News Reel

Lawmakers are warning Americans to beware the many financial scams linked to Super Bowl LX, from fake betting sites to counterfeit tickets.

Some backbenchers blame Pm’s chief of staff for Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador

After the release of a vast tranche of documents and emails that shed further light on the close relationship between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, the government has come under intense pressure to release details about its vetting process before Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador in December 2024.

Below, we look at how much Keir Starmer knew about Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein, and what vetting process the former peer went through for the top diplomatic job in Washington.

Data from November 2025 was also revised lower amid a softening in labor market conditions at the end of the year

US job openings dropped to the lowest level in more than five years in December and data for the prior month was revised lower amid a softening in labor market conditions at the end of 2025.

Job openings, a measure of labor demand, decreased by 386,000 to 6.542m by the last day of December, the lowest level since September 2020, the labor department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report, on Thursday.

‘I shouldn’t have to prove I am innocent,’ said man misidentified by Sainsbury’s staff using Facewatch system

A man was ordered to leave a supermarket in London after staff misidentified him using controversial new facial recognition technology.

Warren Rajah was told to abandon his shopping and leave the local store he has been using for 15 years after an “Orwellian” error in a Sainsbury’s in Elephant and Castle.

KINGSTON, R.I., Feb. 5, 2026 — Using advanced computer simulations, researchers from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO) have concluded how and why strong ocean currents modify surface waves.

Using a high-performance computer, the research team generated models to show how storm-driven currents affect wave height and dominant wave period. (URI images courtesy of Isaac Ginis)

“Our primary finding is that hurricane-generated ocean currents can substantially reduce both the height and the dominant period of hurricane waves,” said Isaac Ginis, URI professor of oceanography. “The magnitude of wave reduction depends strongly on how accurately ocean currents are predicted. This highlights the importance of using fully coupled wave-ocean models when forecasting hurricane waves.”

Ginis conducted the research with URI Professor Tetsu Hara and Angelos Papandreou, who earned his Ph.D. in oceanography from URI in December 2025. Their results were published in a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Physical Oceanography in January 2026.

According to Ginis, waves are most strongly reduced by currents on the front right of the storm, where winds, waves and currents are typically strongest.

“On the front-right side of a hurricane, storm-driven currents move in the same direction as the waves,” said Ginis. “This causes the waves to travel more quickly through the high-wind region. Because the waves spend less time being energized by the wind, they do not grow as large as they otherwise would.”

The team’s computer simulations included hurricanes of different sizes, strengths, and forward speeds. Depending on the hurricane characteristics, the simulations revealed that the maximum significant wave height—the average height of the highest one-third of waves—can be reduced by 0.4-2.2 meters, or roughly 1-7 feet, and the dominant wave period can be shortened by about 0.3-1.5 seconds.

Researchers produced models to show how currents of varying strengths, moving in different directions impact surface waves.

“While wave height often gets the most attention, wave period is also a key factor in determining how waves affect offshore or nearshore structures, such as oil platforms,” said Ginis.

The simulations required a powerful computer, so the researchers remotely accessed URI’s high-performance computing nodes installed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts. URI formed a partnership with the computing center in 2021.

Ginis is hopeful that the team’s research, which was funded by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program/Office of Naval Research, will be adopted by weather services to more accurately predict waves during hurricanes.

The professor will have an opportunity to discuss potential operational implementation of the team’s findings with NOAA scientists and hurricane forecasters at the American Meteorological Society Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology in San Diego on March 30.

“This work has strong potential for operational use because we use the same wave and ocean models—WAVEWATCH III and MOM6—that are already part of the National Weather Service’s HAFS hurricane forecast system,” said Ginis. “Our findings could be incorporated without major changes to existing forecasting tools. Our group has a long history of working with NOAA scientists, and results from our previous studies have already been implemented in operational hurricane models.”

More from HPCwire

• URI and UMass Are Jointly Building and Operating a Cluster Called ‘UNITY’ at the MGHPCC [2022]
• U of Rhode Island Partners with the Massachusetts Green HPC Center [2021]

Source: URI

The post URI: Computer Simulations Show Strong Ocean Currents Reduce Size of Surface Waves appeared first on HPCwire.

Back taxes won't automatically disqualify you from a refund, but that doesn't mean you'll see the money, either.

Donald Trump’s former adviser told Epstein in 2019 that he was ‘focused on raising money for Le Pen and Salvini’ before European elections

Dozens of messages contained in the latest tranche of Epstein files lay bare the attempts by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon to tap Jeffrey Epstein for support and funding to bolster European far-right parties.

The messages mostly date to 2018 and 2019, when Bannon, after being sacked by Trump, regularly visited Europe in his quest to forge a movement in the European parliament uniting ultra-rightwing and Eurosceptic forces from several countries including Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and Austria.

Family of Lilia Valutyte, killed by Deividas Skebas in July 2022, say she ‘will always live in our hearts’

A man who stabbed a nine-year-old girl to death in 2022 has been found guilty of her murder.

Deividas Skebas, a 26-year-old Lithuanian man, killed Lilia Valutyte by stabbing her through the heart while the child was playing with a hula hoop outside her mother’s embroidery shop in Boston, Lincolnshire, on 28 July 2022.

Feb. 5, 2026 — Researchers at West Virginia University (WVU) and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have discovered that by adjusting the ratio of elements in a recently discovered material called “iron telluride selenide,” they can switch “exotic” quantum states on and off in materials that are critical for building quantum computers.

Credit: WVU

Iron telluride selenide is valuable to the scientists and engineers who are trying to make quantum computing a reality because it possesses superconductivity, as well as certain exotic properties.

For quantum computing applications, the elements iron, tellurium and selenium are typically grown in ultra-thin films. The researchers found that by tweaking a chemical recipe and changing the interactions between electrons in the films, they could “tune” those elements, moving them between different quantum phases.

They were also able to reach a highly desirable state called a “topological superconductor.” Topological superconductors are promising for building error-free quantum devices of the future because they are inherently stable and resistant to the noise that affects most quantum materials.

Coauthor Subhasish Mandal, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, explained that today’s most powerful computers hit a wall when tackling certain problems, from designing new drugs to cracking encryption codes. Error-free quantum computers promise to overcome those challenges, but building them requires materials with the exotic properties of topological superconductors, which are difficult to produce.

The research team included University of Chicago collaborators Shuolong Yang, assistant professor of molecular engineering, and graduate student Haoran Lin. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, reveal that as the ratio of tellurium and selenium changes in iron telluride selenide, so do the correlations between different electrons. Changing those ratios serves as a sensitive control knob for engineering exotic quantum phases.

“Iron telluride selenide is a unique material because it brings together all the essential ingredients one would hope for in a platform for topological superconductivity: superconductivity itself, strong spin-orbit coupling, and pronounced electronic correlations,” Mandal said. “This combination makes it an ideal system in which to explore how different quantum effects interact and compete.”

The team noted that overly strong correlations pin electrons in place, while overly weak interactions wash out the material’s topological features. At the right strength, these interactions give rise to topological superconductivity, Mandal said.

Christopher Jacobs, a graduate student in Mandal’s group, turned to advanced computational methods to explain the transition. Jacobs realized that the motion of electrons changed as tellurium concentrations increased, and that those changing electron correlations drove the quantum states and the way electrons behaved on the material’s surface.

“Seeing this delicate balance unfold experimentally was both surprising and illuminating,” said Mandal. “It points to electron correlations as a powerful and previously underappreciated tool for engineering topological quantum matter. And it highlights the fact that quantum materials are not fixed objects — they can be actively tuned by subtle internal interactions.”

Source: UWV

The post WVU and UChicago Researchers Tune Quantum States in Superconducting Material appeared first on HPCwire.

Members of Congress are demanding answers from Meta after it ran advertisements by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they say included imagery and music intended to appeal to white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.

The Intercept was among the first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Related

DHS Used Neo-Nazi Anthem for Recruitment After Fatal Minneapolis ICE Shooting

The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.

“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.

“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.

Related

Judge Censored an ICE Agent’s Face Over “Threats.” His Info Was a Google Search Away.

McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Trump administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.

The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.

After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.

Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.

The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.

Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.

“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.

The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.

Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.

The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.

“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”

Related

Deportation, Inc.

Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.

Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.

The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

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US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff said that the US, Ukraine and Russia have agreed to exchange 314 prisoners in “the first such exchange in five months.”

He said:

“This outcome was achieved from peace talks that have been detailed and productive. While significant work remains, steps like this demonstrate that sustained diplomatic engagement is delivering tangible results and advancing efforts to end the war in Ukraine.”

“We may be, in the course of 2026, coming to a point where the whole thing becomes unsustainable, because so much of the Russian economy has been distorted so much by the building up of the war economy at the expense of the civil economy. I think defying the laws of economic gravity can only go on for so long.”

It is not good enough just to criticize Trump. We must offer a positive vision that will improve the lives of Americans

At this difficult moment in American history, it’s imperative that we have the courage to be honest with ourselves.

The United States, once the envy of the world, is now a nation in profound decline. For the sake of our children and future generations, we must reverse that decline and change, in very fundamental ways, the direction of our country.

We must create a vibrant democracy by ending Citizens United and preventing billionaires from buying elections.

Whether the Democratic establishment likes it or not, we must guarantee healthcare as a human right through Medicare for All.

We must build millions of affordable homes and apartments and give our younger generation the opportunity to own a home of their own.

We must make public colleges, universities, trade schools and medical schools tuition-free and have the best childcare and public school system in the entire world.

We must expand Social Security and bring back traditional pension plans so that every senior in this country can retire with dignity.

We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage and guarantee every worker the right to join a union.

We must demand that the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America pay their fair share in taxes.

Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and ranking member of the health, education, labor, and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress

Former truck driver, now 80, allegedly one of many ‘sniper tourists’ who paid Bosnian Serb soldiers to be allowed fire on city

An elderly Italian man is under investigation as part of an investigation by prosecutors in Milan into individuals who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so they could kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.

The 80-year-old is being investigated on charges of aggravated murder, a source close to the case told the Guardian. The man, a former truck driver from the northern Italian region of Veneto, is the first suspect to be placed under investigation since the inquiry began in November.

Prosecutors allege that Kyle Wagner, 37, shared social media posts threatening ICE agents.

CAA’s guidance also including booking sites to enable passengers to make ‘more informed travel decisions’

Airlines and booking firms should give UK customers information about the environmental impact of their flights, the regulator has said.

The Civil Aviation Authority urged booking sites to enable passengers to make “more informed travel decisions” by setting out estimates for carbon emissions for flights landing or taking off from British airports.

The search for Savannah's Guthrie's mom, Nancy Guthrie, stretches into a fifth day after she disappeared over the weekend.

Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the creative process. Amazon plans to launch a closed beta program in March, inviting industry partners to test its AI tools. The company expects to have results to share by May. [...] Amazon is leaning on its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, for help and plans to work with multiple large language model providers to give creators a wider array of options for pre- and post-production filmmaking.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Considering a silver investment in today's economic climate? Here's where the price stands as of February 5, 2026.

Russia's customs service says a 2.8-ton chunk of the Aletai meteorite was found in a shipping container, labeled as a garden ornament.

Officials in Reedley, California said they had tried to warn federal authorities about the possibility of similar labs after one was found there in 2023.

President speaks at National Prayer Breakfast and praises his director of national intelligence amid scrutiny over her role in a raid of a Georgia election office

Amid the various winding comments throughout Trump’s speech today, he said that the Department of Education will officially issue its new guidance to protect the right to prayer in public schools today.

“Now the Democrats will sue us, but we’ll win it,” Trump said, eliciting some laughs from the audience at the National Prayer Breakfast. “They’ll sue us. They sue us for everything. I’m the most sued human being in history.”

Feb. 5, 2026 — SoftBank Corp. announced its wholly owned subsidiary SAIMEMORY Corp. signed a collaborative agreement with Intel Corporation on February 2, 2026 to advance the commercialization of Z-Angle Memory (ZAM), a next-generation memory technology designed for high capacity, high bandwidth and low power consumption.

Established in December 2024, SAIMEMORY is a SoftBank subsidiary conducting research and development to promote the commercialization of next-generation memory technologies. SAIMEMORY will leverage the next-generation memory foundational technologies and technical expertise validated by Intel’s Next Generation DRAM Bonding (NGDB) initiative that was completed under the Advanced Memory Technology (AMT) program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration through the Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

With the aim of creating prototypes in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2028 (FY2027) and achieving commercialization in FY2029, SAIMEMORY will advance research and development on innovative memory architectures and manufacturing technologies. Through the utilization of ZAM next-generation memory technology, SAIMEMORY and Intel will work together to enable high-capacity and high-bandwidth data processing, enhanced processing performance and reduced power consumption in data centers and other environments that require the training and inference of large-scale AI models.

SAIMEMORY’s development of next-generation memory technologies represents one of SoftBank’s key initiatives to support next-generation social infrastructure. By collaborating with Intel and other technology partners and research institutions in Japan and abroad, SoftBank will contribute to the creation of advanced, homegrown semiconductor technologies, and to the strengthening of Japan’s global competitiveness.

More from HPCwire: SoftBank Group and Intel Corporation Sign $2B Investment Agreement

About Intel

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) designs and manufactures advanced semiconductors that connect and power the modern world. Every day, our engineers create new technologies that enhance and shape the future of computing to enable new possibilities for every customer we serve. Learn more at intel.com.

About SoftBank Corp.

Guided by the SoftBank Group’s corporate philosophy, “Information Revolution – Happiness for everyone,” SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434) operates telecommunications and IT businesses in Japan and globally. Building on its strong business foundation, SoftBank Corp. is expanding into non-telecom fields in line with its “Beyond Carrier” growth strategy while further growing its telecom business by harnessing the power of 5G/6G, IoT, Digital Twin and Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) solutions, including High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS)-based stratospheric telecommunications. While constructing AI data centers and developing homegrown LLMs specialized for the Japanese language, SoftBank is integrating AI with radio access networks (AI-RAN), with the aim of becoming a provider of next-generation social infrastructure. To learn more, please visit https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp.

Source: SoftBank Corp.

The post SoftBank and Intel Collaborate to Commercialize Next-Gen Memory Tech appeared first on HPCwire.

Today show host Savannah Guthrie and her siblings have published a video statement calling for the safe return of their mother, Nancy Guthrie, 84, reported missing on Sunday. Guthrie said her mother's health was fragile and she needed her medicine to survive. She said she had heard of the reports of a ransom letter and continued: 'We are ready to talk, however we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated. We need to know without a doubt that she is alive'

• Savannah Guthrie releases video appealing for proof her missing mother is alive

Housing affordability is improving as more homeowners list their properties, according to data from Zillow.

US federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring warrantless arrests unless there is a likelihood of escape

US immigration agents in Oregon must stop arresting people without warrants unless there is a likelihood of escape, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

US district judge Mustafa Kasubhai issued a preliminary injunction in a proposed class-action lawsuit targeting the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of arresting immigrants they happen to come across while conducting ramped-up enforcement operations – which critics have described as “arrest first, justify later”.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff calls Ukraine and Russia's exchange of 314 prisoners "tangible progress," but acknowledges a lot of work left to end the war.

Industry leaders urge EU to tell authorities to stand down entry-exit system controls if needed

Travel industry leaders have called on the European Commission to tell all border authorities to stand down the new entry-exit system (EES) if needed, as fears increase of summer disruption.

European airports have warned of a potentially “disastrous” experience for passengers and huge queues unless the new biometric controls for foreign visitors are relaxed.

South Crofty site could get $225m funding as US seeks to secure supply of critical metal

Donald Trump has aggressively pursued investment into hi-tech industries in recent months, but the US administration has now set its sights on a more traditional sector: tin mining in Cornwall.

The South Crofty mine, near the village of Pool, could start up again after nearly three decades aided by a potential $225m (£166m) investment from across the Atlantic, creating 300 jobs.

A leaked pitch to reshape Ethereum’s leadership exposed deep divisions over politics, power and ether’s static price

US crypto developer Danny Ryan submitted a proposal in November 2024 to Vitalik Buterin, the founder and symbolic leader of Ethereum, a prominent blockchain powering the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum’s de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift.

Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too. The EF could now “exercise a stronger voice” without compromising its ethos of decentralization, Ryan said – and he was open to leading that charge if appointed as the foundation’s new executive director.

CHARLOTTE MCQUILLAN
Staff Reporter

The fanfare surrounding the New York City mayoral race has finally slowed down after New Yorkers elected Democratic Socialist and New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. His campaign succeeded against former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa. 

Unlike most mayoral races, this race captured the attention of many Americans across the country. The main question is: Why did the New York City mayoral race seem so important?

Dr. David Redlawsk, the chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the university, said there has always been a fascination with New York City in the American imagination. 

Not only is it a cultural icon, but it is also a predominant political setting in our nation’s history. Mamdani is a young New Yorker who sits outside of the traditional party perspectives, despite running as a Democrat. 

“He still kind of comes from outside, and he was running in a race against the former governor of New York, who had to resign in disgrace,” Redlawsk said. “And I think it just created kind of a context about power, about where it sits, and also about the future.

He went on to say that democratic politics, particularly, have a past of being run by older politicians, and how there is a strong desire for younger faces. Mamdani’s campaign was compelling because he was a young man who came out of nowhere. 

Not only is Mamdani the city’s first Muslim and Democratic Socialist mayor, but 75% of the youth voted for him with the highest mayoral voter turnout in New York City since 1969. 

“Younger people are less likely to vote in these kinds of elections,” Redlawsk stated. “The campaign that he ran was very much a campaign about a new New York.

“He focused a lot less on the label than on the issues that voters feel, on the day-to-day reality of life for so many people right now.”

A midterm backlash from the Democrats was no surprise for New York, but Mamdani’s election represented both a political and cultural shift toward a different perspective. 

Factions within the Republican Party partially fueled Mamdani’s win. His Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, was openly opposed to President Trump. Contrarily, his Independent (formerly Democratic) opponent, Andrew Cuomo, had been endorsed by Trump. 

“Cuomo was the epitome of a sore loser, in that he lost the primary, but in New York, even if you lose the primary, you can still file as an independent […] And so he also kind of brought that sort of thing; it’s kind of like you already lost. What are you doing here?” Redlawsk said.

Both Cuomo and Sliwa congratulated Mamdani on his win and urged their supporters to give him a chance. 

“Within the Democratic Party there’s potential for a new perspective, for a new leadership, and [Mamdani] could be the vanguard of that,” Redlawsk said.

Spotify is planning to let premium subscribers in the U.S. and U.K. buy hardcovers and paperbacks directly through its app starting this spring, partnering with Bookshop.org to handle pricing, inventory and fulfillment. The Swedish streaming company, which entered the audiobook market in 2022, will also introduce a feature called Page Match that lets users scan a page from a physical book or e-reader and jump to the exact spot in the audiobook edition. Spotify will earn an undisclosed affiliate fee on each purchase.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President says army will ‘checkmate barbaric terrorists’ who attacked Woro and Nuku in Kwara state, killing 170 people

Nigeria will deploy an army battalion to a district in the west of the country where suspected jihadist fighters killed 170 people in attacks in two villages in the region on Tuesday night, the office of the president has said.

In the country’s deadliest armed assault this year, gunmen attacked Woro and Nuku villages in Kaiama district in Kwara state, shooting residents, razing homes and looting shops.

Explore which states have the highest number of athletes competing for the U.S. Olympic team at the 2026 Winter Games, and search for your own hometown.

SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain, Feb. 5, 2026 — Quantum Motion today announced the opening of its offices in Spain, establishing a permanent base for quantum system development, integration and deployment in the European Union. The new site, which is located in the newly inaugurated nanoGUNE Quantum Tower, supports Quantum Motion’s scale-up of silicon-based quantum computing systems and strengthens the collaboration across Europe’s semiconductor, academic and industrial ecosystems.

Quantum Motion’s offices in the newly inaugurated nanoGUNE Quantum Tower in San Sebastian, Spain

The nanoGUNE Quantum Tower was officially inaugurated on February 4th, 2026. The opening ceremony was attended by the president of the Basque Government, Imanol Pradales; the head of the regional government of Gipuzkoa, Eider Mendoza; the mayor of San Sebastian, Jon Insausti; the president and director-general of nanoGUNE, Javier Martínez-Ojinaga and Jose M. Pitarke respectively; the Basque minister of Science, Universities and Innovation; and other representatives from principal institutions, research centers and the European quantum industry.

“Our expansion in Europe demonstrates our continued commitment to global collaborations and partnerships,” said James Palles-Dimmock, CEO of Quantum Motion. “The state-of-the-art technology infrastructure available in the new Quantum Tower and our collaboration with the Basque government, academia and experts at CIC nanoGUNE provide a huge advantage as we advance our ability to deliver commercially useful, silicon-spin quantum systems at scale.”

“The scale and ambition of this project are such that we decided to expand our facilities with the construction of the new Quantum Tower to provide dedicated space to our Quantum Hardware research group and laboratories and to Quantum Motion,” said Jose M. Pitarke, nanoGUNE’s director-general. “We look forward to advancing the future of quantum computing in collaboration with Quantum Motion.”

Quantum Motion and CIC nanoGUNE are jointly collaborating on initiatives focused on delivering fault-tolerant, utility-scale quantum systems in Europe, including:

• QuDos – A prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant project awarded to Gonzalez-Zalba focused on using semiconductor quantum dots as the basis for building ultra-low-power microwave qubit control and readout electronics for quantum computers.
• SPINS Consortium – The Semiconducting Pilot Line for Industrial quantum nanoSystems, which is bringing together leading European research and technology organizations to deliver semiconductor quantum chips with high manufacturing and technology readiness levels. Quantum Motion, in collaboration with nanoGUNE, is focusing on the integration of quantum and classical electronics on a monolithic chip.

“The Basque Country has one of the strongest ecosystems globally when it comes to the development of quantum technologies,” said Fernando Gonzalez-Zalba, principal engineer at Quantum Motion and Ikerbasque research professor at CIC nanoGUNE. “We look forward to building the next generation of quantum processing units based on silicon manufactured in industrial 300 mm wafer lines, as well as deploying and servicing systems throughout Europe.”

About CIC nanoGUNE

The Nanoscience Cooperative Research Center (CIC) nanoGUNE, located in the Basque city of San Sebastian, was established with the mission of conducting world-class nanoscience research for the competitive growth of the Basque Country. nanoGUNE is recognized by the Spanish Research Agency as a Maria-de-Maeztu center of excellence.

About Quantum Motion

Quantum Motion develops and deploys full-stack quantum computers manufactured using industry standard 300mm CMOS wafer technology with the goal of delivering commercially viable, utility scale, fault tolerant systems. A key part of this approach is the development of cryoelectronics, integrating qubits with classical control circuits capable of operating at deep cryogenic temperatures, which enables extreme scaling of quantum processors. Fault-tolerant quantum computing will enable the most powerful quantum algorithms, targeting solutions to currently intractable problems in fields as diverse as chemistry, materials science, medicine and artificial intelligence. The company employs over 100 people across the UK, US, Australia and Europe and comprises specialists in quantum theory, hardware and system engineering and software. Learn more at www.quantummotion.com.

Source: Quantum Motion

The post Quantum Motion Expands Global Presence by Opening European Offices in Spain appeared first on HPCwire.

You can buy the S24 Ultra for half the price of the latest model but its performance isn't much different.

Prisoner exchange agreed at most significant contact between Kyiv and Moscow in months, but ‘work remains’

Ukraine and Russia concluded a second day of US-led talks in Abu Dhabi on Thursday without a breakthrough towards ending Europe’s most deadly conflict since the second world war.

The two sides agreed to a reciprocal exchange of 157 prisoners of war each, offering a rare concrete outcome from the discussions.

Owner of local cinema says Amazon is upset at way they marketed movie as some in US say healthy ticket sales are not reflected by empty seats

An independent cinema in Oregon has claimed Amazon pulled screenings of their documentary about Melania Trump in protest at the cinema’s marketing strategy.

As reported by local newspaper the Lake Oswego Review, the general manager of the Lake Theater & Cafe has claimed the corporation cancelled future screenings of Brett Ratner’s authorised study of the first lady after being alerted to promotional pushes such as: “To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania” and “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out on Friday!”

Bankers and billionaires are flocking to the city where income tax is zero but critics say it ignores money laundering – and pay disparities are huge

• Business live – latest updates

Aidan Doyle was an estate agent in Liverpool before he decamped to Dubai and turned a £30,000 annual income into £500,000 a year and climbing.

Acting as an agent for buyers and sellers, Doyle has seen his commission soar beyond anything he could hope to generate in the UK after just three years in the city, one of seven city-states in the United Arab Emirates.

Malcolm Turnbull says government is ‘engaged in an exercise of denial’, as defence minister insists $368bn deal is ‘full steam ahead’

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Australia’s submarine agency insists the Aukus agreement is progressing “at pace and on schedule”, but skeptics of the $368bn deal argue the chances of the US ever selling promised Virginia-class submarines to Australia are increasingly remote.

The former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has said the Australian government is engaged “in an exercise of denial” about the parlous state of Aukus’s progress, while the Greens senator David Shoebridge said the deal was a “pantomime”, hopelessly one-sided in America’s favour.

Feb. 5, 2026 — In 2025, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ)—one of Germany’s three national supercomputing centers within the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS)—successfully established an environmental management system in accordance with the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). The certification confirms the center’s commitment to sustainable operation.

Photo credit: V. Hohenegger, LRZ

On top of the energy consumed by IT systems at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), it only needs 23 percent for cooling. This gives the data center a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.23, compared to an average of 1.46 in German data centers. LRZ is similarly economical with water – for one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of cooling output, only 2.3 liters are used in a closed-loop system. A sophisticated water cooling infrastructure in the compute building also eliminates the need for harmful antifreeze chemicals.

While these efforts have been in place to ensure LRZ operates its high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure as efficiently as possible, they also helped ensure the center would be certified for the first time under the demanding European Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) and forms the basis for LRZ being validated  as a sustainable organization. Over the past year, the LRZ systematically organized and documented all sustainability-related measures across various areas of work happening at the institution.

“Ideas for operating our data center efficiently are a deeply ingrained part of the LRZ DNA,” said Prof. Helmut Reiser, deputy director of LRZ. “For decades, we have been researching how to make data center operations more efficient. After all, the money we save on electricity and cooling can be invested in computing performance for science. The calls for electric vehicles in our fleet, for the use of electricity from renewable sources, for waste separation, and for many other measures to minimize environmental impact—these have always come primarily from LRZ employees, who bring forward good ideas and initiatives to use resources more sustainably in everyday operations. With EMAS, we have systematically incorporated these goals and developed a comprehensive environmental management system as well as a sustainability strategy for the LRZ from a wide range of individual measures. The EMAS audit confirmed that our ideas and their implementation are excellent.”

Transparency and Sustainability in Research

LRZ environmental management officers Sophia Kranz and Dr. Hiren Gandhi worked closely with LRZ staff and leaders from all departments and work areas for more than a year to compile information and key figures related to the ecological impacts of LRZ activities. For the EMAS certification, additional measuring devices were installed, applicable regulations and laws were reviewed, and—most importantly—existing processes were reconsidered.

Since 2012, LRZ has used only electricity from renewable sources, and since its foundation, it has evaluated strategies for energy-efficient data center operations. In cooperation with technology partners, it developed and continuously improved a direct high-temperature cooling system for high-performance systems. Energy-conscious planning of computing jobs as well as optimization of scientific codes and algorithms also improve the center’s energy balance.

With its EMAS certification – and, even more importantly, the accompanying environmental statement, which explains the measures and documents consumption figures – the LRZ offers transparency to the scientific community and to funding agencies in Germany and Europe, which increasingly require evidence of sustainability and resource-efficient project execution.

Efficient Computing and Use of Waste Heat

In addition, the Energy Efficiency Act (EnEfG), which came into effect at the end of 2023, requires larger data centres to adhere to standards relating to energy efficiency, waste heat usage, the use of electricity from renewable sources, and transparency about their sustainability. The background is the rapidly increasing electricity demand of IT infrastructures, as well as the realization that waste heat from computing systems can be used cost-effectively for heating or by heat-intensive facilities such as swimming pools or greenhouses.

The LRZ’s environmental statement shows that it already meets most of the legal requirements, and work is underway on the remaining ones – such as supplying heat to neighbouring facilities on the research campus.

For more details, please visit the original LRZ press release here.

Source: GCS

The post LRZ Earns EMAS Certification for Sustainable Data Center Operations appeared first on HPCwire.

Alexa Plus is aiming higher with a new superhero Super Bowl spot and a US-wide launch, including a free version for any app user.

ExpressAI and ExpressMailGuard give ExpressVPN users more ways to boost their privacy online.

The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter's seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records. 404Media: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device. "Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device," the court record reads, referring to the FBI's Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson's devices. The FBI raided Natanson's home as part of its investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is charged with, among other things, retention of national defense information. The government believes Perez-Lugones was a source of Natanson's, and provided her with various pieces of classified information. While executing a search warrant for his mobile phone, investigators reviewed Signal messages between Pere-Lugones and the reporter, the Department of Justice previously said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We asked registered dietitians for their top healthy air fryer recipes. Their picks are perfect for Super Bowl parties.

Haiti’s vicious circle: Funding is needed to end the violence. But the violence means the funding doesn’t come Expert comment jon.wallace 5 February 2026

Beyond restoring security, a push to rebuild Haiti’s society and create jobs is vital to any lasting solution. But who will fund such an effort, as the cycle of violence continues?

Politics in Haiti is a blood sport. The last elected President, Jovenel Moïse, was gunned down by mercenaries in 2021. Since then, the country has descended into rampant gang violence. Thousands have been killed and abducted in the chaos. Criminals control roughly 90 per cent of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Legal economic activity has nearly ground to a halt. 

Now there is serious doubt on whether the country will have a government after 7 February, when its Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) was originally set to dissolve. Internecine battles have broken out over what should follow the Council, and more specifically who can remain in power. 

In recent weeks, several TPC members attempted to remove Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé in a palace coup. Those same members have put forward plans for a reduced Council that would include – of course – them. There is a real threat that some Council members will mobilize the gangs to coerce other members and the international community. In response, the US has parked a warship and three coast guard cutters off the coast of Haiti.  

The upheaval threatens the future of any government in Haiti and the status of the UN’s new Gang Suppression Force (GSF) mission to the crime-ridden country. What can be done to break Haiti’s cycle of disaster?

Council of chaos

The TPC was established in April 2024, after gangs prevented interim president Ariel Henri from returning to Haiti. 

At the time, Haiti lacked an elected government. It still doesn’t have one. The parliament was dissolved in 2020 when its mandate ended without new elections. The hope was that the TPC, created after Caribbean Community (Caricom) negotiations, could provide transitional government until new democratic elections could be held in late 2025, with a new government seated by 8 February 2026.  

Related work

A roadmap for security and governance reform in Haiti

Even before the TPC’s recent internal turmoil, political gamesmanship and efforts to protect armed allies and secure access to resources hobbled the transitional authority. The first prime minister, Gary Conille, was forced to resign only six months into his term.

And the Council failed to deliver progress on any coherent policy across any area, most importantly security. From January to November 2025 alone, 8,100 people were killed in the country of 11 million, according to UN Secretary General António Guterres – a 20 per cent increase from 2024. Sexual violence has also spiked in recent years.

In addition to the armada floating just outside Port-au-Prince, the US slapped visa restrictions on five of the members of the TPC jockeying for power in the government. At the end of January, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reported that he had spoken to Fils-Aimé and ‘emphasized the importance of his continued tenure as Haiti’s prime minister to combat terrorist gangs and stabilize the island’ adding that the TPC ‘must be dissolved by February 7 without corrupt actors…’

Violence strangles the economy and the hope for speedy elections

Economically too, the power struggles in the interim government have choked off growth. The World Bank estimates that the crisis had in six years cost Haiti nearly $10 billion a year in lost economic activity by 2024. Small and medium enterprises were particularly affected.

The failure to re-establish even a modicum of security has prevented the planned elections. It became conventional wisdom that attempting to convene a popular vote in a country overwhelmed by gangs would likely – either through coercion, campaign support or running their own candidates – formally turn Haiti’s government over to criminals. Now, with the status or form of an interim government after 8 February uncertain, even an updated plan to hold elections in late 2026 looks unrealistic. 

The potential absence of a credible Haitian government puts the UN mission at risk. The plan is to deploy an 11,000-strong multi-national force to crack down on gang leaders and recapture territory, including transportation hubs and economic infrastructure. But that requires an effective government counterpart in Haiti. 

Even if current dialogues and negotiations can cobble together a governmental authority, it will likely not enjoy broad support among the political elite. As has been the case for decades, corrupt political and business leaders frozen out of power will use gang contacts to sow discontent and chaos – enforcing a street veto on the next government.

The lack of broad acceptance among the political elites (and their followers) and the spectre of politically directed violence will hobble any future government in its greatest – and long overdue – task: purging, reforming and rebuilding Haiti’s security and judicial sectors.  

Any viable solution to the security crisis will require not just effective international and domestic military and police action against gang leaders. It also demands a complete overhaul of Haiti’s police, military forces and intelligence services and a fair and speedy court and penitentiary system to ensure justice for victims, many of them women and children. There must be accountability for the brutal crimes being committed every day. 

A lack of funding could be fatal to that effort, and to the more traditional community and development efforts necessary to ensure long-term success.  

Like many other countries facing security and humanitarian crises, Haiti confronts a declining global budget for development assistance. With the US Agency for Development (USAID) now abolished by the Donald Trump administration and subsequent cuts to development assistance by the UK, Canada and EU, many of the steps needed to follow reducing gang power, such as disarmament and demobilization, will have scant resources. 

Founder’s extraordinary intervention has laid bare rising tensions between European governments and tech firms

• Europe live – latest updates

Spain has accused Pavel Durov of “spreading lies” and seeking to undermine democratic institutions after the Telegram founder used the messaging app to attack government plans to introduce a social media ban for under-16s and to hold tech companies responsible for hateful and harmful content.

Durov’s extraordinary public intervention – which came a day after Elon Musk called Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, a “true fascist totalitarian” over the proposed measures – reveals the rapidly escalating tensions between European governments and powerful global technology chiefs.

Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, is now streaming.

Bank indicates anti-inflation measures in Rachel Reeves’s budget likely to pave way for rate cuts in months ahead

• Business live – latest updates

• UK inflation rises for first time in five months to 3.4% in December

Bank of England policymakers have left interest rates unchanged at 3.75%, but indicated that lower inflation as a result of cost-of-living measures in Rachel Reeves’s budget should pave the way for cuts in the months ahead.

The nine-member monetary policy committee (MPC) voted to leave borrowing costs on hold, despite forecasting weaker growth and lower inflation than at its last quarterly forecast in November.

Savannah Guthrie said she and her family were aware of reports of a ransom note and that they are "ready to talk."

President Trump said he is directing all federal law enforcement to be at the "complete disposal" of Savannah Guthrie's family as the search continues for her mother, Nancy Guthrie.

Crews are battling a large fire at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Dickson City, Pennsylvania, Wednesday night.

The EU’s IRGC terrorist designation marks a major shift on Iran Expert comment thilton.drupal 5 February 2026

Europe has realized that engaging Tehran without leverage, interlocutors or credible pathways to change is unsustainable. But it should not abandon Iranians altogether.

The European Union’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization last week marks the end of the EU’s long strategy of engagement with the Islamic Republic.

That strategy began in the early 1990s and endured throughout the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme that started in late 2002. Over more than three decades, the EU sought to balance pressure with dialogue, preserving diplomatic and economic channels even at moments of acute confrontation. 

The IRGC designation therefore represents not merely a policy adjustment, but the collapse of a core assumption in European Iran policy: that sustained engagement could preserve leverage, empower Iranian interlocutors and ultimately moderate Tehran’s behaviour.

Deteriorating relations

Relations between the EU and Iran had already been eroding since 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched that year, marked a decisive turning point, as Iran’s provision of drones and military support to Russia placed Tehran directly at odds with a central European security priority. 

The death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 and Tehran’s violent suppression of the ensuing protests further strained ties, exposing the widening gap between the rhetoric of engagement and realities on the ground in Iran. 

The failure to revive the nuclear agreement in mid-2023 due to Iran’s rejection of the latest agreed draft made engagement more challenging and removed the last structured framework for cooperation. The triggering of UN snapback sanctions in September 2025, which was led by the E3 (France, Germany and the UK), angered Iran, entrenching mutual mistrust. 

Still, until early 2026, few would have expected EU–Iran relations to deteriorate further, let alone reach the point of the IRGC being listed. The move has been debated for years in European capitals, particularly after the US designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2019, and Canada followed suit in 2024. 

However, the EU had hesitated until now. Some within Europe saw the listing of the IRGC as a step that would effectively criminalize engagement with large parts of the Iranian state. They also feared retaliation against dual nationals, further escalation in theatres where EU forces operate and the closure of diplomatic off-ramps. 

The anticipated effect of designating the IRGC was never behavioural change by the group itself. Instead, the aims were signalling, deterrence and normative clarity – benefits that the EU had long judged insufficient to justify the costs.

What changed?

This calculus was ultimately shifted by the scale and brutality of Iran’s domestic repression during the early-2026 uprisings. 

Mass arrests, executions, internet shutdowns, and the open use of lethal force against demonstrators erased any remaining confidence in gradual change. Unlike previous episodes, the violence could not plausibly be attributed to rogue commanders or security excesses. It reflected a system-wide choice. Security institutions, clerical authorities, and political officials – including figures previously portrayed as reformist or pragmatic – aligned behind the crackdown and publicly framed repression as necessary.

Related work

Iran’s internet shutdown signals a new stage of digital isolation

For European policymakers, this alignment destroyed the remaining logic of engagement. Europe found itself with no remaining credible interlocutors to engage with, nor any meaningful distinction between coercive and diplomatic power centres. Refraining from the designation therefore risked legitimizing violence, undermining Europe’s credibility and exposing the EU to accusations of moral complicity. The reputational cost became too high.

The decision to designate the IRGC came after Italy, Spain and France decided to support the measure, having reportedly previously been hesitant. Announcing the decision, the EU’s foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas attributed the move to the crackdown on protesters in Iran, saying that ‘repression cannot go unanswered.’ The US welcomed the move, while Tehran described it as a ‘major strategic mistake.’

Impact

From an operational standpoint, the designation is unlikely to dramatically alter Iran-related business in practice, though it materially raises compliance stakes. Any European company with dealings linked to Iran already faces high sanctions risks and many will already have significant due diligence checks in place. 

