A business jet with six on board crashed on a Laredo, Texas, highway and caught fire, killing one person and causing chaos as passersby frantically tried to save those inside.

With the specifics of the U.S.-Iran deal still unclear, Israel continues strikes in Lebanon and shippers face mixed messages on the Strait of Hormuz.

David Lammy accused Matt Vickers of ‘promoting conspiracies’ about the nature of the attack

Andy Burnham may have trouble getting through to Keir Starmer if he tries ringing him after the Makerfield byelection to urge him to set a timetable for his departure. Burnham reportedly wants to call Starmer this weekend. (See 9.47am.) But, in his interview with Sky News, Starmer said: “I’m sure I’ll talk to Andy after the weekend.”

If Starmer declines to take Burnham’s call, he may be following Ed Miliband’s example. In a Times story today, Patrick Maguire and Steven Swinford report:

Sir Keir Starmer’s relationship with Ed Miliband has broken down to such an extent that the energy secretary has been accused of “ghosting” the prime minister in recent weeks.

Senior government sources claimed that Miliband declined to take calls from the prime minister during a tense stand-off over defence spending.

Robert White's win in the heavily Democratic city sets him up to take the top spot in November's general elections, when he could replace 18-term delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.

US president says the deal is ‘not final’ and backs leaders calls for wider talks on Tehran’s missile programme

• Trump backs G7 leaders’ call for wider talks on Iranian missile programme

• Analysis: Where does Iran deal leave US-Israel relationship?

Trump also addressed media reports of a leaked US-Iran deal (see post at 11:57), denying claims it includes a $300bn reconstruction fund for Tehran.

“We’re not putting up 10 cents,” he said. “We are not investing and we do not have a fund.”

It’s not final. It’s a memorandum of understanding, and if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head.

If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head, okay, because they’ve misbehaved for 47 years.”

The moment was published by the White House after the US president walking into the summit for Wednesday morning’s session

Rutte says the adjustment in the US pledge to the Nato Force Model is “not primarily about where forces and assets are currently, but about who would do what if our defence plans were activated.”

He says historically the model was “overly reliant” on the US.

“You will likely have seen news adjusting its contributions to the Nato force model. In some cases, this has been cast as a problem, as the US pulling away from its allies, but that is not the reality. The US has made clear that it is committed to Nato.

That commitment comes with an expectation that allies will more fairly share the responsibility for our security here in Europe.”

Republican primary runoff voters chose US representative Mike Collins to face Ossoff in November

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President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned Iran he was ready to resume military action if Tehran did not abide by its obligations, two days ahead of the signing of an accord to end the war between the foes.

“No it’s not final. It’s a memorandum of understanding,” Trump said at the G7, referring to the agreement expected to be signed in Switzerland on Friday.

The Republicans agreed with Dumocrats to remove very fair, and talented, William Pulte, from serving as Acting DNI in return for getting FISA approved by the Dumocrats. However, the Republicans moved so fast with the hearings of the Great Jay Clayton, current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, that Pulte would be gone before the Dumocrats would vote on FISA. Now, the Dumocrats are saying they will vote against FISA — So, the Republicans wound up having fulfilled their commitment, but Dumocrats broke the Deal.

In addition, the newly nominated U.S. Attorney, Jamie McDonald, must be confirmed and blue slipped. Because of the ridiculous views of Republicans on blue slipping (Dumocrats are often willing to nix it), I may not be able to get the extraordinary Sullivan & Cromwell Partner, Jamie, approved, and I don’t want to take Jay Clayton away from the great job he is doing until Jamie is in place. Therefore, to add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it.

Not complicated, actually, the Republicans fell into a trap. Regarding the approval of our Great Patriot, Jay Clayton, we are cancelling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI today, and will not be going forward until Jamie McDonald is approved to be U.S. Attorney. In the meantime, Bill Pulte will remain as the Acting Director of National Intelligence.

Forecasters say the potential first tropical cyclone of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season could develop into a fully formed storm on Wednesday and bring life-threatening flash flooding.

David Pearce was convicted of first-degree murder for the deaths of Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales after a night of partying in Los Angeles. He was also found guilty of raping seven other women who came forward to testify at his trial.

The mother of murdered model Christy Giles pleads for others to share their locations. She says the technology helped police catch David Pearce, who murdered Giles and her friend, architect Hilda Marcela Cabrales.

⚽ All the latest news on day seven of the tournament
⚽ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Mail us

It is Wednesday, so you can feast upon your weekly dose of The Knowledge.

Socceroos forward Awer Mabil on that viral video.

The reason why it went viral is because it was raw. It was not edited. It was just purely what the players wanted to say and all put together. It had an effect because individually Australians can feel and relate with it.”

Move will allow Trump’s controversial pick, Bill Pulte, to assume role and remain in place for at least several weeks

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Donald Trump abruptly halted the confirmation process for Jay Clayton as the US’s top intelligence chief early Wednesday, in a move that will allow Trump’s controversial selection for acting director of national security, Bill Pulte, to assume the role and remain in place for at least several weeks until Clayton is confirmed.

Trump pushed the Senate to confirm Clayton after his appointment of Pulte as acting director sparked bipartisan pushback and stalled his administration’s push for renewal of the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa).

Republicans question details of deal set to be signed later in the week as European leaders seek to join talks. Plus: can we refreeze the Arctic?

Good morning.

Donald Trump, facing severe criticism from some domestic supporters for conducting a war against Iran that has met hardly any of its original objectives, has backed a joint G7 leaders’ statement that welcomes his proposed peace deal.

What is the domestic criticism of the deal? Many Senate Republicans said there were still unanswered questions and they needed thorough briefings before it was finalized. Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump and a longtime hawk on Iran, said: “The way Iran describes it, it’s awful. The way we describe it, it makes sense to me. Let’s look at it and see what it actually is.”

How do people in Iran feel about the deal? The Guardian’s Deepa Parent found a shared sense of exhaustion, and anger that nothing has really changed.

What does the deal mean for US-Israeli relations? The strategic interests of the US and Israel appear to be diverging and Benjamin Netanyahu has been left in a political bind, facing an election having led Israel in three wars – in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran – without a clear victory in any of them.

How are authorities cracking down on protests against ICE? Fifteen people in Minnesota have been charged with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers over their response to a deadly immigration enforcement crackdown in the state earlier this year. The prosecutors allege the defendants were part of two Minneapolis-based “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement”.

PM says Greater Manchester mayor is ‘huge asset’ who can play big part in Labour government if he wins byelection

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has indicated he would give Andy Burnham a cabinet job, describing him as a “huge asset”, as he attempted to head off a challenge to his leadership that is expected to come after the Makerfield byelection on Thursday.

Starmer, who is fighting for his political life from the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains in France, said if there was a leadership challenge, he intended to fight.

The US president drew laughs from his fellow G7 leaders for his quip as he walked into a meeting on the last day of the their summit

Broadcast channels under review and 10% of senior leaders to go as part of drive to cut £500m in costs

Entire BBC programmes will be scrapped and compulsory redundancies will be necessary as part of sweeping cuts at the corporation, the new director general, Matt Brittin, has told staff.

The former Google executive also announced he was reviewing the BBC’s broadcast TV channels and radio network, as audiences continue to switch to online content.

Following the supreme court’s gutting of the voting rights act, the president’s recent claims of fraud are cause for serious concern

The first case I argued in the supreme court was in 1982. I represented African American voters from Burke county, Georgia, where no Black person had ever been elected to office even though 40% of the voters were Black. The reason was simple. All candidates were elected at large by the voters of the entire county, and the white majority could outvote Black voters every time.

Federal law banned many older methods of southern discrimination–the bogus literacy tests, “understanding” tests, and poll taxes, for example – but structural barriers like the one in Burke county were pervasive, and they suppressed Black politics across the south. In Georgia, fewer than one percent of the elected officials in the state were African Americans while more than a quarter of the state’s registered voters were Black.

Victims’ families to speak in court as Heuermann, 63, to be imprisoned for killing spree that spanned decades

The families of eight women strangled by Rex Heuermann are expected to speak at the Gilgo Beach killers sentencing in Riverhead, New York, more than three decades after the 63-year-old Manhattan architect began his killing spree.

Heuermann pleaded guilty to murdering seven women and admitted to the killing of an eighth victim in April. He will receive three consecutive life terms for three killings and a consecutive sentence of 100 years to life imprisonment for four more.

These can be used at any time with or without equipment.

Apple is partnering with brands like Eve, Aqara and others to bring Apple Home support to security cameras. Here are my favorites.

The European Commission has declined (PDF) to propose a law requiring publishers to keep discontinued video games playable, despite the Stop Killing Games initiative collecting nearly 1.3 million verified signatures. Instead, it plans to develop a voluntary industry code covering end-of-life transparency and preservation. Dextero reports: The Commission's full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, "would not be proportionate." It cited concerns about intellectual property rights, confidential business information, publisher costs, and potential cybersecurity or safety risks once games are no longer supported. The code of conduct could include more transparent storefront labeling about possible game discontinuation, along with more partnerships between publishers and cultural heritage institutions to preserve games. However, it would not legally require publishers to provide offline patches, private server tools, or other methods for players to continue accessing games after official support ends. The Commission also argued that existing EU consumer law already provides some safeguards, including requirements around transparency, contract duration, termination conditions, and possible refunds if a shutdown conflicts with the agreement or a consumer's reasonable expectations. [...] Despite the setback, Stop Killing Games has said it is not ending its push for legislation. In a response posted after the Commission's decision, the official Stop Killing Games account said the outcome was "not unexpected" and claimed the campaign had already prepared for the result. The group said it is now pushing for members of the European Parliament to amend Stop Killing Games into the Digital Fairness Act instead. "We can move on without the Commission and their non-decision," the group said, referencing earlier comments from Accursed Farms creator Ross Scott.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

About 150 jobs have already been lost in Bolton as company reports 145% rise in profits and hands £20m to shareholders

• Business live – latest updates

The online electrical goods seller AO World has revealed it is outsourcing up to 200 UK call centre roles to South Africa blaming rising labour costs, as it handed £20m to shareholders.

As the retailer reported a jump in profits, it said it was shifting the majority of call centre jobs overseas “in response to ongoing inflationary cost pressures, and particularly rising employment costs”. It expects to save about £4m a year as a result of the change.

Lionel Messi tied the Men's World Cup goals record with his first World Cup hat trick as Argentina topped Algeria.

Pamphlets from event featured projects in West Bank and East Jerusalem despite previous denials by organisers

An Israeli real estate event in north London appears to have advertised the sale of land in Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, despite previous denials that illegal settlement properties would be marketed at the event.

Pamphlets shared with the Guardian from the event on Sunday showed real estate projects in Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Kfar Eldad and Teneh Omarim in the occupied West Bank, as well as Ramat Eshkol and Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem.

Voters in the San Francisco Bay Area are deciding who will fill the remainder of former Rep. Eric Swalwell's congressional seat in a special primary election on Tuesday.

Education secretary describes historical practice in England as a ‘shameful period’ in country’s history

Downing Street is to make a full apology on behalf of the state to those affected by historical forced adoption in England, the education secretary has confirmed.

Bridget Phillipson, giving evidence to MPs on the education select committee on Wednesday, described it as a “shameful period” in UK history.

When Congressional Democrats rallied against President Donald Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to serve as temporary director of national intelligence last week, they said he was an unqualified pick who would be too eager to use the job to undermine elections.

Now some high-ranking Democrats are lining up to support another permanent appointee with a dubious claim to the legal job requirements — Jay Clayton — who has also openly questioned the integrity of U.S. elections.

Clayton’s nomination will be heard by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., hopes to have him confirmed as soon as Thursday — a lightning-fast process for a top intelligence post.

What’s at stake, however, isn’t just the outcome of Clayton’s nomination process. Trump’s pick is intertwined with the fate of a key domestic surveillance law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that expired Friday.

Privacy advocates are worried that Clayton’s nomination will give some Democrats the excuse they have been looking for to vote for renewing Section 702. The advocates are raising concerns about Clayton and calling on Congress to add a warrant requirement to the surveillance law, no matter who ultimately takes over as intel chief.

The top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who have both supported renewing Section 702 without major changes, have issued positive statements about Clayton’s nomination.

Neither House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has tipped their hand as to whether Clayton’s nomination will lead them to support a so-called “clean” renewal of Section 702.

Related

Hakeem Jeffries Finally Finds a Spine: Dem Leaders Rallied Against Extending Domestic Spy Law

Jeffries said last week that he supports making significant reforms to the law, although he did not specifically commit to a warrant requirement.

Sean Vitka, executive director of the left-leaning advocacy group Demand Progress, urged Democratic leaders to stand firm on reform.

“There is no universe where the momentary person who happens to satisfy Himes and Warner’s vibe check,” Vitka said, “should mitigate everybody’s concerns that are decades old with warrantless surveillance.”

Election Conspiracies

The reauthorization of Section 702 once appeared to be on a “glide path,” according to Warner. The law sets the parameters for when intelligence agencies can warrantlessly search American communications collected abroad.

Related

“Terrorist”: How ICE Weaponized 9/11’s Scarlet Letter

Congress was within days of passing a new version of the law with minor tweaks when Trump nominated Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to serve as temporary director of national intelligence.

When he tapped Pulte, Trump said he wanted to him to use the post to investigate “rigged” elections. That alarmed Democrats who noted that Pulte is already accused of misusing sensitive mortgage databases to help launch investigations against Trump’s political enemies.

The intelligence chief post has no formal role in election administration, but that did not stop outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from appearing at an FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, ballot warehouse.

Pulte’s lapdog reputation was not the only thing that worried Democrats. They also noted that he did not meet the job requirement for the intelligence chief post in statute, which states that the nominee “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Centrist Democrats who were willing to renew Section 702 despite Gabbard’s overt politicization of the intelligence chief job finally had enough when it came to Pulte’s nomination. Even Warner and Himes voted against the law’s reauthorization.

Trump’s nomination of Clayton was an attempt to undo the backlash. Clayton currently serves as the federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and was previously the Securities and Exchange Commission chair — the kind of resume that reassures Washington insiders.

“I’ve known and respected Jay Clayton for decades,” Himes said on X. “His intelligence, temperament and deep commitment to public service will make him a terrific DNI. Had this nomination been made a week ago, lots of pain might have been avoided.”

