creating instability with major export partners. Meanwhile, the Iran war has helped drive Iowa diesel prices sharply higher, adding another major expense for farms dependent on heavy equipment.
The political irony is difficult to miss. Trump carried Iowa by more than 13 percentage points in 2024, with rural communities providing crucial support. Mark Mueller, president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association and a Republican voter, told Axios his farm is now “scraping by” and warned that more farmers could face bankruptcy or retirement.
The strain appears particularly severe for younger and smaller operators, who often rely heavily on borrowed money and have less financial cushion against volatile crop prices and rising interest rates.
Republicans are increasingly concerned the economic damage could suppress turnout among voters who normally support the party. Trump announced a proposed $15 billion Iowa steel plant Monday, but production is not expected until 2030, offering little immediate relief to farmers facing losses today.
Why Should Delaware Care? The allocation and spending of millions of dollars awarded to Delaware through a settlement with drug manufacturers has been rife with scandal. With the program now revamped, many localities are spending their share of the funds on police departments and isolated drug recovery resources. But Seaford’s more comprehensive approach has leaders feeling optimistic and could serve as a model for other municipalities.
The city of Seaford, the former DuPont nylon-capital in western Sussex County, has consistently struggled with gun violence and drug misuse incidents.
Community leaders say the city’s rural, post-industrial nature makes it difficult for kids to find productive ways to use their time outside of school. This, in turn, begins the cycle of using drugs and engaging with gun violence at a young age.
After having dealt first-hand with these challenges in his community for nearly three decades, Seaford Police Chief Marshall Craft saw an opportunity for change: funds from Delaware’s Prescription Opioid Settlement Distribution Commission (POSDC).
“There’s a saying out there for the definition of insanity: ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you get what you’ve always gotten,’” said Craft, who has served as police chief since 2019. “This [project] is a way for us to find some more permanent solutions to a problem.”
The POSDC is a state-run group that distributes millions in funds from legal settlements with drug manufacturers to municipalities and other local organizations around the state.
Following a year and a half of planning, Craft has coalesced a handful of local organizations from the drug recovery, community health, youth outreach and homelessness spaces to direct more than $1 million in opioid dollars toward a vision of change in Seaford.
That vision, Craft said, includes standing up a new team of drug recovery outreach specialists, updating a well-trafficked city park to be safer and more appealing to kids and encouraging collaboration between law enforcement and other community organizations.
Building a community hub
Seaford, a city of 8,400 people, has seen three fatal shootings in the past 18 months — two of which involved victims under the age of 25. It also falls at the bottom of the list of median income and school district outcome rankings in the state.
“Young people say, ‘You want us to do these positive things, but you take away our basketball courts. There’s no youth programming for us,’” said Jalyn Powell, a youth-focused community activist and founder of nonprofit organization OUTLOUD DE.
Nutter Park is one of the few open spaces in Seaford where kids gather to play on the sports courts and use the playground equipment.
It also, however, was the site of a high-profile homicide in the spring of 2025, and is where people often gather to do drug exchanges, Craft said.
In an effort to change the role the park occupies in the community and create a greater sense of safety, project leaders are directing $90,000 from the city’s local government POSDC allocation — which the city will receive for at least the next decade — to update its basketball courts and add lighting and cameras to the area.
The project is based on the concept of crime prevention through environmental design, or improving lighting and aesthetics in a community to reduce crime. Other communities in Delaware, including the neighboring town of Laurel, have also used the model.
The city just kicked off construction in August, and Craft said he expects the work on the courts to be finished this fall.
Meanwhile Powell, who works in local schools and the Chandler Heights apartment complex which neighbors the park, is joining the initiative to turn Nutter Park into what city leaders are calling a “Prevention Hub.”
For Powell, this means expanding youth dinners, camps and other prevention programming in the East Seaford area, where the park and apartments are located.
Powell and her group, OUTLOUD DE, have been doing prevention programming in several schools around the state for the better part of a year. During that time, Powell said she consistently has gotten feedback that kids want more “structured spaces,” like sports courts and parks.
As the self-described “boots on the ground” part of the initiative, Powell said her focus is providing kids with “positive alternatives and youth programming” about the risks of substance use and taking care of their mental health that they are unlikely to learn at school or at home.
“There’s a lot of stigma in the community, as it relates to help seeking, healing and health as a whole,” she said.
Seaford High School sophomore Laela Taylor-Brown, who has been participating in the youth program for the past year, said she’s learned how to better “cope with my mental health,” instead of turning to drinking or drugs, as she did before.
Taylor-Brown said she found the program so useful that she is now serving as a peer advisor, leading sessions with other kids in the community about stresses in their life and drug use prevention.
“Doing OUTLOUD helped me realize I have a bigger village than I thought,” she said. “I have a family now.”
In an effort to change the role Nutter Park occupies in the community and create a greater sense of safety, Seaford leaders are directing $90,000 from the city’s local government POSDC allocation to update its basketball courts and add lighting and cameras to the area. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Despite Powell and the police department’s initiative in Nutter Park just beginning, Craft said he is already awash with more ideas of how to infuse prevention and a positive law enforcement presence into the park.
These ideas, which Craft said are his passion projects after work hours now that his kids are out of the house, include a police athletic league, a Nutter Park-themed coloring book and musical instrument playground equipment for the less athletically inclined kids.
Resources and recovery
While Powell and the police department work to reach youth through Nutter Park, Seaford also has a plan to address adults’ needs through a new team of case managers helping to connect individuals with drug use, mental health and homelessness challenges to services.
This work is being administered by a new organization called the Seaford Community Opioid and Substance Use Disorder Response Initiative, or SCORI, with three employees doing daily outreach to individuals in Seaford.
SCORI is a collaboration between the Community Collaboration of Delaware, an organization that provides recovery services primarily in New Castle County, the Seaford Police Department and the University of Delaware Center for Drug and Health Studies to direct nearly half a million dollars toward drug use recovery in the community.
Some of the funds and resources are also being funneled through the Delaware Rural Health Coalition — formerly the Sussex County Health Coalition — which works to address individuals’ barriers to receiving healthcare in rural areas like Seaford.
Samantha Parker, a Seaford native who has been in drug recovery herself for 14 years, is SCORI’s program manager.
Parker said she and the other two outreach coordinators, who are also in recovery, have spent the two months since the program launched going into wooded encampments and other hotspot locations around the city to introduce themselves and begin connecting people with the appropriate resources.
“Going out there every day, I want to be the person I wish I had when I was out there,” said Julie Montuori, one of SCORI’s other peer outreach specialists.
Parker and Montuori described the broader collaboration as valuable because it allows them to efficiently communicate with Seaford Police to work with the court system and get individuals’ court orders dropped. This can streamline people’s ability to go straight into drug recovery treatment, instead of getting bogged down with minor legal charges.
SCORI also has its office in Redemption City, a homeless shelter and day center in Seaford, which the pair said helps them get individuals in contact with homelessness or housing resources.
Though the outreach team just began work in August, the data collected thus far by the University of Delaware shows the new approach is effective.
As of Sept. 12, the team had served 55 clients, 13% of whom agreed to go to a drug treatment program. Emalie Rell, a scientist at the UD Center for Health and Drug Studies, said that percentage was a “phenomenally high” number.
While Rell said it’s too early to draw anything conclusive from the data, she said the numbers indicate that the majority of individuals being served by SCORI have a combination of substance abuse, mental health and housing needs, which makes the collaboration between organizations more valuable.
Long-term outlook
Craft has a palpable excitement for the Nutter Park and SCORI projects, and seemingly endless ideas for future initiatives to add.
He used artificial intelligence to create a series of “pep songs” about the projects, which he played at a late-August Nutter Park ribbon cutting, that featured lyrics such as “Seaford strong: no drugs, no violence. That’s our stand, healthy choices across the land.”
In spite of his and other community leaders’ positive momentum with the initiative, they acknowledged that it largely remains to be seen what, if any, impact it will have on the crime and drug use numbers in Seaford.
Nonetheless, Craft pointed to consistently dropping crime numbers from 2023 through 2025 as evidence that Seaford is headed in the right direction. Aggravated assault charges dropped by 56% over the two-year period, while drug arrests dropped by 43% and theft by 28% over the same timeframe.
“It’s improving quality of life, reducing crime, reducing crashes, improving pedestrian safety and community awareness, all in there,” Craft said.
Other state leaders are also taking note of the model and way of using opioid dollars.
Brad Owens, executive director of the POSDC, said he has not seen any other local government take “such a coordinated way” of combining recovery support, homelessness services and the police department in its application of opioid settlement money.
Owens said Seaford, like all participating municipalities, needs to do monthly and quarterly reports of how it is spending its allocation, and what the data is showing about changes to overdose rates, 911 calls and gunshot incidents as a result of the programming.
Still, he said there is excitement from other localities in Delaware, like the city of Wilmington, about implementing a program modeled by Seaford’s.
“Everybody is watching this,” Owens added. “We will use it to inform how we respond to other local governments in the future.”
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
What are financial markets telling us?
7
October 2026 — 18:00 TO 19:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Learn how geopolitics, inflation, AI and fiscal policy are converging to reshape borrowing costs.
Learn how geopolitics, inflation, AI and fiscal policy are converging to reshape borrowing costs.
Global bond yields have risen sharply this year thanks to a variety of forces, including war-fuelled inflation, AI-driven growth, loose fiscal policy and geopolitical risk. Recent interventions have struggled to contain market pressure, sharpening questions about where we may be headed. Is a new financial crisis possible?
This event discusses:
What are rising yields signalling about inflation, global growth and government debt burdens?
Why have recent interventions struggled to contain pressure in bond markets?
How is conflict in the Middle East affecting inflation expectations and borrowing costs?
What does AI-driven economic activity mean for interest rates and asset prices?
How are loose fiscal policies changing sovereign debt risks?
Could weaker demand for AI compute trigger a wider market correction?
Lansing, MI — A coalition of Michigan Jewish leaders is increasing pressure on Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to endorse five commitments concerning Jewish safety, identity and participation in political life as the state’s closely watched Senate race enters its final weeks.
Nonnegotiable Michigan said 17 Democratic political leaders have joined its campaign, including University of Michigan Regent Mark Bernstein, state Rep. Noah Arbit and Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus Vice Chair David Kramer. The organization says its effort is separate from debates over Israeli military policy or U.S. foreign aid and is intended to ensure that Jewish Democrats, including Zionists, remain welcome within the party.
Its five requested commitments include protecting Jewish safety, recognizing Jews’ right to define their own identity, supporting Jewish sovereignty in Israel, and ensuring Zionist Jews can participate fully in American politics.
Rabbi Josh Whinston, a progressive Reform rabbi involved with the group, accused El-Sayed of using antisemitic language and “dog whistles.” El-Sayed’s campaign had not publicly accepted the commitments or responded to The Center Square’s requests for comment.
Jewish opinion surrounding El-Sayed is not uniform. Separately, more than 600 Michigan Jews signed a letter supporting his Senate campaign, while other prominent Jewish Democrats have endorsed him despite disagreements over Israel.
El-Sayed, who would become the first Muslim U.S. senator, faces Republican Mike Rogers in November.
Amy Miller, a lawyer for the advocacy group Disability Rights Nebraska, puts away voter registration material at the organization’s office in Lincoln. Allison Hess for ProPublica
Without Amy Miller, some elderly and disabled people wouldn’t be able to vote.
The attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska travels the state, investigating the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As she reminds the residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month, she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in the upcoming midterm elections. “He 100% knew who he wanted to vote for,” Miller said, but he struggled to write with a pen.
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
Congress funds her organization’s efforts to ensure that even people who might not have access to the internet or transportation have the opportunity to participate in elections.
Miller, who has worked at her nonprofit for six years, said she’s never faced regulators wanting to impede her work.
“Shutting that down and making it more difficult for these Americans to access the ballot box is bewildering to me,” she said.
The proposal is part of the Trump administration’s broader assault on federal efforts to expand access to voting, especially among groups that have historically faced discrimination and disenfranchisement.
Miller speaks with a co-worker at Disability Rights Nebraska.Allison Hess for ProPublica
President Donald Trump has championed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to provide documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote, and that may require everyone to deliver that proof in person, which would effectively end voter registration drives.
Last year, the Trump administration banned nongovernmental organizations from conducting registration drives at naturalization ceremonies, though the agency temporarily lifted the ban amid litigation over the policy change. The Department of Education also sent a letter to colleges and universities stating that they could not use federal work-study dollars to support voting-related work. (The directive has been contested.) Previously, those funds were used to pay students who had part-time jobs to conduct voter registration on campus and in neighboring communities.
And on the first day of Trump’s second term, the president rescinded an executive order signed by Joe Biden that had directed federal agencies to expand opportunities for registration. Biden’s order acknowledged that some Americans, including Black citizens and people with disabilities, face historic and ongoing barriers to voting access.
Neither Vought nor his office responded to ProPublica’s questions about the proposed change. But in a letter sent to state officials in 2022, he condemned Biden’s executive order as a “power grab” that would “increase voter registration and turnout, especially among Democratic Party supporters.”
Vought’s proposed change, which wouldn’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterms, could have ramifications for the next presidential election well beyond voting accessibility.
Nonprofits that receive government funds to help people sign up for Medicaid benefits, food stamps or other programs subject to the National Voter Registration Act are required to provide registration forms and help people fill them out. Like Disability Rights Nebraska, these groups would be caught between contradictory federal directives if the proposed ban is finalized.
Thousands more nonprofits receive federal funds for other services but provide voter outreach using private donations. Nonprofit experts said the confusion over which groups the ban affects and the burden of proving an organization is in compliance could lead many to pause or curb registration efforts ahead of the 2028 election. Colleges and universities that help students navigate registering to vote while away from home could be similarly affected.
But it is nonprofits like Disability Rights Nebraska and the people they serve that will be among the most directly hit.
“I don’t really think this rule had in mind that we are going to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. But it’s going to have that kind of effect,” said Rabia Belt, a Stanford law professor who’s an expert on disability and citizenship.
In 2002, Congress helped tackle the challenges people with disabilities face in voting when it passed the Help America Vote Act. The legislation was designed to upgrade states’ voting systems and improve security in the wake of the controversial 2000 election, when close results in Florida triggered a recount, followed by lawsuits that ultimately ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to George W. Bush being declared the winner.
That funding has narrowed the gap in casting ballots between those with disabilities and those without, according to an April 2024 report from Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research that was written for the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel that helps implement the reforms put in place by the Help America Vote Act.
Disability Rights Nebraska often registers voters at public events, such as at this National Night Out event in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.Courtesy of Amy Miller
But challenges persist when it comes to voter registration. During the 2024 election, 3.6% of registered voters with disabilities reported difficulties with registering, compared to 1.4% of registered voters without disabilities, according to survey data from Rutgers. That gap may sound small, but it is statistically significant and represents the experiences of about 740,000 registered voters with disabilities, said Douglas Kruse, one of the Rutgers professors who compiled the survey.
The draft version of the OMB proposal was published in May. It is part of an extensive attempt to remake the rules governing federal grants. Once OMB’s final rule is released, it will almost certainly be subject to litigation. Legal experts said some lawsuits will likely focus on how the rule contradicts existing laws and policies, like the grants that were enshrined in the 2002 law and repeatedly approved by Congress.
Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the OMB for part of Biden’s administration, said the proposal disregards how the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse.” The legislative branch sets the budget and gives dozens of federal agencies instructions on distributing those funds; the agencies create detailed policies to select grant applicants and get the money out the door.
Vought understands that federal funding provides a tool to consolidate power into the White House, said Bagenstos, who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in disability and appropriations law.
“This is not even a surgical power grab,” he said. “It’s just a massive across-the-board power grab.”
Disability Rights Nebraska was awarded $141,000 in voter accessibility funds this year. When the organization heard about the proposed rule, it submitted a public comment in opposition. Such a change “would affect the ability of nonprofits such as ours to conduct” voter registration drives, which are “an invaluable service to Nebraskans with disabilities who are otherwise locked out of the voting experience,” the group wrote.
The organization’s work is strictly nonpartisan as mandated by law, the letter said. During a visit in June to a rural assisted living facility, the group wrote, 30% of the new voters its staff helped register identified as Republican, 20% as Democrat and 50% as nonpartisan or affiliated with a third party.
To ensure their drives are nonpartisan, Miller said she and her colleagues conduct the work in pairs, with each person representing a different party, as required by law.
Many of the residents she speaks with are essentially cloistered, Miller said.
She recalled one visit to a rural assisted living facility in early 2024. The community is so small it doesn’t have a library or a gas station. The nearest election commissioner’s office is a 30-minute drive away.
Disability Rights Nebraska had put up a poster inside the building, listing key facts about voting access for people with disabilities. At one point, Miller said, a young man in a baggy T-shirt pointed at the poster. “Is this true?” He asked her.
Yes, she told him.
“So I could register?”
“You can,” Miller said. “Do you want to register?”
He did. Miller said he knew what party he wanted to register with, though she declined to identify the party publicly or give personal details about him to respect his privacy. She said he told her he had lived at the home for a couple of years and this was the first time someone had offered to walk him through the registration process.
Miller said she wished the politicians making rules about voting rights could witness such moments.
“If I could just bring a politician with me to stand in the front hall of a nursing home” and see how people react when they realize they can vote again, she said. “I wish they could see that and realize how important the work is.”
Washington, DC — The U.S. Department of Education formally rescinded the Biden administration’s Title IX interpretation protecting students from sex discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, returning schools to regulations adopted during President Donald Trump’s first term.
The department said Monday that the move restores the 2020 Title IX rule and brings federal regulations into line with court decisions that struck down the Biden administration’s 2024 expansion. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the change would reduce confusion for schools while protecting women’s athletic opportunities and privacy.
The Biden-era rule had interpreted Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Republican-led states challenged that interpretation, and federal courts ultimately blocked the regulation before Trump returned to office.
Since taking office again, the administration has pursued a narrower definition of sex under federal education law and has pressured schools to restrict transgender athletes from women’s sports programs. The department has also rescinded earlier civil-rights agreements involving gender identity.
LGBTQ and women’s-rights advocates argue the rollback could leave transgender students more vulnerable to discrimination and weaken protections for some survivors of sexual harassment or assault. The administration maintains that existing Title IX protections remain intact for discrimination based on biological sex.
The Senate on Thursday approved a sweeping college sports bill to establish a federal framework for college athletics aimed at protecting student athletes — despite some pushback from some Democrats who argue that it could do the opposite.
Washington, DC — The second annual Make America Healthy Again Summit is bringing senior federal health officials together with celebrities and wellness influencers whose records include serious criminal cases and repeatedly challenged health claims.
Russell Brand is scheduled to moderate a discussion with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz. Brand is awaiting trial in Britain after pleading not guilty to three counts of rape, three sexual-assault charges and one indecent-assault charge involving six women. He has denied committing non-consensual sexual acts.
Later in the program, former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson will appear on a “MAHA Athlete” panel. Tyson was convicted of rape in 1992 and served three years in prison.
The summit also gives prominent roles to wellness personalities whose scientific claims have been challenged by independent fact-checkers. Chiropractor Eric Berg is participating in a cancer-prevention discussion. Science Feedback has rated multiple Berg claims unsupported or based on flawed reasoning. Gary Brecka, moderating the Tyson panel, has likewise been fact-checked for inaccurate or misleading claims involving depression, fluoridation and thyroid disease.
The lineup places federal health policymakers alongside celebrity personalities and alternative-health influencers, creating an unusual mixture for a conference presented as helping shape the future of American health.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s administration has made noncitizen voting a major election-integrity issue ahead of the midterms, but available evidence continues to show that illegal voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. The administration has expanded use of the federal SAVE database and pressed states to search voter rolls for potentially ineligible registrations.
The effort has produced some legitimate cases, but not evidence of widespread noncitizen voting. Reuters reported that federal prosecutors recently intensified enforcement, while investigations across multiple states have generally identified small numbers of cases compared with tens of millions of registered voters. Separate reporting found many registration problems resulted from clerical or automated system errors rather than intentional fraud.
The administration has nevertheless repeatedly presented noncitizen voting as a significant threat to election integrity. Election officials and voting experts dispute that characterization, pointing to studies and state reviews showing confirmed cases are uncommon. AP has similarly reported that Trump and allies have amplified the issue despite limited evidence of widespread illegal voting.
Courts have also constrained some administration efforts, while federal law limits systematic voter-roll removals close to Election Day. The Supreme Court recently allowed continued use of the expanded SAVE system while broader legal challenges proceed.
Olsen had been assigned to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida, where he was working on the "grand conspiracy" investigation targeting Obama- and Biden-era officials
Vatican City — Pope Leo XIV pushed back against President Donald Trump’s dismissal of artificial intelligence safety concerns, saying warnings from experts should be taken seriously rather than waved away as “fake news.” The comments came Monday as governments and technology companies continue debating how aggressively AI should be regulated.
Speaking with reporters while returning from France, Leo said he was not in “panic mode” about catastrophic AI scenarios but argued that ignoring potential risks would be irresponsible. He called for continued dialogue among scientists, political leaders, technology companies and civil society over safeguards for increasingly powerful systems.
Trump told the United Nations General Assembly last week that fears surrounding dangerous AI were a “hoax,” while arguing that excessive regulation could weaken the United States against China in the global technology race. His administration has generally favored faster development and fewer federal restrictions.
The debate extends well beyond politics. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that rapidly advancing AI agents could soon operate with extraordinary autonomy, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that many safety problems can be addressed through engineering rather than extensive government regulation.
Leo acknowledged Nvidia’s recent work on technical guardrails but questioned the consistency of developing safeguards while opposing government oversight. He urged policymakers and industry leaders to keep examining potential dangers rather than assuming technological development will remain manageable on its own.
Smyrna sophomore, Terrell Ingram, runs the ball against Red Lion in the Eagles first game of the season. Photo credit: Dave Reeder
The first month of the Delaware high school football season concluded with last weekend’s slate of games. Multiple programs finished the month undefeated across all three classifications.
The first month of Delaware high school football is in the books and many programs across the state have started their 2026 season on a good note. 11 teams are undefeated through the first four weeks of play and many programs have wins against out-of-state competition showing off the talent within Delaware.
Here’s a quick look at a few teams from each of the DIAA’s three football classifications that you should keep an eye on as the season continues:
Class 3A:
Smyrna Eagles
The Eagles have scored 35 or more points in each of their first three games this season, improving to 3-0 with an overtime win over Cardinal Ohara High School (from Pennsylvania) on September 26. Smyrna’s offense is led by senior quarterback Drew Marks, sophomore runners Terrell Ingram and Norman Berry and junior receiver Mikiah Jackson. Marks has thrown for multiple touchdowns in two of Smyrna’s three games this season with Jackson on the receiving end of five of those scores. Ingram and Berry combined for seven touchdowns this season.
Smyrna will compete in its first Class 3A matchup of the season this Friday, October 2, against Middletown High School. Middletown is 1-2 this season with a couple of out-of-state losses to Cardinal Hayes High School (NY) and Our Lady of Good Counsel High School (MD). Middletown beat Smyrna last season, 33-28.
Appoquinimink Jaguars
Appoquinimink is 3-0 this season with a Class 3A win already under its belt with a victory over Dover on September 18. The Jaguars started their 2026 campaign with a win against George Washington High School (PA) and won a 3-2 matchup against Howard last Thursday to remain undefeated on the season. Appoquinimink’s defense is the backbone of its undefeated start, holding all three of their opponents this season under 10 points. The Jaguars defense has given up only 15 points through three games.
The Jaguars will play St. Georges this Friday at 7:00 p.m. at home in Middletown, Delaware. The Jaguars defeated St. Georges, 35-0, on the road last season. The win sparked a three-game winning streak that helped Appoquinimink finish the regular season with a 7-3 record and trip to the semifinal round of the 2025 DIAA Class 3A Football State Championship tournament.
Class 2A:
Archmere football lines up on offense at the start of its game against the St. Mark’s Spartans, September 18. Photo Credit: Ryan Colasanti
Archmere Auks
The Auks stand atop the District 1 standings in Class 2A with a 3-0 record and wins against two fellow 2A competitors, St. Mark’s and Delaware Military Academy. Archmere recorded shutouts in each of their first two wins and held DMA without a point until the fourth quarter in their most recent win. The Auks defense has recorded a sack or turnover in every game this season.
Archmere faces a tough road matchup in its next game traveling to Felton, Delaware, to take on the Lake Forest Spartans. The Spartans are 2-1 this season with a win against Class 3A Dover in their most recent game. Last season, Lake Forest defeated Archmere, 35-13, in the regular season and 38-35 in the quarterfinal round of the DIAA Class 2A Football State Championship tournament.