However, the designation means that companies will need to ensure they check for Iranian counterparties have ownership, control or facilitation links to IRGC-affiliated networks. Enforcement agencies are likely to scrutinize Iran-linked transactions more closely, increasing legal and reputational risk for businesses even where activity is technically permissible. 

By designating the IRGC, the EU also creates another legal tool to impose secondary sanctions against businesses and individuals in third countries with ties to the IRGC. The risk for secondary sanctions will therefore also impact non-EU companies with ties to Iran.  

Europe sidelined?

Politically, the most immediate consequence is the near-total sidelining of the EU from shaping Iran policy.  This is already clear in the US-Iran talks currently scheduled for Friday. A range of countries have been reported as among the potential participants, but none of them are European. 

Europe looks set to lose what little influence it retained as a bridge between Tehran and Washington at precisely the moment when decisive choices will be made over Iran’s future. Whether president Trump will decide to pursue negotiations or escalate militarily, Europe will lack the leverage to shape outcomes. 

I put Withings’ new BeamO thermometer to the test for several weeks to determine who could benefit from its four-in-one design.

In first-of-its-kind complaint, state accused four fossil fuel majors and US oil lobbying group of climate disinformation

Amid rising concern about global heating and soaring energy costs, Michigan has sued big oil for allegedly fueling both crises – a move experts have hailed as groundbreaking.

In a first-of-its-kind complaint, the state’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, accused four fossil fuel majors and the top US oil lobbying group last month of acting as a “cartel” to stifle the growth of renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), while suppressing information about the dangers of the climate crisis. The conduct, the lawsuit alleged, violates federal and state antitrust laws.

Forget about battery woes with these wireless cameras that tap into solar power with excellent results.

From cheap point-and-shoots to pricey medium-format models, these are the best analog film cameras to consider -- and the film to put in them.

rysler is recalling more than 450,000 vehicles with improperly designed trailer tow modules whose trailer lights may not work and that have trailer brakes that could fail, federal officials say.

PM says he is sorry for believing ‘lies’ told by former Labour minister and that he too is ‘angry and frustrated’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has attempted to reboot his faltering premiership, apologising for appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador and urging his MPs to unite behind him.

The prime minister gave a lengthy speech on Wednesday about community cohesion, but faced a barrage of questions about his leadership after one of his most turbulent days since entering Downing Street.

France's navy seized 4.24 tons of cocaine from a ship in the south Pacific and also intercepted a boat trafficking cocaine in the Caribbean, officials said.

Third-quarter figures reveal 57% fall in profits and firm expects to lose 850,000 broadband users in full financial year

• Business live – latest updates

BT lost more than 200,000 broadband customers in the last three months of 2025 and profits fell sharply, mainly linked to its shared ownership of the pay TV broadcaster TNT Sports.

The telecoms company said that in the third quarter of its financial year, 210,000 customers left Openreach, its wholesale broadband network, and that it expected to lose a total of 850,000 broadband customers in its full financial year. That was down from previous guidance of 900,000.

Kalshi, the largest U.S. prediction market, accused a small data startup called Juice Reel of "extortion" after a stock analyst used the company's transaction-level data to argue that prediction market users lose money faster than gamblers on traditional betting apps -- then walked the allegation back hours later. The equity research analyst Jordan Bender at Citizens found that the bottom quarter of prediction market users lost about 28 cents of every dollar wagered in their first three months, compared to roughly 11 cents per dollar on sites like FanDuel and DraftKings. Kalshi's head of communications told Bloomberg the report was "flat-out wrong" and called the data an extortion attempt. Juice Reel CEO Ricky Gold said Kalshi had actually pressured him to tell Bloomberg the data was inaccurate. Kalshi later issued an updated statement saying it continued to dispute the findings but "after further review, we don't believe the intention was extortion." The company did not provide any data to counter the analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Days after Labour’s 2010 defeat former cabinet minister began dogged pursuit of ‘highly paid’ jobs, emails show

Peter Mandelson began seeking advice from the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on how to land “highly paid” senior roles with companies including BP and Glencore within days of Labour’s 2010 electoral defeat, emails show.

A flurry of messages, sent in the weeks and months following the collapse of the New Labour project, reveal how Epstein mentored Mandelson as the former cabinet minister touted himself for lucrative jobs at global businesses.

The Netherlands' Queen Maxima wants to contribute to her country's safety, the royal family says, as Europe's defense anxieties deepen.

A police helicopter crashed near the scene of what authorities in Flagstaff, Arizona called "an active officer-involved shooting investigation," according to police in Page, Arizona.

U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern that the end of New START could lead to “a dangerous and costly arms race” between the world’s biggest nuclear powers.

Minute Maid's parent company, Coca-Cola, says it's ending production of its frozen juice concentrates, including orange juice.

The text-scanning feature can be used with any English-language audiobook available from Spotify.

Meal kits aren't just getting cheaper -- they're getting easier, too.

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Should you get the newest AirTag model or pay less and buy the first-generation tracker?

The president’s policies have weakened the US’s competitive position and undermined its alliances to China’s advantage

If Donald Trump’s presidency has any theme (beyond self-promotion), it’s that his “America First” agenda will Make America Great Again. Unfortunately for the American people, if Trump’s maneuvers and machinations have made any nation greater, it’s been China, not the United States.

During Trump’s first term, he treated China as a strategic rival and often talked of checking its rise. His administration complained that China was seeking to “challenge American power” and “erode American security and prosperity”. But during his first year back in the White House, Trump – in governing by whim and impulse with little strategic vision - has done lots to Make China Great Again.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

Experts say Tom Homan’s charge, replacing Greg Bovino’s aggressive tactics, may change the tone, but not the mission

In his clearest attempt yet to “de‑escalate” tensions in Minneapolis, Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s “border czar”, announced on Wednesday that the administration will draw down 700 federal immigration officers as the statewide crackdown continues.

The Twin Cities remain on edge, waiting to see whether the fear will ease.

At least two cases confirmed at detention center for children and their parents in Texas

At least two cases of measles have been confirmed at a major immigration detention center for children and their parents in Texas as cases of the dangerous virus in South Carolina, Arizona, Utah and other US states continue growing and alarming experts.

In January alone, the US saw 25% of the total confirmed in all of last year, and the outbreak shows no sign of slowing as federal officials stay silent on vaccination.

Elizabeth Caisaguano and her mother released from Texas facility hit by measles outbreak. Plus, the Epstein stories you may have missed

Good morning.

A 10-year-old Minnesota girl has been released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after a month in detention in Dilley, Texas, school officials said, one of hundreds of children detained at the facility.

What are the conditions like at the detention center? Federal officials have confirmed that Dilley, which houses families, is now the site of a measles outbreak.

What did the judge say? On Monday, Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas Western District, issued an order blocking the removal or transfer of Elizabeth and her mother and giving the federal government five days to respond to the family’s release petition. “This didn’t have to happen. … They did everything they were supposed to do and still found themselves detained and separated,” he said.

Brad Karp has resigned as chair of the powerful law firm Paul Weiss after revelations of extensive communications with Epstein.

The documents provide a high level of insight into Epstein’s close relationship with the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, in which Bannon acted as a mentor for Epstein’s appearances in the media.

The UK prime minister is fighting for his political future amid fury over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his friendship with Epstein. Mandelson appeared to leak confidential information to Epstein while a minister.

Bill Gates has said he “regrets” ever knowing Epstein, as his former wife Melinda French Gates alluded to “muck” in their marriage, and said the Microsoft founder has questions to answer.

The release included Epstein’s full “household manual” detailing strict, cult-like requirements for his Florida mansion staff, who were expected to “see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing”.

Writers and theater groups across the country are creating works in response to crackdowns on their communities

On a cool winter night in Los Angeles, dozens gathered to protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on the arts and the recent federal immigration raids in southern California. But these protesters didn’t carry signs or chant in front of a government building – they recited poems such as Antifa Tea Party and Love in Times of Fascism. They performed anti-fascist improv to a small but lively crowd at The Glendale Room, a library-themed theater, as part of the monthly show Unquiet: A Night of Creative Resistance.

“If you’ve got talent or skills as a communicator, you can move people,” Chris Kessler, a writer and poet, said after performing at Unquiet. “I really believe that we need to be moving people toward a stronger sense of collectivism in the face of fascism.”

"Our message is: Wildfire smoke is very dangerous. It is an increasing threat to human health," said a study author.

Sponges are color-coded for a reason. Here's what each one means and when to use it.

The last remaining nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia has expired, ending decades of arms control between the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals.

Seattle’s Aden Durde will be the first British coach to appear in the Super Bowl. He wants to ensure he’s not the last

Midway through the 2023 NFL season, Dallas Cowboys star edge rusher Micah Parsons was frustrated. Asked about the source – a feeling of being held by opponents all the time – Parsons credited his defensive line coach Aden Durde with keeping him in check.

“[Coach Durde] pulled me aside and said, ‘You gotta remember, you’re Micah fucking Parsons,” he recalled. “‘This shit is going to happen. You just gotta keep going. Fuck all the other stuff.’”

The interview,⁠ revealed in the latest tranche of Epstein files, was reportedly intended for a sympathetic documentary

Steve Bannon, a one-time adviser to Donald Trump, has long styled himself as a populist nemesis of the global elites. Yet the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files shows that he exchanged hundreds of friendly texts with the wealthy financier, discussing politics, travel and other topics.

One of the biggest surprises in the files was a bizarre video in which Epstein – who exploited and abused dozens of young girls – is interviewed by Bannon at what appears to be Epstein’s New York home.

Minutes after a federal agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in a Chicago suburb last September, a group of police officers stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out the answer to a question of protocol: Who would investigate the shooting?

“Wouldn’t it be state’s, at a minimum?” one Franklin Park officer asked, according to body camera footage.

Chief Mike Witz shook his head. “No, because it’s a federal shooting,” he said. “You’re not going to investigate a federal officer.”

His officers didn’t investigate. In their report, they didn’t even note the names of the two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the scene of Silverio Villegas González’s death. Instead, they deferred to the FBI.

Local law enforcement officials also did not investigate when a Border Patrol agent shot and wounded a U.S. citizen in her car in Chicago less than a month later. Or when an ICE agent in Phoenix shot a Honduran man during a traffic stop later that month.

In fact, local police did not open investigations into six of the 12 shootings by on-duty federal agents that have led to the deaths or injuries of citizens and immigrants since September, a ProPublica analysis found. In three other shooting cases, state or local police said they have opened inquiries, which they called a routine practice in those jurisdictions. And in Minnesota, where ICE and Border Patrol shot and killed two U.S. citizens and injured a Venezuelan man last month, state police have tried to conduct independent investigations only to be thwarted by the Trump administration, which has gone so far as to block officers from a scene, even when they had a judicial warrant.

In almost every instance, President Donald Trump’s administration blamed the injured and dead for the shooting within hours of the incident, raising questions about whether federal officials can fairly and objectively investigate their own. Legal experts and advocates for immigrants say this apparent lack of accountability demands that local authorities step up and exercise their power to investigate and prosecute federal agents who break state laws — from battery to murder.

“Local police and the state have gotten a free pass,” said Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the co-founder and director of its Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. “Residents have every right and should be demanding that, ‘Hey, state authorities, police, local police: Protect us. Arrest people who kill us, who batter us, who point guns at us and threaten and assault us without legal cause to do so.’”

It’s usually the opposite scenario: federal authorities coming in to investigate a troubled police department. But local authorities have investigated and charged federal agents in the past. It’s just rare and complicated. The federal supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution bars local interference with federal law enforcement officers when they act reasonably and within the scope of their duties.

But given the aggressive tactics employed by immigration agents under the Trump administration, Futterman and other legal experts said local police and prosecutors are morally obligated to at least try to hold federal law enforcement officers accountable.

“We’re in an environment right now where ICE officers are blatantly and egregiously violating the Constitution and the law,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The federal government has made it very clear that they are not going to do anything to provide any sort of accountability backstop to its officers. Unfortunately, because Congress is not taking any steps to rein ICE officers in, there really is no option other than states protecting their constituents’ rights.” 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that agents are “trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and our officers.” All use-of-force incidents are properly reported and reviewed by an appropriate law enforcement agency, the spokesperson said.

Immigration agents at the border have long been criticized for use of deadly force and lack of rigorous investigations afterward. But now the same militarized force is on display in major American cities far from the border, where residents are not used to their presence. 

The shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month — and the federal government’s resistance to a routine local investigation — has prompted Democratic and some Republican officials across the country to call for more accountability. Last week, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order directing police officers to document alleged illegal activity by federal immigration agents and refer any evidence of felonies to prosecutors. 

California’s governor and attorney general issued a reminder to local police of their rights to investigate federal agents. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes launched a website asking residents to submit evidence of federal agents’ misconduct. And prosecutors from nine jurisdictions around the country announced a new coalition to provide mutual support to law enforcement authorities bringing charges against federal officers.

In Minneapolis, prosecutors say they’re working with state police to investigate in spite of resistance from federal officials. So far, DHS officials have refused to provide evidence or even the names of the agents involved in the January shootings. Prosecutors went so far as to obtain an emergency order to require that federal agencies preserve evidence in the Pretti case. A judge dropped the temporary restraining order on Monday, following assurances from the federal government that it would maintain investigative materials. 

The prosecutors said they believe they can still gather enough evidence to make an informed decision about whether to charge the federal agents.

“We get cases submitted to us every day that don’t have all the evidence we would like,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in an interview. “We would certainly like the gun. We would like the shell casings, that kind of thing. But it’s also not a mystery as to why these people died.”

Even after getting a judicial warrant, investigators from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension were turned away by federal agents from the Minneapolis intersection where Pretti, 37, was shot and killed. Federal officials also excluded the BCA from the investigation into the death of Renee Good, who was shot and killed in her car two weeks before Pretti. 

BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said he’d never seen his officers physically stopped from doing their job by another law enforcement agency. Across the country, he said, state agencies like the BCA routinely investigate deadly force incidents like this one.

“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said.

Within hours of each killing, Trump officials publicly labeled the dead “domestic terrorists.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a gun when he approached the officers, while the Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti was planning a “massacre.” 

Video footage contradicted the administration’s version of events. Pretti, for instance, never unholstered his gun, which he was legally allowed to carry.  

Early last week, Trump sent Bovino and Border Patrol agents away from Minneapolis, and on Wednesday DHS officials said they would pull another 700 agents out of the state — signs  the administration may be changing its approach in response to rising criticism. The FBI is now investigating the Pretti shooting, and the Justice Department announced Friday that it had opened a civil rights investigation. 

A DOJ spokesperson did not answer questions for this story but referred reporters to a press conference last weekend in which Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said DHS is following its normal investigative protocols in the Pretti shooting. 

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has said it has no plans to investigate Good’s shooting. 

“We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger,” Blanche told Fox News.

Police in Franklin Park and Chicago have not explained why they didn’t open their own investigations into the two shootings last fall. In the Franklin Park case, the decision to let the FBI alone investigate the killing of Villegas was made within minutes of the shooting, according to dispatch records. 

Villegas, a 38-year-old restaurant cook, was shot as he tried to drive away from ICE agents who had pulled him over. As in Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s narrative of what happened did not match the evidence. DHS claimed that Villegas dragged one of the agents, causing serious injuries. The agent fired “because he feared for his life,” officials said. Police body camera footage released after the shooting showed the agent downplaying his injury as “nothing major.”

At the scene, Franklin Park police officers directed traffic and interviewed a witness, the footage shows. At one point, one officer told his colleague that the police department was “just securing until they get here,” referring to the FBI.

Witz, who was then the police chief but has since retired, could not be reached for comment; the current chief did not respond to interview requests.

A similar situation unfolded in Chicago on Oct. 4 after a Border Patrol agent fired into the vehicle of a woman who federal officials claimed “ambushed” them. Marimar Martinez was charged with assaulting federal agents, though the charges were later dropped. 

At the time, the Chicago Police Department said officers had responded to a call about a shooting “to document the incident” and to “maintain safety and traffic control.” When asked last week why it didn’t open an independent inquiry, the department directed ProPublica to its October statement, which made clear the police were “not involved in the incident or its investigation” and directed questions to federal authorities. 

As the events in Minneapolis continued to generate criticism nationwide, Chicago’s mayor unveiled his executive order that directed officers to investigate federal immigration agents who break the law and to refer them for criminal prosecution. In a statement, the mayor’s office said the initiative was a response to “the absence of legal repercussions in the wake of the shooting of Marimar Martinez in Chicago and the killings of Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park and Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.”

Legal experts said they were not aware of recent examples of Illinois law enforcement agencies investigating an on-duty federal agent, though last month a suburban police department obtained misdemeanor charges against an off-duty ICE agent accused of attacking an activist who was filming him while the agent was pumping gas. 

Illinois State Police officials said they would investigate federal agents who were accused of breaking the law if they are asked to do so.

Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called on a state accountability commission to examine the roles of key Trump officials in the escalation of aggressive tactics during a monthslong immigration enforcement campaign in Chicago and its suburbs late last year. Pritzker had previously established the commission to​ gather videos and testimonies about federal agents’ conduct, and to create a public record of what happened. The commission lacks subpoena power but can refer information about potential violations of state law to law enforcement agencies or prosecutors.

“Just imagine if the agents who shot Mr. Villegas González back on Sept. 12 had been publicly disciplined,” Rubén Castillo, a retired federal judge who chairs the commission, said at a hearing Friday. “Maybe, just maybe, the Minnesota shootings would not have occurred, and two people would be alive who are now dead.”

He added: “We will have conversations with those in local law enforcement to suggest prosecutions that should be occurring even as we speak.”

In California, neither the Los Angeles nor Ontario police departments investigated after two men were shot by federal immigration agents in separate October incidents and then accused of assaulting federal officers — despite video evidence and victim statements that conflicted with the accounts officials provided. A federal judge dismissed the case against one man, a Mexican immigrant and popular TikTokker; the other, a U.S. citizen, pleaded not guilty and has a trial scheduled for April.

Police in Phoenix also said they are not investigating the shooting of a man who federal officials say fled immigration agents last October, leaving the case to the FBI and ICE. And local police in Portland, Oregon, are not investigating an incident where federal agents shot at a Venezuelan man who had allegedly hit an unoccupied Border Patrol vehicle with his car in early January, injuring him and his passenger. The man was later charged with assaulting an officer. Unlike in some of the other cases, the Oregon attorney general’s office has opened its own investigation.

In contrast, police in Pima County, Arizona, and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and the Texas Rangers have all said they opened investigations into recent shootings involving federal immigration officers.

Asking local officials to investigate their federal counterparts does not come without challenges. Police officers and prosecutors are wary of being seen as interfering with federal law enforcement operations. They may be reluctant to damage their already complicated relationships with agencies with whom they sometimes partner. 

Then there’s the worry about the political consequences, including the threat of losing federal funding, a dynamic that’s particularly acute under the Trump administration.

“This particular federal government has lobbed all kinds of threats and acted on threats against local authorities and state authorities for failure to cooperate or not do what they want them to do,” said Futterman, the University of Chicago law professor. “It’s a reason in itself not to bite a hand that feeds you.”

Even when local officials open their own investigations into federal agents, there’s no guarantee they can bring the cases to court. Federal agents can claim immunity in response to state charges, legal experts said, and can move their cases to federal court.

That immunity stems from a Supreme Court ruling more than a century ago. During the Civil Rights Movement, that immunity was used when the federal government wanted to protect its law enforcement officers tasked with enforcing then-controversial efforts like desegregation in hostile states. 

Now local officials face the opposite challenge: protecting their constituents’ constitutional rights from what they believe is excessive force at the hands of federal officers. 

Steve Descano, the commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax County, Virginia, would be the first to admit that nothing about prosecuting federal agents is easy. During the first Trump administration, Descano brought state manslaughter charges against two U.S. Park Police officers who shot and killed a Virginia man. A federal judge dismissed the case in 2021 and said the officers were entitled to immunity because their actions were necessary and proper.

Still, Descano, who is part of the coalition of prosecutors aiming to hold federal law enforcement accountable, said he believed he and others have a responsibility to do so. 

“If they are not willing to take these actions,” he said, “then they are cowards and they are not worthy of their positions.”

The post “You’re Not Going to Investigate a Federal Officer” appeared first on ProPublica.

Wireless security cams are versatile, but you need to think about battery life and mounting options. We tested models to find the best.

The 2026 Winter Olympics are bringing thousands of athletes from around the world together for more than two weeks of competition — and the Games are a gold mine for statistics.

Some of the largest banks in the nation for years have eschewed the business of private prison giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two firms that operate more than half the private carceral facilities in the country, including many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.

The moves to “debank” the companies, which have been dogged by reports of rights abuses, came after the banks’ reviews of their environmental, social, and governance policies, which included site visits and meeting with civil rights leaders. According to a nonprofit report, the moves by banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, cost the prison companies billions in potential financing.

Now, the private prison firms are fighting back, spending millions on lobbying Congress to pass a law to require that the banks can’t deny their business.

The two prison giants spent millions lobbying for legislation known as the Fair Access to Banking Act, a pending bill that seeks to prevent banks from denying access to institutions or people including those involved in “politically unpopular businesses but that are lawful under Federal law.” A press release marking the bill’s introduction last year said, “The legislation requires that lending and services decisions must be based on impartial, risk-based analysis, not political or reputational favoritism.”

Civil liberties advocates have criticized the legislation.

“Private prisons profit purely from locking people up, but the market is not immune to public accountability,” said Eunice H. Cho, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project who has represented immigration detainees housed in privately operated ICE facilities. “Consumer advocacy is a very important part of the democratic process, including economic boycott and protest against corporations. Banks are sensitive to understanding the risks of doing business with harmful industries.”

“We value the relationships we have with our financial partners,” Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, said in a statement. “We also believe all lawful businesses should be treated fairly under the banking system.”

GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Millions in Lobbying

Last year, GEO Group spent $3.3 million in lobbying various departments and agencies of the federal government, of which $1.37 million was spent in lobbying the House and the Senate on issues that included the Fair Access to Banking Act, according to federal lobbying disclosures.

Meanwhile, in 2025, CoreCivic spent $3.5 million total on https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/search/?registrant=®istrant_country=®istrant_ppb_country=&client=CoreCivic&client_state=&client_country=&client_ppb_country=&house_id=&lobbyist=&lobbyist_covered_position=&lobbyist_conviction_disclosure=&lobbyist_conviction_date_range_from=&lobbyist_conviction_date_range_to=&report_period=&report_year=2025&report_dt_posted_from=&report_dt_posted_to=&report_amount_reported_min=&report_amount_reported_max=&report_filing_uuid=&report_house_doc_id=&report_issue_area_description=&affiliated_organization=&affiliated_organization_country=&foreign_entity=&foreign_entity_country=&foreign_entity_ppb_country=&foreign_entity_ownership_percentage_min=&foreign_entity_ownership_percentage_max=&search=search#js_searchFormTitlelobbying, of which $2 million went toward pushing for the legislation, according to the disclosures.

Despite hiring high-profile D.C. firms for their lobbying activities, both prison companies utilized their in-house government relations experts when it came to advocating for the banking legislation, which is moving through the Senate and the House.

In its fourth-quarter lobbying report, GEO Group mentions “S. 401 and H.R. 987, Fair Access to Banking Act; Issues related to the availability of banking services for federal contractors” as one of its lobbying issues. CoreCivic’s lobbying issues in the same quarter also mentioned “Issues pertaining to financial industry practices; H.R. 987/S. 401 – Fair Access to Banking Act.”

Related

Private Prison CEO on ICE Contracts: We’re a Better Deal Than El Salvador’s CECOT

GEO Group and CoreCivic have long faced criticisms and lawsuits from https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/unchecked-growth-private-prison-corporations-and-immigration-detention-three-years-into-the-biden-administrationrights groups for poor prison conditions, undermining medical needs of detainees, and not doing enough to prevent deaths in their facilities.

In December and January alone, for instance, five of the 11 people who died in ICE custody were housed in detention centers owned and operated by one of the firms, ICE’s press statements show. At least four people died while detained in a GEO Group facility, and one other individual died while detained in a CoreCivic center.

In 2019, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, Fifth Third Bancorp, PNC Bank, and Bank of America said that they would no longer provide any new financing to the private prison industry. At the time, the banks reportedly constituted more than 70 percent of the total financing available to the two companies, with many of them having loaned money to either one or both firms.

Many of these Wall Street banks took similar action against gun manufacturers, oil and gas companies, and porn sites, among other industries, in what came to be known as debanking.

The impact was considerable. CoreCivic reportedly had to scramble for finances abroad.

If the new legislation passes, however, the two companies will have access to fresh lines of credit that could help them build new facilities at a faster pace and cash in on a higher demand for ICE detention facilities.

Related

Deportation, Inc.

Last July, the federal government approved funding of $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In its third-quarter earnings report, GEO Group said it had secured four ICE contracts for four new ICE detention facilities totaling about 6,000 beds. CoreCivic also reported receiving contracts for four facilities with over 7,000 beds. Financial statements suggest that the new contracts have boosted the revenue figures of both the companies, who rely heavily on federal contracts to support their bottom lines.

An Ally in Trump

The concerted effort put into lobbying by GEO and CoreCivic has already reaped some success.

President Donald Trump signed an https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/guaranteeing-fair-banking-for-all-americans/executive order last August that empowered federal banking regulators, such as the Small Business Administration, to monitor financial institutions that denied services to clients based on “politicized or unlawful debanking action.” Last month, Trump announced he would sue JPMorgan Chase for debanking him over the January 6 riots.

In December, the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published a report that scrutinized nine banks and listed private prisons as being among the sectors affected by debanking. The bureau said that it intends to “hold these banks accountable for any unlawful debanking activities, including by making referrals to the Attorney General.”

In June, even before Trump’s order,https://www.semafor.com/article/06/05/2025/bank-of-america-dropped-private-prison-clients-now-its-taking-them-back Bank of America, which had cut ties with private prisons, reinstated CoreCivic as its client, according to Semafor. A JPMorgan Chase spokesperson said the bank hasn’t changed its policy of freezing out private prisons. Meanwhile, most other banks have been quiet about whether they will change course on financing private prisons. (None of the banks responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

If the Fair Access to Banking Act passes Congress, the banks may not have a choice.

“It has been the worst year for immigration detainees in decades,” said Cho, the ACLU lawyer. “Private prisons have an astronomical amount of funds available to them, and it’s unsurprising they are also looking to protect ways to expand those funds with extra lines of credits available. But for detainees, this can have serious implications.”

The post ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans appeared first on The Intercept.

If US elites can find the courage to speak up, we can still prevent our country from descending into full-blown autocracy

Alex Pretti – an ICU nurse documenting alleged cases of federal immigration agents’ overreach – was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on 24 January. Just hours later, Minnesotans gathered in their neighborhoods for vigils to mourn his death and demand an end to the federal incursion on their state.

Meanwhile, the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Zoom and the New York Stock Exchange attended a glitzy screening of the new Melania documentary at the White House, where they munched on popcorn in special commemorative black-and-white boxes and took home Melania-branded cookies.

Cranston report highly critical of systemic failings and missed opportunities around deaths of at least 33 people

Loss of life was avoidable in the worst mass drowning from a small boat crossing in the Channel, a public inquiry has found.

The 454-page report by the former high court judge Sir Ross Cranston is highly critical of failings around the deaths of at least 24 men, seven women and two children in November 2021, four of whom are still missing.

FBI and Venezuela’s intelligence agency also reportedly arrest billionaire media mogul Raúl Gorrín at same address

A close and powerful associate of the deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has reportedly been detained during a joint operation by Venezuela’s intelligence agency and the FBI.

Alex Saab, a wealthy Colombian-Venezuelan businessman long considered Maduro’s frontman, was removed from his position in Venezuela’s government a fortnight after US forces captured his ally on 3 January. In the early hours of Wednesday, the 54-year-old was reportedly detained by members of the Bolivarian national intelligence service (Sebin) at a luxury home in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

For the first time since Texas criminalized abortion, the state’s medical regulator is instructing doctors on when they can legally terminate a pregnancy to protect the life of the patient — guidance physicians have long sought as women died and doctors feared imprisonment for intervening.  

The new training from the Texas Medical Board comes nearly five years after the state passed its strict abortion ban in 2021, threatening doctors with severe penalties. ProPublica’s reporting has shown that pregnancy became far more dangerous in the state after the law took effect: Sepsis rates spiked for women suffering a pregnancy loss, as did emergency room visits in which miscarrying patients needed a blood transfusion; at least four women in the state died after they didn’t receive timely reproductive care. More than a hundred OB-GYNs said the state’s abortion ban was to blame.

In response, the Texas Legislature passed the Life of the Mother Act last year. The law updated the abortion ban’s medical exceptions, added to the legal burden needed for prosecutors to criminally charge a doctor and required the medical board to create guidance for doctors by Jan. 1, something no other state with an abortion ban has done.

The new medical training, which ProPublica obtained under a public records request, assures doctors they can now legally provide abortions, even when a patient’s life isn’t imminently in danger, and goes over nine example scenarios, including a patient’s water breaking before term and complications from an incomplete abortion. 

Some of the scenarios make clear how doctors can intervene in circumstances similar to cases ProPublica has investigated. For example, in 2021, Josseli Barnica was diagnosed with an “inevitable” miscarriage, leaving her at high risk of dangerous infection, and she died after doctors would not empty her uterus while there was still a fetal heartbeat. The new training includes an example that indicates an abortion would be legal in similar cases.

But medical and legal experts who reviewed the training for ProPublica said the case studies represent only the most straightforward situations doctors encounter. The complications that women face in pregnancy are varied, complex and impossible to capture in a brief presentation, many cautioned. One attorney called the training “the bare minimum.”

“I could probably list 100 different situations that would cause people to pause and say, ‘Wow, does that fit into the law?’” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN practicing in Texas. “They’re taking years and years of medical training and experience on how to manage these cases and summarizing it in 43 slides.”

Notably absent from the training is guidance on how doctors should care for patients with chronic conditions, a gray area that has come up again and again in ProPublica’s reporting. Last year, ProPublica investigated the death of Tierra Walker, a San Antonio woman with diabetes and high blood pressure who endured repeated hospitalizations and escalating symptoms before she died. Doctors dismissed her requests for an abortion to protect her health, her family said. Doctors and hospitals involved in Walker’s care did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

And no amount of training can solve what many doctors see as the main problem: the law’s steep criminal penalties. If found guilty of performing an illegal abortion, doctors face up to 99 years in prison, $100,000 in fines and the loss of their medical license. Even the possibility of a lengthy and public court battle can be a powerful deterrent, many physicians told ProPublica. 

The Texas Medical Board writes in its training that “the legal risk of prosecution is extremely low” if doctors practice “evidence-based medicine,” follow “standard emergency protocols” and document cases appropriately. The training also emphasizes multiple times that the burden now falls on the state to prove that “no reasonable doctor” would have performed the abortion. Before the Life of the Mother Act, prosecutors could accuse a physician of performing an illegal abortion with little evidence.

That assurance rings hollow to some doctors, who point to the actions of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton since the state’s abortion ban took effect.

Dr. Damla Karsan, an OB-GYN based in Houston, said she appreciates that the training tells physicians they can use their expertise to make judgment calls during emergency situations. “But having to defend your decision is still scary,” Karsan said. 

In 2023, Paxton overruled Karsan’s medical judgement when her patient Kate Cox sought an abortion at 20 weeks after learning the fetus had a fatal genetic anomaly. Texas bans abortions for all fetal anomalies unless the pregnant woman is facing a medical emergency. Karsan argued that Cox qualified: She had previously had two C-sections, increasing her risk of hemorrhage, infection and future infertility. A Texas lower court permitted the abortion, but Paxton appealed the ruling to the Texas Supreme Court, which ultimately overturned the decision, arguing Karsan hadn’t done enough to prove Cox’s life was at risk. 

Paxton’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the Cox case and the medical board’s assertion that the risk of legal action for doctors who follow its guidance is extremely low.

Texas Medical Board President Dr. Sherif Zaafran told ProPublica that the training was reviewed by Paxton, as well as Gov. Greg Abbott and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the abortion ban’s author. The board, which has 19 members appointed by the governor, including 12 licensed physicians but no OB-GYNs, also consulted with the Texas Hospital Association and the Texas Medical Association. 

Any doctors who practice obstetric care, including all emergency room and urgent care physicians, will need to complete the self-administered online course before 2027 in order to obtain or renew their license.

Multiple doctors told ProPublica decisions about abortion care are also shaped by hospital lawyers. The Life of the Mother Act required the State Bar of Texas to create its own training for attorneys, which ProPublica reviewed. That presentation also explains that prosecutors looking to file a criminal charge now need to demonstrate that no other doctor would provide an abortion if faced with the same scenario.

Blake Rocap, a longtime reproductive rights attorney, said the state guidance should give doctors and hospitals more protections to help patients access care. “It will save lives,” he said.

After Texas’ six-week abortion ban took effect in 2021, doctors, hospitals and reproductive rights advocates repeatedly urged the Texas Medical Board to provide guidance on how medical professionals could comply with it. In particular, they sought clarity around the law’s vague exception for a “life-threatening emergency.” 

For years, the board declined, saying it lacked the authority. 

In the absence of guidance, confusion reigned across the state. The standard of care for miscarrying patients in the second trimester, for example, is to offer to empty the uterus, which can lower the risk of infection and sepsis, according to leading medical organizations. While some Texas doctors told ProPublica last year they regularly offer to empty the uterus in these cases, others said their hospitals didn’t allow them to do so until the fetal heartbeat stopped or they could document a life-threatening complication, leading to delays in care like the one that Barnica experienced. Across the state, cases of sepsis in second-trimester pregnancy losses shot up more than 50% after the ban took effect, according to a data analysis by ProPublica. 

In 2024, the board released limited guidance stating that providers don’t need to wait until a pregnant woman is on the brink of death to intervene. The new training goes further, offering detailed examples of when abortion would be legal.  

One case study addresses patients who get an abortion out of state but retain tissue in the  uterus. Because the pregnancy was already ended, the medical board advises, “ongoing treatment of any retained products is not an abortion and is not considered aiding and abetting an abortion.” ProPublica investigated the death of a woman in Georgia, Amber Thurman, who died of sepsis when doctors there delayed emptying her uterus after an incomplete abortion.

The training also makes clear that the definition of ectopic pregnancies — which are always life-threatening — includes any that implant in an abnormal location outside of the uterine cavity. Previous laws had defined an ectopic pregnancy as one outside of the uterus. While most ectopic pregnancies occur in the fallopian tubes, some can also implant inside the uterus, such as in the scar tissue from a previous pregnancy.

Still, the training doesn’t address a key issue in miscarriage management that ProPublica’s reporting has highlighted: Early pregnancy loss often can’t be conclusively diagnosed with a single ultrasound. Confirming that a pregnancy has ended can take days or weeks. In those cases, some doctors have left women bleeding and in pain instead of offering a D&C, a procedure that can prevent hemorrhage. Another Texas woman named Porsha Ngumezi bled to death in 2023 while miscarrying, according to the medical examiner, after her doctor did not provide a D&C. 

The training also offers no instruction on how to care for patients whose pregnancies are high risk because of underlying medical conditions like autoimmune disorders, uncontrolled blood pressure or heart disease. Pregnancy can often exacerbate these chronic conditions, sometimes leading to a small risk of death, but doctors may not consider this “life-threatening.” 

Walker, the San Antonio woman ProPublica reported on last year, had uncontrolled blood pressure and developed seizures and blood clots. More than 90 doctors were involved in Walker’s care, but not one offered her the option to end her pregnancy, according to medical records. Doctors who reviewed the new training for ProPublica said they still weren’t clear when they could intervene in cases like hers — would it be when a woman first got pregnant because she already had some risk factors that made pregnancy more dangerous? Or would they have to wait until she developed specific symptoms that showed her health was declining?  

Zaafran said the training makes clear that doctors can judge whether a patient is at risk of death or irreversible damage — and that they can intervene before the patient reaches that state. “In other words, you don’t need to wait until somebody has clots or seizures or whatever it might be to make a determination that something needs to be done.”

What doctors do need to do, Zaafran repeatedly said, is document those risks in case their patients qualify for an abortion. But Karsan argues she did that in the Cox case, and Paxton fought her in court anyway. 

While the medical board’s training includes two case studies related to patients with fatal fetal anomalies, neither addresses whether the updated law allows an abortion in a scenario similar to Cox’s. Karsan documented in the medical records that a third C-section would put Cox at risk of death or a hysterectomy if there was a complication, and that argument is what she shared with the courts. The training emphasizes that a fatal fetal anomaly alone is not covered by the exceptions and that “the mother must have a life-threatening physical condition.” Zaafran declined to comment on Cox’s case specifically but said that his understanding was there was not enough documentation. 

Cox told ProPublica she trusted her medical team’s judgment and she did not want to risk her health by continuing her pregnancy. Grieving the unexpected loss while being denied care and seeing her doctor threatened by the top lawyer in the state, Cox said, “was incredibly scary.” She ultimately traveled out of Texas to get an abortion.

“I’m grateful for my doctors. Their hands were tied in many ways,” she said. “The problem isn’t our doctors. It’s that pregnancy is too complicated to legislate.”

The post After Years of Silence, Texas Medical Board Issues Training for Doctors on How to Legally Provide Abortions appeared first on ProPublica.

Sony announced last month that it plans to pass control of its home entertainment division -- including the two-decade-old Bravia television brand -- to Chinese electronics group TCL through a joint venture in which TCL would hold a 51% stake. The Japanese company was long ago overtaken in sales by South Korea's Samsung and LG and now holds just 2% of the global television market. Sony stopped making its own LCD screens in 2011. Chinese companies supplied 71% of television panels made in Asia last year, according to TCL, and less than 10% are now produced in Japan and Korea. TCL is close to overtaking Samsung as the world's largest television maker. Sony retains valuable intellectual property in image rendering, and the Bravia brand still carries consumer recognition, but its OLED screens are already supplied by Samsung and LG. The company has been shifting toward premium cameras, professional audio, and its entertainment businesses in film, music, and games -- areas where intellectual property is less exposed to Chinese manufacturing scale.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world of hard power, and the future of the war on Ukraine 23 February 2026 — 12:00PM TO 1:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 5 February 2026 Chatham House and Online

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, will speak at Chatham House to mark the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, will appear at Chatham House to mark the fifth year of the Russia invasion.

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi will provide a keynote speech, and answer questions from the audience. The ambassador will give his take on the evolution of the war on the battlefield, and what this means for chances of ending the war.

