News Reel

A frozen bank account can create a domino effect for your finances, especially if payday is approaching.

The US military said it carried out strikes on Monday against targets including boats attempting to lay mines and missile launch sites

• US strikes Iran missile sites and mine laying vessels

Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei said on his Telegram channel that Gulf powers will no longer be a shield for US bases and the US will no longer have a safe haven in the region, as Tehran and Washington discuss a framework to end their three-month-old war, Reuters reports.

The post follows overnight attacks on Iran by the US, testing the ceasefire agreed in April. The strikes came as Iran’s top negotiator and its foreign minister were in Qatar for talks with Qatar’s prime minister over the potential deal to end the war.

California lawmakers are moving to exempt most open-source operating systems from the state's upcoming age-verification law after backlash from Linux and privacy advocates who warned that the original rules could force decentralized projects to collect users' ages. The amendment would likely shield major Linux distributions, though SteamOS and other Linux-based platforms tied to proprietary app stores may still face compliance questions. Tom's Hardware reports: Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California's legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state's earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to "copy, redistribute, and modify the software." The proposed amendment specifically states: "Operating system provider" does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software. The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead. Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user's age or birth date during device setup, then expose an "age bracket signal" to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as "under 13," "13-15," "16-17," and "18+," immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems. [...] AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an "operating system provider" under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California's age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted. California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ursula von der Leyen visiting Lithuania amid drone incursions as diplomats are called over Russian requests for envoys to leave the Ukrainian capital

Back to Ukraine, the EU has summoned Russia’s top diplomat in Brussels over Russian warnings telling foreigners and diplomats to leave Kyiv amid planned new strikes on the Ukrainian capital.

EU’s foreign policy spokesperson Anitta Hipper said on X:

“[Russian] threat to foreign citizens & diplomats to leave Kyiv is an unacceptable escalation. @eu_eeas summoned the Chargé d’Affairs, calling to stop hitting civilians & [Russia] to engage in genuine peace talks starting with a full and unconditional ceasefire.

@EUDelegationUA stays in Kyiv.”

“[The threat] shows once more, actually, one thing that we already knew, that Russia is absolutely not interested in any peace and has a total disregard for all the efforts towards the peace.”

As Iran accuses the U.S. of a "grave violation" of the fragile ceasefire, Rubio says a deal is still possible despite the latest clash.

Updates from the third day’s play at Roland Garros
Players tackle heat in test of endurance | Mail Daniel

Kouame holds for 6-6 in the first; he and Cilic will now play a first-set tiebreaker, and I’d not be at all surprised if the 17-year-old took it. I’m almost tempted to post one of my school reports from the same age just to make clear how ridiculous what he’s doing is.

On Chatrier, Sabalenka and Bouzas Maneiro are ready to start. Can the world no 1 win a major on a non-hard surface? I’m sure the answer is yes, but equally, I’m not sure it’ll be this one, this year.

Scottish National party’s attempt to focus on call for independence referendum overshadowed by embezzlement scandal

The Scottish National party was accused of “embezzling” voters after opposition leaders highlighted the crisis over Peter Murrell’s misuse of £400,000 from party funds.

The scandal over Murrell’s guilty plea on Monday to embezzling £400,310.65 while he was the SNP’s chief executive overshadowed a Holyrood motion tabled by John Swinney to call for a second independence referendum.

‘Robert’s answer is not Reform policy’, Yusuf said about an answer that Jenrick gave to journalists days earlier

Keir Starmer has said that SNP leaders need to explain why they did not realise that Peter Murrell was stealing more than £400,000 from the party.

Asked about yesterday’s court proceedings in Edinburgh, where Murrell admitting embezzling money from the party to spend on luxury goods, Starmer said:

I think anybody looking at what’s happening up in Scotland will be baffled that those at the top of the SNP say they didn’t know anything about what was going on, so clearly there are questions that need to be answered.

• Response to New York crowd behavior was criticized

• Rea: abuse was no worse than at ‘youth soccer game’

Don Rea Jr, who was cricitized for his response to verbal abuse directed at European players during last year’s Ryder Cup, is out as president of the PGA of America, effective immediately.

Tuesday’s news came on the heels of the PGA of America’s board of directors suspending Rea for the remainder of his two-year term, which ends in November. PGA of America vice-president Nathan Charnes was named acting president.

Woman argued water was a universal human right but court ruled no law obliged hoteliers to serve it from taps

A tourist’s simple request for a glass of tap water at a hotel restaurant in the Italian Dolomites has culminated in Italy’s top court ruling that being served water from the tap is not a consumer right, after a lengthy and costly legal saga.

The case dates back to 2019 when the woman spent a week at the five-star hotel in the ski resort of Corvara, in Badia, over Christmas and new year. She was on a half-board deal with the evening meal included, except for drinks.

Ken Paxton, Texas attorney general, takes on four-term incumbent John Cornyn on Tuesday in a primary that tests Trump’s grip on Republican party

• America’s ugliest primary? Texas Republican infighting could hand Senate seat to Democrat

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President Trump’s administration floated a plan to ask federal workers to sign non-disclosure agreements, according to a government document released Tuesday, Reuters reported.

This is not the first time the administration has brought up non-disclosure agreements with federal workers.

Last year, after the administration fired federal workers in mass amounts for “poor performance,” they were asked to sign confidentiality agreements, but refused, the Guardian reported.

Panel of three judges says congressional map was drawn to intentionally discriminate against Black voters

Alabama cannot use a new Republican-friendly map in this year’s midterm elections because it was drawn to intentionally discriminate against Black voters, a panel of three federal judges ruled on Tuesday.

The decision blocks Alabama from using a congressional map lawmakers passed in 2023 but never went into effect because the same court found it was drawn with intent to discriminate. Alabama was eventually ordered to adopt a map with two majority-Black districts that both elected Democrats. After the US supreme court gutted a major provision of the Voting Rights Act in a case called Louisiana v Callais in April, Alabama took the extraordinary step of moving its imminent congressional primary and sought to use the 2023 congressional map this year.

The three-judge district court panel ordered Alabama to use a congressional map with two majority-Black districts in the upcoming midterm elections.

A top DHS official directed ICE attorneys to aggressively pursue administrative fraud cases against immigration lawyers accused of filing false asylum claims.

All Cabinet members, including outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, are expected to attend, a White House official told CBS News.

Launching a business can be thrilling, but it pays to plan ahead to maximize your chances of success. Here's what to consider (sponsored by AT&T).

Joanna Howe says the image was sent to her by a woman ashamed of her abortion, and used it to support ‘rally for Emma and Ruth’ in favour of NSW bill

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An image posted by anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe claiming to show aborted twin girls called “Ruth and Emma” appears to be a picture of sugar gliders.

The two little pink bodies are displayed on a clean white background and experts say the image does not look at all like the product of an abortion.

A few free settings changes won't transform your TV's built-in speakers, but they'll make them sound considerably less bad.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.'s most disruptive effects. Leo's declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to "all people of good will" that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds. While emphasizing that "technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity," he wrote that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs." Among other things, Leo called for: - government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I. - protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened - education to help students think critically about the technology - action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I. - safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons. Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. "A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity," he wrote. "This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace," he added. Anthropic's Christopher Olah said companies like his own need moral guidance to avoid being swayed by "a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing." "We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend," Olah said. "Today is just the beginning -- the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia says arrest of Bishop Hilarion, who heads Orthodox congregation in Karlovy Vary, was politically motivated ‘setup’

Czech police have released a Russian Orthodox bishop who was detained on suspicion of drug possession, after Moscow condemned the arrest as a politically motivated setup.

Bishop Hilarion, also known by his secular name, Grigory Alfeyev, was stopped by police on Sunday in Karlovy Vary, a spa town in western Czechia popular with Russian tourists, after officers discovered containers of a white substance in the boot of his car.

Medical debt can follow you into retirement. Whether it can impact your Social Security check is another matter.

Temperature reaches 35C at Heathrow on Tuesday after 34.8C high at Kew Gardens in London on Monday

• Tell us: how are you coping in the UK heatwave?

The UK has recorded its highest-ever May temperature for the second consecutive day, as thermometers hit 35C (95F) at Heathrow and Kew Gardens in London, the Met Office said.

The latest high was recorded the day after the country’s provisional hottest meteorological spring temperature, of 34.8C in Kew Gardens in south-west London. The previous May peak of 32.8C had stood since 1922.

Trial of former DUP leader expected to last four weeks alongside trial of facts for wife, Eleanor, on charges of aiding and abetting

The jury in Jeffrey Donaldson’s trial for alleged sex offences has been sworn in, launching one of the most high-profile trials in recent Northern Irish history.

The former MP and Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader entered Newry crown court on Tuesday amid a heavy police and media presence for the trial which is expected to last about four weeks.

End of shutdown comes despite interim court order questioning authority of body overseeing the move

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Iran’s access to the global internet slowly restarted on Tuesday, ending a record 88-day blackout that has contributed to thousands of Iranians losing their jobs and provided cover for the Iranian security services to mount a large-scale wartime crackdown.

The resumption came despite an interim administrative court order questioning the authority of the body overseeing the move, called the “special headquarters for leading the country’s cyberspace”. The body had been set up by the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, a week ago.

Janice Nix convicted of manslaughter after brother of Andrea Bernard alters account of incident in 1978

A woman has been found guilty of killing her five-year-old stepdaughter by punishing her in a scalding hot bath almost 50 years ago.

Andrea Bernard’s death in 1978 in Thornton Heath, south London, was treated as an accident until the girl’s older brother, Desmond Bernard, went to police in 2022 with a new account of what happened, Isleworth crown court heard.

Owners’ lack of motivation due to ‘split incentive’ is main reason rental properties are missing out on energy upgrades, research finds

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Renters make up nearly a third of Australian households, yet many are missing out on energy upgrades – such as insulation, appliances and rooftop solar – that could slash their power bills and improve home comfort.

The problem, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), is landlords’ lack of motivation.

Oil prices were mixed after U.S. strikes on Iranian forces, underscoring the risks still hanging over markets and consumers.

The Supreme Court turned away an appeal by the NFL stemming from coach Brian Flores' racial discrimination suit, allowing his case to proceed in federal court.

Kentucky conservative says ‘I haven’t made a final decision about which office to seek, if I run’

Thomas Massie is planning his comeback.

The conservative Kentucky congressman filed to run again for the US House of Representatives in 2028, less than a week after losing to Donald Trump’s hand-picked challenger Ed Gallrein 55-45 in a bruising primary.

Prediction sites, which allow bets on all topics from weather to politics, may be in breach of country’s rules

Spain’s ministry of consumer rights has blocked access to Polymarket and Kalshi while it investigates whether the leading prediction market sites are violating Spanish law by operating without a gambling licence.

On Tuesday the ministry said it had launched disciplinary proceedings against the two platforms, which allow users to bet on everything from the weather to political events, amid allegations that they lacked the “necessary administrative authorisation” to operate in Spain.

TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 26, 2026 — One of COMPUTEX‘s organizers—TAITRA (Taiwan External Trade Development Council)—has announced that the COMPUTEX 2026 keynote address by Matt Murphy, Chairman and CEO of Marvell Technology, is now scheduled for June 2 at 10:30 a.m. (GMT+8) at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 2, 7F.

Matt Murphy, Chairman and CEO of Marvell Technology, and Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA

During the address entitled, “The Future of AI Depends on Connectivity,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, will make an appearance on stage with Murphy. Building on the companies’ partnership announced in March, Murphy and Huang will discuss how Marvell and NVIDIA are working together to provide customers with greater choice and flexibility in developing next-generation AI infrastructure. In addition, other executives from the extensive Marvell partner ecosystem will share how they are working closely with Marvell to help the industry unlock the next wave of AI innovation.

Marvell technologies enable the critical links in modern AI data center infrastructure—from inside servers and racks to the geographically distributed networks connecting data center regions—allowing customers to deploy AI-optimized systems with unprecedented performance and scale.

COMPUTEX 2026 with the theme “AI Together,” is set to take place from June 2 to June 5 at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 1 & 2, TWTC and TICC. This event will host 1,500 exhibitors across up to 6,000 booths, showcasing three major themes: AI & Computing, Robotics & Mobility, and Next-Gen Tech.

Registration & Event Information

• Registration: https://events.computextaipei.com.tw/en/KeynoteDetail03.aspx
• Exhibition Dates: June 2 – June 5, 2026
• Venues: Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 1 & 2; TWTC Hall 1

More from HPCwire

• Cisco Joins COMPUTEX 2026 Keynote Lineup with Focus on Full-Stack AI
• Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to Deliver Keynote at COMPUTEX 2026
• COMPUTEX 2026 Brings the Global AI Ecosystem to Taipei
• COMPUTEX Forum 2026 Opens for Registration
• Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon to Kick Off COMPUTEX 2026 with Opening Keynote

About COMPUTEX

COMPUTEX was founded in 1981. It has grown with the global ICT industry and become stronger over the last four decades. Bearing witness to historical moments in the development of and changes in the industry, COMPUTEX attracts more than 40,000 buyers to visit Taiwan every year. It is also the preferred platform chosen by top international companies for launching epoch-making products.

Taiwan has a comprehensive global ICT industry chain. Gaining a foothold in Taiwan, COMPUTEX is jointly held by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and Taipei Computer Association, aiming to build a global tech ecosystem. COMPUTEX has become a global benchmark exhibition for AI and startups, connecting global pioneers and enabling new sparks of breakthrough technology.

About TAITRA

Founded in 1970, TAITRA is Taiwan’s foremost nonprofit trade-promoting organization. Sponsored by the government and industry organizations, TAITRA assists enterprises in expanding their global reach. Headquartered in Taipei, TAITRA has a team of 1,300 specialists and operates 5 local offices as well as 62 branches worldwide. Together with Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) and Taiwan Trade Center (TTC), TAITRA has formed a global network dedicated to promoting world trade.

TAITRA’s five local branch offices in Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung provide services to companies outside metropolitan Taipei. Through these domestic offices, TAITRA is able to maintain close contact and interaction with local companies in their respective areas and provide direct and substantial services in areas such as feature trade promotion, business information, market seminars, on-the-job training, procurement meetings, meeting room rental, etc. Branch offices play vital roles in Taiwan Trade Shows coordination between Taipei headquarters and local companies, and invite buyers to visit local industries.

Source: COMPUTEX

The post NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang to Join Marvell CEO Matt Murphy at COMPUTEX 2026 Keynote appeared first on HPCwire.

Police responded to reports of gunfire at store in town of Scottsbluff, and found the culprit to be a dog

Police responding to reports of a shotgun blast at a convenience store sounds like the opening of countless American crime movies, but when cops in Nebraska responded to a recent such call they found an unusual culprit: a dog.

Local TV station KNOP News 2 reported that police in the town of Scottsbluff were called out to a local store recently after reports of a blast involving a shotgun.

Streaming platform says remix tool agreed with Universal Music Group will protect artists from piracy

Spotify’s chief executive has defended the company’s move into AI-generated music, claiming it offers users and creators a better alternative to piracy and unregulated AI slop.

Last week, the platform announced a new feature in which premium users will be allowed to create their own, AI-generated remixes and song covers using music from participating artists.

Combined Company Expected to Trade on Nasdaq Under Ticker Symbol ‘TQ’

ST. GALLEN, Switzerland and NEW YORK, May 26, 2026 — Terra Quantum AG, a global leader in quantum technologies, quantum security, and AI-driven optimization solutions, and Axiom Intelligence Acquisition Corp 1 (NASDAQ: AXINU), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, today announced the execution of a definitive Business Combination Agreement that will result in Terra Quantum becoming a publicly listed company.

Upon completion of the transaction, the combined company will operate under the Terra Quantum name and is expected to trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol “TQ.”

The transaction values Terra Quantum at an equity value of approximately $3.5 billion, representing an increase from the valuation contemplated under the Company’s previously announced non-binding letter of intent with another special purpose acquisition company. The enhanced valuation reflects Terra Quantum’s continued commercial growth, expanding strategic partnerships, and ongoing development of its quantum technology platforms.

Headquartered in St. Gallen, Terra Quantum has established itself as a leading quantum technology company through its unique combination of proprietary quantum algorithms, quantum security solutions, hybrid quantum-classical computing technologies, and enterprise-grade software platforms. The Company serves customers across financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, logistics, energy, government, and defense sectors, helping organizations solve computationally intensive problems that were previously impractical or impossible to address using conventional approaches.

Building the World’s Leading Quantum Technology Platform

Terra Quantum’s mission is to accelerate the practical adoption of quantum technologies by delivering measurable business outcomes today while preparing enterprises for the quantum-powered future.

Unlike many participants in the sector that remain focused primarily on hardware development, Terra Quantum has built a comprehensive technology stack that combines quantum computing, quantum-inspired optimization, artificial intelligence, and quantum cybersecurity into a unified platform capable of generating immediate commercial value. This approach has enabled the Company to establish a growing global footprint and position itself at the forefront of one of the most transformative technological shifts of the twenty-first century.

As governments and enterprises increasingly prioritize investments in advanced computing and secure digital infrastructure, Terra Quantum believes it is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the massive market opportunity expected to develop over the coming decades.

Management Commentary

“Today’s announcement marks a new chapter for Terra Quantum and validates the vision we established when we founded the company,” said Markus Pflitsch, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Terra Quantum. “Over the past several years, we have assembled a highly experienced team in quantum technology, developed a world-class portfolio of intellectual property, and demonstrated that quantum technologies can deliver real-world business value today. Becoming a publicly traded company will provide us with enhanced resources and visibility to accelerate innovation, expand globally, and further strengthen our position as a market leader in the quantum industry.”

Pflitsch continued: “We believe quantum computing will fundamentally reshape industries, economies, and national competitiveness over the coming decades. Terra Quantum believes it is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation through our technology platform, commercial focus, and commitment to making quantum solutions accessible and impactful for enterprises worldwide.”

“Axiom was formed to partner with an exceptional company that is defining the future of an important industry,” said Doug Ward, Chief Executive Officer of Axiom. “Following extensive diligence, we believe Terra Quantum stands apart as one of the most advanced and commercially focused quantum technology companies globally. Its combination of scientific excellence, proprietary technology, enterprise adoption, and visionary leadership, coupled with a strong track record of building and scaling DeepTech companies, creates a compelling platform for long-term value creation. We are excited to support Terra Quantum as a publicly traded company.”

Dr. Florian Neukart, Chief Technology Officer of Terra Quantum, added: “Our technology platform represents years of pioneering research and development by a highly experienced team of quantum scientists. By becoming a public company, we expect to have enhanced resources to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible with quantum computing while delivering practical solutions that create measurable value for our enterprise customers today. We are entering an exciting new phase of growth and innovation.”

Transaction Overview

The boards of directors of both Terra Quantum and Axiom have unanimously approved the proposed transaction.

Following the closing of the business combination, the combined company will continue to be led by Terra Quantum’s existing management team, including Markus Pflitsch (Founder & CEO), Dr. Eike Marx (CFO and Chief Strategic Officer) and Dr. Florian Neukart (CTO).

The combined company is expected to remain headquartered in St. Gallen, Switzerland, while continuing to expand its international operations and strategic presence in key global markets.

Transaction Structure and Pro Forma Ownership

The proposed business combination values Terra Quantum at an implied pro forma enterprise value of approximately $3.6 billion, assuming no redemptions by Axiom’s public stockholders.

Existing Terra Quantum shareholders are expected to roll 100% of their equity into the combined company. Upon closing, existing Terra Quantum shareholders are expected to own approximately 92% of the combined company, and Axiom’s public stockholders and sponsor are expected to own approximately 8%, in each case assuming no redemptions by Axiom’s public stockholders and excluding the impact of any additional financing.

Based on the funds in the trust account at the time of the IPO, the transaction is expected to deliver up to approximately $190 million of gross proceeds to the combined company, assuming no redemptions by Axiom’s public stockholders, and without taking into account transaction expenses. The parties may also seek to raise additional capital through a private placement of equity securities (PIPE) or other financing arrangements in connection with the closing of the business combination.

The transaction is expected to provide Terra Quantum with access to the public capital markets and additional financial flexibility to support:

• Continued investment in research and development;
• Expansion of enterprise sales and customer success capabilities;
• Strategic acquisitions and partnerships;
• Growth of its quantum security and quantum computing platforms; and
• Geographic expansion across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

The transaction is targeted to close in the second half of 2026, subject to, among other things: (i) approval by Axiom’s stockholders; (ii) the effectiveness of the Registration Statement to be filed with the SEC; (iii) the satisfaction of customary closing conditions set forth in the Business Combination Agreement; (iv) the receipt of required regulatory approvals; and (v) the approval of the listing of the combined company’s securities on the Nasdaq Stock Market. There can be no assurance that the parties will be able to satisfy these conditions or complete the proposed business combination on the anticipated timeline, or at all.

Additional information regarding the transaction will be included in a registration statement and proxy materials to be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

Advisors

Cohen & Company Capital Markets, a division of Cohen & Company Securities, LLC, is serving as exclusive financial and capital markets advisor to Terra Quantum. Heussen Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft mbH, together with Kellerhals Carrard, Winston & Strawn LLP, and Niedermann Rechtsanwälte, are serving as legal counsel to Terra Quantum.

Ellenoff Grossman & Schole LLP together with Bratschi are serving as legal counsel for Axiom.

More from HPCwire: Terra Quantum Eyes Public Markets Through $3.25B SPAC Deal

About Terra Quantum

Terra Quantum is a global quantum technology company focused on developing and commercializing quantum computing, quantum security, and AI-driven optimization solutions. The Company combines cutting-edge scientific research with enterprise-grade software products to help organizations solve complex computational challenges, improve decision-making, and prepare for the quantum future. Headquartered in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Terra Quantum serves customers and partners across multiple industries worldwide.

About Axiom Intelligence Acquisition Corp 1

Axiom is a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses.

Source: Terra Quantum

The post Terra Quantum to Go Public Through $3.5B SPAC Deal with Axiom appeared first on HPCwire.

A skydiver was killed and another suffered injuries after they collided during a scheduled "group jump" in Washington state, authorities said.

Democrat Andy Kim says he saw ‘chaos’ at the New Jersey ICE facility amid ‘standoff’ between protesters and agents

Andy Kim, a Democratic senator, said he was pepper sprayed by federal agents on Monday during a protest at a New Jersey detention facility.

Video posted on social media showed Kim receiving help from a volunteer who is seen pouring water in his eyes outside Delaney Hall in Newark, where detainees are reportedly staging a hunger strike against poor conditions and denial of medical care.

The university aims to use the system to spearhead quantum education and research while boosting STEM in the country.

POZNAN, Poland, May 26, 2026 — Poznan University of Technology (PUT) has launched its first locally installed quantum computer, deployed by IQM Quantum Computers, to advance education and scientific research in the field of quantum technologies.

The moment Poland switched on IQM’s second quantum computer. Minister of Science and Higher Education Dr. Marcin Kulasek, IQM CEO Jan Goetz and CCO Sylwia de Weydenthal, Rector of Poznań University of Technology Prof. Teofil Jesionowski, and industry leaders mark the occasion.

The installation of the IQM Radiance R1 system at the university aligns with the strategic objectives outlined in Poland’s quantum technology development roadmap, as well as broader European initiatives in this area.

Poland has a strong foundation in quantum technologies, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines, built on high academic standards currently supported by significant strategic investments from the government.

One of the key factors behind the university’s decision to select IQM’s offering was the company’s approach based on deployable, on-premises quantum systems, providing researchers, students, and engineers with direct access to a real quantum computer installed locally on campus.

This creates significantly broader opportunities for hands-on experimentation, infrastructure integration, education and hardware-level research compared to cloud-only access models.

“This is proof of our production quantum approach, where institutions such as Poznań University of Technology own their quantum computers, build internal expertise, and develop their own intellectual property,” said Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-founder of IQM Quantum Computers. “This deployment further strengthens Poland’s position as an important hub for quantum development in Central and Eastern Europe.”

The acquisition of the system also aligns with the growing quantum technology ecosystem in Poznan. Starting in October 2026, the university will begin enrolling students in a new engineering program entitled “Quantum Technologies,” further strengthening its long-term strategy for education and talent development.

In addition, the university will launch a master’s degree program focused on quantum computing and will provide access to the quantum computer for initiatives such as the emerging Polish Quantum Olympiad for secondary school students, as well as hackathons and other educational and innovation-focused events.

“The launch of a quantum computer at Poznan University of Technology is not only a milestone in the advancement of research, but above all the beginning of a new era in the education of our students. We want our students not merely to observe the technological revolution, but to actively help shape it from the very first years of their studies, using tools that are truly unique on a global scale,” said Prof. Teofil Jesionowski, Rector of Poznan University of Technology.

European and national strategies are increasingly emphasizing the importance of quantum technologies for scientific competitiveness, economic resilience and ensuring technological sovereignty. The university aims to actively engage in the development of this emerging ecosystem and contribute to its advancements.

With 23 systems sold to customers worldwide, IQM has agreed to a business combination with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ), having recently filed an F-4 registration statement to list on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in the U.S. IQM further intends to list on Nasdaq Helsinki after closing.

About Poznan University of Technology

Poznan University of Technology is a modern academic institution, a leader in innovation, and a strategic partner to industry. It is the lead institution of the EUNICE (European University for Customised Education). As one of Poland’s foremost centers for research, education, and innovation, the university enjoys strong international recognition. Its strengths lie in a unique combination of world-class infrastructure, internationally accredited educational programs, and highly experienced research teams.

For years, the university has consistently strengthened its position as a center of expertise whose impact extends far beyond academia. Its assets include a fleet of training aircraft, nearly zero-energy buildings, and its own photovoltaic farm. Through active participation in major international research programs, including European Research Council grants, Horizon Europe, and Foundation for Polish Science initiatives, researchers, doctoral candidates, and students at Poznań University of Technology make significant contributions to the advancement of European science and innovation.

This vision of continuous progress is reflected in the university’s strategic investment in the technologies of tomorrow. The acquisition of a quantum computer positions Poznań University of Technology among an elite group of educational and research institutions worldwide. Thanks to this unique infrastructure, students gain an unparalleled opportunity to develop their skills through hands-on experience with one of the world’s most advanced technologies. This enables the university not only to drive breakthrough innovations in the post-silicon era, but above all to educate future leaders capable of defining new standards in global science and technology.

About IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Finland Oy (IQM Quantum Computers, IQM) is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, national laboratories and enterprises worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Finland, it has over 350 employees. IQM operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM has filed an F-4 registration statement to the SEC with the intention to become the first publicly listed European quantum company on Nasdaq Global Exchange in the U.S by merging with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ).

Source: IQM

The post Poland’s Poznan University of Technology Unveils IQM Quantum Computer to Drive Research and Education appeared first on HPCwire.

I've shot hours and hours of footage with my pre-production sample. Here are my thoughts about this new action camera.

Elite capture of Africa’s critical minerals mustn’t be mistaken for resource sovereignty The World Today mhiggins.drupal 26 May 2026

The exploitation of resource riches by unaccountable leaders is not the same as states stewarding mineral supplies for the benefit of their people, write Christopher Vandome and Tighisti Amare.

The article ‘Critical mineral-rich Africa can look after itself’ published in the spring issue of The World Today addresses the capacity of African countries to make the most of the resources they may have. It correctly noted that leaders of these countries should assert ‘resource sovereignty’ for the benefit of their societies and economies. However, some of the examples it discusses are problematic.

African political leadership and institutional configurations are the most important determinants of whether states benefit from their natural resources. Sovereign resource management on behalf of citizens can drive diversified development. By contrast, the capture of mineral wealth by narrow elites for personal enrichment and to secure external support for political survival perpetuates inequality and insecurity.

The former is the legitimate exercise of sovereignty through consensual contract renegotiation and the revision of regulatory regimes in ways that increase public benefit and transparency while maintaining trust with good-faith partners. The latter is ‘elite capture’, by which a small group seizes the levers of state and then uses control over mineral resources to strike opaque security and financial bargains often with malign actors, consolidating authoritarian governance rather than accountable institutions.

Predatory actors

As such, the article’s example of President Ibrahim Traoré’s mining reforms in Burkina Faso is perhaps not the best illustration of agency. The president came to power through a military coup in 2022 and now governs a country in which the state effectively controls just a fraction of national territory. The withdrawal in January 2025 of Burkina Faso from the regional bloc ECOWAS has weakened regional mechanisms for addressing insecurity and deepened tensions with neighbours. Social media campaigns, linked to the president’s brother, extol the virtues of African agency and will have you believe that the nationalization of mining assets is a bold assertion of resource sovereignty. The detail is more troubling.

Mining licences have been issued to a Russian firm operating under international sanctions; Burkina Faso’s gold is also widely suspected to be financing Russia’s war in Ukraine and underwriting presidential security deals with Russian security contractors. These arrangements will almost certainly cut the country off from legitimate international financial markets, leaving it with fewer bargaining options and at the mercy of predatory actors whose interests are often at odds with long-term national development.

Furthermore, the government’s cancellation of licences for industrial operators leaves deposits and supply chains vulnerable to illegal extraction and potential exploitation by traders linked to regional terrorism. Unregulated artisanal production, often involving child and slave labour, has increased in Burkina Faso and across the region.

The article also refers to the transatlantic slave trade, citing African rulers who played European powers against each other to drive up prices. Even with historical contextualization, few African citizens view the slave trade – an indelible stain on the conscience of humanity – as a moment of negotiating success. This was obviously not a moment of collective agency; rather, it was an earlier form of elite capture, in which narrow interests were advanced at profound human and societal cost.

Successful stewards

None of which is to say that the 21st-century African state cannot be a successful steward of its mineral resources. For instance, Morocco’s Office Chérifien des Phosphates (the OCP Group) demonstrates how state ownership, long-term planning and transparent corporate governance can provide both national benefit and global competitiveness in the extractive sector. African states should be able to renegotiate mining contracts or update regulatory frameworks; but this must be done in ways that reduce risk, attract patient capital and align with citizens’ interests rather than the security of a narrow elite.

African leaders have real choices in how they engage with international demand for resources. And a more nuanced argument is how they can design deals that bring together African, Chinese, Gulf and western capital, expertise and political partners to de-risk projects and anchor them in long-term developmental needs.

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Trump’s mass deportation campaign is accelerating the climate crisis. Plus, US students on why they booed their pro-AI graduation speakers

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Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has spurred at least an 80% increase in immigration flights year over year, accelerating the climate crisis by emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide, according to data analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian.

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On the morning of Sept. 16, 2024, Emily Waldorf’s preschooler found her curled on the bathroom floor. Waldorf had felt a strange pressure during a shower, like a balloon bulging into her vagina, and was now bleeding. “I can be your pillow, mommy,” her daughter said, nuzzling into her neck. 

Waldorf was 17 weeks pregnant. She and her husband, Justin, dropped their daughter off at her grandparents’ and rushed to Washington Regional Hospital in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Waldorf worked as an acute care physical therapist. 

In a dark room, a doctor pointed to an hourglass shape glowing on the ultrasound screen: There was her amniotic sac, funneling into her dilated cervix, and there was their tiny daughter’s foot, dipping out. 

“Your body is about to miscarry,” the doctor said. 

Three doctors gathered and told the couple that the longer Waldorf’s cervix remained open and her uterus exposed to bacteria, the higher her risk of developing a life-threatening infection. The standard of care, they explained, would be to quickly empty her womb. 

But they couldn’t do that, one doctor said apologetically, sighing deeply. The baby still had a detectable heartbeat, and stopping it would run afoul of a state abortion ban that snapped into place after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022; violations carried penalties of up to $100,000 in fines and 10 years in prison. They needed to wait until Waldorf went into labor on her own or showed signs of a dangerous infection, or until the fetal heartbeat ended.

“Our hands are tied behind our backs,” Dr. Erin Large later told her, according to a journal Waldorf began keeping on her phone and shared with ProPublica. “Tell your friends to vote differently.”

Raised Baptist in a Republican family, Waldorf struggled to understand what the doctors were saying as waves of grief hit her. How could an abortion ban aimed at women who wanted to end their pregnancies keep doctors from helping a woman who didn’t? 

Waldorf didn’t oppose abortion, but she had never considered that the law could apply to her. Her father was a doctor. This was the hospital where she had worked for the past six years. The OB-GYN team treating her had delivered her daughter, and some of them lived blocks from her parents. She was a highly educated 38-year-old woman with connections to the governor. As she lay in a hospital bed, worried that infection could enter her uterus at any moment, she finally understood the ban now applied to anyone losing a baby.

Trapped in a medical limbo, she took a nurse friend’s advice and began writing everything down. That journal, along with her medical records and interviews, offer a rare, harrowing account of how Arkansas’ abortion ban, not best practices or medical training, guided her doctors’ choices.

She was miscarrying as hospitals, physicians, lawmakers and medical boards around the country were being confronted with the reality that the bans, designed to be as strict and punitive as possible, were causing preventable harm and even deaths. Yet even as more of these cases stacked up, there was no coordination between states to protect women. Each state, each woman seemed to operate in a vacuum. And Waldorf would find she was in it alone.

One of the doctors advised Waldorf to go home and told her what to expect: At any moment, she could start bleeding heavily and go into labor. It might happen while she was going to the bathroom or playing on the floor with her daughter.

When the baby started to emerge, the doctor said, Waldorf shouldn’t pull too hard or she could rip the baby’s head off. She would need to cut the umbilical cord herself and return to the hospital for care in a diaper, her fetus wrapped in towels and the cord hanging between her legs. 

Waldorf didn’t want her daughter, or herself, to have those memories inside their home. So she begged to stay, and the doctors agreed. No one could predict when the ordeal would be over. 

Waldorf settled into a small hospital room, her husband glued to the vinyl couch beside her, both reeling from the impending loss of what would have been their second daughter.

The pregnancy had been far enough along to start getting their 4-year-old daughter excited about decorating a nursery, family-of-four camping trips and what it would mean to become a big sister. 

Now they had to engage in the morbid ritual of waiting for that dream to die. Doctors and nurses with Doppler machines and ultrasounds kept showing up, forcing them to hear the heartbeat and see the movement of a tiny body. “Oh look,” Large said during one of the ultrasounds, “she’s opening and closing her mouth.”

“My body failed a baby,” Waldorf wrote in her journal. 