Milford Buccaneers
The Buccaneers are 3-0 for the first time since 2016 starting their 2026 season with wins over Conrad, Indian River and Woodbridge in the season’s first month. Milford’s offense is averaging over 30 points per game this season led by senior Andrew Sivels. Sivels is having an incredible start to the season scoring four touchdowns in each of Milford’s first three games. Sivels has accounted for eight of the Buccaneers’ last nine touchdowns. The Buccaneers’ three wins tie their season total from a year ago.
The Buccaneers will play their third of four straight home games in a matchup against the 1-2 Delmar Wildcats. Milford defeated Delmar, 22-8, last season and Sivels was a big reason why, scoring two Buccaneer touchdowns. The rematch will be played at 7:00 p.m., Friday night.
Sussex Tech Ravens
The Ravens are the lone undefeated team amongst the District 3 standings in Class 2A. Sussex Tech started the season with a win over Glasgow High School and followed it up with two 2A wins against Tatnall and Mt. Pleasant. The Ravens have outscored their opponents 136-12 this season shutting out two of their first three opponents. Junior Eric Wright-McGlotten leads the team with seven rushing touchdowns through the first three games.
The Ravens next game will be a road contest against Bohemia Manor High School from Maryland. That game will be played in Maryland on October 2, at 7:00 p.m. Following that game, the Ravens will begin district play with a matchup against Lake Forest. Sussex Tech finished last season with a 7-3 overall record and 2-3 district record, which included a loss to Lake Forest.
Class 1A:
Concord Raiders
The Raiders started their 2026 season in a similar fashion to last season with three straight wins against Mt. Pleasant, Early College High School and Delcastle. Concord’s defense has started the year strong allowing 20 points through their first two games and earning their first shutout of the season against Delcastle last weekend. The Raider offense is led by senior Declan McNulty who has thrown or ran for a touchdown in every game this season. McNulty had a defensive touchdown as well in the Raiders win over the Hornets.
The Raiders will be on the road for their next game against Christiana High School. That game will be played on Saturday, October 3, at 11:00 a.m. The Raiders defeated Christiana, 20-8, last season.
Newark Yellowjackets
The Yellowjackets are tied atop the District 2 standings in Class 1A with a 2-1 record this season — the first under new head coach Angel Guerrero. Newark opened the season with back-to-back wins against fellow 1A competition in AI duPont and Brandywine, before falling to Newark Charter last weekend. The Yellowjackets scored a combined 61 points in their first two wins with key contributions from seniors Jahsir Bryant and William Teel.
The Yellowjackets will play Tatnall on the road next Saturday before playing their first district game against Delcastle at home. Newark’s game against Tatnall will be at 11:00 a.m. on October 3.
Patriot senior Maxwell Laznik finds a small window of running room against the Odessa defense. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
Newark Charter Patriots
The 2025 DIAA Class 1A Football State Championship runner-ups have started their season with a 4-0 record and multiple wins against Class 2A competition. The Patriots lead all of Class 1A with 118 points this season and their defense is amongst the top allowing only 4.5 points per game. The Patriots defense has two shutout wins this season, both against Class 2A opponents.
Newark Charter will face Conrad in its next game on Friday, October 2. That game will start at 7:00 p.m. and be played at Robert W. Gore Stadium on Newark Charter’s campus. The Patriots beat Conrad, 20-16, last season.
Dayesla Ixtli brings Mexican folklore, wearable sculpture and body painting together in a new Mezzanine Gallery exhibition opening Oct. 2 in Wilmington
WILMINGTON, Del. — For Delaware artist Dayesla Ixtli, a canvas doesn’t necessarily hang on a wall.
It can breathe, move and ultimately become part of the artwork.
Ixtli transforms the human body using elaborate handcrafted headpieces, sculpted armor, textured prosthetics, special-effects body paint, costumes and makeup. She then preserves the completed transformation through photography.
That process is at the center of “Diosas & Guerreras: The Living Canvas,” Ixtli’s solo exhibition opening Friday, Oct. 2, at the Delaware Division of the Arts’ Mezzanine Gallery in Wilmington.
The exhibition, whose title translates to “Goddesses & Warriors,” will remain on view through Oct. 30. Admission to the gallery and the opening reception are free.
Women portrayed as goddesses and warriors
Photo courtesy of the Delaware Division of the Arts.
Drawing from ancestral mythology, Mexican folklore and Indigenous and Latin American spiritual traditions, Ixtli creates women who appear as divine protectors, nature deities and warriors.
The imagery intentionally challenges traditional portrayals of women as primarily decorative or fragile.
“My practice as a visual artist is rooted in the transformative use of the human form as a living canvas,” Ixtli said.
The figures she creates are intended to convey what she describes as “raw power, divinity, and autonomy rather than fragile ornamentation.”
Among the featured works is “Mictecacíhuatl: Lady of the Dead,” named for the Aztec goddess associated with the dead. The work combines a sculpted mixed-media headdress, textiles, special-effects body painting and photography.
“Nymph” features a handcrafted floral headpiece, while “Yemayá: Queen of the Waters” centers on an elaborate handcrafted crown and trident.
The timing gives the exhibition additional cultural context. It opens during Hispanic Heritage Month and concludes just before Día de los Muertos, observed Nov. 1 and 2.
Building a character from head to toe
What viewers see in the finished photographs represents only the final stage of Ixtli’s work.
Each character is a complete artistic production.
Ixtli creates or coordinates the headpieces, accessories, props, wardrobe, hair and makeup before bringing the elements together on the model. Special-effects techniques can add texture and dimension to the body itself.
That makes the final assembly particularly demanding.
Ixtli calls it the “anxious final moment,” when all the individual pieces must come together “perfectly as one final product.”
The payoff comes when the transformation works and viewers respond.
She describes that reaction as “a moment of shared wonder that nurtures my inner child.”
An artistic career born during the pandemic
Ixtli’s path to becoming an interdisciplinary artist did not begin in an art school or traditional studio.
She is largely self-taught.
Her work developed as a form of self-care after the birth of her youngest daughter during the COVID-19 pandemic. She began experimenting with artistic makeup and discovered that completing the transformations provided a sense of accomplishment during a difficult period.
“It wasn’t until those difficult times that I was truly able to immerse myself and dedicate myself to this discipline,” Ixtli said.
After developing her artistic practice independently, she pursued formal beauty makeup training to complement the skills she had taught herself.
The Newark-based artist was born in Tenancingo, Estado de México, and incorporates cultural memory, mythology and Indigenous and Latin American spiritual traditions into her work.
Her artist name also reflects that connection. “Ixtli” is the Nahuatl word for “face.”
Delaware fellowship recognizes her work
The exhibition follows Ixtli’s selection as a 2026 Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellow in the emerging artist category for interdisciplinary visual arts.
The state fellowship provides both recognition and an opportunity for Ixtli to expand her practice.
She plans to explore body-safe pigments and natural adornments that could make her work more sustainable while maintaining the elaborate visual effects that characterize it.
For Ixtli, the fellowship also represents validation of an artistic career that grew from personal experimentation into public exhibitions and performances.
“Art is always saving lives, whether it is for the artist or the spectator,” she said.
She described the fellowship as an “essential push” to continue developing her work.
From festivals to film
During the past five years, Ixtli’s work has taken her to regional festivals, cultural celebrations, fashion shows and performance-art events.
She has appeared as The Magic Marigold Catrina at the Penn Museum’s Day of the Dead celebration and worked as one of the makeup artists on Alba Martínez’s 2022 short film “La Guagua 47.”
She was featured on the cover of Del Hispano Magazine in October 2025 and also operates a business as a freelance face painter and makeup artist.
The Mezzanine Gallery exhibition gives visitors an opportunity to see the finished photographs and wearable artwork together — revealing how sculpture, makeup, costume, cultural tradition and the human body combine to create a single character.
For Ixtli, however, the body remains at the center of it all: not simply the subject of the artwork, but the canvas itself.
To Go
What: “Diosas & Guerreras: The Living Canvas,” a solo exhibition by Dayesla Ixtli
Where: Mezzanine Gallery, Carvel State Office Building, 820 N. French St., Wilmington
Opening reception: Friday, Oct. 2, 5-7 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Oct. 2-30
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Admission: Free and open to the public
Learn more: Delaware Division of the Arts’ Mezzanine Gallery
Nandi Gamble tells Jane Brady that constitutional amendments, parental rights and education will remain priorities as Delaware heads toward a new General Assembly
DOVER, Del. — With Delaware’s 2026 legislative session over and voters preparing to elect a new General Assembly, Nandi Gamble of the Delaware Family Policy Council says some of the state’s most contentious debates over abortion, parental rights and education are likely to return when lawmakers reconvene in January.
Gamble, who tracks legislation for the conservative family-policy organization, outlined those priorities during an interview with former Delaware Attorney General Jane Brady on “A Better Discussion,” the weekly webcast produced by A Better Delaware.
Brady introduced Gamble as someone whose job is to follow legislation affecting families and make that information available to the organization’s members and the public. Gamble said hundreds of bills are introduced during Delaware’s two-year legislative sessions, requiring the organization to track measures it believes could affect family policy.
The conversation offered a preview of the issues Gamble expects the organization to focus on after the November election.
Constitutional amendments could return
At the top of Gamble’s list are proposed constitutional amendments dealing with reproductive freedom and individual privacy.
“There’s actually two that I’m really expecting to come back,” Gamble told Brady.
Senate Substitute 1 for Senate Bill 5 proposes adding a fundamental right to reproductive freedom relating to an individual’s pregnancy to the Delaware Constitution. The measure remained pending after advancing from committee during the current General Assembly.
Supporters describe the proposal as a way to protect reproductive rights under Delaware’s Constitution. Gamble and the Family Policy Council oppose it and highlighted language addressing decisions related to pregnancy, including abortion, contraception, sterilization and fertility care.
House Bill 14 would separately add a right of individual privacy to the Delaware Constitution, stating that the right “may not be infringed without a showing of a compelling state interest.” The bill was released from committee in March 2025 and placed on the Ready List.
Its sponsors say the proposal is intended to protect privacy rights that courts have previously recognized in areas including marriage, contraception, family relationships and child-rearing.
Gamble told Brady her organization views the privacy proposal in part through the lens of abortion policy because privacy rights played a role in earlier U.S. Supreme Court rulings involving contraception and abortion. That is the Family Policy Council’s interpretation of the measure; HB 14 itself is written broadly as a privacy amendment.
Parental consent remains a dividing line
Gamble also highlighted House Bill 46, legislation that would have required parental or legal-guardian consent before an abortion could be performed on someone younger than 16.
A substitute for the bill provides exceptions for medical emergencies and allows Family Court to authorize the procedure if a judge determines the minor is mature and well-informed enough to decide independently or that parental consent would not be in the minor’s best interest because of circumstances such as abuse, neglect or coercion. The substitute remained in the House Health & Human Development Committee.
Gamble told Brady the Family Policy Council sees the proposal as part of a larger debate over the role parents should have in major decisions involving their children.
Brady brought a personal perspective to that discussion, recalling a case she prosecuted roughly two decades ago involving a 14-year-old girl who became pregnant after being sexually abused by an adult teacher.
Brady said the teenager obtained an abortion without her parents knowing and under the influence of the adult who was abusing her. The man was later prosecuted and imprisoned, Brady said.
Gamble said the case illustrated why her organization supports parental-consent legislation.
Supporters of abortion rights have argued that consent requirements can create barriers for minors whose home environments are abusive, unsafe or otherwise unsuitable, while supporters of parental-consent laws argue that parents should ordinarily be involved in major medical decisions involving their children.
End-of-life law remains part of the debate
Gamble also pointed to Delaware’s medical aid-in-dying law as an example of how a small number of legislative votes can determine the outcome of major social-policy questions.
The Family Policy Council opposed the measure for years.
Gamble told Brady the debate demonstrated how individual lawmakers can become pivotal when margins in Legislative Hall are narrow.
“Those one or two votes make a very big difference,” she said.
Supporters of medical aid in dying describe it as an additional option for terminally ill adults who meet specific medical and legal requirements. Opponents have raised moral, religious and medical concerns about allowing physicians to participate in the process.
Turning legislative fights into a voter guide
The November election also gives Gamble’s organization another avenue to advance its priorities.
The Delaware Family Policy Action PAC produces an online voter guide that Gamble said includes candidate questionnaires, legislative voting records and research into candidates who do not respond directly.
Candidates received 10 issue statements this year and were asked whether they supported or opposed them, Gamble said. She told Brady that, for the first time, several Democratic candidates also participated.
When candidates do not answer, Gamble said the organization reviews campaign websites, social media and public forums in an attempt to determine their positions. The guide also tracks endorsements from organizations whose policy positions differ from those of the Family Policy Council.
Because the guide is produced through the group’s political-action arm and reflects its policy priorities, voters can compare it with candidate statements, other voter guides and independent reporting when evaluating candidates.
Brady emphasized the broader value of voters understanding candidates beyond their party labels and encouraged viewers to ask candidates directly where they stand on issues important to them.
Schools and parental involvement
Education is another area Gamble expects to remain prominent.
She said the organization supported legislation intended to give parents greater visibility into school curriculum and other classroom material and provides parents with information about opting children out of certain instruction.
Gamble also raised concerns during the webcast about sex-education materials in schools. Her comments reflected the Family Policy Council’s advocacy position and were not accompanied during the program by examples from specific Delaware school districts or curricula.
More broadly, Gamble said parental involvement in schools remains one of the organization’s central issues. She pointed to previous parental-rights proposals that failed to advance and said similar efforts are likely to remain part of the debate.
From teacher to legislative advocate
Gamble’s path to Delaware politics did not begin in Legislative Hall.
She told Brady she originally entered college intending to become a doctor before changing direction and becoming a teacher.
She taught honors and Advanced Placement biology as well as physics in Florida and said her experience with education policy, particularly the implementation of Common Core, helped lead her into public-policy work.
Gamble became involved with the Florida Family Policy Council in 2015 before eventually moving to Delaware, where she has lived for about seven years.
Today, much of her work revolves around monitoring legislation, communicating with parents and churches, and preparing supporters to participate in public-policy debates.
The organization also operates a Church Ambassador Network that Gamble said connects pastors with legislators and community needs. It recently held its annual summit for pastors and other leaders. Gamble said the event typically attracts about 450 to 600 attendees, with a previous gathering drawing roughly 860.
For Gamble, the November election does not represent the end of those debates. It will determine who is sitting in Legislative Hall when they resume.
And judging from the issues she identified in her conversation with Brady — reproductive rights, privacy, parental authority, education and end-of-life policy — several of Delaware’s most divisive legislative questions are likely to remain part of the debate when a new General Assembly takes office in January.
TO GO
What: “A Better Discussion” with Nandi Gamble of the Delaware Family Policy Council
Host: Jane Brady, chair of A Better Delaware and former Delaware attorney general
Key issues: Reproductive-rights and privacy constitutional amendments, parental consent for minors seeking abortions, medical aid in dying, parental rights in education and the 2026 voter guide
Delaware Family Policy Council: delawarefamilies.org
Legislative updates: delawarefamilies.org/updates
Voter guide: devoterguide.com
Why it matters: Gamble says several of the family-policy and social issues debated during the current General Assembly are likely to return after the November election when newly elected lawmakers convene in January.
ChristianaCare radiation oncologist Lindsay Romak helped develop updated recommendations on when and how radiation should be used to treat one of the most difficult cancers
WILMINGTON, Del. — A Delaware cancer specialist is helping shape how physicians across the country treat pancreatic cancer, a disease that remains among the most challenging cancers to treat successfully.
Dr. Lindsay Romak, a radiation oncologist at ChristianaCare’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute, is a co-author of newly updated national clinical practice guidelines from the American Society for Radiation Oncology, or ASTRO.
The guidelines provide physicians with evidence-based r
ecommendations for determining when radiation therapy should be used for adults with pancreatic cancer and how that treatment should be delivered.
Published in the medical journal Practical Radiation Oncology, the recommendations incorporate new clinical evidence and advances in radiation technology that have emerged since ASTRO issued its previous pancreatic cancer guidelines in 2019.
Why the guidelines matter
Pancreatic cancer presents physicians and patients with particularly difficult treatment decisions.
Only about one in five patients is eligible for surgery when the cancer is diagnosed, according to ChristianaCare. For other patients, treatment can involve combinations of chemotherapy and radiation, depending on how far the cancer has progressed and how it responds to treatment.
That makes determining when radiation should be used — and which patients are most likely to benefit — an important part of treatment planning.
“The treatment landscape for pancreatic cancer continues to evolve, and these guidelines help bring greater clarity to difficult treatment decisions,” Romak said. “By incorporating the latest evidence, we can better identify patients who may benefit from radiation therapy and ensure care is tailored to each patient’s unique circumstances.”
The updated guidelines address radiation treatment for patients across a range of circumstances, including cancers that can potentially be removed surgically, locally advanced cancers, recurrent disease, metastatic cancer and treatment intended primarily to relieve symptoms.
Radiation can play different roles
Radiation therapy does not serve the same purpose for every pancreatic cancer patient.
For some patients, radiation may help control a tumor in the pancreas and surrounding area. In certain circumstances, treatment may help make surgery possible. For others, radiation can be used to relieve symptoms caused by the disease, including pain or bleeding.
The new guidelines also address recurrent pancreatic cancer, treating an area with radiation for a second time and the use of radiation in selected patients whose cancer has spread to a limited number of locations or is progressing only in certain areas.
Those distinctions are important because pancreatic cancer treatment increasingly depends on the characteristics and progression of an individual patient’s disease rather than a single treatment approach.
“National guidelines help translate scientific evidence into better patient care,” said Dr. Adam Raben, chair of Radiation Oncology at the Graham Cancer Center. “Dr. Romak’s contributions to these recommendations reflect ChristianaCare’s leadership in radiation oncology and our commitment to ensuring patients with pancreatic cancer benefit from the latest advances in treatment.”
More precise radiation treatment
The recommendations also reflect technological changes that allow physicians to target tumors more precisely while attempting to limit radiation exposure to surrounding healthy tissue.
Those advances include improved image guidance, techniques to account for tumor movement caused by breathing and adaptive radiation therapy, which allows a treatment plan to be adjusted based on changes in a patient’s anatomy.
That precision can be especially important when treating pancreatic cancer because the pancreas is located close to other organs and sensitive structures.
“At ChristianaCare, we are seeing firsthand how innovations such as adaptive radiation therapy can help us personalize treatment and improve precision,” Romak said. “These advances are expanding options for patients and allowing us to deliver care more safely and effectively.”
Delaware expertise contributes to national standards
ASTRO developed the updated guidelines in collaboration with the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology and the Society of Surgical Oncology.
Romak’s participation puts a physician practicing in Delaware among the specialists helping establish national recommendations that oncologists can use when evaluating treatment options for pancreatic cancer patients.
“It was an honor to work alongside experts from around the world and across the country on these recommendations,” Romak said. “Our shared goal was to provide clear, evidence-based guidance that helps clinicians deliver the highest quality care and ultimately improves outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer.”
The guidelines are intended to support — rather than replace — individualized decisions by physicians and patients. Treatment can vary based on the stage and location of the cancer, previous treatments, a patient’s overall health and other clinical considerations.
For Delaware patients, the work also means expertise helping establish national pancreatic cancer treatment standards is represented locally at the Graham Cancer Center.
TO GO BOX
What: Updated national guidelines for radiation therapy in pancreatic cancer Delaware connection: Dr. Lindsay Romak, a radiation oncologist at ChristianaCare’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute, helped author the new recommendations. Why it matters: The guidelines help doctors determine which pancreatic cancer patients may benefit from radiation therapy, including treatment to control tumors, potentially make surgery possible or relieve symptoms such as pain and bleeding. What’s new: Recommendations incorporate advances in image guidance, motion management and adaptive radiation therapy, along with guidance for recurrent and selected metastatic cancers. More information: ChristianaCare’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute and the American Society for Radiation Oncology.
Republican Senate nominee urges Delaware party leaders and news organizations to organize a face-to-face forum
WILMINGTON, Del. — Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Katz is calling for a televised debate with Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Coons after Katz’s campaign said it learned the University of Delaware will not hold its traditional Delaware Debates program for the 2026 general election.
The University of Delaware has not publicly announced 2026 debate dates, and Delaware LIVE could not immediately independently confirm that the university has formally canceled this year’s program.
UD’s Center for Political Communication continues to describe Delaware Debates on its website as a biennial program conducted in partnership with Delaware Public Media. The university says the debates are designed to give voters an opportunity to hear directly from candidates for statewide federal and gubernatorial offices. The most recent debates were held in October 2024.
Katz said the absence of a Senate debate would deprive voters of an important opportunity to compare the candidates directly.
“Delaware voters deserve better,” Katz said. “Senator Coons and I are asking Delawareans to entrust one of only 100 United States Senate seats to us. They deserve to see us on the same stage, answering the same difficult questions and defending our records, policies and solutions.”
Katz asks party leaders to help organize debate
Katz called on Delaware Republican Party Chairman Gene Truono and Delaware Democratic Party Chair Evelyn Brady to jointly organize a professionally moderated and televised debate.
“This is an opportunity to put people over party,” Katz said. “I am asking Chairman Truono and Chair Brady to work together and give Delaware voters the debate they deserve.”
Katz proposed inviting television, radio and news organizations to participate and distribute the debate statewide.
Katz won the Republican Senate primary Sept. 15 and will face Coons in the Nov. 3 general election. Delaware Department of Elections records list both candidates as qualified for the ballot.
Coons was first elected to the Senate in a 2010 special election and subsequently won full terms in 2014 and 2020. Katz previously represented the 4th Senate District in the Delaware General Assembly as a Democrat and ran for U.S. Senate as an Independent in 2024.
Long-running Delaware tradition
The University of Delaware launched Delaware Debates in 2010 in partnership with Delaware First Media, now Delaware Public Media.
That inaugural program included debates for Delaware’s U.S. House and Senate seats. The Senate debate between Coons and Republican Christine O’Donnell drew national media attention and was co-moderated by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Delaware journalist Nancy Karibjanian.
By 2016, UD described the event as its fourth biennial Delaware Debates. The program continued through subsequent election cycles, including the seventh edition in 2022 and Senate, House and gubernatorial debates in 2024.
UD says the debates traditionally include questions from journalists and university students and are livestreamed or otherwise made available to the public.
As of Sept. 28, the university’s Delaware Debates webpage highlights the 2024 events but does not list a 2026 debate schedule.
Katz: Interviews aren’t the same as a debate
Katz said individual candidate interviews can be useful but argued they do not provide the same comparison as having candidates answer identical questions at the same time.
“Senator Coons has represented Delaware in Washington for nearly 16 years,” Katz said. “Voters are the employers. They deserve a job-performance review of the person who has represented them and a direct comparison with the person asking to replace him.”
Katz, a pediatric critical care anesthesiologist, compared the need for information in elections to decision-making in medicine.
“Patients deserve to understand their choices before making important decisions about their lives, and voters deserve to be fully informed before making an important decision about their government,” Katz said.
He also argued that debates serve as a check on elected officials and political institutions by forcing candidates to answer questions publicly and respond to each other’s positions.
“This is bigger than Mike Katz or Chris Coons,” Katz said. “It is bigger than Republicans and Democrats. This is about accountability and whether Delawareans have a meaningful opportunity to question, compare and scrutinize the people asking to represent them.”
Challenge remains open
Katz said he would participate in a debate hosted by UD, another Delaware college or university, or a coalition of news organizations.
“I am ready to debate Senator Coons anytime, anywhere in Delaware, before a fair and professional moderator,” Katz said. “There is still time.”
Katz closed his challenge by urging organizers to allow voters to make their own comparison.
“Give Delawareans the debate. Give them the facts. Let them see us side-by-side. Then trust the people to decide.”
Delaware LIVE has requested confirmation from the University of Delaware regarding the status of Delaware Debates 2026 and would add its response when received. The Coons campaign should also be given an opportunity to respond to Katz’s debate challenge.
TO GO
What happened: Republican Senate nominee Mike Katz says he has been told the University of Delaware will not conduct Delaware Debates in 2026.
What is confirmed: UD’s website still describes Delaware Debates as a biennial voter-education program, but as of Sept. 28 it does not list a 2026 debate schedule.
What Katz wants: A professionally moderated, televised debate between Katz and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons.
The race: Katz and Coons are qualified candidates for Delaware’s U.S. Senate seat in the Nov. 3 general election.
What remains unanswered: Whether UD has formally canceled the 2026 program and whether Coons will accept Katz’s debate invitation.
Austin, TX — Republican Texas Railroad Commission candidate Bo French is facing renewed scrutiny after an investigation uncovered years of social media posts in which he called for the execution of political opponents and government officials.