He will outline a common strategy for European security, focusing on the role of the UK, and what Ukraine can contribute to strengthening both Ukraine’s and Europe’s defence and deterrence capabilities.

The move is among several measures the acting president has touted since Maduro’s capture – yet critics say it erases Venezuela’s long history of repression

It was designed in the 1950s to be the world’s first “drive-through shopping centre”, a futuristic structure with more than than two miles of ramps looping past 300 shops, as well as cinemas, a hotel, a private club, a concert hall and a heliport.

But the building was never completed, and under the regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, spaces envisioned as shops were turned into cells, and El Helicoide became Venezuela’s most notorious torture centre for political prisoners.

Whether you’re chasing gym quality on a budget or a fancy folding model, accelerate your training with our expert’s pick of the best running machines

• The best running shoes, tried and tested by runners
• The best running watches

Although the treadmill has been around since the early 1800s, when it was once used to punish prisoners (sounds about right), it didn’t become a common feature in the home until the late 1960s, when William Staub unleashed his PaceMaster 600 on the US public.

Where they were once a simple rolling deck, treadmills today are often glossy pieces of interactive tech. Many now offer on-demand, real-time workouts (pioneered by Peloton) and the latest blockbuster movies via streaming services. Even if your treadmill doesn’t sport a whopping touchscreen display, it probably works nicely with heart-rate monitors, smartwatches and smartphone apps to track workouts and offer performance statistics after every session.

Best treadmill overall:
Peloton Tread

Best budget treadmill:
JTX Slimline

As his team returns to the Super Bowl, the New England owner who once stood up on social issues proves he is just another transactional billionaire

During the worst of it, when Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police a decade ago and Colin Kaepernick took a knee in protest, when a widespread reaction was to tell the highly accomplished, overwhelmingly Black professional athletes they were un-American, or well-paid farmhands who needed to get back to work, or both, and some of his peers in the ownership class were releasing players as punishment for joining the protest, it was New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft who positioned himself as the voice of reason.

Kraft attempted to broker peace between the ownership hawks who saw the high-paid kneelers as ungrateful mutineers and, after decades of docility, the radicalized players unwilling to collect their checks in exchange for political silence. Kraft encouraged two of his players – the twins Devin and Jason McCourty – into deeper citizenship, to engage with the legal and political systems and promote reforms. As a sign of compassion and a willingness to listen, Kraft visited the incarcerated rapper Meek Mill, and later the two partnered with another artist, Jay-Z, on various criminal justice initiatives.

New Start expires on Thursday. That leaves no limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals

Let’s be honest: America needs another nuclear weapon about as much as Donald Trump deserves a Nobel peace prize.

Yet on Thursday, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U S and Russia will expire. When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – New Start – goes away, there will be no limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time in more than 50 years.

Edward J Markey represents Massachusetts in the US Senate. He is a co-chair of the bicameral congressional nuclear weapons and arms control working group

In the summer of 2019, a crew leader tasked with overseeing farm laborers sent them to harvest corn in a field where they weren’t authorized to work — and where there wasn’t adequate protection from the sweltering sun. One of them died of symptoms of heatstroke.

Five months later, a crew leader for another Georgia farm kidnapped and brutally assaulted one of his workers who had escaped.

Two years after that, a third crew leader confined workers to housing surrounded by an electric fence so they couldn’t try to flee.

These and other recently documented abuses were carried out by third-party middlemen, or farm labor contractors, who were hired by farm owners to recruit and supervise foreign workers. Those contractors had found ways to wield power with near impunity over hundreds of workers at a time. Federal prosecutors spent years revealing the scope of the problem in Georgia, in a giant labor-trafficking case that launched in 2016 and is now nearing its conclusion.

The evidence in that case led prosecutors to liken the abuse to a form of modern-day slavery. 

But despite prosecutors’ efforts to crack down on the exploitation of workers by labor contractors, there has been little to no movement at the state or federal level to make the changes that can stop it. There are laws and regulations that could curb exploitation, but reports from farmworker advocates and labor experts have shown that enforcement has long been lax. A number of elected officials have pushed for years for the government to do more to ensure workers receive those protections. Some advocates now say the only solution is for the government to require that farm owners cut out the middleman and assume ultimate responsibility for their workers.

Experts told ProPublica there aren’t enough state and federal inspectors to adequately vet whether the contractors are following the rules. Nor is there broad political support to invest more resources to protect foreign workers, who themselves have little incentive for reporting abuse given the fear of retribution. 

“Regardless of the administration — even ones that are sympathetic to labor — regulators are handicapped,” said Cesar Escalante, a University of Georgia professor of agricultural and applied economics. “They know what’s happening, but they’re incapable of enforcing the regulations.”

As American farmers continue to rely on the decades-old H-2A visa program to fill the seasonal farmworker jobs, they’ve grown more reliant on contractors to find and oversee those workers. Contractors often are fluent in the languages spoken by workers, familiar with the Mexican towns where they’re plentiful and well-versed in the process of securing their temporary work visas. Many farmers also end up hiring contractors to manage the laborers’ work, pay and housing. 

Federal regulators have long known about contractors abusing and exploiting these workers — including stealing their wages, charging them illegal fees, forcing them to live in substandard housing, and even physically and sexually abusing them. Government watchdogs have published reports about those regulators’ failures to do more to prevent abuses in the fields — inaction that, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s inspector general’s office, has increased the odds of employers getting away with serious H-2A violations. 

The number of H-2A seasonal worker visas requested by contractors has nearly tripled over the past decade, with roughly 2 out of every 5 H-2A workers now directly overseen by a labor contractor. The Government Accountability Office found that more than half of the employers banned from the H-2A visa program between 2020 and 2023 were labor contractors, even though they submitted just 15% of the visa applications during that same period. 

One of the key ways to uncover abuses by labor contractors is for regulators to inspect the farms where their workers pick crops. Daniel Costa, an attorney and director of immigration with the think tank the Economic Policy Institute, said federal regulators have become so strapped for resources that they’re only inspecting a tiny fraction of farms each year.

“When less than 1% of farm employers are investigated every year, they can act with impunity, knowing that there is a very low likelihood that they will ever be investigated,” Costa said. 

Every year, hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers are drawn to America by the promise of steady, seasonal farmwork through the H-2A program. One of them, Agustin Chavez Santiago, traveled more than 1,500 miles from Oaxaca, Mexico, for his chance to pick crops on a Georgia farm. Once he arrived in the spring of 2019, one of the labor contractors he’d worked with failed to pay him the $11 an hour his contract had promised. Soon after, Chavez was sent to work on a farm where he wasn’t authorized to do so. 

As Chavez harvested corn one sweltering afternoon, his body temperature spiked to over 105 degrees. He walked off the field to sip water and rest. Before he cooled down, Chavez collapsed. He was taken to a nearby hospital and died from symptoms of heatstroke. He was 34 years old.

Federal prosecutors charged two contractors involved in recruiting and overseeing Chavez on trafficking charges. Those contractors each pleaded guilty to a lesser crime; one admitted to money laundering and the other admitted to concealing knowledge of a felony. Lawyers for those contractors declined ProPublica’s requests for comment. 

In addition, workplace safety inspectors determined that Chavez died because of the negligence of another labor contractor who oversaw his work in the fields. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded that the labor contractor did not provide a worksite free from “hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” The contractor’s company paid OSHA a fine of $16,433. He was able to keep supervising workers. 

“The fact that OSHA fined him $16,000 is a slap in the face to the victims,” said Teresa Romero, the president of the United Farm Workers, one of the country’s largest farmworker advocacy organizations. “This person should have been behind bars.”

The contractor didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. He told OSHA in 2019 that he provided water to his employees and allowed them to take breaks in the shade as needed.

The U.S. Labor Department can fine or suspend contractors for violating the rules of the H-2A program. But it’s doing fewer agricultural investigations than at any point since the turn of the millennium. In the latest year of available data, including parts of 2024 and 2025, the department completed 649 of those investigations, fining farm employers $8.3 million across the country. That is less than half of the investigations done just a decade earlier, even though the H-2A program more than doubled in size during that time.

Experts say the decline in investigations reflects the limited capacity of federal regulators, not that conditions have improved for H-2A workers. Alexis Guild, vice president of strategy and programs with the advocacy group Farmworker Justice, told ProPublica that regulators now rely on workers to report potential violations against themselves. But she said many workers are too scared to speak out because it may lead to retribution and the loss of future work. “It creates an environment that’s ripe for abuse,” she said.

The U.S. Labor Department is responsible for vetting H-2A visa applications that the contractors submit to get foreign workers cleared to come to America. Those regulators routinely audit the contractors’ applications to verify information about the number of workers needed and the terms of their employment. If contractors submit false information, they may be criminally charged, as happened in the federal case in Georgia. 

But a surge in those requests has meant that large piles of applications haven’t been vetted as closely for red flags. Regulators went from conducting over 500 audits in the fiscal year ending in 2018 to doing less than 50 five years later. The U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General has warned that the way that its regulators audit “increases the risk of fraud and noncompliance going undetected.” That warning followed another OIG report that said the way that the department had conducted those audits created an “unnecessarily elevated risk of foreign labor program abuse.” 

Federal labor regulators have acknowledged to the Government Accountability Office that they have had “widespread concern” about farmworkers being exploited by contractors. They have also told the GAO that the department has “limited resources” to carry out some of its work, including the audits. 

In recent years, the U.S. Labor Department has been pressed to take greater action to fix these problems. After the Georgia case was publicly unveiled in 2021, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia called for more “rigorous oversight” of the contractors. United Farm Workers has also pushed for workers to have “stronger and more effective” protections from their contractors. 

In response, the Biden administration finalized a rule in 2024 that sought to increase protections for H-2A workers and hold their employers more accountable. But after numerous states filed lawsuits challenging the rule, the Trump administration decided to suspend all enforcement of those strengthened protections until the litigation is resolved. 

The U.S. Labor Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. 

With fewer federal investigations of farmworker abuses, some states that heavily depend on H-2A workers have tried to address rampant contractor abuses. 

Florida regulators require labor contractors to get a state license — a move intended to help ensure greater compliance with the rules of the H-2A program. Washington posts all of its housing inspection and enforcement records in an online database, allowing workers to look at those records before they accept a job. California lawmakers last year passed a new law that will give greater power to its regulators to crack down on the abuses of foreign farmworkers by labor contractors. 

But even amid a period of extra scrutiny, Georgia hasn’t made those or any other major changes that could prevent the kind of abuses uncovered in the massive federal probe. 

Labor experts say that one of the most important actions that states can take to protect H-2A workers is to devote sufficient resources to the inspection of their housing conditions. In the last full year of available data, Georgia had one H-2A housing inspector for roughly every 7,100 H-2A workers. Other states with high numbers of H-2A workers had hired more inspectors relative to the number of workers. In recent years, Michigan has had one housing inspector for every 2,000 or so H-2A workers; North Carolina has had one inspector for roughly every 4,000 workers. (Other states, including California, have had worse inspector-to-worker ratios.)

At the same time that Georgia’s Labor Department failed to expand its oversight of farmworker housing, one of its top officials called for an internal investigation into alleged problems within the department. 

In 2018, as federal investigators were building their case, Georgia’s Labor Department received a complaint alleging that one of its regulators had been approving inspections of H-2A worker housing in exchange for cash. Four years later, a federal agent testified in court that employees of Georgia’s Labor Department had accepted bribes to approve inspections of H-2A worker housing. The employee accused in the 2018 complaint, who was not indicted and retired three months after that agent testified, told ProPublica that he denied any wrongdoing.

Around the time of his retirement, labor advocates published a report that called for the “rebuilding” of the state’s Labor Department. They demanded more stringent inspections of H-2A worker housing, better monitoring for potential violations and increased funding so regulators could more effectively do their jobs. 

Instead of having Georgia’s Labor Department adopt those recommendations, Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order that stripped the beleaguered department of its oversight powers. 

Georgia’s Labor Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for Kemp said the decision was made to “improve alignment with workforce training programs.”

Kemp transferred H-2A oversight to the Technical College System of Georgia. A Technical College System spokesperson said its officials have “strengthened its monitoring processes to ensure thorough oversight of potential H-2A violations.” 

She also noted that the agency has increased the number of employees who conduct housing inspections from three to six — with plans to add a seventh soon. In a statement, the spokesperson wrote that the Technical College System has taken steps that “have enhanced our ability to monitor, document, and respond to issues more effectively than before.”

Yet, even after doubling the number of inspectors, Georgia still has fewer inspectors per H-2A worker than some of the other states that heavily rely on the visa program.

States like Georgia that have too few inspectors for H-2A workers all but guarantee that violations of the program’s rules will increase, according to Diane Charlton, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University. “We need to invest more in actually monitoring labor conditions,” Charlton said. “This has to be a major priority.”

The post The Dramatic Rise of Farm Labor Contractors Has Led to Rampant Abuses. Here’s Why Regulators Have Failed to Stop Them. appeared first on ProPublica.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Since the passage of legislation in 2023 requiring all Delaware municipalities to create Police Accountability Boards, reform advocates have often criticized the boards as disorganized and lacking real authority. The New Castle County Council passed an ordinance that would transfer more power over its county police accountability board to the county executive, prompting questions from citizens.

The New Castle County Council passed an ordinance earlier this week taking more authority over appointments to the county’s Police Accountability Board away from community groups and giving it to County Executive Marcus Henry. 

The move grants Henry the power to appoint the accountability board’s chair, replacing the previous system where the county executive had to ask for recommendations to fill the role from local nonprofit organizations. 

The new ordinance also removes certain community representation requirements from the board, such as a civil rights group and a faith-based leader; mandates board members complete 20 hours of police officer-run training; and reduces the number annual board meetings from 10 to six. 

County council members and representatives from Henry’s office are lauding the ordinance as a way of tightening up the accountability board to make it more effective, but police reform advocates are pointing to it as another example of the accountability boards across the state not functioning properly. 

House Bill 205, passed in 2023, instituted a requirement for each local police department in Delaware to create its own Police Accountability Board to address citizen concerns and discuss potential reforms. 

Most boards, like those of the cities of Wilmington and Dover, oversee their own municipal police departments. New Castle County is the only county-wide Police Accountability Board. It was established in July 2024 to preside over the county police department, which itself is directly overseen by the county’s Department of Public Safety. 

In the nearly two and a half years since HB 205 was passed, police reform advocates have criticized some jurisdictions for not having functioning accountability boards, and others for having boards that only met once or twice over the years. 

The New Castle County ordinance was introduced to the council’s Public Safety Committee at the request of Henry’s office in mid-January.

County Councilmen Kevin Caneco and Brandon Toole, the committee chairs, made it clear at multiple discussions of the ordinance that they were not involved in writing the proposal, but rather were simply introducing it to council at the direction of Henry’s office. 

Still, Caneco said he supports the ordinance as a means of adjusting the board’s functions and providing some more flexibility to meeting times and appointments to the board. 

“I think it actually kind of tightens up the language to make the accountability board a little more organized as we move forward,” Caneco told Spotlight Delaware. 

The ordinance passed 12-1 on Feb. 2, with Councilman Jea P. Street casting the lone vote against the ordinance. 

Street made his disapproval of the ordinance clear at the meeting, arguing that it goes against the “spirit and intention” of Police Accountability Boards. His comments come more than two years after the council engaged in a debate over the creation of the board. 

At that time, Street – a longtime advocate for police reform – issued a warning to his colleagues: Either approve the advisory board, or “we’ll have to look to the courts to run the police department.”  

County executive sought feedback

When New Castle County created its 13-member Police Accountability Board in 2023, it was hailed for being the first jurisdiction in the state to do so.

The county had endured the bruising public scrutiny in the officer-involved killing of Lymond Moses just two years earlier, which came in the wake of calls for reform initiated by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

When then-New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer created the board, he said that, “County residents now have a seat at the table when it comes to law enforcement accountability.”

That approach has now been significantly altered.

Caneco and Toole also said at Tuesday’s meeting that they consulted with members of the Police Accountability Board before moving forward with the ordinance, and got written approval of the changes from Board Vice Chair Kevin Evans.

Natalie Criscenzo, a spokesperson for Henry’s office, wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that Henry met one-on-one with board members to hear their feedback before proposing the ordinance. 

“While some of the proposed changes originated from the executive office, they were shared with board leadership for review,” Criscenzo wrote. “The intent is to support a more responsive, transparent, and community focused police accountability board.” 

The move by Henry was foreshadowed in a sit-down interview with Spotlight Delaware last spring, when he said that he had “a different perspective” on oversight of police.

“I appreciate the work of the Police Accountability Board and other efforts, but I look at it like this: At the end of day, I’m responsible. I’m personally responsible for what happens with the conduct of the police department,” he said. “I appreciate the help of citizens groups and others, but I don’t need additional help in terms of the seriousness and the veracity in my reviews to make sure we’re doing the best we can.”

Caneco introduced an amendment to the ordinance on Tuesday night, requiring the accountability board to submit annual reports and recommendations to county leaders by April 1 of each year.

Discussion of the ordinance among council members focused on the specifics of Caneco’s amendment, and how often the accountability board should present its recommendations to the county council. 

Street was the only council member to bring up the power over the accountability board that the ordinance would grant to Henry. 

Advocates express concern

Citizens, however, expressed concern about the impact of the regulation on the board’s ability to function, and the power being stripped from community organizations to decide who represents them.  

Chris Asay, a member of the League of Women Voters of Delaware who attends various Police Accountability Board meetings around the state, said the ordinance is disappointing for the integrity of boards in the First State. 

“These changes further weaken the independence and diversity of the board,” Asay said, “making it a faux accountability board like most of the other police accountability committees.”

Tanya Whittle, a current member of the New Castle County Police Accountability Board, said she found it “disheartening” that both the county executive’s office and the county council supported an ordinance that she sees as undermining police accountability. 

“It’s moving us away from the efforts we’ve made as far as really having community-led accountability boards,” she said. 

Whittle’s term on the board is up this month. She told Spotlight Delaware she does not plan to seek another term because she has been “frustrated” by the county’s handling of the board.

The post NCC Council gives Henry more authority over Police Accountability Board appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

New European measures to crack down on Russia’s shadow fleet could severely hurt its economy at a time when it is looking increasingly vulnerable.

Post reporters ventured to northwest Nigeria, where fighters affiliated with the Islamic State are on the offensive despite December airstrikes ordered by President Trump.

The number of Black and Hispanic faculty increased at large research universities after a wave of commitments. Now these pledges are being rolled back, a Post analysis found.

On Wednesday, storied newspaper axed nearly one-third of company after earlier unpopular moves by owner Jeff Bezos

Under Marty Baron, the Washington Post won 11 Pulitzer prizes and expanded its newsroom to house more than 1,000 journalists. The storied newspaper’s future is now in question, according to its former executive editor.

“The aspirations of this news organization are diminished,” Baron told the Guardian in an interview. “I think that’ll translate into fewer subscribers. And I hope it’s not a death spiral, but I worry that it might be.”

Women in rural communities describe trauma of moderating violent and pornographic content for global tech companies

On the veranda of her family’s home, with her laptop balanced on a mud slab built into the wall, Monsumi Murmu works from one of the few places where the mobile signal holds. The familiar sounds of domestic life come from inside the house: clinking utensils, footsteps, voices.

On her screen a very different scene plays: a woman is pinned down by a group of men, the camera shakes, there is shouting and the sound of breathing. The video is so disturbing Murmu speeds it up, but her job requires her to watch to the end.

Stars, new events, iconic Alpine venues and a return to full Olympic atmosphere after the pandemic era. Here’s everything you need to know about Milano Cortina 2026

The Winter Olympics are back – and this time they’re zigzagging across northern Italy. Milano Cortina 2026 will be the most spread-out Winter Games ever staged, jumping from Milan’s arenas to the Dolomites’ classic Alpine slopes. With returning superstars, brand-new events and Italy leaning hard into its Olympic heritage, these Games may feel like they’ve arrived quietly – but there is a lot going on. From how and when to watch, to who matters and why these Olympics could look very different, here are your most pressing questions answered.

alternative_right writes: The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their independence from individual providers and 'foreign' legal spheres. The Technical University of Munich was involved in the development. In September and October 2025, the IT Department already conducted a first comprehensive test. Out of a total of 2780 municipal application services, 194 particularly critical ones were selected and evaluated based on five categories. The analysis already showed a high degree of digital sovereignty: 66% of the 194 evaluated services reached the highest levels (SDS 1 and 2), only 5% reached the critical level 4, and 21% reached the most critical level 5. The SDS evaluates not only technical dependencies but also legal and organizational risks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Compact and comfortable Pixel Buds have noise cancelling, decent battery life and good everyday sound

Google’s latest budget Pixel earbuds are smaller, lighter, more comfortable and have noise cancelling, plus a case that allows you to replace the battery at home.

The Pixel Buds 2a uses the design of the excellent Pixel Buds Pro 2 with a few high-end features at a more palatable £109 (€129/$129/A$239) price, undercutting rivals in the process.

Water resistance: IP54 (splash resistant)

Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.4 (SBC, AAC)

Battery life: 7h with ANC (20h with case)

Earbud dimensions: 23.1 x 16 x 17.8mm

Earbud weight: 4.7g each

Driver size: 11mm

Charging case dimensions: 50 x 57.2 x 24.5mm

Charging case weight: 47.6g

Case charging: USB-C

Apparent collapse of Nvidia–OpenAI tie-up raises questions about circular funding and who will bear the cost of AI’s expansion

Did the circular AI economy just wobble? Last week it was reported that a much-discussed $100bn deal – announced last September – between Nvidia and OpenAI might not be happening at all.

This was a circular arrangement through which the chipmaker would supply the ChatGPT developer with huge sums of money that would largely go towards the purchase of its own chips.

The five-time Olympian leads a young US team into Milan after nearly two decades at the vanguard of women’s hockey’s rise and transformation

For nearly two decades, Hilary Knight has been the heartbeat of USA women’s ice hockey – the constant through gold-medal ecstasy and silver-medal heartbreaks, coaching changes, domestic league collapses and the sport’s long, uneven push toward professional stability. Now, at 36, she’s arrived in Milan chasing one more Olympic gold before bringing down the curtain on one of the most influential careers the game has known.

The Olympic women’s hockey tournament opens on Thursday with the United States bringing one of their youngest and fastest teams in years – and their longest-tenured player in the captain’s sweater. Only 11 players return from the team that won silver in Beijing four years ago. Seven are still in college. Many developed inside a professional structure that did not exist for most of Knight’s career, shaped by the emergence of the Professional Women’s Hockey League and the broader surge in investment across women’s sports.

In today’s newsletter: A police investigation, newly released documents and long‑standing questions about​ accountability have converged to place one of Labour’s most enduring figures under unprecedented scrutiny

Good morning. Older readers may remember Peter Mandelson as a man in a sharp suit drifting through New Labour’s 1990s heyday like a Bond villain with a Filofax. An architect of Labour’s modernisation and a lightning rod for right-wing press ire, he has been in the orbit of power for more than three decades.

That run has now come to a shuddering halt after the release of the so-called Epstein files by the US Department of Justice, which detail the extent of Mandelson’s contact with the late billionaire financier and convicted child sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein. While the Met police investigate Mandelson on suspicion of misconduct in public office, the disclosures from the files have also raised urgent questions about judgment, access and accountability at the highest levels of public life.

UK politics | Labour MPs have warned that Keir Starmer’s days as prime minister are numbered after a day of fury over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Gaza | Israeli forces have bulldozed part of a Gaza cemetery containing the war graves of dozens of British, Australian and other allied soldiers killed in the first and second world wars.

Crime | An 18-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a student in his 20s was stabbed in Leicester city centre and later died in hospital, Leicestershire police have said.

Media | Washington Post editor in chief Matt Murray on Wednesday morning announced internally a “broad strategic reset” that will result in “significant” layoffs across the company.

Immigration | Donald Trump’s border tsar said about 700 federal agents would leave Minnesota, a large drop in agents on the ground but still leaving about 2,000 agents there, far above typical levels for the state.

Taiwanese president says ties with Washington ‘rock solid’, hours after leaders of US and China share first call since November

In their first call since November, Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned US president Donald Trump to be “prudent” about supplying arms to Taiwan, according to a readout of their call provided by China’s foreign ministry.

“President Xi emphasised that the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations,” the readout said. “China must safeguard its own sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will never allow Taiwan to be separated. The US must handle the issue of arms sales to Taiwan with prudence.”

Huge release of files provides extraordinary detail on the extent of the disgraced financier’s network

Among the new trove of 3m files relating to Jeffrey Epstein released last week are a vast number of stories shedding light on his relationships with prominent figures in the US, the UK, and around the world. Inclusion in the files does not imply wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s wrongdoing – but a sampling of some of the details they include provides extraordinary detail on the extent of his network.

The chairman of Paul Weiss dined with Jeffrey Epstein and sought his help getting his son a job with a Woody Allen film production

Brad Karp, the longtime chair of powerful Wall Street law firm Paul Weiss, has resigned his top leadership role and will be replaced by partner Scott Barshay, the firm said on Wednesday.

Karp has faced scrutiny after emails released by the US Department of Justice on Friday revealed extensive personal and business communications he had with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

President Trump is awarding the Medal of Honor to a pilot whose faceoff with Soviet fighter jets remained secret for a half-century and a soldier who died in Afghanistan while shielding somebody from a suicide bomber.

Exclusive: David O’Sullivan says war-based economy may be nearing point of becoming ‘unsustainable’

Western sanctions are having a “significant impact” on the Russian economy, the EU’s sanctions envoy has said, ahead of the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

David O’Sullivan, a veteran Irish official, said sanctions were “not a silver bullet” and would always face circumvention, but insisted that after four years he was confident they were having an effect.

Why Putin isn’t thriving in Trump’s anarchic world.

Venezuela, Iran, and the dicey politics of military intervention.

Valve has pushed back the launch of its Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller hardware from its original Q1 2026 window to a vaguer "first half of the year" target, blaming the ongoing memory and storage shortage that has been squeezing the tech industry. The company said in a post today that rising component prices and limited availability forced it to revisit both its shipping schedule and pricing plans. Valve had previously indicated the Steam Machine would be priced at the entry level of the PC space.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Illinois governor pledges to put ‘science, preparedness and people’ first by participating in global response network, following similar move by California

The state of Illinois and New York City have both announced that they will join the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), following Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the global body in 2025.

Illinois’s governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, made the announcement on Tuesday, confirming that Illinois will become part of the coordinated international network dedicated to monitoring and responding to global disease outbreaks.

Police have accused members of a motorcycle club​ and a street gang of targeting the judge.

The 5th Dimension had broad crossover success and won six Grammy Awards, including record of the year twice.

A judge says U.S. immigration agents in Oregon must stop arresting people without warrants unless they are likely to escape.

Democratic leaders outlined their demands for funding the Department of Homeland Security beyond next week.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 5

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 5, No. 500.

"Nancy and Savannah have both contributed so much to the Tucson community," Sally Shamrell, the Guthries' family friend of over 30 years, told CBS News.

Ex-House speaker says at dinner ‘facts are challenged, truth is distorted and press is treated as enemy’ by those in power

The Democratic former speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said on Wednesday that press freedom is “under siege” in the United States after the Trump administration arrested a prominent journalist and searched the home of another.

The warning from Pelosi comes on the same day that the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who has recently sought to curry favor with Donald Trump, conducted mass layoffs of its reporters and editors worldwide.

Some Democratic Colorado lawmakers are demanding answers after reports that "death cards" were left in the vehicles of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and over claims that immigration agents used fake traffic stops to detain them.

BMW may have retreated from its controversial plan to charge monthly fees for heated seats, but the German automaker is pressing ahead with subscription-based vehicle features through its ConnectedDrive platform. A company spokesperson told The Drive that BMW "remains fully committed" to ConnectedDrive as part of its global aftersales strategy. Features requiring data connectivity will likely carry recurring fees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 5, No. 1,692.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 5 #970.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 5, No. 704.

A Covington Army veteran facing deportation after more than 50 years in the U.S. could be removed this week.

As Trump questions the loyalty of a NATO ally, CBS News joins one of its warships taking part in a drill far from home, aimed at defending Europe and the U.S.

"Right now we have the Wild West. I want to see some rules of the road," said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

President Trump told NBC News the call to remove 700 immigration officers from Minneapolis came from him.

Trump’s stopgap bill funds the Department of Homeland Security until 13 February

• White House border czar says 700 federal agents will leave Minnesota

Tom Homan, the president’s so-called “border czar” is set to speak to reporters in Minneapolis shortly.

A reminder that Homan took over the immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota from senior border official Gregory Bovino, just days after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and the mounting backlash in the Twin Cities.

Microsoft has finally delivered on its promise to integrate Sysmon -- the long-standing system monitoring tool from its Sysinternals suite -- directly into Windows, a move that should make life considerably easier for enterprise administrators who have struggled with deploying and managing the utility across thousands of endpoints. The functionality landed this week in Windows Insider builds 26300.7733 (Dev channel) and 26220.7752 (Beta channel). Sysmon allows administrators to capture system events through custom configuration files, filter for specific activity, and pipe the data into standard Windows event logs for pickup by security tools and SIEM pipelines. Mark Russinovich, Microsoft technical fellow and Winternals co-founder, has previously noted the lack of official customer support for Sysmon in production environments -- a gap this integration addresses. The feature ships disabled by default and requires PowerShell to enable. Microsoft notes that any existing Sysmon installation must be uninstalled before activating the built-in version.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet reports $34.5bn profit and revenue soars 48% in recent quarter as it plans a sharp increase in AI spending

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, and is planning a sharp increase in capital spending in 2026 as it continues to invest deeply in AI infrastructure.

Alphabet on Wednesday reported profit of $34.5bn in the recently ended quarter, as revenue from cloud computing soared 48%.

The HPC community has made great strides in energy efficiency over the past 25 years, with a 100x improvement in gigaflops per watt on TOP500 systems. However, the advent of generative AI is changing the rules of the game, both in terms of power consumption and the relative efficiency of systems and software. Does AI spell the end of the road for energy efficiency in HPC?

The short answer is no, but with several caveats. According to Kirk Cameron, the faculty lead the Virginia Tech Institute for Advanced Computing and a co-founder of the GREEN500 list, there is still plenty of work to be done in driving efficiency into HPC systems.

“It hasn’t been solved to my knowledge yet,” Cameron quipped during a presentation at SC25 in St. Louis. “I still have a job.”

Cameron and his Virginia Tech colleague Wu-chun Feng founded the GREEN500 list back in 2006 as a means to spread awareness on the need for energy efficiency in HPC, as well as to help drive improvements. Cameron had been studying the topic for years, but outside of a handful of researchers, interest in the field was practically non-existent.

“In 2001 the notions of Green HPC and energy proportional computing were unknown,” Cameron wrote in a 2013 HPCwire story. “There was no tangible evidence that power was an issue in supercomputers. Vendors simply built large systems to customer specifications. Performance kept increasing exponentially and while performance efficiency was of interest, power efficiency was not.”

Much of Cameron’s work has been on closing the “efficiency gap” he identified nearly 20 years ago (Image courtesy Kirk Cameron)

‘Not My Problem’

Back then, the bulk of the HPC community didn’t worry about how efficiently their systems were using electricity and whether that use was sustainable, Cameron said in his SC25 presentation. There was an assumption that it was a minor problem that would be solved by industry and government and academic labs.

Cameron and Feng didn’t believe that, and they foresaw there was a ton of work to make HPC systems efficient. However, HPC had a few things going for it, namely that the nature of HPC systems lent themselves well to efficiency. So they set out to do something about it.

Their first step was to gather data, which was a challenge at the time because systems were not instrumented to measure power consumption at the granularity that they needed. “The information was pretty sparse back then in terms of how much power things actually consumed,” Cameron said.

When the electricity consumption data was gathered, it showed there was a yawning efficiency gap between the potential efficiency of HPC systems and the actual efficiency demonstrated in real-world systems. While many supercomputers were capable of power efficiency in the 50% to 60% range, many were actually running in the 10% to 20% range.

“The trends are clear and irrefutable,” Cameron wrote back in 2013. “Supercomputer power was a liability and would soon limit scalability. Of course, it would be almost 4 years before the community at-large began to acknowledge supercomputer power was a fundamental constraint. Let’s just say I’ve learned to be patient.”

100x Efficiency Gain

Impacting the efficiency curve is something else entirely. The approach advocated by Cameron has been to identify opportunities in the HPC workloads themselves to cut out energy waste. One source of energy waste is idling CPUs. While supercomputers are designed to run flat-out for hours or days at a time, their workloads are not uniform and they’re not static.

Energy efficiency of systems on the GREEN500 have improved by 100x over the past 15 years (Image courtesy Kirk Cameron)

One source of low-hanging fruit has been to identify when CPUs are idle because the system is moving data, either between memory on the bus or over the network. “Those are opportunities for energy savings and energy efficiency,” he said at SC25.

Fast forward two decades, and the work of Cameron and Feng has borne fruit. The HPC community has broken the exascale barrier with systems that consume 30 megawatts or less. What’s more, systems on the GREEN500 list are now, on average, 100x more efficient that they were 20 years ago. Yes, the energy consumption has increased exponentially, but production of gigaflops has grown even faster.

“Two orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency across the list,” Cameron mused. “I think that’s pretty impressive.”

In November 2025, for the first time, the top five most efficient systems on the GREEN500 list–all BullSequana XH3000 systems with Nvidia GH200 Superchips and Quad-Rail Invidia InfiniBand NDR200 interconnects–all scored more than 68.5 gigaflops per watt on the power efficiency metric. More efficiency gains are expected in teh future.

“That’s a tribute to all the people that worked on energy efficiency over the years,” Cameron said. “We did work a lot of work. We got a lot of things done. But the stakes just got higher, didn’t they.”

Power Redux

Despite the real progress made in efficiency, energy remains a critical factor in HPC. The current trend, of course, is the huge demand for generative AI, along with the HPC and energy that make it run.

We’ve gone from exascale systems that consume about 30 megawatts of power to giant clusters, like xAI’s Colussus, that will consume 10 times that amount in a single system. Multiple GPU-heavy clusters are being built in massive AI factories to run AI training and inference workloads. At least five gigawatt-scale data centers are under construction and due to op

Kirk Cameron is a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech

en this year across the United States, with many more slated for the years to come. All told, about 100 gigawatts of new data center capacity is slated to come online by the end of the decade.

Cameron sees some of the same energy efficiency issues from the early 2000s coming around again. For starters, there’s the issue of whether people actually care about energy efficiency and are willing to do something about it, as opposed to assuming that it’s someone else’s problem. Secondly, there are new challenges related to measuring power consumption. Lastly, what are the steps can be taken to reduce energy waste?

“We did this before,” Cameron said in his SC25 presentation. “But I think it’s going to be more important to consider the tradeoffs.”

Efficiency Tradeoffs

There are some interesting factors in AI and energy efficiency. For starters, it turns out that LLMs running on GPUs can be a pretty efficient use of electricity, Cameron said.

“These are really dense linear algebra codes that are regular, that are compute bound or high data reuse. The more power you give them, the more compute they can do in a given second,” Cameron said. “They don’t leave a lot of room for energy efficiency, because they actually use the hardware pretty efficiently.”

GPUs are less efficient running other HPC workloads, such as sparse unstructured linear algebra codes, which demonstrate irregular memory accesses and low arithmetic intensity, Cameron said. Examples of these workloads include building design, seismic modeling, and Web search, he said.

The least efficient use of GPUs involve moving data across memory or the network, Cameron said. Examples of these workloads include epidemic prediction, radiation therapy, or risk modeling. These inefficient workloads are memory-bound and communication-heavy, and are good candidates for improve energy efficiency, he said.

Idle processors are a major target for efficiency improvements (Image courtesy Kirk Cameron)

Gaining efficiency in these HPC systems will likely involve making tradeoffs. HPC users may tolerate slightly lower accuracy in an LLM prediction, for example, if it means saving more energy. Similarly, device makers may want to throttle down an inefficient piece of hardware when it’s not being used with low-efficiency codes.

One possibility for efficiency gains is to use specialized hardware instead of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology. This was attempted in the early 2000s and didn’t work out so well, Cameron said. It’s also quite expensive. While it’s one possible avenue for efficiency gains, it’s not a likely one.

More than likely, HPC will continue to use COTS technology. That’s because massive investment in AI–not traditional HPC workloads–is driving the design for the next generation of GPUs.

“I know it’s hard to swallow for some of us, myself included, but we don’t drive technology innovation,” Cameron said. “Our job in HPC will be to adapt the technologies that we see in the other markets–cloud or AI–for our purposes, to exploit them as best we can.”

The post AI and Power: Where Does Green HPC Go from Here? appeared first on HPCwire.

Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets – whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later.

Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They’ve shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw – performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment.

↫ Pavel Osadchuk

There’s quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn’t care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren’t a lot of great widgets and we hadn’t entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive.

Now Metro, that’s where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user – I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter – and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I’m still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered.

On desktops and laptops, though, it’s a different story, and I don’t think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?

The message, believed to be from Ghislaine Maxwell, was released as part of the latest tranche of the Epstein files

An email believed to have been sent by Ghislaine Maxwell appears to confirm a photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with his arm around Virginia Giuffre’s waist is real.

The message, released as part of the latest tranche of the Epstein files, was headed “draft statement” and sent by “G Maxwell” to Jeffrey Epstein in 2015.

Luke Pollard says blueprint expected last autumn is ‘a bigger task than many people outside defence realise’

A government minister has defended long delays to a military spending plan that are also stalling the UK’s next-generation Tempest fighter jet programme, but refused to say when it will be complete.

The defence investment plan (DIP), originally expected last autumn, has faced repeated postponements amid warnings that the military faces a £28bn funding gap over the next four years.

Industry bigger than all but seven world economies, and accounts for more than third of China’s economic growth

China’s clean energy industries drove more than 90% of the country’s investment growth last year, making the sectors bigger than all but seven of the world’s economies, a new analysis has shown.

For the second time in three years, the report showed the manufacture, installation and export of batteries, electric cars, solar, wind and related technologies accounted for more than a third of China’s economic growth.

Microsoft Research, in collaboration with various others, has just released LiteBox, a library operating system.

LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various “North” shims and “South” platforms. LiteBox is designed for usage in both kernel and non-kernel scenarios.

LiteBox exposes a Rust-y nix/rustix-inspired “North” interface when it is provided a Platform interface at its “South”. These interfaces allow for a wide variety of use-cases, easily allowing for connection between any of the North–South pairs.