Waldorf’s job, treating critical patients in the intensive care unit, had taught her to compartmentalize, to stay cool under pressure. But as the days bled together, her resolve turned to panic when she discovered one outcome she had not considered. 

Scrolling through social media on her third night, a headline caught her eye: “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.”

On the day Waldorf was admitted to the hospital, ProPublica had published an investigation on the death of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant who died of infection after doctors delayed emptying her uterus. Thurman left behind a 6-year-old son. 

“Oh my god, it isn’t just me,”Waldorf thought.“But she died.”

Almost exactly three years before Waldorf showed up at Washington Regional in urgent need of care, a 28-year-old woman named Josseli Barnica arrived at a Houston emergency room with the same condition. She, too, was 17 weeks pregnant. The fetus’ head was pressed up against her dilated cervix, and a miscarriage was, according to her medical record, “inevitable.” 

When her husband rushed from work to her side, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: Inducing delivery or emptying her uterus would be “a crime,” he later told ProPublica. “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat.”

Texas, like Arkansas, has a criminal abortion ban. Had Barnica landed in one of the hospitals across the world, from Nigeria to Mexico, that follow standards from the World Health Organization and countless medical associations, her treatment would have been much different.

In those hospitals, when a patient’s cervix opens too soon, signaling an “inevitable miscarriage,” or when their water breaks before the fetus can survive, known as previable preterm premature rupture of membranes (shorthanded as “PPROM”), it’s standard for doctors to offer to empty the uterus. That’s true even if there is still a heartbeat, given the high risk of infection. 

“This is basic obstetrics,” said Dr. Alison Goulding, a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist in Texas. “Everyone should know that you have to provide an abortion in these settings or women can die.” 

For 40 hours, Barnica waited in the hospital for the heartbeat to stop, with her cervix exposed to bacteria. She died three days after she delivered, ProPublica reported in October 2024; the cause was a deadly infection. The hospital declined to comment on Barnica’s case but said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and physicians exercise their independent judgment. The doctors involved did not respond to requests for comment. 

Her death and those of six other women in three states over the next three years brought into sharp focus the consequences of the bans. Because the laws’ exceptions for medical emergencies are vague and have rarely been tested in courts, liability-conscious hospital administrators, lawyers and doctors have sometimes put legal concerns above their patients’ well-being, ProPublica’s reporting has found. 

Texas lawmakers responded to ProPublica’s investigations by amending the exceptions in their state laws to make clear that a life-threatening emergency did not need to be “imminent” for physicians to act. The state’s medical board specified that doctors can empty the uterus of any patient with PPROM, and it requires doctors to undergo training to ensure they know that.

But Texas’ reforms stopped at its borders. Without a single federal law governing abortion, each of the 19 other states with similar bans were not required or advised to follow suit. That includes Arkansas, which touts its designation as the “most pro-life state in America.” 

Since its ban took effect, not one person there has been granted a medically necessary abortion, according to the state’s public data.

The state’s Republican lawmakers and officials have repeatedly shot down attempts to broaden the law’s exceptions. And when advocates tried to launch a ballot initiative to let voters weigh in, Republicans blocked it over a paperwork error and created restrictions to make those initiatives harder to file. 

The doctors and Democrats fighting for reform have been doing so without essential knowledge that could help make their case. Though the two states share a border, news of Texas’ changes to its abortion ban — and why they were made — had failed to have an impact across the state line.

Three Democratic state representatives said they hadn’t heard of the new Texas guidance until ProPublica asked about it. “If there are things that are working in other states, we should be looking at that,” said one, Ashley Hudson, who has tried twice to pass broader exceptions. 

On her fourth morning in the hospital, Waldorf was sitting on the toilet when she felt something heavy fall. There was so much blood, she couldn’t see what it was. She thought it was the baby, but a nurse confirmed it was a blood clot, 3 inches across.

Waldorf’s water had broken. All morning, she watched the amniotic fluid drain out of her. Now there was virtually no chance the fetus’s lungs would develop to reach the edge of viability in seven weeks. There was only the risk of infection, growing every passing hour. 

She was convinced that this meant the doctors would finally have to induce her to avoid infection. But after confirming that her fetus still had heart tones, the OB-GYN on duty, Dr. Britte Smith, said she couldn’t induce yet. First she’d need to consult the hospital’s risk-management team.

“Oh,” Waldorf thought. “I’m a liability.”

Smith returned about two hours later, Waldorf recalled, and told her she had two options: She could remain under observation at the hospital, or she could get into her car and drive nearly four hours to Kansas, a state with no abortion ban, where doctors could induce her. The hospital would not authorize a transfer or arrange to send her in an ambulance, and it offered no explanation for why. 

Medical records note that the risk-management team was consulted twice over the next 31 hours, and Smith wrote: “Since there is still a heartbeat and no signs of maternal infection, we can not proceed” with induction of labor. Smith did not respond to requests for comment. 

Waldorf called the maternal-fetal-medicine team at the University of Arkansas for Medical Science in Little Rock, the state’s only academic health center. The team told her standard treatment guidelines recommended that she be induced if she didn’t deliver within 12 to 24 hours because the risk for infection rises every hour. But they also said: “It can’t be done in Arkansas.” The hospital told ProPublica it could not comment on Waldorf’s experience. 

Waldorf’s sister, Elizabeth Rowe, had almost died of hemorrhaging during childbirth, so the family felt an hourslong drive to Kansas through rural roads without medical support was not an option. 

Waldorf’s family and friends were shocked she was running into so many obstacles. Her father, a gastroenterologist named Kenneth Rodgers, was baffled. “You don’t sit around and wait for somebody to become septic. You do whatever it takes to prevent them from becoming septic,” he said. “If I don’t do what’s medically indicated in a potentially life-threatening situation, then I am liable for neglect. Why isn’t this the same thing?” 

Her mother and stepfather were also outraged. 

“It’s inhumane,” her mother, Linda Quattlebaum, said. “I’m pro-life, but for the mother.” Her husband, Paul Quattlebaum, fumed, “If I took my dog to a vet and it had this problem, that dog would get better treatment.”

The next morning, day five, 24 hours had gone by since Waldorf’s water broke. She texted a friend from college that her temperature had risen to 99.3 degrees. 

“What is next?” her friend, Lindsey Haire, wrote back. “Can they help you now?” 

“I think it has to be like 100.4,” Waldorf wrote. “They will continue to monitor my temp or my symptoms.”

“Dear lord,” Haire responded.

Waldorf had spelled out the catch-22 in her journal that morning: “If I need a blood transfusion and it stabilizes my condition, they cannot induce. If my temp continues to spike then they can induce.”

When her sister, Rowe, walked in that morning, she found Waldorf with her eyes wide and glazed over, her jaw tensed. Justin slumped on the couch looking defeated. “Are they going to let me die?” Waldorf asked.

Rowe had never seen her sister this way; Waldorf was always the calm and practical one when challenges arose. 

“That’s crazy,” Rowe said. “We’re in a hospital. People come to the hospital for them to save your life, not to let you die.” 

Some hospitals in states with abortion bans have taken steps to protect their patients. 

When Ohio was under a six-week ban in 2022 and 2023, a group of hospitals in one region gathered to hash out collective policies, including for miscarriages, said Dr. Justin Lappen, the chair of the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine’s committee on reproductive health. “Everyone at the same time thought the worst thing to do would be to have different practices,” he said. 

So they resolved to interpret the vague law the same way: PPROM qualified as a medical emergency. “There’s power in numbers,” he said. “If we are going to do something, we should do it together and be similar, because that also hopefully gives you legal protection.”

But that’s far from the norm. A 2024 Senate Finance Committee report, commissioned in the wake of ProPublica’s reporting on Thurman’s death, found that many hospital leaders and lawyers have left doctors to fend for themselves and have at times remained “conspicuously and deliberately silent” on how to provide care for miscarriages under the bans. 

Physicians described hospital lawyers who “refused to meet” with them for months, were “pretty much impossible” to reach during “life or death” scenarios, and offered little help beyond “regurgitating” the law, according to the report. Information on how to handle the legal conflicts between the bans and federal law is usually not written down and, in some cases, is provided only on a “need-to-know” basis. 

ProPublica has also reported that hospitals in different regions of Texas took vastly different approaches to treating miscarriage — and that miscarrying patients were far more likely to get gravely ill where hospitals weren’t offering abortions without signs of infection. 

Many hospitals in abortion ban states will not even disclose their policy on PPROM to the public, ProPublica surveys have found. Of 10 hospitals with significant labor and delivery wards in Arkansas, only one responded to ProPublica’s questions. 

The University of Arkansas Medical Sciences shared its frequently asked questions on abortion policy that stated, in part, “Under Arkansas law, may an abortion be performed if the mother’s life is at risk? It depends.” Only abortions “necessary” to preserve a patient’s life are allowed, not ones that could prevent “possible” emergencies, according to the hospital’s general counsel. 

“Hospital leaders and institutional lawyers are basically interpreting these laws so conservatively, and so worried about a criminal charge, that they have forgotten about basic professionalism values of healthcare,” said Dr. Jody Steinauer, a professor of OB-GYN at the University of California, San Francisco who studies the impacts of abortion bans. 

In interviews with seven doctors who worked in Arkansas, all said that no hospitals allow doctors to provide abortions for patients with “inevitable miscarriage” or PPROM without signs of infection. 

Dr. Dina Epstein, an OB-GYN in Little Rock, said she and her colleagues see cases like Waldorf’s often. They are always excruciating.

Her patients often panic and beg for help, but none have had the resources to travel to another state for care. Doctors at her hospital are left to negotiate among themselves over what counts as sick enough for them to act, Epstein said. “What organ needs to fail? What thing needs to happen that pushes us over the edge?”

Many hospitals and doctors remain paralyzed, experts say, even though none have been prosecuted for treating a miscarriage with a procedure that would be considered an abortion.

“It’s been five years, and people are still like: ‘I don’t know what we can do,’” said Ghazaleh Moayedi, a doctor in Texas who never stopped providing abortions for women facing miscarriages. “That’s willful ignorance at this point.”

Rowe wracked her brain for something, or someone, who might be able to help her sister. 

She began calling up private ambulance companies, but they would not agree to drive Waldorf because they considered her condition unstable. The cost of a medevac helicopter was in the tens of thousands of dollars. Rowe considered putting it on a credit card. 

Then it struck her. “Let’s call up Sarah,” Rowe said.

The family didn’t personally know Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but in their small-town Baptist circles, she felt only a degree away. Waldorf had gone to the same college, four years behind, and joined the same sorority, known as a social club, at Ouachita Baptist University. They had friends whose cousins had been in the governor’s wedding or had gone on vacation with her. One of those friends had even invited Waldorf to stay at a historic eight-room bed and breakfast with the governor during Ouachita’s annual alumni event in two weeks’ time. 

On Waldorf’s fifth day in the hospital, Rowe reached an aide in the governor’s office at 9:27 a.m., according to Waldorf’s journal. She tried to lay it on thick, telling the aide about the connections Waldorf and Sanders shared. 

“We recommend you seek legal advice,” the aide responded.

“This is an emergency,” Rowe countered. “We need some help now!”

The aide’s reply, according to Rowe: “What is it you expect the governor’s office to do?” 

The sisters had the law’s exception language pulled up on a phone. It defined a medical emergency as “a condition in which an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of a pregnant woman whose life is endangered by … a physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself.” Waldorf’s case certainly counted, they argued, and they begged for someone to call the hospital and the attorney general’s office. 

The aide offered to learn more and call back, but the family says it never received another call. A friend also called the governor’s office twice and reached two different aides and got a similar response. ProPublica asked the governor’s office if Sanders was aware of the calls at the time, and if not, what her message would be to women facing this kind of situation. The spokesperson did not respond to the questions, but said: “Governor Sanders has prioritized not just the wellbeing of Arkansas’ unborn children but also at-risk kids and mothers.” 

A friend reached out to Molly Duane, at the time a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who was representing dozens of women denied medical care under abortion bans. Among them was Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who contracted sepsis and lost a fallopian tube in 2021 after doctors refused to induce her at 18 weeks pregnant in circumstances much like Waldorf’s. In response to that case, the Texas Supreme Court said PPROM should count as a medical emergency. 

When Duane received the call, she was confident she had the expertise and the data to fix any fear or misunderstanding the hospital might have. “This is not a hospital in the middle of nowhere,” Duane said, “This is the hospital where she works. Surely I can convince them that providing the standard of care is legal.” 

Her arguments made little headway. In a conversation with Andrew Cozart, the hospital’s director of risk management, and Thomas Olmstead, its general counsel, Olmstead told her, “We cannot rule out the possibility of an overzealous prosecutor,” she recalled. 

Duane sent Cozart evidence it would be a violation of medical standards and common understandings of the law’s exception if the hospital didn’t provide Waldorf an induction. ProPublica reviewed the letter Duane sent and reached out to Cozart and Olmstead, who did not respond to requests for comment.

At 5 p.m., about an hour after the email was sent, Waldorf was getting out of the shower when the CEO of the hospital, Larry Shackelford, knocked on her door. “Let me put on some clothes first,” she told the nurse, flustered. 

Waldorf was used to seeing Shackelford addressing staff at the front of a conference room, polished in a suit and tie. But when he opened the door, he looked disheveled, like he had stood up from his desk and run down the hall.

Waldorf and her husband recall him standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed as she looked at him with her arms crossed. “I feel like a ticking time bomb right now,” Waldorf told him. “I’ve been here for five days, and you guys have not done anything for me.”

“I’m so sorry you’re in this situation,” the Waldorfs recalled Shackelford saying. “We’re going to take the very best care of you.”

He didn’t say much else, except to repeat that she would get the best care, as if that was all he had been authorized to say. When he left, the couple was confused. Was Shackelford saying the hospital was finally going to allow an induction? Or was this a political visit meant to mollify them? Shackelford did not respond to a request for comment. 

But Large returned and told them the hospital’s decision hadn’t changed. “With positive fetal heart rate and no evidence of maternal distress/severe illness at this time unable to augment/induce labor to expedite delivery,” the doctor wrote in the medical records; she advised they should consider going home.

Soon after, Washington Regional officials told Duane they would agree to transfer Waldorf to a hospital in Kansas, where abortion at her gestational stage was legal. Duane found a team at The University of Kansas Health System about four hours away. 

Before authorizing the transfer, though, Large told Waldorf she had to say specific words.

“Repeat after me,” Large said, the Waldorfs and Rowe recall. “I no longer want to receive care here. I would like to transfer to another hospital with a higher level of care.”

Waldorf repeated the words, and they were noted in her medical record. 

At 10:20 p.m., Waldorf was strapped into a five-point harness in the back of an ambulance and began the bumpy ride along rural roads. Her husband and sister followed behind, watching her anxiously through the window. 

Her arrival at the Kansas hospital felt nothing like what she had experienced in Arkansas, Waldorf wrote. Women in green scrubs and hairnets were lined up to greet her as her stretcher rolled out of the elevator. Their leader, Dr. Megan Thomas, spoke first.

“We are so glad you made it,” she said.

The University of Kansas hospital system was not always this helpful.

Two years earlier, its legal team at a separate facility had blocked care to a woman named Mylissa Farmer for PPROM at 17 weeks, even though the state did not have a sweeping abortion ban.

The Biden administration investigated the case as a violation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which it interpreted as dictating that hospitals must offer patients abortions in emergency situations, even if they are in states with bans. 

Federal investigators learned that The University of Kansas Health System officials had deemed the political climate “too hot and heated” to help Farmer, according to their report. The government cited the hospital for violating the law and threatened fines if the system didn’t correct issues that led to the denial of care. The hospital said Farmer’s care was in line with hospital policy, medical standards and the law based on the facts known at the time. The University of Kansas Health System has since become something of a beacon for women in Waldorf’s situation.

It’s hard to see where that kind of accountability push would come from today. 

The Trump administration rescinded the Biden-era guidance pressing hospitals to offer emergency abortions and dropped the government’s related lawsuit.

Republican lawmakers in states with bans haven’t introduced legislation to punish hospitals and physicians who fail to provide care, even though they often blame deaths and injuries under bans on malpractice and confusion.

And state medical boards, which oversee the licensure of doctors, have not disciplined physicians reported to have refused to perform a medically necessary abortion during a miscarriage, including the doctors involved in Barnica’s, Zurawski’s and Farmer’s care. 

If the medical board in Arkansas could issue guidance about PPROM like the one put out in Texas, that would help enormously, doctors there told ProPublica. “It addresses the vagueness and all the specific questions we have as providers,” Epstein, the Little Rock doctor, said. 

Even the prominent anti-abortion advocacy group Americans United for Life told ProPublica it agreed with the Texas stance on treating previable PPROM. 

ProPublica asked the Arkansas Medical Board, the governor’s office and Republican lawmakers who sponsored the abortion ban if they planned to issue similar guidance. 

The Arkansas board told ProPublica the law is already clear enough. Medical boards in 18 other states that banned abortion either said they did not have plans to issue new guidance or did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

The governor’s office did not answer questions from ProPublica.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, Mary Bentley, a Republican state representative and lead sponsor of the original ban, said she believes that the law does allow doctors to offer abortions to women with PPROM and that they do not need to wait for signs of infection. She said she is reaching out to the medical board to see if they can issue guidance similar to Texas’ and she would work toward more legislation if needed.

“Medical decisions should not be made by lawyers,” she said. “We need to just clarify it for them better. The women of our state definitely deserve it.” 

One of the last levers of accountability is the courts. Abortion-rights groups, including Amplify Legal, where Molly Duane is now the litigation director, have sued at least 13 states over their laws, sometimes forcing clarifying statements from judges — though they’ve had limited impact so far. 

One lawyer in Texas has started filing malpractice lawsuits. Michelle Maloney represents 10 women or their families who allege doctors did not provide medical care that should have been considered legal under the abortion law’s medical emergency exception. 

“I think it is the most effective way to potentially make hospital systems do what they need to do to support doctors,” Maloney said. “If we can create some risk on the other side, hopefully we can motivate people to do the right thing.”

Soon after Waldorf arrived at the Kansas hospital, she received misoprostol to induce labor and delivered around 1 p.m. 

She and Justin held their daughter for a few precious moments as her heartbeat stilled, marveling at her perfect tiny fingers and toes and whispering private words of love. 

They named her Bee, in honor of the interconnectedness of the natural world, and so they could see reminders of her each spring. 

Then the tenor in the room turned. Waldorf’s placenta was having trouble detaching. Blood kept gushing out, soaking the pads under her dark red. The nurse kept weighing them.

“Is that a lot of blood?” Waldorf asked, her eyes locked with those of the nurse.

“It’s a lot of blood,” the nurse replied.

The monitor began beeping. Waldorf’s blood pressure was dangerously low. Justin saw his wife’s face turn white.

Working in the intensive care unit, Waldorf had seen patients die with this exact combination of symptoms. “This is it,” she thought. 

A doctor reached elbow-deep into her uterus, trying to loosen the placenta. The team was about to take her to the operating room when he was finally able to detach it. 

Doctors said she lost a liter of blood and her complications were likely worse for having been forced to wait so long to deliver. 

Waldorf realized that if she had gone into labor at home or on the road, there was no way she would have made it to the hospital in time.

In Waldorf’s medical record, the Kansas doctors stated the induction was performed “with the intent to preserve the life and health of the mother.” It included four dense paragraphs citing evidence of the high risks of sepsis and hemorrhage if the medical team waited to empty her uterus. 

Some hospitals in states with bans have provided similar prewritten language their physicians can use to remove ambiguity about why an abortion falls under an emergency exception. Washington Regional, which has not provided such guidance to its doctors, declined to comment on its policies. None of the doctors involved in Waldorf’s care at Washington Regional agreed to discuss the case.

Back at home, Waldorf’s mother came to stay. Waldorf continued to bleed so much that she didn’t want to go out in public and suffered headaches for a week. In her journal, she unpacked her grief and rage.

“It all feels quite like the Handmaid’s tale,” she wrote on Sept. 24. “I had to seek refuge, travel by ambulance across borders.”

She and Justin had a hard time explaining to their daughter what had happened when she would ask when her little sister would arrive. They told her she wasn’t coming anymore, until the girl eventually stopped asking. 

Alumni weekend came around. Waldorf had canceled the stay at the bed-and-breakfast with the governor, but she decided seeing her community might be healing. At the opening event, the emcee announced that Sanders was in attendance and the audience rose to applaud. Waldorf stayed seated. So did her mother and stepfather, who had supported the governor for years.

Her stepfather tore the Sanders bumper sticker off his car and made it known to local politicians what had happened. 

On Dec. 8, the night before she was scheduled to return to work, Waldorf found herself frantically cleaning her house and snapping at her daughter.

The next morning, she could barely push herself out of the car. Walking into Washington Regional, she was flooded with memories of the days she had spent there as a patient, and of how her colleagues and the CEO had not been able to help her.

A month later, she submitted her resignation letter. The decision made her feel lighter, she wrote. “Exhausted. Free.” She started her own physical therapy practice that spring, naming it Hive Therapy in honor of Bee. 

She estimates the lost income, startup debt and out-of-pocket medical costs from her ordeal at more than $147,000. Included in the tally was more than $5,000 for the ambulance ride to Kansas, which Washington Regional was unwilling to pay for. 

In a letter to Duane, the hospital’s general counsel, Thomas Olmstead, used Waldorf’s words against her — the words Large had asked her to repeat. 

The ambulance transfer happened because of Waldorf’s “specific request,” he wrote, and not because the attending physician believed that Waldorf needed a “higher level of care.” 

“It is simply not reasonable for you to make demand that WRMC assume responsibility for the cost of a patient-directed transfer,” he wrote. Olmstead has since been promoted to executive leadership. He did not respond to a request for comment. 

When reached for comment, Large would not speak about Waldorf’s case even though Waldorf had given her permission to. But, she said, “I am glad that the topic at hand is being discussed, because that’s incredibly important. I’m glad her voice is being heard.” 

The Arkansas Medical Board said it is not currently investigating any complaints against the doctors. Local lawyers have been unwilling to take on a malpractice case because Waldorf didn’t die or end up with permanent injuries. 

A year after leaving her job, in February 2026, Waldorf joined a lawsuit led by Duane, alongside an OB-GYN and five other women denied care under the Arkansas abortion law. It seeks to block the state’s ban on the grounds that it violates the state constitution; named as defendants are Sanders, the Arkansas attorney general, state prosecutors and members of the state medical board. The state is currently trying to get the case thrown out on jurisdictional grounds, and the governor’s office told ProPublica, “Governor Sanders looks forward to defending Arkansas’ pro-life laws in court.”

Waldorf’s personal story and deep Arkansas roots seem to have grabbed the attention of people who don’t usually follow abortion policy. Boys she knew in college who she hasn’t talked to in 20 years reached out to say how upset they were to hear about her experience. A pastor she’d known since childhood defended her on Facebook against anti-abortion attacks. Friends who described themselves as “pro-life” have written long messages about how her story has sickened them and how they want the law changed. 

Waldorf said she hopes that sharing the details of her trauma may finally make a difference. But it hasn’t stopped her from reliving it all. Fayetteville is small. Barely a day goes by where she doesn’t bump into former co-workers from the hospital — at the grocery store or the coffee shop or school pick-up. Recently, she saw Large a few booths over at a local restaurant. 

Each run-in brings it all pouring back. The ultrasounds. The “risk management.” The blood, so much blood.

But also, the state line. The relief she felt crossing it.

The post She Faced a Life-Threatening Miscarriage. Under Arkansas’ Abortion Ban, Even Calls to the Governor’s Office Didn’t Help. appeared first on ProPublica.

Dodge installation fees and take security into your own hands with these super smart security kits.

What are Iran’s next domestic, regional and international moves? 1 June 2026 — 12:00 TO 13:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 26 May 2026 Online

Three months after the war, this panel examines how Iran’s leadership is navigating wartime governance, elite dynamics and public sentiment at home, while recalibrating its regional strategy and engagement with both allies and adversaries.

Three months after the outbreak of war, Tehran is facing economic strain and continued challenges to its domestic stability, all the while having to recalibrate its regional posture and international strategy in light of evolving conflict dynamics and shifting geopolitical alignments.

This panel examines how Iran’s leadership is navigating wartime governance, elite dynamics and public sentiment at home, while recalibrating its regional strategy and engagement with both allies and adversaries. It will further assess how these domestic and external pressures are shaping Tehran’s deterrence calculus and diplomatic positioning in an increasingly fluid regional and international environment.

The new species, named Microeledone galapagensis, has a blue hue, which is believed to be the rarest color in nature.

Measure could ease concerns from countries – such as France – that are sceptical about bringing in more members

• Europe live – latest updates

The EU could deny future member states veto rights for several years in an attempt to make enlargement more politically acceptable as the bloc undergoes a push to admit new countries before the end of the decade.

Under plans being considered by the European Commission, prospective member states – such as Moldova and western Balkan countries – would not, on joining the EU, have the automatic right to veto foreign policy decisions or other issues agreed by unanimity, such as taxation.

North Korea launched multiple short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea, South Korea's military said, the latest in a series of weapons demonstrations by Pyongyang this year.

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Kareem’s Daily Quote

“I am a reasonable man. I just have a low tolerance for people who aren’t.” Spenser, Robert B. Parker’s detective character

The line is from Robert B. Parker’s famous Boston detective, Spenser, but honestly it’s a sentiment most of us have wanted to tattoo on our foreheads at one point or another.

At first, it’s simply a classic tough-guy wisecrack: punchy, a little arrogant, deeply relatable. But in actuality it hits on a major, frustrating truth about how we interact with each other every day. It’s a flag that sets boundaries in a world that often feels like it’s losing its mind.

Our American culture praises people for being “chill.” Though we’re in no way mellow, we’re nevertheless told to go with the flow, keep the peace, and understand that everyone has their own perspective. For the most part, that’s great advice, if slightly cliché. Being reasonable means you’re willing to compromise. You listen, you weigh the facts, and you accept that you aren’t always the smartest person in the room.

But there is a dangerous trap here: confusing being reasonable with being dormant. When you have a high tolerance for unreasonable behavior, you end up burning your own time and sanity to keep someone else comfortable. You find yourself nodding along to a coworker who’s saying unreasonable things, or playing therapist to a friend who refuses to fix their own predictable problems. Spenser’s quote is a reminder that you don’t have to accept chaos just to prove you’re tolerant.

What makes the quote so brilliant is the contrast between its two sentences. The first half, ”I am a reasonable man,” establishes that you’re willing to play by the rules. You are fair. If someone brings a valid argument or a genuine mistake to the table, you’re ready to meet them halfway.

The second half, ”I just have a low tolerance for people who aren’t,” says you’re actually not “tolerant” at all. You set a boundary. And the moment the other person abandons logic, fairness, or basic respect, the reasonability is over. It’s an acknowledgment that you cannot use reason to change the mind of someone who didn’t use reason to get into their position in the first place. Trying to argue logically with someone who is acting entirely out of spite, unchecked ego, or willful ignorance is like the proverbial dance with a bear. Cutting that interaction short isn’t being rude; it’s deciding that some things are worth the effort and some aren’t.

Now, living this way isn’t always easy. When you develop a low tolerance for unreasonableness, people will occasionally call you difficult, impatient, or cold. I’ve certainly experienced my share of all three. But there’s a big difference between having a low tolerance for unreasonable people and just being a jerk. Jerks dismiss people because they don’t agree with them. A reasonable person with tight boundaries only dismisses people when they refuse to act in good faith.

Ultimately, it’s not selfish to protect your time from the chaotic, the manipulative, and the willfully ignorant. It’s the only way to keep yourself grounded. By refusing to entertain the nonsense, you save your energy for the people, ideas, and problems that actually deserve it.

So the next time you find yourself trapped in an absurd argument or dealing with someone else’s self-inflicted drama, remember Spenser. Take a breath, recognize that you’ve done your part by being fair, and feel completely free to walk away. You’re a reasonable person—and you don’t owe the unreasonable world an apology for that.

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The content creators behind channels like Chloe VS History are using AI tools to ‘bring history to life in a really visceral way’

“I have just arrived in Tudor London, 1536,” a young woman in a green puffer jacket tells the camera. “I’m going to check in at my room in the inn, get into the market. Then, later I am meeting the actual king – yep, Henry VIII – in person.”

On YouTube and other social platforms, users are flocking to watch AI-generated “history influencers”, characters that vlog their travels to historical settings.

Carruthers’ court case was fraught with problems. A second execution attempt would be the kind of cruelty no decent society should countenance

On 21 May, Tony Carruthers had an experience that few others have had. He was taken to the execution chamber, where the state of Tennessee began the process of putting him to death, but it failed to finish what it started.

Carruthers was not killed and he lived to tell about it. He became the ninth person to survive a failed execution in the last 80 years.

Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty

Judges, state public defenders and city officials in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are taking steps to curb a cycle of missed court dates and arrest warrants for crimes related to living outside that has led to a county jail population that’s about half homeless.

Eighteen months ago, judges in Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque, noticed an increase in charges related to homelessness — including for obstructing a sidewalk, unlawful camping and unlawful storage of personal property. They said they also saw that some people who received the citations didn’t have an address and were missing court dates. People living on the street often lack cellphones and permanent addresses, making it difficult for them to know when to appear in court.

Missed court appearances can lead to warrants that — if the person encounters officers again — can land them in jail.

Starting July 1, when Albuquerque police issue citations for nine offenses associated with homelessness, they will schedule related court appearances for Fridays, according to a memo issued by Presiding Criminal Division Judge Michelle Castillo Dowler. The judges anticipate that having a specific day each week for the city ordinance cases will lead to fewer people missing court dates and fewer warrants for failing to appear.

Officials will also use the set hearings to attempt to address the problem in other ways. A caseworker and an attorney from the New Mexico Law Offices of the Public Defender will attend the Friday hearings. The public defender’s office is also working to have local treatment and service providers available outside the courtroom, said Dennica Torres, the district defender for the public defender’s office.

“It’s like a one-stop shop on Fridays,” she said. Her office, the district attorney’s office and the courts have been working since last year to address the homelessness-related caseload. The city of Albuquerque has also set aside $200,000 for a city attorney or paralegal to assist with the Friday effort, Torres said. 

“We can’t simply just cycle vulnerable individuals through jail and back out on the street,” Mayor Tim Keller said at a recent news conference. “Both of those are not the right answer.”

The changes come after ProPublica reported in March that under Keller’s tenure, charges have skyrocketed for ordinances related to living on the street. In 2025, people were charged 1,256 times for obstructing sidewalks, nearly six times the number of cases in the previous eight years combined; more than 3,000 trespassing charges were handed out, the highest for any year since 2017; and cases of unlawful camping increased to 704 from 113 the year before, according to previously unreported county data.

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Albuquerque’s Mayor Said Arrests Were “Not the Solution” to Homelessness. Yet Jail Bookings Have Skyrocketed.

Court data shows that charges for the nine offenses that will be part of the court’s Friday hearings continue to rise — from 579 between January and April of 2025 to 2,072 during the same period this year. (Judges did not include trespassing in the charges scheduled for Fridays.)

ProPublica found the number of people at Bernalillo County’s Metropolitan Detention Center who are designated as “transient” or homeless has soared in recent years, to nearly 12,000 in 2025, from 3,670 in 2022. Last week, nearly 53% of people booked at the jail were recorded as homeless.

Keller did not respond to ProPublica’s questions or requests for comment. But he previously told the news organization that arrests and citations are not a solution to homelessness, which is a contentious issue in Albuquerque. While the city’s homeless population more than doubled from 2022 to 2025, the increase in homeless people jailed by the county more than tripled. 

Keller, who has been mayor since 2017, has responded by increasingly deploying city crews to clear encampments and also by ramping up enforcement of crimes related to being homeless. Keller previously defended the Albuquerque Police Department’s actions. 

“What we’re doing is following the letter of the law,” he said. “There are much more punitive things that I’m sure a lot of people would want, that we don’t do because they’re inappropriate.”

The post Albuquerque Officials Take Steps to Curb Surge in Citations, Jail Stays Related to Homelessness appeared first on ProPublica.

Sen. John Cornyn is facing off against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who received President Trump's endorsement.

Why Should Delaware Care?
In his second year in office, Wilmington Mayor John Carney made housing a focus in Delaware’s largest city. But debate with city council over how to spend city dollars exposed a divide over whether Wilmington should prioritize dollars for affordable housing developers or for immediate help to people in need.

After weeks of debate over how Wilmington should spend its money to address affordable housing, the City Council passed a compromise budget that largely preserved Mayor John Carney’s plan to incentivize development over short-term rental assistance.

The budget included an $8.4 million appropriation to subsidize developers who build affordable housing. It also included $2 million to help smaller developers acquire vacant lots in the city, and $1.5 million dedicated for grants to housing nonprofits to provide immediate assistance for renters. 

The City Council agreed on those final figures after a tense back-and forth during a Thursday meeting. While council members appeared to agree on the goals of fewer evictions, more affordable homes and less housing instability, many disagreed on how to get there.

Also during the meeting’s public comment period, more than 30 residents spoke, with most urging the body to support Councilwoman Christian Willauer’s plan to appropriate additional dollars for rental assistance and support for homelessness. 

“Its almost depressing that we don’t have the will to do some of the things that were talked about during public comment,” Council President Trippi Congo said during the meeting. 

As the council spoke during various parts of the meeting, the sound of chants and cowbells echoed from outside the city council building as protesters, housing advocates and unhoused residents demonstrated in support of immediate housing services. For those advocates, the need had become more urgent after Carney decided to close Christina Park, the city’s only sanctioned homeless encampment.

Ariana Miller, one of Christina Park’s youngest residents, was among the public commenters, criticizing Carney’s move to shut down the park. 

“We don’t have nowhere else to go. Like, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m only 21 years old,” she said. 

The competing proposals

At the core of the debate Thursday were competing housing proposals brought forth by Willauer and Carney.

Proposed earlier this month, Willauer’s would have redirected city money to programs like rental assistance, eviction settlement support and a housing trust.

The proposal came in response to Carney’s initial plan to use $20 million from the city’s tax stabilization fund for affordable housing, with most of the dollars targeted for developer subsidies to help build about 200 affordable homes.

Carney introduced the plan at his budget address in March.