Related

The Right’s “Election Fraud” Cry for Midterms Previewed in Primaries

Advocates were more dubious. They noted that only days before his selection, Clayton had been asked on CNBC about the delays in returning California’s election results that had fueled right-wing conspiracy theories.

“On the integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job,” Clayton said, without offering evidence. “And the American people are right to question it.”

Clayton’s willingness to engage with one of Trump’s favorite tropes alarmed advocates, who say that Gabbard’s role in the Georgia warehouse raid shows how the intelligence chief post could be misused to sow election doubt.

Even centrist Democrats concede that, like Pulte, Clayton doesn’t have “extensive” national security experience. In his defense, supporters point to the role of federal prosecutors in launching national security cases.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the armed services committee, sounded a note of skepticism on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We have to look very clearly at Jay Clayton,” Reed said. “He is a very accomplished lawyer, but the statute requires someone taking this job to have significant national security experience, and that has to be measured. I don’t think he does.”

Senators of both parties will have an opportunity to probe Clayton’s qualifications at Wednesday’s confirmation hearing. Warner has said that Clayton will have to answer questions about his views on elections.

Whatever happens with his nomination, privacy advocates say the entire saga of replacing Gabbard further proves the need for major reforms to Section 702.

“It doesn’t matter who’s in charge,” longtime privacy booster Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said on June 11. “FISA 702 can’t be renewed without real reforms.”

“Case in point: Trump’s latest nominee for director of national intelligence was peddling election conspiracies just a few days ago.”

The post Are Jeffries and Schumer Getting Ready to Greenlight Domestic Spy Power for Trump? appeared first on The Intercept.

Online uproar follows Canadian brand’s use of taiko drum at sponsored festival held to celebrate Chinese culture

The activewear brand Lululemon has apologised after a promotional event held on the Great Wall of China appeared to mistakenly feature a Japanese drum, prompting an uproar.

The Canadian-headquartered company, known for its upmarket leggings, has been growing rapidly in China and arranged for a yoga festival to take place in late May on a section of the wall near Beijing.

Nearly every indicator of climate change is flashing red. But we still hold the tools available to bring the planet back into balance

The ocean is running a fever. In 2025, the number of days of marine heatwaves – prolonged spells when the sea turns abnormally, dangerously warm – was more than triple what it was in the early 1990s.

These are not abstract statistics. A severe and persistent marine heatwave bleaches coral reefs, strips away the kelp forests that shelter young fish, empties fishing grounds and – if occurring frequently – can tip whole ecosystems past the point of recovery.

Karina Von Schuckmann is an IGCC author and senior adviser of Mercator Ocean International

Unrestrained development of unsafe AI systems is leading to intolerable risks

• Stuart Russell is a computer scientist known for his contributions to AI and a new Guardian US columnist

The AI company Anthropic has been making major headlines recently. Its trillion-dollar IPO plan and its blood feud with secretary of defense Pete Hegseth have attracted much attention, but two other events may be even more consequential.

In early June, the company posted an article describing early signs of recursive self-improvement (RSI), a process in which an AI system devises ways to increase its own intelligence, leading to a greater ability to improve itself, and so on.

Stuart Russell is a distinguished professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence and a Guardian US columnist

Federal Tort Claims Act, over which DoJ has total discretion, provides workaround to Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund

January 6 defendants who assaulted police officers are pursuing legal claims for millions in compensation from the Trump administration using an obscure federal process with minimal oversight, but which offers the Trump administration a way to compensate those responsible for violence even after scrapping its “anti-weaponization fund”.

The defendants are pursuing their claims using the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which allows individuals wronged by the government to file claims for monetary damages. The justice department has complete and unchecked discretion over whether to settle the claims, giving the Trump administration a powerful vehicle to reward those responsible for violence on January 6. The claims would be paid out from the judgment fund, a perpetual appropriation allowed for by Congress and the same pot of money Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund was going to draw from. All of the defendants seeking compensation received a pardon from Trump.

Steven Mills and Tiffany Score reached an agreement with the biological parents of their child after fertility clinic’s mix-up

A Florida couple who learned they had been given the wrong embryo after their newborn, Shea, appeared to be of a different race, will retain permanent custody of the child.

Steven Mills and Tiffany Score reached a custody agreement with Shea’s biological parents – identified anonymously as Patient 004 – in a court filing last week from their lawsuit against the Florida clinic allegedly responsible for the embryo snafu.

As a House committee debated President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill last year, Republican backers repeatedly emphasized that its changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, wouldn’t affect vulnerable people.

SNAP reforms would “restore integrity” to the program and ensure it works for the “most vulnerable among us, including children,” said Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican and chair of the House Agriculture Committee.

Passing the bill would be a “historic accomplishment” that will ensure “those in need can continue to receive the assistance they need,” said Rep. John Rose, a Republican from Tennessee.

And Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, said the bill would focus resources on the “neediest” Americans. “If you are a pregnant woman, your benefits are unaffected. If you have young children at home, your benefits are unaffected by this bill. If you are disabled, your benefits are unaffected by this bill.”

But nearly a year after the measure was signed into law, the number of children receiving food assistance has plummeted by at least 776,000, according to a ProPublica analysis. At least 12 states break down program participation by age, and of the 1,670,011 people who are no longer receiving benefits in those states, 776,134, or 46%, were children.

Another analysis reached the same conclusion: Just last month, the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found there were 700,000 fewer children receiving food assistance.

Arizona has seen the nation’s largest percentage decline in SNAP participants; 205,223 children are no longer receiving the benefit since July 2025, a 55% drop. Louisiana had the second largest percent decline among children, 22%.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, hasn’t detailed the impact on children aided by the program, but initial figures show that compared to February 2025, 4.3 million fewer people received SNAP nationwide in February 2026, leaving 37.8 million participants.

Although children weren’t the intended targets of the legislation’s changes, they’re increasingly “collateral damage,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If states are trying to comply with the law’s changes to SNAP, they’re likely not focusing on making the program accessible, Bergh said. Other experts said that people may be pushed off the program because of increased paperwork requirements to remain eligible.

States are required to impose work requirements for most adult recipients, while preparing for two major cost shifts. In October, states will begin covering 75% of the program’s administrative costs. States have been paying 50% of those costs.

In addition, states will have to pay a larger share of SNAP benefits starting in October 2027, based on their error rate. Error rates reflect overpayments or underpayments of SNAP benefits. While sometimes characterized as fraud, such errors are usually the fault of the state agency or the SNAP recipient, according to USDA, which describes them as “largely unintentional.”

If a state agency is facing staffing shortages and struggling to comply with new regulations, it will be harder for low-income families to access the benefits, Bergh said. “Families are falling through the cracks.”

In Massachusetts, for example, the share of SNAP applicants who called an assistance line and couldn’t reach a worker rose from 61% in November to nearly 81% in March, according to the Department of Transitional Assistance, which administers SNAP in the state. The state agency did not respond to a request for comment.

A USDA spokesperson did not address ProPublica’s questions about the number of children who have lost access to SNAP. “There is no shortage of resources for the most vulnerable among us, including children,” the spokesperson said.

The three members of the House Agriculture Committee who defended last year’s bill before its passage — Rose, Thompson and Johnson — did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about their statements now that many children no longer receive SNAP benefits.

Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins about her recent comments that it was “good news” that millions of people no longer receive SNAP. If more than 700,000 children have been dropped in the 12 states that report those figures, “that number’s going to be into the millions” when other states are included, he said.

Rollins responded, “The 700,000 number of children is not correct,” contending that most people who were kicked off SNAP were “fraudulent.”

“That is not a nonpartisan group that gave you that number,” she said. (ProPublica independently verified the figures reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

McGovern said he has talked to people who have lost food assistance. “These are people who actually need and rely on this food assistance to provide basic nutrition for their families,” he said.

Pressure to lower error rates “creates a temptation for the states to bump off working families,” said Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University. Working families may have more volatile incomes, making it harder for state agencies to assess benefits accurately.

“When they say we want to preserve SNAP for those with the greatest need, they’re sort of acknowledging that they want the scale of the SNAP program to be smaller,” he said.

Mariana Chilton, an expert in child hunger at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said a smaller program won’t save money in the long run. Research shows that children who receive SNAP benefits are healthier, have better academic outcomes, use hospitals less often and have better mental health as teenagers.

She called the situation a “public health crisis” in the making. “When children are not healthy, this affects children today and it affects them throughout their lifetimes,” she said, likening hunger during early childhood to a brain injury.

As Arizona’s SNAP participation drops, nonprofits are feeling the effects. St. Mary’s Food Bank, the largest in the state, has seen a 15% increase in need this year, which translates into 300,000 more visits from people in search of food, said Milt Liu, the chief executive officer.

Read More

“The Alarm Bell”: Arizona’s Drop in SNAP Participation Signals Potential Nationwide Impact of Trump Legislation

“It’s important for everyone to realize that policies have implications for people on the edge, and we’re seeing that in our line every day,” he said.

On a recent morning, Ana Alvarez waited in a line of vehicles at a St. Mary’s food bank in Phoenix. Alvarez, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant, started coming to St. Mary’s after she lost her SNAP benefits in September.

She reapplied for SNAP with the Arizona Department of Economic Security in December, but the application is still pending. The department did not respond to questions about its backlog.

She clips coupons and has cut out trips to the zoo and restaurants with her children. The slow season at the restaurant where she works is about to hit. And as summer temperatures rise, Alvarez wonders how she will afford her electric bill, her rent and her car payment.

At least once a week she contacts the agency about her application. The last time she called, a worker told her what others have in the past: She will have to keep waiting.

The post More Than 770,000 Children Are No Longer Receiving SNAP Benefits After Trump Changes Federal Food Program appeared first on ProPublica.

Apple TV's horror comedy upped the stakes with its season finale, delivering a big, emotional twist and teasing even more of the island's disturbing lore.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware lawmakers introduced legislation last week to create the state’s first ever Commission on Indigenous Affairs. The commission would give Indigenous Delawareans a means of communication between the state government leaders and sovereign nations, advising policymakers on decisions that could impact their community.

Delaware lawmakers advanced a bill last week aimed at strengthening ties between the state and its Indigenous population. 

The House of Representatives unanimously passed House Bill 365, which would stand up the state’s first-ever Commission on Indigenous Affairs. If established, the commission would advise lawmakers and Gov. Matt Meyer on issues affecting Delaware’s Native American communities. 

According to the bill, some of those issues could include healthcare, social services, housing, employment, and education needs.

Representatives from both the Nanticoke Indian Tribe and the Lenape Tribe of Delaware – two of Delaware’s largest – were inside the House Chamber for the June 9 vote. 

House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn Harris (D-Dover), who sponsored the legislation, addressed the commission’s potential impact on Delaware’s Indigenous communities after lawmakers voted to advance the bill.

“This is a momentous day for them,” Harris said. “Finally they will have their voice in our government in a way that is solid.”

House Bill 365 now awaits consideration in the Senate.

What would the commission do?

The state’s Commission on Indigenous Affairs could create programs and events that raise awareness of Lenape, Nanticoke and other Indigenous people of Delaware, according to HB 365. 

The commission would be made up of nine members operating under three-year terms. That membership would consist of at least two members from the Lenape tribe, at least two members from the Nanticoke tribe and five members who are Indigenous residents of Delaware from any tribe or nation. 

Members would be appointed by Gov. Matt Meyer from a panel of candidates recommended by the Lenape and Nanticoke tribes.

The commission would be tasked with providing state policymakers with Indigenous perspectives and advising them about how policies, laws and administrative rules would impact Delaware’s Indigenous communities.

It remains unclear what specific policy recommendations the commission would put forth for lawmakers to consider. The bill’s language, however, mentions land acknowledgment, clean water initiatives, protection of native plant species and wetlands and protection of historic Indigenous burial sites and artifacts.

House Bill 365 would allocate $20,000 a year for the next three fiscal years toward the commission. According to the bill’s fiscal note, that money could go toward startup and other programming costs.

Peace walk precedes vote

Before the House vote, Rep. Harris hosted a peace walk with representatives from Delaware’s Indigenous communities who came to Legislative Hall in support of the proposed commission.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike were invited to participate in the demonstration of solidarity and support for HB 365.

During the demonstration, participants walked in a circle while different speakers took turns coming to the center to recite prayers.

“Wanishi,” meaning “thank you” in certain dialects spoken by Delaware’s Indigenous communities, was a common call and response phrase echoed throughout the walk.

Attendees also acknowledged that the commission would have important work ahead of it, should it be enacted by the General Assembly.

“Healing cannot begin until truth is acknowledged,” said Raggatha Rain Calentine of the Indian Mission United Methodist Church during a moment of prayer. “Justice cannot grow where truth is denied.”

The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, which is made up of both Nanticoke and Lenape tribe members, has historically lived throughout New Jersey, Delaware, southern New York, and eastern Pennsylvania. The Lenape and the Nanticoke are the largest Indigenous populations in Delaware, but they do not currently have a formal commission to advise policymakers within the state government.

“The common sense would just make sense if we were at the table, helping guide, as we always have,” said Denise Bright Dove Ashton-Dunkley, tribal councilwoman and educator of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation in New Jersey.

After passing unanimously in the House, HB 365 will be considered by the Senate Elections and Government Affairs Committee this Thursday, June 18. 

Get Involved
The Senate Elections and Government Affairs Committee will discuss HB 365 at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 18, inside Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. For more information about that meeting, including how to attend virtually, click here.

The post Lawmakers work to stand up Delaware’s first Commission on Indigenous Affairs appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Major operation launched after spate of pet thefts in Ho Chi Minh City, according to local media

Police in Vietnam have rescued more than 400 cats in a bust of a cat meat crime ring in Ho Chi Minh City, according to animal welfare groups and local media reports.

More than 40 cats were reunited with their owners after the multiday operation last week, but several dozen of those rescued have died due to the harsh conditions in which they were found, the groups said.

President Trump delayed Jay Clayton's nomination to lead the U.S. intelligence community, saying he's trying to force Congress to pass a voter ID bill that currently lacks enough support to be approved.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 17, No. 836.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 17 No. 1,102.

Abdiqadir Salah was pierced by shrapnel in a bombing that killed 12 in Somalia. But as the US denies civilians were hurt they face no hope of compensation

Read more: Killed walking home from school: why did Somali children become targets of US drone strikes?