↫ LiteBox GitHub Page

Suggested use-cases are running unmodified Linux applications on Windows, sandboxing Linux applications on Linux, running OP-TEE applications on Linux, and more. It’s written in Rust, and the code is available on GitHub under an MIT license.

Besides noise, what does Zero Vector Frequency affect when it comes to board performance or riding?

The Puerto Rican singer’s highly anticipated Super Bowl half-time show has inspired non-Spanish speakers to study Puerto Rican dialect and slang

Bad Bunny is expected to perform the Super Bowl half-time show on Sunday entirely in Spanish – which has inspired fans to quickly learn the language.

In October, the Puerto Rican singer – born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – kicked off the 51st season of Saturday Night Live expressing pride over the achievement in Spanish, after which he said in English, “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn!”

This is now a Class I recall, meaning that the use of these continuous glucose monitoring systems could cause serious health consequences or death.

Major obstacles to viable deal remain after Volodymyr Zelenskyy accuses Moscow of violating energy truce

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators have held a “productive” first round of US-led peace talks in Abu Dhabi, as Washington seeks a pathway to end the nearly four-year war in Ukraine.

The two-day trilateral talks that are due to continue on Thursday come after Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Moscow of exploiting a US-backed energy truce last week to stockpile weapons before launching a record number of ballistic missile attacks at Ukraine on Tuesday.

By age 20 diagnosis rates for men and women almost equal, research finds, challenging assumptions of gender discrepancy

Females may be just as likely to be autistic as males but boys are up to four times more likely to be diagnosed in childhood, according to a large-scale study.

Research led by the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden scrutinised the diagnosis rates of autism for people born in Sweden between 1985 and 2020. Of the 2.7 million people tracked, 2.8% were diagnosed with autism between the ages of two and 37.

We may want to go places with Ken and order a bunch of food after watching these.

The five new heroes offer a variety of playstyles that should appeal to a range of players across all three roles.

The five new heroes offer a variety of playstyles that should appeal to a range of players across all three roles.

Singer was member of vocal group that scored 1960s hits with Up, Up and Away and Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In

Singer LaMonte McLemore has died. He was a founding member of the 5th Dimension, a vocal group whose smooth pop and soul sounds with a touch of psychedelia brought them big hits in the 1960s and 70s.

McLemore died on Tuesday aged 90 at his home in Las Vegas, surrounded by his family, his representative Jeremy Westby said in a statement. He died of natural causes after having a stroke.

Former Lieutenant Governor Tahesha Way is not the clear front-runner in New Jersey’s special congressional election on Thursday. She’s seventh in fundraising out of 10 candidates as of last week’s Federal Election Commission deadline, and public polling has been sparse. But as the race drew close to the finish line, the Israel lobby made her the beneficiary of a last-minute push. 

In the final weeks before the election, an Intercept analysis has found, 30 donors to groups including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its super PAC, and Democratic Majority for Israel have poured more than $50,000 into Way’s campaign. On Friday, amid the fundraising push and less than a week before the election, DMFI officially endorsed her. 

The lobby is known for spending against progressives and the most vocal critics of the state of Israel, but in New Jersey, it appears to be backing one moderate to pick off another. Yet more pro-Israel money in the race comes at the expense of Tom Malinowski, who is no progressive on Israel policy but nevertheless has become the subject of AIPAC ire — marking a reversal for the group, which supported him in 2022.

AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent more $2.3 million on ads against Malinowski. The ads do not mention Israel but attack Malinowski on immigration, saying he helped fund “Trump’s deportation force” because he voted in favor of a 2019 bipartisan appropriations bill that funded the Department of Homeland Security. The majority of Democrats, including many supported by AIPAC, voted for the bill.

In a statement to The Intercept, UDP spokesperson Patrick Dorton made no mention of Malinowski’s DHS funding vote. He said Malinowski had fallen afoul of the group’s policy priorities by discussing the possibility of conditioning aid to Israel.

“It’s our goal to build the largest bipartisan pro-Israel majority in Congress. There are several candidates in this race far more pro-Israel than Tom Malinowski,” Dorton said.

Related

AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.

Way and Malinowski are competing in a crowded race in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District to replace former Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who vacated the seat after she was elected governor. 

Way and Malinowski’s campaigns did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Also running are Analilia Mejia, the former political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign; veteran Zach Beecher; Passaic County commissioner and election lawyer John Bartlett; former Morris Township Mayor Jeff Grayzel; and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill. 

Way already had substantial support from the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, which endorsed her and has spent more than $1.7 million backing her campaign, almost half of what it spent in total last cycle. But even with close to $4 million in outside spending on her side, she has lagged behind her opponents in fundraising. She’s raised just over $400,000 — compared to Malinowski’s over $1.1 million, more than $800,000 for Gill, and over half a million for Beecher. Bartlett has raised more than $460,000, Grayzel has raised $428,000, and Mejia has raised just over $420,000. 

Now, pro-Israel donors who have given to AIPAC to boost other pro-Israel candidates are trying to help Way close the gap. They include retired investor Peter Langerman, who has given $75,000 to AIPAC’s United Democracy Project since 2023 and $12,000 to AIPAC since 2022. Another Way donor, Florida loan executive Joel Edelstein, has given $25,000 to UDP since 2023 and $3,500 to AIPAC since 2022.

Among Way’s other donors are Bennett Greenspan, founder of the genealogy company Family Tree DNA, who has given $40,000 to United Democracy Project, $4,000 to DMFI PAC, and $1,250 to AIPAC PAC since 2022. Way donor and New Jersey real estate developer Michael Gottlieb gave $25,000 to UDP in 2023. Another Way donor, founder and former president of Microsoft partner HSO, Jack Ades, has given $10,750 to AIPAC since 2024. Gottlieb and Ades have given to Republican candidates including Reps. Mike Lawler and Elise Stefanik in New York; Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.; Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign; and the Republican group WinRed. 

More than half of the contributions to Way — $33,000 of the $53,000 in total — all landed on January 14, a common sign that outside groups have sent out a fundraising push to their network.

Another donor to Way’s campaign is Joseph Korn, a New Jersey real estate developer who served on the New Jersey board of the Jewish National Fund, a controversial national organization that has funded settler groups in the West Bank. 

Way is campaigning on a relatively centrist platform that primarily includes fighting against President Donald Trump’s agenda. She’s also running on strengthening the Affordable Care Act, ensuring access to reproductive care, protecting democracy and voting rights, and lowering costs without raising taxes, including raising the cap on state and local tax deductions, or SALT. Her website does not mention foreign policy or Israel. 

Way is also endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus PAC; the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State; IVYPAC, which backs candidates who are members of the historically Black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority; and several other New Jersey organizations. 

The Israel lobby’s support for Way may not ultimately help its policy priorities. As a recent column in the Forward points out, by pitting Way and Malinowski against each other, AIPAC donors might help a more progressive candidate get elected.

The post AIPAC Donors Flood Last-Minute New Jersey House Pick With Cash appeared first on The Intercept.

Mistral AI's new Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and Voxtral Realtime are intended to run on your device, meaning your conversations never find their way to a data center.

The reduction of ICE officers in Minneapolis is a significant scaling back of Homeland Security’s presence and comes after two U.S. citizens were killed.

I've tested dozens of inexpensive earbuds to find the best values. These are my current top bargain picks, almost all of which cost less than $100, and some less than $50.

A government lawyer who told a judge that her job "sucks" during a court hearing stemming from the Trump administration's immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota has been removed from her Justice Department post.

Here's everything you need to know about ski mountaineering, aka skimo, and when you can watch the newest Olympic sport.

Soon, you may be able to access every family member's health data in one place.

The president noted plans to visit China in April, as Beijing sends a warning to White House over Taiwan arms sales.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
School was disrupted in certain areas of the state on Wednesday after several districts received bomb threats. Law enforcement investigators ultimately said they were not credible. They also said that schools in states across the country had received similar threats. 

At least five schools in Delaware received automated voice-recorded bomb threats on Wednesday, and the calls might be linked to larger nationwide threats. 

The Delaware State Police confirmed to Spotlight Delaware that they learned that “multiple states nationwide have received similar threats and language via voicemail.”

For some schools in Delaware, the calls disrupted their daily schedules. Others went on with their days as planned. 

David Karas, spokesman for the Wilmington Police Department, confirmed that officers responded to Padua Academy and Cab Calloway School of the Arts in reference to reports of bomb threats. He said no devices nor other material threats were identified. 

Delaware State Police also said its investigators found no evidence of bombs, despite the reported threats. 

In a message sent to families on Wednesday, Concord High School Principal Jeff Lawson said the school had received a “threat of violence” that was left on the school’s answering system. Law enforcement determined it was not a credible threat, he said.

Also on Wednesday, the Capital School District announced it was implementing a two-hour delay for students in grades 1 through 8, due to a “transportation disruption,” caused by multiple bomb threats that affected school operations. 

In the statement, the Capital said the delay was implemented “out of an abundance of caution” as the alerts were being investigated. They said nothing was found at any school facility. 

Farther to the south, Cape Henlopen  School District said law enforcement determined that a threat made to its high school “was a hoax made to cause disruption to school operations.” 

Unlike the Capital School District, there was no delayed opening and the Cape Henlopen High School day continued as normal, according to the district.

Delaware House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown said in a Facebook post that she is also aware of the bomb threats made against multiple schools across the state, including her son’s school. 

“As a mother, I am relieved to know that all threats involving our schools are taken seriously and investigated thoroughly,” she said in the post. 

Minor-Brown also noted that law enforcement believes the threat “to be of low credibility but remains vigilant.”

The post Some classes disrupted after several Delaware schools received bomb threats  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

NASA used Anthropic's Claude for an experiment in plotting the rover's course, which the agency deemed successful.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Nike may have engaged in "a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against White employees."

EEOC demands firm turn over ‘DEI-related objectives’ amid Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity initiatives

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has launched an investigation into Nike over allegations that the sports giant discriminated against white employees and job applicants.

The federal agency is demanding that Nike turn over information related to the allegations, including the company’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-related 2025 Targets and other DEI-related objectives”, it announced on Wednesday.

Hey, so like heres how i wired up my shiny new momentary switches:

First confirm you are building for thor 301
the size of connectors are JST-GH 1.25

i went ahead and bought a little kit on amazon of GH connectors with precrimped ends, i find this is the only possible way to do it after buying a crimper and tiny wire and throwing both away YRMV….

the photo below shows how i pinned my male end
from left to right, lever down:

Black: Ground(GND)
Yellow: ONL
Red: 5v
Green: ONH

switches with lights will always have the same pin orentation.

switches without lights will not have Positive or Negative terminals

Here is your cheatsheet
(-) NEGATIVE: GND = BLACK
(NO) NORMALLY OPEN: ONL = YELLOW
(+) POSITIVE: 5V = RED
(C) COMMON: ONH = GREEN

BOOM, wrap it up and call it a day.

Feel free to ask any questions, other controllers pins will vary, and you will need to adjust.

Talks that had been scheduled in Turkey salvaged after Arab states convince White House not to walk away from negotiations

Talks between the US and Iran scheduled for Friday have been brought back from the brink of collapse after the US initially rejected Iran’s request to move them from Turkey to Oman without the presence of a group of Arab states.

Iran’s foreign minister said late on Wednesday that the talks would proceed in Oman after reports of a last-minute effort by Arab states to convince the White House not to walk away from negotiations.

Approved by voters, the new map gives Democrats as many as five seats, neutralizing five GOP seats added by Texas

California can use a new congressional map that was approved by voters in November, the supreme court has ruled, handing Democrats a major victory in their effort to neutralize Donald Trump’s push to protect Republicans’ fragile House majority in this year’s midterm elections.

In December, the court said Texas could use its redrawn congressional map in 2026, designed to carve out as many as five Republican-friendly congressional districts, rejecting a lower-court ruling that found it had been racially gerrymandered.

If you snagged a ticket for the big game, AT&T's new service helps you stay connected, even for T-Mobile and Verizon customers.

The four prosecutors who spearheaded a $250 million Minnesota fraud case have all left the U.S. Attorney's Office in a growing wave of resignations.

Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano and her mother released from Texas facility to head back home to reunite with her father

A 10-year-old Minnesota girl has been released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after a month in detention in Dilley, Texas, school officials said, one of hundreds of children detained at the facility.

Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano, a fourth-grader, and her mother walked free from the immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, on Tuesday night. Elizabeth is a student in the school district of Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, which is also home to five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was released from Dilley over the weekend amid widespread outrage about his detention.

From indestructible wallets to Crocs (yes, Crocs), we rounded up the best guy-approved Valentine’s Day gifts they won’t know how they lived without

• 26 sentimental and practical US Valentine’s Day gifts for her in 2026

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

Whether you have been together for years or just made it official, one thing remains certain: he is going to claim he doesn’t need anything. But secretly, he will appreciate a really good Valentine’s Day gift. Many men in our lives default to what they have always used and loved, from threadbare T-shirts to melted spatulas. (And if that’s you too, we won’t judge if you peek at this list for yourself.)

When thinking of a present for your go-to guy, prioritize the gift of novelty. Introduce him to a new gadget he hasn’t thought of. Show him that it’s OK to cry with a personalized keepsake commemorating your shared history. Introduce a little color into his life if his year has been a bit bleak.

Report offers alternative of the US navy retaining boats and operating them out of Australian bases

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A new United States congressional report openly contemplates not selling any nuclear submarines to Australia – as promised under the Aukus agreement – because America wants to retain control of the submarines for a potential conflict with China over Taiwan.

The report by the US Congressional Research Service, Congress’s policy research arm, posits an alternative “military division of labour” under which the submarines earmarked for sale to Australia are instead retained under US command to be sailed out of Australian bases.

Health secretary to increase pay offer and guarantee working conditions for resident doctors only

Wes Streeting is to offer resident doctors a bigger pay rise than other NHS staff as part of a new package of measures to try to end their long-running dispute.

The health secretary also plans to guarantee resident doctors in England that hospitals will be fined if they do not give them good working conditions, such as rest areas and access to hot food.

While last year's Pixel 9A went on sale in April, the latest in Google's cheaper A series will be coming this month.

Former WaPo executive editor Martin Baron told CBS News the paper's coverage will be "dramatically diminished" because of the job cuts.

Two-decade study indicates a diet rich in foods such as olive oil, nuts and vegetables can cut risk of every type of stroke

A Mediterranean diet can reduce the risk of every type of stroke, in some cases by as much as 25%, a large study conducted over two decades suggests.

A diet rich in olive oil, nuts, seafood, whole grains and vegetables has previously been linked to a number of health benefits. However, until now there has been limited evidence of how it might affect the risk of all forms of stroke.

Over 50 million Americans will face higher utility costs as a result of rate hikes approved in 2025, according to PowerLines.

Ryan Routh, the man convicted in a 2024 assassination attempt of President Trump at his Florida golf course, has been sentenced to life in prison.

European security officials believe two Russian space vehicles have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent. From a report: Officials believe that the likely interceptions, which have not previously been reported, risk not only compromising sensitive information transmitted by the satellites but could also allow Moscow to manipulate their trajectories or even crash them. Russian space vehicles have shadowed European satellites more intensively over the past three years, at a time of high tension between the Kremlin and the West following Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For several years, military and civilian space authorities in the West have been tracking the activities of Luch-1 and Luch-2 -- two Russian objects that have carried out repeated suspicious maneuvers in orbit. Both vehicles have made risky close approaches to some of Europe's most important geostationary satellites, which operate high above the Earth and service the continent, including the UK, as well as large parts of Africa and the Middle East. According to orbital data and ground-based telescopic observations, they have lingered nearby for weeks at a time, particularly over the past three years. Since its launch in 2023, Luch-2 has approached 17 European satellites.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commons committee chair says DWP repeatedly failed to prioritise the vulnerable and was slow to fix errors

The government’s most senior welfare official has been accused of presiding over a “culture of complacency” that led to thousands of unpaid carers inadvertently running up huge benefit debts.

Debbie Abrahams, the chair of the work and pensions select committee, said the Department for Work and Pensions had repeatedly failed to prioritise vulnerable people, was unwilling to learn from its mistakes, and slow to fix errors.

Beyond model scale alone, AI for science is increasingly being shaped by the data and compute infrastructure that allows algorithms to search and connect scientific evidence. In biomedicine, for example, data continues to grow and fragment across papers, databases, and clinical records. One response to this fragmentation is the use of knowledge graphs, which turn the scattered data into connected maps that both scientists and algorithms can explore.

That approach was illustrated in a recent talk by researchers at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), who presented their ROBOKOP platform, or Reasoning Over Biomedical Objects linked in Knowledge Oriented Pathways. ROBOKOP is a large-scale biomedical knowledge graph system that links genes, drugs, diseases, and pathways into a navigable map of evidence, which can then be paired with machine learning to prioritize hypotheses in drug repurposing and rare disease research.

The talk featured Kathleen Carter, a bioinformatics data scientist at RENCI, which is based at UNC Chapel Hill. In practice, ROBOKOP treats biomedical discovery as a structured search over existing evidence, in contrast to large language models that generate answers by synthesizing patterns from text. By modeling biomedical knowledge as explicit nodes and relationships, the system allows researchers to trace proposed connections back to specific pieces of evidence rather than relying on probabilistic inference alone. That structure is especially important for the field of biomedicine because the same concept may appear under multiple names, findings can conflict depending on context, and mechanisms may be both beneficial and harmful under different conditions. Encoding those relationships directly into the data helps preserve nuance while keeping large-scale search feasible.

(Shutterstock)

Operationally, ROBOKOP is designed as a large-scale data integration and graph analytics pipeline. Building the knowledge graph involves curating and ingesting diverse biomedical data sources, transforming them into a shared structure, resolving terminology through ontologies, and periodically reassessing source quality. Carter described a governance process that ranks candidate sources using FAIR-style criteria, with an emphasis on open-access data and selective use of proprietary resources where appropriate. The result is a semantic integration layer that allows downstream analytics to operate on normalized concepts, rather than repeatedly rediscovering that different strings refer to the same protein, phenotype, or chemical.

A second layer in the workflow Carter described is graph machine learning. The knowledge graph is embedded, transforming entities and relationships into numerical representations that allow models to assess similarity, neighborhood structure, and multi-hop connectivity. At scale, this stage becomes operationally significant, as embedding large graphs, refreshing models as data evolves, and evaluating tens of millions of candidate relationships place sustained demands on storage and compute resources. Even when inference takes the form of path-based traversal, maintaining and updating the underlying graph remains a substantial part of the workload.

One of the most mature applications of ROBOKOP is large-scale drug repurposing, where the system is used to scan existing biomedical knowledge for underexplored connections between approved drugs and known diseases. Carter described how RENCI’s graph is integrated into Every Cure’s MATRIX project, which evaluates tens of millions of potential drug–disease pairs by tracing biologically plausible paths through genes, pathways, and clinical associations. Rather than proposing novel compounds, the workflow prioritizes existing drugs that have already cleared regulatory hurdles, narrowing an otherwise unmanageable search space into ranked candidates for human review. Those candidates are then enhanced with supporting evidence from the literature and clinical data before being assessed by medical experts, creating a pipeline that moves from graph-based search to validation and, in some cases, clinical exploration.

A recurring theme in the RENCI talk was data quality and provenance. Carter emphasized that ROBOKOP is built primarily on open-access biomedical resources, drawing from established public databases that span chemicals, proteins, ontologies, and cellular interactions. Each source is individually parsed and transformed into a common structure before being added to the graph, a process that combines automation with hands-on curation. To manage scope and reliability, the team evaluates candidate sources through a formal review process that ranks them against FAIR-style principles, periodically revisiting those decisions as data and standards evolve. While proprietary datasets can offer additional coverage, particularly in commercial biology knowledge graphs, RENCI has largely prioritized openness and transparency, opting to use licensed data selectively rather than as a core dependency. The system also has mechanisms in place for researchers to nominate missing sources and refine how existing data is modeled over time.

This work reflects how progress in AI for science is being shaped not only by advances in foundation models, but also by investments in data integration, graph infrastructure, and compute systems that make scientific evidence searchable and reusable at scale. As scientific knowledge continues to expand faster than any individual or AI model can absorb, systems like ROBOKOP that emphasize transparency and provenance will become critical for giving this knowledge the structure needed for scientific progress. For biomedicine in particular, the payoff will not be just better answers, but more transparent paths from data to labwork to the clinic. Learn more about ROBOKOP and knowledge graphs by viewing the RENCI discussion at this link.

The post ROBOKOP is RENCI’s Graph-Based Approach to Biomedical Evidence appeared first on HPCwire.

Anthropic's Super Bowl ads take a shot at OpenAI, but a much more important question looms.

Starmer faces criticism from MPs on all sides of the Commons

• This liveblog is now closed. Read the politics team’s report on today’s developments here

PMQs is starting soon. Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

The Reform UK MP Lee Anderson has dismissed claims that his party’s plan to support the pub industry would cost far more than the £3bn it claims.

To be honest with you, we’re not interested in who you’ve been talking to. We’re more interested who we’ve been talking to, and we’ve been talking to landlords and small businesses up and down the country, and every landlord that I speak to … they want this VAT cut.

We can go on all day about the numbers. I’m not interested in the numbers that the BBC have sourced. You’re hardly a bastion of truth at the BBC when it comes to things like this.

This doesn’t add up. This is an unfunded tax cut which also pushes hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

Reform says that reinstating the two-child limit for most, but not all, families would save £2.29bn in 2026/27. The party claims its package of tax cuts would also cost £2.29bn – making it cost neutral – with the bulk coming from a proposal to halve VAT on hospitality, which it estimates would cost £1.7bn.

The Supreme Court declined to block California's new congressional map​ that could net Democrats five seats in the upcoming midterm elections.

MPs say release of papers on Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador could trigger leadership challenge

Labour MPs have warned that Keir Starmer’s days as prime minister are numbered after a day of fury over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

The government was on the brink of a defeat in the Commons until a mid-debate amendment brokered by Meg Hillier and Angela Rayner to force the release of documents about Mandelson’s appointment and the depth of his relationship with the convicted child sex offender.

The documentary premiered at the Kennedy Center. Three days later, the president announced he was shutting it down

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland; sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

Has anyone seen Melania (the film) yet? I have. I went to watch it on Friday morning. The idea was to interview other people watching the movie: to get a sense of why they wanted to see it, how they felt about Melania, how weird they were, etc.

It didn’t really work that well in the end, because most of the crowd at the AMC in midtown Manhattan were journalists trying to do the exact same thing as me. As far as I could tell, three non-reporters attended our showing. Of the two who agreed to talk to me, one was there because he had a monthly movie theater pass, and the other was a man who, without wanting to be too unkind, had a very low bar for compelling drama. (“I think it’s interesting just to kind of see, you know, how her life really is, at least to some extent,” this person told me.)

Mortgage interest rates are much lower than they were one year ago. Here's how much a $500,000 costs monthly now.

PLANO, Texas, Feb. 4, 2026 — Siemens today announced the acquisition of Canopus AI, an innovator in computational and AI-driven metrology solutions, enabling semiconductor manufacturers to achieve new levels of precision and efficiency in wafer and mask inspection processes. This acquisition strengthens Siemens’ position in the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem and expands its semiconductor design and manufacturing digital thread by integrating additional cutting-edge metrology technologies, enhanced with advanced AI capabilities.

Siemens has acquired Canopus AI to expands its semiconductor design and manufacturing digital thread by integrating additional cutting-edge metrology technologies, enhanced with advanced AI capabilities

The semiconductor industry faces increasingly complex manufacturing challenges as device geometries continue to shrink and production volumes scale. Massive metrology has become critical to ensuring quality and yield in advanced semiconductor fabrication. Canopus AI’s innovative AI-powered solutions complement Siemens’ existing portfolio, providing semiconductor manufacturers with intelligent inspection and measurement capabilities that drive operational excellence.

“The acquisition of Canopus AI exemplifies Siemens’ commitment to leveraging industrial AI to solve critical challenges in semiconductor manufacturing,” said Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO, Siemens Digital Industry Software. “By combining the computational lithography and manufacturing physics simulation capability in our Calibre portfolio with Canopus-AI’s advanced metrology and inspection technologies, we are creating a differentiated, end-to-end EDA digital thread that improves the fidelity of printed wafer patterns, accelerates yield ramp and reduces time-to-volume for advanced nodes. This integration further advances our vision of a comprehensive, high-accuracy, semiconductor manufacturing digital twin, enabling sub-nanometer process control and mask development.”

Founded in 2021 and based in Grenoble, France, Canopus AI is a fast-growing software and AI company dedicated to revolutionizing wafer and mask metrology and inspection. Canopus AI is pioneering ‘Metrospection,’ a revolutionary approach that enhances metrology and inspection workflows with AI. By bridging the gap between conventional wafer metrology and inspection, this comprehensive software framework uses AI to help chip designers and manufacturers meet the extreme precision requirements of advanced technology nodes.

“We are delighted to join Siemens and bring the power of AI-enabled metrology in the semiconductor industry to a broader audience as part of Siemens’ EDA community of users,” said Joël Alanis, chief executive officer, Canopus AI. “Together, we’ll empower innovators pushing the boundaries of semiconductor design and manufacturing with robust wafer and mask metrology and inspection and help them to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing semiconductor industry.”

The transaction closed on January 12, 2026. To learn more about the Canopus AI acquisition and how Siemens is committed to leveraging AI technologies to solve critical challenges in semiconductor manufacturing, visit https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/calibre/2026/02/04/siemens-acquires-canopusai.

About Siemens Digital Industries Software

Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.

About Siemens Digital Industries

Siemens Digital Industries (DI) empowers companies of all sizes within the process and discrete manufacturing industries to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformation across the entire value chain. Siemens’ cutting-edge automation and software portfolio revolutionizes the design, realization and optimization of products and production. And with Siemens Xcelerator – the open digital business platform – this process is made even easier, faster, and scalable. Together with our partners and ecosystem, Siemens Digital Industries enables customers to become a sustainable Digital Enterprise. Siemens Digital Industries has a workforce of around 70,000 people worldwide.

About Siemens AG

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, mobility, and healthcare. The company’s purpose is to create technology to transform the everyday, for everyone. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers customers to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformations, making factories more efficient, cities more livable, and transportation more sustainable. Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a leading global medical technology provider pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere. Sustainably.

Source: Siemens

The post Siemens Acquires Canopus AI to Bring AI-Based Metrology to Semiconductor Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.

Here are some highly rated series to stream, plus a look at what's new in February.

Government faces call for transparency on former peer’s involvement amid fears he may have leaked more sensitive information

Peter Mandelson’s involvement with the US tech company Palantir must be exposed to full public transparency, campaigners have said, amid fears he may have leaked more sensitive information than is alleged in his emails to Jeffrey Epstein.

Palantir, a $300bn company that provides military technology to the Israel Defense Forces and AI-powered deportation targeting for Donald Trump’s ICE units, has UK government contracts worth more than £500m. Global Counsel, a lobbying company Mandelson co-founded and part-owns, also works for Palantir.

No 10 is under huge pressure to reveal exactly how the former peer was vetted for his job as US ambassador

After the release of a vast tranche of documents and emails that shed further light on the close relationship between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, the government has come under intense pressure to release details about its vetting process before Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador in December 2024.

"I hope no one ever finds themselves in the same situation of brutal legal abuse that I did," Artemy Ostaninsaid in his final statement in court.

• Davis played sporadically after arriving in Luka Doncic trade

• Eight-player swap comes ahead of Thursday’s trade deadline

The Dallas Mavericks are sending 10-time All-Star forward Anthony Davis to the Washington Wizards in an eight-player trade, ESPN reported Wednesday.

The Mavericks will receive Khris Middleton, AJ Johnson, Malaki Branham and Marvin Bagley III plus two first-round draft picks and three second-round selections, per the report.

The bill would mandate use of the biblical term ‘Judea and Samaria’ after a similar effort passed in Arkansas

Florida legislators are pushing to pass legislation that would ban the use of the term “West Bank” in K-12 public schools and state agencies, including public colleges and universities, and mandate use of the term “Judea and Samaria”.

The West Bank is the internationally recognized term for the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River that was seized from Jordan by Israel in 1967. The rightwing Israeli government refers to the area as “Judea and Samaria” in reference to the biblical kingdoms of ancient Israel as part of broader efforts to bolster historical and religious claims to the land. The international community, on the other hand, broadly recognizes the West Bank as occupied land that must be part of a future Palestinian state.

Filing bankruptcy pro se is a complex process, but knowing all your options could save you thousands in legal fees.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is widely viewed as a strong contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, particularly by Gavin Newsom. But his record is a real problem, just not in the way pundits think it is. 

Take, for example, his determination to thwart the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5 percent levy on residents of the state worth $1 billion or more. This is hardly Bolshevism, as keen mathematicians will note that 5 percent still leaves 95 percent, meaning those affected would wake up the next morning in the same economic bracket that calls to mind a camel and the eye of a needle. Regardless, Newsom remains firmly in the plutocrats’ corner.

There was also his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, late last month — always a popular destination for those angling for high office — amid President Donald Trump’s lunge toward Greenland. Just as European leaders were discovering that, having tolerated U.S. imperialism in Venezuela, it was now threatening their own backyard, Newsom kindly offered some unsolicited advice, scolding them that “Trump is a T. rex — you mate with him or he devours you, one way or the other, and you need to stand up to it.” (The revelation that T. rexes can be defeated by standing up to them will come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen “Jurassic Park.”) Trump, for his part, merely shrugged in response: “I used to get along so great with Gavin.”

Last week and with much publicity, Newsom launched a review of TikTok’s moderation practices, accusing the platform of suppressing Trump-critical content after a deal was finalized to transfer Chinese ownership of the app to a consortium of pro-Israel, Trump-loving billionaires, including Larry Ellison and Michael Dell. It is unsurprising that social media is an issue of concern for Newsom, as he is apparently the last person on Earth under the impression the Trump administration can be tweeted into submission, a strategy which will surely pay dividends any day now.

Finally, students of shameless self-promotion may already be familiar with “This Is Gavin Newsom,” the podcast launched in early 2025 in which the governor has sought to bridge the political divide by sitting down for chummy dialogue with far-right celebrities like Ben Shapiro and the late Charlie Kirk. What this looks like in practice is Shapiro goading Newsom into denying Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza, while Kirk earned Newsom’s fulsome agreement about the nefarious menace of trans women playing sports. 

Yet there are those in the political media unbothered by all this — if anything, it is the kind of thing they would like to see more of. Instead, their concern comes from a different direction, if not an alternate universe, altogether.

Writing in The Atlantic late last month, Marc Novicoff and Jonathan Chait argued “Gavin Newsom’s Record Is a Problem.” While acknowledging he has “sensed what Democrats want … and is delivering it with a roguish charisma” (your mileage may vary), they nevertheless worry he may be perceived as too progressive. This will, one assumes, be followed by essays on why Chuck Schumer is too courageous and JD Vance is too likable.

Novicoff and Chait posit that Newsom’s tenure as governor has seen California “fall hard for faddish progressive policies on immigration, education, and crime that either didn’t work, violated the intuitions of most Americans, or both.” As proof, they offer the state providing Medicaid to undocumented immigrants and gender-affirming health care for prisoners, both of which they present as catastrophic missteps that will come back to haunt him in 2028.

Such is the modern centrist credo: to overcome a perception rooted in fantasy, it may be necessary to make the reality of people’s lives worse. In fact, it would seem their preferred litmus test for a candidate is that they not only refuse to recognize the rights and basic humanity of immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and the incarcerated, but that they also must never offer even the most superficial indication to the contrary.

This is all par for the course from Chait, who maintains Kamala Harris’s 2024 defeat had little to do with her support for Israel during a genocide, her proud past as California’s “top cop,” or her unwillingness to distance herself from Joe Biden’s legacy. Instead, Chait blames those few instances during her Hindenburg-like 2019 stab at the Democratic nomination where she briefly and unconvincingly pivoted left before returning to the comfort of political moderation.

Related

Jon Chait Thinks Kamala Harris Went Too Far Left. He’s Just Falling for Trump’s Demagoguery.

In the real world however, the arch-centrist Chait got everything he could hope for in Harris, who promptly blew it; now, with Newsom as the alleged front-runner for 2028, the fact that Chait is already preemptively recycling the same excuses for failure does not inspire confidence.

“Just about everything people don’t like about the Democratic Party has come true in Newsom’s California,” Chait and Novicoff write, inadvertently stumbling onto a point. Many Americans despise the Democrats for their craven coddling of billionaires and corporate interests, their fealty to zombified Third Way snake oil, and their twitchy, terrified suspicion of any mass movement too radical for their own beige, milquetoast taste — and sure enough, in the California governor’s mansion sits a man who personifies all these grim qualities.

If Newsom — who treats billionaires as a treasured natural resource, who mobilized thousands of National Guard troops to quash Black Lives Matter protests, who made a photo op of breaking down a homeless encampment with his own hands — is not impeccably centrist enough for the likes of Chait, who the hell is? A John Fetterman who’s on the ball and not acting like a Republican? A Kyrsten Sinema whose personal life isn’t straight out of a daytime soap opera? A reanimated WelcomeFest speaker stitched together in Matt Yglesias’s laboratory?

It does ring true that Newsom will be painted as a deranged radical out of some Californian hippie dystopia, because under Trump, what was once McCarthyism is now standard practice. So why would anyone still believe the forces he represents can be met halfway, given they will inevitably smear as commies anyone to the left of “The Turner Diaries”?

Watching Newsom’s refusal to accept this reality has not been edifying. Following the murder of Renee Good by ICE last month, Newsom’s press office released a post on X which simply read “STATE. SPONSORED. TERRORISM,” a position which held for a little over a week until Ben Shapiro badgered him into walking it back. For all his tough-guy posturing, one wonders how tough a politician can really be if Ben goddamn Shapiro — whose greatest enemies are socialism, wokeness, and things on high shelves — can get you to fold like a cheap lawn chair. But this is Newsom’s style: blustering proclamations that might, to the casual observer, be mistaken for principle or policy, closely followed by the reticence and cowardice that defines mainstream Democratic politics.

Related

It’s Time for Concrete Action on ICE. Sadly, We Have the Democrats.

It should go without saying that Newsom’s palling around with right-wing pseudo-intellectuals like Kirk and Shapiro — along with his assurances that he does not favor abolishing the death squads currently occupying Minnesota — do not appear to have won him any converts, respect, or sympathy from the American right. And why should it? In Trump, they have found a president that will indulge their darkest desires, liberate their deepest prejudices and deliver the violence they yearn to see inflicted on all those they judge as deserving — in short, everything they could ever want. Meanwhile, there are still those who believe the key to defeating American fascism is making sure the left gets none of what it wants. Go figure.

Unsurprisingly, there has been little indication the American progressive left perceives Newsom as deserving anything but disdain. Recent weeks have only bolstered the sense that committing to the abolition of ICE is a prerequisite for any remotely moral candidate in 2028. If Newsom fails to become that candidate, it will not be because he appeared too left-wing, but because he lacked the guts or the inclination to be anything except what he manifestly is: a preening political operator, beholden to a status quo that no longer exists.

The post Gavin Newsom’s Biggest Problem Is Gavin Newsom appeared first on The Intercept.

The American has earned the trust of Luciano Spalletti in Italy, but his role with the USMNT remains an open question

Juventus have tried to get rid of Weston McKennie. They even succeeded once, sending him on loan to Leeds United only for the American to return six months later. When he got back to Turin, as US coach Gregg Berhalter told the story at the time, Juve had emptied his locker and given away his parking spot. Despite this, McKennie stuck around.

It’s just as well for the Old Lady that he did – McKennie is now in the form of his life. The 27-year-old has scored four times in just eight games since the start of 2026. He has become one of Juve’s most important players and arguably the biggest driving force behind their recent upturn in form. Luciano Spalletti – among the most big-name coaches currently working in Italian football – has used McKennie to mould the team in his own image.

Immigration authorities say they're targeting the "worst of the worst," but they haven't asked to take custody of over 100 non-citizens in Minnesota's prison system.

Casey Wasserman has said he regrets 2003 emails with the convicted sex trafficker

Several Los Angeles officials have urged Casey Wasserman, the chair of the LA28 Olympics committee, to step down after emails between him and the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell surfaced.

The emails date back to 2003 and appear among more than 3m files related to Jeffrey Epstein released by the justice department last week.

These are our CNET experts' top picks for best desks of the year.

Improve your office ergonomics with the best standing desks available.

A sprawling informal economy of rogue streaming devices has taken hold across the U.S., as consumers fed up with rising TV subscription costs turn to cheap Android-based boxes that promise free access to thousands of live channels, sports events, and on-demand movies for a one-time $200 to $400 purchase. The two dominant players -- SuperBox and vSeeBox -- are manufactured by opaque Chinese companies and distributed through hundreds of American resellers at farmers markets, church festivals and Facebook groups, according to a report by The Verge. The hardware is generic and legal, but both devices guide users toward pirate streaming apps not available on any official app store. vSeeBox directs users to a service called "Heat"; SuperBox points to "Blue TV." One user estimated access to between 6,000 and 8,000 channels, including premium sports networks and hundreds of local affiliates. A 2025 Dish Network lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller alleged that some live channels on the device were being ripped directly from Dish's Sling TV service -- Sling's logo was still visible on certain feeds. Dish has pursued resellers aggressively, winning $1.25 million in damages from a vSeeBox seller in 2024 over 500 devices and $405,000 from another over 162 devices. None of this has meaningfully slowed adoption. The market has roots in earlier Chinese-made devices like TVPad that targeted Asian expat communities and reportedly sold 3 million units before being litigated out of existence. SuperBox and vSeeBox simply broadened the audience to mainstream America.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British firms could get more opportunities to supply defence equipment to Kyiv if agreement can be reached

The UK could reap greater benefits from a €90bn (£78bn) EU loan for Ukraine, if it agrees to help pay the cost of borrowing, after European countries signed off long-awaited financial aid for Kyiv.

British firms could have greater opportunities to supply defence equipment to Ukraine funded by the loan if the government agrees a “fair” contribution towards EU borrowing costs.

A commitment to an ongoing story and more frequent new heroes, including five right now, move the game in the direction it always seemed to promise.

Ex-Trump adviser adds to elections officials’ concern about potential interference from Trump administration in voting

Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist and rightwing podcast host, said he wants to see immigration agents at the polls in November, a proposal that election officials have feared.

Bannon has no formal power, but is an influential figure on the far right and is closely tied with the Trump administration.