CNN’s KFile reported that accounts linked to French repeatedly advocated executions, including in 2020 posts targeting former President Barack Obama and other Obama administration officials over claims surrounding the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. One post said the death penalty for what French called the “Obama conspirators” was necessary, while another referenced execution as the historical punishment for treason.
The investigation also found that French wrote in February 2025 that he wanted “public executions” of government officials identified by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort. In another deleted post, he called for the public execution of Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff.
French was already under criticism after posting an image of South Asian students at the University of Texas and describing their presence as a “problem.” Republican Sen. John Cornyn subsequently said he would not vote for French, while other Texas Republicans publicly condemned the post.
French is running for the Railroad Commission, which despite its name regulates Texas’ oil and gas industry. His social media history has now become a significant issue in the statewide campaign.
New York, NY — Questions over police access to privately operated surveillance networks are growing after records showed the New York Police Department searched Flock Safety’s license-plate database 1,710 times between March 2023 and December 2025, despite saying it has no contract with the company.
The records, obtained and analyzed by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and LatinoJustice PRLDEF, came from Have I Been Flocked, which compiles audit logs released through public-records requests. Nearly 1,000 NYPD searches reportedly included no meaningful explanation or only vague entries such as “investigation,” “wanted person,” or “inquiry.” At least 131 searches listed the Queens district attorney’s office as the requesting agency.
The NYPD has previously acknowledged that a limited number of authorized personnel can access a national commercial license-plate-reader repository. The newly disclosed logs, however, prompted the two advocacy groups to seek records showing whether officers used Flock through another agency’s contract, along with training materials, policies, audit logs and any payments to the company.
Flock says participating agencies control whether their camera data is shared and that every law-enforcement search is logged for review. The company says it does not sell customer data and has begun adding tighter documentation requirements, including standardized offense categories and planned case-number requirements for searches.
Ithaca, NY — A criminal investigation into an alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University has been reopened after a former student filed a civil lawsuit accusing seven Chi Phi fraternity members of sexually assaulting her over several hours. Prosecutors say the new allegations differ substantially from what was initially reported to police.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said his office intends to present the case to a grand jury with the cooperation of the woman, identified in court filings as Jane Doe. He said investigators will examine whether new evidence exists that could change the earlier decision not to pursue criminal charges.
The lawsuit alleges the woman was drugged and repeatedly assaulted at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. It also claims two fraternity members were expelled while others received lesser university sanctions. No one was arrested or criminally charged following the original investigation.
Van Houten said the woman’s 2024 statement to police described circumstances differently, including her use of alcohol and drugs and the nature of the sexual activity. Her attorney has argued that authorities failed to properly follow up with a traumatized sexual-assault survivor.
Cornell has said the allegations are deeply disturbing and that its Title IX process resulted in sanctions including expulsions and suspensions. The university also said the Chi Phi chapter remains barred from campus.
Charles Spencer, the brother of the late Princess Diana, spoke to "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King about writing his new book, "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister."
US midterms polls: Are Democrats winning or is Trump losing?Expert commentthilton.drupal
Polls suggest Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives as American voters are dissatisfied with President Trump and his policies.
Americans go to the polls on 3 November to elect a third of the US Senate and all the House of Representatives.
The Republicans currently have majorities in both chambers of Congress. But their prospects of retaining this control look increasingly dire.
The Republicans’ chances have been dragged down by President Donald Trump’s near-record low public approval rating and voter dissatisfaction with his handling of the Iran war and the economy, among other things. Democrats appear poised to take advantage, with most pundits suggesting they will retake control of at least the House of Representatives.
But the race is not over yet. In the end, the key factor will likely be turnout, which is historically lower in midterms than presidential elections. Whichever party better mobilizes their voters to turn up on election day will ultimately determine the outcome.
Democrats are strong favourites
At this point, this election is the Democratic Party’s to lose.
Republicans currently hold a narrow majority in the 435-seat House of Representatives. To control the House, which gives a party the ability to name chairmen of committees and set the legislative agenda, the Democrats will need to win at least 218 seats. They currently have 212 seats.
Due to polarization and redistricting, most seats are highly unlikely to change party. Election analysts estimate that only around 21 House seats are close contests or ‘toss-ups’. Still, most pundits forecast Democrats winning between 220 and 230 seats overall – a relatively comfortable majority.
Senate more challenging
The Democrats face a more difficult challenge recapturing the Senate. Republicans now hold 53 of the 100 seats. Given that the vice-president can cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate, the Democrats will need to win four seats (and not lose any they currently hold) to gain control of the Senate.
They are likely to pick up a Senate seat in North Carolina, where the state’s former two-term Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, has a significant lead in the polls. Then things get harder for the Democrats.
They need to win contests in three other states currently represented by Republicans. Current polling suggests their best chances are in Alaska, Maine, Ohio, Texas and Iowa.
Public opinion surveys show all five races to be toss-ups. But the Democrats also need to defend a Michigan seat that is considered a toss-up, where the incumbent Democratic senator is retiring in a state Trump won in 2024.
If the national tide swings heavily in the Democrats’ favour, they could gain control of the Senate. But that is less likely than their chances of winning the House.
Public dissatisfaction
Public opinion has been generally downcast ahead of the election. Two-thirds of those surveyed in May think the country is headed in the wrong direction. A July survey found only about a quarter of the public think the economy is doing well, with concerns over the cost of healthcare, food, housing and gasoline. Most recently, a majority said going to war with Iran was the wrong decision.
More registered voters think the Democrats would do better than the Republicans in dealing with gas prices, the economy, and foreign policy.
Democrats also have a 6 to 14 point advantage in nationwide polls of voter intentions known as the ‘generic ballot.’ This question measures party popularity by asking a selection of registered voters nationwide which party’s candidate they intend to vote for, without naming specific candidates. Historically, the generic ballot is a key indicator; the Democrat lead suggests a majority on election day.
Moreover, in the last five midterm elections, there has been a change in control of at least one chamber of Congress. And only four times in the last 164 years has the president’s party gained seats in a House of Representatives midterm election.
Voter turnout in midterm elections is usually relatively low compared with presidential elections: averaging less than 50 per cent compared to roughly 60 per cent. Voter enthusiasm will therefore be a big factor in maximizing turnout. Polls suggest Democrats are more motivated to vote: 79 per cent of Democrats said they are extremely motivated to vote, compared with 69 per cent of Republicans.
The Trump factor
Looming over all of this is voter opinion about President Trump, the ever-present force in current American politics.
The most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll has Trump’s approval rating at 32 per cent, a new low for him, with a disapproval rate of 66 per cent.
Other recent polls have shown Trump’s approval rating ranging from the mid-30s to low-40s; a recent YouGov poll put it at 37 per cent.But a recent poll by the American Research Group, conducted 16–20 September, showed the president with just a 29 per cent approval rating – the first time it has dropped below 30 per cent.
Historically, presidential approval matters in congressional elections. For context, Trump’s ratings are significantly lower than either President Bill Clinton’s in 1994, when the Democrats lost 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats, or President Barack Obama’s in 2010, when Democrats lost 63 House seats and 7 Senate seats.
Majorities disapprove of how Trump is handling all major issues. And a plurality of registered voters, including a majority of independents who make up about a third of the electorate, say their vote in the congressional election is ‘mostly against Trump’.
The potential impact of Trump’s low approval on the November outcome has led Charlie Cook, a leading political analyst, to observe not a ‘blue wave’ but the effects of a ‘red undertow.’ Either way, Democrats appear well-positioned to take advantage of disapproval with Trump to make congressional gains.
Caveats
But as with any forecast, there are caveats. While Democrats may be more motivated to vote overall, polling shows that 83 per cent of Republicans who strongly support President Trump claim they are absolutely certain to vote in November. Moreover, Republicans have the advantage of much larger finances as they try to mobilize their voters.
The electorate is also more polarized between Republicans and Democrats than at any time in recent history. And congressional gerrymandering means that there is a relatively small margin of error for Democrats.
So, despite the various factors that point to a Democratic victory in November, the election could still tighten.
Not over yet
Ultimately, voters decide elections, not pollsters. And recent election polling has repeatedly underestimated Republican support, as Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris learned to their dismay.
Historically, American voter intentions are unlikely to change this close to election day. But US elections are also notorious for October surprises: the deepening financial crisis in 2008 and developments in the Hillary Clinton email probe in 2016 are just two examples.
It is also possible that 4 November will dawn without a clear victor. The president’s previous challenging of election results and processes, for example with regards to postal votes, could mean potential disputed outcomes and court challenges. This could delay final results for days or weeks, further undermining the reputation of American democracy.
Polls suggest the Democrats are poised to win the US House and possibly the Senate. But, as the American baseball player Yogi Berra once said: ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Pollster Frank Luntz warned Monday that President Donald Trump is pursuing a “very dangerous strategy” by making himself a central figure in the 2026 midterms as Republicans try to motivate voters who backed him in presidential elections.
Luntz told CNN that Trump’s challenge is recreating his presidential-year turnout coalition without simultaneously energizing voters who strongly oppose him. “There are more people who oppose Donald Trump who are planning to vote than those who support him,” he said.
That concern is reflected in CNN’s latest national polling. Trump’s approval rating stands at 33%, his lowest level in CNN polling across either term. Forty-four percent of voters said their midterm vote would be intended to oppose Trump, compared with 19% who said it would express support for him. Democrats led Republicans 49% to 41% on the generic congressional ballot.
Luntz emphasized that the political environment differs from 2024, citing voter frustration with affordability, the Iran war and Trump’s confrontational style. He described Hispanic voters, younger voters and male union members as particularly important parts of the Republican coalition.
Still, Luntz said stronger turnout among Trump supporters could improve Republican prospects, underscoring that midterm participation—not presidential-election history—will ultimately determine results.
RAHWAY, New Jersey — Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. used his only televised debate against Democrat Rebecca Bennett to distance himself from President Donald Trump on several issues important to New Jersey voters, including immigration enforcement and the Gateway rail tunnel.
Kean said he opposes a proposed ICE detention facility in Roxbury Township, declaring, “My focus is to make sure we don’t have an ICE facility in Roxbury.” The position puts him at odds with the Trump administration, which revived plans for the facility after previously abandoning them. Bennett said she had opposed the project earlier, while noting that Kean had not previously taken a public position.
Kean also defended the $16 billion Gateway Tunnel project connecting New Jersey and New York, which Trump has criticized and tried to block from receiving federal funding. “I will challenge anybody who gets in my way, including this president,” Kean said.
The debate also covered Iran, taxes, Israel and artificial intelligence. Kean defended U.S. military operations against Iran, while Bennett argued the conflict has increased costs and made the country less secure.
The 7th District is among New Jersey’s most competitive House races. Trump carried it by about one point in 2024, while Democrat Mikie Sherrill carried it in the 2025 gubernatorial election.
Israel’s election: What will it mean for neighbours and allies?
8
October 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:15 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Hear from experts on the foreign policy choices facing Israel’s next government.
Hear from experts on the foreign policy choices facing Israel’s next government.
Israel’s upcoming election follows three years of war and a marked decline in international support. Leading candidates to be prime minister offer little in terms of rethinking Israeli foreign policy and all reject Palestinian statehood. The election outcome could have profound consequences for the Palestinians and Israel’s relations with neighbouring states and international partners.
This event discusses:
What is at stake for Palestinians and regional states in Israel’s election?
Would a change of government alter relations with the UK, US and Europe?
How do leading candidates view relations with Lebanon, Syria and Turkey?
How might Israel’s next government approach Iran?
Could a new government change Israel’s approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict?
Can Israel’s next government rebuild international public support?
CARSON CITY, Nevada — Republican Jim Marchant, one of the country’s most prominent election deniers, is again running to become Nevada’s secretary of state, four years after narrowly losing the same office to Democrat Cisco Aguilar.
Marchant has repeatedly promoted unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and has said being labeled an “election denier” is a “badge of honor.” He continues to argue that Nevada elections have been fraudulent since 2008 despite Republican and Democratic candidates winning statewide contests during that period. WIRED identifies Marchant among 197 election-denying candidates seeking congressional or statewide offices nationwide this November.
If elected, Marchant has proposed sweeping changes, including canceling existing voter registrations and requiring residents to re-register, eliminating universal mail voting, moving toward paper ballots and expanding hand counting. He also supported efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election and stood alongside Nevada Republicans as they signed false electoral certificates claiming Donald Trump won the state.
Aguilar, who defeated Marchant by about two percentage points in 2022, has made election security and protection of election workers central to his tenure.
The financial gap between the candidates is substantial. Aguilar reported more than $1 million cash on hand this summer, while Marchant reported just $13.86 after raising $1,000 during the second quarter.
Marchant won the Republican primary in June and will again face Aguilar in November.
Why Should Delaware Care? Wilmington has made adding more housing a priority, but the fight over Bancroft Parkway shows the challenges that can come with bringing larger developments into established neighborhoods. The months-long dispute has raised questions about how the city balances its need for housing with residents’ concerns about the size and impact of new development.
Earlier this month, Wilmington City Councilman Chris Johnson tabled a measure that would have rezoned land along Bancroft Parkway, allowing developers to move forward with plans for a high-rise apartment complex.
If the high-rise were built, it would be the tallest development along the Bancroft Parkway, a century-old greenspace that runs through northwest Wilmington.
The decision came amid months of opposition from nearby residents, who have raised concerns about the size and scale of the proposed development and argued that it would change the character of the surrounding northwest city neighborhood.
For now, those concerns have put the rezoning and the project on hold. But residents and the Wilmington and Newark-based developer, Tsionas, have remained in discussions over whether they can reach a compromise on what could ultimately be built at the site.
In a press release last week, the resident group, Protect Bancroft Parkway, said neighbors recently met with the president of the development company, Angela Tsionas, and her attorney, who presented a concept for what the developer believes it could build under the property’s existing zoning — without the rezoning measure currently before City Council.
Under the presented concept, the development would include 72 apartments across two buildings, one would be three stories tall and the other eight stories, along with approximately 48 surface parking spaces. The apartments would be less expensive than luxury units and would feature fewer amenities, such as a gym or garage, and more modest finishes, according to the press release.
The new concept marks a significant change from the previous proposal, which called for a 12-story apartment building and a parking garage with nearly 300 spaces.
Despite the new proposal, residents made it clear they remain opposed to rezoning the properties, arguing that the change would legally allow a taller, larger development that could increase traffic and parking problems and alter the neighborhood’s character, regardless of the developer’s promises to build something smaller.
“Build within the legal right you have to build. Go to town, do what you want, but don’t try to change the law,” said Kathleen Dinsmore, a longtime neighborhood resident and an organizer of Protect Bancroft Parkway.
Tsionas did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s requests for comment.
According to Johnson, discussions between his office, Tsionas and residents have continued. While the rezoning measure remains tabled for now, he said he believes the development plans are still moving forward.
“Now, what that project is, I can’t 100% say for sure, but they intend to move forward,” he said.
Hundreds of local residents have protested the Tsionas project in recent months, which has slowed the project’s advancement. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Residents push back on rezoning
Back in March, Tsionas originally proposed building a nine-story high-rise along the Bancroft Parkway, submitting an application to the city to rezone two pieces of land so they could move forward with a 315,000-square-foot apartment complex that would have included almost 200 units and an underground parking garage with 325 spaces.
Tsionas currently owns the 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue Apartments, a luxury six-story housing complex that sits near the parkway, at the intersection of North Grant Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s visible from the property where the new project is to be built.
The locations they requested for rezoning included 2140 W 11th St. and 1010 N. Bancroft St., which are both zoned C-1, one of the city’s commercial districts. That current zoning is capped at a maximum height of three stories and 47 feet, while rezoning the properties to the requested C-2 commercial district would allow up to 15 stories and 180 feet.
Tsionas also owns a third parcel at 1100 N. Grant St. that would be part of the development and sits adjacent to the two properties it sought to rezone. Unlike those properties, however, the Grant Street parcel is already zoned C-2.
Tsionas’ mixed-use project, 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue, is visible in the background from the site of 1010 N. Bancroft Parkway. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
In the application, the company’s attorney noted that the plan was developed through a series of working group meetings with the local community, where different proposals were discussed and “reworked based on the working group’s feedback.”
But shortly after the application was submitted, residents began to push back against the development, saying that it would change “the character in appearance and nature” of the area, alter its skyline, and substantially increase traffic in the area.
In April, City Council referred the developer’s application to the City Planning Commission for review. But two months later, the City Council passed a resolution to approve a 90-day extension for the City Planning Commission to make recommendations on the application, in part because of community concerns.
In May, Tsionas submitted an amended rezoning application, which altered the development to a “stepped concept,” including a four-story building along Bancroft Parkway, an eight-story building, and a 12-story building along North Grant Avenue. The following month, Johnson held a town hall to talk with residents.
Then in August, Tsionas submitted a letter to the city council, agreeing to make changes to development and commit dollars to community initiatives. In the letter, the market-rate developer agreed to cap the maximum height of the housing complex at eight stories as opposed to 12. They also agreed to set up parking to direct traffic away from the Bancroft Parkway median.
The company also agreed to commit $300,000 to the Todmorden Foundation’s new senior affordable housing program. They also agreed to provide $50,000 annually for the next three years to a public safety program administered by West Side Grows Together and Cornerstone West CDC.
Later that month, the city Planning Commission held its meeting on the proposal, drawing representatives from Tsionas and 200 residents. Neighbors raised concerns about the development’s potential impact on property taxes and traffic, construction-related noise and safety, and the lack of binding commitments from the developer not to build to the maximum height of 15 feet if the rezoning was approved.
“This development, if allowed to move forward, will destroy our section of Brancroft Parkway for my children’s generation,” said one resident, Andrea Cassidy, during the meeting.
Wali Rushdan, an attorney representing Tsionas, defended the rezoning as consistent with the city’s plan and future needs, arguing the project would not worsen existing traffic and that deed restrictions could address community concerns.
“Your voice does matter, but that doesn’t make you right,” he said. “So again, I ask that you all carefully consider this, all the arguments that have been raised, as well as the current and future needs of our city.”
The commission ultimately voted 4-1 against the rezoning. That decision raised the threshold for approval by city council, requiring 10 of the council’s 13 members to vote in favor rather than a simple majority, according to Johnson.
Johnson told Spotlight Delaware that the commission’s decision was unusual because the city’s Planning and Development Department had recommended approving the rezoning.
“This is quite a unique and rare territory for the city that the planning commission would go against the planning professionals in the city,” he said. “I think part of the issue with this matter is that planning professionals from a city perspective believe this is an appropriate project.”
On Sep. 3, Councilman Johnson decided to table the city council measure that would have approved the rezoning of the properties.
He said he held the measure in response to community concerns over the height of the building.
Kathleen Dinsmore is among the residents of Bancroft Parkway who believe that the Tsionas project will dramatically change the character of their historic neighborhood. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Why residents are still opposed
Dinsmore has lived in the Bancroft Parkway neighborhood for nearly seven years. She is one of several residents who helped start Protect Bancroft Parkway, a neighborhood group formed in April to oppose the rezoning.
The group has since created a website to serve as a hub for residents, providing copies of the rezoning applications, updates on the project and upcoming meetings, as well as a mailing list.
Dinsmore said she first learned about the project in March, after Tsionas submitted its initial rezoning application, from residents who had participated in invite-only working group meetings held by the developer with Councilman Johnson.
She said many other residents were unaware of the proposal. Dinsmore and several neighbors began spreading the word and organized a community meeting at the Woodlawn Library in late April to discuss the rezoning and how residents wanted to respond.
“I just didn’t feel like it was right that people didn’t know. That was my biggest thing. Like we really deserve to have known. I keep going back to that. The developer didn’t have to, but I believe our representative on city council had an obligation,” Dinsmore said.
The group has since sought to demonstrate the extent of the neighborhood’s opposition. Members went door to door on blocks surrounding the proposed development and reached residents at 99 of 123 households, according to Dinsmore. Of those, 93 signed a petition opposing the rezoning.
“People were very angry because for months they had heard that this was just going to happen without us having any way of having our voice heard,” she said.
Dinsmore said broader public outreach from Tsionas and Johnson followed as residents became more vocal about their opposition. That included a June town hall and a meeting earlier this month where residents and the developer discussed, for the first time, what could potentially be built under the property’s existing zoning.
While residents have raised concerns about the proposed development’s density and its potential effects on traffic and parking, Dinsmore said one of their central concerns is what the zoning change itself would permit, not simply what Tsionas currently intends to build.
If the city council approves the rezoning, she said, the properties could legally accommodate a larger development in the future regardless of the developer’s current plans. Residents also do not view a private agreement with Tsionas as sufficient protection, Dinsmore said, because enforcing such an agreement could require residents to take legal action if its terms were violated.
“We are forever subject to possibly having to deal with the developer on anything that they violate,” Dinsmore said.
But the residents’ campaign has also drawn criticism from some who view the opposition as an example of NIMBYism, an acronym for “not in my backyard” commonly used to describe resistance to development near one’s home.
Another resident, Barbara Kanter, told Spotlight that labeling residents’ opposition as NIMBYism or classism is misplaced because the proposed apartments would cater to people with incomes similar to those already living in the neighborhood.
“There is not an argument for it other than the developer wants it there,” she said.
Dinsmore also rejected that characterization, arguing that residents are not seeking to prevent development of the properties altogether, noting Tsionas could still develop the site under its existing zoning, she said.
Instead, Dinsmore said residents’ concerns center on the scale of development that rezoning could allow and whether the surrounding neighborhood can accommodate it.
“I believe we can be pro-development and pro-housing in this city, and care passionately about being Wilmingtonians, and not want a massive building right on a green space in a neighborhood that’s not set up for it. I think we can do both,” she said.
Brazil’s presidential election is more than just another polarized contestExpert commentjon.wallace
A Bolsonaro victory would mean Trump-aligned governments dominate South America.
The first round of Brazil’s presidential election is scheduled for 4 October, with 13 candidates competing to occupy the Brazilian presidential palace, Planalto.
For now, the contest is dominated by two men. Only a few percentage points (depending on the poll) separate 80-year-old President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) – running for his fourth term – and 45-year-old Flávio Bolsonaro of the right-wing Liberal Party (PL).
Flávio is the son of the man Lula defeated in 2022, former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019–23), sometimes referred to as the ‘Trump of the tropics’. Lula squeaked out a narrow victory in the 2022 contest, of 50.9 to 49.1 percent in the second round, after public opinion surveys had seriously undercounted the support of his right-wing rival. Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving time for plotting a coup, after his supporters rioted in Brasilia in 2023 in an effort to overturn the 2022 results.
This year’s contest is more than a familial grudge match. For one, it looks a lot like recent presidential elections in the region. In June, elections in both Peru and Colombia went to a second round. Each resulted in a narrow victory for conservative candidates who, like the Bolsonaros, are aligned with the regional diplomatic agenda of US President Donald Trump.
Another tight contest now looms in Brazil, the most populous country and largest democracy in Latin America, the tenth largest economy in the world, and for decades an international champion of the Global South, through blocs like BRICS.
Both Lula and the younger Bolsonaro face high levels of voter rejection. More than 54 per cent of Brazilian voters disapprove of Flavio according to one poll. Lula does little better in the same survey, with 52 per cent against the president running for a fourth term.
The issues
Brazilian voters are divided over a number of issues relating to Brazil’s political system and its place in the world.
According to a Pew survey conducted in Brazil in early 2026, only 37 per cent of Brazilian voters were satisfied with their democracy, down from 66 per cent in 2013. And Brazilians are ideologically split on favourable views of China versus the US.
57 per cent of Brazilians who identify as leftist have favourable views of China, compared to 40 per cent of those on the right. Those opinions flip on attitudes towards the US: 58 per cent of self-identified right-leaning voters have favourable views of the US, while only 30 per cent on the other side of the ideological spectrum do.
Division on these issues indicates that this election could have major implications for the direction of Brazil’s foreign policy, its global influence, and the PT foreign policy agenda since 2003.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidency…would trigger, if not a pulling out, then a significantly reduced role in the BRICS group.
Brazil’s situation is not unique. Distrust in democratic electoral systems has increased around the world – a sentiment that outsider political entrepreneurs have exploited. Their ability to do so stems from political polarization, discontent with the political class – and the simple fact that casting a ballot and accepting the aggregate macro tabulations of all voters requires a certain commitment of faith. As political tribes have become more separated and disconnected from alternative views and media, it becomes easier to feed on distrust, suspicion and resentment.
According to a recent Chatham House/ Convergent Opinion survey, distrust in the electoral system is greater among those who voted for then-president Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 than those who voted for Lula that year.