A seven-year-old boy who was riddled with shrapnel during a deadly US airstrike in Somalia faces losing his ability to walk unless he has a £750 emergency operation.

But Abdiqadir Salah’s family cannot afford the surgery and the US – which refuses to admit that any civilians were killed or injured during its attack six months ago – appears unwilling to pay compensation to those affected by airstrikes in Somalia.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S; EA Vancouver/Electronic Arts
Micromanaging your fighter is a little tedious, but the action is thrilling in this authentically detailed sporting simulation

Becoming a professional fighter takes years of repetition, drilling techniques and training footwork until everything is instinctual. Your body needs an automatic answer for every limb, from every angle. In MMA, which encompasses every martial art, it’s even harder.

EA Sports’ UFC 6 realistically captures the grind of this brutal discipline. Throw on Career Mode and you spend most of your time working on combos and techniques. It’s all about making the complex controls feel second nature, increasing the effectiveness of every strike thrown by your fighter. With simulated six-week-long training camps between bouts, you can sometimes spar 12 times before a fight that could be over in a matter of seconds.

The Americans have the advantages on paper, but the Socceroos’ strengths are in their defensive organization and the power of the unknown

• World Cup newsletter | Daily podcast | Download the app

It is the showdown to determine the world’s best “soccer”-playing nation: the much-anticipated Group D clash between two countries in which football has more than one meaning.

Neither will be distracted by nomenclature, however, when the United States run out against Australia in Seattle on Friday in a contest set to captivate both sides of the Pacific.

Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens — a decision he worries would make their personal information more vulnerable to breaches and possible exploitation.

But if it refused, the East African nation would likely lose out on more than a billion dollars to address HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses, even as its people face ongoing threats from Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases. 

So, on Dec. 10, it agreed.

“If you take the deal, you’re going to be exploited. If you don’t take it, you’re going to die,” said Ssekamwa, an attorney and digital rights expert in Uganda. “It’s the essence of digital colonialism.”

Across Africa, countries have faced similar dilemmas as the U.S. has held a series of closed-door negotiations in which lifesaving aid has been conditioned on access to citizens’ health data. The negotiations come in the wake of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which — in contrast with the new contracts — provided billions of dollars in aid with few strings attached. Officials in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana have been so outraged by the demands that they rejected the initial deals. 

The demand to access health data is central to the Trump administration’s new America First Global Health Strategy, an openly transactional approach that seeks to leverage the desperate need for medical treatments abroad. Aid will now be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in September.

The State Department declined to publicly release global aid and data-sharing agreements it has signed with more than 30 countries as part of its new approach. But a ProPublica analysis of nine of the deals offers a window into the extensive U.S. demands for access to data — and the potential risks and vulnerabilities for the citizens of countries that have signed them. ProPublica also reviewed a data-sharing agreement struck with Uganda, which has not previously been reported; a data agreement with Kenya; six agreements over the sharing of pathogens that can cause pandemics that were made public by the State Department this week; generic templates of deals for sharing both data and pathogens that can cause pandemics; and an analysis of the documents the advocacy group Public Citizen shared exclusively with ProPublica. 

ProPublica also consulted more than a dozen experts in data privacy and global health, including several with direct knowledge of U.S. policy who said that the insistent demands for data access and other resources as a condition of aid are unprecedented. Without seeing the full suite of agreements, they could not identify all vulnerabilities. But they spotted some red flags: The terms of the deals are vague and lack language standard in most data-sharing agreements that adequately limits what data is collected and how it can be used. That increases the risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.  

In the Ugandan data deal, the U.S. will get direct, real-time access to nine of the nation’s health data systems for seven years, including the central repository that stores all of its health information, lab data, data collected by community health workers and, critically, its system for managing individuals’ electronic medical records. The agreement calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed. It also says the data should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services. 

But lawyers and digital privacy experts argue that the deal raises questions about who will have access to the massive cache of health data and whether it could be inappropriately accessed and exploited.

Some expressed concern that, because it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized, people with HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases could have their records exposed.

Stephanie Psaki, who served as the U.S. coordinator for global health security under President Joe Biden, described the Trump administration’s approach as a “blunt instrument of ‘just give me the login to your data systems.’” 

“The U.S. would never agree to that,” she said, if the deal were offered in reverse.

In Uganda, the U.S. will provide up to $1.7 billion over five years for global health security and the treatment and prevention of deadly conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and polio. In the past, the U.S. gave this aid without asking for direct benefits in return, saving an estimated 170,000 Ugandan lives per year. 

While a significant investment, it is less than the U.S. previously spent in Uganda and will decrease every year of the agreement. By 2030, the African nation will receive 45% less global health funding than when Trump retook office, according to an analysis by Vincent Lin of Partners in Health, which provides healthcare in poor countries. 

Several experts said there is broad support for some of the goals of the new plan for aid, including reducing African countries’ dependence on the U.S. for healthcare needs. But they worry the transactional nature of the approach could backfire by undermining trust or, in some cases, driving nations to reject deals altogether.

After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries. Each of the agreements ProPublica reviewed includes a section on responding to outbreaks. And some countries have signed separate pathogen-sharing agreements, which state that countries must “initiate sharing specimen(s) and related data” within five days of a U.S. request. The Trump administration is also planning unprecedented involvement of private companies to manage and process data.

The State Department told ProPublica that it needs access to the data to improve health outcomes in recipient countries and keep Americans safe. The new approach also requires countries to invest more in their own health systems in exchange for the aid, a promise many countries will likely struggle to fulfill. And, in some cases, including the deal with Uganda, it aims to boost local manufacturing through partnerships with American companies.

The State Department said it took multiple factors into account to ensure the required investments from other countries were “realistic and achievable.”

“The United States is investing billions of dollars in other countries’ health systems to fight infectious disease. In return, we expect governments to increase their own spending on health, so programs are sustainable and under genuine national ownership, not permanently financed by U.S. taxpayers. For the first time, both sides are putting skin in the game to ensure lasting impact,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to questions about the agreements.  

In response to follow-up questions from ProPublica, spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the agreements “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals. No personally identifiable information is being received or shared by the United States government.”

Uganda’s Ministry of Health, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Personal Data Protection Office and embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to questions for this article. 

In the age of artificial intelligence, large health data sets have become so valuable they’ve been referred to as the new gold. The precise value of the health data of an entire nation is unclear, but it could be extremely valuable to AI-driven companies for training models. The industry of buying and selling such information troves is worth billions. And countries around the world have come to regard their citizens’ health records as national assets that deserve special protections and can confer economic and strategic advantages. 

Yet the agreements, which are part of a strategy the State Department openly states is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations,” provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in what happens with their data or receive a fair share of its benefits. “Once companies get this data, the value is being accrued. But there’s no way for the [African] population to know how companies will use it,” said Jane Munga of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has argued that the agreements may violate African privacy laws.

Africans have also expressed concern that they will not be able to access and benefit from medicines and vaccines developed from pathogen samples shared with the U.S. Five of the six specimen-sharing agreements reviewed by ProPublica state that, in the event that a medical product is developed primarily from a specimen from the country, the U.S. government “shall prioritize” a request from that government behind the needs of the U.S. Only one of the agreements, with Nigeria, commits the U.S. to facilitating “priority access” to — and the donation of — any medical products developed using the specimens.

The phenomenon of extracting information and samples from less-resourced populations and failing to credit and compensate them for their contributions to medical developments is well known enough to have several names, including “parachute science.” Just a few years ago, countries, including some in Africa, hosted COVID-19 vaccine trials, only to later struggle to access the shots they helped to develop.

Each agreement includes “benefit-sharing provisions,” the State Department said in response to questions. 

After the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance, it also drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and severely scaled back the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which combats HIV globally. In addition to withdrawing from the WHO, the U.S. removed itself from international negotiations over a pandemic agreement intended to affirm countries’ sovereign rights to their biological resources and ensure equitable access to medical interventions.

Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who served in the first Trump administration, is now in charge of creating the system that would rise from the ashes. Before joining this administration, Smith founded three companies with business models that rest in part on using data to reduce healthcare costs, including CareBridge, a home care provider that sold for a reported $2.7 billion in 2024. During the presidential transition that year, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. After Trump took office, he presided over some $67 billion in sweeping cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services before being brought on as an adviser to the State Department. 

Although the humanitarian aid system had been largely dismantled, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing aid. So Smith and his team had to find new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics — all without most of the international partners and staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work. 

A Rhodes scholar known for his intense work ethic, Smith threw himself into the effort. State Department staff fielded calls from him at all hours of the night to explain budget items on spreadsheets. Through his personal lawyer, Smith referred questions to the State Department.

One of the greatest challenges lay in the handling of health data. In the past, PEPFAR, the HIV program, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from government health records — a setup that Trump administration officials and others have criticized as inefficient.

The America First plan proposed standardizing data collection and processing within countries. The Ugandan data agreement requires the country to provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the country’s data systems. The new approach, U.S. officials say, will enable the U.S. to continue auditing programs and track outbreaks. 

The agreements ProPublica reviewed include statements about the U.S. government’s intent to ensure data security and say that the data is being accessed for the purposes of addressing diseases and auditing that work, but they leave open the possibility that sensitive information could be revealed, according to the data privacy experts ProPublica consulted. 

At particular risk are countries that don’t have national data privacy laws, such as Liberia, whose memorandum of understanding requires “interlinked and interoperable” data systems for “surveillance, laboratory, response, health, environment, agriculture.” That country’s main health agreement doesn’t require the U.S. to limit the amount of data it takes to the least needed, a standard clause in U.S. contracts, according to Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, a recent postdoctoral fellow focusing on bioethics at Stanford University. (Neither Liberia nor the State Department has released the supplemental data-sharing agreement.) “Once data is breached, it’s nearly impossible to get it back,” Mahamadou added.

The Liberian government did not respond to a request for comment.

The Ugandan data-sharing agreement says it will comply with the laws of both nations and permits the sharing of “sensitive personal data” if the consent of individuals whose data is shared is obtained, there is a compelling public health emergency of international concern and it is the only way information can be provided in a “timely and accurate format.”

Ssekamwa, the digital rights expert who also founded and runs the African Centre for Digital Justice, said there are important questions that haven’t been answered by the Ugandan government.

“Does the U.S. have appropriate data protections? Can the systems provide anonymized data? Are they really up to that standard?” said Ssekamwa. “If I’m someone who has had health issues, can you deny me a visa because of the health issues I’m having?”

Psaki, the former global health security coordinator, worried about the haste with which the changes to data access are happening. “Even in the best of circumstances, you can’t go from having parallel data systems that were established over 20-plus years to finding some way to integrate those data systems in six months.” 

Speed has been a hallmark of the America First global health effort. In September, just a month after Smith joined the State Department, it launched the strategy at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and five large pharmaceutical companies. By November, Smith was crisscrossing the African continent with a small team of negotiators, trying to persuade dignitaries to agree to deals. 

The State Department said the deals were “negotiated in a thoughtful and strategic way over many months.” 

On Dec. 4, Kenya became the first country to sign, during a triumphant celebration with Rubio and President William Ruto in Washington. Outcry over the agreement had already begun two days earlier, when a Kenyan activist named Nelson Amenya announced on the social platform X that he had seen a sample of the specimen-sharing agreement as well as a legal analysis that showed it would violate Kenyan law.

As a condition for receiving $1.6 billion in aid, the Kenyan government agreed to provide access to seven years’ worth of health records — two years longer than the U.S. would provide financial support. 

Although the Kenyan data-sharing agreement states that the U.S. will take “all reasonable measures to protect the confidentiality of information” and abide by American and Kenyan laws, Amenya worried that wouldn’t be enough. “Every HIV test, TB diagnosis, malaria case – accessible to US officials,” he wrote in the post, which now has one million views. “Your medical records, your children’s health data – all exposed.”

A few days later, a Kenyan senator named Okiya Omtatah sued members of the Kenyan government over the agreement, arguing that it poses a threat to citizens’ constitutional right to privacy by “allowing broad foreign access to sensitive data.” A Kenyan nonprofit also sued, and more than 50 groups weighed in on their side, describing the document as giving the U.S. “excessive access” to African data and raising the possibility of serious human rights violations. 

In court filings, the Kenyan government argued that it is obligated to achieve the “highest attainable standard of health” and that it is unable to do that on its own. After blocking the deal for months, in May, the Kenyan court temporarily allowed implementation of the agreement to proceed while it considers the case.

Since outrage bubbled up in Kenya, some other countries have negotiated shorter terms for sharing data and pandemic specimens, and have inserted additional protections, according to the Public Citizen analysis.

Still, groups across Africa have sounded alarms about dangers inherent in these provisions, including data breaches. Examples of such unauthorized access to personal data abound, including a recent case where the healthcare data of some 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank wound up listed for sale on the Chinese website Alibaba. 

Revealing whether someone has had an abortion, mental health condition, substance use treatment or sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence. And even when personal information has been removed, individuals in “anonymized” data can be reidentified using other AI and other tools. 

The Ugandan data-sharing agreement calls for the U.S. government to “promptly notify the Government of Uganda of any unauthorized access” in such cases and requires the parties to conduct a joint breach assessment and remediation plan afterward. But by that point, it may be too late, Ssekamwa fears. “Once the data gets out of Uganda, we are skeptical that the government of Uganda will actually have any power to control it,” he said.

The secrecy around both the negotiations and the agreements has raised further suspicions. The State Department has declined to share the agreements, telling ProPublica the agency will release them when negotiations with all partner governments are complete and describing its actions as “protecting sensitive negotiations—not ‘secrecy.’” In response to a public records request filed by ProPublica, the State Department said it planned to provide the documents in September 2027. The advocacy group Public Citizen recently filed suit against the federal government in an effort to obtain the documents. 

“Why are they hiding the agreement if they think the terms are OK?” asked Bernard Okpi, a Nigerian lawyer who sued his government in March, alleging that the deal violates the country’s constitutional right to privacy and promotes religious discrimination by prioritizing funding for Christian faith-based health facilities. That suit is pending, and the Nigerian government did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

The State Department said that the agreement with Nigeria “was negotiated in connection with reforms the Nigerian government has made to prioritize protecting Christian populations from violence.”