Marius Borg Høiby, 29, on trial accused of 38 crimes, broke down in tears as he claimed press had harassed him for years

Marius Borg Høiby, the son of Norway’s crown princess, has told a court he does not remember taking pictures and videos found on his phone that police say show him sexually assaulting a woman at a royal residence.

Høiby, Mette-Marit’s son from a relationship before her marriage to Crown Prince Haakon, is on trial accused of 38 crimes, including four rapes and assaults.

Is it against the law for someone to possess a firearm who is considered an “unlawful user” of any controlled substance, including marijuana? The exact definition of those terms is at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court decisions this term.

On March 2, 2026, the justices will hear arguments in United States v. Hemani, a case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where the appeals bench struck down the application of a federal law banning anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from possessing firearms or ammunition.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Ali Danial Hemani after it obtained a warrant to search his home. Agents found a 9mm pistol, 60 grams of marijuana, and 4.7 grams of cocaine in Hemani’s possession, according to court documents. The government believed that Hemani was a habitual marijuana user. A grand jury found that Hemani had violated the “unlawful user” provision” of U.S.C. 922(g)(3) by possessing a handgun while in the possession of marijuana. Hemani said that U.S.C. 922(g)(3) didn’t apply to his case and that the arrest violated his rights under the Second Amendment, which protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

The case has attracted a considerable amount of attention, with groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA), the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, and the Cato Institute filing briefs supporting Hemani. In addition to United States Solicitor General John Sauer, a group of 19 states, Everytown For Gun Safety, and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence support the federal government’s position.

The Facts in the Case

A magistrate judge initially ruled in favor of Hemani finding the government lacked sufficient “historical analogues,” required by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, to prosecute him. “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” said Justice Clarence Thomas in Bruen. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

On June 21, 2024, Supreme Court applied the Bruen test for the first time in United States v. Rahimi, ruling that an individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another person may be temporarily disarmed under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), without violating the Second Amendment.

Hemani’s case was considered in the context of several other court decisions as it headed toward the Fifth Circuit. The appeals court ruled in favor of Hemani in Jan. 31, 2025. It cited United States v. Connelly (2024) also from the same circuit, which found that a marijuana-smoking gunowner who was not impaired could not be charged under U.S.C. 922(g)(3).

The Basic Arguments at the Supreme Court

In his petition to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Sauer said the Fifth Circuit’s Connelly decision was wrong, and there was enough evidence historically to support U.S.C. 922(g)(3)’s firearms restrictions for a person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance,” and such restrictions applied to Hemani. The Court accepted the case on Oct. 20, 2025.

In his most recent brief to the Supreme Court, Sauer cites Bruen and Rahimi, and he argues the government can show the application of the law “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Sauer notes, “[T]his case presents narrow circumstances where the government can satisfy that rigorous burden.”

Sauer believes the historical record supports disarming people actively under the influence of alcohol or controlled substances, and it also supports temporarily disarming people who habitually use alcohol and, by association today, controlled substances. “Early American legislatures recognized that habitual drunkards present heightened dangers of crime and violence,” he states. “They classified drunkards as criminal vagrants subject to confinement in jail or workhouses, committed drunkards to lunatic asylums, and subjected drunkards to surety laws backed by threat of jail.”

The Solicitor General notes that Congress and the states have restricted firearms possession by illegal drug users “for as long as that social evil has plagued America” and the Supreme Court should reverse the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.

In their latest brief, Hemani’s attorneys believe the case’s core question is if U.S.C. 922(g)(3) can be applied to a person who occasionally uses marijuana and is not a habitual consumer: “The only question before this Court is whether §922(g)(3) is constitutional as applied to someone who admits to consuming marijuana a few times a week. It is not.”

The government’s case against Hemani also has other problems, they believe: “Lower courts have long recognized that it is not clear what the ‘unlawful user’ prong covers at all, and some have candidly admitted that it is likely unconstitutionally vague absent at least some sort of temporal connection between drug use and gun possession.”

They also don’t agree with the historical precedents cited by the government as permitting a restriction of Hemani’s Second Amendment rights. The government’s interpretation is “broad enough to encompass anyone who drank beer, wine, or spirits with meals a few days a week,” they argue. “By the government’s logic much of the Founding generation—not to mention tens of millions of Americans today—could have been deprived of the right to keep a firearm in the home for self-defense.”

Broader Second Amendment Trends

United States v. Hemani is one of two major Second Amendment cases at the Court this term. The justices heard arguments on Jan. 20, 2026 in Wolford v. Lopez, which may clarify when and where people with gun-ownership permits can possess firearms in publicly accessible private locations. A core question in that case is if the owner of a concealed gun permit can enter many private properties without informing owners they are carrying a gun legally unless asked.

In both of the current cases, the justices will consider the new tests proposed in Bruen and Rahimi, and if the basic Second Amendment rights of citizens will be expanded or restricted based on historical interpretations from the Court.

The decision in United States v. Hemani will likely come down from the Court by late June.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

As the wheels of justice begin to turn in Britain, a spotlight should also shine on the financier’s wealthy enablers in the US

“The more Epstein documents get released, the more we see how he had so many powerful friends, and that’s ultimately what helped him,” commented the US lawyer Lisa Bloom in an interview with the Guardian this week. As Ms Bloom, who represents 11 of Jeffrey Epstein’s dogged and brave victims, drily notes: “That’s not the way the justice system is supposed to work.”

From the outset, the Epstein affair has offered a textbook example of the ability of the influential and well-connected to avoid scrutiny and intimidate those who would exert it. A ruthless pursuit of transparency, both institutional and personal, is the only way to combat such tactics and hold power to account. In the extraordinary days following the release of further Epstein files last week, the wheels of justice in Britain are belatedly beginning to turn on that basis.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Fulton County officials moved Wednesday to regain control of thousands of 2020 election records seized by federal agents last week.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, shot dead on Tuesday, appealed to ‘a nostalgia for a past that is remembered as more secure’

The assassination of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the second son of Libya’s late dictator Muammar Gaddafi, is a reminder of both how violent Libya remains more than 15 years after his father’s demise – and how much Saif had come to be perceived as a threat to Libya’s governing elite.

The loyalist Gaddafi green movement remained a potent gathering point for some Libyans nostalgic for a return to imagined past security that Saif’s father symbolised.

Ryan Routh, who tried to kill president in 2024, also receives a consecutive seven-year sentence for gun conviction

A man convicted of trying to assassinate Donald Trump on a Florida golf course in 2024 was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison.

US district judge Aileen Cannon pronounced Ryan Routh’s fate in the same Fort Pierce courtroom that erupted into chaos in September when he tried to stab himself shortly after jurors found him guilty on all counts.

“It’s clear to me that you engaged in a premeditated, calculated plot to take a human life,” Cannon said.

Investors were assessing on Wednesday whether a selloff in global software stocks this week had gone too far, as they weighed if businesses could survive an existential threat posed by AI. The answer: It's unclear and will lead to volatility. From a report: After a broad selloff on Tuesday that saw the S&P 500 software and services index fall nearly 4%, the sector slipped another 1% on Wednesday. While software stocks have been under pressure in recent months as AI has gone from being a tailwind for many of these companies to investors worrying about the disruption it will cause to some sectors, the latest selloff was triggered by a new legal tool from Anthropic's Claude large language model (LLM). The tool - a plug-in for Claude's agent for tasks across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis - underscored the push by LLMs into the so-called "application layer," where these firms are increasingly muscling into lucrative enterprise businesses for revenue they need to fund massive investments. If successful, investors worry, it could wreak havoc across a range of industries, from finance to law and coding.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chatham House fellow gives evidence on Venezuela to UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee News release jon.wallace 4 February 2026

Dr Christopher Sabatini, Senior Research Fellow for Latin America, provided evidence on 3 February.

Senior Research Fellow Dr Christopher Sabatini provided evidence to a session of the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee on 3 February. 

Dr Sabatini was invited to provide evidence due to his expertise on Venezuela and US policy towards the country. During his appearance he discussed repression and electoral fraud under Venezuela’s deposed President Nicolás Maduro; US claims of narcotics trafficking by his government; the subsequent attack on Venezuela and removal of Maduro and his wife; and the response of the Venezuelan people and the wider region.

Dr Sabatini also discussed US objectives in the country now regarding democracy, economic recovery and the oil industry, and the relation of the Trump administration’s actions to domestic US politics.

Drawing from his previous work on Chatham House’s Venezuela working group, Dr Sabatini’s testimony focused on recommendations on how the UK and other democratic governments can be more effective defending international norms and multilateralism through collective, pre-emptive diplomacy. 

Dr Sabatini said:  

‘The response to President Trump’s sabre rattling over Greenland provides an example of what nation states acting pre-emptively and collectively may achieve. 

‘In the case of Venezuela, governments could and should have acted earlier to defend the other international norms of self determination and human rights. 

‘International efforts to defend human rights, self-determination and national sovereignty may not have been enough to deter the targeted military action in Venezuela. But they would have signalled earlier a commitment to international norms’.

Watch the session in full.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, is accused of shooting two members of the West Virginia National Guard near the White House in November.

The Anker Solix E10 competes with the Powerwall and other home battery backups. It offers three ways to keep your home powered during an outage. You can buy it now.

Suit is the first under new law allowing residents to sue providers protected in their states under ‘shield laws’

A physician based in California has become the first medical provider sued under a recently enacted Texas statute that empowers private individuals to file civil lawsuits against providers who mail abortion medication into the state.

The case was brought by Jerry Rodriguez, who claims that Remy Coeytaux, a doctor practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area, violated a Texas law that allows abortion providers to face penalties of at least $100,000 if they mail pills into Texas. The filing alleges Coeytaux mailed abortion medication to end Rodriguez’s girlfriend’s pregnancies twice, once in 2024 and again in early 2025.

Local politician says armed men rounded up residents, bound their hands behind their backs and shot them

More than 160 people have been killed in two villages in western Nigeria in the country’s deadliest armed assaults this year, as communities reel from repeated and widespread acts of violence perpetrated by jihadists and other armed groups.

The death toll from Tuesday’s attacks in Woro and Nuku in Kwara state stood at 162 on Wednesday afternoon, according to Mohammed Omar Bio, a member of parliament representing the area.

NSS with ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms passes lab testing and enters Modules in Process list, making Rocky Linux from CIQ one of the first Enterprise Linux distributions advancing FIPS-validated post-quantum cryptography with NSS

RENO, Nev., Feb. 4, 2026 — CIQ today announced that Network Security Services (NSS) for Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC) 9.6 with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms has achieved Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and entered the Modules in Process (MIP) list. This milestone makes Rocky Linux from CIQ the first Enterprise Linux distribution with an NSS module containing NIST-approved PQC algorithms advancing toward full FIPS 140-3 validation.

The NSS module includes two NIST-approved PQC algorithms: ML-KEM (Module-Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism) for secure key exchange, and ML-DSA (Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm) for digital signatures. These algorithms are designed to resist attacks from both classical and quantum computers.

When Rocky Linux released NSS version 3.112 in September 2025 with ML-KEM and ML-DSA support, the algorithms were feature complete but not FIPS compliant. CIQ Distinguished Engineer and Samba Project Co-Creator Jeremy Allison led the effort to enhance NSS to meet FIPS 140-3 standards for submission to NIST.

“The ML-KEM and ML-DSA code in NSS was feature complete, but not FIPS compliant,” said Allison. “CIQ has enabled and open-sourced FIPS 140-3 compliance code in nss-3.112 for these increasingly important algorithms to provide security for our customers and help them prepare for the post-quantum future.”

All of CIQ’s FIPS PQC engineering work is open source and available on GitHub, contributing to the broader security community.

The National Security Agency’s CNSA 2.0 sets a compressed timeline for National Security Systems to adopt quantum–resistant cryptography, with key transition milestones beginning in 2027 and a full migration targeted by 2035. However, the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat makes immediate preparation critical. Adversaries can collect encrypted data today and decrypt it once quantum computers become capable.

NSS provides application-level cryptography for browser sessions, SSL/TLS connections, and serves as the cryptographic provider for Java applications when systems operate in FIPS mode. This makes PQC-enabled NSS relevant not just for web communications but for the broad range of Java-based enterprise applications common in government and regulated industries.

“Organizations making platform decisions today need confidence that their infrastructure partner can deliver quantum-resistant solutions,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ. “Achieving MIP status with CAVP-certified PQC algorithms demonstrates CIQ can solve these complex engineering challenges and gives customers confidence in the roadmap for OpenSSL and other cryptographic modules as we build the quantum-resistant stack they’ll need.”

CIQ’s cryptographic strategy extends beyond NSS. The company is tracking PQC implementation across all five FIPS cryptographic modules:

• NSS — ML-KEM and ML-DSA in MIP with CAVP certification, full FIPS 140-3 validation anticipated Q2 2027 at current velocity
• OpenSSL — PQC support added in OpenSSL 3.5; FIPS 140-3 validation process begins for Rocky Linux from CIQ 10.2 in Q3 2026 and RLC 9.10 in mid-2027
• Kernel — Monitoring upstream PQC development
• GnuTLS — PQC stabilization ongoing upstream
• LibGCrypt — Awaiting stable PQC release upstream

As upstream projects stabilize PQC implementations, CIQ will continue pursuing FIPS validation to deliver comprehensive quantum-resistant infrastructure.

NSS with ML-KEM and ML-DSA post-quantum algorithms in MIP status is available now for Rocky Linux from CIQ customers. Many compliance frameworks accept MIP status while awaiting full CMVP validation. The MIP listing and technical details are available on the NIST Cryptographic Module Validation Program website. CIQ’s open source FIPS PQC compliance code is available on GitHub.

Read more about the CAVP certification in this CIQ blog post.

More from HPCwire

• NIST Validates Quantinuum Cryptography Solution – Origin
• NIST Selects HQC as Fifth Algorithm for Post-Quantum Encryption
• NIST Issues Draft Post Quantum Cryptography Transition Strategy and Timeline
• NIST Releases First 3 Finalized Post-Quantum Encryption Standards
• Google Outlines Implementation of NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standard

About CIQ

CIQ delivers secure and performant software infrastructure for the demands of all modern workloads, from the most mundane to the most extreme HPC and AI jobs. We believe infrastructure should drive the future of your business and that both the operating system of a single machine and the orchestration layer to manage a cluster of machines and even hybrid environments needs to be optimized for your requirements. We are an open source company who has started and contributed to critical infrastructure projects such as Rocky Linux, Warewulf, Fuzzball, Ascender and Apptainer. For more information, visit ciq.com.

Source: CIQ

The post CIQ’s NSS Module 1st to Achieve CAVP Certification for Post-Quantum Cryptography Algorithms appeared first on HPCwire.

The FBI raid in Georgia is not an aberration. It fits a broader playbook, with troubling historic precedents

What in the hell were FBI agents doing in an election facility in Fulton county, Georgia, last week? They surely weren’t investigating a crime. Nor were they serving the public.

Justifying Donald Trump’s “big lie” about winning the 2020 election may seem like his own lost cause – but like his Confederate forebears, he is weaponizing it, damage be damned. Not even his subsequent election victory has quieted Trump’s appetite for more power, earned or otherwise.

Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist

Vatican appears to have ordered removal of restored work, which artist confessed he had made to resemble PM

The face of a winged angel bearing a striking resemblance to the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has been erased from a fresco in a historic Rome church, putting an end to a debacle that embarrassed the Vatican.

The image on the wall painting in a chapel of the Basilica of St Lawrence in Lucina in central Rome was removed overnight, leaving the cherub headless.

Penny, a doberman pinscher, won best in show at the 150th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York

Sheriff’s department says detectives are speaking with anyone who may have been in contact with Nancy Guthrie

Authorities in Arizona have still not identified a suspect in the investigation surrounding the apparent abduction of Nancy Guthrie, the elderly mother of the Today show host Savannah Guthrie.

In a statement posted on X, the Pima county sheriff’s department said that detectives were continuing to speak with anyone who may have been in contact with Nancy Guthrie and were working with the Guthrie family.

Departure marks large drop in agents on the ground but still leaves about 2,000 there, far above typical levels for state

• US politics live – latest updates

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said about 700 federal agents would leave Minnesota, a large drop in agents on the ground but still leaving about 2,000 agents there, far above typical levels for the state.

Homan said the reduction came as county jails were negotiating over increased coordination with federal officials, though it’s not clear which counties have agreed to coordinate with immigration enforcement officials.

The disappearance of "Today" show co-host Savannah Guthrie's mother, Nancy Guthrie, is being investigated as a crime.

Since federal immigration agents fatally shot a man in Minnesota, the state's top corrections official told CBS News there have been "conversations" with the federal government

Two school districts and a teachers union allege that the immigration crackdown has spilled onto campuses and interrupted the functioning of schools across the state.

HAMBURG, Germany, Feb. 4, 2026 — ISC High Performance is excited to announce the creation of the ISC Next Generation Committee, a new operational and advisory body aligned with ISC’s goal of fostering high performance computing (HPC) talent development. The committee aims to enhance dialogue between the established HPC community and students and young professionals, ensuring ISC remains relevant and accessible to the next generation of talent.

“The Next Generation Committee marks an important step in the systematic development of the ISC program to make it more accessible for younger attendees,” said Colleen Sheedy, People and Organization Development Manager at ISC Group. “Our objective is not only to invite students and young professionals to participate in ISC, but to involve them more actively in shaping ideas, formats, and connections within the community – within a clear and sustainable framework.”

A Structured Bridge Between Generations

The committee’s creation follows sustained feedback from younger attendees who expressed a need for stronger orientation, greater visibility, and more opportunities to contribute. While these attendees have long provided valuable input informally, the Next Generation Committee formalizes this engagement and establishes a structured channel for emerging talent to engage with the ISC community.

Positioned as a connector between generations, the committee advances three core objectives: enhancing the visibility of young talent, reducing barriers for new participants, and ensuring the relevance of ISC content for students and entry-level professionals.

The Next Generation Committee operates within a clearly defined scope, combining selected operational contributions with an advisory function. Its activities include:

• Supporting the development of onboarding and networking formats for young participants,
• Contributing ideas and feedback on selected program elements,
• Facilitating dialogue between young participants and established stakeholders.

The committee will be officially introduced at ISC 2026. During this initial phase, members will focus on observation, community engagement, and identifying key needs and opportunities. From 2027 onwards, the first jointly developed measures will be implemented as part of evolving our offering for the next generation of HPC practitioners.

Committee Members

• Chair: Niklas Roemer, Master’s student in Computer Science, ETH Zurich
• Deputy Chair: Maria Hampel, Master’s student in Informatics, Dresden University of Technology; Research Assistant at the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH)
• Antonia Maar, HPC & AI Analyst, Intersect360 Research
• Jannik Pflieger, Master’s student in Informatics, Technical University of Munich; Department Lead PushQuantum e.V
• Majesa Trimmel, Junior Research Engineer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC); PhD student in Computer Architecture at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)

Investing in the Future of the HPC Community

With the Next Generation Committee, ISC reinforces its long-term commitment to community development and talent cultivation in HPC. Beyond technical excellence, the initiative aims to foster orientation, networking, and professional development, enabling young talents to find their place and voice within the ISC ecosystem.

Join ISC High Performance 2026 in #ConnectingTheDots

ISC 2026 returns to the Congress Center Hamburg from June 22 – 26 for its 41st edition. Since its inception in 1986, it has been recognized as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most attended event for the HPC community, and increasingly for AI and quantum professionals interested in performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

Source: ISC

The post ISC Forms New Committee to Boost Engagement of Emerging HPC Talent appeared first on HPCwire.

House Democrats say US anti-trafficking efforts have been hamstrung by diversion of resources to immigration raids

A diversion of law enforcement personnel and resources to assist with Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign and deployments to US cities has undermined the government’s efforts to combat child exploitation and human trafficking, Democratic lawmakers warned.

In the letter, sent on Wednesday and first shared with the Guardian, nearly two dozen House Democrats demand that the homeland security and justice departments “immediately” restore full staffing and resources to their anti-trafficking divisions. It also makes reference to the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files, arguing that the government’s failure to publicly release the full scope of the documents in its possession “damages trust in institutions meant to deliver justice”.

Will Ilia Malinin's signature quadruple axel earn him gold in Italy?

Plugging up data-leaking apps extends your phone's battery life. Who would have guessed?

SYDNEY, Feb. 4, 2026 — Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC), a leader in quantum computing and quantum machine learning, today announced the launch of Quantum Twins, an application-specific quantum simulator designed to accelerate molecule and materials discovery. Built utilizing the company’s atomic-scale semiconductor manufacturing process, Quantum Twins showcases the exceptional precision and already-achieved scalability of SQC’s full-stack approach to quantum computing.

Quantum Twins are comprised of large arrays of qubit registers (quantum dots) patterned on pure silicon with 0.13 nanometer (atom level) accuracy. This exquisite precision enables SQC to create custom chips – Quantum Twins – that physically encode direct replicas of the physical systems and chemical interactions that customers wish to analyse and understand.

This world-first product provides a pathway to simulation of quantum systems that is impossible for classical computers. Quantum Twins provide an enhanced understanding of quantum interactions. Analysing magnetism, atomic interaction and superconductivity at this scale will pave the way for novel information storage, low power electronics and broad materials discovery. Details on the scientific foundation of this platform were published today in Nature, a system including 15,000 qubit registers.

The launch follows a period of rapid expansion in SQC’s manufacturing capabilities. In November 2025, the company demonstrated the ability to pattern 250,000 qubit registers in just eight hours, de-risking the required manufacturing yields and volumes needed to deliver commercial-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers. As a full-stack company, SQC can design, produce and test new quantum chips in under a week. It’s one of the many key advantages of the company’s 14|15 platform in the race to deliver the world’s first commercial scale quantum computer.

SQC’s Founder and CEO, Michelle Simmons, said: “Quantum Twins represents a window into the quantum world that customers can use for materials discovery today. The enabler is that we can engineer hundreds of thousands of qubit registers with atomic precision. It’s an incredible achievement in semiconductor manufacturing with sub-nanometer accuracy.”

SQC’s Chair and former ARM CEO, Simon Segars, added: “Expanding our product offering with the launch of Quantum Twins brings SQC’s atomic-scale advantage to the global materials and chemistry sectors. Having demonstrated commercial success with our quantum machine learning system, Watermelon, SQC’s latest offering is a definitive signal of our world leading manufacturing precision and scalability.”

SQC debuted its multi-qubit, multi-register processor last month with industry-leading fidelities up to 99.99% and performance that improves as the system scales. The company recently progressed to Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative and its quantum machine learning system, Watermelon, is already delivering impact across a variety of sectors including telecommunications and defence.

Quantum Twins are now available via direct contract with SQC. For more information, visit www.sqc.com.au.

More from HPCwire

• Silicon Quantum Computing Highlights Nature Results on Multi-Register Silicon Quantum Processor
• SkyWater Technology and Silicon Quantum Computing Team to Advance Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing
• Silicon Quantum Computing Selected by DARPA to Advance into 2nd Stage of Quantum Benchmarking Initiative

About Silicon Quantum Computing

Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) is at the forefront of global efforts to build a commercial-scale quantum system. Leveraging over 25 years of technological excellence and delivery, SQC’s proprietary machines and processes allow the company to see and control matter atom-by-atom. SQC’s atomically engineered quantum machine learning chips and universal quantum computing systems have demonstrated world-leading algorithmic fidelity, positioning the company at the forefront of quantum innovation. Controlling its own QPU manufacturing means that SQC can design, produce and test new systems every week while delivering quantum machine learning and simulation systems to customers today. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

Source: Silicon Quantum Computing

The post Silicon Quantum Computing Launches Quantum Twins to Accelerate Molecule and Materials Discovery appeared first on HPCwire.

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Julie Le expressed frustration to judge, in response to questions about failure to comply with court orders

An ICE attorney who publicly expressed frustrations with her role and told a court “this job sucks” is no longer detailed to the US attorney’s office for the district of Minnesota, according to NBC News.

“The system sucks. This job sucks,” Julie Le, an attorney representing the US attorney’s office in Minnesota, said in response to a federal judge’s questions on why ICE has repeatedly failed to comply with court orders.

Position of Mountbatten-Windsor now appears even more grave, and the shadow cast over his family even darker

When King Charles stripped Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his titles and announced he would be booted out of Royal Lodge, Buckingham Palace said the “censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him”.

Four months and more than 3m documents later, Charles must surely feel vindicated on his tough approach. For while there is nothing to suggest the king nor any other senior royals knew then what was to come in the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, what has emerged has been truly shocking.

President Trump is expected to sign an executive order putting JD Vance and Andrew Ferguson in charge of the group.

Melinda French Gates insists Microsoft founder has questions to answer over his relationship with Epstein

Bill Gates has said he “regrets” ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein, as his former wife Melinda French Gates alluded to “muck” in their marriage, and insisted the Microsoft founder has questions to answer over his relationship with the deceased child sex offender.

Allegations that Gates hid a sexually transmitted disease from his wife after contact with “Russian girls” surfaced in the latest release of the Epstein files, which have provided remarkable insight into the disgraced financier’s multiple celebrity connections and activities.

U.S., Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are back around a table for a second round of technical talks, but in Kyiv, Russian bombs bring suffering and skepticism.

Robb Pitts said call came days before federal agents seized 2020 election documents in Georgia

• US politics live – latest updates

The Fulton county commission chair, Robb Pitts, said at a press conference this morning that he received a phone call last Monday – two days before the FBI served a criminal warrant to seize 2020 election documents – to warn that he, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, former Raffensperger deputy Gabriel Sterling and others in the state were at risk of imminent arrest by federal agents.

“That did not happen on Monday,” Pitts said. “It didn’t happen on Tuesday, but lo and behold on Wednesday, the FBI shows up.”

King Charles' disgraced brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor moves from his royal mansion to a private estate after appearing in newly released Epstein files.

Pinterest says two engineers lost their jobs after writing custom scripts to identify employees who were cut in a recent round of layoffs.

In today's market, the price of your silver bars depends on the spot price, premiums and even where you buy them.

Former phone hacker Graham Johnson denies claims, saying payments were part of effort to draw attention to unlawful behaviour by media

A researcher investigating lawbreaking by the media paid private investigators and ex-journalists for their testimony about alleged unlawful activity at the publisher of the Daily Mail, the high court has heard.

Graham Johnson, a former phone hacker who later turned to researching unlawful activity in the press, confirmed he had made payments to six people who all feature in the case Prince Harry and others have brought against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL).

Anthropic said today that its AI assistant Claude will not carry advertising of any kind -- no sponsored links next to conversations, no advertiser influence on the model's responses, and no unsolicited third-party product placements -- calling Claude a "space to think" that should remain free of commercial interruption. The announcement comes days after Anthropic's chief rival, OpenAI, announced plans to bring ads to some of its ChatGPT offerings. Anthropic said its internal analysis of Claude conversations found that a significant share involve sensitive or deeply personal topics. An advertising-based model would also create incentives to optimize for engagement and time spent rather than usefulness, Anthropic said, noting that the most helpful AI interaction might be a short one that doesn't prompt further conversation. Anthropic generates revenue from enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions. The company said it is exploring agentic commerce -- Claude handling a purchase or booking on a user's behalf -- but stressed that all such interactions should be user-initiated, not advertiser-driven. Anthropic has also brought AI tools to educators in over 60 countries and said it may consider lower-cost subscription tiers and regional pricing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The most popular mom content tends to be rightwing tradwife propaganda or not political at all – pushing progressive creators out of the algorithm

For someone who doesn’t have a marble island in their kitchen I spend a disproportionate amount of time staring at marble kitchen islands, slack-jawed, brain turned half off. That’s because I consume a lot of videos from mommy bloggers, mom influencers and the like. In kitchen “closing shift” videos, they wipe down their islands and reset by lighting luxury candles, the glow accentuating their respectable cosmetic procedures. Other times I watch them waltz through their morning routines: getting kids out the door, sweating it out in boutique fitness classes, showing off Amazon hauls, or explaining their children’s matching holiday photoshoot outfits.

For better or worse, this is how I have chosen to spend my one wild and precious life: consuming blissfully low-stakes motherhood content on my phone. It is domestically competent ASMR that also satiates my desire to peek into everyone’s bathroom cabinets. I nod in unsolicited approval as a TikTok mom I follow shares her green juice order. Fascinating. I should drink something like that. Another posts timestamps of her baby’s night-time sleep schedule. I, who lives between walls that have never heard the wail of an infant, ingurgitate the entire video.

National progressives see a chance in Texas to install a new member of the Squad in the place of departing Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett — by electing her pastor.

With Crockett vacating her House seat to run in a competitive — and increasingly ugly — Senate primary, pastor Frederick Haynes III is running to fill her seat. The progressive outfit Justice Democrats endorsed Haynes’s campaign on Wednesday, becoming the first national group to wade into the primary for the Democrat-friendly 30th Congressional District.

The primary in Texas is just a month away, and Justice Democrats views Haynes as one of its first real chances to notch a win for the electoral left this cycle, the group’s spokesperson Usamah Andrabi told The Intercept. The 65-year-old Dallas pastor has already attracted some national attention for his outspoken criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, putting him at odds with many of his peers in Texas and the Deep South, where an open affinity between right-wing Christianity and pro-Israel Zionism is common.

That stance also marks an apparent difference between him and Crockett. While Haynes is running on ending U.S. military support for Israel and the genocide in Gaza, Crockett has drawn criticism for voting to send U.S. military aid to Israel and taking a trip there as a first-term member of Congress in August 2023 with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Israel Defense Forces. She has similarly faced criticism for accepting campaign support from the crypto industry, while Haynes has called for new regulations on cryptocurrency.

Crockett, who has brushed off some criticism of her record as “intellectually lazy,” says she’s in favor of Haynes’s campaign and endorsed him last month.

“Every leader approaches things differently, and I greatly respect Congresswoman Crockett’s work and approach,” Haynes told The Intercept. “My worldview and my positions are deeply rooted in my community, and the struggles I see those around me experiencing on a daily basis. Our community is justice minded here in Dallas.”

Also running in the March 3 Democratic primary for Crockett’s seat are former Texas state Rep. Barbara Mallory Caraway and pastor Rodney LaBruce. To win a primary in Texas, candidates have to receive a majority of votes or compete in a runoff in May.

A pastor for 40 years and a fixture in Dallas, Haynes is the 11th candidate Justice Democrats has endorsed this cycle. The group is backing more new candidates ahead of the upcoming midterm elections than it has in any other year since its inaugural 2018 cycle, which ushered in now well-known Squad members like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. After major losses last cycle, Justice Democrats says it’s deploying a more aggressive strategy this time, seeking to capitalize on voter frustration with the party establishment.

Related

National Progressives Side With Mamdani in House Race Splitting NYC Left

“We try to be as selective and intentional about the races and candidates we pick and really evaluate their path to victory,” Andrabi said. “We’re hoping we can really, as a movement — but if not, as Justice Democrats — to start this cycle off with some wins.”

In Haynes’s view, “Dems have let us down,” he told The Intercept. “The wolves of hunger, fascism, and injustice are at our door, and what does the Democratic establishment have to offer in response — strongly worded letters? Our community deserves better than this: they deserve leadership that will fight for them with the courage and commitment that this moment requires.”

As the pastor at Crockett’s church, Haynes has been an activist on issues from predatory lending to voting rights. His church holds a legal clinic, hosts a toolkit for congregation members to contact their legislators, and runs programming on food security, economic and environmental justice, and civic engagement. The church website hosts a link to a petition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza led by former Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.

That activism has also made him a target of the right. In a story last week, Jewish Insider wrote that Haynes delivered “an anti-Israel polemic from the pulpit” the day after the October 7 attacks. In his remarks, Haynes denounced Israeli apartheid.

“The Palestinians don’t have the financial backing from the United States that Israel has, and so they throw their rocks and shoot their arrows,” Haynes said on October 8, 2023, “and Israel is able to bomb them and kill them.”

“You see a much tighter grip on evangelical Christians and churches in the south, particularly ones that represent Republican constituencies, from the Israel lobby and AIPAC,” Andrabi said. But Haynes “sees it as his moral imperative to call out Israeli apartheid and genocide, particularly because so many other Christian leaders have used it for their own benefit and used it to advance their own interests and the interests of right-wing politicians.”

In addition to ending U.S. military support for Israel and regulating the crypto industry, Haynes is running on abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, providing Medicare for All, getting dark money out of elections, and banning congressional stock trading. He’s also rejecting corporate PAC money.

“Every time we choose imperialism abroad, or tax cuts for the wealthy, we are telling working people in our communities that we value their lives less,” Haynes said, citing the notion that a budget is a moral document, often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. “Every bomb dropped in Palestine is money for an underfunded school, an unpaved road, a mother who has to decide between groceries and insulin. Our tax dollars must go to supporting life in our families at home, not death in other families abroad.”

At age 65, Haynes contradicts the narrative that the battle over the future over the Democratic Party is purely about pitting younger candidates against older incumbents. The gerontocracy in Congress is its own issue, Andrabi said; being represented by corporate interests and right-wing lobbies is another. 

“It is a new generation. But that generation is not necessarily just defined or limited by an age group,” Andrabi said. “It doesn’t do us much good to replace old corporate shills with young corporate shills. The problem is that they’re corporate shills, not just that they are aging.” 

The post He’s Running to Fill Jasmine Crockett’s House Seat From Her Left. He’s Also Her Pastor. appeared first on The Intercept.

Six children among dead as Israeli agency restricts evacuations two days after crossing to Egypt reopened

Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes have killed at least 21 people, including six children and seven women, in Gaza, and Israel has halted the evacuation of patients through the Rafah border crossing just two days after it reopened.

Among the casualties was a medic who rushed to the scene to assist the wounded and was killed by a second strike on the same location in the southern city of Khan Younis. Tents in al-Mawasi, an encampment of displaced people in Khan Younis, were shredded by the blasts.

As Westminster week once again put dog breeding under the spotlight, Peta’s messaging remains as incisive as ever. But its moral clarity fades when the conversation shifts to cats

Every February, the Westminster Dog Show arrives in New York City trailing equal parts pageantry, nostalgia and protest. The dogs come to be judged. The owners and handlers come to uphold breed standards. And, almost as reliably as the movie references and the best-in-show ribbon, Peta arrives ready to dominate the conversation.

If there is one certainty about the Super Bowl of canines, it’s that the protest will share the stage with the pageantry. Westminster is an annual collision of tradition, spectacle and dissent, and Peta has become exceptionally good at owning that moment. This year was no different. Two enormous billboards screamed down from across the street of the Javits Center, where breed judging unfolded on Monday and Tuesday ahead of the prime-time sessions at Madison Square Garden. One read: Flat-faced dogs struggle to breathe. NEVER buy them. Another: You can get a nose job. They can’t. DON’T buy breathing-impaired breeds.

RENO, Nev., Feb. 4, 2026 — Positron AI, a leader in energy-efficient AI inference hardware, today announced an oversubscribed $230 million Series B financing at a post-money valuation exceeding $1 billion.

The round was co-led by ARENA Private Wealth, Jump Trading, and Unless, and includes new and strategic investment from Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Arm, and Helena. Existing investors Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, DFJ Growth, Resilience Reserve, Flume Ventures, and 1517 also participated. The financing validates Positron’s mission to make AI inference dramatically cheaper and more energy-efficient at scale.

“We’re grateful for this investor enthusiasm, which itself is a reflection of what the market is demanding,” said Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI. “Energy availability has emerged as a key bottleneck for AI deployment. And our next-generation chip will deliver 5x more tokens per watt in our core workloads versus Nvidia’s upcoming Rubin GPU. Memory is the other giant bottleneck in inference, and our next generation Asimov custom silicon will ship with over 2304 GB of RAM per device next year, versus just 384 GB for Rubin. This will be a critical differentiator in workloads including video, trading, multi-trillion parameter models, and anything requiring an enormous context window. We also expect to beat Rubin in performance per dollar for specific memory-intensive workloads.”

Positron is building the infrastructure layer that makes AI usable at scale by lowering the cost and power required to run modern models. The company’s shipping product, Atlas, is an inference system designed for rapid deployment and scaling. Atlas is also a fully American-fabricated and manufactured silicon and system, enabling fast production ramp and dependable supply for customers who need capacity quickly.

“Memory bandwidth and capacity are two of the key limiters for scaling AI inference workloads for next-generation models,” said Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis, an advisor and investor in Positron. SemiAnalysis is a leading research firm specializing in semiconductors and AI infrastructure that provides detailed insights into the full compute stack. “Positron is taking a unique approach to the memory scaling problem, and with its next-generation Asimov chip, can deliver more than an order of magnitude greater high-speed memory capacity per chip than incumbent or upstart silicon providers.”

Jump Trading Leads After Deploying Atlas

A key highlight of the round is Jump Trading’s decision to co-lead after first becoming a customer.

“For the workloads we care about, the bottlenecks are increasingly memory and power—not theoretical compute,” said Alex Davies, Chief Technology Officer of Jump Trading. “In our testing, Positron Atlas delivered roughly 3x lower end-to-end latency than a comparable H100-based system on the inference workloads we evaluated, in an air-cooled, production-ready footprint with a supply chain we can plan around. The deeper we went, the more we agreed with Positron’s roadmap—Asimov and the Titan systems—as a memory-first platform built for future workloads. We invested because Positron combines traction today with a roadmap that can reshape the cost curve and capabilities for inference.”

“Jump Trading came to Positron as a customer,” said Agrawal. “As they saw our roadmap for Asimov, our custom silicon, and Titan, our next-generation system, they chose to step up as a co-lead investor. A customer becoming an investor is one of the strongest validations we can receive. It signals both technical conviction and real-world demand.”

Building Toward Asimov and Titan: A Memory-First Platform for Next-Gen Inference

Positron’s next-generation custom silicon, Asimov, is designed around the reality that modern AI workloads are increasingly limited by memory bandwidth and capacity, not just compute flops. Asimov is designed to support 2 terabytes of memory per accelerator and 8 terabytes of memory per Titan system at similar realized memory bandwidth to NVIDIA’s next-generation Rubin GPU. At rack scale, this translates to memory capacity of well over 100 terabytes.

“As AI inference scales, efficiency and system design matter more than raw benchmarks,” said Eddie Ramirez, Vice President of Go-to-Market, Cloud AI Business Unit, Arm. “Positron’s memory-centric approach, built on Arm technology, reflects how tightly coupled systems and a broad ecosystem come together to deliver scalable, performance-per-watt gains in next-generation AI infrastructure.”

This memory-first architecture unlocks high-value inference workloads, including long-context large language models, agentic workflows, and next-generation media and video models. Positron is on track to tape out its Asimov chip just 16 months after its June Series A financing gave it the resources to fully launch the design process, and the company intends to maintain this pace with future chips. “To us, development speed is an essential competitive advantage,” said Agrawal. “Competing with Nvidia means matching their shipping frequency, and we have designed our organization around that goal.”