Only 45 per cent of 2022 Bolsonaro voters expressed very much or some confidence that elections would be free from political interference this year, compared to 78 per cent of 2022 Lula voters. That is concerning, but not necessarily surprising. Jair Bolsonaro cast doubt on the integrity of Brazil’s electoral system before the 2022 elections. (Flávio has promised to respect this year’s election outcome. But he has also vowed to grant amnesties to those who took part in the 2023 riots).
Fuelling this division is an escalating diplomatic row with the administration of US President Donald Trump. In July, the US imposed new 25 per cent tariffs on some Brazilian goods. The same month, the Brazilian government denied visas to two US envoys, accusing them of planning to meddle in elections – a charge the US State Department called a ‘baseless lie’.
The diplomatic dispute has escalated further, with the White House revoking the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to the US, and Lula’s office accusing the US of ‘a deliberate escalation of hostile measures against Brazil, motivated by ideological reasons’. In his speech at the UN General Assembly on 22 September, Lula warned against foreign interference in the election.
The potential foreign policy about-face
A Bolsonaro victory this year would create another friendly South American government for the Trump administration, adding to the White House’s growing list of aligned leaders (either for transactional or ideological reasons) in Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador.
Indeed, a Bolsonaro government would probably adhere to Trump’s approach on various issues, including a more martial approach to narcotics trafficking and transnational criminal networks operating in or from Brazil. It will likely see Brazil joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas initiative.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidency would also bring a U-turn to PT-focused foreign policy agendas. It would trigger, if not a pulling out, then a significantly reduced role in the BRICS group, which Trump has criticized for ‘anti-American policies’. And Brazil might well draw back from other global forums, such as the UN, the G20, and COP where Brasilia has staked its claim as a representative of the Global South.
In reality, under the PT, Brazil’s track record in supporting multilateralism has been spotty. Often it has been partisan in defending human rights and democracy even in its own neighbourhood.
Equally, it is not clear that a new Bolsonaro government would represent a triumph for Trump’s so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’, which seeks to establish American supremacy in the Western Hemisphere.
While a Bolsonaro-led Brazil would return Brasilia to his father’s anti-woke cultural battles, it would not necessarily fall into line with the Trump White House, particularly on trade. Bolsonaro distanced himself from Trump’s heavy tariffs. And, as was true for his father and neighbour Argentine president Javier Milei – who both had campaigned on reducing Chinese influence – a new Bolsonaro administration would balk at reducing trade with China, Brazil’s largest trading partner since 2009. China, though, may seek to reduce its Brazilian imports, if Bolsonaro strays too far in challenging Beijing.
Regardless, Brazilians face a stark choice in October. Brazil’s commitment to international law and multilateralism hangs in the balance, as does the Global South’s voice in the global order.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The White House’s official app surged to the top of Apple’s news category after launching its 24/7 Trump TV channel, but cybersecurity researchers say the app collects extensive user data while providing limited clarity about where that information ultimately goes.
The White House says the app has surpassed 2 million downloads and offers direct access to administration news, livestreams and presidential messaging. It promoted the recent rankings as evidence Americans were bypassing traditional media for information directly from the presidency.
A Washington Sun investigation found the app communicates with multiple third-party services and includes software capable of monitoring location and user activity. Researchers also identified a dormant keylogger script, though they said it was unlikely to function as traditional surveillance software on mobile devices.
The White House privacy policy acknowledges that app information can be handled by third-party services and says collected data may be used for tailored content, statistical profiles, policy decisions and lawful information-sharing with government agencies.
Questions have also been raised about federal security requirements. Government records show 45Press received a White House technology-services contract currently valued at about $1.72 million.
The White House did not answer the Washington Sun’s specific questions about security certifications or the researchers’ findings, instead pointing to its announcement celebrating the app’s popularity.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., speaks at a press conference with other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington, D.C. last year. Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images
An Arizona congresswoman has proposed three bills that would fund literacy classes, dual language programs and training for teachers of students learning English in the state, hoping to remedy gaps highlighted by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, filed the bills Sept. 16, the same day Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica reported that the state had lowered the score students need to pass its English proficiency test. Experts warned the change will push thousands of students out of language services before they know English well enough to succeed in school. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican longtime defender of Arizona’s English-only policies, approved the change.
Grijalva’s Reaching English Learners Act would create competitive grants of up to five years for colleges that partner with high-need school districts or early childhood programs to train teachers to lead classrooms of English learners. It gives preference to programs that recruit teacher candidates who were once English learners or come from underrepresented groups. Colleges would pay at least half the cost of the training. The bill does not specify a cost for the program.
A spokesperson for Grijalva said she had previously drafted the bills but noted that Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s reporting underscored why federal support is needed to improve English learning.
In a statement to the news organizations, Grijalva said, “Superintendent Horne’s mismanagement of the misguided ‘English-only’ model underscores the need for real federal support for English learners, educators, and their families, which is exactly what my legislation would provide. Instead of repeating the mistakes of the past by simply making the English proficiency test easier to pass, we should give students the resources and support they need to actually succeed in the classroom, including through supporting bilingual education.”
Horne disputed Grijalva’s characterization, arguing that the English-only model is superior to bilingual education. “To put bilingual education in schools is to sacrifice the students to dogma and condemn them to not learn English properly, which negatively will affect their future academic endeavors and their hope for good jobs in the economy,” Horne told the news organizations.
The state Department of Education has previously defended its decision to make it easier to pass the test by saying it first administered the exam to 600 native English speakers to set a baseline for the changes. The department skipped this step in 2020, when it made the last major change to the test, officials noted.
As the news organizations reported, after the state lowered the score needed to pass the fluency test, the statewide pass rate, known as the reclassification rate, jumped to 26% in 2026, from 12% the year before. Of the nearly 113,000 students who took the exam, about 30,000 were classified as proficient and removed from English-language services this school year.
Proposition 203, which Arizona voters approved in 2000, established the state’s English-only policies. Students learning English spend two to four hours a day in separate English instruction until they pass a test showing they’re fluent enough to learn in a mainstream classroom.
Past attempts by the state to reclassify large numbers of children learning English as fluent prompted federal investigations. The government alleged that placing such students in classrooms where they struggled because they lacked knowledge of English violated their civil and educational rights. Arizona agreed to a settlement more than a decade ago to resolve the matter.
Grijalva proposed two other bills to aid English learning and literacy.
Samantha Ramos teaches students during her English-language development class at John B. Wright Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, in August.Cassidy Arazia for ProPublica
One of the measures, the Families Learning and Understanding English Together Act, would authorize $75 million a year from 2027 through 2031 for family literacy programs. Head Start programs, school districts, adult education providers and nonprofits could apply for grants of $150,000 to $1 million a year to teach English and literacy to young children and their caregivers together. To qualify, programs would have to serve areas where English learners are a majority, or growing share, of students at local schools.
The Supporting Young Language Learners’ Access to Bilingual Education Act, would fund dual-language immersion programs for children from low-income families from preschool through fifth grade. Students in those programs would learn in English and a second language and would use the second language for at least half the school day. The bill would authorize $15 million for 2027 and unspecified amounts in the following four years.
Since Democrats do not have a majority in either house of Congress, the bills do not stand much of a chance this year.
DANVILLE, Pennsylvania — Immigration enforcement near hospitals and medical facilities in Pennsylvania is raising concerns that immigrants may delay or avoid healthcare because they fear arrest, according to advocates and medical professionals.
Earlier this month, ICE and local police arrested construction workers near Geisinger Medical Center in Danville after they left work. Officials emphasized that no arrests occurred on hospital property, but witnesses reported seeing unmarked vehicles around the medical complex before the Sept. 2 operation. ICE says it arrested 10 people that day, while advocates and witnesses say the broader operation may have resulted in more than 40 arrests.
The concern extends beyond Pennsylvania. Doctors interviewed by Stateline said increased immigration enforcement has caused some families to skip appointments, delay treatment and avoid hospitals altogether, with some children developing more serious medical problems as a result.
The Trump administration eliminated a longstanding policy in January 2025 that generally restricted immigration enforcement in or near hospitals, schools and houses of worship. ICE says immigration status, not location, determines who is subject to enforcement.
Immigrant advocates argue that even when arrests occur off hospital grounds, visible enforcement nearby can create a chilling effect. Mirna Miranda of CASA said some immigrants now weigh the risk of detention against seeking medical treatment.
The Geisinger operation follows another Pennsylvania case in which ICE arrested 24 construction workers traveling to a worksite at Mount Nittany Medical Center.
K.K. Bautista, left, and her adoptive mother hold their respective children outside a camper at the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park, where homes previously washed away. Bautista moved there because it was the only place she could afford after Helene destroyed her previous home. Jesse Barber for ProPublica and The Assembly
This past weekend marked the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, which claimed more than 250 lives — 108 in North Carolina — and left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days to weeks. In Asheville, the largest city in the western part of the state, the storm left residents without drinking water for 53 days.
Part of what made the storm so devastating to the region when it hit, 400 miles inland from where it made landfall, is that the Appalachian Mountains’ typically porous soils were already saturated by recent rainfall. The rainwater hit bedrock and raced down steep mountain slopes like water on a slide. It overran the banks of normally shallow creeks and rivers, carrying the earth above it. One in 4 of those who died from the storm in North Carolina did so because of mud and landslides.
I’m a reporter with the North Carolina online magazine The Assembly, and my stories have also covered natural disasters in California, Arizona and Texas, where I was a data reporter on ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative team. In my recent story for The Assemblyand ProPublica, I wrote about how a gap in federal flood policy is putting mobile home residents in harm’s way again and again, allowing people in North Carolina to move onto the same lots where homes previously washed away.
Joe Rogers moved into a riverfront mobile home park in Haywood County in 2006, his front door less than 100 feet from the river’s banks. At the time, the flood maps showed that the land the park sat on was at risk but didn’t have his home in the 100-year floodplain, which would have required expensive elevation. The lot was empty, and at $200 a month, the rent was affordable. Rogers reckoned he had at least 40 years until another storm came around.
In 2021, the park was hit by a tropical storm, and the river rose a couple of inches into the home of Rogers and his wife, Sandra. When firefighters knocked on their door in the middle of the night in 2024, the couple figured Helene would play out like the last storm. Instead, the frigid, muddy river water rose from ankle deep to chest high in under an hour. Neighbors helped Joe escape, but before he could get Sandra out, the river lifted the home off its foundation and drove it downstream. Sandra’s body was found five days later, about 15 miles down river.
It wasn’t the first time that floodwaters destroyed homes at that park. In 2004, Hurricane Frances brought torrential rainfall to Western North Carolina. From his home on the park’s hillside, Dave Masters could see his father’s mobile home surrounded by water. Masters forced his then 63-year-old dad to leave, and the two watched as the river pried the home loose and drove it down the street like a car, where it crashed into a telephone pole before getting stuck under a bridge.
When the county sought properties to buy out to reduce the future risk to life and property after the 2004 floods, it bought out a home across the river but not the mobile home park. New residents moved into harm’s way.
Asked why residents are again allowed to live by the river, Haywood County’s current recovery officer told us he “did not know it was even possible” to buy out a mobile home park. Small counties like Haywood often look to the state for direction. North Carolina Emergency Management, which reviews buyout applications, said buying out a park is no different from commercial or residential properties, and put the onus on the property owners to participate in the program and work with the local government. The park’s current owners did not respond to our questions.
Joe Rogers at his new home in Candler, North Carolina. Hurricane Helene destroyed his former home at Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park and killed his wife, Sandra.Jesse Barber for ProPublica and The AssemblyRogers’ dogs, who survived HeleneJesse Barber for ProPublica and The Assembly
Allowing people to continue to live in locations with severe and repeated flooding is one of several weaknesses reporters at ProPublica have identified while investigating deadly floods.
When it comes to updating floodplain maps, government agencies have prioritized coastal areas, as they often have large populations that can experience complex storm surges and sea level rise, said John Dorman, the retired director of North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Program.
Many inland areas are still operating with their original flood maps from the 1970s or ’80s. In rural places that have experienced population growth and development since then, the maps don’t account for the way these places have changed. New homes, for example, take up valuable areas where floodwater is supposed to run, displacing water not unlike what happens when adding an ice cube to a glass of water.
In North Carolina, my reporting shows what can happen when cash-strapped local governments adopt the minimum federal floodplain regulations, which allow campers to reside in floodplains and enable recreational vehicles to park in locations where they would never approve homes at ground level.
At the park where the Rogerses lived, five campers now sit on riverfront lots where mobile homes were anchored into the soil until Helene hit.
Weaknesses in flood policy revealed themselves in the Texas Hill Country, too, when floods claimed more than 130 lives over the July 4 weekend in 2025. The majority of the people who died in the 2025 Central Texas floods were in places identified as flood-prone by the federal government, our analysis showed.
The Hill Country floods highlighted issues about missed evacuation orders and the need for robust emergency action plans. In the months that followed, the Association of State Floodplain Managers developed model ordinances that require annual permits for campgrounds in floodplains, updated emergency plans and restrictions on building floodways.
Chad Berginnis, the director of the ASFM, likened the minimum federal requirements to a standard recipe and said states can do more. He told me how the state of Wisconsin requires anyone who seeks to even move dirt in the floodway to have an engineer certify that it won’t raise the flood level.
If you are a part of the network of disaster response and recovery partners, we need your help to build a comprehensive picture of the real conditions across the country.
Texas has more structures in flood-prone areas than any state besides Florida, according to a nationwide structure analysis by ProPublica and the Tribune. The Texas Legislature has repeatedly failed to pass bills that would allow local leaders to curb potentially unsafe development, the two newsrooms found. Without major changes, that means the same federal, state and local rules that allowed residents to live near the Guadalupe River are allowing many of them to rebuild there after the floods.
As the Tribune’s Emily Foxhall reported, Joan Connor and David Stearns were one couple who were determined to get back in their home after surviving the 2025 floods by clinging to their pergola. With help from volunteers who repaired the storm damage and donated furniture, they were home by Christmas. It took less than a year for their home to fill with water again. They still plan to repair the house.
Likewise, in Western North Carolina’s Haywood and Buncombe counties, residents are going back to the same locations that were destroyed by storms, including the lot where Rogers lost everything during Helene. Rogers wonders how the local and federal government can keep allowing people to live in harm’s way.
“Ain’t that the definition of insanity: keep doing the same thing, hoping for a different result?” Rogers said. “They’re going to — I hope none of them does, you know — lose a spouse and everything that they own.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping whether China would be interested in buying American weapons, according to U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue, an unusual proposal given Washington’s longstanding security competition with Beijing.
“President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” Perdue said Sunday on Fox News Sunday. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point,” according to The Hill.
Perdue did not specify what weapons Trump had in mind, whether Xi expressed interest or whether any formal proposal followed. The White House also has not announced plans to loosen U.S. restrictions on military technology exports to China.
The remarks come amid persistent tensions over Taiwan. The United States is obligated under the Taiwan Relations Act to help Taiwan maintain its defensive capabilities and has approved billions of dollars in weapons sales to Taipei. Beijing considers Taiwan part of China and strongly opposes those sales. Reuters reported ahead of Xi’s Washington visit that Beijing wanted Trump to reduce or halt them.
Trump and Xi concluded a three-day Washington summit Friday that produced limited public agreements beyond trade measures and continued diplomatic engagement. Reuters described the meetings as emphasizing personal diplomacy while leaving major disagreements unresolved.
Trump said afterward that he expects to meet Xi twice more before the end of 2026.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rep. Ro Khanna said Sunday that Democrats should consider impeaching President Donald Trump for a third time if they regain control of the House, arguing that doing so would establish standards for presidential conduct rather than simply punish Trump.
Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, the California Democrat cited several potential grounds, including Trump’s initiation of war with Iran without congressional authorization, firings of federal employees and allegations involving foreign governments and the Trump family. “It’s about setting a standard,” Khanna said.
Khanna also urged the administration to accept Iran’s proposed seven-day ceasefire framework aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump publicly rejected that proposal Saturday, while Iranian officials said Sunday that diplomacy remained the only viable solution.
Democratic leaders have not committed to impeachment if they win the House. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said relevant committees would determine what oversight or accountability measures are warranted.
Republicans argue another impeachment would be politically motivated. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan said Sunday that Democrats would use control of the chamber to investigate Trump, his family and senior administration officials rather than conduct “legitimate oversight.”
Trump was impeached twice during his first presidency and acquitted by the Senate both times.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A new television advertisement featuring President Donald Trump and rhetoric closely resembling his 2024 campaign messaging aired Sunday on Fox News Sunday with an unusual disclosure: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
The 30-second spot shows Trump walking through a hallway while audio plays from a campaign-era speech describing a “final battle” against the “deep state,” globalists, communists, Marxists, fascists and the “fake news media.” Mediaite reported that the wording is nearly identical to a Trump campaign video released in 2024.
The ad is part of a broader government-funded campaign that has appeared on Fox News, Newsmax and other networks. The White House says the spots are public service announcements intended to promote patriotism and educate Americans, not campaign advertisements.
However, federal appropriations law prohibits taxpayer money from being used for “publicity or propaganda,” and the Government Accountability Office has previously said that restriction applies to communications that are purely partisan or designed to aid candidates or parties. No court has ruled that the Trump ads violate that prohibition.
The campaign has drawn criticism from lawmakers and political figures across party lines, particularly because it is airing weeks before the midterm elections. AP reported that government spending on the ads had already reached hundreds of thousands of dollars.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook said Sunday that Democrats retaking the House has looked like a “done deal” for some time and that winning control of the Senate has become “very realistic,” though his comments represent an election analyst’s assessment rather than a guaranteed outcome.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Cook said he expects Democrats could gain roughly 20 House seats and four or five Senate seats. He pointed to competitive Senate races in Michigan, North Carolina, Alaska, Iowa, New Hampshire and Minnesota, with Kansas potentially joining that group.
Cook attributed the changing environment to a familiar midterm pattern: supporters of the president’s party becoming less motivated while opposition voters turn out more heavily and independents move away from the governing party. He described the current environment as a “red undertow” rather than a uniform Democratic wave.
Recent polling provides context for that assessment. A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Sept. 17-20 found President Donald Trump’s approval at 32%, while Democrats held an eight-point advantage over Republicans when respondents were asked which party they would support for Congress.
Decision Desk HQ’s separate forecasting model has also recently treated control of both chambers as competitive, with its Senate model describing the contest as essentially even.
Cook emphasized that individual races remain uneven and that candidate quality, turnout and local issues can still alter results before Election Day.
Sylvester Stallone was a struggling actor who wrote the perfect script for himself – and refused to sell it unless he played the title role. He talks about his new memoir, "The Steps," that recounts his rocky road to fame before and after "Rocky."
The British singer's songs have ranged in subject matter from being single to sexual assault and coping with drugs and alcohol. She talks about the risks and rewards of going it alone as an independent artist, and about her smash hit "Where Is My Husband!"
HOUSTON, Texas — A University of Houston student whose parked car was riddled with police gunfire during a July shootout was initially told the city owed her nothing, even though authorities do not accuse her of any wrongdoing.
Abigail Trujillo, 20, was working at Highland Village on July 6 when Houston police confronted Jamarcus Spates, who was driving a reportedly stolen vehicle. Nine officers opened fire, and dozens of bullets struck Trujillo’s Nissan Altima, totaling it. She still owed money on the vehicle and depended on it for school and work.
When Trujillo sought compensation, city attorneys denied her claim and wrote that they “regret your inconvenience.” The dispute highlights a broader legal fight over whether governments must compensate innocent property owners when police destroy property while pursuing suspects.
A similar Texas case involved Vicki Baker, whose McKinney home was heavily damaged by a SWAT team pursuing a fugitive. In May, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling requiring McKinney to pay Baker nearly $60,000 under the Texas Constitution.
After publicity surrounding Trujillo’s case, Houston Mayor John Whitmire said the city had “totally mishandled” it. He said officials would help replace her car and review other previously denied property-damage claims.
La Salle College High School (PA) defeated Salesianum, 28-10, Friday night. The loss was Salesianum football’s first this season.
The Salesianum captains start to walk to mid-field for the coin toss prior to their game against La Salle.
Swoop and a pair of Eagles cheerleaders stand at midfield. The Eagles celebrated their Friday Night Captains Program which helps promote and celebrate local high school football.
The teams go through the coin toss with Swoop and the Eagles cheerleaders in the background. As a part of the Friday Night Captains program, the Eagles will make a donation to both football programs.
Sallies quarterback Brady Nabb fires a pass on the game’s opening possession.
Salesianum defender, Jett Healy, attempts to knock the pass down on La Salle’s first offensive possesion.
Sallies senior Liam Sherlock finds an opening to run through against the Explorer defense.
The Salesianum student section was packed as they cheered on the Sals.
Sallies senior Tysir Jones races down the right sideline on his 78-yard reception. This play came right after La Salle took the lead on its prior drive.
Jones was brought down at the La Salle two-yard line. Jett Healy scored the game tying touchdown on the next play.
Before she became infamous as one of the youngest American women ever sentenced to die, Christa Gail Pike was a North Carolina teenager who broke into a community center to steal some candy. At 5-foot-3, with thick auburn curls, she’d been in trouble at home and in school but not with the law. A juvenile court judge put Pike on probation, but she ran afoul of the rules. In the fall of 1991, when she was 15, Pike was sent to the Juvenile Evaluation Center in Swannanoa. She arrived just before Thanksgiving.
Nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, just minutes away from Asheville, the center first opened in the 1960s as a “haven for troubled children,” in the words of the press. It was supposed to be an alternative to more severe “training schools,” but by the 1990s was skewed toward punishment. According to former staff, progress was measured in points, which were added or subtracted according to a child’s behavior. Infractions ranged from having “contraband” — including pencils or pens, which were allowable only in sanctioned study areas — to running away.
The system didn’t work for Pike. “She was not following the rules or she was doing something to sabotage herself,” one social worker would later testify at a hearing in Pike’s case. Although her violations weren’t generally serious, they did keep her stuck in place. Most kids stayed at the center for a few months; Pike stayed for well over a year.
It seemed possible that Pike might not actually want to go home. From the time she was a little girl, she’d been hurt and neglected by the adults who were supposed to protect her. Months before arriving in Swannanoa, Pike had been temporarily removed from her home by the state’s social services agency, which found that her mother’s live-in boyfriend was physically and sexually abusing her. Shortly afterward, Pike wrote a letter to her best friend saying she wanted to kill herself. Among a list of reasons, she wrote that she’d been raped by a different man, a neighbor who assaulted her when she was 11 years old.
Nevertheless, Pike stood out among her peers at the juvenile center. She was engaging and intelligent; she earned her GED and became a teacher’s assistant. “Christa was open and willing to grow,” one counselor would later write in a clemency letter on Pike’s behalf. “Though she had psychological struggles and resulting behavioral difficulties, I could see that Christa was a good child who was trying to find her place in the world. I never saw Christa act aggressively or violently. She was trying to figure out how to heal from her traumas.”
“She is so much more than the darkness which has followed her from childhood into adulthood.”
Pike finally left Swannanoa in March 1993. The following year, the counselor got a letter from her in the mail. “She shared that she would be visiting Asheville soon and invited me to meet up with her,” the counselor recalled in the clemency letter. But the visit never happened. In January 1995, Pike was arrested alongside two other teenagers while enrolled at a Jobs Corp program in Knoxville, Tennessee. At 18, she was charged with first-degree murder.
The crime seemed pulled from a horror movie — an act of savagery that would become imprinted in the public psyche. Nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of Pike’s classmates, had been lured into a secluded corner of a city park, then beaten, bludgeoned, and slashed with a boxcutter. Her body was found naked from the waist up. On her chest, her attackers had carved a pentagram.
Pike admitted her guilt within days. In a tape-recorded statement to investigators, she sobbed that she had begun hitting Slemmer and just didn’t stop. “I literally thought I was going crazy cause I’d never seen myself act like that before in my life,” she said. Before long, witnesses came forward with disturbing new details. In the public’s eye, Pike transformed from an 18-year-old who committed a shocking act of violence into a woman driven by the devil himself.
Weeks after her 20th birthday, Pike was convicted and sentenced to die.
Pike had been on death row for nearly 30 years when Tennessee announced her execution date: September 30, 2026. In a lengthy clemency petition submitted earlier this month, Pike’s lawyers urged Gov. Bill Lee to spare her life. They told a story of Pike’s upbringing that her jury never heard, a childhood shaped by untreated mental illness and sexual abuse beginning when she was just two years old. They enclosed dozens of letters from people who have known Pike over the years, including in North Carolina.
“We in North Carolina — myself included — failed Christa.”
One of the letters came from the lawyer who represented Pike in her first juvenile delinquency hearing, not long before she was sent to Swannanoa. Now a retired tribal court judge, he was filled with regret. “In my view, this proceeding was the most pivotal event of Christa’s sad childhood,” he wrote. It set in motion everything that would follow. Rather than treating her like a vulnerable child in need of support, the juvenile system had compounded her trauma through more punishment, with devastating consequences.