The Trump administration says that its new global health strategy is designed to save lives and keep the U.S. — and the world — safe from disease outbreaks. But ultimately its hard-driving and secretive negotiations may work against those goals.

While the administration aspired to strike agreements with 50 nations, including the three countries that walked away from negotiations in part over concerns about data sharing, it has fallen far short of that number. (In Zambia, officials also balked at U.S. demands for critical minerals.) The loss of aid in those countries is already proving to be devastating. 

Despite the Trump administration’s stated goal of putting “America first,” the U.S. may feel the consequences of those failed negotiations, too, as mistrust compounds the loss of long-standing systems that provided care and responded to disease outbreaks. 

“It’s in everyone’s interest to have a comprehensive approach to respond to an outbreak early,” said Psaki, who pointed to the quickly escalating number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo as evidence. While that country struck a healthcare deal with the U.S., five of the nine countries bordering it have not. “We need to get data and samples from all nine countries to collaborate effectively on that outbreak, and now we don’t have that.”

The State Department said the U.S. has responded swiftly to the outbreak and has provided over $270 million to the global fight against Ebola.

In Uganda, where people have also fallen sick and died from Ebola, Ssekamwa said that his country needs all the help that the healthcare deal can bring, including improved protection from outbreaks, but there needs to be more robust protection of people’s personal data.  

“We are happy to benefit from the technological advancement and the fruits of big data,” he said. Instead, he said, “the U.S. has left so many gaps within the agreement, which can be exploited in their favor.”

The post “Digital Colonialism”: U.S. Demands to Access Africans’ Data Raise Privacy, Sovereignty Concerns appeared first on ProPublica.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 17, No. 1,824.

AI is slashing the cost of starting and running a business. "Everything has decreased in cost and increased in speed," one entrepreneur said.

After a resounding primary victory and ahead of a potential presidential run in 2028, progressive California lawmaker Rep. Ro Khanna has received the endorsement of the influential advocacy and watchdog group TrackAIPAC, known for posting red cards of lawmakers and candidates who receive money from the pro-Israel lobby.  

Khanna, a Democrat representing parts of San Francisco’s Bay Area, is the first member of Congress to go from a target of TrackAIPAC’s online fury to the winner of its endorsement. Though Khanna never took money from the pro-Israel lobby giant, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he received a red anti-endorsement card from TrackAIPAC in 2024 largely due to his legislative record. Khanna has taken money from the liberal Zionist group, J Street, which opposed Gaza ceasefire attempts in 2023 but has since pushed for conditions on military aid to Israel. 

Khanna’s TrackAIPAC endorsement, first reported by The Intercept, came after the lawmaker on June 10 became the initial signatory of a new pledge from TrackAIPAC called PEACE, the pledge to enforce American law, counter foreign influence and end war crimes. Among other commitments, candidates who sign the pledge swear off money from AIPAC and aligned groups, acknowledge Israel’s genocide in Gaza, oppose military aid to any country that commits human rights violations, and agree to stand against efforts in Congress to emmesh the U.S. and Israeli militaries. 

“I’m proud to be the first member of Congress to sign the PEACE Pledge to reject campaign contributions and political support from AIPAC, DMFI, and other groups that promote unconditional support for Israel,” Khanna told The Intercept in a statement. “The pledge also affirms my opposition to the genocide in Gaza and my commitment to voting against future military assistance to any country whose security forces are committing human rights violations. Rejecting AIPAC money isn’t enough — every member of Congress must be clear on these issues.”

With the endorsement and the new pledge, TrackAIPAC is flexing its growing influence on the Capitol. Its viral social media posts have played a large role in making AIPAC into a politically toxic entity, helping drive underground much of its campaign giving in the midterms. Those posts have also compelled lawmakers, including Khanna, to seek meetings with the group in hopes of removing their red cards. With its political arm, Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, TrackAIPAC has also been endorsing and funding candidates. 

TrackAIPAC’s founders said they want to offer a good-faith offramp for members of congress looking to evolve on Israel and Palestine. Beyond tracking the pro-Israel lobby’s political spending, the group also serves as an advocacy organization pushing for Palestinian rights in the Capitol. It has claimed major midterm primary victories in races it has endorsed a candidate, such as in New Jersey with the victory Adam Hamawy, a former Army surgeon who volunteered in Gaza during the war, Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania and Mai Vang in California. 

“We’ve been really effective at building a megaphone and bringing accountability to folks who are on the wrong side,” TrackAIPAC co-founder Casey Kennedy, told The Intercept. “But with that success we’ve had, now we have a responsibility to offer a bridge to folks to chart a new path forward.”

Related

How Does TrackAIPAC Actually Track AIPAC?

The group has attracted controversy over its methodology, which examines campaign financing as well as lawmakers’ legislative record on policies relating to Israel and Palestine. TrackAIPAC has at times assigned its red card to lawmakers who do not take AIPAC money, which critics have called unnecessarily confusing or misleading. 

Last June, Khanna became the first lawmaker to meet with TrackAIPAC, according to the group, and asked why TrackAIPAC had initially assigned him a red card. By the time they met, the group had removed the red card but did not grant him its green seal of approval. Instead, it appended a label that remains on his page today stating: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.” 

In contrast, Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. has a green card and a positive label stating: “This candidate rejects Israel lobby contributions. This representative has a strong legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.”

Khanna had previously appealed to TrackAIPAC on social media, doubling down on his rejection of AIPAC support. The posts drew the ire of AIPAC, which relentlessly attacked him on social media, at times using TrackAIPAC’s own red card graphic. 

Khanna’s stances on Israel and Palestine have shifted in recent years. In the immediate weeks after October 7, 2023, Khanna voted in favor of a string of pro-Israel House resolutions, including reaffirming Israel’s “right to self-defense” on October 25. A week later, he signed a resolution that condemned antisemitism and “the support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations” in colleges and universities. Khanna was also notably absent on early resolutions calling for a ceasefire. 

Khanna has since become a loud critic of Israel and has voted against a bill that sought to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which has been used to silence criticism of Israel. In the summer of 2025, he cosponsored the Block the Bombs bill and signed on to a pair of resolutions by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., acknowledging Israel’s offensive in Gaza as a genocide and recognizing the Nakba. Earlier this month, Khanna attempted to strike a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act that would codify Israel’s joint development of weapons with the U.S. 

It was also this month when Khanna’s office reached out again to TrackAIPAC to revisit the possibility of gaining the group’s endorsement, the group said. His office had been receiving inquiries about his “continue improving” label on TrackAIPAC’s presidential candidate list. At the time, TrackAIPAC had already been developing its pledge and offered it to Khanna’s office.

“Groups like AIPAC are pouring money into our elections and are influencing policies that undermine human rights,” Khanna told The Intercept in a statement. “When Track AIPAC offered, I was proud to sign the pledge.”

While Khanna has not formally announced a run for president, he is positioning himself to the left of the Democratic establishment on Israel. In April, he announced he supports the halt of both offensive and so-called defensive weapons to the country due to its human rights abuses. 

Adam Carlson, a political consultant and pollster behind Zenith Research, who has been critical of TrackAIPAC’s methodology in the past, has said he expects other congressional and presidential candidates courting the left to sign on to the new TrackAIPAC pledge. But he doesn’t expect a shift from the kinds of establishment Democrats often in the crosshairs of TrackAIPAC over their support for Israel.

“It’s a flex – the more people they get to sign this pledge, the stronger they are,” Carlson said of TrackAIPAC, “But it won’t change the dynamic broadly.” 

He cautioned of potential pitfalls, such as how the group will hold legislators who sign the pledge accountable and warned of the risk of purity tests on the left that could hurt certain candidates’ election chances in swing districts.  

TrackAIPAC said anyone who abandons the pledge would again receive a red graphic and be targeted in the group’s intense social media campaigns. Cori Archibald, TrackAIPAC co-founder, also resisted the premise of a purity test. “If you’re gonna have a litmus test,” Archibald said, “I think genocide is certainly a good one.”

The post Once a Target of TrackAIPAC, Ro Khanna Gains Its Endorsement appeared first on The Intercept.

“She went from barely surviving to truly thriving,” a rescuer said of her Havanese, who won the top prize.

Joint statement welcomes Trump’s deal with Iran to end war and calls for further talks involving European leaders

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Donald Trump has backed a joint G7 leaders’ statement that welcomes the deal he has struck with Iran but says a follow-on agreement is necessary to rein in Iran’s ballistic missile programme, an issue not directly addressed in the memorandum of understanding that is due to be signed on Friday by Iran and the US.

The statement says future negotiations with Iran would benefit from the involvement of a wider group of regional and international actors including the UN nuclear weapons agency, the IAEA.

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Satoshi Matsuoka’s new paper, “FP8 is All You Need (Part 1): Debunking Hardware FP64 as the HPC Holy Grail,” raised some eyebrows during the TPC26 event in Baltimore two weeks ago. When the RIKEN CSS director mentioned his new paper on the Ozaki scheme during his TPC plenary, it spurred numerous conversations among the TPC26 attendees. One of those was Joseph George, AMD’s director of AI and supercomputing.

George shared his thoughts on Matsuoka’s paper, which posits that FP8 hardware combined with Ozaki II emulation is a suitable replacement for the FP64 hardware that has been the HPC community’s gold standard when it comes to modeling and simulation workloads. You can read HPCwire contributor Doug Eadline’s article on Matsuoka’s paper here.

During TPC26, HPCwire sat down with George to discuss Matsuoka’s assertion that FP64 is no longer a requirement and that, thanks to Ozaki emulation, FP8 is all you need. George left no doubt that AMD has no plans to discard FP64 in favor of FP8 anytime soon.

“Precision matters in a very, very, very big way,” George said. “You can approximate in other places in AI. When it comes to science and all the industries that we care about, precision is critically important.”

Satoshi Matsuoka, the head of RIKEN, discussed his new paper, “FP8 is All You Need (Part 1): Debunking Hardware FP64 as the HPC Holy Grail,” at TPC26

AMD supports Ozaki with its line of Instinct GPUs. It is just software, after all. It is giving its customers the option to use Ozaki if they want. But according to George, AMD customers in the private and public sectors are not asking the chip company to remove the FP64 cores from the GPUs and focus instead on ramping up the lower precision cores.

“Our position is this: We want to make sure that the scientists that you and I have been interacting with all day [at TPC26] have as much flexibility as possible,” George said during a break at the Trillion Parameter Consortium‘s recent all-hands meeting. “So if you want to run FP4, FP6, FP8 on some parts of your workload, feel free to do that. If you want to run Ozaki and emulate your FP64, you can do that. If you want to run hardware native FP64, we want you to do that. The only thing we come back to is focus on the science. Focus on getting the answers as close to right as possible. That’s really what we want to do.”

AMD has concerns about the accuracy of results using lower precision computing cores, INT8 with Ozaki I and FP8 with Ozaki II. George said he has not seen definitive evidence that Ozaki emulation can deliver results that match up to the results that HPC customers have traditionally gotten with FP64.

“In science, where we start with is truth. We want to get to facts and truth,” George said. “If you get to wrong answers really fast, that’s not helping anybody. We want to get to right answers fast.”

George encourages AMD customers to do their homework and see whether their HPC workloads could be migrated to lower precision hardware running under Ozaki. It could be that some codes may be more amenable than others to being converted to the type of matrix math that FP8 excels at.

Traditional supercomputers have featured a good helping of FP64 to run modeling and simulation workloads

“If it’s matrix, I could see Ozaki working really well for something like that,” George said. “But if it’s anything else, there’s now a question of, is the validity there. And that’s the one thing that we require…It’s got to be right. That’s the thing we need to be focused on. So is it possible? Sure. Anything’s possible. It’s just going to take a lot of time, I think, to get there.”

AMD has plans to ramp up the amount of FP64 in its forthcoming MI430X GPU, which the DOE will be using in Discovery, the new leadership class supercomputer announced in October that will be the successor to Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laborator. If the company maintains the same ratio between computing power and memory bandwidth, as AMD Fellow Nick Malaya said is the plan when he spoke with HPCwire in March, then the MI430X would have somewhere in the neighborhood of 192 teraflops and 204 teraflops of FP64 capacity. These numbers, which AMD did not confirm, would represent a sizable increase from the MI355, which has 77 teraflops of FP64 capacity.

George said he isn’t hearing clamoring from AMD clients to abandon FP64 compute. What he’s hearing from scientists and engineers is that they need the tools to get the correct answers. That means FP64 for the near-term and the mid-term, he said.

“There’s too much that’s been invested by the scientific community on all these applications,” George said. “Now, are they going to relook at the science? Are they going to relook at the applications? Are they going to relook at all these things? Maybe, and probably, yes. But in the meantime, you and I still need to make sure that the weather’s right. We still need to make sure the nuclear codes work. We got to make sure that we’re governing health in all our nations. We’ve got to make sure all those things stay intact and working for you and I, who are not scientists.”

During a recent energy and gas conference in Texas, the message George received was clear as day: Do not abandon FP64. “We absolutely cannot get away from FP64 for things like seismic analysis,” George said. “We just can’t do it.”

Is the HPC community ready to get by with lower-precision hardware made popular by AI?

While George doesn’t see FP64 being abandoned in favor of lower precision hardware anytime soon, he says it’s likely we’ll see a larger mix of different precisions in the medium and long term.

“Most likely what’s going to happen is a mixed precision environment where some places you can leverage what’s coming on AI. In some places, the science demands and the accuracy demands might be FP64,” he said. “It’s going to be workload-specific. There are going to be some workloads that absolutely require a level of precision that FP64 provides, and some that are going maybe tolerate some mixed precision. It’s a wait and see. We have to see what the science comes back and says.”

Listening to your customers is always a good approach. In the case of Ozaki and the abundance of lower-precision hardware in the market as a result of the AI boom, there is definitely the option to pursue emulation. While Nvidia has said that it’s not abandoning FP64, is leaning on Ozaki emulation with its latest Rubin GPU, which has 33 teraflops of native FP64, about as the same as the H100 GPU but less than the B200 GPU.

AMD is open to Ozaki, if it works. It’s not shutting the door to Ozaki. But it’s not shutting the door to FP64, either. “You’re not hearing AMD say ‘We’re not in anything that’s not FP64.’ That’s not what we’re saying,” George said. “It’s not ‘FP64 or nothing.’ It is what the science requires.”