“Positron is solving one of the most important bottlenecks in AI: delivering inference at scale within real-world power and cost constraints,” said Ari Schottenstein, Head of Alternatives at ARENA Private Wealth. “The combination of shipping traction today with Atlas, plus a credible path to Asimov, creates a rare opportunity to define a new category in AI infrastructure.”

Positron is building this platform with an ecosystem of industry leaders, including Arm, Supermicro and other key technology and supply-chain partners.

Momentum and Growth Trajectory

Positron expects strong revenue growth in 2026, positioning the company to become one of the fastest-growing silicon companies ever, achieving large-scale commercial traction in roughly 2.5 years from company launch. The company is working with multiple frontier customers across cloud, advanced computing, and performance-sensitive verticals, and continues to expand deployments and customer programs.

More from HPCwire: Positron Secures $23.5M to Design And Manufacture Energy-Efficient, Made-In-America AI Chips

About Positron AI

Positron AI builds purpose-built hardware and software to make AI inference dramatically cheaper and more energy-efficient. Positron’s shipping product, Atlas, is designed for rapid, scalable deployment, and the company’s next-generation custom silicon, Asimov, targets tape-out toward the end of 2026 with production in early 2027. Positron’s systems are built to serve long-context and next-generation AI workloads with leading economics. Learn more at positron.ai.

Source: Positron AI

The post Positron AI Raises $230M Series B to Scale Energy-Efficient AI Inference appeared first on HPCwire.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The plan for a massive data center near Delaware City has garnered backlash from residents who are worried about its potential impact on energy costs and the environment. Today’s ruling could stop the project from moving forward entirely. 

Delaware’s environmental agency ruled Wednesday morning that a plan for a massive data center near Delaware City is not allowed under the state’s Coastal Zone Act. 

This decision could stop the project from moving forward entirely, unless developer Starwood Digital Ventures wins an appeal or makes major changes to its design. It has until Feb. 18 to appeal the decision to the Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board, an administrative panel.

The Delaware General Assembly passed the Coastal Zone Act in 1971 to protect the state’s shorelines from the impacts of new heavy industry.

The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) decided that the proposed data center near Delaware City, dubbed Project Washington, is not allowed under the law primarily because of its diesel generators.

The data center plan calls for 516 backup diesel generators that would operate in the case of a power outage. They would together need 2.5 million gallons of stored diesel, which DNREC Secretary Gregory Patterson called “entirely unprecedented” in his ruling. 

“The large tank farm that is incorporated into this proposal will pose exactly the types of risks that justify the categorical exclusion of such a tank farm from the Coastal Zone,” Patterson wrote.

The most backup generators currently at a facility in the Coastal Zone is eight, he wrote. 

Reactions from Delawareans

New Castle County Councilman Dave Carter, who previously worked for DNREC and has been trying to regulate data centers, said he thought the agency made the right decision. 

“Personally, I didn’t see how they could find the decision any other way,” he said. 

Carter said he believes an appeal of the decision would be “a difficult, very long process” and that Starwood may have to try to find other ways to generate the backup power needed to keep the facility running 24/7. 

State Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown), author of a data center regulation bill, wrote in a statement that she agreed with DNREC’s decision but that it “should not be viewed as a referendum on the future of data centers in Delaware.” 

“Given the growing emphasis on technology and artificial intelligence, it’s clear that data centers are here to stay — and it’s up to us to implement meaningful regulations that balance economic opportunity with energy affordability and reliability,” Hansen wrote.

Dustyn Thompson, chapter director of Sierra Club Delaware, called the decision a “monumental win for the environment.”

“We applaud the Department and the administration for standing up for our environment and our communities and ensuring that neither bears the brunt of this new heavy industry,” he wrote in an emailed statement. 

House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown, who represents the district where Project Washington would be located, posted on Facebook thanking those who submitted public comments to DNREC ahead of the decision. 

“This decision reflects the very real concerns raised by residents about environmental impact, air pollution, large scale fuel storage, and the potential risks to our community’s health and quality of life,” she wrote. “Those concerns were heard, carefully evaluated, and ultimately validated.”

Delaware Building Trades President James Maravelias — who has been a leading advocate for the project and the construction jobs it could bring — said the state needs to find a workable solution to its data center controversy that can provide new jobs, and implement guardrails onto the industry.

He also noted that the specific fight over the Starwood project isn’t over, citing the developer’s right to appeal.

Starwood representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Decision is major milestone for CZA

Then-Gov. Russ Peterson, an environmentalist champion, shepherded the Coastal Zone Act to passage in 1971 as Delaware saw a rising trend of industrialization creeping down the shores of the Delaware River from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The act was the first coastal zone prohibition enacted anywhere in the United States, and even pre-dated federal environmental efforts like the national Clean Water Act.

Since being approved more than 50 years ago, Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act has largely proved to be a deterrent to controversial developments within the coastal plain, or the land roughly east of U.S. Route 13/113 and Delaware Route 1.

Existing industrial sites were grandfathered in, but new heavy industrial sites would undergo additional regulatory scrutiny to make sure that they did not pose a threat to the health of residents or the environment.

In the last few decades, industrial users like Fujifilm and Veolia have received modifications to their operations permits under the CZA, while new projects have been limited to uses like a marijuana processing facility and a fish smoking plant.

Its most famous utilization was a 2008 case that denied a liquefied natural gas terminal and was ultimately upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court – but that terminal was actually being built in New Jersey. Delaware state officials denied New Jersey’s ability to build a pier into the First State’s territorial waters of the Delaware River by using the CZA, which Supreme Court justices agreed with.

The CZA has never been used to deny such a high-profile project here in Delaware though, which marks the Starwood decision as a watershed moment for DNREC’s enforcement of environmental regulations.

The post Delaware City data center faces major setback after environmental denial appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Former Post executive editor blasts owner Jeff Bezos’s ‘sickening efforts to curry favor’ with Trump

The Washington Post laid off hundreds of employees on Wednesday, which its former executive editor said “ranks among the darkest days” in the newspaper’s history. Approximately one-third of employees were affected.

Staffers at the Post have been on edge for weeks about the rumored cuts, which the publication would not confirm or deny. “It’s an absolute bloodbath,” said one employee, not authorized to speak publicly.

Film-maker Peter Ettedgui responded to BBC interview in which Reform leader apologised for any hurt caused

Nigel Farage has been accused of making a “non-apology” by a school contemporary who accused him of racist and antisemitic behaviour, after saying he was “sorry” if he had “genuinely” hurt anyone.

For the first time since the row broke after a Guardian investigation, the Reform UK party leader appeared to indicate some remorse for the impact of his alleged behaviour while at Dulwich college, a private school in south London.

For months, the Trump administration has justified its dramatic midnight raid on a Chicago apartment complex by saying that it had intelligence that the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building. But officials have provided no evidence to back up the claim.

Now, new documents confirm in the government’s own words that what prompted the raid was more pedestrian: allegations that immigrants were squatting in the complex. And the landlord had given federal officials, who were already targeting immigrants in Chicago, the blessing to search the building.

Arrest records for two of the 37 immigrants detained that September night, included in a motion filed Tuesday that’s tied to an ongoing federal consent decree, provide the clearest picture yet of what led to the controversial and aggressive operation, in which agents descended from a Blackhawk helicopter, broke down doors and zip-tied U.S. citizens and immigrants.

The records reveal that agents entered and searched the complex with the “owner/manager’s verbal and written consent.” Agents wrote that they launched the operation “based on intelligence that there were illegal aliens unlawfully occupying apartments.” They said they focused their search on units “that were not legally rented or leased at the time.” That narrative appears word for word in both arrest reports — for a Venezuelan man and a Mexican man.

“It was a brutal lie against the American public,” said Mark Fleming, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center and co-counsel in a lawsuit against the government that led to the consent decree. “This was really about immigrants purportedly occupying apartments unlawfully, which is radically different than the story they told.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security makes no mention in the records of Tren de Aragua, even though officials repeatedly cited the gang’s presence in the building as the motivation for the raid. Agents paraded immigrants in front of cameras and called their arrests a victory against terrorism. The government also claimed two of those arrested were gang members but never provided any proof.

ProPublica previously reported, based on interviews and records, that there was little evidence to back up the government’s claims. Even today, four months after the raid, federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone who was arrested. 

Over the past few months, ProPublica has interviewed 15 of the immigrants detained that night; all denied gang membership. They and others who lived in the building acknowledged there was criminal activity there, including the murder of a Venezuelan man last summer, but nobody knew of gang members there.

The two arrest records were filed in federal court as part of ongoing litigation over whether the government, during its monthslong deportation campaign in Chicago, violated a 2022 consent decree that limits warrantless arrests. The consent decree is still in place, and the government continues to challenge it.

Government attorneys had previously acknowledged in court that hundreds of immigrants detained last year may have been improperly arrested. 

Following a court order, DHS has been providing administrative arrest records to attorneys who now are demanding the release of some of those immigrants from custody or the removal of restrictions for those who are already out. That includes the Venezuelan man and Mexican man taken during the raid.

In the motion filed Tuesday night, immigrant rights attorneys said that to justify warrantless arrests across Chicago, the government described immigrants as flight risks though they were not. Some of the factors that DHS used to make that determination for the South Shore men — including their “willful disregard for other’s personal property” and their “attempt to flee from law enforcement” — were baseless and contradicted by the arrest narratives, the attorneys wrote.

Even more of the 37 arrests that night may have violated the consent decree, attorneys said, but the cases under review are for those who remain in the U.S. As the weeks and months passed, most of the immigrants detained in the South Shore raid were deported or gave up on their efforts to stay in the country.

The property owner, Trinity Flood, a Wisconsin-based real estate investor, and the management company at the time of the raid, Strength in Management, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday morning. Flood and Corey Oliver, the management company’s owner, have repeatedly declined interview requests and have not acknowledged any involvement in the operation.

A DHS spokesperson did not respond to questions Wednesday morning but repeated earlier statements that the raid was performed legally. “Given that two individuals of a Foreign Terrorist Organization were arrested, at a building they are known to frequent, we are limited on further information we can provide,” the spokesperson said.

From the beginning there had been questions about whether Flood and her property manager tipped off the government to get rid of squatters in her building, which had repeatedly failed city inspections in the two years before the raid. 

Last month, state officials launched a housing discrimination investigation into allegations that Flood and Strength in Management used federal agents to illegally force the Black and Hispanic tenants from the 130-unit building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

In their complaint, state officials wrote that “building management blamed Venezuelan tenants for their own (management’s) failure to provide needed locks and security service, as well as other needed maintenance and repairs, and perpetuated stereotypes about Venezuelan gang members to send a message that tenants born outside of the United States were considered gang associates, even if they were law abiding.”

Within hours of the raid, workers from the management company were tossing tenants’ belongings in the trash and clearing out apartments, the complaint states.

State officials said that they could not provide any additional information on an ongoing investigation, but that they look forward to a response from Flood and Strength in Management.

Several Venezuelan immigrants detained that night said they were angry to learn that the building’s owner and property manager had facilitated federal agents’ entry. “We were paying our rent, doing things the right way,” said Jean Carlos Antonio Colmenares Pérez, 39. “Then suddenly, boom, the government comes in and takes us out. I don’t understand.”

Colmenares spent more than two months in federal custody before he was deported in December.

“They took us out as if we were dogs. As if we were criminals,” said his cousin, Daniel José Henríquez Rojas, 43.

Henríquez was detained for about two months before he was deported. Federal agents also took his wife and then-6-year-son that night and later transported them to a facility in Texas where they were detained for about a month. The family is now back together in Venezuela.

Johandry José Andrade Jiménez, 23, had moved into the South Shore complex with his wife and three young daughters just two days before the raid. Andrade was deported in December. His wife was released with an ankle monitor in Chicago, where she now struggles to support their daughters alone.

“They separated me from my family,” Andrade said. “I feel awful.”

Read More

“I Lost Everything”: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime

The complex was home to dozens of mostly African American and Venezuelan tenants. While some said they had stopped paying rent because of the dangerous and dilapidated conditions, close to a dozen Venezuelans, including Colmenares, Henríquez and Andrade, told us they were paying rent to people they believed worked for the management company.

But in some cases, that money was going to other tenants who claimed to be the managers. ProPublica interviewed a U.S. citizen who said that he and others moved Venezuelan families into empty units, charged whatever amount they believed was fair and pocketed the money. “We started making them pay rent to us,” the man said.

Flood, who is facing a foreclosure lawsuit, said in court records last fall that her company had invested millions of dollars to repair and maintain the building and on legal fees for evictions. Weeks before the raid, the company obtained court orders to evict squatters.

The building continued to deteriorate after the raid. Oliver testified in court that he briefly hired security people but then fired them after they didn’t do their jobs. In November, a county judge ordered that another company take over management of the building and required that the remaining residents move out.

The post The Real Story Behind the Midnight Immigration Raid on a Chicago Apartment Building appeared first on ProPublica.

The talks are expected to be held after the U.S. military said it shot down an Iranian drone​ and Iranian forces threatened to seize a U.S.-flagged vessel.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

The Kremlin has reacted to comments made by French president Emmanuel Macron that he was looking to resume contact with Putin on the war in Ukraine.

According to Reuters news agency, the Kremlin confirmed ongoing technical discussions between Russia and France, but provided no further details or indicated any dialogue between Putin and Macron.

At night, the enemy carried out a massive attack with strike drones on the Odesa region. Damage to civilian, residential and industrial infrastructure was recorded.

In the city of Odesa, about 20 residential buildings and cars were damaged. Four people were rescued from the rubble, but one person was unfortunately injured.

Feb. 4, 2026 — The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has unveiled the EU’s first AI chip using modern 7-nanometer technology. The neuromorphic chip was designed by Prof. Hussam Amrouch in accordance with the industry standards set by world-leading chip manufacturer TSMC. The professor of AI processor design and his research group now plan to produce at least three new designs per year, to be manufactured from 2028 onward by the Dresden-based European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC).

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has unveiled the EU’s first AI chip using modern 7-nanometer technology. The neuromorphic chip was designed by Prof. Hussam Amrouch, pictured. Photo Credit: Andreas Heddergott/TUM.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and broader geopolitical shifts have exposed weaknesses in global supply chains. “That is why it will be crucial in the future to cover all stages in Germany and Europe — from training AI chip specialists to technological development and chip manufacturing,” said Prof. Amrouch.

Amrouch recently established the MACHT-AI chip research and training center at TUM, funded by the Bavarian Ministries of Science and Economic Affairs. Looking ahead, he envisions students in Germany learning to design AI chips and develop algorithms directly with companies, with production also taking place domestically.

AI Chip Enables Local Data Processing

In contrast to cloud-based chips such as those manufactured by NVIDIA, Prof. Amrouch’s approach focuses on technology that processes data locally on the device itself rather than sending it to the cloud. ‘This is a fundamental solution for protecting the privacy of our citizens,’ said Amrouch.

The AI chips are based on the open-source RISC-V architecture and can be customized for specific applications — from recording and analyzing heartbeats or brain signals in healthcare to implementing language models. This specialization is more efficient than using a general-purpose AI chip. Amrouch: ‘You can buy a Ferrari, but that doesn’t necessarily make you faster in the city. An e-bike is more efficient here.’ Another critical point is that the technology is also intended for use in control electronics in quantum computing in the medium term.

Data Remains Private and Secure

Local data processing enhances cybersecurity and helps protect technologies against misuse by third parties. ‘Those who design and build the chip know exactly what is inside it and can guarantee how it will function,’ says Amrouch, who believes it is essential for companies to be able to assure their customers that their data will remain private.

Trust is a critical ‘currency’ for industries such as the automotive sector, where Europe currently lacks sovereignty in high-performance chips. The defense industry also places the most stringent demands on security, for example when it comes to the use of chips for drones. Potential built-in vulnerabilities such as Trojans pose incalculable risks here, especially if chips are developed and manufactured outside Germany and the EU.

Markus Blume, Bavaria’s Minister of Science, said: “This is a big breakthrough for AI research at TUM. The European Union’s first AI chip using 7-nanometre technology comes from Bavaria and combines performance, energy efficiency and security. With MACHT-AI, TUM plays a central role in Bavaria’s semiconductor ecosystem. To remain competitive and independent while retaining technological sovereignty, we are developing key technologies and training talent here.”

Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs Hubert Aiwanger is convinced: “Artificial intelligence has undergone tremendous development in recent years. As an economy, we must be in a position not only to keep pace with this development, but also to help shape it. The development of TUM’s own AI chip is an impressive demonstration of how well the Bavarian semiconductor ecosystem is developing.”

TUM President Thomas Hofmann said: “Geopolitical risks have increased dramatically in recent years. That is why cutting-edge technology must be developed and produced in Germany and Europe. With his AI chips, Prof. Hussam Amrouch impressively demonstrates how dependence on Asia and the USA can be successfully reduced, and Europe’s technological self-determination strengthened. And, incidentally, with a very sustainable concept.”

Source: TUM

The post TUM Unveils EU’s 1st 7nm AI Chip with Local Processing and RISC-V Architecture appeared first on HPCwire.

State-owned company will sell under the Lepas brand, continuing its rapid expansion in the British market

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The Chinese carmaker Chery is launching a fourth brand in the UK, continuing a push into the British market where it has rapidly become a major player.

The state-owned company said on Wednesday it would sell cars under the Lepas brand, which is developing battery and hybrid SUVs aimed at younger families, mainly in the European market.

Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. BBC: The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was "doubling down on an AI-forward approach," according to an employee who posted some of the memo on LinkedIn. Pinterest told investors the move would impact about 15% of the workforce, or roughly 700 roles, without saying which teams or workers were affected. But then "two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly," a company spokesperson told the BBC. "This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues' privacy," the spokesperson added. The script written by the Pinterest engineers was aimed at internal tools used at the company for employees to communicate, according to a person familiar with the firings who asked not to be identified. The person said the script created an alert for which employee names within a tool like the team communication platform Slack were being removed or deactivated, giving some insight into who at the company was impacted by the layoffs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PARIS, Feb. 4, 2026 — Welinq, a leader in quantum networking technology, today announced the commercial launch of its high-performance, rack-mounted Entangled Photon Pair Source. The company has also sold and delivered its first unit to a leading European institution. This milestone marks a pivotal step forward in the development of quantum infrastructure, providing businesses and research institutions with an integration-ready solution.

Credit: Welinq

The advancement of quantum technologies depends on the ability to generate and distribute entanglement at scale across quantum networks. Welinq’s Entangled Photon Pair Source addresses this challenge by delivering the critical technology required to reliably generate entangled photons for secure communications and quantum computer interconnects. Designed for compatibility with a wide range of quantum technologies, including multiple quantum computing modalities, this flexibility positions Welinq’s source as a core building block for next-generation, scalable, high-performance quantum infrastructures.

Tom Darras, CEO and co-founder of Welinq, commented: “With this sale, we are not only demonstrating the viability of our technology, but also its strategic importance in building the quantum infrastructures of tomorrow. Our vision is to provide a complete networking solution for quantum-augmented data centers and quantum-safe networks, and this commercial source is a vital piece of that puzzle.”

A High-Performance, Integration-Ready Photonic Solution

Welinq’s Entangled Photon Pair Source delivers a unique combination of performance, stability, and cross-platform compatibility, making it a foundational component of quantum networks. Designed for deployment within existing fiber infrastructures, it enables the reliable generation of entanglement required for quantum-safe networks and quantum-augmented data centers.

Key features include:

• High-performance photon generation: delivers high-quality heralded single photons and entangled photon pairs. The product uniquely combines narrowband emission with linewidths ranging from 2 to 20 MHz, ideal for interfacing with atomic-based quantum technologies, along with dual-wavelength output: one photon in the telecom C-band for low-loss fiber transmission, and the other at a visible wavelength optimized for coupling to atomic systems.
• Robust, integration-ready design: housed in a compact 19-inch industrial rack-mount form factor and engineered for continuous operation at room temperature, ensuring straightforward deployment in existing photonic and data-center environments.
• Full-stack compatibility: developed as a core element of Welinq’s end-to-end quantum networking solution, the source’s properties are engineered to operate directly with Welinq’s commercially available QDrive quantum memories. This enables the creation of high-performance quantum nodes and interconnects. Beyond quantum memories, the source integrates with Welinq’s broader technology portfolio, including advanced software solutions for algorithm partitioning and high-performance qubit-photon interfaces across multiple quantum computing platforms making it a key component of a complete, scalable quantum networking system.

A Second Commercial Milestone for On-Prem Quantum Networks

With the recent commercial delivery of its quantum memory to SkQCI and the newly launched entangled photon pair source, Welinq now provides multiple interoperable core components required to deploy operational quantum networking systems directly on customer premises. These technologies are no longer confined to laboratory demonstrations, but are being delivered as engineered, production-ready modules to end users.

This second commercial milestone confirms strong market validation of Welinq’s technology portfolio in Europe. By addressing concrete deployment needs across research and industrial customers, Welinq is establishing itself as a leading European provider of quantum networking infrastructure, while actively expanding its commercial footprint into international markets, including the USA and Asia.

More from HPCwire

• Welinq, Qphox and Sorbonne University Announce Project Meet-Q to Advance Quantum Networking
• Welinq Unveils High-Performance Quantum Memory for Scalable Quantum Data Centers

About Welinq

Based in Paris, Welinq is pioneering in the industrialization of quantum infrastructure, offering solutions that extend beyond individual hardware components. With a full technology stack spanning software solutions for algorithm partitioning and a suite of quantum hardware, including photon pair sources, quantum memories, and qubit-photon interfaces, Welinq addresses the comprehensive needs of quantum data centers and secure networks. A spin-off from Sorbonne University, CNRS, and PSL University, Welinq was founded in 2022 by Tom Darras, Julien Laurat, and Eleni Diamanti.

Source: Welinq

The post Welinq Secures 1st Sale of Its Entangled Photon Pair Source appeared first on HPCwire.

Defense department says it may end support unless youth group abandons inclusivity and returns to ‘God and country’ values

The Pentagon is again threatening to sever ties with Scouting America unless the organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America reverts to “core values” and realigns itself with service to “God and country”.

A warning to end the US military’s longstanding partnership with one of the nation’s largest and most popular youth organizations came in a Monday night post to social media by the Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, who insisted the scouting movement “lost its way” in a 2025 rebrand that promoted inclusivity and included admitting girls and LBGTQ+ members.

As anti-migration policies sweep the continent, the Spanish PM is going against the tide by announcing plans to legalise the status of undocumented migrants

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You don’t need a degree in political science to understand why so many supposedly centrist European leaders have begun talking about immigration in terms that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.

Far-right parties across the continent have fuelled their rise by seizing on the issue as a political cosh with which to beat their more mainstream and established rivals, whom they accuse of complacency, inaction and a failure to defend borders.

Anniversary depicts a rightwing takeover of the US inspired by a book of essays. But it’s fuzzy on the bits in between

As we all know from history and the current news cycle, autocracy is bad. But it can also be boring. For every explosive confrontation in Minneapolis, there is a quieter, less tangible threat in the form of Kash Patel’s FBI seizing voting records from Fulton county, Georgia – a state Donald Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 – or the steady implementation of 900-page manifesto by the influential rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, neither of which lend themselves to blockbuster treatment. And so we have a problem: how to animate the quiet part of what’s happening in the US to reflect a dangerous but tedious reality – namely, that this thing ends not with a bang, but a combination of voter manipulation and federal electoral interference that undermines faith in the democratic process.

I bring this up after a week of watching popular movies that resonate in Trump’s US, most of which go heavy on the firefights and light on the details of how we arrive at them. The latest, Anniversary, which launched this week on Netflix – a streamer increasingly uninterested in the subtleties of any situation, let alone this one – depicts a US in which an evil rightwing genius in the shape of a beautiful young woman talks the country into ditching democracy via the medium of (I love this detail; the sheer optimism of it) a stirring book of essays.

A new painting by the maestro of Trumpian kitsch offers a fever dream of musical unity – and fundamentally misunderstands orchestras and conductors. And where are the music stands?

Events in the United States of Trumpland continue to reveal staggering new dimensions to the possibilities of orchestral music. Trump’s announcement that his “Trump Kennedy Center” is to be shut for a refit is a brilliantly cynical way to stop the noise when artists try to cancel their appearances during the rest of his presidential tenure: it’s shut already! Bigly losers, all of you!

But that’s not the new dawn for the artform I’m talking about. I mean the inspirational painting unveiled by the maestro of Trumpian kitsch, Jon McNaughton (and stamped with the presidential seal of approval – ie a post on Truth Social).

The USMNT manager said players should stay out of conversations that don’t deal with soccer

Last week, Mauricio Pochettino began a World Cup year with an unforced error.

At the tail-end of a virtual press conference that covered a wide range of ongoing USMNT business, the 53-year-old Argentine – who has made himself commendably available to the American soccer press – was asked about recent comments by Tim Weah.

Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.

This will be the first time humans have traveled all the way to the moon since the early 1970s.

SAN DIEGO, Calif., Feb. 4, 2026 — EPRI has announced a collaboration with Prologis, NVIDIA, and InfraPartners to study smaller-scale data centers designed for distributed inference, a form of real-time data processing used across sectors including logistics, health care, finance, and public services. The announcement was made today at DTECH.

The collaborators will assess the deployment of micro data centers—ranging from 5 to 20 megawatts—at or near utility substations with available grid capacity that can be quickly set up. The goal is to bring inference capabilities—the process of generating real-time responses from trained models—closer to where data is generated and consumed, while making better use of underutilized infrastructure and reducing pressure on congested transmission systems.

The companies will explore how smaller, distributed sites can meet computing needs without straining the grid. The collaboration aims to have at least five pilot sites in development across the U.S. by the end of 2026, providing a replicable model for rapid, scalable deployment.

“AI is transforming every industry, and the energy system will need to continue to evolve to meet increasing demand,” said EPRI President and CEO Arshad Mansoor. “This collaboration with Prologis, NVIDIA, InfraPartners, and the utility community highlights the type of innovative actions required to meet the moment. Using existing grid capacity to bring inference compute closer to where it’s needed—quickly and reliably—is a win for all.”

As artificial intelligence applications scale across industries, demand for AI inference continues to surge. Meeting this demand not only requires more compute, but AI infrastructure deployed closer to end-users to relieve pressure on congested transmission systems.

From autonomous logistics to fraud detection and digital diagnostics, inference systems are playing an increasingly important role in supporting real-time decision-making across nearly every sector of the economy. These workloads don’t require hyperscale facilities, but they do demand reliable, fast, and location-sensitive compute power. By moving inference closer to the edge of the grid, utilities and infrastructure providers can respond more efficiently to the growing volume and velocity of data.

This approach also supports grid reliability. By co-locating computing capacity with substations that have existing but underused distribution headroom, utilities may reduce transmission congestion, improve system flexibility, and help integrate renewable energy.

“As energy demand grows, we need infrastructure solutions that support grid reliability and make better use of what’s already built,” said Parag Soni, senior vice president and global head of Utility Strategy and Engagement at Prologis. “This collaboration is about using our development and energy expertise to help deliver smarter, more flexible infrastructure right where it’s needed.”

“AI is driving a new industrial revolution that demands a fundamental rethinking of data center infrastructure,” said Marc Spieler, senior managing director for the Global Energy Industry at NVIDIA. “By deploying accelerated computing resources directly adjacent to available grid capacity, we can unlock stranded power to scale AI inference efficiently. This distributed approach, powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, maximizes existing energy assets, helping to deliver the intelligence required to transform every industry.”

Each organization will play a key role in supporting this project and the development of sites that relieve pressure on the grid:

• EPRI, independent, non-profit R&D institute: Provides independent, unbiased technical expertise and research-based validation. The institute identifies and supports locations that have capacity and fiber connections for joint demonstrations. EPRI also collects lessons learned, analyzes results, and confirms how well active projects perform so future distributed inference projects can follow best practices.
• Prologis: Identifies and evaluates suitable land and buildings near substations for rapid deployment, and coordinates development, planning, permitting, and delivery as demonstration sites advance. Will lead the long-term commercialization approach for this partnership. Prologis’ experience supporting energy and infrastructure deployment across its portfolio helps enable earlier site readiness as locations are evaluated.
• NVIDIA: Delivers optimized, GPU-accelerated computing platform for distributed inference workloads, offers technical guidance on distributed inference architectures, and facilitates connections to potential compute offtakers.
• InfraPartners, AI data center builder: Provides AI data centers designed for high-density power and cooling, and built using advanced offsite manufacturing.
• Participating utilities: assesses available distribution capacity; informs siting and interconnection pathways; and ensures alignment with operational requirements.

“AI is becoming the real-time engine of growth for the modern economy, and it demands a new kind of digital infrastructure,” said Harqs Singh, chief technology officer at InfraPartners. “By pairing InfraPartners’ AI data center solutions with EPRI’s technical leadership, NVIDIA’s platforms, and Prologis’ national footprint, we’re enabling rapid deployment of AI nodes where they’re needed most. Together, we’re building the foundation for the next decade of intelligent infrastructure.”

About EPRI

Founded in 1972, EPRI is the world’s preeminent independent, non-profit energy research and development organization, with offices around the world. EPRI’s trusted experts collaborate with more than 450 companies in 45 countries, driving innovation to ensure the public has clean, safe, reliable, and affordable access to electricity across the globe.

Source: EPRI

The post EPRI Launches Distributed Inference Data Center Pilot with NVIDIA and Prologis appeared first on HPCwire.

Satellite images and witness testimony show destruction as IDF claims it was forced to take defensive measures

Israeli forces have bulldozed part of a Gaza cemetery containing the war graves of dozens of British, Australian and other allied soldiers killed in the first and second world wars, satellite imagery and witness testimony reveal.

Satellite imagery of the Gaza war cemetery in al-Tuffah, a district of Gaza City, shows extensive earthworks in the southernmost corner of the graveyard. Bomb craters can be seen around the cemetery, but in this area the destruction appears to have been more systematic.

Google's much-anticipated plan to merge Android and ChromeOS into a single operating system called Aluminium is shaping up to be a drawn-out, complicated transition that could leave existing Chromebook users behind, according to previously unreported court documents in the Google search antitrust case. The new OS won't be compatible with all existing Chromebook hardware, and Google will be forced to maintain ChromeOS through at least 2033 to honor its 10-year support commitment to current users -- meaning two parallel operating systems running for years. The timeline itself is messier than Google has let on publicly, the filings suggest. Sameer Samat, Google's head of Android, called the merger "something we're super excited about for next year" last September, but court filings describe the "fastest path" to market as offering Aluminium to "commercial trusted testers" in late 2026 before a full release in 2028. Enterprise and education customers -- the segments where Chromebooks currently dominate -- are slated for 2028 as well. Columbia computer science professor Jason Nieh, who interviewed Google engineers as a witness in the case, testified that Aluminium requires a heavier software stack and more powerful hardware to run.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're tracking your glucose, these are the best monitors, according to the pros.

Only 180 bats survived intense heat in South Australian town, including 34 babies that carers say face months of recovery

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A colony of about 1,000 flying foxes in a South Australian town has been shattered by the intense heat that gripped south-eastern Australia last week, with more than 80% of the camp at Naracoorte wiped out.

“It’s a devastating loss of numbers,” said Judith Bemmer, a carer at Bat Rescue SA. Among the surviving 180 animals, about 34 underweight and dehydrated babies were rescued, and would face months of recovery.

Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the chair and members of the newly established Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC), a unified advisory body that will provide independent advice on complex scientific and technical challenges across the Department’s Office of Science.

This announcement advances the Department’s implementation of President Trump’s Executive Order Restoring Gold Standard Science as the cornerstone of federal research—ensuring that the Department and its National Laboratory systems’ science is collaborative, transparent, and guided by evidence to rebuild public trust in science. As DOE modernizes and strengthens its scientific enterprise, SCAC will provide expert input to help inform priorities, improve coordination, and address cross-cutting research challenges across the Office of Science.

“The establishment of SCAC underscores the Department’s commitment to scientific integrity and the power of partnership,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “By bringing together leading minds from diverse institutions, we’re forging a collaborative framework that will not only enhance our scientific endeavors but also accelerate the translation of fundamental research into tangible benefits for the American people. This committee exemplifies how shared vision and collective expertise are essential for navigating the complex scientific landscape of today and tomorrow.”

Members of SCAC, appointed by Under Secretary Gil, represent the full breadth of Office of Science research, drawing expertise from leaders across academia, industry, science philanthropy, and the Department’s National Laboratories. The Committee will help the Office of Science adapt to a rapidly evolving research landscape and address interdisciplinary challenges in a streamlined and flexible manner. It will also provide advice on initiatives that are priorities for the entire Office, including the Genesis Mission, scientific discovery, fusion energy, and quantum science.

SCAC will be chaired by Persis Drell, professor of materials science and engineering and physics at Stanford University, provost emerita of Stanford, and director emerita of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The Committee will adopt the core functions of the Office of Science’s six former discretionary advisory committees. Any current charged responsibilities of these former committees will transfer to SCAC, providing a single, coordinated source of independent expert advice. A full list of the 21 SCAC members is available here.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Announces Members of the Office of Science Advisory Committee appeared first on HPCwire.

A number of countries including Australia are investigating X over Grok-produced sexualised deepfakes

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The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, says global regulatory focus on Elon Musk’s X has reached a “tipping point” after a raid of the company’s offices in France this week.

The raid on Tuesday was part of an investigation that included alleged offences of complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images, violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes, and denial of crimes against humanity.

We asked dentists for their recommendations on the best whitening toothpastes for sensitive teeth and more.

The child walked away from his home during a snowstorm Saturday night, as temperatures fell below freezing.

A man who sued his college after being suspended over a rape allegation was hired into a powerful position at the federal agency tasked with defending workers against workplace discrimination, including sex discrimination.

Benjamin North, who maintained his innocence during the lawsuit, went on to become an attorney who took public stances against what he characterized as the excesses of Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education.

Less than eight years after his case was closed following an agreement with the university, North has quietly become the new assistant general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to a screenshot of the agency’s employee directory and an agency employee who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.

North now reports directly to Acting General Counsel Catherine Eschbach, according to the employee.

“The general counsel’s office is an incredibly important part of the EEOC,” said Jenny Yang, a partner at the law firm Outten & Golden and a former EEOC chair. The general counsel holds the power to decide which employers to sue and over which issues, and oversees litigation brought in the agency’s 15 regional offices, and assistant general counsels help coordinate litigation “for the entire agency,” Yang said. They often review cases and their evidence to evaluate the merits and help determine whether the agency should invest its limited resources into pursuing a suit, she said.

“You need people in that office who understand that their job is to uphold the law and to apply the law faithfully,” she said. (Neither North nor the EEOC responded to requests for comment.)

North’s role could have even more heft than usual, the EEOC employee said, given how many attorneys have left the agency and the office of the general counsel under the second Trump administration. The office is typically filled with “experienced litigators,” the employee said, noting that North was still a college student 10 years ago and now has been hired into “a very senior position” in which he will “have a huge impact on the cases that the EEOC chooses to bring.”

College Allegation Case

North sued Catholic University after he was accused of rape by a fellow student, investigated, and suspended for two years. In his legal complaint, he claimed he and his accuser met at a party, then in an upstairs bathroom “engaged in consensual sex.” According to the judge’s ruling in the case, North sought to refute the accuser’s allegation that she had taken three shots of vodka and became distraught. The university found that she had been incapable of giving consent due to intoxication and suspended North.

North alleged in his suit that the university had violated its own policies as well as Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination at federally funded institutions. The Title IX claim rested on North’s allegation that the university had been biased against him and gave his accuser “preferential treatment,” thereby “discriminating against [him] based on his gender.” He sought $1 million in damages as well as injunctive relief.

In 2019, the case was closed when North and his legal team stipulated to dismissal, indicating an agreement between the plaintiff and defense, usually a settlement. (Catholic University declined to comment.)

North also dealt with Title IX claims as an attorney after completing law school. Before taking his role in the government, North most recently worked at Binnall Law Group. The firm published an article on its website in 2018 saying that universities use Title IX to “abuse the Constitutional rights of students accused of sexual misconduct.”

At Binnall, North served as a Title IX adviser who helped students in such proceedings. (Binnall did not respond to a request for comment.)

North wrote an op-ed for The Federalist in 2021 about Title IX arguing that a Biden administration nominee had “led the charge against students’ civil rights and due process” and that men’s rights are often violated in university proceedings after they’re accused of sexual assault.

Now, North could help guide litigation at the EEOC.

“Given that we are the agency tasked with enforcing protections against sexual violence in the workplace, it sends a concerning signal to have hired somebody with his background,” the EEOC employee said.

That signal will be sent both internally to staff, the employee said, about what the agency wants to focus on and to workers who have experienced sexual harassment or assault at work about whether the agency will take their claims seriously.

Reshaping the EEOC

North is not the first EEOC hire who has raised eyebrows during the second Trump administration. Last April, EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas appointed Shannon Royce, a longtime Christian conservative activist, as her chief of staff. Royce had been serving as president of the Christian Employers Alliance, which sued the EEOC in 2021 over its defense of the rights of trans people at work. Her group also sued the EEOC over its inclusion of abortion care in the protections offered by the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

On January 12, the Christian Employers Alliance announced that it had notched an agreement with the EEOC in which the agency agreed not to enforce abortion and gender identity requirements against its members while the EEOC “considers revising its policies.”

Lucas also hired Connor Clegg, a former Fox News producer, in the agency’s communications department. In 2018, Clegg was impeached as student body president at Texas State University over uncovered social media posts in which he mocked Asian tourists with hashtags that included “#pearlharborwasbad” and “#kimjongil.” He was later found not guilty by the Student Government Supreme Court.

More recently, Clegg posted a long rant to social media about an interaction with a traffic enforcement officer who “barely spoke a lick of English” and reposted a tweet from late Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk that said, “There is an undeniable War on White People in The West.”

North’s hire comes after Lucas has asserted new priorities at the agency.

Related

How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians

In a post to X in December, she directly solicited complaints from white men who allege they’ve been discriminated at work based on their race or sex. She has also instructed agency officials to focus on cases that line up with her own personal priorities, which include “defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights,” “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” and “religious bias and harassment, including antisemitism.”

Meanwhile, under her leadership, the general counsel’s office dropped the litigation it had already brought on behalf of transgender workers and in a disparate impact racial discrimination case.