“I regret to tell you, Governor, that we in North Carolina — myself included — failed Christa,” he wrote. He urged Lee to make up for his state’s mistakes. “She is so much more than the darkness which has followed her from childhood into adulthood.”
If Lee does not show mercy — and barring any last-minute intervention by the courts — Pike will be executed by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Wednesday at 10 a.m. She would be the 19th woman executed in the country in the modern death penalty era — and the first woman put to death in Tennessee in two centuries.
Pike, who turned 50 this year, has spent her entire adult life at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, nearly all of it in solitary confinement. Although there was one other woman living under a death sentence when Pike first arrived at the prison, her sentence was commuted and she was paroled in 2011.
One of Pike’s co-defendants was released long ago, while the other, her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, remains eligible for parole. Shipp was 17 when he participated in Slemmer’s murder, which prevented prosecutors from seeking the death penalty under state law. In a letter asking Lee to grant clemency, Shipp’s trial lawyer wrote that he was surprised that Pike’s attorneys had not emphasized her boyfriend’s role at her 1996 trial. “When I represented Tadaryl in his 1997 trial,” he wrote, “the defense I presented was to shift as much blame as possible to Christa.”
Like many women condemned to die, Pike became an object of lurid fascination. In 1998, after Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker, interview requests poured in from talk shows, filmmakers, and journalists all over the world, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, which compared the level of interest to that of the late Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Pike, the newspaper said, “has become a death-row celebrity, a child star of the true-crime beat.”
The article described Pike as a “savvy subject,” a kinder version of an accusation that has followed Pike from the start: that she reveled in her notoriety while showing no signs of remorse. For many people, including Slemmer’s mother, who plans to witness Pike’s execution, the image of an unrepentant killer basking in attention has remained fixed in time. So has the claim by the lead detective that Pike was filled with excitement by the murder. He told interviewers in the 2025 podcast series “Unrestorable” that Pike was “giddy” while recounting what she’d done. “This was the greatest thing that ever happened to her,” he said. “She was just happy as a lark.”
Audio of Pike interrogation’s does not match these descriptions — and numerous people who know Pike say that she has expressed remorse for years. One woman, who began visiting her 30 years ago, wrote in a clemency letter that Pike has matured into a compassionate person who cares for those around her. “She has told me repeatedly that she would trade places with Colleen Slemmer so that her mother … could have her daughter back,” she wrote.
Although the Tennessee Department of Correction routinely denies interviews with people under a death sentence, Pike addressed the matter through one of her attorneys for the 2025 podcast. The older she has gotten, she said, the more she has absorbed the magnitude of what she stole from Slemmer and her family. “She had a whole world of her own that I just jerked her out of. And there’s a big empty spot there, where she could be shining right now. And she’s not.”
Pike’s case may stand out for its brutality and sensationalism, but her background shares much in common with other people on death row, especially women, whose lives are frequently marked by sexual violence and trauma. One clinical psychologist describes the amount of abuse and neglect Pike experienced from the time she was a preschooler as “almost impossible to grasp.”
This history should have been key to Pike’s defense. But like many others condemned to die, she was also tried in an era in which attorneys assigned to capital cases were often not up to the task. Pike was represented by a pair of court-appointed lawyers who were inexperienced and overworked. Neither had ever handled a capital case — nor had her trial judge.
Perhaps most telling, her own lead attorney would end up being one of a slew of people who seemed eager to cash in on the case. Post-conviction records show that he asked Pike to sign an agreement giving him the rights to her story. “My thought was, I would write a book on Christa, the human side of Christa,” he later testified at a court hearing. “I thought to do that I would probably need to get some kind of release. It was one of those spur of the moment things. I drew it up, I took it over, she signed it. Nothing ever became of it.”
“Looking back,” he added, “it’s probably something I shouldn’t have done.”
There would be no shortage of people telling Pike’s story. Her crime has been described in countless articles, podcasts, and sensationalistic TV series with names like “Mean Girl Murders.” All of them include a disturbing and singular detail that has come to define the case: Slemmer’s body was found with a piece of her skull missing. It would be discovered in the pocket of a jacket belonging to Pike.
“When the piece of skull got out, that’s kind of the death knell for Christa,” a former Knoxville journalist who now creates true-crime coloring books told the “Unrestorable” podcast. “You’re not coming back from that.”
Christa Pike wipes away tears in a Knoxville, Tenn., courtroom during a 2008 post-conviction hearing challenging her death sentence.Photo: Courtesy of Christa Pike’s legal team
This ghoulish revelation fueled the belief that Pike was driven by satanic beliefs. The murder coincided with a societal fixation now known as the “satanic panic,” in which reports of devil-worshipping cults took hold across the country during the 1980s and ’90s, leading to false accusations and wrongful convictions. Fears were especially pronounced when it came to young people, who appeared to be “dabbling in the trappings of satanism,” as the AP reported in 1988, “whether serious or as a prank.” In most cases, there was nothing to back up the hysteria. But many saw Pike’s case as chilling proof that the crisis was real.
The lead investigator in Pike’s case, Knox County Police Detective Randy York, had attended a training on satanism and cults just before Slemmer was killed. In interviews, he has maintained that the pentagram was the key that unlocked the case; a woman called police to say that her daughter was in the Jobs Corp program and was worried about a satanic cult, which ultimately led York to Pike. But there was a more straightforward link: Slemmer was in the same residential program as her attackers. On the day of the murder, all four teenagers signed out at the same time. Only Slemmer failed to sign back in.
Regardless, it was Shipp, not Pike, who was interested in satanism. The teenager kept a satanic altar in his room. But as his lawyer would later write in his clemency letter for Pike, for all the focus on satanism, “that was never the motivation behind what happened.” By most accounts, Pike targeted Slemmer because she believed that she wanted to steal her boyfriend; Pike has said she did not plan to kill Slemmer, only to fight her. But there was no explaining such a senseless crime. “We were all just really screwed up kids,” Pike said on the “Unrestorable” podcast. “We were all going through things that no one understood.”
Pike’s lawyers have long argued that the media frenzy over the crime made it impossible to get a fair trial. Nearly every prospective juror had heard of the case. News cameras filmed the trial from beginning to end, which cast further scrutiny on Pike’s demeanor. Wearing modest floral dresses day after day, Pike was deemed to be inappropriately cheerful, enjoying the limelight of her case.
In his own letter asking for clemency, Pike’s lead trial attorney, William Talman, said that he, too, was unnerved by his client’s seeming contentment at the crowds in the courtroom. As he remembers it, she told him at one point that she was “happy,” which struck him as bizarre. When he asked her why, he wrote, she responded in a way that has haunted him ever since. “It was the first time in her life that she could remember so many members of her family being there for her.”
It’s possible that Pike would have been sentenced to death no matter what her lawyers did. But her legal team has long argued that Talman and his co-counsel failed their client in key ways. On the eve of the trial, prosecutors offered Pike a plea deal that would have sent her to prison for life. She declined. Pike has said that Talman assured her that a jury would never vote to execute a pretty young girl — an account he has denied. But he conceded in court testimony that he should have done a better job discussing the offer with her.
Case records show that Talman’s most devastating blunder was his mishandling of the sentencing trial — the single most critical part of any death penalty case. Today, capital defense attorneys are trained to prioritize mitigation, delving into a client’s early life to uncover any history of abuse, trauma, and mental illness — factors that can persuade jurors to spare a client’s life. Between Pike’s age at the time of the murder and her harrowing childhood, there was plenty to draw from. A clinical psychologist hired as Pike’s mitigation expert put together binders of information that Talman planned to use. But for reasons long in dispute, Talman decided at the last minute not to call her as a witness.
Christa Pike immediately after her sentence was read in a Knoxville, Tenn., courtroom in 1996.Courtesy of Christa Pike’s legal team
At a post-conviction hearing, Talman cited two reasons for his hasty decision. For one, he had discovered during the trial that the psychologist had previously been in a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor. Although she would testify that it was long over by then, she admitted that she didn’t disclose it as early as she should have.
The other reason, according to Talman, was that the judge ordered him to hand over copies of his expert’s binders to the lead prosecutor, who flagged parts that might bolster their case for the death penalty. “He had about a million stickies, little sticky notes, in the report,” Talman said. He feared that the file would end up doing more harm than good.
In the end, that’s precisely what happened. Talman did not call the witness with the best chance of conveying Pike’s lifelong trauma, while the state pulled the most damaging details from the defense’s own file to use against his client. In his closing statement, the prosecutor described Pike as a “monster that we have to deal with.” It took the jury less than an hour and a half to sentence her to death.
Colleen Slemmer Would have turned 51 this month. Her mother, May Martinez, has often expressed indignation over the attention devoted to Pike. She feels it has eclipsed the memory of her daughter, a caring young woman who helped students with disabilities and loved working on computers with her stepdad. Martinez told the Nashville Banner that she hopes the execution will bring her peace — “and that Colleen can always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was.”
Pike’s advocates emphasize that their calls for clemency should never be mistaken for a lack of compassion for her victim. As they stepped up their appeals to the governor last week, youth counselor Sarah Bailey joined a press conference in Nashville, where she said she knew what it was like to lose a loved one to homicide — someone murdered her own son. She also knew what it was like “to have adults decide who you are while you are still becoming a person.” Bailey was convicted of murder for a crime she committed at 16, a devastating mistake that for years defined her “entire identity.”
Finally, she knew Pike. When she got to prison as a frightened teenager, Pike helped her navigate the world around her. “She sent me stamps, she sent me commissary, and she sent me love,” Bailey said. “That said a lot about who she was, and that says a lot about who she has become.”
Bailey echoed what many have said about Pike in recent years. Some of the most urgent pleas for mercy have come from women whose voices are the least often heard. “I’d like to ask that you look past the fact that I am incarcerated when reading this,” one clemency letter reads. “I am an inmate; however, I am also a woman who understands the importance of seeing people as the human beings that we all are.”
“The Christa you will meet today is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors from the beginning,” the letter goes on. “For those of us who have found themselves housed near Christa she has offered hope when there should have only been despair. In a time of pain and struggle, Christa’s small voice rings out to let you know that you are not alone.”
Update:October 1, 2026 After a lengthy delay and multiple attempts to administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital, the state of Tennessee failed to kill Christa Pike on September 30. “Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital,” her attorneys wrote in a statement at 10:36 p.m. “We have not been informed as to her condition.”
Pike was scheduled to be put to death at 10 a.m. for the murder of Colleen Slemmer in 1995. One hour before the scheduled execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay of execution to consider a challenge brought by her attorneys stemming from the failure of Pike’s trial lawyers to present mitigating evidence at Pike’s 1996 trial. But the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay eight hours later, around 6 p.m.
According to media witnesses, the curtain was opened at 7:27 p.m, after which Pike gave a last statement. “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,” she said. However, Pike remained awake and, after a second dose was administered, became unconscious but could be heard snoring on the gurney. Shortly before 9 p.m., the media witnesses were removed from the room.
The botched execution was the second time in four months that Tennessee has failed to complete a lethal injection. In May, Tony Carruthers was removed from the gurney after executioners were unable to place the IV lines necessary to administer the drugs. On that occasion, Gov. Bill Lee postponed Carruthers’s execution for a year.
Pike’s lawyers had challenged her execution in part by warning that she was at risk of being tortured. “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy,” they wrote.
In a statement, Lee said the state would carry out a “comprehensive” investigation into what happened and postponed the state’s sole remaining execution in 2026, which was set for December. “Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.
Update: September 28, 2026 On September 28, Gov. Bill Lee released a statement rejecting calls to stop Christa Pike’s execution: “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”
In a statement, Pike’s attorneys — Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, and Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender — said they are “heartbroken” by the decision. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women,” they wrote. “We will continue to support Christa through every remaining avenue.”
A picture of the pylon at Delaware Stadium during the Blue Hens first game of the 2026 season against Merrimack. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The Virginia Cavaliers (3-1) defeated the University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens (2-2), 42-3, on September 26, in the Blue Hens’ final non-conference game of the regular season.
Virginia quarterback Beau Pribula received the snap standing at the Delaware 15-yard line during the Cavaliers’ first offensive possession of the game. Pribula faked a hand-off to the running back on his left and quickly shuffled his feet to reset for a throw to wide receiver Da’Shawn Martin breaking right toward the middle of the endzone.
Pribula hit Martin in stride and completed Virginia’s 13-play opening possession with an 11-yard score. The drive ate up over seven minutes of the opening quarter and was a sign of more to come in Virginia’s 42-3 victory over the Blue Hens, Saturday evening.
The Cavaliers scored touchdowns on four of their six offensive possessions throughout a first half fueled by their passing game. Pribula finished the half with 264 yards passing, completed 21 of his 24 pass attempts and threw for all four of Virginia’s touchdowns.
Martin was on the receiving end of Pribula’s first score on a drive in which the former Penn State and Mizzou quarterback threw a perfect eight for eight to start the game. Fourth year receiver Rico Flores Jr. caught Pribula’s second touchdown throw on the first play of the second quarter and the final two were hauled in by third year receiver Kameron Courtney in the final five minutes of the frame.
The Blue Hens lone scoring drive came in the early stages of the second quarter and featured a good balance of production from the running game and passing game. Running back Jo Silver ran the ball five times for 27 yards and Minicucci completed all four of his passes to get the Blue Hens into Cavalier territory for the first time.
The drive stalled at the Virginia 22-yard line due in part to a holding penalty that negated a first down scramble from Minicucci and the Blue Hens turned to kicker Tucker Smack for a 39-yard attempt. Smack kicked it in giving Delaware its first — and only — points of the night.
The scoring drive provided a spark for Delaware which trailed, 14-3, after the score and the defense capitalized by forcing Virginia’s offense into its only three and out on the night. Any hope those two positive drives provided Delaware fans was extinguished on UD’s next offensive possession.
Facing a collapsing pocket on second down, Minicucci scrambled out to his right and turned upfield for an eight yard gain, sliding to the ground to avoid being met by a pair of Cavalier defenders. Minicucci immediately grabbed the back of his right leg in clear discomfort after the slide and struggled to get to the sideline before the training staff stopped him right before the out of bounds line to check on him.
Minicucci left the game and didn’t return. Junior Braden Streeter took over under center for the Blue Hens with a little under six minutes remaining in the second quarter and played up until UD’s final drive of the game. The ACC Network cameras showed Minicucci on crutches with a brace on his right leg along the sidelines in the second half.
Pribula led the Cavaliers on their first drive of the third quarter and scored his fifth total touchdown on a 14-yard quarterback run. Cavalier backup Eli Holstein took over for Pribula following that drive. Pribula finished the game with an 86 percent completion percentage, 279 yards passing, five total touchdowns and the Cavaliers ahead, 35-3.
Virginia finished the game with 556 total yards of offense and held the Blue Hens’ offense under 200 yards of total offense for the first time since 2023. Virginia entered the game ranked amongst the top 40 defenses in the country allowing under 17 points per game to its opponents.
The biggest concern for the Blue Hens will be the status of their starting quarterback as the team prepares for their first conference game of the season against the Liberty Flames. The Flames beat the Blue Hens, 59-30, at home last season and enter this upcoming game on a three game win streak.
Delaware’s game against the Flames will be played at Delaware Stadium on Friday, October 2. The game will start at 7:00 p.m.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he rejected an Iranian proposal that could have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and paused regional fighting within seven days, prolonging uncertainty over one of the world’s most important shipping routes.
Iran raised the initiative during the United Nations General Assembly and transmitted it through Qatari mediators. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran was prepared to begin a seven-day countdown toward reopening the strait if Washington agreed to the framework, with broader negotiations potentially following.
“I reject their proposal,” Trump told reporters at the White House, arguing that Iran wanted the strait reopened because its economy was suffering. The United States has imposed a blockade on Iranian ports in an effort to pressure Tehran to reopen Hormuz.
The conflict has sharply reduced shipping through the strait and disrupted global oil flows. Iran has said any broader settlement would require reduced U.S. military pressure and relief from the blockade, while maintaining that it will not surrender its uranium-enrichment rights.
The Wall Street Journal, cited by Reuters, reported that Trump has privately told aides he considers renewed U.S. bombing after the November midterms likely, though officials cautioned that his position could change.
Iranian officials continue to say negotiations remain possible despite the rejection.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump is dismissing reports that Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds reduced references to Trump on his campaign website, even though archived versions show that several prominent mentions were removed.
Trump called the coverage “Another Fake Story” Saturday and argued that Donalds remains firmly aligned with him. Donalds also said he was “proud to have” Trump’s endorsement.
But the underlying website changes are real. An archived version featured a top banner urging visitors to “chip in to support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds,” along with repeated “Trump-endorsed” branding. The current homepage instead emphasizes the slogan “Fighting to defend the Florida dream,” while Trump’s endorsement remains in a rotating list with other supporters.
The Washington Post reported that at least eight references to Trump’s endorsement disappeared, along with a photo of Donalds and his wife with Trump and a policy section titled “Enact the Trump Agenda.”
Donalds’ campaign says the redesign reflects a greater focus on affordability, insurance costs and government transparency, not a break with Trump. CBS News likewise reported that Donalds denied distancing himself from the president despite the reduced prominence.
Trump’s criticism therefore disputes the interpretation that Donalds is politically separating himself from the president, rather than the documented fact that multiple Trump references were removed.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he “loves women” while rejecting former President Barack Obama’s suggestion that governments might function better if women were put in charge for a period of time.
Obama said earlier this week that he had sometimes imagined placing women in charge of every government for two years to see whether conditions improved, adding that he believed they likely would.
Asked whether he agreed, Trump responded: “I love women, I think they’re great. But what a ridiculous statement that is.”
The exchange comes amid renewed attention to Trump’s repeated verbal attacks on female journalists. Mediaite columnist Ana Marie Cox recently highlighted his past insults toward reporters including Maggie Haberman, Rachel Scott, Nancy Cordes, Mary Bruce and Catherine Lucey. Trump has called Haberman “unattractive,” Scott a “horror show” and Cordes “stupid,” among other remarks.
Earlier this month, Trump also called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “very dumb and unhappy,” and later objected to her presence at the United Nations, telling her CNN “should not be here” after his administration had barred the network from White House access.
Trump’s response to Obama did not address those previous remarks, instead framing the former president’s gender-based leadership argument as overly broad.
Salesianum senior Tysir Jones evades a defender during his 78-yard reception in Salesianum Football’s matchup against La Salle College High School. Photo credit: Dave Reeder.
La Salle College High School defeated Salesianum, 28-10, on September 25, in Salesianum Football’s final game of the season against out-of-state competition.
WILMINGTON, DE — The La Salle College High School Explorers dealt Salesianum its first loss of the 2026 season, defeating the Sals, 28-10, Friday night.
La Salle entered the game ranked as one of the top 30 programs in the state of Pennsylvania, according to MaxPreps, and showed what makes them a formidable opponent.
Following a scoreless first quarter, the Explorers’ scored on their third drive of the game starting at their own 37 yard line. La Salle ran three plays before a pass from junior quarterback Luke Gordon to junior Bryce Hanton brought the Explorers to the Sallies eight yard line with a gain of 45-yards. The Sallesianum defense stopped the La Salle offense on their first three attempts near the goal-line, but on fourth and a yard to go, Gordon completed a pass to receiver Evan Pettine for the one-yard score.
Gordon’s passing touchdown put the Explorers ahead with 7:45 remaining in the first half. The lead held for a total of 34 seconds.
Salesianum’s senior quarterback, Brady Nabb, led the Sallies offense out to the field at their own 20 yard line, following the Explorer scoring drive. Nabb caught the snap in the shotgun formation on the drive’s first play and delivered a five-yard strike to senior wide receiver Tysir Jones coming back toward the ball. Jones caught the pass and quickly turned his attention upfield.
Jones side stepped the first La Salle tackler and used a stiff arm to intercept a second would-be tackler, before settling near the sideline. Jones took the reception 78-yards down the right sideline to the La Salle two yard line. Senior Jett Healy ran in a two-yard touchdown on the next play, tying the score with 7:11 to play in the second quarter.
La Salle scored a touchdown on its following possession via a five-yard run from Hanton and the Sals answered the score with a 28-yard field goal by junior Giuliano Villa before the end of the half. The Explorers led 14-10 at halftime in front of a packed Abessinio stadium crowd that included a fan favorite mascot.
Swoop, the Eagles’ mascot, was in attendance along with members of the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleading team as a part of their Friday Night Captains program, which helps celebrate and promote local high school football programs. Fans entering the stadium were given Eagles towels and Swoop made his way through the stands to take pictures and interact with the crowd before the game. As a part of the celebration, it was announced pregame the Eagles will make a donation to both football programs.
La Salle scored the last two touchdowns of the game in the third and fourth quarter, tallying a second score from Hanton on a 46-yard touchdown run in the third and a ten-yard touchdown catch from Pettine in the fourth.
The Explorers defense only allowed the Sallies offense to cross the mid-field line twice and forced a pair of Sallies turnovers in the second half, holding Salesianum without a score in the frame. The Sallies offense finished the game with over 220 yards of total offense, the majority of which came through the air. Jones finished the game as the Sals’ leading receiver with five catches for 126 yards.
Salesianum will play its first road game of the season next week when they travel to Georgetown, Delaware, for a matchup against Sussex Central High School. The game will start at 7:00 p.m. on October 2.
Sallies defeated Sussex Central, 31-7, last season at home.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Cook Political Report moved 15 House races toward Democrats on Friday, another sign that the battlefield for control of the chamber has shifted significantly in the final weeks before the midterm elections.
Cook’s updated ratings show Democrats favored in 208 races rated Solid, Likely or Lean Democratic, compared with 205 seats in the equivalent Republican categories. Another 22 races are rated Toss Up. Democrats need a net gain of three seats to secure a House majority.
Many of the competitive districts are seats President Donald Trump carried in 2024. Cook’s September Battleground District Project found Democrats leading Republicans 49% to 47% on the generic congressional ballot among 1,052 likely voters across 37 competitive districts. Trump had carried those same districts by about five points collectively in 2024.
Cook attributed much of the movement to dissatisfaction with Trump’s handling of the economy and changing political conditions in Republican-held districts.
Republicans still retain important advantages, including significant campaign resources. An NRCC spokesperson dismissed the ratings changes and argued that Republican candidates have stronger organizing and financial operations in competitive districts.
With more than a month remaining, the ratings reflect Cook’s current assessment of competitiveness rather than election results, and several closely contested districts remain unresolved.
SAN FRANCISCO, California — OpenAI says some of its autonomous AI agents accessed public information on U.S. government websites in ways the company did not expect or intend, adding to concerns about how increasingly capable AI systems behave when given access to the internet.
The company said its review found interactions with public data on two Securities and Exchange Commission websites and the U.S. Census Bureau. OpenAI said there was no access to private accounts, misuse of credentials, system breach or alteration of government data.
The disclosure followed research by independent AI evaluation group Transluce, which identified agents attempting to exploit vulnerabilities on several public-data websites. Researchers linked some of that activity to agent swarms previously confirmed by OpenAI and said the systems sometimes pursued unauthorized methods while performing otherwise routine information-gathering tasks.
Transluce documented attempted compromises involving Data USA, the University of New Mexico’s digital library and an Australian government health website. OpenAI has been reviewing broader cases of agent “misalignment,” where models pursue goals in unexpected or prohibited ways.
The incidents follow an earlier case in which OpenAI said experimental models autonomously breached systems operated by AI platform Hugging Face.
OpenAI said most government-site activity involved ordinary research on publicly accessible information, but acknowledged that some agents violated website policies or behaved unpredictably.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump will campaign next week in Oklahoma and Alabama, two states he won overwhelmingly in 2024, as Republicans prepare for a difficult final stretch before the November midterms.
Trump is scheduled to hold a rally Thursday in Durant, Oklahoma, followed by a Friday event in Mobile, Alabama. He carried Oklahoma by roughly 34 percentage points and Alabama by about 30 points in 2024, while the Senate and gubernatorial contests in both states are considered safely Republican.
The appearances come as the national political environment has grown more challenging for the GOP. The Cook Political Report shifted several Senate races toward Democrats this week, moving Kansas from Likely Republican to Lean Republican and South Carolina from Solid Republican to Likely Republican.
Trump has said he plans to visit dozens of campaign locations during the final month before Election Day, including more competitive states.
His standing has also weakened nationally. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week put Trump’s job approval at 32%, a career low in that survey, with dissatisfaction over living costs and the Iran war contributing to the decline. Republicans still view Trump as an important tool for motivating their base, particularly in a midterm election where turnout can be decisive.
It was late May, the French Open was on and DraftKings was pushing me into the action.