The post FP8 or FP64? AMD Says It Will Give Scientists What They Need appeared first on HPCwire.

UC Davis researchers say an implanted brain-computer interface has allowed Casey Harrell, an ALS patient who cannot speak, to synthesize sentences from brain activity with 99% accuracy in controlled tests and about 92% accuracy in everyday use. The Register reports that the system has remained usable at home since 2023, helping Harrell communicate naturally, control a computer, and return to full-time work without researchers needing to supervise each session. The Register reports: A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak. [...] Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman, co-principal investigator and co-senior author of the paper published Monday, as well as the surgeon who placed Harrell's implant, described the results his team published as the crossing of a threshold in BCI technology: Not only has Harrell's implant been working well with daily use since 2023, but it's also incredibly accurate. In controlled tests, the system managed to synthesize sentences from Harrell's brain activity with 99 percent accuracy; outside of the lab in daily use, Harrell still assessed it as being accurate 92 percent of the time. "The key thing to me is that it's enabling everyday communication for a guy who wants to talk but can't," Brandman told The Register in an interview. "Despite being paralyzed [Harrell] has gone back to work full time and has meaningful conversations with his daughter who's never heard the sound of his voice." Prior work in the BCI space, Brandman told us, has either required researchers to be in a patient's home whenever they're using the tech, or for the patient to come to the researchers. That's not the case here, with the system allowing Harrell's home care team to hook him up to the system themselves, enabling him to use the device for more than 3,800 hours in the past few years. Based on the time the study was filed (It published Monday but went into peer review in July 2025) that would mean Harrell was using the device for more than five hours a day, on average. "It is a life that is more full of dynamic action and with friends and family, with colleagues, and it is something that allows me to communicate more in my natural way of communicating than any other technology that I have experienced," Harrell told UC Davis via his BCI system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the AI focus shifts from training models to running them, CPUs with large addressable memories have become the hot commodity. To that end, HPE today announced from its annual Discover conference that it’s adding its Nvidia Vera CPU-based its ProLiant Compute DL394 server to its Private Cloud AI offering. The company made a slew of other announcements around its data lake, networking, and other products at the show.

HPE introduced Private Cloud AI two years as vehicle for delivering enterprise AI capabilities to customers as a unified solution stack consisting of HPE servers, storage, networking, and software. The offering is based on Nvidia’s reference architecture for its GPU, Ethernet platform, data processing units (DPUs), and network interface cards.

According Fidelma Russo, HPE’s executive vice president and its CTO, HPE has increased the scale of Private Cloud AI inference clusters up to 256 Blackwell-class GPUs. To that end, it is also adding support for Vera, Nvidia’s new Arm-based CPU that it formally launched at the GTC conference in March 2026.

HPE DL394

HPE is supporting Vera in Private Cloud via the DL394 Gen12 server, which it announced earlier this month at the Computex conference in Taiwan. Built around Nvidia’s Vera CPU, which sports 88 “Olympus” Arm cores and 176 threads, the DL394 supports up to 3 TB of LPDDR5X memory, offering up to 1.2 TB per second of memory bandwidth to the CPUs, all contained in a 2U air-cooled chassis.

In addition to the DL394 servers for AI inference workloads, HPE’s Private Cloud AI offering will gain several other new capabilities, including HPE Zerto security software, which provides protection against rogue agent, as well as continuous data protection and data rewind functions. HPE Private Cloud AI users will also benefit from the capability to restrict local agents.

HPE also announced that it’s bolstering two other related offerings, which it calls HPE AI Factory at Scale and HPE Sovereign AI Factory. HPE says that these offerings are getting support for Nvidia Confidential Computing, which protects models and private data during execution for on-premises or sovereign deployments. The solution accomplishes this by implementing a “chain of trust through cryptographic attestation and encryption,” as well as the use of BlueField and DOCA, or what it terms “CUDA for networking.”

HPE also announced that Private Cloud AI is getting an upgrade at the data fabric level. Private Cloud AI already supported the HPE Data Fabric Software. But now the offering’s data fabric is getting an update that will extend Model Context Protocol (MCP) support to Apache Airflow, the open source data flow software. HPE says this will “enrich distributed data with metadata.”

An option to deploy the HPE Data Fabric on a dedicated ProLiant server will simplify deployments, Russo said. “We are also recognizing that sometimes it is very difficult for customers to deploy software around data fabric,” she said. “And so for certain use cases, we have a pre-integrated appliance to allow faster operations, faster deployment.”

HPE also already offered its Alletra Storage MP X10000 storage within the Private Cloud AI. When connected to DL380a Gen12 server using eight Nvidia H200 GPUs, HPE says customers will see their token response time decline by up to 20x.

The Alletra Storage MP X10000 was the first storage array certified by Nvidia for object based workloads earlier this spring, Russo said. “And we’ve now added file,” she said.

“Our architecture is different than other architectures,” Russo continued. “There is no tradeoff between performance, between object and file. They work in parallel with each other, and this makes it a unique architecture for AI analytics and mixed workloads. It’s built-in services around metadata management, about round acceleration, about metadata enrichment, and some KV cache acceleration we have within it now gives us better performance at the private cloud AI level than we had before.”

The post HPE Adds Nvidia Vera CPUs to Private Cloud AI Offering appeared first on HPCwire.

Marko Arnautovic sealed Austria’s victory over debutants Jordan with a goal from the penalty spot as his side returned to the World Cup in style

Supporters on both sides have descended on San Francisco with Jordan making their World Cup debut and Austria returning to the stage for the first time in 28 years.

It’s a comfortable 15C in San Francisco which should suit Austria more than Jordan ahead of a 9pm kick-off. The players have finished warming up and should be out with their game faces on shortly.

Iran's foreign minister says Israeli troops can't remain in Lebanon under the pending deal with the U.S.

Exclusive: Ed Davey to make call ahead of 10th anniversary of Brexit vote, in strengthening of party’s position on EU

The Lib Dems will urge Andy Burnham to end Labour’s “torpor and timidity” towards the EU as they call for the UK to rejoin the single market, in a notable strengthening of their own position.

Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote next week, Ed Davey will challenge Burnham to scrap Labour’s red lines on the customs union and single market if he becomes prime minister and immediately begin talks on a more ambitious deal with the EU.

Arnault’s addition of leading weekly to stable of publications raises concerns about media ownership in France

He is known as the “wolf in cashmere” – the owner of the world’s biggest luxury group whose brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tiffany have made him one of the world’s richest people.

But Bernard Arnault, a close friend of Donald Trump, is under fire from journalists’ unions in France for buying up almost all the country’s business and economic press.

Heads of state and participants from more than 80 countries at three-day event in Accra to pursue actionable commitments to reconciliation and restitution

Ghana is hosting a conference to advance the continent’s push for reparatory justice after the adoption of the landmark United Nations (UN) resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.

Heads of state and government, ministers, civil society representatives, historians, researchers and legal experts representing more than 80 countries are converging in the capital, Accra, for the three-day event, billed Next Steps, which starts on Wednesday. It is the first major gathering on the issue since the resolution was adopted.

Exclusive: health professionals, survivors and politicians voice concerns in open letter over comments by Fatima Maada Bio, who denies supporting the practice

The first lady of Sierra Leone has denied that she supports female genital mutilation amid rising anger around her perceived approval of the practice.

But in an exclusive response to the Guardian, Fatima Maada Bio, the wife of President Julius Maada Bio, also said she would not openly condemn FGM until she saw “reliable data” that the practice was harmful.

From Christian Pulisic and Antonee Robinson to Sergiño Dest and Folarin Balogun, the Socceroos will have their hands full in the Group D clash

In a highly anticipated Group D clash against the USA, the Socceroos face a range of threats on Friday (Saturday AEST): physical, technical and tactical. A draw will almost certainly secure a place in the round of 32 for the Socceroos and, after their heroics against Turkey, Australia can rightfully feel this is a game they can win. To do so, they will need to neutralise the most dangerous components of the USA menace.

A headteacher, a motorcycle taxi driver and a travel agent are among those who are counting the human and economic cost of the virus

Justin Keno watches more than 400 pupils stream through the Nelson Mandela school’s gate each morning, and wonders which of them might be carrying Ebola.

The institution’s principal has done everything he can to prevent the spread of the virus: installing hand-washing basins at the entrance, providing alcohol-based hand rub for parents, making pupils bring packed lunches instead of eating in the canteen, and banning food sellers from outside the gates.

China and Russia are harvesting encrypted secrets—and getting closer to cracking them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom's pricing of VMware. During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its "HPE Morpheus Software -- VM Essentials" offering for free for "up to one year," per a press release. HPE's website describes its virtualization platform as a "VMware alternative." It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you're ready," HPE's website says. "New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services," HPE's announcement reads, referring to HPE's group for helping IT teams manage funding. Free for a year is cheaper than what Broadcom has charged for VMware vSphere since taking over. VMware prices have skyrocketed due to VMware's parent company eliminating perpetual licenses and bundling products into expensive packages. Notably, per its website, HPE recommends charging $600 per CPU socket per year for VM Essentials; Broadcom has controversially shifted vSphere licensing pricing to a per-core basis. "Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom," Jeremiah Jenson, VP of HPE's North American channel and partner ecosystem, told CRN. The executive claimed that VM Essentials could bring up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware while also helping to "eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT." From March 1 to June 30, HPE has also been offering a free year of VM Essentials via rebate to customers who buy an AMD server and a one-year VM Essentials license. VM Essentials is only available through channel partners, a stark contrast from Broadcom's VMware approach, where the chip giant has drastically reduced the number of resellers that can sell VMware products. HPE's new promotion aims to entice customers to more deeply consider migrating off VMware. [...] HPE also announced that it would give 600 reseller partners who earn the HPE partner program's Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year free VM Essentials software licenses for three years. Partners still have to pay support costs, though. The benefit is "a step in the correct direction," said Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider (MSP) Members IT Group (MITG), which VMware cut from its reseller program after 19 years of partnership a year ago. However, limiting the promotion to 600 partners is "very shortsighted." He believes that HPE should give all of its partners VM Essentials "to facilitate getting [VM Essentials] into customer sites and displacing the competitors." "They need to fling [VM Essentials] as far and as fast as they possibly [can] to immediately gain traction and draw ISVs to them, which will increase adoption even more," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ICE has moved detainees out of a controversial soft-sided detention center in the Florida Everglades known as "Alligator Alcatraz," a spokesperson said, citing safety concerns around hurricane season.

Voters are casting ballots in four states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, including the runoff race in Georgia to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Rep. Barry Moore won the Republican Senate runoff in Alabama on Tuesday night, CBS News projects, defeating political newcomer and U.S. Navy Seal Jared Hudson.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 17, No. 632.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 17.

President comments that Moscow ‘should make a deal’; Trump-aligned Ossoff wins Senate primary in Georgia – key US politics stories from Tuesday 16 June at a glance

At the G7 summit, Donald Trump repeated familiar language about the Ukraine war – lamenting “the great antipathy” between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders that made it difficult to reach a settlement. He vowed to do what he could, saying Moscow “should make a deal”, noting that it had “lost a great many people, just like Ukraine”.

Trump spoke to Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelenskyy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Sunday before travelling to the G7 and claimed both men were open to a meeting. He described the death toll in the war as “ridiculous”. The US president some time ago lost patience with his inability to force home a deal in which Ukraine gave up territory it had not lost on the battlefield.

Rep. Mike Collins will face off against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November as Republicans look to Georgia to deliver a key GOP victory that could determine control of the Senate.

Critics have questioned the overall legality of the boat strikes as well as their effectiveness since the U.S. military began them in September 2025.

A suspect was taken into custody in Philadelphia in connection with the shooting at Wilmington Hospital that left one person dead and another injured, police said.

This live blog is now closed.

With 55% of the vote counted in Georgia, NBC News projects Mike Collins will defeat former football coach Derek Dooley to win the Republican primary for the US Senate. Collins currently leads by 10 points, 55% to 45%.

The Associated Press has not yet made a call, but NBC’s analysis is based on the fact that Collins is doing better than Dooley in the votes cast on election day, which tend to favor candidates, like Collins, endorsed by Donald Trump, who hates mail-in ballots almost as much as he hates windmills.

Representative Mike Collins defeats former college football coach Derek Dooley, while Rick Jackson selected as governor pick

Georgia’s Republican primary runoff voters chose US representative Mike Collins over former college football coach Derek Dooley to lead the party’s bid to challenge US senator and rising Democratic star Jon Ossoff in November’s midterm elections.

They also selected billionaire healthcare executive Rick Jackson over Trump-backed lieutenant governor Burt Jones to face Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms in November, after a bruising election campaign that led to libel litigation and federal challenges to Georgia election law.

Rick Jackson, the billionaire healthcare executive who grew up in poverty and spent time in Atlanta's public housing projects, has won the Republican runoff for Georgia governor, CBS News projects.

The casino said some 350 horses are usually housed in the area, but the fire was contained before it could spread and only affected the one barn.

The company's next major product wave could include AI-focused AirPods, smart glasses, a 20th-anniversary iPhone and a new foldable.