But during negotiations with the City Council prior to Thursday’s meeting, the mayor revised his proposal down to a $11.8 million package, reducing the developer subsidy pool to just over $8 million.

The new plan would create about 100 units of affordable housing, Carney’s spokeswoman Caroline Klinger said. It also would appropriate $250,000 for a housing block grant aimed at immediate services.

Klinger said the block grant dollars would support a nonprofit to expand existing housing programs. Those include emergency assistance with rent and eviction prevention, as well as case management, financial counseling and employment assistance.

Still, council members Willauer, Congo, Shane Darby and Coby Owens urged their colleagues to consider that their initiative struck a balance between immediate assistance and long-term housing. They also argued the amount Carney’s plan would allocate to a housing block grant would not be enough to fund every program.

“If the city goes and spends all our money on something that doesn’t involve helping people right now. We’re not going to have the money available to help people,” Willauer said.

On the other side of the debate, council members James Spadola, Latitia Bracy, Yolanda McCoy and Zanthia Oliver argued that it didn’t make sense to allocate money to programs that the council hadn’t yet passed.

“It seems inappropriate to put this forward until these ordinances are actually passed and signed into law,” Spadola said.

Council ultimately struck down Willauer’s amendment in a narrow 6 to 7 vote.

The body instead passed a counter floor amendment, introduced by Owens to add about $1.5 million to the housing block grant to increase funding going toward immediate services.

The amendment narrowly made it through by a 7-6 vote.

Klinger said that Carney’s administration is supportive of the amendment.

The post Wilmington settles on housing compromise in final budget vote appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Rule prevents many immigrant truckers from renewing driver’s license – even if they’ve driven legally for years

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Nearly 200,000 US truck drivers are at risk of losing their commercial driver’s licenses after the US Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a new rule that disqualifies many foreign-born truck drivers from getting or renewing their licenses.

Tens of thousands of immigrant drivers are stuck in a limbo after the rule took effect in March, and lawsuits challenging the rule are still being reviewed by federal courts.

As always, the kids will be the stars of this year’s community. But they will be aided by their families, friends, teachers and coaches

The cult of the great man, common in the US given our love of glorifying the individual, has lately reached depressing extremes. Elon Musk, fancying himself a modern Midas, wreaked massive chaos on the federal government last year with his band of Doge hacks. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has instituted an unofficial cult of personality in DC, and recently posted – then deleted – an image of himself as a Christ-like figure. Less malevolently, we tend to think of great scientists, authors and philosophers as working in splendid isolation, assuming that their accomplishments are a function of their solitude and individual gifts.

When some people witness the crowning moment of the Scripps National Spelling Bee – the champion, standing alone, hoisting the trophy as the confetti falls – they may understandably assume that competitive spelling works the same way. But, as with so much in life, success in competitive spelling is a function of community – an important lesson for us all to remember in an age of atomization, AI alienation and Trumpist individualism.

Scandal-plagued Ken Paxton has won Trump’s backing over John Cornyn – but he might lose against James Talarico, a Democrat with a groundswell of popularity

Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, takes on four-term incumbent John Cornyn on Tuesday in the ugliest primary election of the year. The winner of the Republican Senate runoff in Texas will contest November’s general election against Democrat James Talarico.

Paxton and Cornyn have spent months coveting the most valuable endorsement in Republican politics: Donald Trump. Last week, scandal-plagued Paxton got it, with the US president describing him as “a true Maga warrior”.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Amazon is already one of Middletown’s biggest employers. A planned expansion would quadruple its footprint in the region. But plans to use robots in the new facilities have also raised concerns about jobs being replaced. 

E-commerce giant Amazon has plans to build two robotic-centric facilities in Middletown that together could quadruple the company’s footprint in fast-growing, southern New Castle County.

The company recently bought two adjacent tracts of farmland along the western edge of Middletown for $207 million, according to New Castle County property records. Local farmer and developer Richard Money previously owned the land.

“It’s one of the highest per acre industrial land sales that we’ve seen,” said Rob Stenta, a Wilmington-based commercial real estate broker for Cushman & Wakefield. 

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the company purchased the land and said it would become a site for “operations facilities.” 

While the spokesperson declined to give further details, a land-use attorney for the project, Richard Forsten, told the Middletown Town Council last year that two new buildings would be “designed for robotics.” Each would have more than twice the square footage as the current Amazon distribution center in town.

The minutes from that meeting last year also state that one facility will bring about 1,000 jobs to the area, and the other will bring 500. 

The company’s expansion adds to years of explosive growth in Middletown, which has been led by Mayor Kenneth Branner for nearly four decades. During his tenure, the town transformed from a small farming village to a suburban center that now sits as the fourth largest municipality in the state.

The booming commercial construction has also added to town coffers, with Middletown receiving 1.5% of all real estate sales within town limits via the transfer tax. The latest Amazon purchases added more than $3 million alone.

In recent years, developers have also sought to make the town and its surrounding area an anchor of Delaware’s e-commerce industry. But in response, some residents and elected officials have questioned whether the economic benefits outweigh concerns about traffic and land use.

Those questioned have continued with Amazon’s latest plans.  

“You won’t find many people in lower New Castle County that are happy with all of the growth and all of the traffic issues,” Middletown-area land-use activist Dale Swain said when asked about Amazon’s expansion. 

Branner declined requests for comment for this story. 

In his presentation to the Middletown council last year, Forsten also said the operations of the proposed facilities would be similar to those at an Amazon fulfillment center at the former General Motors plant along Boxwood Road.

There, robots across four upper floors collect items to be boxed up for shipments. Employees on the ground floor receive the items and process the shipments.

That would be a change from the current legacy operations in Middletown, which is more heavily reliant on human manpower and employs several thousand people.

It also comes amid Amazon’s reported shift to replace up to a half million workers with robotics over the next decade.

Community reactions

Sentiments of community members interviewed by Spotlight Delaware toward Amazon were mixed. 

Many said they were surprised at how quickly Amazon is expanding in Middletown. Some also expressed concern about robots taking people’s jobs and about increased truck traffic. Some also said they were happy about the investment in the town. 

Former Amazon employee and Middletown resident Patrick Liberatore said he doesn’t understand why the company is building two more facilities in town. 

“I don’t think you need three,” he said. 

It is not immediately clear if Amazon’s existing Middletown distribution center will remain in operation after the additional two facilities are built. When asked about it, Amazon spokesman Steve Kelly said that “changes to operations are geared towards better serving customers and making improvements for employees.”

Notably, Amazon is buying the land and building the newest facilities though. In the past, it has leased completed facilities, including its existing Middletown site, which could suggest that it may leave that site. Its lease for the Merrimac Drive center expired in 2024, but holds four-year extension options.

Liberatore worked at both the Middletown fulfillment center and the robot-centric facility on Boxwood Road, near Wilmington. He said there were more technical issues at the Wilmington location because of robots. But, he added, it was “super cool” to watch them work. 

Jennifer Steele, another former Amazon employee and Middletown resident, said she is concerned the robots at the new facilities will mean there are fewer jobs for people. 

“Give more people opportunities if you’re going to build more,” Steele said. 

Amazon says its robotic fulfilment center in Wilmington employs a thousand people. 

State Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown) said she had heard Amazon would expand in the town but was surprised at how much. While she is glad to see more jobs in the area, she is “curious” about how additional truck traffic could affect the roads, she said. 

Swain said he understands there are financial benefits for the town, but said he and others are worried about the effects the growth will have on the local infrastructure. 

Other industrial projects in the Middletown area have faced similar criticism.

The post Amazon robotic facilities could quadruple tech giant’s Middletown footprint appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Peer’s comments come as Milburn report is likely to find government has failed to tackle youth unemployment

• Business live – latest updates

The boss of Next has sounded the alarm about a “dramatic fall” in the number of entry-level jobs in the UK that is driving up youth unemployment, saying the retailer now receives twice as many applicants for each role than two years ago.

Lord Wolfson said the clothing and homeware chain, where he has been chief executive since 2001, typically received 10 applications for every job in its shops in 2024 but that number has now risen to 19.

South Korean Starbucks' boss apologized again as it faced a backlash over a marketing campaign widely seen as mocking victims of a bloody military crackdown in 1980.

Some say project Iran is a disaster, but as a get-out-of-jail-free card it’s a winner. He did say he was smart, didn’t he?

How far would you go for your son? For Donald Trump, the answer is simply: “The Bahamas? That is way too far! Why can’t you just get married on the golf course we buried your mother in? Or better still, the one I’m being carted to the second I get off the reinforced toilet I’m typing this on.” And so it was that the president cordially flaked on the latest marriage of his large adult son Don Jr, which took place somewhere in the Bahamas last weekend. If the world felt somehow different to you on Sunday morning, you were right. We now live in a post-troth society.

In other ways, though, the world would have felt quite samey. Those whose notional protest placard reads “IRAN DEAL WHEN?” remain fobbed off round the clock by a US administration that is always “close”, looking at a “pretty solid thing on the table” and debating “specific language in the initial document”. The Iranian government, meanwhile, is laying mines in the strait of Hormuz, expressing “resolute” support for Hezbollah and saying gnomically trolling things like how the two sides are both “very close and very far”. The president loves to imply that deals are always like this, once again confusing commercial Floridian real estate with the fanatical remnants of a dysfunctional regime in whose interest it is to play him.

Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Five of the deaths were by drowning while two people died competing in sporting events

Seven people have died in France in an extreme early-summer heat event that is affecting a swathe of western Europe, as France and the UK set record highs for May and temperatures were forecast to rise further on Tuesday.

“What I can say today is that there have been seven deaths linked directly or indirectly to the heat,” a French government spokesperson, Maud Bregeon, told TF1 television, adding that five of the deaths were by drowning.

Trump campaign accelerating climate crisis as officials move migrants to detention jails and deport them from US

US immigration enforcement flights are producing hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of climate-damaging carbon emissions as officials shuttle unprecedented numbers of people to detention centers far from home and deport them to countries across the world.

Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has spurred at least an 80% increase in such flights year over year, accelerating the climate crisis by emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide, according to data analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress and four other members of the House of Representatives have asked the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General to investigate why a federal probe into a prison drugs-for-votes scheme was abandoned after the 2024 elections. 

“Credible allegations of election fraud uncovered through federal investigative work warrant serious scrutiny and transparent explanation,” the members of Congress wrote in the May 20 letter, adding that it was essential for “public confidence in democratic institutions” that such claims are handled consistently, “regardless of the political actors involved.” 

The letter was signed by Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández Rivera, a Democrat and member of Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party, as well as Reps. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight Committee; Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y.; Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; and Jesús “Chuy” García, D-Ill., a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Their request follows a ProPublica investigation that published earlier this month detailing how prosecutors had uncovered a drugs-for-votes scheme being run by a violent gang in Puerto Rican prisons and were deep into looking at whether now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón or her campaign were involved. In the days following President Donald Trump’s election in 2024, as prosecutors prepared the indictment, they were told by supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico to exclude the voting-related charges against inmates and prison staff, four sources with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. Then, once Trump took office, they were told to abandon the probe into potential political ties entirely, the sources said.

In their letter, the members of Congress urged the inspector general to examine the Justice Department’s decision to not pursue charges related to election fraud “despite reported findings and evidence.” They added that the failure to further investigate contradicts the Trump administration’s “repeated emphasis on prioritizing election integrity and election security as federal enforcement priorities,” in addition to deeming drug traffickers threats to public safety and democratic institutions. 

Initially, Hernández Rivera sought a House Judiciary Committee investigation into the issue but then decided the inspector general’s office would be a better avenue. 

“This has always been about following the facts and ensuring there is accountability,” he said in an email to ProPublica. “Given the concerns raised about the DOJ’s handling of the investigation and prosecutorial decisions, we believe an Inspector General review is the appropriate mechanism to independently examine what occurred and whether standards were applied consistently.”

The letter was addressed to Don Berthiaume, who had been serving as acting inspector general and has been nominated for the position. While his confirmation is pending, William Blier, the deputy inspector general, is leading the office. 

The inspector general’s office has jurisdiction over misconduct by Justice Department employees, including the Bureau of Prisons, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration. However, it does not oversee allegations of attorney misconduct, which are handled by the Office of Professional Responsibility, unless the allegations include criminal behavior. The inspector general’s office declined to comment on the letter.  

González-Colón, a longtime Republican and member of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, has declined repeated requests for interviews by ProPublica. In a previous statement, she denied any wrongdoing and said she “has stood firmly against corruption” throughout her career and political campaigns. “I categorically reject any attempt to link me to unlawful conduct,” she said. She also told local news outlets she didn’t think any investigation into the matter is warranted. González-Colón has not been charged with any crime. 

Read More

Prosecutors Had a Drugs-for-Votes Scheme “Locked Up.” Under Trump, They Were Told Not to Pursue Charges.

An indictment filed in December 2024, while Joe Biden was still president, charged 34 members of a gang, known as Group 31 or Los Tiburones, and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths. The indictment also alleged that the gang connected with government officials “for the purpose of reducing prison sentences” and told inmates “who to vote for in primary and general elections.” But the indictment included no charges related to the drugs-for-votes scheme.

Sources familiar with the investigation said gang leaders forced inmates to vote for González-Colón or face brutal beatings, or be cut off from the drugs they were addicted to. Prosecutors said they had evidence that González-Colón had spoken with one of the prison gang leaders on WhatsApp during the primary campaign and were pursuing other potential ties when they were instructed not to look any further, people with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. 

W. Stephen Muldrow, U.S. attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, said his office does not comment on open cases. While a couple of defendants have made plea agreements, most of the cases are still pending. 

A spokesperson for his office, Lymarie Llovet-Ayala, told ProPublica in a previous email that charging corrupt public officials “has always been and remains a top priority” of the office. 

The post Lawmakers Ask DOJ Watchdog to Investigate Alleged Drugs-for-Votes Scheme After ProPublica Report appeared first on ProPublica.

The former Manchester City manager is always interested in fresh challenges. Taking on another continent could be tempting as he embarks on a new chapter

Where do you go after Lionel Messi, Major League Soccer? ?

This is not just a question MLS will ponder, but one soccer in general has been thinking about for some time. It has led to a desperate trend of labelling every promising youngster the “next Messi”, but such was (and remarkably still is) the Argentinian’s quality, that there may not be another player at his level for decades. There may never be one.

President Donald Trump’s seeming ambivalence about the value of allies has created a sense of urgency among nations with close U.S. ties.

As the Trump administration signals hope for a possible deal, Iran says obstacles linger and that "frequent changes" in U.S. positions aren't helping.

Ellen Roome, whose son, Jools Sweeney, was 14 when he died, wants a ban put in place for under-16s

The mother of a teenager who believes he died in a TikTok challenge gone wrong has said Downing Street has been too slow to move towards a social media ban for under-16s, and accused the government of “kicking it down the road”.

Ellen Roome, the mother of Jools Sweeney, 14, is among the families who will meet Keir Starmer on Tuesday as a consultation on a possible social media ban closes this week.

Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects

When Jacob Pagel graduated from Middle Tennessee State University this spring, predictions about artificial intelligence already had him questioning the value of his degree. Then a music executive started preaching about AI’s transformative power during a commencement speech.

“This industry will change on you in a heartbeat. It has already changed more in the last 10 years than in the 50 years prior … AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” said Scott Borchetta, CEO of the record label Big Machine. After a few stray boos from graduates, he doubled down: “Deal with it.”

California crews conducted an overnight operation at the Orange County site of a chemical leak in Garden Grove and said Monday that the threat of a massive explosion had been "eliminated."

Donald Trump says deal will be ‘great and meaningful, or there will be no deal at all’ in online post – key US politics stories from Monday 25 May at a glance

Iran has poured cold water on suggestions that a deal with the US is imminent, pointing to the confusion in US positions and Israeli interference as reasons why an agreement is proving difficult to secure.

Speaking at the weekly foreign ministry press briefing, Esmail Baghaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s negotiating team, also said future management of the strait of Hormuz was a matter for Oman and Iran to agree on, and that it was not tolls that were being proposed but “fees for navigational services”.

In today’s newsletter: Our Russian affairs reporter on Vladimir Putin’s slipping approval and singular goal – as discontent ripples from wider society to the reachers of the Kremlin

Good morning. There is little doubt that when Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he did not expect his troops to still be embroiled there in 2026. And he surely never envisaged a scaled-down victory parade in Moscow, stripped of military hardware, for fear of Ukrainian drone attacks on his own capital.

Putin has survived dangerous moments before, but with the Russian economy stuttering, his popularity is waning – not only with the public but also with the elites who have underpinned his regime for decades. An undoubted master of survival, the unwritten contract the president has with the Russian people is starting to fray.

Middle East | The US has launched strikes on southern Iran in a test of the seven-week long ceasefire, as both sides played down hopes for an imminent peace deal even as negotiators from Tehran began new talks in Qatar.

UK politics | Rachel Reeves has instructed cabinet colleagues to award government contracts in four critical industries directly to British companies, making clear her irritation that ministers have been sending too much government business abroad.

Scotland | Peter Murrell, once one of the most powerful people in British politics, faces a long prison sentence after he admitted to stealing more than £400,000 from the Scottish National party to fund a lavish personal lifestyle.

Cost of living | Higher prices could persist over the summer even if ceasefire talks between the US and Iran bear fruit, consumers have been warned, with economic shock waves likely to be felt “for many months to come”.

UK news | The fierce heat sweeping across Europe over the bank holiday weekend has beaten the UK’s all-time temperature record for May, with scorching highs of close to 35C.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 26.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 26, No. 610.

This blog is now closed – our live coverage of the Middle East crisis continues here

Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesperson of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, has said that time is working against the US and warned that Iran does not respond well to threats.

In a post on X, he wrote:

During the military war, our tactic was an eye for an eye; in the diplomatic war, it is action against action. Do not believe the bluff of the failed president; time is against the Americans.

If they want an agreement, they should negotiate; if they want $6 gas, they should stand firm and bluff until the grass grows under their feet. Iran does not bow to force or threats.

Lack of Pfas regulations raised in parliament after Guardian revealed former Miteni plant bought by Indian company

Protests over the production of cancer-linked Pfas chemicals have spread across India, after an investigation revealed that an Italian factory shut down due to an environmental scandal was bought by an Indian company and partly rebuilt.

At the end of last year, the Guardian revealed that the former Miteni plant in Vicenza had been acquired by the Indian company Laxmi Organic Industries. The factory produced Pfas and was shut down in 2018 after being linked to one of Italy’s worst environmental contamination scandals.

Like so many Britons, I usually consult a weather app before venturing out of the house – and often cancel plans if I don’t like what I see. Here’s what happened when I went cold turkey for a week

When I heard on the radio that more than half of British people would consider cancelling an outing if they saw a 40% chance of rain all day on their weather app, I felt seen. I, too, am a slave to my app. Not that I would ever make a decision based on one whole-day percentage. I pore over three-hourly breakdowns for chances of rain versus minutes of sunshine. If rain is on the cards, I check the probable millimetres. Less than one? I may well throw caution to the wind. Speaking of which, wind speed and direction must also be considered, along with overall and “feels like” temperatures. For the cherry on top, I’ll compare notes with a loved one’s app if they use a different one, quietly mistrusting theirs, and simmering in silent rage if theirs wins.

I’ll admit, though, that my compulsion to check my app (I long ago chose WeatherPro, which I knew nothing about, but liked its layout and name) is borderline neurotic; I fret over probabilities and outfit appropriateness, when I could simply step outside for real-time hyper-local accuracy. I can lose procrastinatory hours consulting long-range forecasts, or checking the weather in Melbourne (where my sister lives) and holiday destinations I have no immediate plans to visit.

Peace deals are leading to more violence.

America and China cannot dominate or exclude each other.

Sonny Rollins, the legendary tenor saxophonist known for his bold tone and constant experimentation, has died at 95.

Negotiators from Iran travelled to Qatar on Monday, with the fate of the country’s nuclear programme and access to frozen assets under discussion

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US has launched strikes on southern Iran in a test of the seven-week long ceasefire, as both sides played down hopes for an imminent peace deal even as negotiators from Tehran began new talks in Qatar.

US forces targeted missile launch sites and boats attempting to lay mines, US central command (Centcom) said on Tuesday, but stressed that the strikes did not indicate the ceasefire with Iran was over.

• Knicks ease to victory in Game 4 of Eastern finals

• New York aiming for first championship since 1973

The New York Knicks are back in the NBA finals for the first time since 1999 after another overwhelming victory completed a 4-0 sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals.

The Knicks are in ruthless form as they attempt to win their first NBA championship since 1973. They also swept the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference semi-finals and beat the Atlanta Hawks 4-2 in the first round of the playoffs. While their path to the finals in their Eastern Conference has been smooth they will face a stiff test to claim the NBA title. They will face either the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder, a team with very few flaws, or the San Antonio Spurs, led by 7ft 4in superstar Victor Wembanyama. The Spurs-Thunder series is tied at 2-2 with Game 5 on Tuesday night.

Hezbollah and Israel launch attacks amid increasingly imperilled ceasefire and stalling talks between US and Iran

• Middle East crisis: live updates

The Israeli army has intensified strikes in southern Lebanon, as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to escalate its offensive in an effort to “crush” Hezbollah in a further erosion of an already fragmented ceasefire.

In turn, Hezbollah said it staged several attacks on Monday on three barracks and a military post in northern Israel “in response to the violation of the ceasefire” by Israel.

If you're looking for an online retailer that sells a wide variety of affordable contact lenses with insurance acceptance and a solid return policy, check out these companies.

Tehran says ‘contradictory statements’ from US and Israeli interference hindering negotiations

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Iran has poured cold water on suggestions that a deal with the US is imminent, pointing to the confusion in US positions and Israeli interference as key factors in why a complete agreement is proving difficult to secure.

Speaking at the weekly foreign ministry press briefing, Esmail Baghaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s negotiating team, also said future management of the strait of Hormuz was a matter for Oman and Iran to reach agreement on, and that it was not tolls that were being proposed but “fees for navigational services”.

I have a Nokia N8, and it’s one of my favourite retro (?) devices I own. It was one of Nokia’s last efforts to make Symbian happen in the post-iPhone era, and while the hardware was quite nice, Symbian just wasn’t made for multitouch devices. It didn’t move the needle much for an already dying Nokia, and things just got worse from there. A bright spot with the Nokia N9, some decent Windows Phone devices, and then the end. We all know the story.

The Nokia N8, though, seems to have been given a new lease on life recently. This smartphone, released in 2010, can be turned into a usable, capable device again, thanks to a brand new, modern custom Symbian ROM called Reborn. It takes the latest stock Symbian version for the N8, removes any and all applications/links/etc. that don’t work anymore, and then proceeds to make a ton of things work again. Modern TLS for HTTPS support, updated certificates, modern email support, a brand new application store, a new update application with a steady stream of OTA updates to fix issues, a bunch of security fixes, a whole slew of quality-of-life touches, and so, so much more.

This is absolutely amazing work. Clearly a labour of love, there’s already been tons of updates over the past year since the ROM’s initial release, and I obviously can’t not install this on my own N8, assuming it still works. A video by Janus Cycle covering the project is also available, for the more visually-oriented among us.

Campaigners, teenagers, legislators and experts give their opinions on the government’s social media consultation

Change is coming for social media platforms. The UK government’s consultation on improving online safety for children will result in some form of action being taken against big tech. Even before the deadline for submissions has passed, ministers have pledged to introduce an Australia-style social media ban for under-16s or restrictions on “addictive” features such as infinite scrolling.

There is overwhelming pressure from safety campaigners and MPs for a further crackdown on social media platforms, despite the introduction of the Online Safety Act, which requires tech firms to shield children from harmful content. The deadline for contributions is Tuesday night and the government has promised to act swiftly.

A Dominican judge has ruled that Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco is criminally responsible for the sexual and psychological abuse of a minor but will not serve a sentence.

US officials credit overnight cooling and monitoring for stabilising tank after leak fears triggered mass evacuation

Firefighters contending with an overheating tank of hazardous chemicals in southern California said they had eliminated the threat of the tank exploding in an overnight operation, Orange county fire officials said on Monday.

The damaged chemical tank in southern California had cracked over the weekend, which authorities were hopeful would relieve pressure and reduce the risk of an explosion.

Mercury in Spain also climbs to well above normal with weather event set to continue for several more days

More than 350 French towns have recorded their highest-ever temperatures for May as France and the UK set national heat records amid an extreme early-summer heat event that could see the mercury rise to 40C in parts of Spain by the end of the week.

The UK’s Met Office said the country’s all-time record for May was broken when a temperature of 34.8C was recorded at London’s Kew Gardens.

Head of Early Years Alliance says additional charges paid by parents represent ‘cross-subsidy’

Parents of nursery children in England are being charged extra fees to cover for government underfunding of free childcare hours, with some paying thousands of pounds a year for consumables such as food, wipes and nappies, campaigners have said.

The comments came as the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, asked the competition watchdog to investigate hidden extra charges that parents have encountered when trying to access government-funded childcare.

• Girl’s mother sentenced to 10 years in prison

• Shortstop has yet to contact his team

Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco was declared criminally responsible for the sexual and psychological abuse of a minor, but he will not serve a sentence, a Dominican judge ruled on Monday.

In his decision, Judge José Antonio Núñez considered that Franco had been the victim of extortion and blackmail by the minor’s mother, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sexually trafficking her daughter.

Exclusive: Former health secretary’s intervention comes as government closes consultation on age limits for platforms

Social media companies should be treated like the tobacco industry, Wes Streeting has argued, as he called for a ban on under-16s accessing certain platforms.

Speaking publicly about the prospect of a ban for the first time since he left government, the former health secretary said one was needed because large technology companies were trying to dodge regulations.

Emergency crews raced overnight to prevent a tank holding a volatile industrial chemical from exploding at an aerospace facility in Southern California.

A draft memorandum includes a 60-day ceasefire extension and the halt of fighting on all fronts, sources say.

The tank at GKN Aerospace is estimated to contain 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate, a volatile chemical used to produce plastics.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 26, No. 814.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 26, No. 1,802.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 26, No. 1,080.

Senior lawyers call on prime minister to request Indian prosecutors drop charges that would breach double jeopardy rule

Four senior lawyers, including the former attorney general Dominic Grieve, have written to Keir Starmer urging him to request that Indian prosecutors drop charges against the British national Jagtar Singh Johal on the basis that continued prosecution would be in manifest breach of the double jeopardy rule which prevents someone being tried twice for the same offence.

Johal has been held in an Indian jail for eight years, and in March last year was acquitted of the terrorist charges laid against him in a court in Punjab. The court found the prosecutors had “miserably failed” to present any reliable evidence, despite having had seven years to do so.

We’re a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I’d better take a peek at how things stand with Windows. I came across a story about Yusuf Mehdi, an executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, who apparently became the face of Microsoft’s “AI” push. After 35 years, he’s leaving the company, but not after pledging to continue pushing “AI” deeper into Windows 11.

Despite this intense backlash, Mehdi is doubling down on the AI vision during his final months at the company. In his LinkedIn announcement, he stated: “I will work through the next fiscal year to help reimagine Windows for the agentic era, grow Microsoft 365 services, and bring our One Copilot vision to life.”

Microsoft has recently scaled back on some intrusive Copilot features in Notepad, Snipping Tool, and Photos, but the executive leadership team still views AI agents as the inevitable future of the Windows desktop experience.

↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest

The numbers for Microsoft and every other software company who dove head-first into “AI” are clear: it’s one of the biggest bottomless pits of all time, and they’re all throwing money down the pit hoping it’ll eventually fill up and overflow. Meanwhile, 100 metres down in the pit, a dude in a leather jacket is holding out a bucket and collecting some of the money before it disappears into the void below. For Microsoft, “AI” represents a $235 billion loss (so far!), so the company had to do something – anything – to stop the bleeding.

They tried shoving Copilot buttons in every nook and cranny of its products, but users rightfully and understandably revolted. They’re toning it down in Windows, and recently, they’ve also had to tone it down in Office as users were horrified to discover a floating Copilot button in Word, Excel, and so on. People really do not want this shit, which puts these companies in a hugely precarious position: just how badly can they abuse the geese?

We’ll see just how much Microsoft will actually roll back its force-feeding practices, and I’m not excited to be partaking in the Windows 11 experiment soon.

Veterans service officer Terrance O'Keefe put out a call from Massachusetts for a World War II veteran who needed a proper hero's send-off. When he arrived at the funeral, a line was already out the church door.

Memorial Day is nearing an end so now is the time to shop for any big-ticket items you've been putting off buying. From TVs to grills to mattresses, we've got you covered.

Tom Kopke from Germany out-tumbles local hero Chris Anderson on a meltingly hot day in Gloucestershire

It was billed as the great cheese-off: a helter-skelter, bone-jarring downhill race between the all-time champ and a young upstart.

After the hype and hyperbole, youth won out as the 24-year-old German YouTuber Tom Kopke beat the 38-year-old local hero Chris Anderson at the annual cheese-rolling event in the English West Country.

GOP lawmakers warned against concessions to Iran in any deal to end the war, while doubts greeted Trump’s push to expand pacts between Israel and Muslim-majority nations.

Netanyahu’s joint war with the US began with talk of regime change in Tehran but may leave him with few strategic gains

• Middle East live – latest updates

When Donald Trump launched a pre-emptive war on Iran with Israel in February, many in the country hailed the campaign as the crowning triumph of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political and diplomatic career.

Three months on the regime is still in power in Tehran, Trump is chasing a deal that will reopen the strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, and the reported terms have provoked alarm, dismay and anger in Israel.

Exclusive: Chancellor pushes for procurement of ships, steel, energy and AI to prioritise Britishness as well as cost

Rachel Reeves has instructed cabinet colleagues to award government contracts in four critical industries directly to British companies, making clear her irritation that ministers have been sending too much government business abroad.

In a letter seen by the Guardian, the chancellor tells every cabinet minister in charge of a spending department to “buy British” wherever possible, adding that she is disappointed they are not already doing so.

• Team sit 13th in MLS’s West Conference

• Neville thanks club and fans after departure

Phil Neville is no longer in charge of the Portland Timbers after they announced they had “mutually parted ways” with their head coach.

“In my nearly two decades of owning and operating the Portland Timbers, there are very few people I have enjoyed working with more than Phil Neville,” said Timbers owner Merritt Paulson. “Phil has outstanding leadership qualities and a boundless sense of positivity even in the face of adversity. I cannot thank Phil enough for his tireless dedication to this club and the Portland community, which he and his family truly embraced.”

Police launch murder investigation after incident in early hours of bank holiday Monday outside One Four One bar

A 30-year-old woman has died after being shot outside a bar in a busy area in Sheffield city centre.

South Yorkshire police have launched a murder investigation after the incident in the early hours of this morning outside the One Four One bar on West Street.

Protesters say agents used pepper spray and batons in clash outside Delaney Hall where a hunger strike is under way

Protesters outside a New Jersey migrant detention center where a hunger strike is under way alleged that US immigration agents deployed pepper spray and batons against them during a demonstration on Monday.

The protesters tried to stop ICE from transferring Martin Soto – who announced the strike – but officials said that they were able to move him to the Elizabeth contract detention facility.

Video shows officers and firefighters surrounding a white car partially submerged in fast-moving water

Authorities in Texas rescued an infant on Saturday after a vehicle became trapped in flood waters in Beeville, south of San Antonio.

Video released on Sunday by the Beeville police department showed officers and firefighters surrounding a white car that was partially submerged in fast-moving water. As one first responder approached the car, a distressed man in the vehicle asked: “Can you get my kid?”

"The expansion of SpaceX's Starlink network of internet relay satellites continued Monday with a Memorial Day launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station," reports Spaceflight Now. The mission added another 29 Starlink satellites to more than 10,000 already in low Earth orbit: This was SpaceX's 60th orbital flight of the year, consisting of 59 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy rocket... Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, [Falcon 9 first stage] B1078 landed on the drone ship, 'A Shortfall of Gravitas,' positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 151st landing for this vessel and the 614th booster landing to date for SpaceX. Meanwhile, the second stage shut down eight minutes and 39 seconds into flight and entered a coast phase, before short second burn at T+52 minutes. The stack of Starlink satellites deployed 61 minutes and 26 seconds after launch. On X.com SpaceX shared footage of the booster rocket landing, and a longer video showing Starship's 12th test flight Friday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Director general of World Health Organization urges neighbouring countries to take immediate action

The World Health Organization has warned that the Ebola outbreak is outpacing response efforts and countries neighbouring the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are at high risk from the disease.

“We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us,” said the WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as he urged neighbouring countries to take immediate action.

Iga Swiatek and other top female seeds progressed while Stan Wawrinka said goodbye after his 21st French Open at the age of 41

Jones 1-2 Swiatek* (* denotes server): Better from Jones. Six shots of baseline exchanges, and Jones finishes it off with a forehand winner past Swiatek to make 30-15 in her favour. Swiatek’s backhand then goes long after 11 shots between the pair. However Swiatek crawls back and takes it to deuce. The pair exchange advantages for a while but Jones strikes and gets the break back with a forehand winner.

*Jones 0-2 Swiatek (* denotes server): Swiatek breaks Jones at love. Three break points at 0-40, sealed with a crushing forehand winner.

With inflation continuing to rise, borrowers need to understand the impact on the mortgage interest rate climate.

Former husband of Nicola Sturgeon faces long prison sentence after admitting stealing from party to fund lavish lifestyle

• Luxury watches, iPads and a Jaguar: what Peter Murrell bought with embezzled funds

Peter Murrell, once one of the most powerful people in British politics, faces a long prison sentence after he admitted to stealing more than £400,000 from the Scottish National party to fund a lavish personal lifestyle.

The former SNP chief executive admitted on Monday he used the stolen money between 2010 and 2022 to buy items including a luxury motor home, a Jaguar SUV and a VW Golf, boutique cosmetics, iPads and a Lalique Feuilles salt and pepper set worth £2,618.

Engine failure in Canada is latest setback for British driver, who is 43 points behind teenager Kimi Antonelli after five races

George Russell was left wondering quite which deity he had offended as he despairingly contemplated his retirement from the Canadian Grand Prix with a mechanical failure. Fortune, for good or ill, will always play a part but what also became clear in Montreal is that Russell’s teammate and championship leader, Kimi Antonelli, is going to be fearsomely hard to beat this season, whatever the circumstances.