A promotion pinged on my phone. “BET & GET,” it boomed, offering to boost my profits if I threw down on tennis, punctuating the point with a cartoon stack of cash. I was already in the middle of a two-hour betting spree, ripping 64 wagers on the clay courts of Paris from my office chair in New York City.
A $75 bet that Claire Liu would win the fifth point of her first set tiebreak against Maria Sakkari? Wrong. How about an easy $300 on Francisco Comesana to win the first game of the second set against Luciano Darderi? Negativo.
I’ll be the first to admit that my backhand needs some work. But this wasn’t about sports. It was about scratching an itch.
For the past six weeks, I’d been gambling like a man out of control, testing the guardrails of one of America’s most popular — and controversial — products: online sports betting. I’d morphed from a prudent, just-for-fun $40 bettor into a “degen” (sports betting slang for a degenerate gambler) who casually yeets $1,500 on a game. I’d feverishly jumped from sport to sport, following playoff basketball bets with live Czech table tennis. And I’d gone hog wild at the online casino, doubling down at the blackjack table. Most of the time, I’d lost — then chased those losses with more bets. Now, I was in the grips of yet another binge.
And as I approached $4,500 in losses in 24 hours, transferring money from my bank directly into my DraftKings account, the company seemed to clock the problem, sending me an in-app notification.
“Take a loss? Now take a beat,” it read. This felt right after the tear I’d been on. To date I’d blown about $12,500 in total on DraftKings. That’s the equivalent of six months of mortgage payments in as many weeks.
I followed the prompt to the site’s “responsible gaming” center, where I opted to limit myself to just two hours per day on the app and barred myself from depositing more than $100 in a 24-hour period. That pause is an essential part of DraftKings’ seemingly paradoxical business model — to make as much money as possible from the nation’s growing ranks of sports bettors without encouraging gambling addiction. The company says these limits are a cornerstone of that strategy.
Yet 30 minutes later, the company pushed me in the other direction. My phone buzzed with the first of four promotional alerts that day. Betting opportunities, they said, were waiting.
If you’ve bet on sports with FanDuel or DraftKings, you can help ProPublica understand how these apps work. Use our browser extension to download your betting history, then upload the files to us.
This wink-and-a-nod dynamic is now at the center of a fierce public policy debate over online gambling, addiction and consumer protection.
Since 2018, when the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports betting, Americans have put more than $600 billion into play. Sports betting is now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. Add in prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, and more people are betting on sports than ever before.
That explosive growth has come with consequences: About a quarter of active sportsbook account holders surveyed by the Siena Research Institute this year said that they’d lost enough on a bet that they’d have trouble meeting their financial obligations. As a result, regulators and lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts are starting to question whether things have gone too far — and some are now proposing stricter consumer protections.
Amid the mounting scrutiny, major operators like DraftKings have pushed back, arguing that their responsible gaming system provides adequate safeguards to protect their customers from spiraling out of control. “I think as a business, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts,” Lori Kalani, the company’s chief responsible gaming officer, told me. If a customer waves too many red flags, she said, the company will proactively close the account. But when I asked how often this actually happens, DraftKings wouldn’t say.
So I decided to find out for myself: If I bet like a compulsive gambler, would DraftKings stop me — even if it cost the company money?
I opened an account under my own name and linked it to my debit card. ProPublica bankrolled me. When the app asked me what I did for a living, I disclosed that I was a reporter. I assembled a panel of addiction specialists, recovering gambling addicts and professional sports bettors who pointed me to the telltale wagering habits of someone who’s out of control. And then I got to work.
Over the next 10 weeks, I’d mimic those patterns and come to find out just how much DraftKings would encourage my recklessness — and just how little pushback I’d get as I spiraled downward.
I used the NBA playoffs as my launching pad, and, like much of New York, I was all in on the Knicks. After a week of moderate betting, I waved my first red flag during Game 3 of the Knicks vs. Atlanta Hawks first-round series.
I slept fitfully after my night of loss chasing and awoke at dawn to catch a train to Boston, where I attended a symposium on online gambling put on by the Public Health Advocacy Institute at the Northeastern University School of Law.
There, Matthew Gaskell, a British psychologist and expert on gambling addiction, said that the bettors that companies are most interested in are, well, losers like me. Indeed, a modest set of very active losers account for a substantial amount of sportsbooks’ revenue, he said. (A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.) And the companies have created sophisticated technology products designed to squeeze maximum engagement out of them, just as social media companies like Meta did years earlier with users of Facebook and Instagram, added Darragh McGee, a researcher at the University of Bath.
In fact, as The New York Times reported, DraftKings employs machine learning and data scientists to identify losing customers and entice them with promotions to keep them going — even if those are exactly the kinds of customers at risk of becoming addicts. DraftKings told the newspaper its promotions are geared toward users who spend a lot of time on the app and that the company “rejects any implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers.”
To keep users loyal, the major operators offer VIP programs, not unlike what airlines or rental car companies do. As a bettor climbs the tiers, the perks get bigger and better, from free bets and swag to primo seats at games, fancy dinners and even concert tickets. A FanDuel VIP in Pennsylvania received a personalized video message from MLB slugger Bryce Harper.
I wanted to be a VIP. I wanted cool perks.
To help get that status, I’d tapped the skills of Isaac Rose-Berman, a precocious 26-year-old professional sports bettor and policy expert at the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank that focuses on policy issues impacting dudes. He had a hunch that by chasing losses and displaying other signs of problem gambling I’d eventually get an invite. We just didn’t know when it would come — or how much it would cost.
It happened sooner than either of us thought.
At 5:01 p.m. the day after I lost nearly $1,800 on basketball in one night, during the closing remarks of the gambling addiction symposium, an email popped into my inbox. “Welcome to the DraftKings VIP Showcase,” the subject line read. I couldn’t believe it. My night of loss chasing was being rewarded.
The VIP showcase is basically a three-week tryout. Every week I’d get a new promotion as the company sussed me out to make sure that I was worthy of the title. It wanted to know whether I was actually a big spender, aka a whale, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing — a pro bettor, like Rose-Berman, who, armed with math, can beat the house more often than most by exploiting mispriced odds. Bettors like these, known in the business as sharps, calculate savvy wagers that have as much to do with sports knowledge as with probability. The apps do not like losing money to them and so limit how much they can bet.
For long-term losers like me, though, those limits don’t apply. I’m not a sharp. I’m a square.
And when I read the fine print of the VIP loyalty program, I was floored to see the incentive structure laid out so plainly: The more I spent on long-odds wagers, the quicker I’d accumulate the credits I needed to advance from tier to tier — from bronze, to silver, to gold, to diamond, to Onyx — and thus get closer to the cool perks I so desired. The upshot? Full send every time, baby!
Before I could get started though, I encountered my first in-app responsible gaming prompt since I began betting.
Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
In just over a week, I’d gambled away roughly what a minimum-wage worker in New York City earns in a month by chasing my losses and repeatedly tapping my bank account. But the notice wasn’t served to me because of how I’d been betting. It was sent because when New York lawmakers legalized mobile sports betting in 2023, they required the apps to notify users when they hit $2,500 in total deposits.
The law also requires sportsbooks like DraftKings to submit a “problem-gaming plan” to the state regulator but leaves the specifics of it up to the companies. The plan must include, among other things, procedures “for identifying users with suspected or known problem-gaming behavior” and for “providing information to users concerning problem-gaming identification and resources.” But the exact details are unclear because such plans are not publicly available. (A DraftKings spokesperson wouldn’t provide a copy, and my request for it under the state’s open records law with the gaming commission is under review.)
The app’s response to my $2,500 in deposits was tepid. With a click I could either set limits on my betting or avoid doing so altogether. Eager to gamble, I clicked “I Understand” and moved on. That was it, warning resolved. I got on the horn with my panel of experts to map out the next phase of my experiment. It was time to up the ante.
One of my advisers, Joshua Grubbs, who studies gambling disorders at the University of New Mexico, said he’d expect to see someone on my trajectory pick up the frequency of his betting, have longer sessions on the app, jump from sport to sport in search of fast action and start experimenting with more exotic betting products, like parlays and prop bets.
OK, I said. Let’s rip some parlays.
Parlays link multiple events into a single wager, drastically decreasing the likelihood of all parts happening while simultaneously increasing the potential payout. They’re enticing, aspirational bets. And, Grubbs was quick to remind me, they’re known by another name: a sucker’s bet.
DraftKings heavily promotes parlays, offering “profit boosts” that juice their potential payouts.
The companies say these bets make watching a game more fun and exciting. They’re a reason to tune in, and hang on, if you’re not otherwise interested in whatever’s on TV.
Do enough parlays, though, and you become seduced by what’s known as the “near miss” effect — a psychological phenomenon in which your brain basically tricks you into thinking you’ve got skill after almost winning.
Mathematically, however, you’re actually four times more likely to get three out of four legs of a parlay, for example, than all four. Yet every time I got close, I wondered if maybe I just needed to tweak my formula, even as my rational brain recognized that I couldn’t hit a parlay to save my life.
Prop bets play on a different dynamic in your brain. They are wagers on a player’s stats or a specific event within a game that’s divorced from the overall outcome. Among the most controversial forms is the microbet, which offers very fast action — who will win the next point in a tennis match, will the next pitch be a strike. Another one of my consultants, Natasha Schull, an anthropologist at New York University and the author of “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas,” said microbetting is as close as you can get in sports betting to playing slots, widely considered to be one of the most addictive forms of gambling.
So I followed Grubbs’ and Schull’s advice to escalate my risk-taking as I bet from my living room couch.
Betting on the couch was fun enough, but I was itching to feel what it was like to have money riding on a game being played right in front of me. So in early May, when my neighbor and I went to see the Yankees play, I decided to give betting IRL a try.
It’s hard to overstate how heavy-handed the sports betting messaging in Yankee Stadium is. When I went to get a hot dog, there were ads from DraftKings’ chief rival, FanDuel, on the monitors that displayed the menus.
I settled into my seat, cracked a cold one and logged into DraftKings. It was time for more microbets. When Yankees shortstop José Caballero was up in the fifth inning, I bet $50 that he’d either get a hit or take a ball on his third pitch. I was right! Easiest $95 I’d ever made.
So I kept going — with less success.
I lost $50 on the next pitch to Caballero, then I went 0-5 at $20 a pop trying to guess what Baltimore Orioles center fielder Leody Taveras would do from the box during his third plate appearance. I’d managed to squander my payday in just a couple of minutes.
Schull told me that since there’s so little lag time between placing your wager and getting your result, you can quickly get into a flow of submitting and repeating bets — exactly the kind of trance she observed in gambling addicts pulling slot machine levers. The result, obviously, is that it’s very easy to lose a lot very quickly.
I’d soon find out that DraftKings knows this, too, though its take on microbetting was far less full of doomerism.
Three days after the Yankees game, on May 7, following yet even more parlay losses, the company served me a “responsible gaming” pop-up video — the first I’d been served in the app since the New York-mandated one on April 25.
“Took a loss? Now take a beat,” it read, directing me on how to visit the “My Stat Sheet” page on the app, where I could set a budget or impose limits on my ability to spend. I clicked “Maybe Later,” and the interruption was over.
But DraftKings’ apparent concern for my well-being was belied by a promotion the company sent me just hours later: A 20% profit BOOST on bets of up to $250 for an unlimited number of live microbets on baseball plate appearances. This was exactly the kind of bet that had led me to lose so quickly at the ballpark. Now the company was encouraging me to run it back at even bigger dollar amounts for as many times as I wanted until the promotion expired later that day. “Bet, settle, repeat!” read the push notification that popped up on my phone. I could practically hear the crank of a slot machine lever.
On May 7, the app served me the first “responsible gaming” pop-up since the New York-mandated one on April 25.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublicaJust hours later, DraftKings sent me a promotion urging me to place microbets on baseball.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
When I described this bet-pause-promote progression to Kalani, DraftKings’ responsible gaming chief, she told me she’d “take that back” to her team for review but added, “I just don’t think we should be drawing broad conclusions from, you know, your single account, what you did.”
A few days later, exactly two weeks after my first big night of loss chasing during the Knicks game, I was formally accepted into the VIP program and assigned my very own, personal concierge. It had taken only three weeks and $5,800 in deposits on the app. My rep said he’d be “keeping an eye out for opportunities and perks tailored specifically” to my account, plus “reminders about Responsible Gaming.”
I could text him directly. I could reach out for special treatment. Rose-Berman explained to me that this meant I could ask for “bonus bets,” free one-time bets using house money, or, more commonly, “deposit matches,” extra house money called DK Dollars, that fattened up my account when I made a transfer from my bank. He said that sportsbooks are happy to provide these freebies to losers like me because they’ve assessed, rightly, that we’re likely to end up gambling it right back — and that the special treatment will keep us loyal. I’d be earning crowns that I could convert to DK Dollars as I climbed the tiers of the loyalty program, which I could use to bet more or buy merch. I couldn’t help but hope that I’d also get the really cool stuff. A personalized video from a major leaguer? Tickets to a game? Swag?
My rapid ascent to VIP at DraftKings made me wonder how its major competitor, FanDuel, would handle a problem gambler like me. So I repeated the behavior there, placing the same kinds of bets at the same odds over the course of a week on their app.
One night I blew $529 on playoff basketball bets and then chased my losses with a $750 wager on professional hockey, backing the Minnesota Wild in a high-scoring matchup against the Colorado Avalanche. When the Avs won and my money was gone, I found the only remaining live action I could: a cricket match between Indonesia and Malaysia.
Like most Americans, I have no idea what cricket is. But whatever. It was near midnight and this was work, so I deposited $500 and tried to put it all on Malaysia. That bet would’ve netted me $11,000 had Malaysia won, but FanDuel wouldn’t accept it and required me to lower my wager amount. When I later asked the company about this, FanDuel wouldn’t say whether it did so because it didn’t want to lose the money or out of a commitment to responsible gaming. In any event, I put $200 on Malaysia instead and, of course, lost.
The app also put some speed bumps in my way over the course of that night, prompting me with “Reality Check” reminders six times that showed me the amount of time I’d been on the app and the amount I’d wagered thus far.
One of six FanDuel “Reality Checks” I encountered while betting on the app on May 3.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
And unlike on DraftKings, my weeklong betting behavior on FanDuel didn’t result in a VIP invite. When I reached out to FanDuel for comment, the company touted its responsible gaming tools. A company spokesperson added in a statement that FanDuel’s program is “designed to identify potential risk early and empower customers with real-time information about their play.” For some customers, the statement said, “trained specialists” will intervene “or apply protective measures, including limits or exclusion,” though the company didn’t say how often that happens and what it takes, exactly, to trigger those measures. The New York Times reported that FanDuel is one of several operators that have signed up with third-party firms that help gauge customers’ risk for problem gambling to curb it. DraftKings is not among them but said it has its own tools.
Over on DraftKings, things were heating up. A month into my experiment I’d already lost $4,671 — enough scratch to buy a used car (with a lot of miles) — and my bet size was growing, too. I was getting used to risking large sums. I looked back on how nervous I’d been to place $200 bets when I first started and couldn’t believe that I’d been so naive.
I’d been wagering so much, in fact, that the quick-tap deposit buttons in the app had increased to $500, $750 and $950, making it even easier to mindlessly transfer large sums from my bank into my DraftKings account.
The default dollar figures exemplify “dark patterns” aimed at making betting large amounts as frictionless as possible.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica. Debit card number redacted by ProPublica.
Computer scientists have a term for this choice of user design: They call it a “dark pattern.” Critics say this is a key way that apps essentially trick you into subscribing to or purchasing things you don’t want or need with just one click.
And boy, was I getting fed opportunities to click. I’d selected the open settings for notifications on DraftKings, and as a result I was just getting pummeled with push alerts to my phone. Sometimes there’d be six in a day, offering BOOSTS. In the app, they’ve even got their own tagline: “BOOSTS DON’T STOP.”
I was hoping for tickets to a game or swag or anything super cool, but so far my VIP rep had hooked me up with only a 12-month ESPN subscription. That and lots of promotions to bet, at all hours. On Saturday, May 16, as I was getting the kids home from my son’s baseball game, DraftKings pushed me an “Exclusive Offer” to double my winnings on any bet up to $250. I pieced together a parlay on the subway, placing the bet as my service cut in and out.
The Yankees were playing the Mets that night, and Rose-Berman had encouraged me to shoot the moon — to climb the tiers of VIP status — so I strung together a five-leg parlay for the full eligible amount. My payout, highlighted in purple at the bottom of my slip, would be $6,250 if it hit.
The Yankees lost, and I hit only one leg of my parlay. As I nursed my wounds I began to wonder: Would I have spent that $250 but for the promotion?
I promise you I wasn’t trying to lose. Sure, I was firing unlikely bets, but I wanted them to win. If you could lose intentionally then you could win intentionally, and gambling wouldn’t exist. Over time most gamblers lose, and like them my performance was trending southward consistently — and fast.
But then, heading into Memorial Day weekend, I got on a hot streak. In statistics, this is called variance, but colloquially we refer to it as luck. Over five days, I notched real wins betting serious cash. After winning $3,869 on parlays from a Yankees game and the thrilling double overtime Spurs win in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, I almost forgot that, net, I was still down $8,836. And you know what? I felt like Superman.
To my betting brain, I was flying high. I was hot. I contacted one of my advisers, Rob Minnick, himself a recovering gambling addict who hosts a YouTube channel about problem gambling, and asked what he did after big wins.
He told me to withdraw the deposit I’d made immediately before my hot streak and then bet the winnings left in my DraftKings account with gusto because, hey, it’s just house money.
“I always say on my channel, like all wins are just future losses because when you don’t stop, it eventually gets given back,” he said.
Today, nearly a quarter of all Americans, and half of men ages 18 to 49, say they have an active sportsbook account, according to the Siena Research Institute. And with the advent of prediction markets, millions more are believed to be betting on sports.
But companies like DraftKings and FanDuel don’t just offer sports action: You can also gamble on casino games like blackjack and roulette in the handful of states where that’s legal. The companies call it iGaming, and they want it to be legal everywhere that sports betting is.
“I do think it’s a when, not if, that a lot of these states are going to legalize iGaming,” DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said at a June investor conference. “Customers want it. The tax revenue potential is real. And so we’re seeing a lot of momentum develop in different states.”
New York doesn’t permit that kind of gambling, but New Jersey is one of the roughly half dozen states that does. Since I was headed down the shore for Memorial Day weekend and my DraftKings account was flush from playoff basketball betting, it proved to be the perfect opportunity to try out iGaming.
I logged into my account from the beach on May 22 and was hit with a reminder of the app’s responsible gaming suite of tools, including the option to set a budget. I bypassed the prompt with the swipe of a finger, and there, on the main page, was a shortcut straight to the card table.
New Jersey allows iGaming, so I could access the casino right from DraftKings.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
I explored the expansive casino offerings: I played roulette and tried out blackjack. The cards were dealt on a table that looked straight out of Vegas but for your phone. I didn’t have to think about how much to wager because DraftKings had already done that for me: With the click of a button I could bet as much as $1,000 per hand. And I was struck by how DraftKings cross-promoted iGaming to the sports bettor.
That included “baseball blackjack” and “basketball blackjack” — a regular deck of cards but instead of a felt card table background, there was a baseball diamond or basketball court.
I didn’t think much of that until after I bet on the Knicks and Cavs in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals the next day. At the bottom of the receipt of my bet slip, I noticed for the first time a “Suggested For You” section. Mine advertised baseball blackjack and basketball blackjack. The app was drawing me back to the table.
In states where it can offer iGaming, DraftKings has casino games like baseball blackjack.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublicaThe app suggests sports-themed iGaming like football, baseball and basketball blackjack.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
Not that I needed that hard of a nudge to start playing cards again.
Rose-Berman and I had discussed a strategy for the weekend: To escalate my compulsive betting late into the night, I transitioned from my usual sports fare to even faster, more exotic sports action (read: Czech table tennis) and then, ultimately, to the casino, following the path DraftKings was all but paving for me.
As I devolved in Jersey, Draft Kings promoted me to silver-tier status.
I’d played about 500 rounds of blackjack in a couple of days — accounting for just over half of my total betting activity during 10 weeks on DraftKings. By the end of the holiday weekend, I’d blown close to $3,000 on casino gambling. Before I left the Garden State, I asked my VIP rep whether there was any way to get just the casino stuff off my phone.
Days later he responded, informing me that, no, unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. But he did ask me whether I needed “help with setting in app limits.” I declined the offer.
DraftKings’ Kalani told me I wasn’t the first user to voice this complaint and said the company was working on allowing customers who’d rather just bet on sports to toggle off the casino on their phone.
I came away from my betting mania with an overarching takeaway: that the “responsible gaming” prompts that were served to me were no match for the product design pushing me to do more gambling.
While I was fighting off sleep to play cards, DraftKings occasionally threw me some responsible gaming speed bumps. Just before midnight, for example, a “time reminder” popped up on the blackjack table, telling me I’d been on the app for three hours and 45 minutes.
The pop-ups were barely disruptive: They covered a small part of the screen and could be swept away in a second. The design of the blackjack game, by contrast, facilitated betting big and chasing losses. That’s because DraftKings has made doubling your bet one of the options you’re served in between hands — literally enabling doubling down in a millisecond with the push of a thumb.
A time reminder from DraftKings.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublicaThe “x2” button is another “dark pattern.”Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
Minnick, who, in addition to hosting a YouTube channel on problem gambling, has co-founded a nonprofit industry watchdog that Rose-Berman advises, told me this dynamic pretty much summed up how he has come to understand the industry’s “responsible gaming” approach.
“It’s like an entire system that’s just built to appear to be doing something good while giving them basically like a free pass to do everything bad by saying, ‘Hey, we told you, you know, you have a responsibility, it’s your fault,’” Minnick said.
In a statement, DraftKings disputed that characterization, saying that all 5,000-plus of its employees are trained on responsible gaming every year and that it’s “not a side initiative. It is embedded across our business and essential to DraftKings’ long-term sustainability.”
But either way, Minnick and others said the framework for protecting consumers shouldn’t be entrusted to a publicly traded company that’s driven to grow revenue. “It’s unfair for us to expect or require a private business to do something that goes against its own mission of generating profit, right?” Minnick said. “Well, if you choose the industry standard, it’s going to be the least effective means.”
By late May, according to my expert panel, I was enthusiastically waving all the red flags of a compulsive gambler. Loss chasing? Check. Regular depositing? Yup. Exotic betting products? Lots of ’em. Long hours on the app and bets of increasing size and frequency? Yes and yes.
Yet the only pushback I got from DraftKings came in the form of responsible gaming prompts that required me to opt in to the app’s tools. The company told me it sent a total of 32 such notices over my 10 weeks of gambling, including emails that every DraftKings customer gets. By my count, I got in-app notifications about my betting on 14 of the 71 days I gambled.
Kalani, who served as DraftKings’ outside lawyer before becoming its responsible gaming chief, says her 51-person team manually reviews user accounts suspected of problem gambling. But I’d never heard from a single one, and I wondered if it was because I wasn’t compulsive enough.
So to erase any conceivable doubts about my status as a problem gambler, I went full “degen,” as sports bettors say when they’re on a particularly wild tear.
This is the moment that I bet feverishly on the French Open. I was fueled with $1,100 I’d won from my second bet ever, on April 16, a $200 wager on the Knicks to win the Eastern Conference finals. Now, six weeks later, I was compulsively betting on tennis, a sport I’d never bet on before. Once I blew my stack, I went straight to the responsible gaming center to set limits on how much I could deposit and how many hours I could be on the app.
The company says it doesn’t want there to be a stigma attached to using responsible gaming tools, but instead wants to encourage its users to budget, impose limits and avoid going off the deep end. DraftKings says millions of customers have visited its responsible gaming center, but the little data available publicly suggests only a small percentage opt into these tools.
As of April, just over 8% of active DraftKings users in Massachusetts were using them, a company official told state regulators this summer. This number was trending up, which was a good thing, the official said.
But when I used the tools, it didn’t take long to see their limitations. Just a half an hour after opting in, I received the first of four push alerts.
When I asked Kalani if the push notifications undermined my efforts to control myself, she dismissed the issue.
“People use our tools all the time, and they also appreciate being offered the same things other customers are also offered,” she said. “I think they are two very different things.” Besides, she said, those kinds of marketing materials aren’t sent to customers who opt into more severe restrictions, like a “cool-off” period.
I knew she was right about that from firsthand experience because I’d opted into a three-day cool-off after blowing another couple of grand on tennis to really communicate to DraftKings that I was struggling.