Federal prosecutors alleged that the 15 people were “conspiring to impede or injure federal officers” during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Commodore has unveiled the Callback 8020, a $499 Sailfish OS flip phone that runs most Android apps but deliberately blocks social media, browsers, email, and workplace apps to discourage doomscrolling. The "not dumb dumbphone" still supports messaging, music, maps, ridesharing, hotspots, a removable battery, and plenty of Commodore nostalgia. "The phone uses T9-style texting with predictive input, includes Commodore SID ringtones, ships with a selection of Commodore and Sailfish games, and even includes Snake," reports TechSpot. From the report: Commodore says it has developed patent-pending technology that prevents browsers and social media apps from being sideloaded, while DNS-level blocking should stop them from working even if someone finds a way to install them. Users can still sideload nearly anything else if it's not available on the Commostore, but apps designed for doomscrolling remain off limits. That means useful services such as WhatsApp, SMS, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Spotify, Uber, Lyft, maps, podcasts, QR scanning, voice notes, and hotspot support work, but the likes of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Gmail, and browsers do not. The Callback 8020 has a 3.25-inch 480 x 640 internal display, a MediaTek Helio G81 chip, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 48MP Sony rear camera, an autofocus front camera, dual SIM support, USB-C, a headphone jack, FM radio, and something many of us miss from flagships: a removable battery. There's no 5G as Commodore argues that 4G VoLTE and Wi-Fi better fit a device meant to discourage constant streaming and scrolling. [...] The main screen is touch-capable but disabled by default, while the outer display keeps things deliberately sparse, showing basics such as time, battery, signal, and notifications via dome LEDs. The 8020 name is a nod to Commodore's 8010 modem from 1980. The phone comes in ProtoPET White, SX Silver, BASIC Beige, a translucent Starlight Edition, and a gold Founders Edition with a 24-karat gold-plated Commodore button. Standard models start at $499, the Starlight version is $549.99, and the Founders Edition costs $640. Preorders open June 30, with shipping targeted for winter. You can watch the launch ad on YouTube.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bomber that crashed during test flight at Edwards air force base in California killed all eight crew members

The investigation into a US air force bomber’s deadly crash during a test flight at a California base on Monday could take up to six months to complete, officials said.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, carrying eight people, crashed in a fiery explosion that sent up thick plumes of smoke at the Edwards air force base in the Mojave desert, about 100 miles (161km) north-east of Los Angeles.

June 16, 2026 — The HANAMI project continues its mission to strengthen Europe–Japan collaboration in high-performance computing (HPC) through joint research activities carried out on Fugaku, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

HANAMI researchers from Materials Science (Work Package 6) have been advancing scientific applications, optimizing software for next-generation HPC architectures, and supporting research across multiple scientific domains, including materials science, quantum simulations and numerical libraries.

Fugaku supercomputer

One of the initiatives focused on optimizing the Yambo code for Fugaku’s massively parallel ARM-based architecture. Researchers improved OpenMP parallelization and restructured key computational kernels to reduce time-to-solution while maintaining strong scalability. These developments are now integrated into the Yambo 5.4 beta release and also support ongoing work on reduced-precision benchmarks in collaboration with RIKEN.

The Fugaku allocation also supported research into next-generation photovoltaic materials. Using advanced simulations, the team studied the structural, electronic and optical properties of a newly synthesized lead-free perovskite with promising potential for solar cell applications. The work contributes to the development of more sustainable alternatives to conventional lead-based materials.

In another research line, HANAMI researchers carried out large-scale diffusion Monte Carlo calculations on LaH10, a hydrogen-rich superhydride known for its high-temperature superconductivity under pressure. The simulations generated highly accurate datasets that will support the development of machine-learning interatomic potentials, helping improve the predictive accuracy of molecular dynamics simulations for superconducting materials.

The project also advanced the validation of a new pseudo-Hermitian eigensolver developed as an extension of the ChASE library. Large-scale numerical experiments on Fugaku demonstrated efficient performance on both distributed GPU systems and CPU-only architectures, significantly broadening the library’s applicability to future HPC infrastructures.

Lastly, HANAMI’s work package 6 team also used Fugaku to optimize the SIESTA code for Fujitsu’s A64FX architecture and on the study of water-in-salt electrolytes (WISE) for zinc-based energy storage devices. These simulations provided important insights into electrolyte behavior, supporting research into more stable and durable battery technologies.

Together, these studies demonstrate how HANAMI is combining advanced scientific applications with software optimization to maximize the potential of large-scale HPC infrastructures such as Fugaku. The project continues to reinforce Europe–Japan collaboration while supporting the development of more efficient, scalable and reliable scientific computing environments.

For a complete presentation of the activities carried out on Fugaku, read this blog post.

Source: HANAMI Project

The post HANAMI Project Expands Europe-Japan HPC Research Through Fugaku Studies appeared first on HPCwire.

Company Contributes to 300mm Wafer-Scale Superconducting Qubit Manufacturing and Workforce Development

ELMSFORD, N.Y., June 16, 2026 — SEEQC, Inc., a developer and manufacturer of scalable, energy efficient digital chips for quantum computing systems, today announced its participation in a four-year Microelectronics Commons Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH) program. As one of eight U.S. Microelectronics Commons hubs, NORDTECH collaborates with regional partners across New York State and the United States to enable innovative R&D projects and advance critical lab-to-fab innovations in direct support of Department of War objectives, while also supporting workforce development goals.

The NORDTECH project is aimed at advancing scalable fabrication of superconducting qubits using next-generation materials on 300mm industrial-grade silicon wafers. SEEQC is a subcontractor to NY CREATES (Albany, NY) and collaborates with academic, industry, and government partners including Cornell University, NYU, Princeton University, Syracuse University, Quantum Circuits / D-Wave, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

The program focuses on improving materials such as tantalum (Ta) and tantalum nitride (TaN) for high-coherence qubit fabrication and establishing scalable manufacturing processes within a U.S.-based 300mm wafer fabrication environment.

SEEQC’s role includes:

• Developing a high-throughput, high-fidelity cryogenic qubit evaluation platform
• Providing performance feedback to fabrication teams
• Development of one of the world’s first quantum Process Design Kits (PDK) within the Cadence EDA ecosystem
• Supporting integration of qubit designs compatible with SEEQC’s digital SFQ-based control architecture

Scaled, standardized quantum chip processing is expected to accelerate research, improve fabrication repeatability, and strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities.

“Industrial-scale quantum fabrication requires both materials innovation and reliable evaluation infrastructure,” said Dr. Oleg Mukhanov, Chief Scientific Officer of SEEQC. “Our work supports the transition from laboratory-scale experimentation to repeatable, scalable quantum chip production.”

“The U.S. Microelectronics Commons hubs, like NORDTECH, are foundational to building resilient U.S. semiconductor and quantum supply chains,” said John Levy, CEO of SEEQC. “SEEQC is proud to contribute our expertise in digital superconducting technology to a national effort aimed at accelerating quantum innovation.”

The program also includes workforce development initiatives, including educational content and experiential internship opportunities across participating institutions.

About SEEQC

SEEQC is building quantum computers on a chip. SEEQC’s digital chip technology is designed to make quantum systems scalable, energy efficient, and commercially viable. The company operates advanced chip development and fabrication facilities in the United States and Europe. More than three-quarters of SEEQC’s workforce hold Ph.D. degrees across physics, electrical engineering, materials science, computer science, and related disciplines.

Source: SEEQC

The post SEEQC Selected for CHIPS Act–Backed NORDTECH Quantum R&D Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

Why Should Delaware Care?
One person has died and another has been injured during a shooting at one of Delaware’s largest hospitals — a public crime that left the state’s largest city shaken.

A person opened fire at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, killing one person and injuring another, according to the city’s police chief. 

Wilmington Mayor John Carney announced in a Facebook post late Tuesday night that a suspect, a 23-year-old man, had been arrested in Philadelphia. Charges and extradition back to Delaware were pending, Carney said. He did not further confirm the suspect’s identity.

The investigation is ongoing, but the Wilmington Police Department determined the shooting was a “targeted, isolated incident,” Carney added.

Carney’s Tuesday night announcement followed a press conference earlier in the evening where Wilmington Police Chief Wilfredo Campos had said the suspect was still at large.

He said, at the time, it was not immediately clear whether the victims were employees or patients at the hospital. The identities of the victims also were withheld in order to notify their families.

Carney said on Facebook that more information would be released “as soon as possible.”

During the press conference, a visibly shaken Carney condemned the bloodshed.

“Any violence or loss of life in our city is unacceptable,” he said. “It’s particularly distressing when an incident like this occurs at a hospital whose fundamental purpose is to treat injuries and save lives. If ever there’s a place that should be a sanctuary from such violence, that is the place.”

ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital, the second largest hospital in Delaware that sits alongside the city’s Washington Street Bridge in a sprawling tower campus, was put on lockdown after the shooting. That precaution has since been lifted.

“It’s truly extraordinary to see those caregivers showing up for work, and that’s what they do every day,” said Jenn Schwartz, the incoming president and CEO of ChristianaCare. “They care for people, they care for the community, and they’re showing up tonight to take that shift, even with what’s transpired today.”

Law enforcement swamped scene

With the location of the shooter unknown throughout the lockdown, dozens of officers from a variety of police departments responded to the scene. SWAT teams were also deployed to sweep the building.

Also arriving on the scene were federal agents from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

A little after 5 p.m., people began walking out of the hospital’s southwest entrance, many with their hands in the air. They then congregated within the facility’s parking garage. 

Shortly thereafter, paramedics carted one patient to an awaiting ambulance. It is not immediately clear if the person was an admitted patient or a victim.

As the situation unfolded, several hospital employees and members of the public congregated around the perimeter of the hospital.

Among them were three hospital staffers who said they were taking a class to learn about active shooters when they were told to leave the building. While noting the inconceivability of the situation, they said they were directed out of the hospital through a side door exit.

Also outside the hospital was a man speaking with his wife, a ChristianaCare employee, who was still inside the main hospital building.

In an interview, the man said his wife told him the remaining employees had been shuttled into a single area, as officers went floor by floor through the building.

Campos, the Wilmington police chief, confirmed that police had swept every room in the hospital and parking garages, giving him confidence the shooter had left the scene. He added that officers were reviewing surveillance camera footage to determine how the shooter may have left the building.

When asked whether the public should feel safe following the violent episode, Campos said, “What we’re doing right now is actively investigating this case, and we’ll provide more information as soon as we can.”

The post Suspect arrested in ChristianaCare Wilmington shooting that left 1 dead, 1 injured appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

KYOTO, Japan, June 16, 2026 — Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has announced a new collaboration with Synopsys, Inc., enabling users of Synopsys’ simulation tools to navigate directly to Murata’s website to access and download the latest high-performance simulation models from Murata. The collaboration covers Synopsys’ 3D electromagnetic field analysis tool Ansys HFSS and thermal analysis tool Ansys Icepak, and marks a significant step toward streamlining the simulation workflow for electronic circuit designers. Murata is also the first company to offer passive component simulation models via Ansys Icepak.

As demand for high-speed, high-capacity communications continues to grow, electronic circuit design has become increasingly complex. Engineers must now account for a range of physical phenomena, from electromagnetic interference (EMI) to component heat generation, within a single design. Addressing these challenges early in the design process is critical; overlooking them can trigger costly redesigns, extend development timelines, and drive up prototyping expenses. This has placed greater pressure on electronic component suppliers to provide ready-to-use, high-quality simulation models that are compatible with the tools engineers already rely on.

Developing accurate models for electromagnetic and thermal analysis is inherently challenging, as both electromagnetic behavior and temperature distribution shift considerably depending on design conditions. Murata’s vertically integrated approach, spanning raw material development and manufacturing through to final product processing, enables the company to draw on an extensive proprietary dataset, resulting in simulation models that closely reflect real-world component performance.

The models are compatible with Ansys 2026 R1. Ansys HFSS supports electromagnetic field analysis and covers Murata’s RF inductors and multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), while Ansys Icepak supports thermal analysis and covers Murata’s power inductors.

Looking ahead, Murata will continue to deepen its collaboration with Synopsys, expanding its model lineup to support more advanced and efficient electronic design.

The following data is available for download from Murata’s website:

• Electromagnetic field analysis data for Ansys HFSS — RF inductors
• Electromagnetic field analysis data for Ansys HFSS — MLCCs
• Thermal analysis data for Ansys Icepak — Power inductors

About Synopsys

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) is the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, enabling customers to rapidly innovate AI-powered products. We deliver industry-leading silicon design, IP, simulation and analysis solutions, and design services. We partner closely with our customers across a wide range of industries to maximize their R&D capability and productivity, powering innovation today that ignites the ingenuity of tomorrow. Learn more at www.synopsys.com.

About Murata

Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. is a worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and sale of ceramic-based passive electronic components & solutions, communication modules and power supply modules. Murata is committed to the development of advanced electronic materials and leading edge, multi-functional, high-density modules. The company has employees and manufacturing facilities throughout the world.

Source: Murata

The post Murata and Synopsys Simplify Access to Component Simulation Models for Ansys Users appeared first on HPCwire.

Binance is expected to lose permission to serve EU customers in July after Greek regulators reportedly decided to reject its MiCA license application. Reuters reports: Under new EU rules, called MiCA, crypto firms have until the end of June to obtain a licence to allow them to keep servicing clients across the bloc. Binance's application, made to Greece's market regulator, is set to be turned down, the people said. European regulators have been attempting to rein in crypto exchanges, which allow people to trade cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin around the globe. Under MiCA, crypto companies have to apply for licenses from regulators in individual EU countries, which they can use as a "passport" to operate throughout the 27-nation bloc. At stake is oversight of the multi-trillion-dollar crypto industry, which regulators have long warned could destabilize markets and harm investors if not properly supervised. The Greek rejection would mean Binance will not be given the green light to operate in the EU, leaving the fate of Binance's customers based in the bloc uncertain. Binance posted on X after the Reuters report was published that it intends to "support an orderly process and minimise disruption to our users", without giving further details. A spokesperson for Binance, which has 300 million customers worldwide, earlier said it has been pursuing a MiCA licenze and had worked with regulators for 18 months. Binance believes it has met the requirements to be MiCA authorized, the spokesperson said. It understood that Greece's Hellenic Capital Market Commission had completed its review of the application and it was considered compliant. "HCMC has given no formal indication of the contrary," the spokesperson told Reuters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prosecutors claim defendants were part of Minneapolis-based ‘antifa’ groups that ‘violently oppose’ law enforcement

Fifteen people in Minnesota were charged with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers over their response to a controversial and deadly immigration enforcement crackdown in the state earlier this year.

The US attorney for Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, and the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for Minnesota, Michael McCarthy, announced the charges at a press conference in Minneapolis on Tuesday.

The retro phone has a physical T9 texting button layout, the ability to run most Android-based apps and a social media blacklist.

Brazil supreme court finds that Eduardo Bolsonaro – who resides in the US - tried to get sanctions put on judges trying ex-president over coup plot

Brazil’s supreme court has sentenced Eduardo Bolsonaro to four years and two months in prison after finding him guilty of courting US ⁠interference in his father’s coup plot trial last year.