Russell ground to a halt on the circuit Gilles Villeneuve on lap 30 after a thrilling battle with his Mercedes teammate that had ebbed and flowed. The British driver deserved better, the two had been exchanging the lead and going side by side repeatedly, inches apart and trading paint on one occasion, only for Russell’s efforts to count for naught as he went out not with a whimper when the systems on his car shut down due to battery failure.

Scientists say record-breaking heat is a reminder of how climate crisis is affecting lives

The fierce heat sweeping across Europe over the bank holiday weekend has beaten the UK’s all-time temperature record for May, with scorching highs of close to 35C.

A temperature of 33.5C was recorded at Heathrow airport on Monday lunchtime, according to provisional data from the Met Office, beating the previous May record that was set in 1922 and reached again in 1944. Later in the afternoon a temperature of 34.8C was recorded at London’s Kew Gardens.

Here are the financial considerations to make when shopping for a new vehicle amid high car prices.

Fifa approached Mexico after US declined to host Iran squad despite it playing group games in the United States

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said on Monday her government agreed to allow the Iranian national football team to stay in Mexico during the World Cup, adding that the United States did not want to host the team.

Sheinbaum said football’s governing body Fifa approached her government after the US said it did not want Iran’s squad to stay in the country throughout the tournament, despite Iran playing all three of its group matches there.

Anyone who’s written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn’t for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and libraries. A lot of codebases will try somewhat to support various environments, mostly through the use of preprocessor checks and guards, but these attempts are finicky at best and straight up broken at worst.

I have ran into many of these situations while working on my C compiler, so here’s a small list of some of them.

↫ lemon/Sofia

Sometimes I wonder how computers even get anything done at all.

• Luis de la Fuente names 26-man squad for tournament

• Real Madrid players miss Spain squad for first time

Spain will go to the World Cup without a single Real Madrid player for the first time in their history as Luis de la Fuente named his 26-man squad for this summer’s tournament.

While Real stars such as Dean Huijsen, Dani Carvajal and Gonzalo García miss out, De la Fuente included Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal, who tore his left hamstring on 22 April and missed the rest of his club’s La Liga campaign.

Brent crude futures down 6% to lowest level in two weeks and stock markets rise

Oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Monday and stock markets rose on hopes that the US and Iran are inching closer to a peace deal.

Brent crude futures, the global oil benchmark, were down 6% to $97.43 a barrel, the lowest level in two weeks, with hopes that an agreement to end the near three-month US-Israeli war on Iran can be struck.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the ballroom is "being constructed for the physical safety and security of all Presidents, their families, staff, Foreign Dignitaries, and guests."

Strongly anti-Turkish party doubles its seats although mainstream parties did not see vote crumble as predicted

An anti-immigrant far-right party, inspired by Greece’s defunct neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, made the biggest gains in Sunday’s parliamentary election in Cyprus.

Elam, the Greek National People’s Front, which has pushed for the closure of checkpoints on the ethnically split island and is vociferously anti-Turkish, doubled its seats in the 56-member legislature after securing 10.9 % of the vote.

Ciaran Martin says Reform UK leader’s allegation over Guardian report on £5m gift ‘entirely unsubstantiated’

Nigel Farage’s claim that a Russian hack was behind a Guardian report on the £5m gift he received from a crypto billionaire has been described as “without any merit” by a former head of the National Cyber Security Centre.

Ciaran Martin, founding chief executive of the agency, which is part of GCHQ, said Farage’s allegation, if true, would have major implications for UK policy towards Russia but that the Reform UK leader had yet to provide “a shred of evidence”.

In his "Magnifica Humanitas" encyclical, Pope Leo warns that as civilization grapples with the power of AI, the main challenge is remaining "profoundly human."

John A Walko was identified through DNA and brought home to Pennsylvania 80 years after his WWII death

The remains of a US soldier killed during the second world war were returned to his Pennsylvania hometown more than 80 years after he died after DNA analysis identified him.

John A Walko, a US army Pfc who died on 20 October 1944 during the Battle of Aachen in Germany, was escorted from the Pittsburgh airport to Commodore, Pennsylvania by a veteran’s motorcycle group earlier this month, according to Cleveland.com.

Region adapting to diminished US power after Washington fails to land knockout blow on Tehran or safeguard allies

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The shock of the Iran war and its fallout has driven rivals in the Middle East to get behind a peace deal, pushing the Trump administration to accept a tentative agreement in the face of furious opposition from Israel and its supporters in Washington.

The diplomatic efforts come as the region is reshaping to adapt to diminished US power after Washington’s inability to land a knockout blow on Iran, force the opening of the strait of Hormuz or safeguard its Gulf allies. Tehran has few friends in the region, but the regime’s survival has meant that its neighbours have had to find an accommodation.

Two other small British children who stayed at same hotel fell critically ill from same condition months earlier

The travel company Tui is under scrutiny over its safety protocols after a British baby girl died from a gastric illness following a stay at an Egyptian hotel – the same resort where two other children were left critically ill from the same condition months earlier.

Ariella Mann, one, died in January from a kidney condition linked to E coli after falling ill at the five‑star Jaz Makadi Aquaviva hotel in Hurghada on an all‑inclusive two‑week package holiday booked through Tui.

Plus all the details on everything new coming in the next few years at the Disney Parks and on Disney Cruise Line.

The Mexican government announced the auction of a plot of land within the country club where drug kingpin "El Mencho" died during a clash with the army in February.

Group have been stuck in flooded cave in central Laos for five days after heavy rain caused landslides

Divers who helped in the dramatic rescue of a young Thai football team in 2018 have joined efforts to free seven people who have been trapped for five days inside a remote, flooded cave in central Laos.

The group entered the cave in Xaysomboun province on Wednesday to hunt for wildlife and search for gold, reports suggest. Heavy rain led to landslides, which blocked the cave entrance.

Magnifica Humanitas, which translates to "magnificent humanity," advocates for a moral framework for AI that aims to safeguard the future of humankind.

Charing, Challock and Molash worst affected, as South East Water says ‘technical failure at pumping station’ to blame

Hundreds of homes in Kent and Sussex have been left without water by a company that MPs recently accused of incompetence.

South East Water said the hot weather and extra demand for water meant it was having to pump more drinking water than usual to higher ground.

The twists and turns in this saga are bewildering, but Donald Trump appears to have the cards stacked against him

For those following the crisis between the US and Iran, the past few days have been bewildering. On Friday, the six-week-old ceasefire seemed doomed. Donald Trump skipped his son’s wedding to remain in the White House and was reportedly contemplating renewed military strikes on Iran. On Saturday, apprehension was replaced by optimism. Trump announced that an agreement with Iran would be concluded “shortly”. On Sunday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, added to the hope by saying that there would soon be “good news”.

Iran’s leaders soon dampened the optimism. The country’s media dismissed Trump’s social media post as propaganda, and Iranian officials highlighted several remaining points of dispute. As Tehran began revealing – in very general terms – its conception of a deal, the gap between it and Washington became even more evident.

A region known for its lack of walkability now has more obstacles for pedestrians to contend with

Robots have taken over Los Angeles.

It’s not just the AI-generated videos that have caused angst in Hollywood. Our streets are full of driverless Waymo vehicles, covered in more sensors and gadgets than the Batmobile. And our walkways are home to fleets of boxes on wheels, hurrying past pedestrians and navigating outdoor bar-hoppers as the robots deliver smoothies and keto-friendly salads.

• Nascar champion died last week at age of 41

• Sport honors late driver before Sunday’s race

Daniel Suárez honored his close friend Kyle Busch in the best way possible on Sunday night.

Suárez used a two-tire pit stop and hard rain to hold off Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin and win an emotional Coca-Cola 600 in the first race since the death of 41-year-old two-time Nascar champion Busch. Suárez’s third career Cup Series victory broke an 82-race winless streak for the driver. The veteran was a part-time driver in Nascar’s truck series in 2015 and 2016, wheeling the Kyle Busch Motorsports No 51.

The Spurs are up against the best team in the NBA in the Western Conference finals. But their star player has enough sorcery to give them confidence

Victor Wembanyama called for the ball. His San Antonio Spurs were up by nine at the tail end of the second quarter, but had led by as many as 16 in the first half. Down 2-1 in the Western Conference Finals to the Oklahoma City Thunder, building the lead in the final seconds of the half felt urgent – in the previous game, the Spurs had exploded into a 15-0 lead, only to lose heavily. In Game 4 on Sunday night, the klaxon was closing in, and so might the Thunder. Wembanyama got in a couple dribbles, but only had time to reach half-court before the clock forced him to shoot. He hoisted the ball into the air from 43ft; the buzzer sounded. The ball slammed cleanly into the basket.

Buoyed up by that shot and the Thunder clanking almost all their three-point attempts off the rim as if in solidarity with one another, the Spurs completed a 21-point annihilation to tie the series.

The Justice Department acknowledges it has removed from its website news releases about criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, calling the information "partisan propaganda."

Pontiff calls for ‘disarming’ of artificial intelligence and apologises for church’s delay in condemning slavery

Pope Leo has denounced the “culture of power” driving the rapid rise of artificial intelligence while warning that the technology must be subject to the “most rigorous” ethical constraints as it infiltrates everything from work to war.

In his encyclical – the first major text on safeguarding humankind of his papacy – he also apologised for the Catholic church’s long delay in condemning slavery, describing it as “a wound in Christian memory”, and spoke of the “new forms of slavery” due to the digital economy.

Seven Laotian villagers entered a cave five days ago searching for gold and were trapped inside after heavy rain triggered flash flooding.

The WHO chief says there have been 220 suspected deaths in the ongoing Ebola outbreak as Ugandan health authorities report two new Ebola infections.

Restore Britain, set up by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, appears to be taking some support from Nigel Farage

Andy Burnham is unlikely to be Elon Musk’s first pick to be prime minister of the UK. But an intervention by the US tech billionaire on behalf of a far-right offshoot of Reform UK is one of several signs that a divided right wing could deliver the Makerfield seat to the Manchester mayor.

On 18 June, Burnham will fight a byelection in Greater Manchester, and polls have him only slightly ahead of Reform’s candidate, Robert Kenyon, a plumber. But a far-right party set up by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe looks as if it is taking some support from Reform.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill is asking ICE to let her inside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark.

Three people died and four others were injured after their vehicle collided with an elephant in Murchison Falls National Park, police said on Monday.

Links between Trump Organization and Ivanishvili family for Tbilisi skyscraper raise new conflict of interest concerns

A Trump Tower planned for the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, is to be built on land currently part-owned by the son of the US-sanctioned leader of the country, according to official records.

The proposed skyscraper, a joint venture between a local consortium and the Trump Organization, which is managed by the US president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, will be on a plot whose current registered owner is the International Charity Fund Cartu.

Media credentials for the accused gunman’s New York trial acquired by his supporters have provoked sharp reactions

On what felt like an early New York City summer day, a gaggle of women in the bloom of youth gathered outside Manhattan’s criminal courthouse last week, waxing philosophical about Luigi Mangione and the man he is accused of murdering.

“Fuck Brian Thompson, that’s all I’m going to say,” one of the three women, who sported a button adorned with Mangione’s face, said of the late UnitedHealthcare executive. After directing the same invective towards Thompson’s mother, the woman continued: “I said what I said.”

Ever-growing influence of social media and AI means such ideas spreading at faster rates than before, experts say

Hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks carry with them familiar attendants in the US: extreme conspiracy theories about a planned pandemic, or “plandemic”, designed to upend midterm elections or push new vaccines or any one of a myriad of wild ideas.

Ebola, which the World Health Organization warned on Friday is spreading rapidly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, poses a “very high” risk at the national level. In the upside-down world of conspiracy theories it could be a bioweapon, a financial plot, or a scheme to extract national resources.

Jay Morris denies experts’ claims that he violated ethics rules over land deals near the site of Meta’s Hyperion datacenter

This story is from Floodlight, a non-profit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action

For more than two years, John “Jay” Morris, a Louisiana state senator, helped pave the way for Meta to build one of the world’s largest datacenters, called Hyperion, in Richland Parish.

Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation. "Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success... The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy. Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said. Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The thieves stole jewelry, high-end watches and souvenirs such as sports jerseys, among other belongings, police said.

"I think it's just disrespectful to those that I served with who didn't come back," a veteran suing to stop construction of the arch told CBS News.

Dominic Grieve says people are ‘perfectly entitled’ to ask Richard Hermer for review of teenagers’ sentences

Appeal judges would be unlikely to criticise the attorney general, Richard Hermer, if he asked them to review “unusual” non-custodial sentences handed to three teenage boys convicted of raping two girls, one of his predecessors has suggested.

Dominic Grieve, who also served as home secretary, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the goal of rehabilitating offenders – particularly younger ones – needed to be balanced with providing deterrence.

Exclusive: Research shows cost of crime for each affected business was on average £83,000 in past year

Nine in 10 retailers based in rural locations have been victims of crime in the past 12 months, according to research, underlining the widespread impact of the rise in shoplifting and theft even in more remote parts of the UK.

Rural retailers include farm shops as well as stores selling machinery and other equipment. The financial cost of crime for each affected retailer was on average £83,000 during the past year, according to a survey carried out by the commercial insurer NFU Mutual. Meanwhile, one in 20 victims said crime had cost them more than half a million pounds.

Trump and his allies have so undermined the US government that we need a new vocabulary to describe them

Words matter. When describing a government, they inevitably carry moral weight.

Over the past 16 months, Trump and his appointees have so profoundly undermined the United States government that different words should be used to describe them than have been used to describe all previous administrations.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK

The state saw 33 tornadoes last year and severe flooding as researchers say links to climate change are undeniable

The tornado hit west Ann Arbor at 1.45am on 15 April, passing through Veterans Memorial park, where it knocked several mature oak trees and ripped up baseball field fences before setting its sights on a local ice rink.

“It came up through the parking lot and, in that time, the pressure differential between the tornado and the air inside the rink collapsed the wall,” said Scott Spooner, a manager at Ann Arbor Parks and Recreation.

Luna and Zavier Gozo’s World Cup dreams ended with a Friday email from US Soccer

Real Salt Lake coach Pablo Mastroeni was in disbelief. The US roster for the World Cup would include neither his team’s star playmaker Diego Luna nor their head-turning youngster, Zavier Gozo. While the uncapped Gozo was a late long shot to make the squad, Luna seemed a near-lock given his importance to the national team throughout 2025.

Mastroeni knows the magnitude of these moments. As a player, he was the proverbial 23rd man in 2002, relaying that US coach Bruce Arena told him he’d made the roster as “a rah-rah guy.” Injuries and circumstance, plus his own approach, landed the midfielder in the lineup for the USMNT’s 3-2 win over Portugal to open group play as well as both of the team’s ensuing knockout matches.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.

Here you will find information about the most important or interesting public meetings happening in Delaware this week.

• Joint Finance Committee to markup the state budget
• New Castle County to vote on its spending plan
• Newport train station proposal to be deliberated

JFC begins a budget ‘markup’

Delaware legislators on the powerful Joint Finance Committee will meet Wednesday and Thursday to decide how to distribute billions of dollars to schools, police, prisons and public health services, among other government agencies.

While the legislature’s final vote on the roughly $7 billion operating budget will not occur until later in June, the spending decisions from the powerful budget committee this week will largely be preserved in the final budget.

As a starting point for its budget-writing process, the committee uses the governor’s proposed budget, which Gov. Matt Meyer introduced in January. 

Meyer based his proposal on the latest state revenue estimates available at the time.

But last week Delaware’s budget forecasting committee updated its projections, reporting that it expects the state to receive nearly $200 million more in revenue than previously thought.

While the report is likely to ease fears of cuts to individual state offices, it could invite a renewed lobbying effort among lawmakers and others to include new appropriations to the final state budget.

📍 The Delaware Joint Finance Committee hearings are scheduled for 10 a.m. on Wednesday and Thursday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. For details about the Wednesday meeting, click here. For Thursday, click here.

Also meeting this week is the Joint Legislative Oversight and Sunset Committee, which will review how the Delaware Department of Labor operates the state’s unemployment insurance program. 

Two years ago, Delaware’s auditor called the state’s unemployment insurance fund – then estimated at $344 million – “un-auditable.”  The finding raised concerns about a key part of the government that serves as a financial backstop for tens of thousands of workers in the state.

Delaware residents can attend any committee hearing in person or virtually through the General Assembly’s online meeting system. To view details of all hearings, scroll through the “What’s Happening” box here. 

The full legislature will reconvene on June 9. 

New Castle County to vote on tax hike

While state legislators will begin writing their budget this week, representatives of Delaware’s second largest government could approve theirs. 

On the agenda for the New Castle County Council’s Tuesday meeting are the county’s operating and capital budget ordinances – along with a handful of amendments to them. 

In March, County Executive Marcus Henry first proposed a version of the spending plan, which included a 17% property tax hike for residents. The steep tax increase was there to partially close the county’s $42 million budget deficit.

While the agenda for the Tuesday County Council meeting says the budget ordinance is tabled, county officials previously said the council planned to address the budget this week.

A county official confirmed Friday that the council intends to address the budget on Tuesday. 

📍 The New Castle County Council will meet as a full body at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For more information, including about virtual attendance, click here.

Will trains stop in Newport again? 

For years, a goal of transit advocates in northern Delaware has been to reopen a commuter rail station in Newport. The previous train station in the small municipality west of Wilmington ceased operations several decades ago 

Five years ago, state planners listed the reopening of a train station among their transportation goals for the area. 

On Tuesday, transportation officials will meet to discuss the latest details of studies into the proposal.

📍 The Newport Rail Advisory Committee will meet at 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Minquas Fire Company, located at 21 N. James St. in Newport. For more information, click here.

The post Get Involved: Key Delaware budget meetings happening this week appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Danny Kruger says matter is ‘private’, after party leader claimed hack was behind Guardian story about £5m gift

A senior Reform UK figure has refused to call on the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, to hand evidence to the UK’s security services to support his claim he was hacked by Russian agents.

Farage has come under mounting pressure to substantiate the claim that a state-sponsored Russian hack was behind the disclosure published by the Guardian last month of a £5m gift he had received from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Labour and the Conservatives have both stressed the threat to national security posed by the Russian state.

In today’s newsletter, how quick starts, keeping the ball and banking on the bench will help the finalists beat the high temperatures and humidity

Graeme Souness is one of the toughest footballers of all time, a midfield titan for Liverpool and Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s. He was occasionally outwitted by subtler players such as the Brazilian genius Zico, but no opponent ever got the better of him physically.

No human opponent, anyway. During the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, Souness lost a stone in weight (6.35kg) against West Germany at Querétaro in stifling heat and at high altitude. “I can remember going down on my haunches and thinking: ‘God, do I not feel good,’” he said. “It was the worst I ever felt on a football pitch. I couldn’t breathe.”

Exclusive: Mining giant says technology is not yet advanced enough to run a fully electrified fleet but experts say it is hooked on federal fuel tax credits

• Revealed: the internal BHP memo that slammed the brakes on world’s biggest miner’s climate push

• Read more from the BHP files investigation here

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

BHP has continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying diesel trucks in the Pilbara despite internal documents suggesting it would increase emissions and be “misaligned” with its decarbonisation goals.

The mining giant is Australia’s biggest consumer of diesel and trucks are its biggest single source of diesel emissions. Replacing the fleet with battery-electric trucks is considered a critical step in the multinational’s efforts to decarbonise.

Exclusive: Jimblebar processing facility would have produced higher quality iron ore sought by steelmakers around the world – themselves under pressure to curb pollution

• World’s biggest miner BHP backtracks on climate action with key projects put on ice, leaked documents reveal

• Read more from the BHP files investigation here

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

BHP quietly dumped plans for an iron ore processing facility that would have cut emissions drastically, despite internally rating it as having “excellent social value” and being “well-aligned” to its shareholder-endorsed climate plan and decarbonisation targets.

In 2025 the mining giant was well advanced in its plans to build a beneficiation plant near its Jimblebar open-cut mine in the Pilbara, which would greatly improve the purity and quality of its iron ore.

Exclusive: Cache of internal documents leaked to the Guardian and the ABC’s Four Corners show multinational has war-gamed ways to massively delay decarbonisation

• Revealed: the internal BHP memo that slammed the brakes on world’s biggest miner’s climate push

• Read more from the BHP files investigation here

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

The world’s biggest miner has halted or delayed projects to cut vast amounts of emissions and has quietly war-gamed options to push major climate investments in its Western Australian iron ore operations into the next two decades, internal documents show.

An exclusive investigation based on documents leaked to the Guardian and the ABC’s Four Corners can reveal that BHP, one of Australia’s biggest historic emitters, has dumped plans for a facility that could have significantly reduced emissions and has put on ice renewable projects designed to power its iron ore operations in the vast, resource-rich Pilbara region.

Daniel Sikkema faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Brent Sikkema was stabbed to death in his Rio de Janeiro townhouse in 2024.

Two people were seen being taken on stretchers into ambulances after, authorities said, a man sprayed a substance inside an upscale mall in Tokyo.

US president says he is not rushing into a deal after proposed plan to end war prompts Republican backlash. Plus, mood in Russia turns against Putin

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Good morning.

Donald Trump defended himself against criticism from fellow Republicans yesterday as he appeared on the verge of agreeing a deal with Iran to end the war.

What has Iran said? Foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei has been speaking at a news briefing about the contours of a potential deal with the US to end the war: “It is correct to say that we have reached a conclusion on a large portion of the issues under discussion. But to say that this means the signing of an agreement is imminent – no one can make such a claim.”

Why does he think voters are becoming disenfranchised? Massie pointed to several significant constituencies – including “Make America healthy again” campaigners, fiscal hawks pushing for sweeping government budget cuts, and voters who don’t want the US engaged in wars – who he claimed had been “alienated” by the administration’s actions. “And so, I’m worried that in November, this is going to cost the party a lot.”

Double-sided page featuring a sketch and text sheds new light on the baroque master and his time living in Rome

More than 400 years ago, the up and coming Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens toured the streets of Rome, notebook in hand, sketching images from Renaissance works adorning the city’s churches and palazzos.

Now a rare sheet, thought to be from his Roman sketchbook, has gone on display in his home city of Antwerp, shedding new light on the baroque master.

Guest column: Joanna Shields, a member of the UK's House of Lords, reflects on her audience with the pope and the role of faith leaders in building a moral framework for AI.

We want to hear what you think about your ISP.

Trump’s second term has revealed that Washington’s policy response to such a crisis will be misguided and full of chaos

A bona fide financial crisis has not broken out since the US housing meltdown of 2007. Even the Covid pandemic and subsequent upsurge in inflation didn’t lead to financial upheaval. The jitters produced by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 were soon forgotten.

Given this stability, it might take some effort to convince financial markets that another big one is around the corner. But it is. Financial markets and their regulating governments may believe they have acquired immunity, but the world is careening toward a moment of financial upheaval that could well dwarf the damage caused by the last one.

The American Music Awards celebrate fan favorites in the music world and feature performances from multiple artists.

Activists detained by Israel after attempting to deliver aid to Gaza as part of Global Sumud Flotilla arrive in Australia

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Australians returning home from detention in Israel say they were abused, tortured and demeaned while in custody and have asked to meet the prime minister, Anthony Albanese.

Nine of the 11 Australians who joined more than 400 people from around the world on an aid flotilla to Gaza returned home on Monday, where they were met with hundreds of supporters after landing at Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane airports.

• Gkolomeev’s 50m freestyle ‘record’ brings relief

• Glitzy night lacks excitement forecast by organisers

They promised multiple world records. To redefine what the human body is capable of with performance enhancing drugs. Even to change sport forever. But by the end of the inaugural Enhanced Games in Las Vegas organisers were left with one abiding emotion. Relief.

Only in the final event of the night, after more than five hours of competition, could they lay claim to having gone quicker than an official world record as Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev swam 20.81sec in the men’s 50m freestyle.

Most retail stores will be open for business on Memorial Day, while post offices will be closed. Here's what to know.

Even the state’s most celebrated restaurants are struggling to remain open as costs climb, with no relief in sight.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware has hundreds of Gold Star families who have suffered the loss of a loved one in military service. On Memorial Day, we remember the sacrifice of their service members in the protection of America.

Kristen Giordano had just returned from a spring walk around her Dover neighborhood when she sat down on her couch. 

Her husband, J.P. Blandin, was trying to find something for them to watch when he noticed the men in uniform walking up their driveway.

“These must be recruiters looking for Tyler,” he said to her of his youngest son in their blended family. 

But Kristen knew.

“My heart just sank,” recalled the daughter of an Army master sergeant. “I knew something was really wrong, but your mind plays tricks on you. Maybe Joey was just hurt and they’d be taking me to him …”

A military heritage

Joseph “Joey” Marquez was born prematurely on June 17, 2002.

As a nurse whisked him to the neonatal intensive care unit, his grandmother caught a glimpse of her new grandson. From that first moment in life, his face was marked by deep dimples – the features that framed the smile that would define his life.

To family and friends, he was “Dimples” or simply “Dimps.”

Growing up, Joey was a determined kid who loved sports. His mother recalled when he was 2 years old, he broke his leg and had to wear a cast. She found him putting a sock over the cast so he could go outside and play soccer.

“He was a lot of fun – very high energy and really athletic,” Kristen said. “But he was also a real momma’s boy.”

Coming from a large Italian family, Joey was very close to his sister, Alexis, and his grandparents and uncles.

Kristen is a bit of an Army brat herself, having grown up at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where her father was an administrator. Both of her grandfathers were combat veterans as well, and her older brother joined the Army out of high school.

From a very young age, Joey developed a close relationship with Kristen’s dad. Perhaps it was fate – after all he was named after him.

“I think Joey really looked to my dad as his father figure,” Kristen said. She split with Joey’s father when he was 13.

Two passions in life

For Joey, the future was likely to include only one of two things: the military or sports.

In particular, Joey loved baseball, having started playing when he was just a few years old. When Kristen met J.P., the longtime baseball coach for Delaware State University, he used sports as a bonding opportunity with his stepson.

“We had a batting cage in the backyard, and I would throw him batting practice all the time to try to get him ready for his senior year of baseball,” he recalled. “When I came into their lives, I just wanted to be their friend. Baseball gave me an opportunity to do that.”

When Joey’s senior year of high school in 2019-20 was derailed by the COVID pandemic, J.P. called in favors to colleges and high schools in the area. He gathered a group of ballplayers to run a short COVID league in order to give Joey a proper final season.

But shortly after graduation, Joey asked his grandfather to accompany him to see an Army recruiter. It sealed the deal.

“I remember I had given Joey a really nice baseball bat that I had first given my son, and that summer after school I asked him if he had any summer games to play. He said no and gave me back the bat, which really felt like him saying, ‘Thanks for the opportunity, but I’m focused on what’s next,’” J.P. recalled. “I was always so blown away by how mature he was.”

Love of service

Joey enlisted and shipped off to basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in January 2021.

Kristen wasn’t worried. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was underway and America was likely heading to an era of peacetime service. Although her family had long military service, no one was ever killed nor did she know anyone in the military community who had lost a loved one.

Joey wrote her letters and called her as often as he could through the nearly six months of basic and advanced infantry training. 

“He loved it. He was a top performer,” Giordano recalled. 

And he got a nickname within his unit: Private Dimps.

When his graduation approached in June 2021, Kristen planned a whole weekend of sightseeing with him in St. Louis. She was so excited to get to see him, even if for just a few short days.

But as she boarded her flight, she got a call from Joey. He had just received his orders to report to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, and wouldn’t be able to stay for their vacation.

Kristen was disappointed, but Joey was excited. He wanted to see the world, and the new assignment was about as far west as he could go in the continental U.S.

Joey would return home only once more, in October 2021. His family gathered to celebrate his progress and Kristen recalled that his hugs seemed just a bit longer than normal. After seeing his grandparents off, Kristen asked him if everything was OK.

“He looked at me and said, ‘I just feel like I’m never gonna see them again,’” she recalled. “It probably was more about them than him, but now it just feels like a premonition.”

An unexplained loss

In Washington, Joey was training as a motor transport operator, or the driver of heavy trucks that haul cargo or troops. His unit often spent their days in the Yakima Training Center – a remote, dusty piece of ground that resembles the Middle East’s conditions.

By the spring of 2022, he was often conducting field training exercises and the long hours were wearing on him. One Sunday night in April, he called home but sounded tired, saying that he had a migraine.

“They weren’t sleeping and they had been getting up early to train on driving while wearing night vision goggles,” Kristen recalled. “I told him to get some sleep, and that I loved him, to be safe and that I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

She would never get to talk to her son again.

At 5:40 a.m. April 25, 2022, the truck that Joey was riding in attempted to descend a hill, but hit a soft shoulder and rolled several times. He was killed instantly and two other soldiers had to be flown out with injuries. 

Unfortunately, such fatal accidents are not uncommon in the Army, with about 10 service members dying from them each year. Joey was just 19 years old.

It would be hours later that casualty notification officers came to Kristen’s front door – in a state of shock, she doesn’t remember what they said to her.

She spent the rest of the day contacting her family to let them know of the tragedy before they saw it online or in the news. In particular, Kristen was worried about Joey’s older sister, Alexis, who was his best friend.

It would take the family 10 days to receive Joey’s body back for burial – and it was then, in watching his coffin come off the plane, that reality set in for Kristen.

“I didn’t get to see him because he was in such bad shape, and that didn’t help,” Kristen said, wiping away a tear. “I was kind of hanging on to this hope for months that it wasn’t really him; that they had made a mistake, and he was just gonna come walking through the door. 

“That part has been really, really difficult. I felt like I didn’t really get to say goodbye.”

Finding purpose

For months after Joey’s death, Kristen couldn’t go back to her job working in human resources for the Caesar Rodney School District. It just didn’t feel meaningful enough anymore.

She struggled to find purpose until she began volunteering with the USO, the nonprofit that assists service members and their families. Now she works full-time at the USO center on Dover Air Force Base, providing a community for service members to get a snack, play pool or just hang out with their friends.

“I think about Joey and his friends, and how they probably would have loved somewhere to go like that, being so far away from their families,” she said. “I think having that purpose has helped me in a lot of ways, it’s almost been like an extension of therapy.”

Through the USO, Kristen also connected with Mission BBQ, the restaurant chain that honors service members and Gold Star families, where she was hired as a community coordinator for several years. She flew around the country to help open new locations and bring in Gold Star families.

Kristen also organized 5K runs in Joey’s memory, raising money to help build a Gold Star Families Monument in the Delaware Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Millsboro.

While all of those things have helped her to honor the memory of her son, the loss still feels fresh, especially around days like Memorial Day.

“I hear people all the time talk about how they’re getting an extra day off or they’re making plans to drink some beer down at the beach. But they don’t realize what a day like Memorial Day means for families like mine,” Kristen said. “I loved Joey with my whole heart, and just because he’s not here anymore doesn’t mean I love him any less.”

The post ‘I didn’t get to say goodbye’: Gold Star mother honors fallen soldier son appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Rain overwhelms sewer system in parts of US city, while temperatures in France break May record

New York City saw flash flooding on Wednesday, as large parts of Brooklyn and Queens received about 2in (50mm) of rainfall in as little as 20 minutes. Officials said the deluge caused water to flow into the sewer system at a rate of up to 6in an hour, quickly overwhelming an aged network that was designed to accommodate just 1.75in an hour.

Residents and commuters found themselves wading knee-deep through flood water that flowed with dangerous speed in places. One video showed a woman alighting from a bus losing her footing and being dragged along by the torrent of water. Several major roads were blocked, including the Long Island Expressway, and subway services were disrupted as water spilled into stations. Large amounts of mud and other debris was left behind; videos showed bags of rubbish being swept down streets along with loose litter.

The drill rapper Tony Mohraz, also known as 021kid, is an advocate for the return to the Iranian throne of the Pahlavi dynasty.

As former Soviet Republic goes to the polls, it finds itself in a strategic tug of war between Russia, the US, Turkey, Europe and Azerbaijan

To describe Yerevan, a charming city of liberal values encased in imposing Soviet architecture, as the centre of the world is a stretch, but Armenia’s claim that it can become the strategic crossroads of the landmass of Eurasia is becoming less and less fanciful. As the former Soviet Republic goes to the polls on 7 June for national elections, it finds itself in a five-way tug of war between Russia, the US, Turkey, Europe and Azerbaijan.

The interest has in part been sparked by the possibility of an end to Armenia’s conflict with its neighbour Azerbaijan – and the chance this represents for Armenia to end its physical isolation and become part of the middle corridor, a vital trade route linking western China and Europe, bypassing both Russia’s northern corridor and the Suez canal.

"Think Olympics on steroids. Literally," quips the BBC, describing Sunday's controversial Enhanced Games event in Las Vegas featuring dozens of athletes "using performance-enhancing drugs to try and break world records in track, weightlifting and swimming. Some $25m (£18.6m) in prize money is up for grabs — with cash prizes for winners... The drugs they use must be legal, and approved by the Federal Drug Administration. But substances like testosterone and human growth hormone — banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency — are not only celebrated here, they're encouraged and for sale... Health experts warn that anabolic steroids and growth hormones can cause strokes and cardiovascular damage, among other risks. Event organisers claim Enhanced will push the limits of human performance while critics, especially in the Olympic movement, dismiss it as an affront to the spirit and founding principles of competitive sport... Earlier this month, the Enhanced Group — the company behind the competition — began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. And the competition is seemingly being treated as an opportunity for Enhanced to sell performance-enhancing medicine and supplements online. "The project was founded by entrepreneurs Aron D'Souza and Maximilian Martin in 2023," the artidcle points out, "and has attracted backing from prominent investors including billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr." And NPR adds that "Most of the participating athletes trained for the competition in Abu Dhabi, as part of Enhanced's own study." Enhanced did not break down what specific athletes used which drugs, but they announced on Wednesday in the lead-up to the event that 91% of the athletes competing used testosterone or testosterone esters, 79% used human growth hormone, and 62% used stimulants, such as adderall... The games have been largely panned by outside medical experts and sports governing bodies. Multiple recent studies assess the harm surrounding the Enhanced Games. Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called the games a "dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle" in a statement. The International Olympic Committee said the games are a "betrayal of everything that we stand for." The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last year urged U.S. authorities to stop the games. The International Federation of Sports Medicine said in 2024 that they see the medical oversight as "insufficient" to support the athletes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inmates at Barinas prison allege they were peacefully protesting when prison staff opened fire, leaving some wounded

Inmates at Venezuela’s western Barinas prison staged a protest on its roof on Sunday, piling flaming mattresses and calling for the removal of the facility’s director, whom they accused of overseeing guards as they shot unarmed prisoners.