When you’re cooling off, you literally can’t log in. I’d picked a torturous time to enroll — the NBA Finals were underway as I was headed to a reunion trip with the college bros. I couldn’t have scripted a more stereotypical scenario for betting. The Knicks were playing the Spurs in Game 1, but I couldn’t get in on the action!
When I emerged from betting purgatory, it did seem like DraftKings had taken its foot off the gas. I wasn’t getting push alerts. Some of the bonus perks the app regularly fed me weren’t available. Even the dark patterns deposit buttons had returned to the default amounts of $10, $20 and $50.
So on June 8, ahead of Game 3 in the Knicks-Spurs series, I texted my VIP host to see what the deal was — and to see how firm the guardrails were. I asked whether I could get some extra DK Dollars in exchange for making a big deposit. I wondered if, given the circumstances, he’d invoke responsible gaming. He responded a day later and initially demurred.
But on the advice of a recovering gambling addict I’d been speaking to, I tried another tactic: asking for a bonus bet — just to remind my rep that I was eager for action.
Not one week after coming off my three-day cool-off, my VIP rep juiced my biggest deposit to date with an extra $1,250 in free DK Dollars.
Kalani told me she didn’t see a problem with this, either. It had been me, after all, and not my host, who first made contact following the cool-off. “At that point, again, you’re a VIP customer, and you’re asking for something that we would give to any customer,” she said.
Overall, “the system worked the way it was supposed to” in my case, Kalani said. The range of behaviors and indicators that DraftKings scans for that trigger closing or manually reviewing an account didn’t ping for me, she said.
While I often played late into the night, I wasn’t playing in the wee-est hours, between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., she said.
I found this response revealing, though perhaps not in the way she’d intended it to be. I’d deposited $21,600 into my account in less than eight weeks, exhibiting just about every sign of compulsive gambling there is, according to my expert consultants. By DraftKings’ metrics, I didn’t even register for a manual review. Kalani had told me that the company was motivated to retain customers who were betting “within their means and can sustain their own entertainment.”
So I asked Kalani straight up: Does DraftKings ever cut somebody off purely based on their betting history and not because they’ve disclosed that they’ve got a problem? “Yes, we do that all the time,” she told me. She repeated the same answer when I asked her how often. I pressed again, and a spokesperson interjected, telling me he could take the question as a follow-up. I checked in later, but the company told me that “we do not share the specific number of closures.”
Sportsbooks know how to identify and restrict gamblers’ behavior. In fact, they already do so when it comes to sharp bettors like Rose-Berman. Gaming regulators in Massachusetts who crunched the numbers on this last September found that, on average, just 0.64% of gamblers in the commonwealth were limited as of December 2024 and that, within that group, winning bettors were more likely to have their bet maximums lowered than losers.
Sportsbooks could do the same to losers who are digging deeper and deeper holes. In fact, the Times reported, data scientists at DraftKings had developed a tool to identify customers who were headed in this direction, but the company didn’t adopt it. Kalani told the Times that DraftKings’ existing system for identifying problem gamblers was a “better methodology.”
As it stands, the current system relies on users to opt into setting responsible gaming tools like budgets or time limits. That model restricts the tools’ utility to those who have the wherewithal to police themselves, said Brianne Doura-Schawohl, a gambling reform advocate who lobbies statehouses to impose stronger consumer and public health protections on behalf of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling.
To stem the flow of casual money losing and potential addiction, advocates say, the design should be the exact opposite, requiring users to opt out of setting limits, especially since research shows that gambling can impair decision-making.
The argument about responsible gaming tools, while legitimate, misses an even larger public policy question, Doura-Schawohl added. States that have legalized sports betting derive billions of dollars in revenue from it — even as research shows that gambling disorder diagnoses are skyrocketing in those places. That makes it harder for lawmakers to impose stiffer regulations on specific offerings such as VIP programs or prop bets, like microbets, that are huge sources of revenue for companies and thus state coffers, she said. Other countries have already taken aggressive steps to curb some of the industry’s more problematic products, from marketing practices to advertisements. But in the U.S., the industry has actively opposed proposed reforms in Washington as well as statehouses across the country, and it even seeded a political action committee with $41 million to influence elections this year.
“We want regulations like deposit limits, the reconsideration of microbets. Let’s talk about the inundation of advertising that we’re all sick of,” Doura-Schawohl said. “How do the products themselves impact harm? I think VIP is a big problem with that.”
Midway through June, the unimaginable happened: The Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in more than half a century.
It’s hard to add anything of substance to the canon of what’s already been written about the historic turn. But what I can say is that from a betting perspective, this was very good for me. My first bet, for $100, was on the Knicks to take home the chip. And ahead of Game 5, I had laid down my biggest bet ever: $10,000 on the Knicks — five times my biggest bet to date. As the city erupted in celebration, my account was as flush as ever, with $25,350. I’d erased all of my previous losses and netted a couple grand in profit.
And as it turns out, I was far from alone.
In fact, so many New York fans went big that the unlikely win resulted in sportsbook operators reporting a $48.5 million loss for the week ending after the Knicks secured the championship, the first time that’s happened since state lawmakers legalized online sports betting.
This confusing series of events presented a wrinkle in my experiment: What does the problem gambler who has been a consistent loser do when, by the grace of God, he comes out ahead?
Minnick, Grubbs and Rose-Berman all had the same answer: He keeps on going. “Congrats on becoming a huge world cup fan,” Minnick texted me.
It was good timing. The 48-team tournament was a major betting event, with billions wagered on the regulated apps alone. DraftKings was eager to get me into the action.
For the first time in the 12 days since my cool-off, with my account newly fat with house money, the company turned back on the push notifications notifying me of BOOSTS and betting opportunities. Between 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. on June 16, for example, I got five alerts pushing me to bet. “Defending champs Argentina start their quest for back-to-back glory,” read one. “Can they score 3+ goals vs Algeria (+180)?…” So I threw myself into World Cup betting with enthusiasm. And guess what? I was winning. A lot.
I was up $16,000 on top of my initial investment — astronomical heights. I frankly started to wonder: What if I was really good at this? What if I kept on winning?
My experts knew better. Winning, and winning big, can actually be dangerous for a problem gambler because it instills in that person a false confidence, a validation of their betting behavior. What I experienced was also a representative snapshot of how it really plays out on a problem gambler’s account.
“Most people’s gambling stories aren’t straight down,” Rose-Berman told me. “The whole point is that so much of the asymmetric downside is caused by the initial upside.”
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I had to keep going. I was putting more money than ever into play, placing between $3,000 and $7,000 a day on games, going for lucrative, unlikely parlays.
Think about that. That’s well above monthly rent for most people.
But I was hit in the app with responsible gaming prompts on only one of the 10 days that I spent so lavishly on the World Cup, receiving time reminder pop-ups notifying me of how long I’d been on the app, and how much I’d wagered, on June 17.
In fact, DraftKings was egging me on. Because of my VIP status, I’d been able to bet up to $250 to qualify for a profit BOOST. But as I kept spending more and more, DraftKings lifted the qualifying bet amount from $250 to $500 and even $1,000.
I’d recently hit the gold tier of VIP, but I still hadn’t gotten any cool perks as a result of my status. So I texted my host to see if I could get tickets to a World Cup match in New Jersey. No such luck, he said.
That should have been an omen. My fortune was turning.
In all, I’d lost $10,702 and decided enough was enough. I’d eventually withdraw the remainder and return it to ProPublica.
But before closing out my experiment, I wanted to see just how far DraftKings would let me go. So I asked my VIP rep if I could get a match on a (hypothetical!) $25,000 deposit.
If I deposited more, my rep said, he could “look into the account and see what is available to add in.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is urging U.S. service members and their families to register and vote in the 2026 midterm elections, saying hundreds of thousands of troops failed to register two years ago. The Hill reported the appeal Friday.
Hegseth directed troops to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which helps military personnel and eligible family members register, request absentee ballots and vote while stationed away from home. He also told commanders their role was not to influence choices but to encourage participation: “You’re not telling them who to vote for. You’re just telling them to vote.”
According to FVAP data cited by The Hill, about 67% of active-duty service members were registered for the 2024 election, down three percentage points from 2020. Roughly 71% of the 1.3 million active-duty force qualified for absentee-voting protections because they were stationed away from their voting residence.
The Pentagon’s 2026 voting plan already directs voting-assistance officers to publicize elections, help troops complete registration forms and conduct voter-outreach campaigns.
Hegseth has also appeared at Republican campaign events this year, including stops supporting candidates in Kentucky and Iowa. The voting message itself, however, did not endorse a party or candidate.
JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri — The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked Missouri from using a Republican-drawn congressional map for the November midterms, marking the third time the justices have intervened against the Trump-backed redistricting plan.
In an unsigned order Friday, the court suspended lower-court rulings requiring use of the 2025 map, saying changing districts after absentee voting had begun would “usher in electoral chaos.” No justice publicly dissented. Missouri will instead use the congressional map adopted in 2022.
President Donald Trump had urged Republican-led states to redraw congressional boundaries mid-decade to improve the party’s position in the House. Missouri lawmakers responded with a map that dismantled Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-based district and could have given Republicans seven of the state’s eight seats.
The Missouri Supreme Court previously ruled that the new map could not take effect until voters considered a referendum backed by more than 300,000 petition signatures. A federal appeals court nevertheless ordered the map restored Monday, prompting another emergency appeal.
Timing proved critical. Absentee ballots using the 2022 districts were already being distributed, while more than 1 million Missouri voters would have been shifted into different districts under the new lines.
The ruling does not end the underlying litigation, but it determines which districts Missouri will use in the November election.
In the Texas Senate race, comments Republican Ken Paxton made in 2022 about the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, are circulating on social media, thanks to posts by his opponent, Democrat James Talarico, and the Democratic Party. But their posts use just a snippet of Paxton’s remarks, depriving voters of the full context.
Talarico’s campaign posted on X on Aug. 2: “Ken Paxton said the Uvalde shooting was part of a ‘plan’ by ‘God.’ 21 elementary school children and teachers were murdered in the shooting.” The campaign similarly cited those words in a post in early September. On Sept. 24, the Democratic National Committee and Texas Democrats posted on Instagram what it called “leaked audio,” offering a 6-second clip of remarks Paxton publicly made on a radio program in 2022, and which had already circulated back then. Others are sharing similar posts on social media.
The Democrats’ post highlights Paxton saying: “Look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short, no matter what it is.” Paxton did say that, but there was more to his remarks. He faced criticism even for his fuller comments at the time, so voters likely would have different reactions to the interview. But voters can’t properly evaluate what Paxton said without seeing or hearing his full remarks.
Paxton, who has been the Texas attorney general since 2015, was interviewed by radio host and pastor Trey Graham in the days after the May 24, 2022, mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children, whose ages ranged from 9 to 11 years old, and two teachers.
In the interview, which aired May 29, Paxton said the shooting and shooter were “evil.” He was invited by Graham “to speak a word of comfort … to the families and those who have lost tragically children in this situation. As a follower of Jesus, as an elected official, what might you be able to say that might give a little comfort?” (Starting at the 9-minute mark.)
Here’s Paxton’s full response:
Paxton, May 29, 2022, interview: Look, I think it’s difficult to give comfort. If I lost one of my children, I’d be pretty devastated, especially in a way that is so senseless and you know seemingly has no purpose. I think I would, I would just have to, if I had the opportunity to talk to people, I’d have to say, look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short, no matter what it is, and certainly we’re not going to make sense of, you know, a young child being shot and killed way before their life expectancy. And so, even though we can’t make sense of it, I would just have to encourage them to hold on to their faith and to hold on to their belief that there really is purpose in what God does. And we may not know it now, but someday we will.
The online news site Salon wrote about Paxton’s comments on June 14, 2022. He faced criticism, including from the father of one of the students killed in the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. The Houston Chronicle editorial board wrote that Paxton had “demurred on offering words of comfort for Uvalde victims’ families, opting for cold resignation.”
Wooden crosses at a memorial on June 3, 2022, dedicated to the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
The headline on a June 2022 Washington Post opinion piece called Paxton’s comments a “shameful … cop-out.” Columnist Karen Tumulty wrote: “It was all in God’s plan. That’s a suggestion we often hear from pious, well-meaning people when other words fail in the face of an unspeakable, inexplicable tragedy. The idea is that some day we will all understand that larger purpose of our suffering. It is meant to be a balm.”
She continued: “But those words sound more like a shrug when an elected leader — and in this case, one who is his state’s top law enforcement officer — offers that as an explanation for a horror that was preventable and exacerbated by human error.”
Paxton opposed tighter restrictions on guns in the wake of the tragedy. He told Graham in the radio interview: “There are murder laws, and this guy didn’t follow that murder law. And so, if you had a gun law that said he didn’t have a gun, I don’t think that that would have been very effective for him. … Don’t suggest that somehow having more gun laws would have stopped this guy from shooting because that’s not the answer.”
Paxton said that schools could “hire policemen at every school” and also “train other people” to respond before law enforcement can arrive. “And had there been somebody in the classroom with a gun, we could have, we could potentially save every life,” he said.
When we asked the Talarico campaign about its X posts, JT Ennis, the campaign press secretary, pointed us to 2022 articles critical of Paxton’s remarks, most of which we described above, and the 6-second snippet of Paxton’s comments, as posted by Shannon Watts, founder of a group advocating stricter gun laws to prevent gun violence. The campaign didn’t respond to our question about whether some voters would have a different view of Paxton’s remarks with additional context.
We also asked the Paxton campaign about the Democrats’ posts and whether Paxton had a response to the 2022 criticism of his comments. We haven’t received a reply.
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Southern Delaware event moves because of incoming storm; Wilmington’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s remains scheduled for Oct. 31
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — The Southern Delaware Walk to End Alzheimer’s has been postponed to Saturday, Nov. 14, because of the incoming storm, organizers announced Friday.
The walk had been scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 26.
The Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter made the decision to move the event as potentially disruptive weather approaches the region.
The Southern Delaware event is one of two Walk to End Alzheimer’s events planned in Delaware this fall. The Wilmington walk remains scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 31.
The annual walks bring together people living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias, caregivers, families, friends and supporters while raising money for Alzheimer’s research and the association’s care and support programs.
Participants can walk individually or as part of a team and raise money in support of the Alzheimer’s Association’s mission.
A signature part of the event is the Promise Garden ceremony. Participants carry different-colored flowers representing their personal connection to Alzheimer’s and dementia, including those living with the disease, caregivers and people walking in memory of someone they have lost.
The Delaware walks are part of the nationwide Walk to End Alzheimer’s program, which the Alzheimer’s Association describes as the world’s largest fundraiser for Alzheimer’s care, support and research.
The organization provides education and support for Delaware families dealing with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Its 24/7 Helpline also connects families and caregivers with information, local resources and support.
The postponement gives Southern Delaware participants several additional weeks to register, organize teams and raise money before gathering Nov. 14.
The Wilmington event is not affected by the Southern Delaware postponement and remains scheduled for Oct. 31.
To Go Box
Southern Delaware Walk to End Alzheimer’s
When: Saturday, Nov. 14
Original date: Saturday, Sept. 26
Status: Postponed because of the incoming storm
Wilmington Walk to End Alzheimer’s
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Participate: Individuals can register to walk, create or join a team, volunteer or make a donation through the Alzheimer’s Association.
Learn more: Visit the Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter online or call its 24/7 Helpline at 800-272-3900.
COLUMBIA, Missouri — The University of Missouri has barred a man from campus and referred an incident involving comments endorsing political violence to university police, Columbia police and the FBI after a confrontation at a Turning Point USA event.
Video from Thursday’s “Pick Up the Mic” event shows the individual wearing a shirt styled after one worn by Charlie Kirk when Kirk was fatally shot in Utah in September 2025, with what appeared to be fake blood added. During an exchange, a TPUSA speaker asked whether the man supported people being killed over freedom of speech. “Yeah, absolutely,” he responded.
Turning Point USA’s Missouri chapter initially described the individual as a student, but the university later clarified that he is not enrolled at Mizzou. Officials said he was formally trespassed from campus and that the incident had been referred for further investigation.
Columbia police confirmed they were notified following the event and were coordinating with University of Missouri police. The FBI’s Kansas City office also confirmed it was aware of the incident, according to the Washington Examiner.
No arrest or criminal charge had been announced as of Friday. Authorities have not publicly said whether investigators consider the comments a prosecutable threat rather than protected speech.
From tacos and live music to gardens, history and a fall festival, here are outings for Sept. 26-27, with a website for every stop.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Whether you are planning a family afternoon, a date night or a drive through the Brandywine Valley, there is plenty to do this weekend. With a weather forecast that looks like rain, here are some options both inside and out! Check the weather
Newark Community Day — Newark. Music, food, crafts and children’s activities fill the University of Delaware Green from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. A good choice for families and grandparents. Website: newarkde.gov. newarkde.gov
Rum & Red Roses: A Pogues Tribute — Wilmington. John Byrne and fellow musicians celebrate The Pogues at The Crown at The Queen at 8 p.m. Saturday. Doors open at 7 p.m. Website: thequeenwilmington.com. thequeenwilmington.com
“Fiddler on the Roof” — Arden. Pair a musical with Candlelight Theatre’s dinner theater experience. Check the performance schedule and ticket availability before going. Website: candlelighttheatredelaware.org. candlelighttheatredelaware.org
Delaware Art Museum — Wilmington. Explore the galleries and sculpture garden, then consider lunch nearby. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Website: delart.org. delart.org
Delaware Taco Festival — Wilmington Riverfront. Tacos, entertainment and children’s activities take over Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park on Saturday and Sunday. General admission runs from 1 to 7 p.m. each day. Website: tacofestival.com. www.tacofestival.com
Fifer Orchards Fall Fest — Camden-Wyoming. Head to the farm Saturday for a corn maze, pumpkin and apple picking, activities and cider doughnuts. Fall Fest is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Website: fifers.com. www.fifers.com
History Book Festival — Lewes. Authors and readers gather across town for a weekend devoted to history. Saturday offers a full day of free presentations; Friday’s keynote and Sunday’s closing event are ticketed. Website: historybookfestival.org. www.historybookfestival.org
Longwood Gardens’ Festival of Fountains — Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Visit the gardens during the day or book Saturday’s 8:15 p.m. “Electric 80s” Fireworks & Fountains Show. Longwood closes at 6 p.m. Saturday to visitors without a fireworks ticket. Website: longwoodgardens.org. longwoodgardens.org
Fall Jamboree at Mt. Cuba Center — Hockessin. Live music, lawn games, fire pits, guided tours and haywagon rides run from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday. Sunday is the rain date. Website: mtcubacenter.org. mtcubacenter.org
IndiaFest — Wilmington. The Indo-American Association of Delaware hosts its cultural celebration Saturday at St. Mark’s High School, 2501 Pike Creek Road. Check the organizer’s site for the program and admission information. Website: iaadelaware.org. www.iaadelaware.org
Historic New Castle day trip — New Castle. Walk the historic streets and riverfront, and visit the Court House Museum or the free exhibition at the Arsenal. The city also lists a Belgian Beer Fest from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday. Websites: newcastlehistory.org and newcastlecity.delaware.gov. history.delaware.gov
Brandywine Valley art and scenery — Chadds Ford and Greenville. Plan your own afternoon around the Brandywine Museum of Art, Winterthur’s grounds and a scenic drive. Check admission and tour availability before leaving. Websites: brandywine.org and winterthur.org.
To Go Box
When: Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 26-27. Some events run on only one day.
How to plan: Use the website listed with each option to check tickets, schedules and weather updates before traveling.
As the UN warns traditional safeguards are ‘unravelling’, Donald Trump says he will encourage, not restrain, the AI race
When the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, sat down for an interview in the heart of Silicon Valley at the weekend he had known for two days that his was the first government known to have been attacked by a rogue AI agent.
He didn’t reveal the attack then, but he sounded a warning about the march of AI: “the risk is that AI develops in a way in which humans are no longer in control of what AI is producing.”
TAMPA, Florida — Hillsborough County has declared a local state of emergency after the number of locally acquired dengue fever cases climbed to 170, making the Tampa-area county the center of Florida’s current outbreak.
Florida’s latest surveillance data counted 190 locally acquired cases statewide, with Hillsborough accounting for nearly 90% of them. Neighboring Pasco and Pinellas counties also declared emergencies Thursday as officials stepped up mosquito-control efforts aimed at limiting further spread.
The Hillsborough declaration took effect Sept. 24 and is initially scheduled to last seven days unless extended or rescinded. It gives county officials additional authority to deploy emergency resources and may allow reimbursement for certain response costs.
The increase has been substantial. Florida health officials reported just 59 locally acquired infections in Hillsborough County on Sept. 4, meaning the county’s total has nearly tripled within several weeks.
Dengue is spread primarily through bites from infected mosquitoes. Symptoms can include fever, severe aches, nausea, vomiting and rash. Most symptomatic patients recover within about a week, but roughly 1 in 20 people who become sick can develop severe dengue, which may cause internal bleeding, shock or death.
Officials are using mosquito traps along with ground and aerial treatments while urging residents to eliminate standing water and protect themselves from bites.
Sovereignty is a word borrowed from statecraft. A sovereign country is independent in its decisions. The term “digital sovereignty” is a more recent invention that applies to organizations and even individuals.
In this article, I discuss what the push for digital sovereignty implies for Linux-focused, open source developers and companies. The framework I use is a European one, because I am Vienna-based and familiar with it. As I discuss later, the implications are not limited to Europe.
A framework for defining and rating digital sovereignty
SOV-1, Strategic: Ownership and governance are controlled, avoiding external dependencies.
SOV-2, Legal and Jurisdictional: Protects against external laws and unauthorized access.
SOV-3, Data and AI: Control and privacy compliance for data and AI models in the cloud.
SOV-4, Operational: Day-to-day cloud administration, management, and support are handled securely from within.
SOV-5, Supply Chain: Protects against vendor lock-in and external bottlenecks.
SOV-6, Technology Openness: Encourages open standards and the freedom to choose technologies.
SOV-7, Security and Compliance: Aligns cloud services with European cybersecurity standards, frameworks, and compliance audit rules.
SOV-8, Environmental Sustainability: Adoption of energy-efficient infrastructure, environmentally responsible practices, and activity reporting intended to reduce environmental impacts of technological activity.
Rating technology providers for digital sovereignty compliance
The framework rates providers on two scales: a Sovereignty Effectiveness Assurance Level (SEAL), and a complementary Sovereignty Score for cloud services. The first indicates a minimum level of sovereignty objectives met. The second shows a provider’s strengths and weaknesses across the objectives.
Each objective is rated from SEAL-0 to SEAL-4. SEAL-4 means an EU supply chain, from the physical chips up to the software.
The mechanic I find most interesting is that a provider does not get one SEAL level. It receives eight, and the overall level is the lowest of them. Your weakest objective decides your rating, not your average. Anyone who has ever tuned a storage stack will recognize that logic.
Meeting the technology-openness objective
Open source software can put providers in a strong position to address the technology-openness objective, SOV-6, because customers can inspect the code, operate it independently, and avoid dependencies on proprietary implementation. Because the source is open, that argument does not stop at the EU border. A service provider in the US or in Asia aiming for full SEAL-4 is not held back by choosing open source software.
Open standards need open implementations
SOV-6 specifies two things: open standards and the freedom to choose technologies. In software, an open standard might define an interface that anyone can implement, but if only one vendor has implemented it, a buyer still has a single supplier for it. Depending on a single supplier also weakens a provider on SOV-5, the supply-chain objective, which protects against vendor lock-in. Freedom to choose means being able to substitute one implementation for another.
An example is the Container Storage Interface (CSI), a vendor-neutral storage standard developed under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and used by Kubernetes. CSI is the standard, LINBIT provides a CSI driver for LINSTOR® and its upstream CNCF project, Piraeus Datastore, and a buyer running Kubernetes can use this driver. Because of the open standard nature of the interface, the buyer can also move between storage back ends. This is freedom for the buyer, motivation for providers to make a better solution, and neutrality from a foundation like the CNCF.
Implications of digital sovereignty for cloud and technology services providers
What poured oil on the fire was an incident involving the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. After the US sanctioned court officials, the chief prosecutor reportedly lost access to his Microsoft-hosted email account, and bank accounts in the United Kingdom were frozen. Since these actions, some EU banks with US exposure are preferring to over-comply rather than take any risk. Microsoft disputes the framing and maintains it never suspended services to the ICC as an organization. For me, the detail of who pressed which button matters far less than the lesson: neither the email nor the banking depended on a European decision.
In the US, similar discussions have taken place, only with different verbiage. There it is “economic security” and “supply chain resilience”, mostly aimed at China, and where Europe says “technological sovereignty”, Washington says “technological leadership”. Different branding, same substance.
Conclusion
As digital sovereignty gains weight in technology sourcing decisions, smaller vendors benefit.