The office of Brazil’s ‌prosecutor general had ‌charged Eduardo Bolsonaro – who lives in the US - courting interference from the Trump administration to help Jair Bolsonaro’s case, by imposing sanctions on the court’s justices and tariffs on Brazilian goods.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and SAN ANTONIO, June 16, 2026 — AMD and Rackspace Technology today announced the signing of a definitive agreement for the phased deployment of an initial 30 MW footprint dedicated to AMD-based compute deployments across Rackspace’s global data centers beginning in late 2026 through 2028. The agreement operationalizes the Memorandum of Understanding announced May 7, 2026, and establishes AMD as a strategic technology partner at the silicon layer of Rackspace’s governed AI stack.

Credit: Shutterstock

At full deployment, 30 MW of dedicated AMD compute across Rackspace’s footprint will represent meaningful capacity to serve regulated enterprise workloads, including healthcare providers who have expressed early interest in accelerated compute for clinical AI and inference at scale. This collaboration incorporates both AMD Instinct GPUs (including MI355X, MI350P, and future successor solutions) and AMD EPYC CPUs inside an integrated Enterprise AI Cloud architecture, enabling Rackspace to route each workload to the right compute with full accountability for performance and outcomes end to end.

“Enterprises in regulated industries need AI infrastructure that is governed from the ground up, with one operator accountable for business outcomes, not a collection of vendors each owning a piece,” said Gajen Kandiah, CEO, Rackspace Technology. “This collaboration combines the right compute with the right operating model and delivers something the market hasn’t offered before: a governed AI stack with one accountable partner from silicon to outcomes.”

“As enterprise AI evolves, customers need infrastructure that can deliver the right mix of accelerated and general-purpose compute for each workload,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “By bringing together leadership AMD AI compute solutions and Rackspace’s governed cloud operating model, we are helping regulated enterprises deploy high-performance AI infrastructure with the openness, scalability and accountability needed to run AI at enterprise scale.”

Both companies expect to dedicate sales and marketing resources to identify and engage enterprise customers for AMD compute-powered infrastructure, with each company committing personnel to jointly develop and pursue customer opportunities across regulated industries.

This agreement will accelerate delivery of the four integrated capabilities announced with the MOU: Enterprise AI Cloud, Enterprise Inference Engine, Inference as a Service, and Bare Metal AMD Instinct, offering a complete, governed stack from bare metal compute through fully operated inference. Together, the companies aim to establish a new category of managed enterprise AI infrastructure that offers enterprises an alternative to the bare metal model. The shift from AI experiments to agentic workflows running inside core enterprise systems is accelerating demand for exactly the kind of governed, accountable infrastructure this collaboration is built to deliver.

About Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology (NASDAQ: RXT) is the operator of the full enterprise AI stack from governed private cloud to AI inference and agents in production. With an Outcomes-as-a-Service model built on secure infrastructure, data foundations, and forward-deployed engineering, Rackspace delivers business results for regulated and mission-critical industries where governance, sovereignty, and uptime are non-negotiable. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at http://www.amd.com.

Source: AMD

The post AMD and Rackspace Sign Deal to Deploy 30 MW of AI Infrastructure Across Global Data Centers appeared first on HPCwire.

Meta's smart glasses are raising surveillance concerns again.

Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, squares off with state lawmakers over the facilities powering an AI boom

A controversial haunted house near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, taps into its dark history every fall to scare tens of thousands of visitors. In 1968, a local news station documented appalling conditions for disabled people in the red brick buildings on the banks of Schuylkill River. Residents were found naked and emaciated at what was then known as the Pennhurst state school and hospital. The institution shut its doors permanently in 1987 after a lawsuit over inhumane conditions.

By 2010, a Halloween attraction stood in its place, and Pennhurst asylum’s previous owner suggested during its early years that he wanted to spook guests by repurposing the hospital’s surgical lights and medical cabinets to use as props.

This live blog is now closed.

You can follow all the latest developments from the G7 summit in our Europe live blog:

We will be including any Iran-related news from the summit in our Middle East crisis live blog.

Starting in 2027, France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI will stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, effectively forcing government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to phase out older cryptographic systems. Reuters reports: Samih Souissi, ANSSI's chief of staff, said at the France Quantum conference that the agency would halt such certifications from 2027, and that businesses should be buying only quantum-safe products by 2030. ANSSI approval is required for use in French government agencies and critical infrastructure, making the policy a de facto phase-out of older encryption. "It's not only a technical issue," Souissi said. "It's a matter of governance, industrial planning, regulation, and sovereignty." The move reflects concern that attackers may store encrypted data now and unlock it later when quantum computers become strong enough to crack today's protections, a risk known as "harvest now, decrypt later."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The AI tool will be trained on proprietary Disney assets, helping Imagineers rapidly produce 3D models of characters and rides.

A pair of MacBooks top the list, including Apple’s new Neo, but I have plenty of picks for Windows users, including budget models and high-powered rigs for gamers and creators and everything in between.

Former secretary of state says the winner of a genuine Democratic primary ‘would have beaten Donald Trump’

Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term was “a terrible mistake” that cost Democrats the presidency and may have permanently damaged his legacy, Hillary Clinton has declared.

Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Monday, the former US secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee said Biden had reneged on a prior commitment to step aside – and that the betrayal of that promise proved catastrophic. “He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy, and for the country,” she said.

The KDE team released KDE Plasma 6.7 today, and with it comes a long list of improvements, new features, bug fixes, new old themes, and so much more. A new feature that is sure to please those among us who use virtual desktops: you can now have different virtual desktop setups per display. It’s been a long-requested feature, so it’s great to see it makes its way to the KDE users. I despise virtual desktops, but I’m happy to see something that I assumed was already part of KDE to finally actually become available.

Another major feature in KDE Plasma 6.7 is something we’ve already talked about: the return of the classic Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4.x days. These themes have seen extensive work over the past year or so to make them usable on the latest KDE release, which includes tons of bug fixes, visual nips and tucks, and countless additions to the collection of assets required to make a modern KDE theme look complete. This includes a ton of new icons in the old styles, light and dark modes, accent colour support, and much more. There’s still work left here, including adding support for QtQuick/Kirigami applications – which brings us to the next major new addition to KDE 6.7

This is also something we’ve already talked about: Union. I won’t repeat what I already explained last time Union came up, but suffice it to say that Union effectively unifies the various different ways KDE applications are themed, allowing theme designers to use relatively standard CSS to create themes that cover every aspect of the KDE user experience. Before Union, theme designers had to create individual, unique themes for a variety of parts of KDE – the Plasma desktop, QtWidgets using QStyle, QtQuick/Kirigami – which was a ton of work, and in the case of QtQuick/Kirigami, wasn’t really possible at all. As such, without Union, KDE’s theming is essentially broken, and Union fixes that. For now, Union is not enabled by default, and must be installed and enabled separately for testing.

Of course, there’s a ton of other smaller new features, changes, and bug fixes as well. KDE Plasma 6.7 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

The head of a Maine conservative news outlet said Graham Platner, the Democrat running to represent the state in the Senate, is lying about his blue-collar oyster farming job.

In a June 5 Fox News appearance, Maine Wire Editor-in-Chief Steven Robinson told Laura Ingraham that Platner’s business is "a campaign prop."

"The oyster business, totally fake," said Robinson, whose outlet was founded in 2011 by the conservative think tank Maine Policy Institute.  "There’s no oystermen in Maine … And if you look at the date [when] his fake oyster business was created, it was created after ‘Graham for Maine,’ his Senate website."

Platner’s Hancock County-based oyster farm, Waukeag Neck Oyster Co., is a key part of the 41-year-old candidate’s biography. A Marine Corps veteran and Maine native, Platner is seeking to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has held the seat for three decades.

On June 10, Senate Republicans released an ad that also sought to undermine Platner's image. The same day, President Donald Trump disparaged Platner.

"He's not a businessman at all. His parents supported him. He's a loser," Trump said of Platner during a June 10 bill signing for immigration enforcement funding.

Neither Platner’s campaign nor Robinson responded to PolitiFact’s requests for comment. On X, Platner’s campaign shared a Republican National Committee post with Robinson’s comments, calling them "defamatory." 

Maine Wire published a Facebook post June 8 that said, in part: "The oyster ‘business’ site should be an FEC-reportable expenditure because it’s just a prop for his campaign, part of the fake working-man routine he’s running."

Is the oyster business legitimate?

Waukeag Neck’s parent company, Frenchman Bay Oyster Co., registered with the state as a business in December 2018, according to the Maine Secretary of State’s Office website. Records show the business is currently in "good standing" and has filed its required annual report every year since forming.

Since 2021, Frenchman Bay Oyster Co. has appeared on the Food and Drug Administration’s monthly list of companies federally allowed to sell shellfish across state lines.

Platner was operating his business years before he started his campaign. And records show he launched his business website months before he announced his campaign Aug. 19, 2025.

The oyster farm’s website says Platner joined the business in 2018 and took over operations in 2019, "slowly but sustainably making it a commercially successful small scale aquaculture operation."

Platner began working with Maine Small Business Development Centers, which provides counseling to small-business owners, in 2021 and was awarded a $20,000 grant to buy new cages and equipment for the business, according to the organization’s 2021 year-end review.

Waukeag Neck Oyster Co. as of June 8 had 47 Google reviews; several reviews from before he announced his candidacy mention Platner by name. One February 2024 review includes a picture that appears to show Platner shucking an oyster. The reviewer wrote, in part: "Graham does an amazing job harvesting and serving these delicacies."

Free Beacon, a conservative news website, reported in May that the oyster farm’s website says it is "not currently taking tour reservations" and social media accounts for the farm have shifted from posts about harvesting oysters to criticizing Trump since Platner announced his candidacy. The piece also noted a March 2026 letter sent to Platner by the Maine Department of Marine Resources telling Platner didn’t have the boundaries of his property properly marked in 2024 and 2025 on his oyster farm as required by law.

In August 2021, the state approved Platner’s company for a 20-year aquaculture lease of 5.8 acres south and west of Ingalls Island in Sullivan Harbor, located in Hancock County.

As part of that approval process, Platner spoke Aug. 9, 2021, during a public hearing. He said he needed the approval to expand "existing aquaculture operations," according to state records. The application said Platner had two existing aquaculture leases. (The minutes of a July 28, 2021, special called meeting of the Town of Bar Harbor identified Platner and one of his co-owners as having had multiple oyster harvesting applications "for many years.")

Platner rebuffed the idea that he is not an oysterman in a May story from The New York Times.

"I work with my hands on the ocean and I don’t make much money," Platner told The Times. "I’m not really sure what else the definition is than working, making money from working, not being rich.

Robinson: It’s a ‘campaign prop’

Robinson said Platner’s campaign website was registered before the oyster farm website.

Platner registered the campaign website domain in April 2023 and the oyster farm’s domain in January 2024. But — according to archived versions of the websites — the Waukeag Neck Oyster Co. website went live in January 2025, which is months before Platner's campaign website went live and he announced his campaign.

Platner’s income from the oyster business is unclear. Under the "compensation" section of his personal financial disclosure, the one entry listed as providing him more than $5,000 annually is from his mother’s business, Ironbound Restaurant and Inn. The description is simply "oyster purveyor to restaurant." 

At midnight on Primary Day, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released an ad aimed at Platner: "Graham Platner runs a hobby oyster farm, whose only customer is his mother’s restaurant."

Our ruling

Robinson said the oyster business was "totally fake."

Public records show that Waukeag Neck Oyster Co. has been registered with the state since 2018. Platner received a grant in 2021 to buy business equipment.

The business applied for and in 2021 obtained approval from the state to farm oysters. Waukeag Neck also has a social media presence that predates Platner running for office. 

We rate this statement False.

The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington DC has turned green with algae shortly after it had undergone a renovation. The no-bid contract to waterproof and repaint the site was awarded to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based company that had previously carried out work on a swimming pool at one of Donald Trump’s golf clubs.

• Algae thwart Trump’s $14.2m attempt to turn reflecting pool ‘American flag blue’

• Before-and-after photos: Trump’s $14.2m makeover delivers … a blue pool

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The driving technology company Mobileye plans to launch a robotaxi service in an as-yet-unnamed US city in 2027, it said earlier today. The service will be vertically integrated, using Mobileye's Moovit mobility platform to interact with customers booking rides, coordinate drivers, and so on. The Israeli company, which was bought by Intel in 2017 before going public again in 2022, says it will start with around 100 robotaxis early next year. The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye's advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles. It has developed a new "SuperVision" ADAS that combines cameras and radar sensors, used by Porsche and Polestar, among others. On the robotaxi front, it has partnered with Volkswagen Group's MOIA to develop a commercially available robotaxi based on the VW ID. Buzz minivan, and last year, Mobileye revealed plans to work with Lyft to deploy robotaxis in Dallas, "as soon as" this year. [...] If Mobileye's experience with the initial 100 robotaxis goes well, it says it will scale up to around 17,000 robotaxis within the following five years. "The robotaxi revolution has only just begun, and its potential for transforming how we travel around the world continues to increase," Shashua said. "This initiative is not a replacement for our existing partnerships; it is an extension of them," said Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. "We remain deeply committed to enabling automakers and mobility providers with Mobileye Drive. At the same time, operating our own service allows us to accelerate adoption, gain direct operational experience, and showcase the full potential of autonomous mobility."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's MacBook lineup includes three tiers: Neo, Air and Pro. See our favorites and find the best MacBook for your laptop budget and needs.

This is what spending money on a more advanced AI model will get you.

Anthropic's Claude AI service appeared to stop working on Tuesday. Here's what we know so far.