“We want justice. They are shooting us, the guards and the wardens,” a prisoner said in a video shared by the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, a local NGO, on X, in which a man is seen with a bullet wound in his chest.

Jackrabbit XG Front Suspension Upgrade. If you own a JackRabbit ebike, you already know it’s one of the most fun, portable, and zippy micro mobility solutions on the market. But let’s be honest: while that rigid frame is great for weight savings and simplicity, it can be a bit unforgiving when you hit a pothole or a patch of rough pavement.

Jackrabbit XG Front Suspension Upgrade: Smoothing Out the Ride

If you’ve been looking to elevate your riding experience, a front suspension fork is arguably the most impactful modification you can make. Today, we’re diving into my recent Jackrabbit XG front suspension upgrade to see if it’s worth the hype.

Scroll Down For The Video

Why Upgrade Your Jackrabbit ebike Suspension?

The JackRabbit is built for city streets, but even the best-paved cities have cracks, bumps, and debris. A rigid front end transfers every bit of that vibration directly into your wrists and shoulders. By swapping to a suspension fork, you’re not just adding comfort; you’re increasing control and safety, ensuring your front tire stays planted on the ground through uneven terrain.

When searching for the best Jackrabbit XG front suspension upgrade, you’ll find several kits marketed specifically for the platform. These are often the easiest route, as they come with the necessary hardware to ensure a direct fit. However, for those who enjoy the DIY spirit of JackRabbit mods, there’s always a path to explore aftermarket compatibility.

The Orion Moto AX5 Route

For my build, I decided to go a slightly different route. I opted to purchase a set of AX5 air suspension forks from Orion Moto. These are the OEM replacement forks for the Orion E20 electric balance bike. I have experience with the Orion E16X and the availability of Orion Moto spare parts. This is where the idea came from

I’ll admit, there was a fair amount of “calculated risk” involved. While I was reasonably certain they would fit, there is always that moment of truth when you’re stripping the front end down.

Here is what I encountered: The AX5 steerer tube is actually shorter than the original Jackrabbit fork steerer tube. In a standard setup, this would be a major roadblock. However, because I had already swapped out my stock cockpit for a different stem and aftermarket handlebars, the geometry worked out perfectly. The shorter tube height meant I didn’t need to add a stack of spacers, resulting in a cleaner, more aggressive look for the bike.

Jackrabbit XG Front Suspension Upgrade VIDEO

Is it Worth the Effort?

Putting the AX5 air forks on the Jackrabbit XG transformed the ride quality. The air adjustability allows me to dial in the sag for my weight, something a cheaper coil spring fork simply can’t do. It handles curbs and road chatter with ease, making it feel less like a “toy” and more like a high-performance urban commuter.

Jackrabbit XG Front Suspension Upgrade is  

Whether you buy a plug-and-play Jackrabbit XG front suspension upgrade kit or choose to source your own parts, the improvement is night and day. If you’re looking to dive deeper into custom builds, check out our other guides on essential Jackrabbit accessories and the best JackRabbit mods to take your ride to the next level.

Ready to smooth out your commute? Grab your hex keys and get wrenching!

Share Your Thoughts 

Have you changed the handlebars on your Jackrabbit e-bike? Have some knowledge to share? Drop a comment on my socials. FB IG YT

More Jackrabbit Articles From The Sideways Movement

• Three Easy Jackrabbit XG Mods
• Jackrabbit XG Review
• Hydraulic Disc Brake Upgrade For Jackrabbit E-bike 
• Jackrabbit XG Throttle Replacement 
• The Best Handlebars for a Jackrabbit XG

As always, thank you for reading, and don’t forget to check out our social media channels for more Onewheel-related stoke.

Sideways 4 Life!

The Sideways Movement – Onewheel Blog – thesidewaysmovement.com

The post Jackrabbit XG Front Suspension Upgrade appeared first on The Sideways Movement.

Paris police looking into more than 100 allegations of mistreatment by ‘monitors’ after parents’ groups said they had fought for years to be taken seriously

France is facing a child abuse scandal as ‘monitors’ at dozens of state nursery and primary schools are investigated for violence, sexual assault and rape.

Paris police are examining more than 100 allegations of mistreatment, physical violence and rape of children as young as three by school monitors during lunch breaks, nap times and after-school activities, prosecutors have confirmed.

The Varnish project has renamed itself to Vinyl Cache. We followed this rename with a new vinyl-cache package. This upgrade results in breaking changes and users are advised to study these changes and how it affects them before following the replacement. All references to "varnish" have been changed to "vinyl" in all binaries and directories.

At minimum, users will have to:

• rename /etc/varnish to /etc/vinyl-cache
• rename /var/lib/varnish to /var/lib/vinyl-cache
• fix up ownership of files inside /var/lib/varnish
• user varnish becomes vinyl
• group varnish becomes vinyl
• user varnishlog becomes vinyllog
• user vcache remains the same
• disable the old varnish.service and varnishncsa.service systemd units
• enable the new vinyl-cache.service and vinylncsa.service systemd units

Meanwhile, the varnish package has been dropped from [extra]. We're not currently planning to maintain a new varnish package as it's a different upstream project.

Thursday California's governor issued an executive order "directing state agencies to prepare workers and businesses for AI-driven workforce disruption," reports San Francisco's KQED. In a statement the governor said "This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future." The order mandates agencies to explore a range of policy options, including severance standards, expanded unemployment insurance, job retraining programs aimed specifically at white-collar workers, worker ownership models and a concept the governor called "universal basic capital," giving all residents a stake in assets such as corporate stocks, bonds or wealth funds... Tom Kemp, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, applauded the fact that the order named data privacy as a consumer protection concern and highlighted the CPPA's automated decision-making technology regulations, which he called "the nation's most comprehensive." Others are more skeptical. "Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it's a political choice," Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, wrote in a statement. However, Gonzalez noted one area of genuine agreement: the order's emphasis on collective bargaining as a tool for protecting workers from AI displacement... According to Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index, software developers ages 22 to 25 are among those most likely to see their skills made redundant earliest. This year, U.S. employment fell nearly 20% from 2024, even as headcount for older developers continued to grow. Following the job cuts announced at Meta, a union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canada released a statement that suggests Silicon Valley's own labor force may seek to organize... "It's undeniable that our whole industry is being transformed by the corporate push to adopt new AI tools," [Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009 said in a statement]. "It's hard not to feel anxiety and fear when we can see more and more tech companies cutting huge portions of their workforce both in anticipation of replacing them with AI, and to fund their multi-billion-dollar bets on AI as the future of the industry..." In February, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Gonzalez delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Newsom: regulate AI or lose labor's support for any future presidential run. Shuler called a potential AI-driven economic collapse a coming "crisis." In August 2025, Newsom announced a partnership with Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe to expand AI education in California schools and community colleges, a workforce preparation push that now looks like a precursor to Thursday's more sweeping order. The article notes that after signing the bill the governor shared this comment on X.com. "California will pursue new policies that make sure working Californians — not just Big Tech — benefit from the wealth and breakthroughs coming out of this space." Newsom telegraphed Thursday's order earlier this week, when he appeared at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference in Washington. "Businesses are going to make a fortune, and that's why you cannot continue to have a payroll tax system that taxes jobs and then subsidizes automation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bonolo Selelo and Tsholofelo Kumile are going to court for right to wed but face fierce opposition from church groups

Bonolo Selelo was at Botswana’s national museum for a Gaborone Pride event when she spotted Tsholofelo Kumile and was struck by her good looks. The two initiated a conversation and when Kumile expressed anxiety about what a tarot reading at the event might hold, Selelo thought nothing of offering her a hug. The reading turned out positive but Kumile claimed her hug anyway and they talked for hours.

That was 1 October 2023. Two months later, they moved in together. Then, on a hike during the Easter holidays in 2024, Selelo proposed to Kumile. A year later, they visited a local government office to register their intent to marry and were told it wasn’t legal.

Not choosing is not an option.

Will Washington squander Tokyo’s new security commitment?

This blog is now closed. See our latest full report here

In Lebanon, the civil defence agency said early on Sunday its regional facility in the southern city of Nabatieh had been destroyed by an Israeli strike.

The Directorate General of Civil Defence said the building had collapsed and a large number of vehicles and equipment had been damaged by a “direct hit in a hostile Israeli strike”.

Film starring Pedro Pascal next to ‘Baby Yoda’ took $165m globally on opening weekend, failing to surpass the opening of 2018 flop Solo

The Mandalorian and Grogu may have blasted into first place at the box office – but its launch was far, far away from impressive, having the lowest opening weekend for a Star Wars film since Disney took over the franchise.

The film, which stars Pedro Pascal as the titular helmeted warrior who travels the galaxy with a tiny companion better known as “Baby Yoda”, made $102m at the domestic box office (US and Canada) over the US’s four-day Memorial day weekend, contributing to a total $165m global box office.

President insists ‘I don’t make bad deals!’ as hawks from his own party call proposed agreement a disaster – key US politics stories from Sunday 24 May at a glance

Donald Trump defended himself against criticism from fellow Republicans on Sunday as he appeared on the verge of agreeing a deal with Iran to end the war.

As hawks in his party called the proposed agreement a disaster and questioned why the US president had launched the conflict in the first place, Trump claimed on social media that his deal would be “THE EXACT OPPOSITE” of the one agreed by Barack Obama, which Trump pulled out of in 2018.

AI "crashed the party" at this year's Cannes Film Festival, writes The Hollywood Reporter. The festival exposed "the fault lines reshaping cinema," their article argues, including how "AI is here — and the industry has stopped pretending otherwise." A humanoid robot spotted marching up and down the Croisette seemed to sum up the worst AI fears of the film industry — the machines have arrived and they are taking your place. But inside the Palais and the market tents, the conversation over artificial intelligence had moved beyond fear into something more like uneasy acceptance. Fighting AI "is a battle we will lose," said Demi Moore, a Cannes jury member this year, at the festival's opening press conference, suggesting the film industry needs to "find ways in which we can work with it." That's not the official Cannes line. The festival has banned films using generative artificial intelligence from its competition lineup. But at the Cannes film market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has shifted. AI-friendly tech giant Meta signed on as an official partner to the festival in a multiyear deal. Its AI tools were used to help produce an [out of competition] festival entry: Steven Soderbergh's documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. [Meta's press release announcing the partnership touts "our creator partnerships," their Meta AI assistant, and "our latest AI and wearable technologies" including Ray-Ban Meta AI features for smartglasses like "AI-powered translations that break down language barriers in real-time".] At the Marché du Film [film market], there was an "AI for Talent Summit" that took the AI revolution as given, focusing instead on ethical AI use, data sovereignty and on the ways the technology can be used to enhance, rather than replace, creativity. For the indie film industry, it felt like a turning point.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The actor, who played Tracy Jordan’s gentle bodyguard in 80 episodes of the beloved comedy, died in his sleep after years of health problems

Grizz Chapman, best known for his role as Grizz on the hit comedy 30 Rock, has died aged 52.

His cousin, the Harlem Globetrotter Donte Harrison, confirmed Chapman’s death on social media on Saturday.

Sources identified the 21-year-old suspect as Nasire Best of Dundalk, Maryland, and documents obtained by CBS News show Best previously blocked a White House entry lane in June 2025.

Nearly a third of vice-chancellors would cut hardship support if necessary over next three years, according to poll

Vice-chancellors have said they may need to cut hardship support for impoverished students and reduce outreach activities aimed at disadvantaged groups if the dire funding struggles at universities continue.

The anonymous poll of leaders by Universities UK (UUK) revealed the extent of the budgetary quagmire facing higher education, with more than two-thirds prepared to cut staff jobs by compulsory redundancy if difficulties continue over the next three years, while nearly 90% said they were looking at hiring freezes or voluntary redundancies.

Definition of green facilities made in 2022, before release of ChatGPT, says Action to Protect Rural Scotland

A Scottish government policy designed to encourage datacentres to build in Scotland could lead to a massive volume of carbon emissions being ignored, according to an analysis by a Scottish charity.

“Green datacentres” are at the heart of Scotland’s ambitions to develop economically. Enshrined in national policy, they are part of a larger, UK-wide effort to attract big AI investment to Scotland.

A piano teacher has won over an Oscar-winning composer with his new method for teaching students to play, and to compose their own music. The "Payam Method" has students sweeping national competitions.

From improvising classical music to playing songs students like, the approach by Payam Music focuses on student enjoyment while learning piano.

Payam Khastkhodaei, the son of Iranian immigrants, says he's developed a new method of teaching that has students loving their piano lessons. Now his students are sweeping national competitions.

Stocks on Wall Street have rallied in recent months, but author Andrew Ross Sorkin sees a crash coming. The question is: when will the bubble pop, and how much will the market slump when it does?

Scientists are hoping to use genetic engineering to reduce the transmission of Lyme disease. The scientists' target is not the deer or the ticks often associated with the disease; it's wild mice.

Russia suspected of obstructing signal on flight bringing John Healey home from visit to British troops in Estonia

An RAF jet carrying the defence secretary, John Healey, had its signal jammed for the entire three-hour flight after it flew near the Russian border.

Healey had been visiting British soldiers in Estonia and was travelling back to the UK when the electronic attack happened, the Times reported.

Phoronix reports on a presentation about trying FreeBSD on modern Framework laptop from last week's Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation: With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops... With the Framework Laptop, the touchscreen "just worked" as did other basic functionality from the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, including peripherals like a wireless mouse. Among the challenges were Zoom failing for video calls but eventually working, the web camera took steps to enable, and Microsoft Teams only partially worked. With the help of online resources, ultimately she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Officials at the highest levels of the Iranian government say they don't know where Mojtaba Khamenei is and have no way to contact him directly, relying instead on a network of couriers.

Announcement comes after former minister Alan Milburn says Britain has neglected a generation of young people

Ministers are expanding youth work-experience and training schemes, after Alan Milburn warned Britain is spending £25 keeping young people on benefits for every £1 spent helping them into work.

Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, will announce plans for 300,000 extra work experience placements over the next three years as the government attempts to tackle what the minister described as a “quiet crisis” in youth employment.

"Canonical says Ubuntu Pastebin will be decommissioned at the end of May 2026," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "as part of an infrastructure modernization effort." The announcement only appeared this week, giving the Linux community barely any warning before a service that has been tied to Ubuntu support culture for years suddenly disappears. Ubuntu Pastebin has long been used for sharing logs, crash reports, config files, and terminal output across IRC, Ask Ubuntu, forums, bug reports, Reddit, and countless troubleshooting guides scattered around the internet. The bigger concern is link rot. Once the shutdown happens, years of old support discussions could lose critical debugging information overnight. Community members have already pointed out that some Ubuntu packages and scripts still reference paste.ubuntu.com directly. While it is understandable that aging services eventually get retired, the extremely short transition period is rubbing many Linux users the wrong way, especially in a community where old documentation and archived troubleshooting threads still regularly help people solve problems a decade later.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Highest temperatures of 2026 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as Kew Gardens in London reaches 32.3C

England, Wales and Northern Ireland recorded their highest temperatures of 2026 on Sunday, which was also the UK’s hottest May day for at least 79 years.

Kew Gardens in west London recorded 32.3C (90.1F), Cardiff 27.4C and Armagh 23.4C.

Luke Grimes leads the Yellowstone sequel.

American president says he is not rushing into a deal after proposed plan to end war prompts Republican backlash

Donald Trump defended himself against criticism from fellow Republicans on Sunday as he appeared on the verge of agreeing a deal with Iran to end the war.

As hawks in his party called the proposed agreement a disaster and questioned why the US president had launched the conflict in the first place, Trump claimed on social media that his deal would be “THE EXACT OPPOSITE” of the one agreed by Barack Obama, which Trump pulled out of in 2018.

The Web Serial API lets websites write to (and read from) serial devices using JavaScript, including USB and Bluetooth devices with virtual serial ports. And this week's Firefox 151 release introduced support for the Web Serial API on desktop. "Most folks won't use this API," acknowledges Mozilla's blog, "but for our community of builders and tinkerers, it unlocks the ability to use Firefox to communicate directly with compatible hardware devices like microcontrollers, development boards, and other serial-connected devices..." With Firefox's browser engine, Gecko, now supporting Web Serial, users can now connect, code, configure, and control compatible hardware directly from the browser in many workflows, often without additional software or complicated setup... As part of this week's launch, Adafruit, one of the internet's most beloved open-source hardware communities, is collaborating with us to test and validate what browser-based hardware development can look like in Firefox with Web Serial support... With Web Serial support in Firefox 151, Adafruit's browser-based hardware workflows now work directly in Firefox as well, with no additional software or complicated setup required for many projects. We invite you to give it a try... We want the web to be open, flexible, and shaped by the diversity of people building on it. If you're wiring up your first board, experimenting with hardware projects, or dusting off an old electronics kit, give Adafruit and Web Serial in Firefox a try. Build something amazing. Make something useful. Tell us what works. Tell us what breaks. Most of all, make it your own. Mozilla's "Hacks" blog demonstrates with an Adafruit ESP32-S2 based board "where messages sent from web code can be directly displayed on the device over Web Serial." And Mozilla engineer Alex Franchuk even built a handheld device that changes a web page's CSS properties.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patti LaBelle said she's "having fun living it down" as the legendary singer marks her 82nd birthday.

Negotiations are "in a very good place," a senior Trump official said, but, a deal to end the Iran war likely will not be signed this weekend.

A spearfisher was killed on the Great Barrier Reef on Sunday in Australia's second fatal shark attack in just over a week, police said.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 25, No. 1,801.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 25, No. 1,079.

Red light therapy masks are a popular addition for your skin care regimen. Here's the best way to use one.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 25 No. 813.

Some casualties after attacks on multiple locations in south and east of country on Sunday, state media reports

Israeli strikes hit southern and eastern Lebanon on Sunday, a day after 11 people were killed in a single raid on the south despite a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war and claims that the US and Iran are about to reach a peace deal.

Saturday’s strike in Sir al-Gharbiyeh “resulted in a massacre whose final toll is 11 dead including a child and six women, and nine wounded including four children and a woman”, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

Lee Zeldin says ‘low-volume release’ of flammable chemicals is most likely amid fears of explosion at Orange county facility near Disneyland

Government officials in Orange county, California, have warned that an overheated chemical tank “will fail” and could result in a chemical explosion in the area, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator said on Sunday.

“We’re being told that the tank will fail, but there are different scenarios as to what that means,” Lee Zeldin, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Zeldin, a former Republican congressman with no prior experience in environmental policy, was chosen by Trump as the head of the EPA.

WHO says outbreak poses ‘very high’ risk for country, but risk of disease spreading globally remains low

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo say that suspected Ebola cases have now passed 900 in the ongoing outbreak in the east of the country.

The DRC’s ministry of communication said in a post on X on Sunday that there were 904 suspected cases and 119 suspected deaths.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Kevin Hassett, White House National Economic Council director, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, join Nancy Cordes.

It's "the first time in seven years that a new Star Wars film has launched on the big screen," writes CNBC. And Variety notes it's expected to earn $102 million through Monday: [B]ox office analysts are mixed on the results. On one hand, it's significant for any film to debut above $100 million in post-pandemic times. On the other, "Star Wars" is one of Hollywood's preeminent film properties, so there's an expectation of a certain level of box office. And this start is the worst for "Star Wars" since Disney bought the franchise in 2012. CNBC cites reports 41% of tickets were sold for more expensive large-format screenings like IMAX and DolbyCinema. So how's the movie? Rotten Tomatoes shows an 89% positive rating from moviegoers on its "popcornmeter" and a 62% average score from professional movie critics. And Ars Technica writes that "The plot is predictable, the fight scenes are meh, but you can't beat the charm of that little green Grogu." So while there's "a paint-by-numbers plot," they add that "the little green puppet pretty much carries the entire film." The new film is ... fine. It's an average Star Wars outing, and it will give families a solid Memorial Day Weekend entertainment option. It's just not the spectacular home run that might have helped launch the flagging franchise into an exciting new era, and diehard Star Wars fans hoping for more are probably going to be disappointed. Of course, not everyone agrees. "How many nails can we realistically drive into Star Wars's coffin before it's time to give up hope of resuscitation?" writes Clarisse Loughrey for The Independent, calling it "the dullest and most inconsequential 'Star Wars' ever made." (She argues that the movie "stitches together what is clearly three episodes of the previously planned fourth season of The Mandalorian and calls it a day. There's not a whiff of effort here.") And a reviewer at RogerEbert.com gave it one-and-a-half stars, complaining that "There's no reason for anything in this movie except the wish to make even more money...." I'm on record as despising the word "content," which was pushed by early tech moguls to devalue art as interchangeable goo in a virtual pipeline, but this washed-out, video-game-looking movie, with its murky night scenes and lack of visual depth, deserves the word. You've seen everything in it before, from the equipment, spacecraft, armor, and tactical maneuvers to the species and various types of terrain (earthlike, but cartoony)... Even Grogu taxes our patience. Some of his cute bits could've ended with him facing the camera and doing jazz hands.

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The following is the transcript of the interview with Dr. Deborah Birx that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 24, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 24, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 24, 2026.

The US has apparently had to agree to unfreeze billions of Iranian assets for a regime more hardline than before the war

• Middle East crisis: live updates

On 24 May each year, Iranians celebrate a historic victory in the war with Iraq: the liberation of Khorramshahr in 1982.

This year, some were hoping a peace deal looking likely to be signed with the US might mark a similar turning point in their country’s history.

Actor recounts three alleged approaches by intelligence services, including through senior BBC executive

Riz Ahmed, the Oscar-winning actor, has claimed that Britain’s intelligence services tried three times to recruit him, including one occasion involving a senior BBC executive.

Ahmed, 43, said: “Well, it’s happened three different times and they’re all slightly ridiculous, and this is what I mean by it, it’s just like inherently comedic.

Apple just registered a new subdomain record: genai.apple.com. The domain was spotted by a MacRumors contributing researcher, and though it doesn't yet lead to a live web page, they believe it's tied to Apple's annual developers conference WWDC which starts June 8, "where the company has promised to announce 'AI advancements' across its software platforms." The blog 9to5Mac speculates that "All signs point to WWDC 2026 being Apple's major AI renaissance, where the company will live up to the promises it made back at WWDC 2024, as well as a few additional new announcements." [I]it goes without saying that this is probably related to Apple's upcoming generative AI announcements at WWDC... Siri should finally be able to understand more personal context, have on screen awareness, and be able to take action in apps for you. This'll finally be made possible thanks to Apple's new partnership with Google, where Apple will be using Gemini-diffused models hosted on Private Cloud Compute to power Siri... Apple will also reportedly be introducing a new Siri app. This'll allow you to access your previous Siri conversations, as well as have text-based conversations with Siri. Other Apple Intelligence upgrades coming at WWDC 2026 include the ability to generate wallet passes from physical tickets, new editing features in the Photos app, and additional functionality for Visual Intelligence...

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Emma Raducanu suffered her first opening-round loss with an error-strewn display against Argentina’s Solana Sierra

Khachanov has reached the last eight of this competition twice – Wimbledon likewise – and the last four of the other two slams. That tells us he’s got an all-court game, with the eye-test advising that he lacks the power-augmenting finesse go further. He does, though, have Gea’s number … so of course, as I type, the young Frenchman flat-bats an incredible pass cross-court to save set point. For all the difference it makes, Khachanov closing out from there to lead 6-3.

It looks a lovely day in Paris, by the way – which isn’t always the case. It’s going to be seriously hard work for those involved in tight matches, given clay-court rallies and soaring tempteratures.

Education secretary asks UK watchdog to look into nursery practices, including non-refundable deposits and add-ons

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, is ordering a competition review of hidden childcare charges amid concerns parents are being hit with extra charges, despite the government’s flagship expansion of funded childcare hours.

Phillipson has written to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) asking it to examine practices including non-refundable deposits and compulsory add-ons.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Reps. Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, and Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 24, 2026.

China has launched the Shenzhou 23 spacecraft with three astronauts heading to its space station.

Trump insists US won’t rush talks with Tehran after rebukes from Republicans, including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham

Republican hawks have issued a rare rebuke of Donald Trump over his planned peace deal with Iran, describing it as a “disaster” and questioning why the US president launched the war in the first place.

Allies of Trump who strongly backed his controversial decision to order war on Iran alongside Israel urged him to “hold the line” this weekend, despite mounting economic costs and no sign of progress on many of the the initial objectives set out by his administration.

GOP congressman says his party is set to count cost of ‘Trump disappointment syndrome’ after primary defeat

Donald Trump’s Republican party is on course for a damaging rejection at the ballot box in November, according to a maverick US congressman ousted by a challenger handpicked by the president.

Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, became the latest of Trump’s targets to be defeated in the party’s primaries this week. He had repeatedly broken with the president over military action against Iran, government spending and the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

It will once again be a beautiful day in the neighborhood thanks to the votes from Pittsburghers to bring back the iconic stamp.

Suspect who died after exchanging fire with agents had tried to enter the complex last summer, records show

A gunman who opened fire outside the White House on Saturday before he was shot by federal agents was already known to the US Secret Service, court records show.

The man, 21, was taken to a nearby hospital, before he was later pronounced dead. He had previously tried to enter the complex, according to an affidavit filed in DC superior court in 2025, following an arrest nearby.

First responders rescued an infant from a car that became trapped in floodwaters in southern Texas on Saturday, video shows.

Last month saw a world first, reports Electrek. Wind and solar generated more power globally than gas: According to new analysis from independent energy think tank Ember, wind and solar produced 22% of the world's electricity in April 2026, compared to 20% from gas. Together, the two renewable sources generated a record 531 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity during the month, 54 TWh more than gas plants generated globally, at 477 TWh... Five years ago, in April 2021, gas generation was almost identical to today's level at 476 TWh. But back then, wind and solar combined generated just 245 TWh — less than half of what they produced this April... Wind and solar generation increased across nearly every major market reporting April data... April tends to be the strongest month for this kind of milestone because spring weather in the Northern Hemisphere usually brings a combination of strong wind generation, rising solar output, and lower electricity demand between heating and cooling seasons. Still, the broader trend is clear. Ember's recent Global Electricity Review found that wind and solar met all global electricity demand growth in 2025. "Governments around the world are also ramping up renewable energy targets to reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuel imports..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An online propaganda war is currently being waged between the United States and Iran, and global reaction suggests the Iranians are beating the Americans at their own game.

John McWhorter talks about his book, "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," published in 2000, along with one of his latest projects.

The following is the transcript of the interview with retired Lt. Col. William Swenson and retired Command Sergeant Major Matthew Williams (Ret.) that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 24, 2026.

Russia used a powerful hypersonic missile that has nuclear capabilities to carry out a massive attack Sunday in Kyiv, Ukraine.

There is broad commitment on the principles of a deal, a senior Trump administration official said, and the administration feels positive about where things stand.

At least two people died in Kyiv, which faced the brunt of the attack, Ukrainian officials said. It was one of the biggest overnight aerial assaults since the beginning of Russia's invasion.

Assault hits water facility, market, residential buildings and schools, killing at least four and injuring dozens

Russia used its powerful hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missile for a third time in Ukraine as part of a massive attack on Kyiv and its surrounding region that killed at least four people and injured about 100.

Russia hit the city of Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv region with the missile, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said. He described a heavy Russian assault that also hit a water supply facility, burned down a market and damaged dozens of residential buildings and several schools.

The United States’ rail system has a dedicated customer base, but remains a niche option for most this summer

Sebastian Caillat didn’t know how fascinating the dental industry could be until he sat next to a dentist on an Amtrak ride from college in New York City to his childhood home in Washington DC in 2023. They spent the ride discussing the dentist’s efforts to self-fund his own practice. Caillat was surprised to learn the extraordinary cost of dental technology equipment – but also how interesting a conversation about dental technology equipment could be.

In Caillat’s view, that conversation represented the magic of Amtrak trains, a mode of transport that he says encourages social interaction. He also saw this dynamic play out last summer, when he rode from New York City to Philadelphia for a Club World Cup match between Palmeiras and Botafogo. Fans of the Brazilian clubs engulfed a train that traveled through New York City and New Jersey, an area home to more than 70,000 Brazilians.

Elisa Sunga shares how to make lavender and lemon poppy seed cake in her cookbook, "Cake Picnic: Recipes for the Love of Cake & Friends."

Reform UK leader claims ‘counter-espionage experts’ suggest state-sponsored hackers are behind disclosure of £5m gift

Nigel Farage is under mounting pressure to provide evidence for his claim that a state-sponsored Russian hack was behind the disclosure of the £5m gift he received from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

Reform UK claimed over the weekend that analysis of Farage’s phone by “counter-espionage experts” suggested that “Farage’s phone, email and bank accounts were compromised by hostile actors, almost certainly linked to Moscow, using spear phishing tactics”, before the Guardian revealed details of his undeclared gift last month.

"For months, scammers have been taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to send spammy emails from an internal Microsoft email address typically used for sending legitimate account alerts," TechCrunch reports: [The scammers] have been able to set up new Microsoft accounts as if they are new customers and use that access to send out emails purportedly from the tech giant, potentially tricking people into thinking these emails are genuine... Last week, I received several, similarly structured emails containing subject lines and web links to scammy sites from Microsoft across different email accounts. These crudely made emails were sent from msonlineservicesteam@microsoftonline.com, an email account that Microsoft uses to send important notifications to users, such as two-factor authentication codes and other critical alerts about their online account. Some of these emails' subject lines resembled official emails that would alert users to fraudulent transactions, while other emails claimed to have a private message waiting for the recipient at a web address mentioned in the email body. In a social post on Tuesday, anti-spam nonprofit The Spamhaus Project said it had also seen Microsoft's account notification email address being abused to send spam and that the activity dated back "several months." A PR representative told TechCrunch that Microsoft was "actively investigating" and "taking action against these phishing reports to help keep customers protected," with measures that include "removing accounts that violate our Terms of Use" and "further strengthening our detection and blocking mechanisms." TechCrunch suggests the issue may not be limited to Microsoft. "Other users commenting on social media say that other companies' email addresses are also being used to send out spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the summer season warms up, long-haul truck drivers lament their bills and vendors worry about raising prices

The self-proclaimed largest truck stop in the world offers drivers just about everything they might need during a break. The Iowa 80 parking lots offer 900 spots for trucks and dozens more for passenger cars, while the varieties of snacks, drinks and souvenirs in the market are uncountable. Elsewhere on the premises is a dentist, a barber and a chiropractor, a weight room, a 24-hour diner and a movie theater. There is also a Truckomat, to wash your truck, and a Dogomat, to wash your dog.

But the one thing that Iowa 80 does not offer is relief from the price of gas, which has increased sharply ever since the US joined Israel in attacking Iran and sparking a global energy crisis. On a recent afternoon, a gallon of regular gasoline at the sprawling stop in eastern Iowa went for $4.26, and diesel $5.72.

If you visit the Flatpak website today, it lists, as the very first advantage of the project: “Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.” If you then move on to the list of supported distributions, you’ll see the usual suspects, but also distributions like Void Linux, Guix, and Alpine. These last three all have one thing in common: they use an init system other than systemd, because Flatpak doesn’t care what init system you use. It seems that for the next major version of Flatpak, however, that’s going to change: systemd will probably become a dependency for Flatpak.

Speaking at the Linux App Summit, Arian Vovk and Sebastian Wick held a great talk about the future of Flatpak. The current version of Flatpak will continue to see a ton of improvements, but at the same time, the limits of what can be done with its decades-old design have become harder and harder to work around. As such, they’re also planning for and working on what they call Flatpak Next, or perhaps Flatpak 2.0, which is effectively a rewrite of Flatpak based on what they’ve learned over the years, making use of modern technologies and ideas that have gained ground since the initial design of Flatpak 1.x.

It’s important to note that everything discussed during the talk is planning, and not a single line of code has been written yet. This means that all of these plans are subject to change, and as the work progresses over the coming years, the end result may turn out very different from what’s been detailed in the talk. In addition, and I can’t stress this enough: if anything in this discussion gives you even the smallest of inklings to go and harass, attack, insult, or otherwise bother anyone involved in Flatpak, systemd, or related technologies, please be so kind as to book an appointment for a yoga class or whatever. It seems like you need it.

Right at the onset of the talk, Vovk and Wick explain that they want to move the permission management from Flatpak into the service layer, through a new service called systemd-appd. Systemd-appd gives applications an identifier and stores their permissions, and then this data can be queried by the rest of the system. In turn, this enables a slew of other features, not least of which is subsandboxing. At the moment, the plan is to introduce this feature in the current version of Flatpak, thereby introducing a dependency on systemd into Flatpak.

From what I understand from Vovk, they were intending to be “super considerate” of distributions and people not using systemd, which I take to mean we’d eventually end up in a situation very similar to systemd-logind, which was extracted from systemd into a separate daemon, elogind, so that distributions using other init systems could still make use of desktop environments depending on systemd-logind. I imagine Flatpak developers wanted to make as many affordances as realistically possible for something similar to happen to systemd-appd, thus ensuring Flatpak would remain available on distributions not using systemd.

Obviously, people who are using distributions like Void or Alpine were concerned about the future of Flatpak on their systems. If Flatpak gains a hard dependency on systemd, Flatpak would no longer work on distributions without systemd, so the talk raised questions – sadly, it seems the questions were directed at someone not technically involved with Flatpak development, and his replies were not particularly helpful and often just downright insulting and inflammatory.

Even though he’s not involved in Flatpak development, enough people assumed that he was, and a toxic brew stirred. Users with genuine, friendly questions about the future of Flatpak on their systems were met with derision and insults, and it spiraled out of control from there, drawing in the rabid anti-systemd Red Hat conspiracy lunatics (and worse). Things got progressively worse for everyone involved, particularly for Flatpak’s developers.

And so we ended up at the situation where everyone’s mad and Flatpak’s developers are “not feeling inclined to spend [their] time on that shit anymore” when it comes to accommodating and making affordances for distributions and people not using systemd. The end result will most likely be that any future Flatpak dependency on systemd will be stricter, and making any independent elogind-like daemon will be much harder than it was going to be. Nobody wins, everybody loses, all because some people thought it necessary and productive to be insulting and inflammatory.