The post EEOC Quietly Hired Lawyer Who Crusaded for Cases of Discrimination Against Men — Including His Own appeared first on The Intercept.

Two brothers of Renee Good, the Minneapolis woman who was shot and killed in January by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, have described the impact on their family to a panel of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The forum, consisting of Democrats from the US House and Senate, listened to testimony from people who have been affected by the way agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have used force

• Congressional Democrats vow justice for US citizens harmed by immigration agents: ‘You deserve peace’

A Doberman pinscher named Penny won best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

From your camera settings to how to develop and scan film, these are my tips for getting started in analog photography.

Phone battery life has always been important, but which brands consistently offer the longest battery life? After extensive testing, we've found the two leaders.

Philando Castile, a lawful gun owner, was shot and killed by a police officer in 2016 – gun rights groups were largely silent

The killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis has sparked a thorny conversation among gun rights groups and Trump administration officials about the second amendment and the right to carry concealed firearms at protests and demonstrations. Among the questions is which cases the movement rallies behind – and which it doesn’t.

In the hours and days after Pretti’s killing, dozens of local national and local gun rights groups lambasted federal officials like Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Gregory Bovino, a senior border patrol official, who baselessly claimed that Pretti’s carrying of a handgun proved that he planned to harm and kill border patrol agents. Prominent gun rights organizations, including Gun Owners of America (GOA) and the National Rifle Association (NRA), called for an independent investigation into the shooting and defended Pretti’s right to carry a gun.

We compared prices, features, performance and customer support of the top WordPress hosting services to help you make the right decision for your website.

Adobe is no longer planning to discontinue Adobe Animate on March 1st. From a report: In an FAQ, the company now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode and that it has "no plans toâdiscontinue or remove access" to the app. Animate will still receive "ongoing security and bug fixes" and will still be available for "both new and existing users," but it won't get new features. Many creators expressed frustration after Adobe's original discontinuation announcement from earlier this week, and the application is still used by creators like David Firth, the person behind the animated web series Salad Fingers. Now, Adobe says that "We are committed to ensuring Animate usersâalways have access to their content regardless of the state of development of the application."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In many ways, Delaware’s multi-billion-dollar budget is like any household spending plan. The big difference is that this family is nearly a million people strong.

Just like a household, the state must find a way to take care of everyone, adjust to changing needs, and stay balanced year in and year out. Both occasionally contend with higher-than-expected expenses, and both face that eternal struggle – balancing wants against needs .

Balancing the Checkbook

“We can’t spend what we don’t have” is a guiding principle in state finance, and a plain cold reality for many households. Neither the state nor a prudent family planner would borrow money just to run everyday expenses, but in the state’s case, it’s against the law: A balanced budget is constitutionally required in Delaware, meaning it cannot spend more than its officially certified revenue forecast allows. Each June, the General Assembly and Office of Management and Budget finalize spending within this cap, much like a family must ensure bills don’t exceed income.

Educating the Kids

Families that value education make it a priority – budgeting for school supplies, tuition, or extracurricular programs. Delaware does the same, dedicating nearly one-third of its General Fund to public education. From early childhood programs to higher education, the state treats learning as an investment in its “next generation.”

Caring for Seniors

Just as families support aging and needy relatives, Delaware allocates significant funding to Medicaid, senior health services, and long-term care. When healthcare costs rise or the senior population grows, the state must find new ways to fund these programs – or make difficult tradeoffs elsewhere, just like any family.

Supporting Those Who Need More

In many families, some members need extra help from time to time. Delaware also lends a hand to those in need, through programs for special education, disability services, and housing assistance. The Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) administers much of this care, ensuring that vulnerable residents aren’t left behind.

Keeping the Household Running

A household budget usually must cover the unavoidable needs of modern life – things like utilities, car repairs, and home maintenance. For Delaware, that translates to public safety, road maintenance, and emergency services, funded through the Operating Budget and Capital Improvement (aka Bond) Bill. These “maintenance” costs keep the state’s infrastructure and services functioning day to day.

Planning for the Future

Families might save for college or home repairs; Delaware saves for economic stability. The Rainy Day Fund and Budget Stabilization Fund are reserve accounts designed to cover emergencies and revenue downturns. Lawmakers must decide when it’s truly “raining” – and how much to draw from savings.

Adjusting to Income Changes

Just as a family’s income swings up or down with pay raises or layoffs, Delaware’s revenue streams – from personal income taxes, corporate fees, and federal funds – fluctuate with the economy. When revenues fall short, the DEFAC (Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council) updates forecasts and leaders adjust spending mid-year.

Debt and Credit Management

Families might take out a mortgage; Delaware issues bonds for schools, roads, and infrastructure. Look at bonds as a giant home loan – but instead of asking a bank, the state goes to the open market, seeking the best terms it can get. Maintaining a strong credit rating is essential to keep borrowing affordable for both families and the state, and the state’s Bond Bill process ensures that debt remains within limits. Delaware has managed to keep a fairly solid credit rating, which means less of its money has to go toward paying off debt.

Negotiating Priorities

In any home, family members debate what to spend their limited funds on – like a vacation, or roof repair? Delaware’s version of this dinner table discussion happens in Legislative Hall, where lawmakers negotiate  over competing funding priorities, from education to healthcare, to the environment and economic development.

Transparency and Accountability

Families track expenses to avoid overdrafts. Similarly, Delaware maintains public budget hearings, detailed appropriations bills, and open financial reports so taxpayers can see exactly where their money goes.

About the Civics 101 Series: Civics 101 is a continuing explanatory series by Delaware LIVE and the Spotlight Delaware content marketing team designed to help readers understand how state government works and how budget decisions affect everyday life in Delaware. To read other stories in the series, visit the Civics 101 home page.

The post Civics 101: How Delaware’s Budget is a lot like a family budget appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

China will ban hidden door handles on cars, commonly used on Tesla's electric vehicles and many other EV models, starting next year, due to safety concerns.

Perfect Tides perfectly captures the older millennial college experience, and a time when nobody worried about being embarrassing online

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I’ve noticed an interesting micro-trend emerging in the last few years: millennial nostalgia games. Not just ones that adopt the aesthetic of Y2K gaming – think Crow Country or Fear the Spotlight’s deliberately retro PS1-style fuzzy polygons – but semi-autobiographical games specifically about the millennial experience. I’ve played three in the past year. Despelote is set in 2002 in Ecuador and is played through the eyes of a football-obsessed eight-year-old. The award-winning Consume Me is about being a teen girl battling disordered eating in the 00s. And this week I played a point-and-click adventure game about being a college student in the early 2000s.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is set in New York in 2003 – a year that is the epitome of nostalgia for the micro-generation that grew up without the internet but came of age online. It was before Facebook, before the smartphone, but firmly during the era of late-night forum browsing and instant-messenger conversations. The internet wasn’t yet a vector for mass communication, but it could still bring you together with other people who loved the things that you loved, people who read the same hipster blogs and liked the same bands. The protagonist, Mara, is a student and young writer who works in her college library.

Dismantling rules will make children vulnerable to chronic diseases ‘make America healthy again’ wants to eradicate

Donald Trump’s aggressive rollback of environmental protections directly contradicts the promises of his “make America healthy again” campaign, according to new research.

Helmed by Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s health and human services department has touted pledges to “transform our nation’s food, fitness, air, water, soil and medicine” and “reverse the childhood chronic disease crisis”. But the president’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is pushing the country in the opposite direction, says the new report from the liberal research and advocacy non-profit Center for American Progress (CAP).

Dictator’s second son, a key figure in post-2011 Libyan politics, reportedly shot dead at home by masked assailants

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and for years the second most powerful person in the country, has been killed in a village south-west of Tripoli, officials said on Tuesday night.

The 53-year-old died from gunshot wounds in the town of Zintan, 85 miles south-west of the capital, according to the Libyan attorney general’s office. Gaddafi’s own office said he was killed in his home by masked assailants.

Buckingham Palace announced in October that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would vacate Royal Lodge, though he was photographed there on horseback just this week.

• Penny the Doberman pinscher named America’s top dog

• Linton lands second best in show nearly four decades on

• Westminster honors Catherine O’Hara with video tribute

A Doberman pinscher named Penny is America’s top canine after earning the title of best in show on Tuesday night at the 150th Westminster Kennel Club dog show in New York.

Judge David Fitzpatrick tapped the four-year-old female with the mirror-sheen black-and-rust coat from Reseda, California, over a field of six other group champions, among them a Chesapeake Bay retriever named Cota, who was awarded reserve best in show to roars of approval from the crowd. Also making the final lineup were an Afghan hound named Zaida, a Lhasa Apso named JJ, a Maltese named Cookie, a smooth fox terrier named Wager and a popular old English sheepdog named Graham.

Bobi Wine’s whereabouts unknown since he fled what he said was night raid on his home by police and military

Bobi Wine, Uganda’s most prominent opposition figure, remains in hiding nearly three weeks after a disputed election, as a high-stakes social media feud with the east African country’s military chief escalates.

Wine’s whereabouts have been unknown since 16 January, when he fled what he said was a night raid by the police and military on his home, leaving his family behind.

Police say 18-year-old arrested on suspicion of murder after death of man in his 20s on Tuesday evening

An 18-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a man in his 20s was stabbed in Leicester city centre and later died in hospital, Leicestershire police have said.

Police and East Midlands ambulance service were called just after 5pm on Tuesday after reports that a man had collapsed. They later received reports that the man had been stabbed.

Citadel hedge fund boss, Republican donor and vocal Trump critic says administration has made ‘distasteful’ choices not in the public interest

The billionaire investor Ken Griffin has accused Donald Trump’s administration of “enriching” its families, and criticised its interference in American businesses as “distasteful”.

Griffin, who is the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel and a large Republican donor, rebuked the Trump administration, saying it “has definitely made missteps in choosing decisions or courses that have been very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration”.

Bills mandate ICE cooperation, school status checks and criminalize information release, testing constitutional lines

The power to enforce immigration law rests with the federal government. But Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, has a vision for states working in coordination with federal immigration officials, and he’s attempting to test it out in Tennessee.

Earlier this month, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Miller had been meeting in Washington DC with Tennessee speaker of the house, Cameron Sexton, to craft model legislation for states around the country.

Vijay Prashad said he was ‘disgusted’ by linguist’s friendship with Epstein as new files shed light on their relationship

• Newly released Jeffrey Epstein files: 10 key takeaways so far

An author who collaborated on two books with Noam Chomsky has written a letter condemning the acclaimed scholar’s friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as newly released files shed light on the social relationship between the two men.

Vijay Prashad – a journalist, author and the director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research – wrote that he was “heartsick” over the new correspondence between Chomsky and Epstein.

Spokesperson says Burns ‘deeply regrets ever meeting’ with Epstein and cut ties after learning of his conviction

A new tranche of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein revealed several communications with William J Burns, a career diplomat who would go on to become the central intelligence director under Joe Biden.

The documents describe the planning for meetings between Burns and Epstein, two of which occurred, and show Epstein texting with Burns and recommending that other people in his orbit meet with him. The meetings and correspondence occurred after Epstein had pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, including solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18.

An exercise bike may be your favorite way to work out, but are you using it correctly? Cycling experts weigh in.

The police chief and mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minneapolis, react to new ICE body cameras and speak about economic impacts and eroding trust in local law enforcement.

There are many reasons why credit card interest rates are high. Here's what to know (and what to do in response).

President claims idea to ‘nationalize’ elections in 15 states before midterms is to prevent noncitizen voting. Plus, how Muslim creatives are changing New York City’s cultural landscape

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Good morning.

Donald Trump suggested on a conservative podcast released on Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.

What did the president say? That immigrants “were brought” to the US to vote. “They vote illegally … We should take over the voting in at least many – 15 places – the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said on the podcast of Dan Bongino, the short-lived FBI deputy director.

What have Democrats said in response? “That statement alone makes clear that this threat to our election security, the basic premise of our democracy, is forward looking, to 2026, to 2028,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said yesterday. “This is about whether these same tactics we’re seeing now, or worse, will be used to disrupt free and fair elections.”

What are Democrats demanding? They agreed to fund most of the federal government through September while providing DHS with two weeks of short-term funding. That will enable lawmakers to return for negotiations around long-term DHS funding after the killings by federal agents of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Among Democrats’ demands are that federal agents wear body cameras and cease wearing masks, follow a code of conduct, and obtain arrest warrants for people in the country illegally.

How did the White House press conference go? Trump again scolded a female reporter, this time CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who was questioning him about the Epstein files. “I’ve known you for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face,” Trump said, adding that CNN should be “ashamed of you”.

Gaza medical officials say Israeli strikes killed at least 19 people, including two infants, with one hospital director asking, "Where is the ceasefire?"

A search and rescue operation involving patrol vessels, an air force helicopter and a boat carrying divers was underway for potentially missing passengers.

I spent my entire adult life cooking with gas. I thought I'd hate my new induction stove, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

Federal authorities are releasing fourth-grader Elizabeth Zuna, the first of several students detained by immigration officers in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights, school officials said.

Ads could remove the sting of Xbox Game Pass price hikes, but will it be worth it?

With the Winter Olympics set to begin in proper on Friday, here’s a look at 10 Americans worth keeping an eye on

Mikaela Shiffrin has surpassed Vonn’s record haul of World Cup wins and staked her claim as the GOAT. But Vonn has a solid claim to be the best ever in the speed events (downhill, super-G), and she has been racing exclusively in those disciplines since returning from retirement, surging to the top of the World Cup downhill standings at age 41. She has a score to settle with the sport’s biggest stage – her lifetime total of three Olympic medals (one gold) would probably be higher if not for a horror crash in practice in 2006 and injuries that either limited or outright excluded her from other Games. After some selection drama in the team combined event in last year’s world championships, it seems inconceivable that Vonn and Shiffrin, both of whom have had some misfortune in the Olympics, would not be paired up to form Alpine skiing’s equivalent of the 1992 basketball Dream Team. Vonn was in a nasty crash last weekend but it seems that she will be fit to take part in Italy.

DNC’s Local Listeners initiative will target one million ‘infrequent’ voters in battleground districts

Democrats are launching an aggressive campaign to win back voters they lost, not to Donald Trump, but to the proverbial “couch,” as they look to regain support ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rolled out a new initiative called Local Listeners with the goal of targeting over one million “infrequent” voters in key battleground districts. Seeking to build on the party’s string of off-year election victories, which extended into 2026 with an upset in Texas last weekend, the DNC is betting that early, localized outreach will be crucial in winning back these voters’ trust – and their ballots – this time around.

Home Chef, HelloFresh and Blue Apron have dominated the meal kit space for years. Here's why this lesser-known service has them all beat.

American athletes are preparing for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. These are some of the top Team USA competitors to watch.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking during an earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Lisa Su stated that its development of Microsoft's next-gen Xbox SoC is "progressing well to support a launch in 2027." While the comment doesn't outright confirm the next Xbox will release next year, it indicates that the Microsoft could be ready to launch soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unionized baristas continue to fight for a fair contract and ask public for solidarity as strike stretches into third month

Striking Starbucks baristas are calling on customers of the world’s largest coffee chain to delete its popular mobile app in solidarity with their demands for a first union contract.

Starbucks Workers United, which has been coordinating a strike for almost three months, is vowing to press ahead.

In July of 1968, Samuel Bowers sat down in his office with fingers poised over his typewriter keys, thoughts filled with fury. As founder and imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he cut a charismatic figure, though one with a militant Christian faith and a hate-filled mind. Just a day earlier, police had killed one of his most trusted assassins and severely injured another. 

Bowers had spent the past few years masterminding bombings at Mississippi’s Black churches and, more recently, synagogues as well. His two foot soldiers now riddled with bullets had bombed the Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson on a foggy night nine months earlier and were en route to bomb a Jewish leader’s home when police gunned them down.

At the typewriter, Bowers pounded out a five-page missive to Thomas Tucker, a local police officer who shot one of the Klan members but had earlier faced suspicions of being a Klan sympathizer himself, journalist Jack Nelson wrote in his 1993 book “Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews.” 

“Mr. Tucker,” Bowers wrote, “the principle of law as it has been twisted and abused by the animals in the Synagogue of Satan, one of which you were guarding and protecting.” The Klanswoman killed, he insisted, was an American Patriot “doing her limited best to preserve Christian Civilization by helping to destroy the body of an animal of Satan’s Synagogue.” 

Flash forward almost 60 years after Bowers wrote his letter. 

On Jan. 10, a whole new generation of congregants at Beth Israel, among Mississippi’s oldest synagogues, awoke to devastating news about their house of worship. Someone had set a fire inside. The blaze had started in the library, destroying it along with sacred Torah scrolls, prayer books and myriad other materials. Smoke had filled the sanctuary. No congregants were injured, but they would not be able to worship there for some time.

Later the day of the arson, a young man with scorched hands faced an FBI agent and others investigating the crime. Stephen Spencer Pittman was born in Jackson in 2006, the year Bowers died. Just 19 years old, he allegedly admitted to investigators that he set fire to the temple due to its “Jewish ties,” according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. He dubbed Beth Israel a “synagogue of Satan.”

The term refers to biblical passages in which Jesus described Jews in specific communities who were persecuting the early Christians. Antisemites like Bowers had co-opted the phrase to describe Jews broadly as agents of evil plotting against white Christians. He believed that Jews who hadn’t converted to Christianity were “heretics” and their houses of worship therefore legitimate military targets — especially those like Beth Israel, whose rabbi had been linking arms with civil rights protestors. 

Why Pittman, who has pleaded not guilty, used those words remains unclear. But according to the affidavit, after the fire burned the temple, Pittman texted his father, “I did my research.”  

What did that research entail? Little is known so far. It remains unclear whether the teenager knew much about the ideology of the people behind the 1967 bombing or if he followed any of today’s antisemitic influencers.

Pittman, a community college baseball player from Madison, Mississippi, did engage in substantial online activity. He appears to have created profiles on multiple social media platforms where he mostly posted about his sport, nutrition and his Christian faith. Yet, shortly before the fire, an Instagram account that appears to be his posted an antisemitic meme of a cartoon character with a prominent nose, a Star of David affixed to his chest and a money bag in each hand.

And across the online world that Pittman traversed, a crop of young influencers have been spreading antisemitism, often rooted in Christianity. They are attracting millions of followers,  embracing conspiracy theories of global Jewish takeovers and using terms like the “synagogue of Satan” that people like Bowers would well recognize. 

Back Then …

In many ways, the original sin of mass antisemitic disinformation stems from a text called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Published in the Russian empire in 1903, it claimed to be an insider account of Jews plotting world domination. The tropes in it weren’t new, but the text provided rich fodder to those who embraced its “evidence” that Jews were orchestrating a global plan to amass wealth and eradicate non-Jews. 

“Only we, the Jews, are qualified to rule the world,” the text proclaimed. “We shall surround our government with economists, bankers, industrialists, capitalists — and the main thing — millionaires — for everything will be settled by gold.”

The fact that the text was proven a forgery did little to thwart those who embraced it. Adolf Hitler called the document “immensely instructive.” Klan groups adopted it as a foundational text. 

Bowers used conspiracy theories rooted in “The Protocols” to contend that Jewish puppetmasters were the real masterminds behind the NAACP, the FBI and the young civil rights volunteers pouring into places like Mississippi and Black people were merely their pawns. With that framing, his followers could demean Black protesters and vilify federal agents and Jews, notably those who linked arms with their Black neighbors to demand equal rights — as the rabbi at Beth Israel had increasingly done before Bowers’ henchmen bombed his synagogue and then his home.

“It’s a way of rationalizing racism and finding a way not to acknowledge Black political agency and power,” said William Robert Billups, a University of Florida historian who hails from Mississippi and published research about Bowers and 1960s synagogue bombers in the Journal of American History.

Some like Bowers, later convicted of murdering a civil rights leader, also imbued their white supremacy with a militant theology known as the Christian Identity movement: Jews weren’t only political and economic threats. They were religious enemies, too, ones seeking to usurp white Christians from their place as God’s true chosen people.

“They didn’t see any daylight between Christianity and whiteness,” Billups said. “They did not believe that Jewish people were fully white and didn’t believe they were fully human.” He wrote in his research that Christian Identity followers believed that Jews’ “innate depravity” drove them to pursue world domination.

Christian Identity adherents tapped biblical phrases like the “synagogue of Satan” to justify their antisemitic views. Because they were religious, references from the Bible “came very easily to their tongues,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League who has spent three decades studying extremism. 

The phrase appears twice in the New Testament. Both references deal with specific local conflicts between established Jewish communities and the early Christians they persecuted. Jesus was offering support to his faithful as they faced these hostilities, not making blanket statements about Jewish people. 

“Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan who say they are Jews and are not but do lie. Behold, I will make them come and worship at thy feet and to know that I have loved thee,” Jesus assured a fledgling church in one of the passages.

But as Bowers continued typing his letter to the police officer that hot day in 1968, he added, “I just do not know what we Christians can do about these Synagogue of Satan Jews other than to oppose them in every possible way and pray for Divine Relief.” 

… And Now

In 2015, the “alt-right” white nationalist movement ascended to extremist popularity online in the corners of 4chan and 8chan and on burgeoning white supremacist websites like The Daily Stormer, named for the Nazi Party’s newspaper. Followers often posted jokey, racy and racist memes where they could hide behind the plausible deniability of humor. 

That summer, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, a move swiftly embraced by The Daily Stormer’s founder and others. The next day, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof drove to Emanuel AME Church, a historic Black congregation in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. 

When Roof arrived, the church’s pastor invited him to join the small group of mostly older women gathered for weekly Bible study. Roof sat with them for about an hour, until the closing prayer. Then he pulled out a pistol.

As he fired more than 70 shots, killing nine people, he said, “Y’all raping all our white women and taking over the nation.” 

Roof had discovered the “great replacement theory.” Adherents believe that an elite group, often Jewish and described in terms such as “globalists,” is orchestrating mass immigration of nonwhites along with social policies that reduce white birth rates and otherwise “replace” whites — and their control of the West.

It’s part of a shift in white supremacist ideology since the civil rights era from preserving white dominance to preventing white extinction. More recently, these notions have also bolstered a crop of influencers circulating versions of the ideology to new audiences. 

In 2017, hundreds of white supremacists and other extremists flocked to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, brandishing torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” An 18-year-old named Nick Fuentes was in attendance and posted on Facebook that “the rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”

The rally proved a launching pad for a career in commentary that now draws millions of followers for whom Fuentes has described the great replacement theory as the “Great Replacement REALITY.” At a “Stop the Steal” rally in 2020, he applauded Trump for standing up to various groups including “the synagogue of Satan.” 

But Fuentes is only one of a slew of influencers who have adopted similar anti-immigration rhetoric and frequently criticize what they perceive as Israel’s power in the United States, particularly related to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. (Supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance contend that the relationship benefits both democracies.)

Candace Owens, whose YouTube channel has 5.75 million subscribers, once worked for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and later at The Daily Wire until she was pushed out last year following conflicts with co-founder Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish. In 2024, she described an anti-Christian global conspiracy. “It does seem that they’re trying to almost now indoctrinate the entire world into their satanic faith. Like I said, it is my belief that this is a synagogue of Satan,” she told viewers. 

Similarly, Andrew Torba, founder and CEO of the social media site Gab, popular with extremists, wrote last fall that the federal government is owned by Israel and “its powerful fifth column of Jewish elites in our country.”

“Naming the group that is the engine of our nation’s subversion isn’t bigotry,” Torba added, “it’s a Biblical diagnosis of a spiritual cancer. It is identifying the modern-day ‘synagogue of Satan’ that Christ Himself warned us about.”

There’s no indication that Pittman, the teenager charged in the Beth Israel fire, was aware of any of these comments.

ProPublica reached out to Fuentes on his website and on X and to Torba through Gab’s general email. We reached out to Owens on her website’s media request portal. (Her website tells users, “We do not allow pornography, incitement to violence or gore, discussions about active drug use and other topics in that vein.”) None responded to requests for comment about the Beth Israel fire and their use of the term “synagogue of Satan.” Torba’s X account posted our emailed questions with the message, “I regret to inform you that journos are at it again.” 

The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks antisemitic incidents including assaults, harassment and vandalism, found an 893% increase over the past decade with particularly large leaps in 2023 and 2024, according to its most recent audit. In 2024, it found 9,354 incidents compared to 1,267 in 2016. The audit also notes that much of the recent surge was related to protests, often on college campuses, against Israeli actions in Gaza, some of which included rhetoric such as “death to Israel.” 

“Increasingly, extreme actors in the anti-Israel space have incorporated antisemitic rhetoric into their activism, and it has become commonplace for perpetrators across the political spectrum to voice hatred of Israel or conspiracy theories about the state in a range of antisemitic attacks,” the ADL report says. 

Synagogues also received hundreds of bomb threats, and fears of violence remain a persistent part of what Jewish communities face. Indeed, in the early morning hours of Jan. 10, a man in a hoodie broke a window and slipped inside Beth Israel Congregation. He poured gasoline and ignited a fire near the spot where Klan members had burned the synagogue in 1967. Once again, the people of Beth Israel were left to rebuild from the ashes of antisemitism. Their library and offices will have to be demolished, it appears, but engineers found the sanctuary walls remain structurally sound. 

Since the fire, at least 15 churches have reached out to Beth Israel saying, “Our house of worship is your house of worship,” said Zach Shemper, the synagogue’s president. “There has been such a lovely, almost overwhelming outpouring of love and compassion from our local community.” 

The people of Beth Israel are, for now, holding services in a Baptist church in Jackson, one they opened their doors to in the 1960s, before the bombing. The Baptists needed temporary space then because they had just broken away from a church that refused to let in Black worshippers, and few other houses of worship would open their doors.

The post A Mississippi Synagogue Was Attacked in 1967 and 2026. The Antisemitic Rhetoric Looked the Same Then and Now. appeared first on ProPublica.

Novo Nordisk share price plunges after blaming lower US drug prices, patent protection issues and rising competition

The maker of Wegovy and Ozempic, Novo Nordisk, has predicted a sharp drop in revenues this year owing to what its boss described as a “painful” push by Donald Trump to lower US weight-loss drug prices, rising competition, and the loss of important patent protections.

Denmark’s Novo, once the poster-child for the growth in weight-loss treatments, said sales this year were likely to fall between 5% and 13%, ending years of double-digit gains, despite the promising launch of its new Wegovy pill in the US. Its share price plummeted 17% on Wednesday, erasing all gains so far this year. In the past year the stock has lost nearly 50% of its value.

Former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn — who emerged as a national figure after the Jan. 6 riot — announced a second bid for Congress on Wednesday.

New York state lawmakers have introduced legislation to boost spending on the state’s troubled guardianship system by $15 million a year — an unprecedented cash infusion for a bureaucracy that has long struggled to care for the tens of thousands of disabled or elderly New Yorkers who cannot care for themselves.

By law, judges appoint guardians to manage the health and financial matters of people they deem incapacitated, and these guardians are then compensated from the estates of their wards. But there are not enough guardians to serve the roughly 30,000 New Yorkers who need them, and the new bill, called the Good Guardianship Act, aims to help the most vulnerable segment of this population: those who are too poor to pay for a private guardian and who have no family or friends willing to serve.

In the industry, they are known as “the unbefriended,” and the millions in new funding would flow to a statewide network of nonprofit guardians who serve them.

The proposal follows a 2024 ProPublica investigation that revealed how the state’s guardianship system was failing this group in particular by conducting little to no oversight of guardians, some of whom provided substandard care and exploited those they were charged with looking after.

The stories prompted the state attorney general to open an investigation into several guardianship providers and spurred the court system to appoint a special counsel to enact reforms. But advocates said the Good Guardianship Act presents the most promising step to date in improving the system — if it can get the support of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The legislation mirrors the recommendations of a task force appointed by the governor last summer, yet Hochul has not said whether she supports the plan and did not include any funding for guardianships in the $260 billion executive budget she recently unveiled.

“What’s it going to take for the governor to pay attention to guardianship and realize there’s a viable solution on the table?” said Kimberly George, who runs a nonprofit that serves about 200 New York City wards and helps lead Guardianship Access New York, a coalition of groups that’s pushing the bill in Albany.

A spokesperson for Hochul, a Democrat who is running for reelection, said the governor will review the legislation.

In recent years, Albany has provided just $1 million to help fund a statewide guardianship hotline, which provides advice for people considering guardianship for their relatives or friends. But the Good Guardianship Act would provide considerably more guardians for those who need them, effectively ensuring that qualified nonprofit groups with a history of providing guardianship services are available to be appointed by judges in cases involving the unbefriended.

To ensure that state funding only goes to what the legislation calls “reputable” nonprofits, groups must be in good standing with a state regulator and their guardianship plans and funding requests must be reviewed by a contractor picked by the director of the state’s Office for the Aging.

Assembly Member Charles Lavine, a Long Island Democrat who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee and introduced the legislation, expressed confidence that the bill would pass this session, noting it has no opposition and fixes a readily identifiable problem.

“It’s time that we did something to be able to provide those who are in actual, real need,” he said in an interview. “We believe we are working in the right direction.”

Lavine hosted a roundtable last fall focused on confronting what he dubbed “the crisis” in the guardianship system, describing it as being “stretched very, very thin.”

The legislation also has the support of legislative leaders in the state Senate — including its powerful majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, her spokesperson said.

State Sen. Cordell Cleare, a Harlem Democrat who chairs the Aging Committee, is shepherding the bill through the chamber. It’s on the panel’s agenda for Wednesday and is expected to be adopted.

The post We Found New York’s Guardianship System in Shambles. Now State Lawmakers Say They Have a Plan to Help Fix It. appeared first on ProPublica.

The world is far off meeting its growing water needs. Can the UN still lead the response? Expert comment jon.wallace 4 February 2026

The 2026 UN Water Conference can still have a big impact this year – if it can discuss water action as critical to human wellbeing and economic activity and focus on pragmatic solutions.

Drastic changes to the hydrological cycle and longstanding water management problems continue to create havoc around the world this year. In January a UN report declared an era of global water bankruptcy. A prolonged drought has contributed to unprecedented water shortages in Iran. And in Mozambique, the worst floods in recent memory have created a humanitarian crisis, destroying crops, livelihoods and infrastructure and displacing 650,000 people.  

The global economy’s thirst for water – the world’s most finite, but underpriced and undervalued resource – is growing, as water-intensive products cross borders in ever greater volumes. The water use associated with trade in food and agricultural products nearly trebled between 1986 and 2022.  

Yet, as recent events demonstrate, this dependence is increasingly precarious. As more water bodies retreat and aquifers decline, the health and wellbeing of the global population will be impacted, while multiple economic sectors and supply chains run the risk of continuous disruption. At the same time, institutions like the UN, that have enabled some faltering progress on global environmental crises, are under strain.

In a febrile geopolitical environment, what value can a UN-led process provide? And can a global response adequately address a problem that is very distinctly local in impact?

The UN’s strained efforts

The severity of the global water crisis is beginning to gain some traction. In December 2026, the UN will convene its third global water conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of the most water-scarce countries on Earth.

These conferences are happening with increasing frequency: the first was held in 1977, the second not until 2023. But the third is happening this year and a fourth is already planned for 2028. This new urgency reflects the fact that two initiatives designed to galvanize global action on water are set to expire soon.  

First, the UN Water Decade comes to a close in 2028. This was intended to generate the political commitment and momentum required to transform how the world manages water. But progress has been limited. 

Meanwhile the sixth UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) which aims to ‘Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’ by 2030, is severely off track. 

A UNICEF/WHO report released last week has shown that 2.1 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water and 3.4 billion lack access to sanitation.  

These uncertain efforts in part reflect a lack of connection to a political process. There is no multilateral governance mechanism for water, no binding targets (unlike for climate change), and no clear global institution with a strong mandate to oversee water governance. 

Addressing that will be crucial to driving water governance efforts towards a post 2030 agenda.  

Action for 2026

The outlook for better international collaboration is only getting harder. In a speech at Davos on 20 January, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney called attention to the ‘rupture’ in the rules-based international order. On 30 January, Secretary General António Guterres said the UN was at risk of ‘financial collapse’.

Nonetheless, opportunities still exist for countries to come together for critical issues based on common values and interests. Properly harnessed, the UN’s December Water Conference could galvanize a period of ambitious action this year, catalysing accelerated investment and progress and reinvigorating the UN Water Decade’s goals. 

That will require pragmatic approaches and well-coordinated regional consultations, engaging inclusively with all relevant stakeholders. The conference needs to be responsive to emerging water challenges. And water action needs to be discussed as critical to economic activity, recognizing its centrality to climate-resilient development and the circular economy. 

Related work

The water footprints of global food and agriculture trade

One criticism of water’s treatment in the current SDG framework is that it is insufficient to capture these emerging imperatives and does not sufficiently enable cross-sectoral coordination.  

Mozambique is a case in point – its water challenges are not one dimensional. The country is a climate risk hotspot, and is highly vulnerable to multiple shocks from conflict and natural disasters. These factors place enormous pressures on a population where only 28 per cent use a safely managed drinking water source.  

New frameworks should better address the complex and connected tensions between accelerating progress on access to water and sanitation, and addressing water’s role in agriculture, energy production, climate change adaptation and natural disasters. 

Think local, act global

Part of the challenge in addressing global water governance is that water availability, use and pollution inherently vary by locale. Differences in climate, topography, hydrology and soil characteristics all influence water availability and pollution capacity. That means global volumetric targets to reduce water use and pollution tend to be unhelpful. 

Nonetheless, impacts within the hydrological cycle are not wholly local. Solutions must rely heavily on cooperation within water catchment areas, across national borders and throughout international supply chains.

Previous global processes tackling water use have ranged widely, touching on everything from boosting access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) for the world’s poorest, to transboundary water cooperation. And water is governed by a fragmented patchwork of national or local policies, that vary in effectiveness. Environmental standards are also disjointed, and too often sidelined. Transparency is scarce. 

Taking decades of dialogue to the next level: how can it be done? 

The previous UN Water Conference in 2023 was criticized for requiring only voluntary commitments from governments, corporations and civil society, and for its vague outcomes. 

Ifunanya Nwangene died in hospital after being bitten in her Abuja home, raising questions about the availability of effective antivenoms

In a last message to her friends, Ifunanya Nwangene wrote: “Please come.”

The 26-year-old singer and former contestant on The Voice Nigeria had been bitten by a snake while asleep in her flat in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, and was in hospital, anxiously awaiting treatment.

Under Tom Brady and Bill Belichick New England were ruthless winners. But new head coach Mike Vrabel has transformed the narrative around the team

There used to be a simple rule: Anybody but the New England Patriots.

From 2001 through 2019, the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick dynasty totaled six Super Bowl titles, 13 conference championship appearances and 17 divisional crowns. They were the Evil Empire, constant contenders in a league designed for parity. It didn’t matter who you were; the Patriots were the final boss.

I’m reporting on a political retribution campaign, disguised as immigration enforcement, in the community where I live

I knew they would come here.

If you’re a president hell-bent on retreading 2020 and retaliating against your enemies, the midwestern state that started the George Floyd protests, with a generous social safety net and diverse population, governed by a vice-presidential candidate you vehemently hate, is a certain target.

Idaho is taking steps to bolster its antiquated coroner system following stories by ProPublica that documented how lawmakers have repeatedly failed to fix problems that harm grieving families.

An advisory panel created last year at the request of Gov. Brad Little is developing legislation to require autopsies in a variety of circumstances, including the unexplained death of a child. It would help coroners pay for those autopsies as long as they get a national certification that proves they can meet certain standards.

The legislation would mimic a similar setup in neighboring Washington. An increase in fees on Idaho death certificates would finance the autopsy reimbursements.

A ProPublica review of hundreds of death records in 2024 found that some coroners failed to meet national standards when investigating child and infant deaths, and a state oversight report found Idaho ranked last in the U.S. for autopsies when children or infants died unexpectedly. The state Office of Performance Evaluations cited poor funding as a major problem.

ProPublica’s examination of training records for Idaho coroners also revealed that many failed to get the hours of continuing education required by state law. Further reporting in 2025 examined how potentially suspicious deaths can slip through the cracks of Idaho’s poorly funded system.

The committee working on the legislation includes seven county coroners and a deputy coroner; representatives of city, county and state law enforcement agencies; a deputy county prosecutor; a county commissioner and a tribal member.

Kelli Brassfield, co-chair of the panel and a lobbyist who represents Idaho’s county governments, cautioned that the proposal likely won’t be ready during the 2026 annual legislative session. But this is the first time in decades that coroners and other local and state officials have agreed on a path forward to improve Idaho’s system for investigating death.

Idaho’s death investigation system is almost entirely funded by counties, and county officials have fought past efforts to require autopsies, which can cost thousands of dollars apiece. At the committee’s meeting in January, Brent Mendenhall, a commissioner from Madison County, was enthusiastic about the draft legislation and the push for more autopsies.

“When I hear that a commission or any county has turned down an autopsy, it just makes me shudder,” Mendenhall said at the meeting. “I just think, ‘What are you doing to that family that doesn’t know what happened?’”

Mendenhall said that under the legislation being developed, coroners who have struggled with a small autopsy budget could approach their county commissioners and say, “Here’s the law, and you need to make sure that I can do this.”

The advisory panel working on legislation is co-chaired by Sen. Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat. Wintrow said ProPublica’s reporting raised awareness of the harms done by a faulty system for death investigations.

“Here’s the system going wrong, and your reporting shines a light on it,” she said.

Bingham County Coroner Jimmy Roberts, a member of the panel, told ProPublica that Wintrow has said repeatedly that one of the motivators to get something done about Idaho’s coroner system is that “she doesn’t want to see the coroner system in the media or in the news any longer.”

“I think that speaks volumes,” Roberts said.

Idaho’s governor said more than a year ago that he would support giving coroners more resources to do their jobs right. Lawmakers failed to take him up on it.

Wintrow won modest changes to the coroners system during the 2025 session with legislation that clarified the roles of coroners and law enforcement in death investigations.

Another development in the wake of ProPublica’s reporting is a newly created series of intensive courses for coroners, law enforcement officers and others around the state to learn how to handle child and infant deaths. Funded by a grant from the Governor’s Children At Risk Task Force, the courses this spring will be the most in-depth training of its kind since 2019.

Roberts and Ada County Chief Deputy Coroner Brett Harding will lead the trainings: eight hours of virtual education for coroners statewide and in-person education for coroners in the Boise area and in eastern and northern Idaho. Eastern Idaho is where an infant, Onyxx Cooley, died suddenly and unexpectedly in February 2024. His mother, Alexis Cooley, found him cold and lifeless and called for help, but the baby couldn’t be revived.