A framework that asks, “Who owns you? Whose laws apply? Can I operate this without you, and can I read the source?” rewards exactly the properties a small open source company has by default. The hyperscalers will feel some headwind, though they are not standing still, and “sovereign” regions run by local operating entities are their answer. Whether that clears a SEAL-3 or SEAL-4 bar is the argument of the next few years.
LINBIT already made an investment in developing in the open. An open license is necessary but not enough on its own, because a project can be open and still be controlled by a single company that can relicense it. What makes the openness durable is governance that the original vendor cannot reverse. DRBD® ships in the mainline Linux kernel, and we are working to upstream the current DRBD 9 code. Code in the commons, for example, in the mainline kernel, under a foundation such as the CNCF, or in another home that no single vendor controls, is the strongest answer to SOV-6 I know of. Every project that puts it there widens the set of technology a sovereign buyer can choose from.
Across videos, standup and cartoons, humorists are skewering big tech’s attempt to make AI ubiquitous and inevitable
“Best case scenario, we never have to do any admin again,” says an AI CEO. “Worst case, we all die.”
A young man struggles to the top of a beautiful mountain, words echoing in his ears: “AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created.” At the top of the mountain, he triumphantly holds up a sign: “Build a datacenter here.”
New energy and trade routes could bypass Hormuz and change the Middle East. But major challenges remainExpert commentthilton.drupal
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is accelerating a wider reordering of the region, as Iraq, Syria and Lebanon plan new oil pipelines and transport corridors. But whether they can seize the opportunity to diversify will ultimately depend on wider reforms.
The war on Iran and the resulting disruption to the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the vulnerability of existing trade and energy routes and unsettled the old balance of power across the Middle East.
In this context, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are seeking to capitalize on their position between Europe and the Gulf and improve their connectivity via oil and gas pipelines, roads, railways and digital corridors. Once central to an Iranian regional order, all three governments are now aiming to achieve greater sovereignty by diversifying their economic ties, a shift supported by the Trump administration.
Yet they are attempting to do so while facing foreign occupations and military action, and while also confronting domestic endemic corruption and fragmented political systems that empower armed groups.
Whether they can seize this opportunity to become more connected – and more sovereign – will therefore depend not only on the infrastructure they build, but on whether they can reform their states to govern it.
Changing energy routes
The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused severe disruption to regional energy flows, including from Iraq.
Pre-war, Iraq was exporting around 3.3 million b/d from its southern oilfields. By the second week of March, exports from southern Iraq had collapsed. Southern exports gradually recovered from mid-April, reaching 2.3 million b/d in August, aided by Iraq giving discounts for buyers and by Iran reportedly giving permission for Iraqi oil tankers to pass through the Strait.
Syria and Lebanon have been less directly impacted by Hormuz, given neither is a major oil exporter and they both have access to the Mediterranean. However, the crisis has spurred a potential wider reconfiguration of regional trade and energy routes, as countries like Iraq look for alternatives.
Both Beirut and Damascus have an opportunity to position their Mediterranean ports and transport networks as gateways between the Gulf and European markets in a reconfigured regional trading system.
Iraq–Syria pipeline
Iraq is already pursuing several ways to diversify its export routes. Baghdad is seeking to expand exports through Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, where Iraqi crude already flows, and is even discussing the revival of a long-stalled idea for a pipeline to Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba.
Iraq and Syria are also pursuing a new pipeline that would carry Iraqi crude oil westwards to the Mediterranean. This would aim to give Baghdad another alternative to its overwhelming dependence on exports through the Strait of Hormuz.
This planned corridor is often described as a revival of the historic Kirkuk–Baniyas pipeline, which once carried oil from northern Iraq to the Syrian coast. But it entails new infrastructure to form a wider network connecting Iraq’s southern and northern fields to a hub at Haditha in western Iraq, from which oil could flow west through Syria to the Mediterranean port of Baniyas and north towards Turkey.
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Base map made with Natural Earth data. Pipelines adapted from Global Energy Monitor dataset, accessed 22 September 2026, CC BY 4.0. Only select pipelines shown. The proposed new Iraq-Syria pipeline requires new infrastructure and may not follow the exact route of the badly damaged historic Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline that is shown as the proposed route here.
Estimates put the cost at around $15 billion, with construction likely to take around four years. The Trump administration is reportedly supporting the plan as part of a strategy to reduce Iran’s regional leverage by diversifying away from Hormuz.
The new network, which has a proposed initial capacity of around two million b/d, would allow Iraq to divert a substantial share of its exports away from Hormuz, reducing Iranian leverage. But it would diversify rather than replace Hormuz: most Iraqi crude exports go to Asian markets, particularly China and India, which are far quicker to reach from the Gulf than the Mediterranean.
New East–West corridors
Lebanon and Syria are also exploring the restoration of railway links that could eventually connect the Lebanese coast through Syria to Iraq, Turkey and the Gulf. This month, Lebanese and Syrian officials inspected a potential rail route connecting the Lebanese port of Tripoli to Homs in Syria. This could be the potential first step in re-establishing Syria as a transit state, with Tripoli as a potential Mediterranean gateway.
Yet while rebuilding the short Tripoli-Homs railway may seem feasible, establishing a wider regional corridor will require much more infrastructure and faces challenges. Lebanon’s previous plans to revive the same railway stalled before work began, in part over financing and mismanagement. Syria’s railway system is badly damaged by war, with the government estimating that its rehabilitation could cost around $5.5 billion.
The same pursuit of connectivity is extending into the digital realm. New fibre-optic networks through Iraq and Syria are intended to give Gulf states alternative land routes for the vast quantities of data that currently travel through vulnerable submarine cables.
Energy under attack
For now, there is a considerable gap between ambition and reality. Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are pursuing these infrastructure projects in the shadow of a war they cannot control and while facing external occupations or interference.
In Lebanon, Israeli forces occupy a self-declared security zone in the south, with more than a million people displaced. In Syria, Israel seized the demilitarized buffer zone in December 2024 and has maintained a military presence there since.
Iran retains influence through its political and armed networks across the region. This includes groups embedded within Iraq and Lebanon that have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to threaten critical infrastructure.
In Iraq, for instance, the Khor Mor gas field has suffered repeated rocket and drone attacks blamed on militias. More recently, attacks launched from Iraqi territory forced the temporary closure of Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline, which is also designed to reduce Riyadh’s dependence on Hormuz. The Houthis have attacked Saudi oil tankers and seized the Bab al-Mandab Strait coastline this month.
The threat to infrastructure is not limited to Iran-aligned armed groups. Israel has repeatedly targeted transport infrastructure during the current conflict, including in Lebanon, demonstrating how the conflict can disrupt the physical networks on which greater connectivity would depend. And in eastern Syria, through which the proposed new Iraqi energy corridor would pass, armed groups including ISIS have attacked oil wells and tanker trucks.
Internal obstacles
Another obstacle is entrenched corruption. Iraq, Lebanon and Syria all sit near the bottom of Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index.
In political systems where public contracting is a principal means of distributing rents, mega-projects can create opportunities for political parties to potentially profit from contracts, often at the expense of their delivery.
Linked to this is the fragmentation of these states themselves. Infrastructure on this scale requires institutions capable of coordinating decisions over years, enforcing contracts, protecting assets and binding competing interests to a common project.
Yet authority in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon remains fragmented among political factions, competing institutions and armed actors. This leaves governments unable to guarantee the security or financing of projects, with multiple actors able to obstruct their completion or extract rents. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the scale of ambition and the capacity to deliver it.
Connectivity doesn’t guarantee sovereignty
The war has increased the strategic value of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon’s geographical position. As states and companies search for alternatives to Hormuz, the three countries offer potential alternative corridors connecting the Gulf to the Mediterranean and Europe.
Whether Iraq, Syria and Lebanon can take advantage of this opportunity will help determine whether they can shape the post-war regional order, or whether it is once again shaped around them.
But connectivity is not the same as sovereignty. New pipelines, railways and trade corridors can offer these states alternatives to the dependencies of the old order, but alone they cannot produce sovereignty. That requires institutions capable of delivering and protecting these projects.
If Iraq, Syria and Lebanon want to seize the opportunities of the changing regional order, they will need to do more than build new routes across their borders. They will need to build states capable of governing these new connections, while ensuring that their benefits extend to their populations, not just elites.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Financial disclosures show U.S. Sen. Jon Husted received gifts from JobsOhio during three consecutive years while serving as Ohio’s lieutenant governor, but neither Husted nor the powerful economic-development organization will disclose what the gifts were or how much they were worth.
Husted’s filings identify JobsOhio as a gift source in 2021, 2022 and 2023. His 2024 disclosure lists a gift from JobsOhio CEO J.P. Nauseef. Ohio law generally requires officials to identify the source of gifts worth more than $75, but not their exact nature or value.
That lack of detail matters because JobsOhio controls profits from Ohio’s state liquor franchise and has directed more than $2 billion toward private businesses. Husted’s office and JobsOhio declined to provide additional information about the gifts.
Ohio ethics rules prohibit public officials from accepting substantial things of value when the source has business before their agency or could improperly influence their official duties. The Ohio Ethics Commission has not concluded that Husted violated those rules, and its executive director said such a determination would require examining all the facts.
The disclosures are receiving additional attention because JobsOhio supported major projects during Husted’s tenure, including Intel’s heavily subsidized Ohio semiconductor development. Husted is currently running for a full Senate term against Democrat Sherrod Brown.
Mountain View Academy in Dandridge, Tennessee Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica
Across the country, states have been shuttering their youth prisons as juvenile crime has plummeted and research shows the facilities are not effective at keeping youth out of trouble after release. From 2000 to 2022, the number of the highest-security facilities for kids has dropped by more than 40%, the most recent federal data shows.
In contrast, Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services has budgeted $360 million to build two new facilities with a total of up to 256 new beds for youth. Construction is set to begin this fall, and they are expected to open in 2028 and 2029.
According to Tennessee officials, the state doesn’t have enough space for kids who courts have found committed crimes. In the last few years, it has held dozens of teens overnight in temporary places, including, at one point, office buildings. In an emailed response to WPLN and ProPublica, the agency attributed the lack of bed space to a number of factors, including teens’ needs for specific mental health services and temporary staffing issues in its facilities. And it said that national trends “do not determine” whether Tennessee has enough youth beds available.
But juvenile crime is down in Tennessee, too, and advocates and experts say the state’s push for more prisons does not line up with the needs of the kids in its care.
“The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control,” said Josh Rovner with the nonprofit research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which seeks to reduce incarceration across the country. “The data doesn’t back that up.”
Tennessee said youth are committing more violent crimes. But fewer are entering the juvenile justice system.
To explain its need for more youth prisons, Tennessee’s DCS points to a recent state-commissioned study. It shows that police reports of violent juvenile crimes in Tennessee — including murder, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft and crimes with firearms — have increased since 2013.
But not every report results in an arrest, for a number of reasons; multiple people might call police for the same crime, for example. Data from the same report shows that the number of kids arrested and entering the system, even for violent crime, has decreased over that time period. Murder was the only violent crime included in the report for which arrests increased, from 15 cases in 2013 to 26 in 2024. That number is still lower than it was at its peak in 2018.
“The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control. … The data doesn’t back that up.”
Josh Rovner, senior research analyst at The Sentencing Project
The state oversees different types of facilities for kids in the justice system, ranging in security level from group homes to prisons surrounded by barbed wire. DCS leaders said in a state hearing that the agency has reached maximum capacity and run out of beds in high-security facilities. DCS said in a recent statement that the number of youth needing space in a particular type of facility can remain high day to day even as overall arrests decline.
In a 2024 lawsuit over Tennessee’s juvenile justice system, advocates said the state is not appropriately utilizing the bed space it currently has, putting kids into the highest-security facilities without considering their need for mental health treatment and other services. Because of juvenile privacy laws, no publicly available data shows what charges land youth in which setting.
In response, DCS acknowledged that it sometimes places youth in facilities based on capacity, but denied that it improperly held youth in the highest-security facilities. The case is ongoing.
Tennessee promised its new prisons would be rehabilitative. Experts say they are too big to succeed at that mission.
Unlike the adult system, the juvenile justice system is set up to rehabilitate, not punish, based on decades of research showing that youth are more capable of change.
DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it is designing the new facilities to provide care that addresses the trauma youth have experienced, including behavioral health treatment tailored to their individual needs. The design includes dedicated spaces for education, job training and recreation. It also includes rooms for mental health staff to do their work, including “calming rooms” for youth.
The agency also describes its existing prisons as rehabilitative. All three of the state’s highest-security prisons are run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews and his company, Wayne Halfway House. The company is required by its contract and state policy to provide mental health treatment, education and other services to imprisoned youth.
The 2024 juvenile justice lawsuit, which an advocacy group and multiple unnamed youth in the system filed against DCS, argued that the department places youth in facilities that are more punitive than rehabilitative. Some teens placed in prison, the lawsuit said, should not be there at all.
The lawsuit also claimed that Tennessee’s juvenile justice facilities keep youth from accessing education and mental health treatment. Two facilities run by Wayne Halfway House, according to the lawsuit, have had policies barring youth from attending school if they misbehave. One teen, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other mental health conditions, did not get needed individual therapy for months while in a Crews facility, the lawsuit stated, and only got a couple of hours of education each day. Several other contractors’ jails and treatment centers across the state are referenced by name in the lawsuit.
DCS said in a legal filing that it didn’t have enough information to respond to all of the specific allegations about youth mentioned in the suit, but it pushed back against many claims, including that youth were provided inadequate education or mental health treatment. It also denied that the teen in the Crews prison was kept from therapy or education, but did acknowledge that some youth in the juvenile justice system may temporarily “receive minimal educational services.”
Wayne Halfway House said in a statement that it disputes the allegations in the lawsuit and referred the newsrooms to “numerous state audits and/or reports” during that time that refute those claims. It declined to share the specific documents it was referencing. “Wayne Halfway House programs are compliant with state policies and law,” the company wrote in its statement.
Daniel Macallair is the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to reduce society’s reliance on incarceration. “These institutions are not humane places,” he said, referring to large-scale youth facilities. “They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.”
According to Macallair, who has been working on juvenile justice reform for more than 40 years, any facility with more than 10 kids becomes unwieldy, distracting from rehabilitation and becoming more correctional. Research shows that larger facilities often involve harsher treatment of youth, including higher rates of sexual abuse and practices such as solitary confinement. One of the prisons that DCS is planning would have up to 160 beds, making it the largest in the state.
“These institutions are not humane places. They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.”
Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
By contrast, the programs that have proven to help youth avoid future crimes are small and based in the communities they are from, Macallair said.
Missouri, a nationally lauded example, has established small facilities throughout the state, keeping youth — even those who commit violent crimes — close to home for therapeutic programs. Research has shown that not only are these community-based programs more effective and affordable, but they lead to low rates of reoffending and high rates of high school graduation.
DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it provides community-based services for youth who can safely remain at home. But Tennessee data shows that the vast majority of youth in the system were not allowed to stay in their communities last year.
One way to assess the rehabilitative success of youth prisons is whether youth are rearrested after release. But Tennessee officials acknowledge that they cannot measure that in a comprehensive or accurate way because the state lacks a centralized way of tracking when a youth commits a new crime.
Tennessee has pushed against outside oversight of its youth prisons. Experts say this is a crucial reform.
The state says there will be a bid process to determine who will operate the new facilities. Right now, two providers run all of the state’s private youth prisons — Wayne Halfway House and Youth Opportunity Investments, a company that runs lower security facilities.
In response to questions about the new facilities, Wayne Halfway House said it would not comment about its business plans. It also noted that the facilities in which it holds youth in state custody for committing a crime are classified by the state as “residential treatment centers,” not youth prisons. Across the country, states use different terminology to refer to these facilities. By federal law they are supposed to provide treatment, but they also are secure facilities, often with barbed-wire fences and cells that lock, that hold youth long-term after a court finds them responsible for a crime — similar to adult prisons.
Experts say robust independent oversight is crucial to keep youth in juvenile justice facilities safe, but Tennessee does not have this. Instead, it has one agency that helps families navigate the system but lacks enforcement power and a new Juvenile Justice Review Commission tasked with releasing its first set of recommendations in 2028.
“The main goal is to bring more transparency to what’s going on inside these facilities, to make that information public, to make recommendations about ways it can improve,” said Michele Deitch, a criminal and juvenile justice expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “You really need the external body that is independent.”
In 2024, a bipartisan group of Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill that would give oversight and enforcement power to an independent organization instead of just DCS. Under the bill, DCS would be required to suspend a facility’s license or stop placing youth there until it fixed violations.
Lawmakers felt that DCS had a conflict of interest — it is responsible for both finding beds for children in these institutions and sanctioning providers if they are not following the rules or regulations.
Wayne Halfway House, which pays a legislative lobbyist and also makes political donations in the state, opposed the bill. One of the bill’s sponsors said that a lobbyist for the company pushed to exempt privately run facilities from the bill, and the proposal made it into an amendment filed in the House.
A lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House said at the time that the company had concerns about how the bill would “affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee.” In a recent statement, the company said it supports the state’s policies and laws that “rigorously oversee organizations like ours and hold us to high standards for operational performance.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration is dismantling several long-standing federal tools used to address racial disparities in American schools, including moving to end more than 50 court-supervised desegregation cases.
The Justice Department said Thursday it is reviewing decades-old school desegregation orders and seeking dismissal when officials determine districts have eliminated the remnants of legally enforced segregation. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said prolonged federal oversight no longer reflects conditions in many classrooms.
At the same time, the Education Department has eliminated federal “disparate impact” regulations under Title VI. Those rules allowed investigators to examine policies that appeared race-neutral but produced sharply unequal outcomes, such as suspension rates or access to advanced classes. The administration argues that approach improperly encouraged racial balancing.
Civil rights advocates warn the combined changes could make discrimination harder to identify unless there is evidence of explicit intent. Former Justice Department attorney Johnathan Smith said the administration is also creating legal “roadblocks” that could make future reversals difficult.
The administration has already halted or narrowed investigations involving racial disparities in school discipline and successfully supported the termination of some longstanding desegregation orders. Critics, including Rep. Bobby Scott, argue that ending oversight too quickly risks allowing old inequities to reemerge.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Three-quarters of Americans say the rapid growth of artificial intelligence makes them feel fearful or concerned, while only one-quarter describe themselves as hopeful or excited, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
The survey found that 43% of respondents felt strong fear or concern about AI’s development, with another 32% somewhat concerned. Only 7% said they were strongly hopeful or excited. The concern crossed party lines: CNN reported that 85% of Democrats and about 62% of Republicans expressed fear or concern about AI.
The poll also found broad dissatisfaction with the federal response. Seventy-one percent said the government is not doing enough to regulate AI, compared with 18% who said current efforts are sufficient and 10% who said Washington is doing too much.
Those findings line up with a separate Reuters/Ipsos survey released this week in which 73% said AI companies are not doing enough to prevent potentially catastrophic consequences, while 55% supported slowing development.
The CNN survey was conducted Sept. 16-17 among 1,206 U.S. adults and carries a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. President Trump, meanwhile, has resisted broad federal AI regulation and argued that slowing development could allow China to gain ground.
TRENTON, New Jersey — Gov. Mikie Sherrill is demanding Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell resign after an independent investigation concluded he sexually harassed a woman and repeatedly violated state ethics rules.
The 61-page report, prepared by Lowenstein Sandler LLP, found “credible evidence” that Caldwell made a romantic advance toward a female staffer’s friend. After being rejected, investigators found he told the staffer, referring to the two women, “You young women are looking for young sperm.” The report concluded the sexually charged remark constituted workplace harassment and caused the employee to avoid interactions and travel with Caldwell.
Investigators also found Caldwell improperly sought a promotion for a state employee he was dating and repeatedly brought personal guests to ticketed events without paying admission, despite ethics training and warnings.
Sherrill said the findings showed “serious, repeated violations of state policy” and gave Caldwell until Friday to resign. She said the behavior represented a pattern that failed to meet her administration’s standards.
Caldwell’s attorney, Thomas Calcagni, disputed the conclusions, arguing the investigation denied Caldwell meaningful due process and that the evidence did not justify the findings. Caldwell is an elected lieutenant governor, meaning Sherrill cannot simply remove him from that office.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sen. Tommy Tuberville is doubling down on claims that airline pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers who participate in the furry community pose a potential safety risk, despite offering no evidence that furry interests have caused aviation incidents or impaired professional performance.
Tuberville told TMZ DC that some aviation workers belong to a furry “club” and called that “some part of mental illness that could be a catastrophe.” His evidence appears to be an “Aviation Furs Meet-Up” held at the Furry Migration convention in Minneapolis. The convention’s own schedule shows the meetup was open to pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers, line operators and anyone simply interested in aviation.
That establishes that some furry convention attendees share an interest in aviation. It does not establish how many are licensed aviation professionals, whether they pose any safety risk, or that furry fandom itself is a mental disorder.
A 2026 review in Transcultural Psychiatry describes furry culture as a stigmatized fan community centered on anthropomorphic characters. Researchers specifically cautioned that available evidence does not consistently show higher rates of mental-health problems among furry fans compared with the general population.
Tuberville nevertheless said he would not want a qualified pilot flying him if that pilot privately identified with the fandom. TMZ’s reporter pressed him on whether professional competence should matter more; Tuberville maintained that the personal interest itself made him uncomfortable.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Tucker Carlson says President Donald Trump should have been removed from office under the 25th Amendment after what Carlson interpreted as a threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran, marking another sharp escalation in his break with the president over foreign policy.
“He should have been removed from office immediately when he threatened nuclear war,” Carlson told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. When Inskeep asked whether he meant removal through the 25th Amendment, Carlson answered, “That’s correct,” adding that Trump should have been “bundled up and taken out.”
There is an important distinction in Carlson’s accusation: Trump has not explicitly threatened a nuclear strike on Iran. Axios noted that Trump has instead threatened to “annihilate” Iran and previously warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Tehran rejected U.S. demands. Reuters confirmed Trump again used the word “annihilate” during his U.N. address this week.
Carlson, once one of Trump’s most influential media supporters, has increasingly opposed the administration’s Iran war and broader foreign policy. He left the Republican Party earlier this year amid those disagreements.
The 25th Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of Cabinet officials to declare a president unable to perform the duties of office. No president has ever been removed through that process.
practice focused on HPC data center trends, AI, cloud, big data, and hyperscale. He is the former editor of AIwire. 
Two major cases to be heard in December focus on religious rights with a significant Second Amendment challenge also scheduled for argument that month. In addition, the question of voter ID laws will reach the Court this fall, along with controversies about climate change, and two Eighth Amendment challenges.
![Screenshot of an email sent at 5:22 p.m. Sept. 12, 2025, from Mike Morath that reads: “Andy: great to meet you. Would love to set something up to talk about how this could be done. I’ve cc’d Nicole Rivera who can get something scheduled for us. MacKenzie: I’d also like to set up another site visit to visit both your Austin secondary and primary with my team. [Highlighting starts.] The Superintendent of H.I.S.D. would also like to do a site visit, so I’ll connect y’all separately. [Highlighting ends.] And hopefully we can schedule them to happen on the same day. Mike.”](img/347f97b32bb6bdaa4b197607ea982cf022cae7db.jpg)
![An email from Mike Morath sent on Sept. 14, 2025, to a redacted studient.com email address and cc’d to a redacted studient.com email address, Nicole Rivera and MacKenzie Price.
The text of the email says: “[Redacted], I’d love to schedule a follow-up discussion. I’ve followed up w/ MacKenzie and separately started to schedule a follow-up re: 1882 partnerships. But I’d also like to talk more about your Tier 3/MTSS/academic intervention work, which is what I believe you’re doing with a bunch of schools around the country. I’d like to learn more about that, to see how it dovetails with the systemic approach taken in Houston and in a few other places in TX. I’ve cc’d Nicole Rivera who can set something up for us. Thanks, Mike.”](https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/redactedFw-met-at-event-1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg)
![An email sent by Michael.Strange@tea.texas.gov on April 17, 2026. The email reads: “Hi all, Here’s what I have for next steps, let me know if I missed anything: Next Steps. Mike: Follow up with Teague and Ector County, Draft a ‘district commitment’ one-pager and share with this team for review. [Redacted]: Reach out to Fort Bend + Pflugerville + other potential small-rural districts. Andy: Provide a summer timeline/milestones for onboarding districts by the start of the 26/27 SY (approx. week of August 17th). Thanks, Have a great weekend!”](img/e4f415d387fcf6fbe6e4cefad57f8d27e683731b.jpg)
One of the biggest surprises for Ron was how dramatically his social life improved after moving.After losing four close friends within just a few months, he found himself increasingly isolated.
” Marris texted Baker. 
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