As things currently stands, it’s very likely that over the coming years, Flatpak will gain a dependency on systemd, possibly without any affordances for an independent daemon to replicate systemd-appd functionality on distributions that do not use systemd. In other words, Flatpak would no longer be able to boast that it enables “Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.”, as it would no longer be distribution-agnostic. And that’s a shame, because Flatpak fills a real need for users, regardless of whatever init system they use.

Which is apparently something some people base their entire identity on, because they’re weirdos.

Former justice secretary Alex Chalk KC says figures Channel 4 obtained show the ‘horror show’ in the system

Almost 60,000 arrest warrants were issued for defendants who skipped court in England and Wales last year, up nearly 50% since 2020 in further evidence of the “horror show” in the criminal justice system.

The figures, obtained in an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches to air on Friday, also show that more than 30,000 failure-to-appear warrants are outstanding, meaning that tens of thousands of criminals could be on the run after being charged. It is unclear how many have more than one warrant to their name.

La Brea Tar Pits – the only urban, active ice age excavation site in world – gets a mammoth face lift for the first time in nearly 50 years

Los Angeles is known for famous museums such as the Getty and the Lacma, but perhaps fewer people are aware that – in the heart of the city – lies a museum that contains one of the world’s most remarkable fossil sites.

The La Brea Tar Pits and Museum is home to the remains of more than 2 million ice age flora and fauna, including mastodons and saber-toothed cats, that became trapped in oily pools that still bubble up today.

Incident said to have happened at racing event in 2002, year of queen’s Golden Jubilee, according to Sunday Times

Police investigating Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor are looking into an allegation that he behaved inappropriately towards a woman at Royal Ascot, according to a report.

The alleged incident is said to have happened at the annual five-day racing event in Berkshire in 2002, according to the Sunday Times.

In California, the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance is widely considered the most prestigious car show in the world. But just a few miles away, the Concours d'Lemons celebrates the junkers of the automotive world.

The It's FOSS blog has news about the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, which gives hardware vendors a secure portal to upload firmware updates "which can then be downloaded and installed by users through clients such as GNOME Software or fwupdmgr." (Originally developed in 2015 by GNOME maintainer Richard Hughes...) The issue, however, obviously, had been funding with the largest contributors being the usual suspects, Framework and Open Source Framework Foundation, at $10K a year. Recently, however, Lenovo and Dell joined suite as Premier sponsors, which is the highest tier at $100K a year each, making the project more sustainable and manageable. These companies contributing makes a lot of sense, considering they are two of the bigger computer companies which offer Linux by default in some cases, especially with Lenovo's ThinkPads being the Linux users' favorite for decades. And now... HP has followed suit as a Premier sponsor, also providing $100K a year, right alongside Dell and Lenovo... The question still remains, however, where are the other vendors? What are they waiting for... This major move by these three companies should not only be seen as a sign of relief and wider acceptance of the usage of Linux, but as a beacon for other vendors to follow, who ought to make their hardware more accessible to the open-source community.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Labour minister says complete disengagement has potential ‘for us to end up in a very, very difficult position’

David Miliband has said Europe should have “separate bedrooms” from the US, but not seek a “divorce” from its traditional alliance, despite the Trump administration’s impact on the relationship.

The former Labour foreign secretary, who has served as the president of the International Rescue Committee since 2013, said at the Hay literary festival on Sunday: “You can see the argument that strategic autonomy for Europe means divorce from the United States. I really counsel the dangers of that.

Douglas McCain, the eldest son of the late Sen. John McCain, has died, his family announced. He was 66.

Explosives-laden vehicle detonated as passenger train travelled through south-western city of Quetta

A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle near a railway track as a passenger train travelled through the south-western Pakistani city of Quetta, killing at least 23 people and wounding more than 70 others, officials have said.

The force of the explosion on Sunday caused two of the train cars to overturn and catch fire, sending thick black smoke into the air, according to footage shared online.

• New York led the entire game in 121-108 win

• Jalen Brunson scored 30 points to lead the Knicks

• Finals appearance would be their first since 1999

Jalen Brunson scored 30 points, Mikal Bridges added 22 and the New York Knicks moved within one game of their first NBA Finals appearance since 1999 with a 121-108 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers on Saturday night.

The Knicks can wrap up the Eastern Conference Finals and sweep their second straight series with a win on Monday night. Knicks fans – who were boisterous throughout the night – were chanting “Knicks in four” as the final seconds of Game 3 ticked away.

Charter to be adopted along river’s entire catchment from Cambrian mountains to Chepstow and Bristol Channel

The entire catchment of the River Wye has been formally recognised as a living ecosystem with intrinsic rights in a charter, a UK first that campaigners hope will help save the highly polluted river.

The charter was celebrated at a community event at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival on Sunday. It includes the right to flow, to biodiversity, to be free from pollution, to be supported by a healthy catchment, to regenerate, and the right to be represented, described as a “significant step” towards protecting and restoring one of the UK’s most beloved rivers.

The document is full of disclaimers and does not address fundamental issues, including Gaza and the Biden-to-Harris transition

When the Democratic National Committee finally released its autopsy on the 2024 election disaster, not even the DNC chair could defend it. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report,” Ken Martin conceded as the autopsy went public on Thursday. After several months of withholding the autopsy on the grounds of not wanting it to be a distraction, Martin fessed up at last: “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close. And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning.”

In response, a former Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau, summed up eight stages of Martin’s tortuous process that has spanned more than a year: “Promise to release autopsy; put incompetent friend in charge; incompetent friend produces incoherent product; announce you’re not releasing the autopsy; lie about why; gaslight people who ask, saying they’re the problem; face internal revolt; release autopsy.”

Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy

Google's settlement with Android users would resolve the lawsuit and alter how the company manages its terms of service, though not all users will receive financial compensation.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called the attack a "cowardly act of terrorism" on social media.

Angry residents of a town at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo​ attacked and burned a tent that was part of a health center where people are being treated for the virus.

Can the Hammers pull off a great escape?

From a reimagined search box to AI agents that hunt for apartments on your behalf, Google Search is being rebuilt with AI at its core.

The newly crowned champions close out their campaign with a London derby against the Eagles.

Spurs need a point against the Toffees to secure EPL survival.

The director of national intelligence was sidelined as the president abandoned his pose as the ‘candidate of peace’

Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, stayed loyal to Donald Trump until the end – and nurtured the president’s grievances against his political enemies. Last year, she accused Barack Obama and several of his top national security officials of leading a “treasonous conspiracy” to highlight Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In January, Gabbard showed up at the scene of an FBI raid in Georgia where officials sought ballots from the 2020 election, even though her role is mainly focused on foreign intelligence.

On Friday, Gabbard submitted her resignation to Trump, saying she would leave her post on 30 June, so she could support her husband after he was recently diagnosed with cancer. News reports quickly emerged that the White House had forced Gabbard to resign. The Guardian reported last month that Trump had privately asked cabinet members whether he should replace her from the post that oversees 18 US intelligence agencies.

Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University

Ohio State is grappling with sexual abuse allegations and questions over donor influence as financial pressures mount across higher education

When Rocky Ratliff transferred to Ohio State University in Columbus to study political science and wrestle for the college in the mid-1990s, he soon found himself being sexually abused by a prominent member of the university athletic department’s medical staff.

At the time, Dr Richard Strauss, who is believed to have abused hundreds of student athletes over a period of decades at Ohio State, and who killed himself in 2005, would subject young men to intense abuse, including rape.

Take a look inside ITER, the world's largest fusion energy project, to see how scientists from around the world are working to recreate the Sun's superpower on Earth to fuel a clean energy revolution.

Anna Wintour has welcomed the Bezoses – and their patronage – with open arms. But after a controversial Met Gala, industry insiders are less enthusiastic

The press conference for the Met Costume Institute’s spring exhibition is always a stately affair, but this year it was giving “feudal lady addresses her serfs” or perhaps “Marie Antoinette during the last days of Versailles”. Here, among the spectacular marble sculptures of the art museum’s American wing, was a beaming Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who Anna Wintour introduced as a “force for joy”, before adding that “she and her husband, Jeff, have shown with this event that they genuinely, genuinely care about giving back”. Meanwhile, in the outside world, protests against the Bezoses’ involvement had been raging for days. The discrepancy between the word on the street and the deference within the glass-ceilinged room was head-spinning.

The Met Gala has recently become a magnet for anti-excess protests, but this was its most controversial yet, owing to the $10m patronage of its honorary co-chairs, centibillionaires Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. It was not the first time Jeff Bezos bankrolled the gala – Amazon was its lead sponsor in 2012. But this year’s event came at a moment of soaring inequality, as Bezos’s personal wealth has mushroomed and his Donald Trump-appeasing decisions have made him less popular than ever with New York City’s left-leaning fashion and arts crowd.

Global Pepfar program has long had Republican leadership and bipartisan support, but initiative is at risk

US midterm voters overwhelmingly support Pepfar, an initiative to end HIV/Aids that also has strengthened health systems against other infectious disease threats but has come under fire from the Trump administration.

About three in four (74%) likely voters in the US midterm elections say they support funding the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), with voters more likely to back candidates who support Pepfar, according to a recent poll. Four in five voters said there is a moral argument for supporting lifesaving treatment for people at risk for or living with HIV/Aids, regardless of their personal choices.

Developers for several top videogames have joined unions under the Communication Workers of America — including Call of Duty, Fallout, Overwatch, Diablo and World of Warcraft. Last month workers on the online game Magic: The Gathering Arena team announced their own CWA union. The gaming news site Aftermath shares some interesting details: Owner Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast could have voluntarily agreed to the union, but instead the issue is going to an official vote with the National Labor Relations Board in June... [O]ne Arena developer shared on Bluesky that one of the reasons they were inspired to organize was because Wizards changed its remote work policy, requiring them to move across the country or to a more expensive state to remain employed. (Changes to remote work have been one of the big drivers of unionization and union action among video game developers.) If the union is successful, the company wouldn't be able to unilaterally change working conditions like remote work; it would have to negotiate with the union over the decision. There's no guarantee unionized employees would get what they want, but they'd have more of a say, and the opportunity to directly influence their work situation, than they would without a union.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global prices are approaching a tipping point that could trigger inflation, shortages and, over time, recession

If a US-Iran deal is about to be reached, three months on from the launch of Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, it will not be a day too soon for oil markets, which are approaching a dangerous tipping point.

The cost of a barrel of crude on the spot market – for immediate purchase, effectively – has bounced about $100 since Iran predictably responded to the onslaught from the US and Israel by closing the strait of Hormuz.

Boys, aged 15, given youth rehabilitation orders for two separate attacks against two girls in Hampshire

A judge’s decision not to jail the teenage boys who raped two girls has been described as a “rock straight in my face” by one of their victims.

Southampton crown court heard the two boys, both aged 15 at the time, raped the teenage girls in two separate attacks that occurred on 26 November 2024 and 17 January 2025 in Fordingbridge, Hampshire.

Labour MP writes to chair amid concerns building societies are overusing quick votes and failing to add members to boards

Nationwide is under pressure to address “emerging governance issues” across the building society sector, amid concerns bosses are bundling voting options and failing to allocate board seats for members.

The Stockport Labour MP Navendu Mishra has sent a formal letter to the chair of Nationwide, Kevin Parry, outlining growing unease over the way executives, including at Nationwide, have been engaging with members who ultimately own their building societies. A letter raising similar concerns was sent to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in recent weeks.

His recent concerts are a thunderous call to fight for democracy. The nation could use more like him

The Bruce Springsteen concert I went to in Brooklyn last week was unlike any concert I’ve attended in decades. It was far more than a fabulous, joyous concert; it was also an inspiring resistance event.

From the get-go, the Boss made clear that this concert would be part of the anti-Trump resistance. It was a three-hour-long ode to the resistance and a thunderous call to Springsteen fans to step up and do more to fight for democracy and against authoritarianism. In this way, Springsteen is serving as a model for how celebrities can stand up against Trump and fight for what’s right.

Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice

Singing through the bloody mist

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

Andrew Weissmann argues for new law to hold political liars like US president accountable for harming democracy

Politicians must be held accountable if their lies damage democracy, according to a former US federal prosecutor and FBI general counsel who was pursued by Donald Trump.

The US must be “as creative as possible” and introduce sweeping structural reforms if it escapes its current “mess”, said Andrew Weissmann, laying out a proposal for a legislative crackdown on election deceit.

Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America is out now

Proposed framework hinges on a 60-day truce, reopening strait of Hormuz, and revived talks on limiting Iran nuclear programme

Donald Trump has said a “memorandum of understanding” in talks to end the US-Israel war on Iran “has been largely negotiated”.

Official details of the deal remain scant and it remains possible some aspects of the memo could change, but here is what we know so far about the potential agreement that could bring an end to the war.

A bystander was also wounded, but no Secret Service officers were injured, officials said. President Trump was in the White House at the time of the incident.

US secretary of state tells reporters peace talks with Iran have progressed but cautions that a deal not 'final' at this stage

Research by National Preparedness Commission calls for ‘worst-case scenario’ planning by European states

Britain’s vital supply chains are unprepared for the prospect of a major shock such as war with Russia, and bold steps are needed to catch up with “worst-case scenario” planning by European states, ministers have been warned.

Donald Trump’s “America First” transformation of the US, which has made what was once a trusted UK ally a much less reliable partner, should also feed into that planning, according to a new report.

Survey after survey show gen Z experiencing deep economic instability, plus eroding trust in US leadership and weakened social connections

Jes Vesconte graduated from one of California’s most prestigious art schools, did a Fulbright in Germany and got a master’s from Columbia University.

Yet Vesconte, 29, is struggling to afford everyday life. Amid freelancing and working service-industry jobs, they are now in the midst of yet another job search to supplement their income before their student loan repayment schedule begins next month.

• Swimmer says event is in ‘safest environment possible’

• Wada, however, insists it is ‘dangerous and irresponsible’

The former Team GB swimmer Ben Proud has denied that young people will be tempted to dope after watching him in the Enhanced Games.

The 31-year-old is on a mid six-figure salary after joining the controversial event and could earn another $1.25m on Sunday night if he swims faster than the 50m freestyle world record.

Gerry ‘the monk’ Hutch comes fourth in contest won by Daniel Ennis of Social Democrats

The Irish gangland figure Gerry “the monk” Hutch has failed in his bid for a parliamentary seat in a Dublin byelection.

The 63-year-old came fourth in a contest won by Daniel Ennis of the Social Democrats, a victory for progressive politics after a campaign dominated by concerns over the cost of living and immigration.

Hey man! Cool project you had in mind back there. Did you end up doing it? If so how did it turn out? Ever get that Adapter V3 working with VESC?

A judge Issued what appears to be the first-ever sanction against the private prison giant CoreCivic for destroying video evidence in a case alleging wrongful death of a man who died by suicide in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

The sanction came shortly before a trial was slated to begin in January, but it never got underway. Instead, in March, the company reached an undisclosed settlement with the family of the detainee.

The judge ordered what is known as an adverse inference against the company in a December hearing. That means the jury could have presumed the missing evidence was unfavorable in an eventual trial and therefore effectively imposed a penalty against CoreCivic.

The previously unreported sanction is the first known incident of a private prison corporation being held responsible in a wrongful death lawsuit for destroying video or other evidence related to immigration detainees dying in custody — despite there being cases of such behavior stretching back nearly a decade, experts said. (Neither CoreCivic nor ICE responded to requests for comment.)

Rebecca Sheff, senior staff attorney of ACLU New Mexico and part of plaintiffs’ legal team, told The Intercept that the judge’s sanction was an important response to prison companies’ propensity for overwriting video evidence. In court, destroying evidence is considered “spoliation,” the legal term for destroying, altering or failing to preserve evidence.

“It’s a practice we documented and unearthed: CoreCivic routinely lets video evidence be overwritten,” Sheff said, “even in this case, where they’ve been put on notice.”

“CoreCivic is essentially used to getting away with it — to not getting called on it,” Sheff added.

Immigration attorney Laboni Hoq, who was not involved in the CoreCivic case but has pursued similar sanctions in a wrongful death case involving the prison corporation GEO Group, said, “There has to be accountability when there are knowable consequences and prison corporations flout their responsibilities to preserve evidence.”

14 of 15 Cameras

The CoreCivic case revolved around the detention of Kesley Vial, a 23-year-old Brazilian asylum-seeker who died in a hospital on August 24, 2022, seven days after attempting suicide at the CoreCivic-owned Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, New Mexico.

Attorneys for Vial’s family sent CoreCivic a letter on the day he died, demanding preservation of all records relevant to his suicide attempt, including video footage taken in Vial’s cell, adjacent areas, rooms, and anywhere relevant to the incident. (Vial’s family declined to comment for this story.)

Related

Private Prison Falsified Records in Detainee’s Death in ICE Custody

In the weeks that followed, a CoreCivic investigator produced a report featuring 49 stills taken from video footage, laying out a timeline supporting the company’s contention that it bore no responsibility for Vial’s death.

CoreCivic, however, never produced the actual video footage underlying 37 of the 49 photos, according to Sheff’s courtroom testimony. In fact, the company destroyed footage from 14 of 15 cameras in use that day, Sheff testified. The company claimed to have taped over the material.

“CoreCivic says that their staff had no way of knowing that Kesley Vial was on the verge of taking his own life on August 17th of 2022,” Sheff told Judge Francis J. Mathew during a December pre-trial hearing. “And when CoreCivic destroyed hours of video footage from that day, fully aware of the likelihood of litigation, they deprived the jury and all of us of the chance to see for ourselves.”

“More than three years later, we still have no convincing explanation for this destruction of evidence,” Sheff added.

The company pointed the judge to its 49-page timeline. 

“I know of no situation where opposing parties get to tell the opposed that what they have is the important information,” Mathew replied, according to an audio recording of the proceedings obtained by The Intercept.

The company’s attorney responded, “The jury will have all the evidence they need to determine whether or not CoreCivic fell below their duty.” 

The judge said, “That’s a question I’m not sure we can answer without that video.” 

In slightly less than an hour, Mathew made up his mind. 

“I do believe that the spoliation of this evidence merits a sanction,” he said, “an adverse inference instruction to the jury.”

Within weeks of the judge’s decision, CoreCivic began settlement discussions with Vial’s family for an undisclosed amount. ACLU New Mexico announced the settlement March 19.

The judge’s order may have factored into the company’s decision to forgo a trial, which was set to start in January, said Eunice Cho, an immigration attorney with expertise in detention conditions.

“The fact defendants settled in the 11th hour made it clear they potentially didn’t want relevant facts to be tried – including the adverse inference,” Cho told The Intercept. “An adverse finding could lead the court to instruct the jury that the evidence contained unfavorable information and may damage the witness’s credibility.”

Hours Before the Suicide

In Vial’s case, the missing footage would have shown key events in the hours before he attempted to take his own life — “including him crying so hard that he was having trouble walking, punching the wall and collapsing to the floor,” according to a September plaintiff’s motion seeking sanctions against CoreCivic.

“There’s no substitute for seeing how he was behaving, how medical staff and officers were behaving, at Mental Health, in the hallway, in the cell – all these consequential, pivotal moments – and what could’ve been done to protect him,” Sheff told The Intercept.

Related

How Solitary Confinement Kills: Torture and Stunning Neglect End in Suicide at Privately Run ICE Prison

Whereas Vial’s case came to a relatively quick end, lawsuits in which judges don’t intervene can become drawn out. Many families of loved ones who have died in immigration detention are stymied by the lack of video evidence and by the amount of time it can take to resolve a wrongful death lawsuit against an immigration detention corporation, said Jeremy Jong, immigration attorney for Al Otro Lado, a legal rights organization.

“They begin thinking, ‘We want justice,’” Jong said. “Years later, it’s more like, ‘We just want to give up.’”

Even when private prison firms are forced to pay out, the sums pale in comparison with the companies’ government contracts. Jong said the disparity creates “perverse incentives” to let poor detention conditions persist, with the settlements acting as “just part of their operating expenses.”

CoreCivic — which, alongside GEO Group, is one of the two largest prison corporations in the U.S. — received $2.2 billion in revenue last year, up from $2 billion the year before.

The issue will only become more important as the Trump administration pursues its mass deportation push, leading to more deaths in detention: 18 this year as of May 1, on track to reach a record high.

With the rising number of deaths, Hoq finds herself advising attorneys and families who contact her regarding wrongful death claims. 

“The first piece of advice I give them is to send a letter to the corporation requesting them to immediately stop overwriting video,” she said. “The issue is more important than ever — to scrutinize whether ICE and prison corporations are following through on their obligation to preserve evidence.”

The post Judge Sanctioned Private Prison Giant for Destroying Evidence in ICE Death Suit appeared first on The Intercept.

The growth of Christianity in Africa has turned the continent into a denominational battleground. Pope Leo’s visit to Angola came as his church confronts a rising challenge.

Elsie Saldaña was born too early to have the life she longed for, but desire didn’t disappear with age.

Money in lost fanny pack was from the owner’s sales of Pokémon collectibles as he sought to raise money for his sister’s medical procedure, police said.

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: Threat actors are exploiting a vulnerability in shared content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure to hide connections to malicious domains. Researchers say the vulnerability could impact roughly 88 million domains and can bypass DNS filtering and protective DNS controls, potentially enabling stealthy command-and-control communications and other evasive attacks. Dubbed "Underminr," the exploit "presents the SNI and HTTP Host of a domain," writes SecurityWeek, "while forcing a request to the IP address of another tenant on the same shared edge." The mismatch, ADAMnetworks reports, has been exploited in attacks targeting large-scale hosting providers, including those that have implemented mitigations against domain fronting... Threat actors' increased reliance on AI is expected to lead to a surge in attacks. "Once Underminr becomes parametric information for AI-generated malware, we could expect to see it in every attack that needs to evade protective DNS as part of the attack chain," ADAMnetworks CEO David Redekop says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Department for Transport is understood to back reducing levy, which critics have called a ‘pavement tax’

• Business live – latest updates

Government officials considered cutting the VAT charged on electricity used at public EV chargers from 20% to 5% at the last budget, but the Treasury under chancellor Rachel Reeves rejected the proposal amid disagreement between departments.

Officials in the Department for Transport encouraged electric car charge point operators to write to the Treasury explaining how they would respond to a VAT cut, according to three industry sources. The charger companies said that they would pass the tax cut on to consumers.

As intelligence itself becomes privatised by big tech, allowing your intellectual faculties to wither in service of inane bots seems a dangerous move

Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.

It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.

Southern California officials are desperately searching for a safe resolution to a leaking toxic chemical tank at an aerospace facility.

President’s claim is tempered by Pakistani PM’s hopes of hosting more talks ‘very soon’, and Iran’s Fars news agency saying strait of Hormuz will remain under Iranian control

Donald Trump claimed on Saturday that a peace deal with Iran “has been largely negotiated”, after calls with a Pakistani mediator, Gulf allies and Israel, potentially paving the way for an end to the war launched by the US and Israel in February.

Trump wrote on his social media platform that “final aspects and details” of a “memorandum of understanding” were still being discussed and “will be announced shortly”, but said the strait of Hormuz would be opened as part of the deal.

At Kouri Richins' sentencing for the murder of Eric Richins, her husband and father of their three sons, she declared her innocence to the court and to her children. But for jurors on the case, the evidence told a different story.

More than 20,000 attacks on markets, farmland and food distribution systems have been recorded since 2018

Hunger is being increasingly exploited as a weapon of war with more than 20,000 documented incidents of “food-related violence” in the past eight years, new analysis reveals.

Attacks include 1,261 strikes on markets used by families for daily groceries and 863 incidents in which food distribution systems were targeted and workers killed.

PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence

UK companies are performing “yoga-level” stretches to describe themselves as AI specialists in an attempt to capitalise on the buzz around the technology, public relations firms have said.

Weary communications executives tasked with securing media coverage for brands have complained that bosses in low-tech industries or running businesses that use automation but not generative AI, are increasingly demanding they are pitched to journalists as artificial intelligence companies.

Darren Aronofsky among proponents of using technology, while Guillermo del Toro says he would ‘rather die’

Under a white marquee on Cannes’ Croisette beach, with the Mediterranean glistening behind him and superyachts drifting across the horizon, the director Darren Aronofsky addressed an audience of executives and tech evangelists gathered for an “AI for Talent” summit.

“There’s so much pushback against AI,” said Aronofsky, who has faced criticism over his embrace of generative AI projects though his new studio, Primordial Soup, at a time when artificial intelligence has become one of the film industry’s most divisive fault lines.

Suspect dies after firing upon agents at White House checkpoint, Secret Service says, with a bystander also injured

• Gunman who opened fire near White House was known to Secret Service

A gunman has been shot dead after approaching a White House security checkpoint and firing at officers, federal officials have said.

The White House, where Donald Trump was present, was briefly locked down on Saturday as the sound of a sustained volley of gunshots rang out, sending journalists in the area running for cover.

US imposed sanctions on nine judges and a prosecutor after ICC issued arrest warrants for members of Israeli cabinet

A former prosecutor at the international criminal court has called for an EU-wide statute blocking what she describes as “thuggish” and “bullying” US sanctions imposed on members of the court that are designed to send the court into oblivion.

In February 2025, the US imposed sanctions on 11 ICC officials, including nine judges and the chief prosecutor as well three Palestinian organisations, in response to the ICC decision in 2024 to issue arrest warrants for members of the Israeli cabinet, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Iran had been scheduled to train in Tucson, Arizona, but it will now move its training base to Tijuana, Mexico, just south of San Diego.

Tesla's upcoming Cybercab "has been certified at 165 Wh/mi," reports Electrek — which makes it "the most efficient electric vehicle ever produced — by a wide margin." The next most efficient EV on the market, the Lucid Air Pure, consumes 28% more energy per mile. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy confirmed the figure, which represents a certified rating — not a marketing claim or internal target. It's an impressive achievement, but it comes with a massive asterisk: Tesla accomplished this by building a tiny two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel, no pedals, and a sub-50 kWh battery pack... Even Tesla's own Model 3 — one of the most efficient passenger EVs you can buy — needs nearly a third more energy to cover the same distance... Where the 165 Wh/mi figure genuinely matters is in the economics of running a robotaxi fleet. Energy cost per mile is one of the biggest operating expenses for any ride-hailing service, and the Cybercab's efficiency gives Tesla a structural cost advantage over competitors... The small battery pack also means faster charging times and lower per-vehicle battery costs — both critical for fleet economics. Tesla has said the Cybercab will cost $30,000, and the efficient powertrain is a big part of hitting that price target. Tesla confirmed Cybercab production has started at Giga Texas in April, though the ramp is expected to be slow initially. The company still hasn't solved unsupervised autonomous driving — the first steering wheel-less unit rolled off the line in February, but Tesla's supervised robotaxi fleet currently crashes at roughly four times the rate of human drivers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump appeared upbeat about the prospects of an imminent deal with Tehran, although Iran and mediators Pakistan appear slightly less sure – key US politics stories from Saturday 23 May

Donald Trump appeared hopeful of an end to his war on Iran, saying the “final aspects and details” of a deal were being discussed and would be announced shortly.

“An agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various other Countries,” Trump posted.

A large ballistic missile attack pounded Kyiv, authorities said, wounding at least five people after Moscow threatened retaliation for strikes in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

Linus Torvalds spoke this week at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America, reports ZDNet — and described how AI is impacting Linux kernel development: "In the last six months, we've seen a lot more commits," Torvalds noted, estimating that "the last two releases, it's been about 20% more commits than we had in the previous releases over many years.... The real change that happened in the last six months was that the AI tools actually got good enough for a lot of people... we're seeing a definite uptick in just development on pretty much all fronts...." On the positive side, he framed AI-discovered bugs as "short-term pain" with long-term benefits: "When AI finds a bug in any source code... long term is you found a bug, we fixed it, that the end result is better for it." After all, he continued, "I think finding bugs is great, because the real problem is all the bugs you didn't find..." For small teams or solo maintainers, he said, flood-style AI bug reports can cause real burnout, especially when "it's a bug report, and when you ask for more information, the person has done a drive-by and doesn't even answer your questions anymore." The AI news site Techstrong notes this quote from Torvalds. "I have a love-hate relationship with AI. I actually really like it from a technical angle, I love the tools, I find it very useful and interesting, but it is definitely causing pain points." The chief challenge with AI is that it forces people to change how they work, he found. People get into a rut, and AI challenges their norm. The Linux security mailing list got the brunt of this new wave of AI-generated commits. Not all bugs are security issues, but when "people think that when they find a bug with AI, the first reaction seems to sometimes be let's send it to the security list, because this may have security implications," Torvalds said. As a result, the security list — watched over by a small group of maintainers — was overrun by duplicate entries... The Linux project learned to manage the bug influx with a set number of tools to sort out and deprioritize the obvious drive-by reports (ones where the person submitting the report won't even answer any questions). One tool, Sashiko, reviews all the patches submitted on the mailing list. "Sometimes the review is not great, but quite often it finds issues and it asks questions and says, 'Hey, what about this issue?'" he said. Linux also updated their documentation, partly just to address "an uptick in bug and security reports from discoveries made in full or in part with AI."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Order facilitates support for 40,000 people told to evacuate Orange county as responders try to divert explosion

California’s governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency Saturday in response to the looming threat of chemical disaster in Orange county.

The proclamation directs the governor’s office of emergency services and other state agencies to provide additional support to Orange county responders. The governor’s office is also making state-owned properties available to shelter the 40,000 people ordered to evacuate from the area.

You may think you know what “long-term support” means when picking a Linux distribution and version, but judging by the multitude of utterly wrong takes and deeply confused users I come across online, I’m starting to get the feeling that in fact, no, you don’t know what it means. KDE’s Nate Graham is seeing the same confusion, and has published a blog post going over what LTS really means in the Linux world.

People seem to think that an LTS release means it’s going to be more stable, have fewer bugs, and receive support for a certain set period of time. The reality is that only that last one really applies, sort-of. LTS generally means you’re going to be using a Linux distribution version where you’ll get security fixes and possibly maintenance updates for a set number of years, but you won’t be getting updates with new features or other updates that aren’t security fixes.

The purpose of an LTS release is to more or less freeze itself and its packages in time, so that users know exactly what they’re getting. However, part of being frozen in time means any bugs, crashes, and hardware support are also frozen in time. The end result is that LTS releases will often have wildly outdated package versions, and those outdated package versions will most likely contain a ton of bugs and issues that have long been fixed in subsequent releases – subsequent releases you’re not getting, because you’re on an LTS release.

LTS releases are fairly stable and reliable as long as you use the most popular software from their included software repositories. So in the circumstances when this stops being the case, I think sometimes people can feel betrayed. They think, “I thought this was supposed to be stable! Why didn’t anyone fix this bug yet? Where’s my long-term support?”

But Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu never promised any level of stability, reliability, or absence of bugs. They promised that the version-locked software in their repos would receive security fixes for a certain number of years. Ubuntu and Kubuntu also offered a certain amount of non-guaranteed best-effort hardware compatibility improvements and non-security bug fixes.

↫ Nate Graham

This causes major problems for upstream developers. People who use an LTS release will be using versions of packages that are out of date and full of bugs that have already been fixed in later versions, but they don’t know that, so they end up reporting these old bugs that have been fixed ages ago as if they’re new. If you’re an LTS user and you experience a persistent bug and subsequent crash in Kwin, you’re most likely going to complain at the Kwin developers, even if the Kwin developers have already fixed this bug 18 months ago. Every week there’s at least a few developers in my Fedi timeline rolling their eyes at Debian users reporting bugs fixed ages ago and getting mad when told they should complain at Debian developers for not backporting the fix.

So many LTS users seem to think that LTS equals increased stability, fewer bugs, and fewer crashes, but that’s just not what LTS is for or what it claims to offer. Sticking to specific (major) versions of packages means not you’re not only missing out on new features and changes – which might be desirable for you – but also on bug fixes.

With LTS, as they say, the bugs are also stable.

JESSICA BASSION
Executive Editor

In front of a sea of blue robes, regalia and relatives, Mariah Calagione, co-founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, delivered the 2026 Commencement address on Saturday, May 23. 

Originally from Milford, Delaware, Calagione and her husband, Sam Calagione, opened Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats in Rehoboth in 1995 — Delaware’s first brewpub and the smallest commercial brewery in America at the time. Their hunger for non-conformity and creativity led them to open Dogfish Inn in 2014, then a seafood and cocktail spot, Chesapeake & Maine in 2016. 

“Off-center goodness for off-center people is sort of like our rallying cry,” Calagione said. “It was really about doing your own thing, putting your own thumbprint on it, kind of like letting our freak flags fly a little.” 

After college, Calagione’s husband worked at a bar in Manhattan, where he fell in love with the idea of brewing and selling craft beer — something that was uncommon on the East Coast at the time. The small scale of Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats offered the freedom to experiment with a wide range of recipes. 

Calagione, meanwhile, comes from a background in marketing and public relations. She spent three years working in local television at a Rhode Island station; she credits the fast-paced, conversational style of news for allowing her to develop the voice of the company. 

“I had zero plan when I was graduating from college, and I think, in a way, that’s good,” Calagione said. “I would say be open to things that aren’t necessarily on your prescribed plan, and if you have a prescribed plan and you can make that work, that’s amazing.” 

The couple’s ingenuity has allowed them to expand their craft and quality in innovative ways, all while shaping the brand’s personality and emphasizing its off-centered sense of fun.

“My husband is a big music geek, as much as he is a beer geek, and we use the term geek very lovingly,” Calagione said. “He finds all different ways to incorporate music and music programming, and it’s sort of a vibe of indie music into what we do at Dogfish Head.”

For over a decade, Dogfish Head has been the Official Beer of Record Store Day, a celebration of nearly 1,400 independently-owned record stores in the U.S. and thousands of similar stores internationally. The couple has also collaborated with numerous musical artists on different beers and events, including the Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam and the Flaming Lips. 

In downtown Lewes, the Dogfish Inn features artwork by artists the company has partnered with on beer labels and concert posters.

“Guests will come and they’ll bring their favorite beer from their hometown,” Calagione said. “At night, you just see guests sitting around the fire pit, getting to know each other, enjoying and trading beers, or you know, just telling stories.” 