Reports released to ProPublica by the coroner who was legally responsible for figuring out why the baby died showed that he did not follow national guidelines. He did not speak with the parents, examine the baby’s body or the scene of the death to search for clues or order an autopsy. That coroner, who has since retired, told ProPublica he spoke with law enforcement officers who responded to the infant’s death and relied on the emergency physician who examined the baby’s body to decide what caused his death.

Alexis Cooley told ProPublica that she hoped the death of her baby would not be in vain, and that sharing his story with the public could set in motion some positive change.

She began to cry when she learned that coroners are working on legislation to improve Idaho’s last-in-the-nation autopsy rate for unexplained child deaths, and that first responders and coroners around the state will get specialized education to handle those cases.

“I’m glad that through my pain and suffering that it’s hopefully lessening the burden on other parents, when a situation like this happens again,” Cooley said. “And it’s amazing that they’re going to be able to get answers and that Onyxx’s case was heard.”

Wintrow, meanwhile, said her committee members’ willingness to work together on a solution to problems is encouraging but that progress is slow and piecemeal in a system with no centralized state agency to develop public policy for coroners. She is working on a pitch to get Idaho a full-time coordinator to fill a role that she has played as a part-time legislator.

The post Idaho Seeks to Improve Its Troubled Coroner System and Lagging Child Autopsy Rates appeared first on ProPublica.

If you're deciding to mix things up with new small appliances, here's the difference between these kitchen cousins.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware is one of just a few states that send school funding questions to voters through the referendum process. Just two districts are going out for a referendum this year after multiple school districts have failed to pass referendums in recent years. Both the Caesar Rodney and Laurel school districts are looking to raise funds to cover operating costs and provide competitive salaries.

The Caesar Rodney and the Laurel school districts will ask their communities to approve tax increases during referendums scheduled for Monday.  

The Caesar Rodney School District is seeking an additional $6 million annually, while the smaller Laurel School District is asking for $1.6 million.

If voters approve Caesar Rodney’s request, owners of a home worth about $300,000 in the district would pay just under $23 more per month in property taxes.  

If Laurel’s request is successful, an average $230,000 home would pay roughly $14.25 more each month. 

Both districts say they need the new dollars to fund ongoing operations, including initiatives to retain and recruit teachers and other educators. Districts throughout the state have struggled in recent years to retain educators amid what school advocates call a national teacher shortage. 

Beyond teacher pay, Caesar Rodney says its $6 million request would also pay for school safety, arts programs and bus services, among other items. 

Laurel says its requested $1.6 million would also stabilize the district’s budget. 

Despite the needs, the decisions to hold referendums come after Delaware school districts have failed in recent years to convince their communities to raise school taxes. 

Among those was Caesar Rodney where voters rejected a referendum in 2023. 

Then, last spring in nearby Smyrna, nearly 60% of voters did the same when the local school district requested $5.4 million. In the months after the failed referendum, Smyrna schools struggling to pay its bills, leaving the district and its union of teachers and other staff members in a standoff over pay.

Also last year, voters rejected two referendum requests from the Indian River School District, even after school board members in the booming Sussex County area went public with their fiscal woes. 

The money from Indian River’s request would have been used to pay “increased operating costs and to maintain a competitive salary package,” that district said last year.

Last year was the first time since 1997 that no school district voters in Delaware approved a spending referendum.

The Caesar Rodney and Laurel school districts hope to reverse that trend when they each hold referendum votes on Monday. 

Polls in the Caesar Rodney School District will be open Monday Feb. 9, from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. at Caesar Rodney High School, Fred Fifer III Middle School, W. Reily Brown Elementary School, Allen Frear Elementary School, Nellie Stokes Elementary School, Star Hill Elementary School, David E. Robinson Elementary School, and the Magnolia Volunteer Fire Company.

Polls in the Laurel School District will also be open Monday Feb. 9, from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. at Laurel Elementary School, the Laurel Fire Department, and the North Laurel Early Learning Academy. 

Two districts trying to catch up

Neither district has taxed its property owners as much as others in recent years.

According to the Caesar Rodney officials, the district has the lowest local funding and the lowest school tax rate in Kent County. Educators within the district also earn less than those in neighboring districts. 

Meanwhile in Laurel, the school district has not held a referendum since 1985. And as a result, educators have told Spotlight Delaware that the small Sussex County district has not been able to keep teachers’ salaries competitive with wealthier districts.

In August, Spotlight Delaware reported about the struggles that rural, working-class districts, such as Laurel, face to keep teacher salaries competitive with those in wealthier areas. 

Patrick Gross, head of the educators’ union in Laurel, said then that he believed Laurel would ultimately hold a referendum in the coming years, but he was cautious about its success.

“I think that the referendum is going to be key … If we can get that done, we’ll see,” Gross said last summer.

The total salary for a teacher in the Laurel School District with 10 years of experience and a master’s degree is just more than $71,000, according to the district’s salary schedule for the 2025-26 school year. 

A teacher with the same experience and education in the wealthier Cape Henlopen School District — about 30 miles from Laurel — makes more than $79,000.

Furthermore, the Cape Henlopen School District, which serves more than 6,500 students, had a budget of more than $180 million during the Fiscal Year 2025.

Laurel schools had a budget of just less than $44 million that same year, while educating more than 2,600 students.

Educators’ salaries are funded by a combination of state and local tax revenue, with the state paying approximately 70% of a total salary. 

The state share takes into account a teacher’s education and experience. It also funds a preset schedule of pay raises for each teacher.

The local share of an educator’s salary is primarily funded by property taxes.  

The post Caesar Rodney, Laurel school districts seek tax increases through referendums appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Some advocates say the Winter Games are driving up property prices and exacerbating income inequality.

International criminal syndicates have been using Fiji as a transshipment point for drugs originating in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Experts say the U.S. needs an additional 2 million to 20 million homes to fix the shortfall, underscoring the challenge of meeting the nation’s housing needs.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The Freeman Arts Pavilion has built a name for itself over the last two decades as a prominent arts venue and economic driver for the Sussex County area. With director Patti Grimes’ upcoming departure, the arts organization’s leadership and future direction remains to be seen.  

Patti Grimes, the long-serving – and influential – executive director of Selbyville’s Freeman Arts Pavilion, announced last week that she will exit her role later this summer. 

Considered to be among the biggest names in the southern Delaware arts and culture scene, Grimes has carried the Freeman Arts organization through a period of exponential growth and expanded reach throughout Sussex County and the broader Delmarva Peninsula since 2007. 

She is set to step down after the organization unveils its long-awaited new stage in July. 

The Freeman Arts Pavilion – an outdoor performance venue in Selbyville, a small town off Route 113 on the Delaware-Maryland border – has grown under Grimes’ leadership to serve more than 130,000 people per year. 

The organization has courted a mix of high-profile performers, like Diana Ross and Jerry Seinfeld, and local, homegrown talent. Freeman Arts also functions as a nonprofit, with an initiative of bringing arts experiences to schools across Sussex County and nearby Worcester and Wicomico counties in Maryland. 

The organization made headlines in January when a James Taylor concert scheduled for September sold out the 4,000-seat venue in 16 minutes. 

Grimes’ departure will force the Freeman Arts Pavilion – and its parent organization the Joshua M. Freeman Foundation – to reckon with whether another leader will be able to carry on the legacy and programming that Grimes has spent the past 19 years building. 

But Grimes told Spotlight Delaware she is not concerned about the transition plan to a new leader of the arts organization. She has worked with the organization’s board of directors to develop a succession plan, she said, and she will still be present to help with the transition process. 

“I felt like it was the right time with this brand new venue to deliver that and launch into the next evolution,” she said. “It will be a great time for a new executive director to come in.” 

Grimes is not retiring from all of her responsibilities with Freeman-related organizations, as she will continue serving as executive director of the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, another grant-giving organization that is named after Joshua Freeman’s father and owned by members of the same family. 

As Delaware’s arts community reacted to Grimes’ announcement, many described her to Spotlight Delaware as one of the biggest names working in the First State, and someone who will leave behind enormous shoes to fill.

Neil Kirschling, executive director of the Delaware Arts Alliance, a statewide arts advocacy organization, said Grimes has been an “incredibly thoughtful partner” in inspiring a culture of excellence in the arts across the state. 

Joe Gfaller, managing director of Clear Space Theatre Company in Rehoboth Beach, said Freeman Arts became a cornerstone of the Sussex County arts scene because of Grimes.  

“There’s no question that the existence of the Freeman Arts has had a transformative effect on our region,” Gfaller said. 

The Joshua M. Freeman Foundation announced in a press release last week that they brought in a global hiring firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, to begin the search for Grimes’ replacement this spring. 

Filling a Sussex County need

When Freeman Arts began hosting performances, its set-up consisted of a small wooden stage and some lawn seating. The organization drew in a couple thousand attendees in its first year. 

“We started as a social experiment,” Grimes recalled. “Is this something that is desired by the greater Sussex County community? Is this something that is wanted?”

Quickly, she found out, the answer was a resounding yes. 

Now, the pavilion draws in more than 130,000 people annually for its concerts and other programs. The organization also is about to complete a 10-year-long, $40 million capital campaign to construct its new stage. 

Since 2017, the organization has been using a mobile stage to host larger performers, like Darius Rucker, Grimes said. 

The new permanent stage will include backstage green rooms and equipment rooms for touring artists, along with a more sleek stage look, which Grimes said she thinks will help continue to attract big name performers. 

Over the years, Grimes said, she has found that the large appetite for the Freeman Arts programming has come from a lack of other arts opportunities in Sussex County, which is more rural and sprawling than the rest of Delaware. At the same time, she said, the large crowd of summer tourists that flock to Sussex County beaches want to participate in the organization’s art offerings. 

The Delaware Arts Alliance conducted a study of the state’s arts economy last year. 

Kirschling, the alliance’s director, said the report revealed that Sussex County has larger “art deserts” than other parts of the state, meaning people in the county often need to drive farther to participate in arts events of any kind. 

By continuing to grow its events with more famous performers, while also investing in local performers and school outreach programs, Kirschling said Grimes has done a good job of building a more robust and sustainable arts community in the Sussex area. 

“What’s nice is that people who live here now don’t have to drive two to three hours to see their favorite artist or to partake in the arts experience,” Grimes said. 

Freeman Arts also has proven to be a catalyst for economic growth and development in the area.

Grimes said that for every $1 spent at the pavilion, $1.90 is distributed back into the local economy, from visitors eating at restaurants, staying in hotels and taking advantage of other activities in the community. 

Jessica Welch, director of the Delaware Tourism Office, provided data to Spotlight Delaware showing the Freeman Arts Pavilion had a $24 million economic impact on Sussex County last year. 

That economic driver is particularly valuable, Welch said, because it is not primarily going to Lewes, Rehoboth Beach, Dewey Beach, or Bethany Beach, where more tourists frequent, but rather is focused in Selbyville, which is further inland and typically gets less economic activity. 

Welch said she expects to see those economic impacts continue to grow as the organization opens its new stage and is able to draw even bigger crowds. 

“Building the infrastructure and setting it up for the future is key,” she said. “Patti [Grimes] should be commended for that work she has done.”

The post Freeman Arts to face new era as Grimes exits, new stage is unveiled appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Digital pinboard business cutting 15% of workforce as it invests heavily in AI

Pinterest has fired two engineers who created a software tool to identify which workers had lost their jobs in a recent round of cuts and then shared the information, according to reports.

The digital pinboard business announced significant job cuts earlier this month, with the chief executive, Bill Ready, telling staff he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach”, according to a LinkedIn post by a former employee.

Pressure grows on PM over ex-minister’s Jeffrey Epstein links as Tories criticise move to withhold some records

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer will attempt to get ahead of the widening scandal over Peter Mandelson’s conduct with the expected release of files relating to his appointment as Britain’s US ambassador, in what a minister has described as “drawing a line in the sand”.

The Conservatives had been preparing to force the publication of the records – including what Mandelson may have told Starmer about his relationship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before being appointed to Washington – with a motion in the Commons.

Signalling issue and train derailment still affecting Southern, Thameslink and Gatwick Express services

The UK’s largest railway franchise has lifted a “do not travel alert” it had issued after a train derailment and signalling issues affected services across south-east England, but service disruption continues.

The train operators Southern, Thameslink and Gatwick Express – all part of the Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) franchise in south-east England – had urged passengers not to travel at 8am on Wednesday morning “if at all possible” because of “multiple incidents”.

Mandarin transliteration of character’s name regarded as auspicious, prompting wave of memes and fan art

Draco Malfoy, one of Harry Potter’s most recognisable villains, has become an unlikely lunar new year icon across China, as fans embrace the character for the year of the horse.

In Mandarin, Malfoy’s name is transliterated as “mǎ ěr fú”. The first character means “horse” while the final character, “fú”, means “fortune” or “blessing” – a powerful symbol found across lunar new year celebrations.

BrianFagioli writes: Google has quietly retired the ZetaSQL name and rebranded its open source SQL analysis and parsing project as GoogleSQL. This is not a technical change but a naming cleanup meant to align the open source code with the SQL dialect already used across Google products like BigQuery and Spanner. Internally, Google has long called the dialect GoogleSQL, even while the open source project lived under a different name. By unifying everything under GoogleSQL, Google says it wants to reduce confusion and make it clearer that the same SQL foundation is shared across its cloud services and open source tooling. The code, features, and team remain unchanged. Only the name is different. GoogleSQL is now the single label Google wants developers to recognize and use going forward.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The death last month of former NFL player Kevin Johnson is possibly linked to three other killings of unhoused people in the same area that occurred over the last four months, detectives said.

Sustainable smartphone takes a step forward with modular accessories, a good screen and mid-range performance

The Dutch ethical smartphone brand Fairphone is back with its six-generation Android, aiming to make its repairable phone more modern, modular, affordable and desirable, with screw-in accessories and a user-replaceable battery.

The Fairphone 6 costs £499 (€599), making it cheaper than previous models and pitting it squarely against budget champs such as the Google Pixel 9a and the Nothing Phone 3a Pro, while being repairable at home with long-term software support and a five-year warranty. On paper it sounds like the ideal phone to see out the decade.

America can project power with little constraint—and its rivals cannot.

OpenAI's rivals are cutting into ChatGPT's lead. From a report: The top chatbot's market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%. The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, indicates the chatbot race has tightened meaningfully over the past year with Google's surge showing up in the numbers. Overall, the chatbot market increased 152% since last January, according to Apptopia, with ChatGPT exhibiting healthy download growth. On desktop and mobile web, a similar pattern appears, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Visits to ChatGPT went from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion between January 2025 and January 2026, a 50% increase, while visits to Gemini went from 267.7 million to 2 billion, a 647% increase. ChatGPT is still far and away the leader in visits, but it has company in the race now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex Pretti had courage and empathy. This, not Maga’s conception of male power, is what we must teach young men

The first thing that grabbed me about the Rapture’s 2011 song It Takes Time to be a Man was the warbly, analogue fuzz of its recurring guitar and piano riff. Once that drew me in, what kept me listening were the lyrics’ hard-marriage of masculinity and empathy. In the final verse, Luke Jenner tells us that: “Well there’s room in your heart now / for excellence to take a stand / And there’s tears that need shedding / it’s all part of the plan”.

For the past year, rightwing voices have waged war on empathy. According to Elon Musk, empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation”. Others go further, calling it “toxic”, “suicidal” and even “sinful”. Certainly, the macho wing of the Maga right sees no place for it amid its (mis)appropriation of medieval history and imagery that is visible everywhere from the face paint and horned headdress of the “QAnon shaman”, convicted for his role in the US Capitol siege, to the tattooed arms and body of Donald Trump’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth.

And yet, consider the ideal of chivalry held by medieval knights: generosity and suspicion of profit, courtesy, honesty and the bind of your word, hospitality, abiding by the rules of combat and granting mercy to your adversary – whose life a knight takes only as a last resort. I say this not because I think the medieval knight should be the new standard for modern men, but to point out that Maga men would fail, miserably so, to live up to their own ideals.

Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist. H​is memoir, Generation Desperation​, is published in January 2026

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Solidarity will protect prosperity.

The Trump administration’s America First strategy has trickled down to what’s left of the government’s humanitarian apparatus, potentially leading to millions of deaths by 2030.

Sustaining the country’s progress requires a more inclusive transition.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 4

No need to load up devices with movies on long flights. You can stream them -- and even live events -- on Starlink-equipped United flights.

The season 2 finale of Fallout was filled with revelations regarding the state of the Wasteland and how it came to be. More questions remain unanswered as war looms on the horizon.

Prediction markets allow you to put money on everything from the US attacking Iran to Jesus returning. Saahil Desai explains their dizzying rise

In the early hours of 3 January, Donald Trump ordered a surprise attack on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, to kidnap the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Millions of Venezuelans’ lives were thrown into uncertainty. Politicians at home and abroad scrambled to respond. It seemed this was something no one had seen coming. Except one person did actually predict it.

In the hours before the attack, someone - and we have no way of knowing who - placed a series of bets that Donald Trump would oust Maduro on a prediction market platform, netting them nearly $500,000 when it happened. These platforms allow their users not just to bet on whoever’s going to win the Super Bowl, but also on world events. Heavily regulated under the Biden administration, these apps have enjoyed a huge boom in popularity since Trump came to power.

Lawyers for accused Tyler Robinson urge removal because prosecutor’s daughter attended rally where Kirk was killed

A Utah prosecutor involved in the case against Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, denied allegations of a conflict of interest in the case during a hearing on Tuesday.

Robinson’s attorneys have argued that a judge should disqualify local prosecutors because the adult daughter of Chad Grunander, a deputy county attorney, was in attendance at the rally on a Utah college campus where Kirk was shot dead. The defense alleges that the office’s move to seek the death penalty just days after Kirk’s killing indicated a “strong emotional reaction” from Grunander, and suggested a conflict of interest.

No Republicans attended hearing with brothers of Renee Good and three US citizens shot and detained by federal agents

Democrats on Capitol Hill offered apologies and promises of accountability on Tuesday amid often harrowing testimony from people who had experienced violent encounters with federal agents engaged in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

With Republicans conspicuously absent, the forum of senators and representatives heard from Luke and Brent Ganger, the brothers of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was shot dead by an Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minneapolis on 7 January as she tried to drive away from agents.

Miran, set to continue as Federal Reserve governor until Jerome Powell successor is confirmed, to leave CEA post

Federal Reserve governor Stephen Miran has resigned from his position as chair of the White House’s council of economic advisers, fulfilling a pledge he made to the Senate as his assignment at the central bank becomes longer-lasting.

Miran had been on unpaid leave from his CEA post since Donald Trump appointed him last year to fill an unexpected vacancy on the Fed’s board of governors to a term that expired on 31 January. The arrangement drew the ire of Democratic senators, who said it would make a presidential puppet of the Fed’s newest policymaker.

Walmart's market cap surpassed $1 trillion on Tuesday, putting the largest U.S. retail chain in an exclusive club dominated by tech groups. Bloomberg adds: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain -- a longtime favorite of bargain-hunting consumers -- has flexed its massive scale and supplier network to keep prices low and grab market share across the income spectrum. While Walmart has maintained its appeal to households looking for value, its online offerings are drawing new, wealthier shoppers seeking convenience.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Statement says Republican senator, 83, checked himself into local hospital and prognosis is ‘positive’

The Republican senator Mitch McConnell was admitted to a hospital on Monday night due to “flu-like symptoms”, his office said in a statement.

“In an abundance of caution, after experiencing flu-like symptoms over the weekend, Senator McConnell checked himself into a local hospital for evaluation last night,” the statement reads. “His prognosis is positive and he is grateful for the excellent care he is receiving.”

The House on Tuesday voted 217 to 214 to fund major parts of the government and end the partial shutdown.

The HPC community welcomed a familiar name last week, when Atos Group announced that it was reintroducing Bull as the name of its HPC and advanced computing arm. With a 95-year history, Bull has strong roots in Europe, and the French government considers Bull to be a sovereign asset with strategic importance.

While Bull is currently a unit of the European multinational company Atos Group, it soon will be a completely standalone company with headquarters near Paris, France. That’s significant not only for historical reasons, but because is arguably the most complete HPC system maker on the continent, capable of building the full stack of hardware and software necessary to develop HPC systems.

A Bull Gamma 60 system installed in Paris in the 1960s (Image courtesy Bull)

Steve Conway, a longtime industry analyst and HPCwire contributor, has been watching the HPC story unfold in Europe for decades. That story would be incomplete without Bull.

“Bull is a storied HPC brand that stayed with the supercomputer products (e.g., BullSequana),” Conway told HPCwire. “Now, the company name sends an important signal to customers, employees and the French government as an investor, that the company will maintain a strong, long-term emphasis on HPC and other advanced computing.

“It’s a smart move to help restore confidence after the financial struggles in recent years,” he added.

Bull’s history is replete with multiple name changes, mergers, and acquisitions. The French government has stepped in to safeguard what it considers a national asset not once, but now twice.

The Bull story starts in 1931, when the company H.W. Egli-Bull was founded as a means to exploit the patented punch card technology developed by Norwegian engineer Fredrik Rosing Bull, who died of cancer at age 43 in 1925. While the company was founded in France, it was a subsidiary of H.W. Egli, which was based in Switzerland.

Bull headquarters in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, outside of Paris (Image courtesy Bull)

The Bull company built a business making tabulators, punched card sorters, and punching machines for automating calculations, and competed with the likes of IBM and other early computer makers. The French company changed its name to Compagnie des Machines Bull in 1933, a name it kept until 1964, when a business downturn led to a merger with General Electric and the creation of several new Bull-General Electric entities.

Bull continued to build computers from the 1960s through the 1980s. It also continued to be acquired by foreign entities and renamed. In 1970, Bull-GE was acquired by Honeywell, which renamed it Honeywell-Bull. In 1975, Honeywell-Bull merged with Compagnie Internationale de l’Informatique (CII) and took the name CII-Honeywell-Bull.

Concerned with the loss of national identity with its premiere computer maker, the French Government nationalized CII-Honeywell-Bull in 1982 and gave it a new name: Bull Group. The new company continued with M&A activity, and in 1987 Bull Group partnered with Honeywell and NEC to create Honeywell Bull (subsequently named Bull HN). In 1989, Bull HN acquired Zenith.

In the 2000s, Bull entered the supercomputer business for the first time. Among its systems was CURIE, which installed at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). When it debuted in 2012, Curie was the was the most powerful European supercomputer, with 1.4 petaflops of sustained capacity on the Linpack benchmark, good enough for number nine on the TOP500 list.

Bull Logos through the years (Image courtesy Bull)

In 2014, Bull joined the Atos Group, a large European multinational IT company with headquarters near Paris, France. Atos continued to develop Bull-labeled HPC systems, including BullSequana in 2016 and JUWELS Booster in 2020, which delivered 25 and 44.1 petaflops  of computing power, respectively.

In 2022, Atos announced it would soon break the exascale barrier with BullSequana XH3000, a new line of supercomputers that feature liquid cooling and a choice of processors and interconnect architectures. Currently there are several BullSequana XH3000s in the TOP500 list, including the Jupiter Booster installed at EuroHPC’s Jülich Supercomputing Center, which is currently number 4 on the list with 1 exaflop of sustained capacity. There’s also Marenostrum, which is installed at the EuroHPC Barceleona Supercomputer Center, which was clocked at 175.3 petaflops of sustained capacity on Linpack and is currently number eight on the TOP500.

Atos also occupies the number 10 spot with a BullSequana XH2000 system installed at EuroHPC’s CINECA site, which ran 241 petaflops on the Linpack test. There are several other XH3000’s in the TOP500, including Jedi at EuroHPC at Jülich, which debuted at number 189 with 4.5 petaflops; and the Viper system at Max-Planck Gesselshaft, which sits at number 299; among others.

Bull’s Jupiter Booster, currently number four on the TOP500

Also in 2022, Atos decided to split its operations in two. Atos Tech Foundations would provide services, digital workspaces and professional services, while Eviden would target advanced computing, AI, the cloud, and cybersecurity. Starting in 2023, Bull was grouped into Eviden.

While Bull was busy with BullSequana XH3000, the French government was angling to make another move to secure what it considered to be an important sovereign asset with strategic military and nuclear value. In 2024, Atos announced that it was in talks to sell its HPC, quantum, and AI divisions of Eviden to the French government for €500 million. The two parties agreed to terms in July 2025, with the French government investing €410 million for the assets.

The deal inched further toward completion last week, when Atos announced the return of Bull. The company stated:

Bull’s new logo

“The rebirth of Bull represents a strategic milestone on its journey towards becoming a private, independent company, following the signing of the share purchase agreement with the French State on July 31, 2025. The complete transaction, which is expected to close in the first half of 2026, will support Bull in accelerating its vision of the digital future–more powerful, more sustainable, more sovereign and more open.”

Bull currently employs 2,500 workers in Europe, Latin America, and India. It owns 1,500 patents. It continues to manufacture its system at a factory in Angers, France.

“With the launch of Bull, we are reconnecting with our technological heritage to build our future,” stated Emmanuel Le Roux, SVP and head of Bull. “Our mission is clear: deliver powerful, sustainable, and sovereign computing and AI technologies that enable nations and industries to innovate with confidence and purpose.”

The post What the Return of Bull Means to European HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

The ruling comes just days after federal agents launched tear gas at a crowd of demonstrators, including young children, that local officials described as peaceful.

The Dyson PencilVac doesn't cost as much as you might expect.

In Mississippi, more than 36,000 homes and businesses have now gone a second week without electricity after a historic winter storm.

Pedro Sánchez says urgent action needed to protect children from ‘digital wild west’, drawing anger from owner of X

Spain has proposed a ban on social media use by teenagers as attitudes hardened in Europe against the technology, drawing personal insults against the prime minister from Elon Musk.

The government is preparing a series of measures including a social media ban for under-16s, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said, promising to protect children from the “digital wild west” and hold tech companies responsible for hateful and harmful content.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 4, No. 499.

Mozilla says the new version will be available on desktop-only on Feb. 24.

NASA plans to test the planned leak repair with a second dress rehearsal fueling test later this month.

The sheriff says the note was sent to a local Arizona news station, which agreed not to report on it, following the disappearance of "Today" show co-host Savannah Guthrie's mother, Nancy Guthrie.

President replied to Collins’ persistent questions about Epstein files by accusing her of not smiling ‘because you know you’re not telling the truth’

• Tulsi Gabbard running solo 2020 election inquiry

• Trump suggests Republicans should ‘take over’ elections

Donald Trump has continued to sow doubt in the election system. While appearing on former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino’s podcast on Monday, the president called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting,” in at least “15 places”, although he did not clarify which ones.

“The Republicans should say, ‘we want to take over’,” Trump said in the interview.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 4, No. 703.

A spokesman for Sen. Mitch McConnell said the Kentucky Republican's "prognosis is positive."

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 4 #969.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 4, No. 1,691.

A year after CBS News California Investigates exposed secrecy inside the California FAIR Plan, the insurance commissioner is backing a bill that would open meetings and financial records and require public reporting for the state's insurer of last resort.

Tyler Robinson's attorneys want the entire Utah County Attorney's Office disqualified because one of the prosecutors has a daughter who was present at the rally where Kirk was shot.

Digital surveillance of your phone data poses a significant risk in any setting, particularly during demonstrations.

The forum, sponsored by two Democrats, is intended to focus on what they call “violent tactics and disproportionate use of force by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Shahed-139 said to have approached USS Abraham Lincoln ‘with unclear intent’ in lead-up to expected US-Iran talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme

The US military says it shot down an Iranian drone that “aggressively” approached the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea.

The Iranian Shahed-139 drone was flying toward the carrier “with unclear intent” when an F-35 fighter jet shot it down, US Central Command said on Tuesday.

Report to tackle courts’ backlog also recommends new criminal justice adviser to oversee courts, prisons and policing

A new post of prime minister’s criminal justice adviser and the widespread use of remote hearings are among the recommendations of a government-commissioned independent review on tackling the courts’ backlog in England and Wales.

The second part of Sir Brian Leveson’s review – unlike the first part, which recommended slashing jury trials – focuses on efficiencies that can be achieved without legislation.

Data comes as government prepares to publish plans to overhaul Send system in England

One in six autistic pupils have not been to school at all since the start of this academic year, according to a new survey which found that mental health issues were often behind high levels of school absence.

Nearly half (45%) of the parents and children who responded to the UK-wide survey by the Ambitious About Autism charity said they felt “blamed” by the government for the absences.

Netflix film revisits evidence that led to Letby’s conviction and hears from expert who says his research was misused

Shortly after Lucy Letby was sentenced to 15 whole-life terms for murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others between June 2015 and June 2016 – a conviction that made her Britain’s worst ever child serial killer – Cheshire police agreed to give “unparalleled and exclusive access” to the makers of a Netflix film about the case.

The finished documentary, The Investigation Of Lucy Letby, which is released on Wednesday, must be very different from what the producers envisaged when they first began work on the project, given the subsequent unexpected turns in the story. Since the two trials, the prosecution evidence and police handling of the case have faced criticism from an unprecedentedly large number of distinguished British and international medical experts. Led by the Canadian neonatologist, Dr Shoo Lee – who says again in the feature-length Netflix documentary that his research was misused to convict the nurse – many of the experts are convinced Letby is innocent, the victim of a catastrophic miscarriage of justice.

Rights group says growing authoritarianism and abuses in US, Russia and China threaten global rules-based order

The world is in a “democratic recession” with almost three-quarters of the global population now living under autocratic rulers – levels not seen since the 1980s, according to a new report.

The system underpinning human rights was “in peril”, said Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), with a growing authoritarian wave becoming “the challenge of a generation”, he said.

‘Mid-career’ female workers also being sidelined by rigid hiring processes, says City of London Corporation

Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers, according to a report that found experienced females were also being sidelined as a result of “rigid hiring processes”.

“Mid-career” women – with at least five years’ experience – are being overlooked for digital roles in the tech and financial and professional services sectors, where they are traditionally underrepresented, according to the report by the City of London Corporation.

Josh MacAlister issues warning as government launches £88m ‘call to arms’ to recruit 10,000 new foster carers

Private providers of child social care in England will be pushed out of the system if they are found to be profiteering, the children’s minister has said.

Josh MacAlister, who is in charge of overhauling the care system for children, also called for a fostering equivalent of the Homes for Ukraine scheme to provide homes for tens of thousands of children.

The ACA Marketplace is a platform for purchasing private insurance plans, some of which offer income‑based subsidies to lower costs.

Entitlement programs are federally or jointly funded programs that guarantee benefits to all individuals who meet legally defined eligibility rules.

The alternative minimum tax ensures certain taxpayers pay a minimum amount by using a separate calculation that limits deductions and exclusions.

Capital gains are profits earned when someone sells a long‑term asset like stocks, real estate, or other valuable property.

Sports betting is legal in 39 states and in Washington, DC, generating millions in tax revenue.

Billionaires and intellectuals attended events with the disgraced financier years after he served time for sex offense, files reveal

Newly released emails and travel itineraries appear to show that for years after Jeffrey Epstein served time for procuring underage girls for prostitution, he continued to attend exclusive dinners alongside Silicon Valley’s most famous billionaires.

The emails, part of a trove released by the Department of Justice on Friday, show that as late as 2018, Epstein was invited to or attended dinners alongside the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Google vice-president and later Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

A federal judge expressed skepticism over the Pentagon's effort to downgrade the pay and rank of Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly after he urged service members not to follow unlawful military orders.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally added support for buttons. The release notes for a February 2 update state that several new starter conditions for automations are now available, including "Switch or button pressed." Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or control devices in your smart home, such as turning lights on or off, opening and closing shades, running a Good Night scene, or starting a robot vacuum. A great alternative to voice and app control when you want to control multiple devices, smart buttons are often wireless and generally have several ways to press them: single press, double press, and long press, meaning one button can do multiple things.

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Armed with your own creativity and this $300 sticker printer, you can bring joy to everyone around you. But if you're looking to start a small craft business, is it right for you?

Leaders had been trading hostile remarks for months but Gustavo Petro’s visit ended with warm words from US counterpart

After months of trading insults – from “sick man” and “drug trafficking leader” on one side, to “accomplice to genocide” with a “senile brain” on the other – the first meeting between Donald Trump and Gustavo Petro ended with pleasantries, autographs and a Maga cap.

The Colombian president was received by his US counterpart for a closed-door meeting at the White House, with no press access.

President Trump has continued to claim without evidence that there is widespread fraud in U.S. elections.

Conservancy sees nonnative species as major threat to local biodiversity, while residents rally to preserve local identity

California wildlife officials moved forward last week with a plan to eradicate a mule deer herd from Santa Catalina Island: extermination.

The plan has long pitted locals from the island off the coast of Los Angeles against the Catalina Island Conservancy, an environmental non-profit that manages 88% of the island’s terrain. The conservancy sees mule deer, which are not native to the island, as a major threat to local biodiversity, water quality and fire resilience.

MacBook Air or MacBook Pro? M4 or M5? Is the older M1 Air still worth it? You have MacBook questions, and CNET's laptop experts have the answers.

Dyson's PencilVac is so thin and light that it feels more like a broom than a cordless vacuum. Here's how using it went.

Search and rescue operation involving boats, helicopter and divers under way off the eastern Aegean island of Chios

A collision between a speedboat carrying migrants and a Greek coastguard patrol vessel off the eastern Aegean island of Chios has killed at least 14 people, the coastguard said.

A search and rescue operation involving four patrol vessels, an air force helicopter and a private boat carrying divers was under way for potential missing passengers.

Freaky robots get their drink on, a furniture designer turns to AI for a website, and more.

Although economists have generally downplayed the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, some employers are highlighting their adoption of AI.

Prosecutors in Paris also order Elon Musk to appear for questioning in April as part of a year-long investigation.

Cartoon lump of coal with giant eyes was spotlighted by US interior secretary in X post saying: ‘Mine, Baby, Mine!’

The Trump administration has turned to an unusual weapon in its attempt to resurrect coal mining – a cartoon lump of coal, complete with giant eyes and yellow mining garb, called “Coalie”.

The administration’s new mascot, kitted out with a helmet, boots and gloves, was introduced in a seemingly artificial intelligence-generated picture posted online by Doug Burgum, Donald Trump’s interior secretary.

The complaint was closed administratively by the intelligence community inspector general's office in June 2025, under prior leadership, watchdog says.

Appropriations measure will let Democrats negotiate with White House and GOP leaders over mass deportation efforts

Donald Trump on Tuesday signed legislation to end a government shutdown hours after it was approved by the House of Representatives, as top Democrats warned they will block further funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if their demands for restrictions on Trump’s mass deportation campaign are not addressed.

The Republican-controlled House approved the $1.2tn appropriations measure by a narrow 217-214 vote, with all but 21 Republicans voting in favor and all but 21 Democrats against. The president signed it later in the afternoon at the White House, bringing to an end the shutdown that began after midnight last Friday, which had halted many operations at departments including defense, health and human services, labor, and transportation.

The new law will ban anyone younger than 16 from using social media apps in Spain.

President Donald Trump wasted no time in responding to the deaths of two U.S. citizens this month during protests against an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Trump and other top administration officials made inaccurate or unsupported statements within hours of the incidents, a departure from how previous presidents responded in similar situations, experts told us.

Hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good on Jan. 7, Trump claimed that Good was “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” The president included a video clip of the shooting, captured from a distance, but closer video showed the agent wasn’t run over.

Then, hours after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, Trump posted a picture of a handgun and wrote, “This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go – What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers? The Mayor and the Governor called them off? It is stated that many of these Police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do!”

Department of Homeland Security officials also made statements that Pretti “approached” officers with a handgun, “violently resisted” an attempt to “disarm” him, and “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” As we’ve explained, in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, it’s difficult to know exactly what happened, but bystander videos contradicted DHS’ account. They don’t show Pretti holding the gun or threatening officers with it.

The president, himself, softened his remarks, saying the next day, “We’re reviewing everything and will come out with a determination” on whether the federal agent’s actions were justified. And the civil rights division of the Justice Department is now investigating the Pretti killing.

All four of the experts we spoke to — a group that included political communications researchers and historians — said that Trump’s remarks following these deaths marked a shift from previous presidents, and even from some of his own rhetoric during his first term.

“As with so much else Trump, yes — he’s extremely different,” Matt Dallek, a political historian and professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, told us in an interview.

“He’s much more extreme and far more untethered from facts and the reality on the ground,” Dallek said, noting that, importantly, it’s not just the president, but also his officials who have taken this tack.

Others we spoke to made the same point.

“Without question,” there has been a shift, Roderick Hart, a professor emeritus of communication at the University of Texas at Austin with expertise in politics and the mass media, told us. “And it has very little to do with this particular situation in Minneapolis. He’s a rhetoric-first guy. … And he’s chosen his people who have exactly the same instincts,” Hart said.

Presidents are normally judicious, particularly when reacting to an event, Hart said. But, “Trump talks before the event is even finished.”

The Minnesota fatal shootings, however, involved federal agents, while examples from past presidencies concern state or local officers. 

For example, former President Barack Obama — who was in office at a moment when the ubiquity of camera phones and the rise of social media converged to shine light on the killings of unarmed Black men and boys — took more time before publicly expressing his thoughts.

One of the first illustrations of this moment didn’t actually feature an officer, but rather a neighborhood watch volunteer in central Florida, who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012. About a month after that, in response to a reporter’s question, Obama said, in part, “Well, I’m the head of the executive branch, and the attorney general reports to me, so I’ve got to be careful about my statements to make sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking place right now. But obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together — federal, state, and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.”

Obama continued: “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

In 2014, a year that saw several high-profile police killings, Obama waited three days to publicly respond to the Aug. 9 death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by a local police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking widespread protests.

Then, Obama said in a statement: “The death of Michael Brown is heartbreaking, and Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family and his community at this very difficult time. As Attorney General Holder has indicated, the Department of Justice is investigating the situation along with local officials, and they will continue to direct resources to the case as needed. I know the events of the past few days have prompted strong passions, but as details unfold, I urge everyone in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country, to remember this young man through reflection and understanding. We should comfort each other and talk with one another in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. Along with our prayers, that’s what Michael and his family, and our broader American community, deserve.”

The former president waited three weeks — when he was asked about it in an interview — to comment on the shooting death that year of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland. In a lengthy answer to a question about how responsible he felt his administration was for addressing police shootings, Obama said, “Well, I think an enormous amount. Not just because, as president, you’re always responsible for what happens in this country and you’ve got to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, but because of my particular experiences that I bring to this office.”