Calagione has always been an advocate for community and much of her work aims to bring people together. She has served on numerous boards, including the university’s Board of Trustees, and has been a part of several philanthropic organizations.

Calagione currently serves on the board of the Delaware Community Foundation and directs two family foundations, the Red Wagon Foundation and the Draper Holdings Charitable Foundation. 

“It’s definitely my passion, like, you know, get out there,” Calagione said. “Get out there and be involved, and you know throughout your life you have many communities that you’re going to be part of, including your UD community. Don’t be one of those people that sits on the sidelines, be part of it, because you’re going to expand your own world.” 

Although Calagione did not attend the university, she shared that being selected as the commencement speaker is especially important to her because of her family’s ties to the school.

“My mom was a trustee for a number of years when I was a little kid, and I remember her going and getting dressed every year to go to commencement with the robes and everything,” Calagione said. “So it’s kind of a full circle moment that I got to do that.”

Despite the uncertainty many graduates face after college, Calagione said staying engaged and being willing to pursue new opportunities can make all the difference.

“Be open, get involved, you know, pay attention to the world,” Calagione said. “But don’t let that drive every decision you’re going to make, because if you only go by what’s on your plan, you might pass by opportunities that you didn’t even think would be a good fit.” 

A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the U.S. House of Representative, reports California news station KCRA: A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the House, reigniting an age-old American debate around the twice-annual clock changes. And this time, the proposal has the president's backing. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will work "very hard" to sign the so-called Sunshine Protection Act into law after the House Energy and Commerce Committee overwhelmingly approved the bill by a 48-1 vote. The bill still needs to pass the full U.S. House, and then the U.S. Senate would consider taking up the measure. The bill would allow U.S states to decide whether to "exempt themselves" from Daylight Saving Time, according to the article. The bill's sponsor described the annual clock-switching as "inconvenient, unnecessary, and out of step with the needs of today's families and economy," while finally creating a permanent Daylight Saving would bring "more usable daylight hours throughout the year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Dart introduced president at New York campaign rally

• Linebacker posted reaction: ‘What we doing man’

• Carter adds that the two players have spoken

The day after New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart took the stage at a rally with Donald Trump to introduce the president, linebacker Abdul Carter questioned his teammate’s actions on social media.

“Thought this sh!t was AI, what we doing man,” Carter wrote in an X post on Saturday morning.

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.

Gnutella is a file sharing protocol that many have forgotten and it has the story of a decentralized technology adopted by millions of casual users who did not care to learn what a peer-to-peer system was. Users showed up because the protocol solved real problems at scale and the solution just so happened to be decentralized. No one ever pretended to use Gnutella in hopes their GnutellaCoinTM would go up in value later. They just downloaded MP3s. The network exploded in popularity, then plateaued for almost a decade, then settled into a permanent long tail state of continued but diminished use.

Welcome to my overly enthusiastic love letter to Gnutella.

↫ Rick Carlino

I genuinely didn’t know – or I had forgotten, more likely – that Gnutella formed the backbone of LimeWire, another name I haven’t heard in a long time. I’m quite sure I used LimeWire over 25 years ago, but details are fuzzy and I might be confusing it with other filesharing networks of a similar vintage. I was an avid CD buyer and MiniDisc user (I used MD well into the smartphone age), so I didn’t have much need for downloading MP3s.

Gnutella is also apparently still active, and there are still clients you can download and use. Of course, it’s a mere shadow of its former self, but this, too, was news to me. I’m kind of inclined to see if it’s still hosting MP3s.

If you want to keep your favorite glasses frames, but have a new prescription, these are the best online retailers for buying replacement lenses.

George Russell backed up his fractious sprint race win in Montreal with pole position in qualifying

Ouch. Lance Stroll’s car is in pieces. Suspension problem, Collins diagnoses.

Lewis Hamilton zooms by on a scooter, setting a good example to any watching kids by wearing a helmet.

Long-time Slashdot reader Sun writes: AMD has announced a change to the way they are licensing Vivado, their FPGA development tool... Hidden between the lines of the announcement [of a new model starting with the 2026.1 release] is the change to the free of charge tier. AMD is adding more devices to be supported in this tier, which is supposedly the carrot. The stick, however, is the removal of certain debug features. The thing that's likely to hit the hobbist community the worst, however, is that the free tier will now not be available on Linux. AMD are saying that old licenses are still in effect, so it appears that if you hurry to install Vivado now, you'd still be able to use it moving forward. It is not clear, however, whether it'll still be possible to install Vivado 2025.2 after Vivado 2026.1 becomes available. "Almost all our surveys show... close to 70% of the customers are still using Windows," explained AMD senior product application engineer Anatoli Curran on the tool's support forum. "Vivado ML Standard Edition v2025.2 is going to be officially supported (I mean if there are any bugs found, these can be fixed) until v2026.3 release... Any release older than the current 3 released versions of Vivado then becomes unsupported (meaning no bugs will be fixed with Vivado Standard Edition v2025.2 after Vivado v2026.3). "However, users can continue using V2025.2 forever, if they wish to do so... Also, Vivado ML Standard Edition v2025.2 is license-free... Users only need to obtain and use any IP Core related licenses, or Vivado Model Composer (for SysGen)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week's guests include Sen. Chris Van Hollen, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, and former White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx.

"The numbers show that layoffs in the U.S. are roughly at or below levels from before the pandemic," reports the Washington Post, "although they are higher than in 2022 when businesses snapped up workers as the economy roared back to life... "A different measure that accounts for the growing U.S. workforce shows that layoffs affected about 1.2% of employed people in March, a number that has been steady for years outside of the pandemic..." In the technology industry, where Meta and other companies are regularly announcing job cuts, the layoff picture is complex. There has been a marked increase in layoffs in recent months in what the Labor Department calls the information industry, which includes employment of software developers and other tech workers. But Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at the research and consulting firm Oxford Economics, noted that hiring has also increased in that category, which includes media and entertainment. The combination of hiring minus layoffs in the information industry is effectively a wash, Martin said. Layoffs at Big Tech companies like Meta and other high-profile employers don't necessarily reflect what is happening in the country, Martin said, and draw far more attention than what may be slow and steady workforce growth. "There's a lot more headlines about job cuts than there are [about] expansion plans by businesses," he said. In his view, technology companies may be pushing out some workers and replacing them with people who have different skills as they respond to the demands of AI. It's true that businesses in some industries are devoting enormous sums of money and attention to AI. It's changing how some people work and a minority of American businesses are rolling out AI tools. But it's also become a trend for bosses to blame layoffs on the productive capabilities of AI and its ability to replace workers, even when job cuts may have little to do with the technology. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has taken note of the pattern that he and others call "AI washing," essentially a high-tech form of whitewashing... "You know something is happening all the time when they have a word for it," said Gautam Mukunda, who teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management... AI-related employment changes are tiny so far, said Nathan Goldschlag, director of research at the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank. He pointed to a recently published analysis of Census Bureau surveys, which found more than 95 percent of businesses that use AI said it hasn't changed their staff sizes — and AI-related employment increases were more common than decreases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kyle Busch, who won more races in NASCAR's top three series than anyone in history, died suddenly on Thursday.

Protesters on Saturday streamed into central Belgrade, many carrying banners and wearing T-shirts inscribed with the "Students win" motto of the youth movement.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 24, No. 812.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 24, No. 1,078.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 24, No. 1,800.

Temperature reaches 30.5C in Kent as amber health alerts issued before bank holiday temperatures rise

The UK has recorded its hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures reaching 30.5C in Kent as forecasters warned more extreme heat could follow over the bank holiday weekend.

The temperature in Frittenden also marked the first time since 2012 the UK has reached 30C in May, according to the Met Office.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool shares this report from the BBC: Air France and Airbus have been found guilty of manslaughter over a 2009 plane crash which killed 228 people. The Paris Appeals Court found the airline and aircraft manufacturer "solely and entirely responsible" for the incident, in which flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The passenger jet stalled during a storm and plunged into the water, killing all on board. A court had previously cleared the companies in April 2023, but they were found guilty on Thursday after an eight-week trial. Both have repeatedly denied the charges and say they will appeal... The companies have been asked to pay the maximum fine — €225,000 ($261,720; £194,500) each — but some victims' families have criticised the amount as a token penalty... In 2012, French investigators found a combination of technical failure involving ice in the plane's sensors and the pilots' inability to react to the aircraft stalling led to it plunging into the sea. The captain was on a break when the co-pilots became confused by faulty air-speed readings. They then mistakenly pointed the nose of the plane upwards when it stalled, instead of down. Investigators concluded the co-pilots did not have the training to deal with the situation. Pilot training has since been improved and the speed sensors replaced.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Two-time Nascar champion died Thursday at 41

• Busch had planned to race in Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600

Nascar driver Kyle Busch died after severe pneumonia progressed into sepsis, resulting in rapid and overwhelming associated complications, according to a statement released by his family.

Dakota Hunter, vice-president of Kyle Busch Companies, said in a news release that the family received the medical evaluation on Saturday.

The Free Software Foundation announced this week that "its global call for free software supporters to organize LibreLocals this May resulted in free software supporters organizing forty-six LibreLocal events on six continents thus far." (And new dates and locations are being added daily.) The FSF invited free software supporters to organize in-person community meetups in their area during May 2026, or LibreLocal month, to bring people together to swap ideas, learn from each other, and celebrate free software. People were encouraged to organize events grounded in freedom to help spread the free software philosophy.... "The success of these LibreLocals speaks to how many people globally are interested in free software and ready to build community, and it demonstrates the strength of our movement" [said FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman]. "People getting together like this also proves how computer freedom and digital rights are on people's minds. When we reject freedom-restricting software and promote software that respects user rights, it helps further so many other basic rights...." The FSF has financially supported some of the events, but notes organizers are going above and beyond to create noteworthy events by any measure, and is impressed with the global network taking shape. "The energy we feel from all organizers is extremely motivating and we look forward to seeing LibreLocal events spread even wider over the next years! We want to support these initiatives even more, so we'll be looking to build a network of sponsors for future iterations as we work towards May 2027," says Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni, FSF program manager... William Goodspeed, the organizer behind the Beijing LibreLocal, reported that their meetup was double the size of last year's, and a number of very rich collaborative projects have emerged among the attendees. Discussing the value of connecting people, de Silva-Weeramuni notes: "Free software supporters know that connecting with each other leads them to learn, experiment, and create great things that protect our individual and shared rights. The extraordinary contributions that free software has made to the world were born through such collaborations between like-minded people towards a freer society. This same global spirit of collectively building a better future is one of the inspiring things that we have once again seen unfold through this year's many LibreLocals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Order aimed at preventing spread of Ebola to US affects travelers who have visited three countries in last 21 days

US authorities have temporarily banned green-card holders from entering the country if they have traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda or South Sudan in the last 21 days.

The order issued on Friday is part of an expanding attempt to prevent Ebola from entering US borders. A previously announced travel restriction blocked only people without US passports who had visited those countries from entering but exempted US citizens and lawful permanent residents.

On Friday TechCrunch reported they could no longer Google the word "disregard". Google's AI Overview responded "Understood. Let me know whenever you have a new prompt or question!" below an icon for hearing the word "disregard" pronounced — then displayed several inches of blank whitespace. "The Merriam-Webster link is still in there, but you have to scroll..." Earlier this week, Google rolled out a completely new Search experience, foregrounding AI summaries and kicking the traditional "10 blue links" far down the page. But the sheer scale of Google Search means there are lots of edge cases that the company doesn't seem to have considered... Google has been catching some flack on social media for this, and it's easy to see why... For most users, that single reply is the only thing you'll see. And crucially, the AI response serves no conceivable value to a user searching the word "disregard." It's just a broken tool. Google appears to have fixed the issue — sort of. Now Googling the word "disregard" brings up a list of news stories about how Google's AI Overviews misinterpreted the word disregard in search queries.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The incident marks China's deadliest mining accident in years.

US president says it’s a ‘solid 50/50’ on either making a ‘good’ deal with Iran or striking the country anew

Donald Trump said he would meet today with American negotiators to review Iran’s latest proposal and decide by Sunday whether he will strike Iran “to kingdom come”.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also told reporters in India on Saturday that “there may be news later today” about Iran. He did not specify what that news would be.

• Gio Reyna, Sebastian Berhalter are included

• Diego Luna is omitted despite strong form

Club América winger Alejandro Zendejas is on the United States’ 26-man roster for this summer’s World Cup, while Lyon defensive midfielder Tanner Tessmann is not included. The selections are the most notable new information gleaned from head coach Mauricio Pochettino’s full World Cup roster, which was obtained by the Guardian and is authentic according to multiple sources with knowledge of Pochettino’s selections.

The roster confirms Zendejas’s selection and Tessmann’s omission, along with the inclusion of Borussia Mönchengladbach’s Gio Reyna and the omission of Real Salt Lake’s Diego Luna, both attacking midfielders, choices that were first reported by the Athletic. US Soccer declined to comment on the roster, which will be officially announced Tuesday at a nationally televised event in New York City.

Citing new research, the Associated Press reports that "modest gains in the fight to curb climate change have dialed back the most catastrophic of future heating." That's the good news. But the same research "also confirmed that there's no chance to limit warming to the international goal set in 2015." Researchers' new list of seven plausible carbon pollution scenarios for the future are pushing aside two staples of climate policy: the extremes on either end. The extremes have become less probable in the past several years because of how we power our world. Carbon dioxide, released from the burning of gas, oil and coal, is chiefly responsible for warming. Increasing use of green energies, like solar, wind and geothermal, which don't emit carbon dioxide, have lowered top end carbon pollution projections. However, because those changes haven't been fast enough, the bottom end projections have risen. The Paris climate agreement in 2015 set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, or the mid-1800s, giving rise to the mantra "1.5 to stay alive," but now scientists say that even their best case scenario still shoots past that signature temperature mark. On the other end, those same new scenarios no longer include the coal-heavy future that would lead to 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, a scary scenario that many scientific studies used in their future projections. The new proposed worst case scenario has an end-of-the-century warming of about 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit), a full degree (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than the old scenario, while the updated best case future is a couple tenths of a degree Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than previously theorized, squeezing past the Paris goal, said climate scientist Detlef Van Vuuren of Utrecht University, lead author of a recent study laying out future scenarios. "There is kind of a narrowing of the futures. It cannot be as bad as we thought, but it cannot be as good as we hoped," said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. The scenarios include a "middle" one where by the end of the century the world warms 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, which is roughly the path society is currently on, scientists said... Because carbon pollution keeps rising globally and stays in the atmosphere for about century, the best case scenario is for warming to shoot past the 1.5 degree mark, peak at 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) for maybe as long as 70 years, and eventually somehow come back down below 1.5 degrees if a technology can be designed to remove massive amounts of carbon from the air, said nine of the 10 scientists interviewed for this article. The world is warming at a pace of a tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) every five years, they said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More people are being jailed in England and Wales as a result of acting to prevent climate breakdown and the war in Gaza, research reveals

Britain has created a new breed of political prisoners through the systematic incarceration of people acting to prevent climate breakdown and the annihilation of Gaza, a report claims.

The research by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the protest group Defend Our Juries says that custodial sentences for acts of direct action or civil disobedience were once rare but are now being imposed with increasing length and frequency.

A Mad Men-style steakhouse break would be welcome. But I’ve had it with the Lunch Industrial Complex

It’s 12.30pm as I write this. My mind is preoccupied with moving my fingers from key to key on my ageing laptop, a task I pause briefly to remove a hair from the screen. Then, I scratch my leg again, which kicks up another hair. I should get back to work, but I can’t concentrate. Why? Because I’m incredibly hungry. It is, after all, lunchtime – the most worthless part of any workday.

It is not that there’s shame in lunch. It’s just that we’re not programmed to eat at a certain time. We’re all different and the whole concept of the office lunch is obsolete nonsense in 2026. Let it go.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

But Trump administration will not return detainees deported to third countries in disease-stricken region

The Trump administration will temporarily pause the removal of refugees to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during a spiraling Ebola outbreak, according to reporting by Politico, but experts say the move won’t help prevent the spread of the disease.

At least one woman is now in limbo after officials moved her to Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, and now say they won’t bring her back because of the Ebola travel ban – despite a judge’s order for her return.

Department of Justice acknowledges removal of information about criminal cases related to 2021 US Capitol rioters

The Department of Justice is acknowledging it has removed from its website news releases about criminal cases related to the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack, calling the information about the prosecutions “partisan propaganda”.

The purge of news releases documenting criminal charges, convictions and sentencings is the latest step by the Trump administration to dramatically rewrite the history of the assault on the US Capitol, when hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in an effort to halt the congressional certification of his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Firefighters are racing to douse flames on California’s Santa Rosa Island as experts express concern for unique habitat

On the south-eastern corner of Santa Rosa Island lies a grove of a few thousand Torrey pine trees, some of them more than 250 years old. The only other place on earth where these gnarled pines exist is in San Diego county, but biologists classify the two groves as different subspecies. So when a rare wildfire broke out on Santa Rosa Island late last week, firefighters raced to keep it from spreading into the grove, where it threatened to consign the island’s Torrey pines to extinction.

So far, they appear to be succeeding – even as the 18,000-acre fire has torched nearly one-third of the island’s surface. But biologists who have studied Santa Rosa Island’s unique ecology are watching anxiously as the fire continues to burn a part of the island that is home to six plants found nowhere else on the planet.

Prewar US gas prices averaged about $3 a gallon nationally – kiss that number goodbye for 2026

Sorry, US drivers, but don’t expect pump prices to return to prewar levels any time soon, even if the US and Iran agree to a lasting peace deal tomorrow.

As the war with Iran enters its third month, drivers have become infuriated by rising gas prices – and inflation – and Donald Trump is facing a historic backlash in the polls. The president promised recently that relief will be swift once the war ends. “I see it going down very substantially when this is over, I think very rapidly too, at levels that you’ve never seen,” he said.

The head of the World Health Organization says Ebola has killed at least 7 people in Congo, but the U.N. agency says it knows the epidemic "is much larger."

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Commerce announced letters of intent (LOIs) with nine quantum computing and manufacturing companies for more than $2 billion in proposed CHIPS and Science Act incentives, backing a wide range of quantum technologies while introducing an increasingly prominent feature of Trump administration industrial policy: federal equity stakes.

The package totals approximately $2.013 billion in planned support and spans two domestic quantum manufacturing initiatives alongside seven quantum technology developers pursuing architectures including neutral atom, silicon spin, superconducting, annealing, photonic and trapped-ion quantum computing.

While the scale of the investment is significant, the structure of the program is equally noteworthy. Unlike traditional federal R&D grants, the agreements require the government to take minority equity positions in participating companies. In doing so, the Trump administration is extending the investment-oriented industrial policy approach it employed with Intel, Vulcan Elements and MP Materials in 2025.

(Shutterstock)

“The Department will receive a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company as a condition for receiving the funds to enhance the return for the U.S. taxpayer,” Commerce said in its announcement.

The agreements remain preliminary and still must be finalized. Reporting by The Wall Street Journal, which previously reported Commerce discussions with quantum firms regarding funding and equity structures, indicated that many details surrounding the size and structure of the equity stakes have not yet been disclosed.

The Commerce initiative appears to be a deliberate portfolio strategy rather than a government effort to identify a single technological winner in quantum computing. The awards support multiple modalities and address distinct challenges spanning hardware, manufacturing, systems integration and packaging.

At the center of the package are two manufacturing-focused initiatives intended to strengthen domestic quantum production capacity.

IBM is slated to receive $1 billion in planned support for a new quantum foundry effort and dedicated business entity focused on quantum chip manufacturing. The company said it will invest an additional $1 billion of its own capital alongside the award to establish what it describes as the nation’s first specialized quantum chip manufacturing facility.

GlobalFoundries will receive $375 million in planned support tied to its new Quantum Technology Solutions business and efforts to develop secure domestic quantum manufacturing capabilities. GF said Commerce would receive approximately 1% equity in the company, “enabling the American public to share in GF’s growth.”

The remaining seven awards are distributed across companies pursuing a range of quantum computing architectures and enabling technologies.

Atom Computing, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, Rigetti and Quantinuum are each slated to receive $100 million in planned funding, and Diraq will receive up to $38 million. D-Wave explicitly noted that all its $100 million would be an equity investment, while Rigetti and Infleqtion detailed similar arrangements. The specifics of the other proposed equity stakes were not detailed.

Notably absent from yesterday’s announcement were IonQ and Quantum Computing, Inc., both of which had been linked to earlier federal funding discussions. Commerce has not publicly indicated whether yesterday’s announcement represents the full scope of its quantum investment plans.

The LOIs may not be the administration’s only quantum policy initiative. Reporting by Nextgov/FCW indicates that the White House is also developing an executive order focused on post-quantum cryptography. According to the publication, the current draft does not include an updated National Quantum Strategy or the broader quantum computing provisions described in earlier February reporting, including a proposed national effort to deliver quantum computing systems for scientific applications and discovery. Nextgov/FCW suggested this could indicate that the Trump administration may have multiple quantum-related executive orders under development.

Internationally, the U.S. announcement was followed by France unveiling its own investment package. Reuters reported today that President Emmanuel Macron announced an additional €1 billion for France’s national quantum strategy alongside €550 million for microelectronics support, underscoring intensifying global competition around quantum and advanced computing technologies.

Predictably, public markets responded positively to news of the agreements, with shares of several publicly traded quantum companies moving higher following the announcement. Whether the strategy succeeds may ultimately depend on two unresolved questions: which quantum architectures prove commercially viable, and whether the government’s emerging role as investor can help turn technical promise into domestic capability.

The post Commerce Takes Portfolio Approach with $2B Quantum Investment Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

Former Wall Street banker takes over amid growing concern over cost of living – and disapproval of Trump’s agenda

Kevin Warsh has been sworn in as chair of the US Federal Reserve, tasked with steering the world’s largest economy as the Trump administration faces mounting pressure over Americans’ financial wellbeing.

Warsh, hand-picked by Donald Trump, takes charge of the powerful central bank as it comes under extraordinary pressure from the US president to cut interest rates, even as prices climb.

Something about building GenAI LLMs bugs me. Before I begin, let me be clear: I am a supporter of AI technologies, particularly in science. Lately, however, a question keeps surfacing that I find hard to understand. GenAI promoters and sellers like to talk about “AI for Business” as a way to reduce costs and replace workers. Well, okay, all new technologies have that effect to some extent, but the GenAI industry seems to be touting GenAI as a replacement for the people who created the genesis content on which their technology was created. On the surface, this seems absurd; on closer inspection, it seems almost self-destructive. Talk about burning the ships while still at sea. There are many sectors where this question hits hard, but two specific topics of interest to me as a technical writer and sometimes programmer are content creation and programming.

GenAI Content Creation

What you are reading is content produced by a human (me). Some studies indicate that over 50% of new web content is being produced by GenAI and is often referred to as AI-slop. From a publishing perspective, the content is cheap, quickly generated, creates automatic “click bait” comments and headlines, and provides coverage of topics “with which a writer has no prior experience.” From a reader’s perspective, AI-slop is often overly generalized, repetitive content, lacking specifics, insights, or even sarcasm—with plenty of em dashes thrown in for good measure—and, in some cases, completely wrong.

Web users, particularly those who read articles, have noticed. GenAI seems to be used for blog posts, product descriptions, press releases, news summaries, and clickbait comments to clickbait articles generated by GenAI. Real user comments usually display large distaste for such content. Beyond the formulaic AI filler content, a recent study reported in 404media.co found that a third of new websites are AI-generated. Researchers analyzing data from the Internet Archive have found that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers published their findings online in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.”

Another study reports that More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans. The authors do mention, however, they think the trend is slowing. “While AI-generated articles grew dramatically after ChatGPT launched, we do not see that trend continuing. Instead, the proportion of AI-generated articles has remained relatively stable over the last 12 months. We hypothesize that this is because practitioners found that AI-generated articles do not perform well in search, as shown in a separate study.”

Figure 1: Trend showing percentage of AI content on the web (reproduced from https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-created-by-ai-than-humans)

Presumably, search engines may be screening content for AI signatures and rank them lower than those it judges are written by real people. Interestingly, they may be using the same models that were used to create the content in the first place. A new eat your own dog food (AI-slop) kind of development.

Then again, this may not be the case. A recent X (Twitter) post by Nav Toor points to a recent study that found the following.

“Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT. The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time…. It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA’s. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA’s. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect.”

This situation is basically resume roulette hoping your AI generated resume lands on the same GenAI tool you used. Yikes.

A final example is the ultimate in GenAI generated content. An infinite, hallucinated encyclopedia ” halupedia” where every link leads to an entry that does not exist until you click it, at which point an LLM pretends it has always existed and writes it for you using the prose of 19th-century scholarly press.

To summarize, GenAI is creating all kinds of content on the web (and elsewhere), not just simple filler content, but articles, resumes, blogs, and even absurd hallucinated encyclopedia. The pre-GenAI content was written by coherent people (prior hallucinated content may date back to the 60’s, but I digress) who may be losing their jobs or worse be talked with “humanizing/correcting” of AI-slop. All this content now lives on the internet. Remind me again where these GenAI models get their training data? We will get to that, but first, a potential bigger issue, code generation.

GenAI Programing

Recall that the one of the L’s in LLM stands for Language. After training on large curated corpuses of the English language, these models are good predictors of language response to queries. If you consider programming languages which have their own grimmer and syntax (more predictable than spoken or written language) then training on existing code should provide a helpful programming tools.

So far the consensus is that this result is true. As a mater of fact, so true that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly stated:

“Coding is going away first, then all of software engineering.”

He is not alone in his prognostication, Jensen Huang has recently stated his desire for “no coding by engineers”

“Nothing would give me more joy than if none of our engineers were coding at all,” Huang said. “And they were just purely solving undiscovered problems.”

Finally, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta has this to say:

“Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code.”

Now that the future of coding is settled, we can move on, or maybe  not. Even with early reports of AI-coding success, there is this nagging question. If we deprecate all the coders, who will write the innovative new code, language, methods, etc. for the future rounds of training. There is now plenty of new GenAI generated code sitting in repertoires across the internet. That should work for next generation training of new models, right?

GenAI Indigestion

GenAI is eliminating the source of data or genesis content that is fundamental to its existence. The dynamics of both content creation and programming is changing largely driven by the belief GenAI will reduce costs by replacing people (that created the content in the first place).

Figure 2: The consequence of GenAI content reuse

Fine you say, we’ll just use GenAI generated data to train new models, which will create more content that we can use for the next model and so on. Problem solved. There is a rather large caveat with this approach, however. An effect called “model collapse” occurs when LLM training becomes inbread.

In a recent paper, researchers have found that GenAI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data points from previous LLM models. Basically, the snake is eating its tail.

Model collapse refers to the tendency of models to produce typical, “average” responses rather than creative outliers. By design, models predict the next most likely token based on the training data. There is a probability setting called temperature that adds some randomness to the next token choice (i.e., a certain percentage of the time, a less likely token is used). This behavior is called regression to the mean, or to the average value (the ones that sit at the top of the normal curve). By recycling these model results, off-center or rare outputs get lost, which acts as a form of probabilistic regression; the process loses information in the tails of the normal curve.

One way to view data loss by regression to the mean is to recall the “photocopier effect.” Each subsequent copy loses some aspect of the original. At some point, the copied document may begin to look different. For instance, if the phrase “print(“Hello, World!”) ” is printed using different fonts and then repeatedly photocopied, the message starts to look the same. Notice how in the top image, the definition in the “l” and “i” is lost. Similarly, the bottom image has a heavy, bold font that is lost.

Figure 4: Text after many photocopy cycles. The photocopier effect can make different fonts look the same. Notice how in the top image, the definition in the “l” and “i” is lost. Similarly, the bottom image has a heavy, bold font that is lost. (images created with Gimp artistic photocopy filter.)

Loss of detail, or uniqueness, is one of the consequences of training on GenAI. As mentioned, GenAI content often seems overly generalized, lacking specifics.

Interestingly, in scientific computing, GenAI and AI in general can avoid model collapse because years of HPC application development enable engineers to generate fresh physics-based data for model training. You can learn more about AI for Science from the Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC) annual meeting, TPC26, in Baltimore at the beginning of June.

Given this situation, how does GenAI continue to grow if the original genesis content is constantly photocopied by re-scraping GenAI generated content? Indeed, the timber industry will replenish a forest after it has been harvested, farmers rotate crops, so why wouldn’t the GenAI industry want to cultivate new content to feed their future models? Instead, the industry seems intent upon doing the opposite by advocating for AI job replacement of creators.

Fortunately, some original content will continue. Sites like HPCwire are created by humans with keyboards. Still, if I were part of an industry with a combined $1.6 Trillion in investment, equivalent to Indonesia’s GDP, I might want to make sure my baby has enough to eat.

The post Genesis Content: Where Does GenAI Get Its Next Meal? appeared first on HPCwire.

Everlane CEO confirms sale in letter to employees and says it will stay true to ‘sustainability’ commitments

Everlane, the retailer that bucked the fast-fashion industry by promising affordable ethically sourced and sustainable clothing, is being acquired by the king of fast fashion, China’s Shein.

A letter to Everlane employees from CEO Alfred Chang confirming the deal was obtained by the Associated Press on Friday.

The UK can’t break off critical mineral links with China. But it can understand its vulnerabilities Expert comment jon.wallace 22 May 2026

Risks emerging from shared infrastructure and data security are areas where UK registered companies need better guidance.

Reliance on China for minerals and industrial inputs, manufactured goods and to a lesser extent emerging technology is driving Western governments to urgently develop national strategies for securing their supply chains. 

The US, as the second largest mining economy in the world, can afford to drive a global effort to decouple from China. And in Asia, the electronics industries of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are so exposed to potential export restrictions that Chinese-free supply is increasingly viewed as a necessity. 

But for the UK, total separation from China is not the best course of action. The UK cannot afford to subsidize industry to secure what relatively little critical mineral input it needs. And UK registered and listed companies benefit considerably from their relationships with China – for sales, financing and shareholders, technology transfers and shared infrastructure.

The likelihood of sustained Chinese weaponization of UK supply chains is also uncertain. Were Beijing to do so, it would amount to a kind of ‘mutually assured destruction’ dynamic: China’s export-led growth has been the central tenet of its economic development, and Beijing does not want to alienate export markets.

The UK therefore needs a critical minerals approach for China that is rooted in market realities, understands national requirements, and acknowledges genuine vulnerabilities. It must reflect the ‘art of the possible’, outlining a clear framework on constructive industry engagement, coupled with clear limitations on such engagement – and diplomatic cover to manage political and commercial risks. 

The UK launched its own critical minerals strategy in November 2025, which provides a solid foundation. But some areas of risk require better guidance, and clearer policy. And the strategy makes scant reference to the geopolitical challenges emanating from the concentration of processing in China.

Competition and co-existence

Economic competition between China and the UK is predominantly in high-end manufacturing, and some areas of chemical and pharmaceutical production. Beyond this, there is a persistent overall trade deficit with China, amounting to £42 billion across goods and services. Total bilateral trade stands at £104.9 billion. 

UK consumers do not want to pay higher prices for goods made without Chinese minerals. They may be willing to occasionally pay a patriotic premium for Welsh lamb. But they would likely not pay significantly higher for a ‘made in England’ phone or laptop. 

Related work

Chatham House fellow gives evidence on China and critical minerals to UK Parliament Business and Trade sub-Committee

And though UK high tech industries are reliant on access to critical minerals, it is not in their concentrated or refined form. Instead, their greatest exposure is in access to semi-manufactured parts coming from third party countries, who in turn are reliant on Chinese mineral processing. 

The relationship is not only one of dependence. There are areas where the UK and China cooperate on mineral supply chains to the advantage of both, particularly in the private sector. 

The UK stands to benefit from a global minerals race due to the many large mining firms listed or registered in the UK. China is a dominant customer for them, accounting for 50-60 per cent of revenues. This trade is of great benefit to the UK. 

Shared ownership of companies or operations is another area of cooperation. In 2000, Chinese investors held stakes in an estimated 40 mines abroad. By 2022 this had risen to an estimated 1,250 mines. Several are on shared deposits or are Western mining firms in which China holds a stake, such as Rio Tinto. 

Beijing holds a stake in 16 of the top 100 non-Chinese mining firms by market capitalization. And some of the world’s largest emerging projects to mine copper, iron ore, and bauxite are only possible due to Chinese financing, cooperation in operations, and offtake and sales.

Furthermore, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has financed and developed infrastructure like the Lobito Corridor, which runs through DRC, Zambia and Angola. UK companies use such links to transport product to market. 

Such cooperation is essential to UK industry. But it also indicates that the UK’s main exposure to risk in supply is in the private sector: which the UK’s critical minerals strategy emphasizes as crucial.

Parameters and limitations

Implementation of the UK’s 2025 strategy requires guidelines and support for companies on how to productively engage in a responsible manner. There is also a need to address the lack of clarity on how political relationships impact on commerce.

Foreign investment in UK firms is a key potential vulnerability. The UK does not restrict foreign investment in its firms, beyond constraints on sensitive sectors dealing with national security, and nor should it. 

But it can learn lessons from other critical minerals producers with Chinese shareholding: for instance, it could seek to limit the voting rights of Chinese entities and their influence over corporate governance and mineral flows. Such measures can help ensure that Chinese shareholding cannot force UK-listed mining firms to comply with Chinese export controls. 

Other important areas require guidelines, for instance risks emerging from shared infrastructure. Mining projects in remote and less developed locations often share railways for exporting their product. Some countries have instructed their mining companies not to use infrastructure provided by global rivals like China. But such measures have only created an uneven playing field: state-owned entities have had to comply, but private operators often carry on. 

It would be more useful for the UK government to provide guidelines and advisory documents for best practice in this area and reassure companies they will not be penalized for using supply routes that cross geopolitical fault lines. 

Data protection is another pressing concern. The mining industry is becoming more digitized, with increasing amounts of automation, and data collected on production, trade, quality and quantity of minerals. Much of this is commercially sensitive, especially concerning information on output or quality, technology, and skills. 

Protected data can be highly exposed on shared operations and infrastructure, for example where border scanning systems use Chinese technology that could send data back to Beijing. Guidelines and protections for UK firms operating in such conditions would be useful. 

Byron Allen’s show Comics Unleashed will take the 11.35pm time slot vacated by the cancellation of The Late Show

Viewers accustomed to watching The Late Show With Stephen Colbert at its typical 11.35pm time slot will be greeted with a different show starting on Friday: Comics Unleashed, hosted by Byron Allen.

While it’s standard for networks to pay a host like Allen, 65, his deal with CBS is a little different. He will be paying the network for Colbert’s old time slot through a 16-month-long lease agreement while selling advertising for the show himself.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Delaware’s second largest city is moving forward with a plan to close a budget shortfall by raising residents’ taxes and cutting departmental budgets. City council and staff say they have tried to keep tax increases at a minimum by tapping into all possible funding sources.

Following weeks of uncertainty, Dover city officials have reached a consensus about how to close a $7 million budget shortfall. They say they will raise residents’ property taxes and electricity bills.  

The budget plan, which passed nearly unanimously at a city council workshop on Wednesday evening, includes a 3 cent increase per $100 of assessed value on city residents’ property taxes, and a 1 cent increase to their current per-kilowatt-hour electric usage rate. 

The City Council still must formally approve the plan.

According to example bills presented by city staff during the workshop, the increases would cause a resident who owns a $150,000 home to pay $15 more toward taxes and energy during a mild weather month, and $25.50 more during an intense weather month.

Those increases — combined with substantial cuts, including to road improvements — will allow the city to move forward with a balanced budget this year. But questions still loom as to how Delaware’s capital city will develop more sustainable budget solutions in the years to come.

The budget will be formally introduced and subsequently voted on during upcoming city council meetings in June. 

Acting City Manager Sharon Duca said the budget still could see minor revisions between now and its first reading on June 8, but the final ordinance is likely to look similar to the plan council members approved on Wednesday. 

‘Finding the money’

In addition to the tax increases, the city cut millions of dollars across multiple departments.

The cuts include freezing hiring for all vacant positions, postponing new vehicle and equipment purchases, and pausing capital improvement projects like repaving roads and improving water quality. 

The city council reviewed and debated the budget proposal submitted by Duca’s office during a two-day budget workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Some council members pushed for the city to draw more money from other places, such as a fund earmarked for new business development, or defund the city’s police training academy, instead of raising taxes. 

Ultimately, Councilman Brian Lewis was the only vote against advancing the budget with tax increases. Councilwoman Julia Pillsbury was absent from the workshop.

Lewis told Spotlight Delaware he is too worried about the impact the increases will have on senior citizens and other residents strapped for money in his district. He still wants the city to “seek more revenue sources” to close the budget gap instead of turning to a property tax increase, he said. 

Other elected officials said they are pleased the city was able to resolve its large budget shortfall with a relatively minor tax increase – and without dipping into the city’s budget reserves, as they have done in other recent years. 

“I think we’re doing the best that we possibly can, and we will have a balanced budget with a minimal increase in the property tax rate,” Council President Fred Neil said. 

A couple of Dover residents showed up to the budget workshops to express opposition to the proposed tax rate increases, and the city’s budget shortfall situation more generally.

“Leave my taxes alone and my pocket alone and take it from your pocket,” resident Bonnie Pennington said. “We’re sitting here talking to y’all, and nothing is getting done.”

City staff also sounded an alarm during the meeting. Having such a lean budget, and delaying improvement projects is not sustainable in the long term, they said.

“The level of deferments in fiscal year 2027 is not sustainable,” Duca said. “There’s often been a saying of, ‘Find the money.’ Finding the money is not an option.”

Crunching the numbers 

The capital city originally faced a $13 million budget shortfall when it began its budgeting process earlier this year. 

Spending cuts across multiple departments decreased that shortfall to $7 million earlier this month, and the newly proposed tax increases will balance the city’s revenues and expenses at $57.6 million for the next fiscal year.

Duca described her focus while revising the initial budget as maintaining essential services while minimizing increased fees imposed on residents. 

The increased electric usage fee will provide $6 million in revenue to the city, while the raised property taxes are projected to generate an additional $1.1 million, Duca said.  

The city also plans to implement a monthly public safety fee at a staggered rate for commercial properties, depending on their size, Duca said. This will divide the funding burden for the police department between residents and businesses, and cover more of the roughly $25 million gap between the Dover Police Department’s budgeted expenses and the revenues it brings in.

The original budget proposal included a larger property tax increase and a public safety fee on residential properties, in addition to businesses, in order to raise the funds to close the shortfall.

But the General Assembly confirmed this week it would pay the city of Dover $1.6 million for fire and police services the city provides to Delaware State University, leading council members to reduce the property tax increase and strike the residential public safety fee entirely.

The Dover Police Department is by far the largest and most expensive department in the city’s budget, making up more than 48% of total expenditures under the revised budget figures.

The department, which has drawn considerable attention over the past year due to conflict between Chief Thomas Johnson and the local police union, was the only department set to receive a sizable 8% increase in funds and to hire more positions in the originally drafted budget.

In the reworked budget, however, the police department’s allocation was cut down. It no longer includes any new positions and features a smaller 5% total department budget increase – up from $25.7 million last year to $26.3 million this year. 

The department’s budget also includes about $670,000 to be spent on Flock security cameras and body-worn cameras for officers, as part of a five-year lease program that is paid out incrementally each year. 

Throughout the budgeting process, city council members  have homed in on the fact that roughly 40% of property in the city is exempt from paying property taxes —properties like the Dover Air Force Base, DSU and Legislative Hall — causing a major hit to the city’s tax revenue. 

Elected officials pointed to the public safety fee proposed as a part of this year’s budget, and the higher education public safety fund from the General Assembly, as helpful ways to offset the impacts of revenue lost from the nontaxable property in the city. 

The city also receives payment in lieu of taxes – or PILOT money – from the state for the large tax-exempt properties within its limit. 

Duca said the PILOT money allocated to Dover is included in the city’s projected $18.2 million in property tax revenue. She declined to say specifically how much the city receives in PILOT money, instead directing Spotlight Delaware to submit a Freedom of Information Act request for the information.

A debate over approach 

While city council members lauded the two days of workshops as a relatively collaborative effort, some disagreements arose over raising property taxes and how much to prioritize police department funding. 

Lewis, the lone vote against approving the budget plan, proposed that the city use the remaining $1.6 million in its Economic Development Fund — typically used to purchase properties for businesses or other infrastructure improvements to attract businesses — to offset the need for a property tax increase. 

But his suggestion was rejected as other council members described the economic development fund as a key engine for drawing future businesses to the city, and ultimately expanding its tax base. 

“I’m reminded of the story about if you give a person a fish, they eat for the day, if you teach a person to fish, they eat for a lifetime,” Neil said. “This [fund] is a fishing pole.” 

The budget workshops also included a lengthy — and at times heated — debate over the viability of the city’s police academy, which trains new officers for the Dover Police Department and other departments in the state. 

Councilman Roy Sudler called for the academy to be suspended until more data is provided about the revenues and costs of its operation. 

Sudler leveled charges against Dover police for not having “a stellar reputation… because [the officers] feel as though the leadership is not sufficient.” 

But other council members jumped to the academy and police department’s defense, saying they are vital to the success of the city, and to attracting more businesses and residents to downtown areas. 

“There is dollar value to the Dover Police Academy,” said Mayor Robin Christiansen, who spent most of his comments throughout the workshop defending the police department. “I would appreciate your support in keeping the police academy in place, so we can meet the public safety responsibilities of a growing city.”

Ultimately, the council directed city staff to conduct an assessment on the “sustainability” of the police academy and present findings during the June 8 city council meeting, where the budget proposal also will formally be introduced. 

Get Involved: The first reading of the Dover budget ordinance will take place at the next city council meeting, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Monday, June 8, at Dover City Hall.

The post Dover agrees to balance budget with tax increases, department cuts  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie was decisively ousted on Tuesday night in his Kentucky primary, a win for President Donald Trump, who had launched an all-out attack on the congressman for his role in pushing for the release of the Epstein files. But in Pennsylvania, the left had a lot to celebrate. Chris Rabb won by nearly 15 points in Philadelphia in a major win for progressives. And Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter and union head, sailed to victory with the support of both the left and moderates. 

Mysterious super PACs with ties to Republican donors poured millions into influencing the election results in both states with varying degrees of success. In Kentucky, AIPAC’s super political action committee and two other groups backed by pro-Israel donors spent more than $15 million in opposition to Massie or in support of his opponent, according to Federal Election Commission reports released through Tuesday. 

In Pennsylvania, advertisements from Lead Left — a super PAC that reportedly has ties to Republican donors — dropped ads attacking two of the candidates as not progressive enough, leading to speculation that Republicans were trying to prop up a weaker candidate for the general election. 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and politics reporter Matt Sledge break down the contentious primary races, the record-level campaign spending and how obscure groups funding the midterm elections are hiding donors’ tracks.

“Groups can kind of game campaign finance deadlines and create super PACs to funnel money to other super PACs so that reporting deadlines are missed and use these ‘pop-up super PACs’ to ensure that ordinary voters never find out who is funding ads before a campaign happens,” says Sledge. “Sometimes there’s even a second layer of pop-up super PACness where those bland-sounding groups send money to other bland-sounding groups. God help you if you’re an ordinary voter trying to track all this money.”

The consequential U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United 16 years ago has allowed courts to chip away at campaign financing restrictions. “Now here we are where any industry that’s facing regulation or any donors who support an unpopular cause can really just open the spigots and try to throw primaries their way,” adds Sledge.  

Certain industries have gotten smart about how to hide where the money is coming from. “Ordinary voters don’t generally like crypto, AI or gambling. They may tolerate it at a maximum, but they’re not motivated by the idea of electing pro-crypto, pro-AI, pro-gambling people,” notes Sledge. “But all of these industries have realized, ‘OK, we can use super PACs that run ads that have nothing to do with our industry and get our friends elected to Congress, and they are going to remember that we spent a lot of money on their races.’”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Matt Sledge: And I’m Matt Sledge, another politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: Today, we’re going to dive right in because I know we’re both exhausted. We were both up late covering the Kentucky and Pennsylvania primaries. Matt, we’re speaking Wednesday morning, fresh off of that Kentucky primary election, where President Donald Trump endorsed Republican Rep. Thomas Massie’s opponent.

Massie decisively lost his race. Is this proof that despite inflation, gas prices, the war in Iran, Trump is still a kingmaker, or I guess in Massie’s case, a hangman?

MS: Certainly when it comes to the Republican Party and intraparty politics, some people thought Massie might pull this out, and instead it was a pretty humiliating defeat for a long-term incumbent in the House.

But you do have to step back a little bit and remember, this is a party-on-party fight. Trump took out a guy who votes conservative nearly all the time, and it’s a safe Republican district. So he spent a lot of political capital taking out one Republican to replace with another Republican, essentially because he was mad about the Epstein files.

JW: The Epstein files is an interesting part of all of this because Thomas Massie fought so hard to get the Epstein files released. We talked about it on the podcast with one of the attorneys for some of Epstein’s survivors, and it did seem like an issue that was breaking out politically.

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Democrats have been speaking about it. I actually heard at the Center for American Progress’s event on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries actually spoke about the Epstein files and talked about it as a top issue for Democrats. So we know this is something that they are trying to make an election issue, but it doesn’t seem like it worked for Massie. Why do you think that is?

MS: I think it’s because it cut against the president so much and, just in the larger picture, enraged the president and turned him decisively against Massie. They had their problems before. I think it was hard for Thomas Massie to argue in his district that getting the Epstein files released was a great coup but also that it didn’t harm the president, because it clearly did harm the president politically. Ultimately, the voters in his district decided that helping the president was more important than anything else.

JW: We also know that pro-Israel groups poured money into this race as well to try and defeat Thomas Massie. Is there anything that you can say about that?

MS: Yeah, it was a lot of money. It was over $15 million from two explicitly pro-Israel groups, super PAC affiliated with AIPAC and then a Republican pro-Israel group. Then also there was a kind of special purpose-created super PAC that was funded in large part by pro-Israel donors. So this was the most expensive House race in history. A huge percentage of that spending came from donors who were motivated by the issue of Israel.

Massie has always opposed foreign aid in general, but I will say he has seemed to take special delight in tweaking supporters of Israel. Obviously that is a minority position within the Republican Party, so these groups came for him, and they were successfully able to help the president oust him.

JW: We’re going to talk a little bit more about how super PACs are hiding where their money is going in this election. But before we do that, I wanted to touch a little bit more on Democratic primaries from last night. So Pennsylvania had some big primaries. Are there any top lines from that race you want to share?

MS: I wasn’t following Pennsylvania as much, but of course, everybody was watching that race in Philadelphia, where Chris Rabb was able to pull out a victory. That’s a huge win for the Democratic Socialist wing of the party. He was up against a more establishment Democrat, and it shows that there is this really energized cohort within the Democratic Party that’s really excited to elect progressives.

JW: As I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, I was up covering that race. One really interesting thing, aside from the Philadelphia primary, was in Pennsylvania 7, the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, ended up backing — really heavily backing — Bob Brooks, one of the more progressive candidates in that race. We also saw Bernie Sanders backing him and the Working Families Party. So we saw this coalition effort between more mainstream center-left and progressives which is obviously different than what we saw in Philadelphia, but it’s interesting to see how those two coalitions could work together in Congress.

And Matt, I want to talk a little bit more about how super PACs are operating in this race. You have a new piece out this week that gets into all of that. So it’s about groups that are funding the 2026 midterm races. You looked at a dizzying array of players who are throwing money into this election cycle.

Before we get into some of those players and the issues they’re pushing, can you set the stage for us? How would you describe the current campaign finance landscape?

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MS: It’s just kinda anything goes, and we’ve seen this gradual and then not so gradual evolution from the Citizens United decision in 2010, which opened the doors for allegedly independent spending on elections. The courts have just chipped away at whatever protections there are. Then the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has refused to get in the way of some pretty questionable behavior. 

Now here we are where any industry that’s facing regulation or any donors who support an unpopular cause can really just open the spigots and try to throw primaries their way. A lot of time, they’re doing it in ways that cover their tracks a little bit, and they’re running ads that have nothing to do with their chosen issues.

JW: I want to get into the history of this, how we even got there. Citizens United is, I would argue, a boogeyman, not just for the left, but anyone who cares about democracy at all. Can you remind us how that SCOTUS decision really changed the landscape for how campaigns are funded and how we’re seeing that evolve in this election cycle?

MS: It is a boogeyman on the left and elsewhere, but I would say a boogeyman for good reason. A truly significant Supreme Court decision that basically said, individual candidates running for office, we can still limit, how much they’re raising and through that, how much they’re spending on elections, but these allegedly independent spenders, groups like super PACs, can spend as much money as they want on a race because they have no connection to the candidates.

There is no danger of corruption, and that’s really what we’re interested in policing here. We don’t want to police free speech. It essentially equated political spending with free speech, which a lot of people would take issue with. 

One of the things that has been really interesting, I say interesting with some chagrin, as this system has evolved, is that we are now in this place, and I wrote about this in my recent article, where groups can kind of game campaign finance deadlines and create super PACs to funnel money to other super PACs so that reporting deadlines are missed and use these “pop-up super PACs” to ensure that ordinary voters never find out who is funding ads before a campaign happens.

Some of these newer industries that are getting in on the campaign spending game, like crypto and artificial intelligence, are also setting up entire networks of super PACs, sometimes a mama or a papa super PAC, and then a Democratic-affiliated super PAC and a Republican-affiliated super PAC so that both donors can channel their money to one party affiliate and to make it a little harder for voters to track where all the money is coming from. 

JW: I really recommend that people go check out your piece. I think it’s an amazing glossary on what’s happening in our elections and the aftermath of Citizens United 16 years later. 

This isn’t just about AI or crypto, as you’ve mentioned. There’s also AIPAC. The Intercept has reported extensively on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has been spending directly on campaigns for a little while now.

In 2024, our colleague Akela Lacy wrote, “AIPAC embraced a new strategy. It would use its vast funds to oust progressive members of Congress who criticized human rights abuses by Israel and the country’s receipt of billions of U.S. dollars in military funding.” Matt, how is AIPAC operating this election cycle?

Given that there’s growing opposition on both the left and the right to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and influence in U.S. politics, is the group changing its tactics?

MS: AIPAC’s brand is in the dumps. Israel’s brand is in the dumps with Democrats as well. You see even very pro-Israel Democratic politicians saying, “I’m not taking AIPAC money.” What the group has done is really make use of these pop-up super PACs. So it’s no longer the United Democracy Project, which is AIPAC’s primary super PAC affiliate spending money in these races. It’s groups with very bland, friendly-sounding names, and AIPAC’s super PAC affiliate sends money to them.

Sometimes there’s even a second layer of pop-up super PACness where those bland-sounding groups send money to other bland-sounding groups. God help you if you’re an ordinary voter trying to track all this money. All you see are negative ads attacking candidates on issues that have nothing to do with AIPAC or Israel.

JW: You just teased it a bit, but I know you poked around some FEC, — Federal Election Commission — reports, for a recent Chicago race and found some interesting information about how AIPAC donors were operating in the race. First, can you tell us what happened in Chicago, and what did you find in the reports?

MS: In Chicago, there was a newly created group called Elect Chicago Women, which sounds great. Who doesn’t want to elect Chicago women? They received money from the United Democracy Project, which is AIPAC’s super PAC affiliate. Then they turned around and handed a million dollars to another newly created group called the Chicago Progressive Partnership. It’s a little surprising they didn’t add “and apple pie” at the end of that. 

So basically what that did is it tweaked things so that under the FEC’s campaign finance rules, the donors for that money did not have to be disclosed until after the race. In, for instance, the 9th Congressional District primary, there was this really hotly contested race between a progressive and an even more progressive candidate, both of whom were not favored by AIPAC.

AIPAC attempted to, through these super PACs, play the spoiler and boost an entirely different super left progressive candidate to hurt Kat Abughazaleh, the influencer. You could argue it worked because she didn’t lose by that much, and they may have successfully employed this tactic. They didn’t ultimately get their chosen candidate over the line, but they did help a candidate they really disliked lose.

JW: We saw this in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night as well. There’s this group, Lead Left, and the New York Times had reported, as well as Punchbowl, on some interesting ties that they had to Republican groups while also trying to sandbag the progressive candidates in the race by arguing that they weren’t really progressive or that Ryan Croswell, who no one would really argue is a progressive, is, just hiding and is really a Republican.

So we’ve seen this in other races, but I wanted to ask, what other races you’ve seen this happen in and what might be of interest to people here?

MS: Yeah, there’s something that’s really interesting happening in Michigan right now where there’s another one of these newly created groups spending a lot of money to boost Haley Stevens, who’s AIPAC’s preferred candidate in the race.

They are using a consulting firm that AIPAC’s super PAC has used in the past to buy television ads. But AIPAC came out and said, it’s not us. We’re not spending this money. As far as I can tell, nobody has gotten to the bottom of this, of where this money is coming from. I think there are several different ways where AIPAC could say it’s not us and for it to be technically true.

But perhaps there really is some other mystery group behind all of this spending. But it’s really telling. This is a super high profile Senate race, a lot of journalists on it, a lot of eyes on it. Whoever is behind this money has so far been able to successfully conceal its origin.

I think it’s really hard to argue that it is good for voters to not know where this huge amount of money in the race is coming from.

[Break]

JW: For those who don’t know, you’re effectively our crypto, gambling, AI lobby reporter on top of everything else you do. Obviously there’s been a lot of crypto, gambling, and AI money flooding the system right now. Where are you seeing that money going this season?

MS: A lot of it so far is being spent in these primaries, and a lot of it in the Democratic primaries is being spent to elect flexible centrist candidates.

The thing with all of these industries is ordinary voters don’t generally like crypto, AI, or gambling. They may tolerate it at a maximum, but they’re not motivated by the idea of electing pro-crypto, pro-AI, pro-gambling people. More often the contrary within the Democratic Party. But all of these industries have realized, “OK, we can use super PACs that run ads that have nothing to do with our industry and get our friends elected to Congress, and they are going to remember that we spent a lot of money on their races.”

The likelihood of backlash from voters who have a million other things to keep track of is pretty small. Politicians are just going to decide, “Let’s keep our head down and not piss off crypto, AI, and gambling,” even though those are pretty unpopular industries.

JW: I have to say, when I was at the Center for American Progress event on Tuesday listening to Gavin Newsom, Hakeem Jeffries, the whole Democratic establishment try to figure out how to plot a lane in the AI fight, I kept thinking Matt would find this hilarious. 

A lot of saying a lot without saying anything.

MS: Yes, they would like to protect our children without actually doing anything.

JW: Yeah. It did, It was giving a little bit of that. 

On that note, The New York Times reported that the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is the biggest donor this midterm cycle by a long stretch.

The firm’s co-founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have dumped more than $115 million into the cycle so far. For context, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has put in about $102 million, Elon Musk $85 million, and Wall Street financier Jeff Yass $81 million. Is this kind of spending standard for midterm elections?

What are the priorities being pushed here, in particular by these tech billionaires who are pouring a ton of money into these elections?

MS: Andreessen Horowitz is a really fascinating case study in all of this. They have major investments in crypto and AI. They created this massive crypto super PAC network in the last election cycle. They saw that it was a success, and they are just repeating the pattern for artificial intelligence this cycle, and they’ve gotten some of their friends in the AI industry to spend a bunch of money as well.

As you pointed out, it’s a lot of money even in comparison to other billionaires. I think the explanation for that is that they are in highly regulated industries, or at least industries that should be highly regulated, and we’re at a moment where the rules are being set, and they have recognized an opportunity to have their friends set the rules.

JW: Following the money a little bit further down the road, former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair has been gaining a lot of attention on social media for posting videos where she alleges — in detail — how the White House and powerful figures on the right coordinate messaging with paid influencers. 

Here’s a clip of her in a recent interview on Zeteo.

[Clip]

Ashley St. Clair: There’s multiple chats that they operate in, and these chats also have— Some are just sequestered to large MAGA influencers in which they send these paid campaigns. Others have members of the administration. Others have the Trump children. And they coordinate this messaging and react to things in real time: Here’s how we respond or don’t respond to any given issue at any given time. 

They also have the paid campaigns in which messaging is pushed out, and it is very much coordinated through both paid messaging and just wanting to be in the club and not be ostracized.

[End of clip]

JW: Democratic California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is being accused of not properly disclosing that his campaign paid influencers $10,000 each to promote him.

What is known about how influencers and messaging are factoring in elections today? What do you make of all this, Matt?

MS: Yeah, I think we definitely have to take anything Ashley St. Clair says with a huge grain of salt, but— 

JW: Good point. 

MS: At the same time, I think she’s also probably getting at something. We all saw after the latest assassination attempt how all these influencers immediately argued that we needed to build Trump’s big, beautiful ballroom, and then a lot of people were questioning how they were able to all land on the same message so quickly.

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It’s clear when you watch any influencers online that half of them are being paid off, so it’s the most natural thing in the world in one way for politicians and campaigns to get in on it. What is really missing here, what’s really missing in this conversation is the question of regulation and disclosure.

If we had a functioning FEC, they might step in and say, “Whoa, you need to disclose when you’re paying off influencers because that should be something the public knows about.” Instead, we don’t have a functioning FEC or a functioning Congress, so nobody is stepping in to make sure that disclosures are happening.

Disclosure should be a bare minimum. Maybe this should be banned outright as well. But we, at the very least, should have clarity on when this is happening, and not just within the context of campaigns but also in the context of politics more broadly.

JW: Those are all really good points.

The lack of any kind of regulation about this is troubling. We’ve obviously been talking about money and where it’s going and how it’s going to influencers, into campaigns, into shady super PACs, but what issues do voters actually care about this election cycle? You and I have covered campaign finance. We’ve covered ICE. But what issues are actually breaking through to voters?

MS: Yeah, I think it’s going to be the economy first and foremost, and then the war on Iran as an extension of the economy, because it dovetails with these concerns about affordability so strongly.

Some of the centrist Dem messaging around affordability is super cringe. But it’s also true that it’s a very important issue for voters. I think it has been rightly identified as a major issue that is just going to dominate everything over the next few months. 

I don’t know how much ICE and the crackdowns will really play into the elections. My guess is that’ll be more of a primary issue. Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley Act, for instance, will have problems in primaries over that. But when you look at the polls in the general election, immigration is still one of Trump’s best issues. His numbers have definitely eroded there, but it’s better than everything else by about 10 points.

So I don’t know if that’ll be as much of an issue that candidates are highlighting in the general elections.

JW: On immigration, I do keep thinking that if the elections had been held earlier when everything that was happening in Minnesota that was enraging people. I think that was an issue about immigration, but it was also really an issue about democracy, about people’s right to protest, about the rights that they assumed they held as American citizens to protest against their government.

I want to pivot a little bit to talk about an issue that we’ve been discussing on the show quite frequently, which is the fallout from the SCOTUS decision. So the Supreme Court ruled in favor of essentially gutting the Voting Rights Act, which unleashed a new wave of redistricting wars that have been sparked particularly in the South to eliminate minority-majority districts.

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Meanwhile, last week, the Virginia State Supreme Court rejected a voter-approved gerrymandering effort that would have boosted Democrats’ chances of gaining four seats in the House. How are you seeing the redistricting wars take shape? Are there any places you’re keeping a particularly close eye on?

MS: Yeah, we’ve seen Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina quickly pass these new maps.

But, I think in a week or two, we might have hit a wall on the redistricting wars just for practical reasons, because primaries are coming so fast and early voting has opened in so many places. Mississippi, for instance, the governor there has said he’s not going to push redistricting this year, I think essentially just because of the timing.

So we may finally be settling in the place we’re going to be for the elections, and it looks like a net loss of a few seats for the Democrats, which could be really significant if the outcome of the House elections is that close. On major votes in the House right now, it’s only a few votes either way could shift them.

JW: Speaking at the Center for American Progress event, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had mentioned that they expect to lose about three or four seats as a result of these redistricting efforts in the South, but they have obviously expressed some confidence in being able to overcome those odds.

Are there other midterms races or themes this cycle that you wanted to talk about?

MS: I think that Michigan Senate race is going to be a huge one. It just gets at so many issues, both of style and substance, of where Democratic voters want to go. That, to me, is really high on the list. This California governor’s race is also fascinating in its own kind of train wreck way. So we’ll see how things go there. Really makes you think how important electoral rules are because we could see some crazy outcome that ordinary voters don’t particularly want.

JW: California is the mess that keeps on messing.

MS: OK. Jess, I gotta turn the tables on you. Any other races that you’re watching, no matter how obscure they are?

JW: I am a DC native, and I also live in DC, so I am following the DC mayoral race, which I know is probably not on most people’s radar who do not live in DC, but it’s fascinating. It’s become this debate really around youth crime and these efforts to restart mass incarceration, I would argue, in DC.

So that’s become a really interesting electoral issue between the two more progressive candidates, Janeese Lewis George, who has really fought against these teen curfews, and Kenyan McDuffie, who has been really pushing for these curfews even though he’s tried to paint himself as more of a progressive. So I think that race, although it’s a mayoral race and might not have much impact outside of DC, has been fascinating to watch for me personally. 

And with that little tidbit from me, I am going to leave it because I know we are both exhausted. Matt, thank you so much for joining us on the Intercept Briefing.

We’ll add a link to Matt’s story in the show notes.

MS: Thanks for having me on.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy-editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

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Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post AIPAC, AI, Crypto, and Gambling Are Hiding Their Big Election Spends appeared first on The Intercept.

Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., flashed a smile alongside her mother, Maria Marcotte, as the pair took a selfie from an international terminal of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. 

“Lisbon, here we come!” Marcotte, a retired advertising executive, captioned her Instagram post on June 16, 2024. 

Stevens and her mother then boarded a plane, seated in business class, according to a congressional ethics disclosure form. The following day, the pair checked into The Ivens, a luxury hotel where Stevens and other members of Congress spent the next four days attending a conference with panels that included a cryptocurrency industry executive, bankers and other corporate leaders. The conference was hosted by the centrist, pro-corporate think tank Center Forward, which has received donations to its nonprofit arm from major pharmaceutical companies and has a super PAC funded by big oil companies. 

Center Forward covered the full $27,779.86 trip for Stevens and her mother — a drop in the bucket compared to what the group’s political funding arm would later spend supporting her run for U.S. Senate.

Now, as Stevens is embroiled in a contested three-way race for a vacant United States Senate seat, Center Forward and its super PAC have spent $2.4 million on television advertisements in Michigan, where the only campaign the group is known to be backing is hers, The Intercept found in a review of advertising data accessed from AdImpact. The group’s first round of ad purchases supporting Stevens, totaling $855,000, was reported last week by State Affairs. Center Forward Committee has also bought at least $50,000 in online ads for Stevens over the past two weeks, according to Google’s ad transparency tracker.

One of the commercials, which ran on broadcast, cable and streaming services across Michigan starting May 12, shows Stevens “standing up to Trump” and “standing up for Michigan,” pointing toward her bills calling for accountability for ICE agent misconduct and seeking to prevent the Trump administration from deploying the U.S. military domestically. “I answer,” Stevens says in a clip from the House floor, “to the people of Michigan.”

A Stevens campaign spokesperson repeated a similar statement in response to queries from The Intercept.

“Haley fights for Michigan and only Michigan,” said her spokesperson Arik Wolk. “She’s spent her time in Congress working to bolster Michigan’s manufacturing economy, Michigan innovation and Michigan jobs — and as Michigan’s most effective Democrat in Congress, she has a track record of doing just that.”

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Stevens’s campaign has been dogged by criticism for her corporate backing. Both of her opponents – Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed – have sworn off corporate contributions. 

The Lisbon conference in 2024 sponsored by Center Forward featured panels led by executives from banks and holdings companies, such as Bison Bank and Bay Street Capital Holdings. One panel, titled “Blockchain Regulation in Portugal (EU),” included the CEO of crypto company Q Blockchain, in addition to bank executives and other boosters of the crypto industry. Prior to the panel, a business school professor gave a lecture on “what the EU’s approach to digital asset and blockchain regulation looks like” and “how the U.S. may be falling behind comparatively.”

At the time, Portugal boasted one of the most tax-friendly systems for cryptocurrency investments and the European Union installed its newly approved crypto regulatory system known as MiCA.

A supplement to the congressional disclosure form described the trip as intended to “bring a bipartisan group of pragmatic policymakers and influencers from various industries and organizations to focus on common-sense solutions” by discussing “foreign direct investment, healthcare, renewable energy, data privacy” and economic ties between the U.S. and Portugal.

The group said its overall mission is “to provide centrists” the information needed to “craft common-sense solutions and provide support in turning those ideas into results.” 

It’s common for congressional delegations to go on international trips paid for by third parties. But Stevens attending a trip sponsored by a pro-corporate group and then receiving significant campaign support from the group two years later raises concerns, said Jeffrey Hauser, a critic of corporate political influence.

“I am worried about what it says, that an institution that has been created to look after corporate interest in Washington had their staff spend a ton of time with the congresswoman, and they came away convinced that she would be loyal to their funders,” said Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. “The travel and the campaign finance expenditure in tandem are worse together than on their own.”

Center Forward also covered additional travel expenses for Stevens’s staff, including $10,844.33 for Stevens’s legislative director to go on the Lisbon trip and $7,198 for her staffers to attend other Center Forward conferences, including one in Mexico where attendees met with executives with Meta, Walmart, Amazon, 3M and General Motors Mexico, according to further disclosure forms.  

Stevens was joined at the Lisbon conference by conservative lawmakers who have supported pro-crypto legislation, such as Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter, R-Ga., a member of the Blockchain Caucus, and Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Homeland Security committee, according to the congressional disclosure form. The delegation also included prominent Democrats, such as Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., and then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, also a California Democrat who has since resigned amid sexual assault allegations. 

Congressional delegation trips are designed to form relationships between advocacy groups and lawmakers with the goal of “persuading a politician of a worldview,” Hauser said. He noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had fine-tuned the model with its annual congressional visits to Israel, which Stevens also attended with her mother in 2019. Rapport is easier to build in an international travel setting than a visit to a member’s office, Hauser added. 

“I think this trip should be seen more as a cultivation method that Stevens agreed to undertake,” he said, “and the independent expenditure in 2026 as an indication that the 2024 travel was well executed.”

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Since 2022, Center Forward Committee has received $400,000 from Chevron, including $100,000 from the big oil giant during the current election cycle; an additional $300,000 from the oil corporation ConocoPhilips in 2023; $500,000 in 2022 from former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg; $100,000 from big tobacco company Philip Morris last July; and in March, Center Forward Committee and its related PAC, Center Forward Initiative Inc., together received $31,000 from United Health Group.

Center Forward’s nonprofit arm was also at the heart of battling Congressional efforts to lower drug prices under the Biden administration. The group received $7.8 million in donations from the pharmaceutical lobby from 2016 to 2023, according to Sludge, the bulk of which arrived during the Biden era. Center Forward spent those years also pouring money into candidates who were opponents to drug pricing reform.

Stevens, for her part, introduced a 2019 bill that attempted to lower prescription drug prices. She currently supports the expansion of Obamacare and the creation of a public option, but she does not support a Medicare for All policy, marking a contrast with her opponent El-Sayed, who has made the policy a core tenet of his platform. 

Center Forward’s ad spending in Michigan arrived as a separate dark money group, the Center for Democratic Priorities, which uses the same consulting firm as AIPAC does for other “pop-up” super PACs, bought $5 million in TV ads for Stevens this month. 

Marcotte and Center Forward did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment on the relationship between the campaign and the organization.

Stevens’s opponents, who are polling neck-and-neck with her ahead of the August primary, criticized the representative’s support from the group. 

“Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Big Insurance are spending millions to save Haley Stevens from her own record on ICE,” said Jackson Boaz, spokesperson for the McMorrow campaign. “That tells you everything about who she’ll work for in the Senate – and everything about how her campaign is going.”

El-Sayed offered a more terse indictment: “Corporate candidate takes money from corporate lobbies to take corporate trips and do corporate dirty work in Congress.”

The post Corporate Interests Paid for Haley Stevens’s Trip to Portugal — and Her Campaign Ads appeared first on The Intercept.

A 2026 ‘super El Niño’ could expose gaps in UK preparedness Expert comment LToremark 21 May 2026