Snap is launching its first consumer augmented-reality glasses this fall for $2,195. "You can preorder a pair of Specs now at specs.com with a $200 refundable deposit, and Snap says they're expected to ship 'this fall' in the US, UK, and France," reports The Verge. From the report: This is a big moment for Snap: The company made a big entry into smart glasses with its original Spectacles in 2016, and the company has been toiling away on nonpublic AR versions of Spectacles over the past few years. CEO Evan Spiegel promised the company would launch consumer AR glasses in 2026 and even turned its smart glasses team into a separate business. The company says that Specs are "fully standalone, with no puck and no tether." (Which is perhaps a jab at Apple's Vision Pro, which is tethered to a separate battery pack.) They'll be offered in two sizes, a 47mm model weighing 132g and a 52mm model weighing 136g, and will have removable inserts that Snap says will support "a wide range of prescriptions." You probably won't mistake Specs, with their wide, bold frames, for any of Meta's smart glasses -- Snap clearly picked a design that it wants to stand out. (They're not my style -- I don't think I can pull off the "snow goggles, but fashionable" look -- though maybe Jony Ive might like them.) They have visible light and infrared cameras, and while the Specs are recording, a little LED bar will glow in the middle of the glasses. Both of the lenses will be able to show you content, and Snap says that its display system is powered by a "proprietary liquid crystal on silicon technology" that offers a 51-degree field of view and can show 16 million colors. The lenses can also go from clear to tinted in 10 seconds, Snap says. The Specs have two Snapdragon processors onboard, and while Snap isn't specifying exactly which ones they are, the company says that one is focused on "computer vision" while the other is focused on running AR Lenses. "Together, they enable fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions that help digital content feel anchored in the real world," Snap says. You can also expect up to four hours of battery life on a charge, which Snap says accounts for things like "audio and video playback, AI assistance, Bluetooth notifications, and more." The Specs come with a charging case that Snap says will offer four more charges for a total of 20 hours of battery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New benchmarks and increased diversity of submissions reflect important changes in AI ecosystem

SAN FRANCISCO, June 16, 2026 — Today, MLCommons announced new results for the MLPerf Training v6.0 benchmark suite. The two new benchmarks added in this round, and the submissions received, highlight rapid and significant changes in the AI ecosystem.

Credit: MLCommons

“It’s an exciting moment for the community,” said Shriya Rishab, MLPerf Training Working Group co-chair. “We’re seeing strong convergence on a set of best practices for training AI models, but at the same time there is increasing technical diversity in the underlying frameworks and systems that are being used to host and run them.”

MLPerf Training v6.0 Adds Two New Benchmarks, Emphasizing Sparse Computation

The MLPerf Training benchmark suite comprises full system tests that stress models, software, and hardware for a range of machine learning (ML) applications. The open-source and peer-reviewed benchmark suite provides a level playing field for competition, driving innovation, performance, and energy efficiency across the industry. The suite’s benchmark collection is curated by a panel of experts from the AI community.

Version 6.0 adds two new benchmarks: DeepSeek V3 and GPT-OSS 20B, both highlighting the industry-wide shift to sparse computation as exemplified by a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Mixture-of-Experts is a model architecture that uses a smart “router” to send different tokens to specialized sub-networks (“experts”). This enables using a high-parameter-count model that is very efficient because training and inference only activate a fraction of the experts for any given token, reducing the computational cost.

DeepSeek V3 is a large-scale pretraining model, utilizing an MoE architecture. It uses 671 billion total parameters, of which 37 billion are activated per token. It provides a standardized platform for evaluating the training efficiency of a leading open-weights MoE model at production scale.

GPT-OSS 20B, also an MoE model, uses a much smaller footprint: 21 billion total parameters, of which 3.6 billion are activated per token. This allows organizations to evaluate the complex routing logic and sparse computation patterns common to MoE architecture on hardware configurations as small as a single 8-GPU node.

“Sparse computation is a dominant trend in AI right now,” said Rishab. “Over the past two years, all of the major new generative AI models have utilized a sparse computation architecture, frequently MoE. We have introduced our new DeepSeek V3 benchmark to test large-scale sparse computation training systems, and in fact it is now the largest benchmark in our suite with 671 billion parameters. It also exercises the performance of critical innovations that are now standard in the industry, including Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and auxiliary-loss-free load balancing.

“On the opposite end of the spectrum, we’ve introduced the GPT-OSS 20B benchmark as an entry point for organizations that may not have the resources to train the largest-scale models, but want to build advanced capabilities. We’ve carefully designed the benchmark for this scenario, including training from randomized weights to avoid the overhead of multi-gigabyte checkpoint downloads; using the same dataset as existing benchmarks in the suite such as Llama 3.1 8B; and choosing a representative sliver of end-to-end training to reduce the cost of generating benchmark results without compromising on the quality of the benchmark.

“Both of these new benchmarks saw quick uptake, drawing many results. Stakeholders clearly see the importance of performance benchmarking for MoE architectures.”

Increasing Diversity of Submissions Highlights New Paths to AI Training

Version 6.0 set new records for diversity of the systems submitted. Participants in this round of the benchmark submitted 95 unique systems, utilizing thirteen different hardware accelerators, 19 different host processors and a couple of different software frameworks. 60% of the systems were multi-node.

Notably, there are more than double the number of cloud systems submitted compared to the version 5.1 results six months ago, reflecting the emerging market for hosting AI training in the cloud.

“There are more ways of getting your AI training than ever before,” said Pavan Yalamanchili, MLPerf Working Group co-chair. “Several companies now offer training systems in the cloud, complementing the on-premises systems that continue to be built out at a furious pace. And we are excited to see so many competitive submissions from a variety of on-premises and cloud providers.”

At the same time, the submissions illustrate growing technical diversity, reflecting a robust, rapidly advancing ecosystem. For example, submitters used multiple different FP4-precision recipes, reflecting the current diversity and exploration across the industry.

“The diversity of FP4 implementations we see in the submissions is not surprising,” said Yalamanchili. “Some implementations are more flexible than others, which allow them to be used in unique training scenarios. But here is where MLPerf’s benchmarking delivers critical insight and value: it allows stakeholders to understand which implementations deliver the best performance for their specific needs. In particular, because MLPerf benchmarks require submissions to meet an accuracy threshold, we shine a spotlight on the differences in performance that these kinds of hardware and implementation design choices can lead to.”

Record Industry Participation Points to Broad Ecosystem, Driven by Generative AI

The MLPerf Training v6.0 round includes performance results from 24 submitting organizations: AMD, ASUSTeK, Azure, Cisco, CoreWeave, Dell, Fujitsu, GigaComputing, Google, HPE, Inventec, Krai, Lambda, MITAC, Neblus, Netweb Technologies India LTD, NVIDIA, Oracle, Quanta Cloud Technologies, SCITIX, Sigmicro, tinycorp, TTA and Vultr. “We would especially like to welcome first-time MLPerf Training submitters,” said David Kanter, Head of MLPerf at MLCommons.

Robust participation by a broad set of industry stakeholders strengthens the AI ecosystem as a whole and helps to ensure that the benchmark is serving the community’s needs. We invite submitters and other stakeholders to join the MLPerf Training working group and help us continue to evolve the benchmark.

View the Results

Please visit the Training benchmark page to view the full results for MLPerf Training v6.0 and find additional information about the benchmarks. To learn about each submitters results, read the supplemental.

About MLCommons

MLCommons is the world’s leader in AI benchmarking. An open engineering consortium supported by over 125 members and affiliates, MLCommons has a proven record of bringing together academia, industry, and civil society to measure and improve AI. The foundation for MLCommons began with the MLPerf benchmarks in 2018, which rapidly scaled as a set of industry metrics to measure machine learning performance and promote transparency of machine learning techniques. Since then, MLCommons has continued using collective engineering to build the benchmarks and metrics required for better AI – ultimately helping to evaluate and improve AI technologies’ accuracy, safety, speed, and efficiency.

For additional information on MLCommons and details on becoming a member, please visit MLCommons.org or email participation@mlcommons.org.

Source: MLCommons

The post MLCommons Releases MLPerf Training v6.0 Results appeared first on HPCwire.

BOSTON, June 16, 2026 — Classiq and Rolls-Royce today published a new technical blog describing work that examines how quantum computing methods could support computational fluid dynamics (CFD), one of the most demanding areas of engineering simulation.

CFD is used across industries such as aerospace, energy, automotive and advanced manufacturing to simulate the movement of air, fluids and gases. These simulations are central to the design of aircraft, jet engines, turbines and other complex systems, but they can require significant high-performance computing resources.

The Classiq blog, “Quantum Linear Solvers for CFD: From Algorithmic Promise to Practical Performance,” looks at a practical question for future quantum computing: can a quantum linear solver be placed inside an existing CFD workflow, and can that workflow still produce useful results when the quantum component is approximate rather than perfect?

Classiq and Rolls-Royce studied a hybrid classical-quantum workflow using a CFD application made publicly available by Rolls-Royce. The application simulates steady flow through a one-dimensional nozzle, including transonic flow with shocks. In the workflow, the classical CFD process continues to manage the overall simulation, while a quantum linear solver is tested as part of an inner step that helps update the simulation.

The work found that the CFD workflow could still converge when using an approximate quantum solver. In one test, an approximate Chebyshev linear combination of unitaries, or Cheb-LCU, approach reduced quantum resource requirements by more than an order of magnitude compared with a Quantum Singular Value Transformation-based solver, while preserving convergence in the full CFD process.

The study was conducted on a smaller-scale test case, and future work will examine scaling to larger more demanding CFD problems. The findings demonstrate why testing quantum algorithms inside real application workflows is important: the practical performance of a quantum method can depend on how it behaves in the larger engineering process, not only on how it performs in isolation.

“Quantum computing matters to enterprises if it can fit into the workflows that engineers and researchers already use,” said Nir Minerbi, co-founder and CEO of Classiq. “This work is an important step in that direction. It shows how teams can move beyond evaluating algorithms on their own and begin studying how quantum methods behave inside real scientific and engineering applications.”

The blog also highlights a broader lesson for enterprise quantum teams. Future quantum applications may not require perfect quantum subroutines at every step. In some cases, useful workflows may be able to tolerate approximation if it reduces resource requirements and keeps the overall process on track.

Classiq’s role included developing and implementing the quantum portion of the hybrid CFD workflow using its high-level quantum software platform. The quantum linear solver implementation is available in Classiq’s open library, supporting repeatability and further research.

For industries that rely on simulation, this type of work can help teams prepare for future fault-tolerant quantum computers while staying grounded in real engineering needs. It also provides a practical framework for evaluating quantum methods as part of end-to-end applications rather than as standalone algorithms.

The full blog is available here.

About Classiq

Classiq is the leading quantum computing software company, providing the technology that makes it practical for enterprises and researchers to access and harness the power of quantum computing. Classiq’s quantum software engineering platform enables an enterprise-grade agentic workflow and advanced compilation to transform high-level functional models into portable hardware-optimized quantum circuits. This enables teams to develop algorithms faster, optimize them for cost and performance, and make quantum applications usable sooner on any quantum computer.

Source: Classiq

The post Classiq and Rolls-Royce Evaluate Quantum Computing’s Role in Future CFD Applications appeared first on HPCwire.

A week or so ago, Apple announced a bunch of features for the App Store on iOS, including personalised recommendations based on your activity and usage of iOS. It turns out this includes a keylogger (taplogger?) in the App Store, which records every single tap you make, every single letter you enter, and a lot of other information. All of this information is unencrypted and sent to Apple.

Now Apple is putting the extensive identifiable analytics they collect in the App Store in action. They record every tap and there’s no way to turn it off.

They can even calculate your typing speed.

↫ Michael Tsai, quoting Mysk

The provided screenshots of the data collected are terrifying, especially because the data is unencrypted, sent to Apple, and fully tied to your user account. Apple clearly wants a slice of that big, juicy advertising pie, and they, too, are discovering that the easiest and best way to serve targeted ads is to collect as much data as they can about you. Of course, this is something the entire internet (but not OSNews!) and several megacorporations are built on by now, but Apple has been incredibly sanctimonious about how it supposedly actually cares about user privacy, making this keylogger yet another case of Apple’s hypocrisy on full display.

Of course, if you care about privacy, you’re entirely free to download your iOS applications from somewhere other than the App Store and install them yours…

Oh, wait.

Elon Musk’s firm briefly reached $2.97tn valuation days after its IPO following purchase of AI coding startup Cursor

SpaceX has overtaken Amazon to become the world’s fifth most valuable company days after its stock market debut.

The milestone came as Elon Musk’s company agreed to buy the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor for $60bn (£44bn), in an attempt to capitalise on the technology’s success as a coding tool.

The update brings a welcome battery bump and points to a future where both act as gateways into Google's broader AI ecosystem.

The latest from Android is upon us. Here's what to expect and a glimpse of what's down the road.

App timers, screen time limits and new restrictions on the Google Play Store are the company's solution to concerns about child safety online.

SpaceX has agreed to acquire Cursor for $60 billion in stock, adding the popular AI coding assistant to Elon Musk's newly public aerospace-and-AI conglomerate. CNBC reports: Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code, and the company has experienced explosive growth since its founding in 2022. In November, Cursor said it crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to a release at the time. Cursor was also ranked at No. 37 on the annual CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2026. [...] Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup, xAI, earlier this year, and the Cursor deal looks set to help revitalize the company's efforts to compete with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which also offer popular coding tools. SpaceX expects the merger to close during the third quarter of this year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The transaction is subject to "requisite regulatory approvals," the filing said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The recent abandonment of plans for a Franco-German fighter jet sent a disastrous signal. Strategic autonomy will be jointly achieved or not at all

It has become a truism to assert that Europe needs to fast-track its own strategic independence in a volatile world. A recent paper from the European Council on Foreign Relations describes the continent’s leaders as grappling with “a ‘Schrödinger’s NATO’ moment, in which America remains formally inside the alliance while behaving as though it were not, just as the Russian threat looms larger”. Donald Trump’s United States has become at best an unreliable and at times reluctant ally, as Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions have exposed the need to strengthen Europe’s defences.

But if the goal of greater autonomy is to be achieved, far better coordination of resources and cooperation between national defence industries will be required. Neither has been much in evidence this month, with France and Germany abandoning a joint £100bn project to build a new fighter jet as part of an updated Future Combat Air System. Originally launched by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel in 2017, plans for the jet were pulled as a result of irresolvable disagreements between Dassault, the French aviation company involved, and Airbus, the European aerospace company whose defence unit is based in Germany.

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.

Young adults and teens are being recruited through apps like Telegram and paid to carry out attacks, officials say

Police investigators in Toronto have said that dozens of shootings – including one at the US consulate in March – are linked to a “multilayered” gun-for-hire network that is also responsible for attacks on synagogues around Canada’s largest city.

Toronto’s police chief, Myron Demkiw, told reporters on Tuesday that young adults and teenagers are being recruited through encrypted messaging apps such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp by “bad actors” and paid by the networks to carry out the attacks. Shooters are required to film their attacks in order to get paid.

British prime minister was left making small talk unsure if a meeting with Trump and Zelenskyy was going ahead

The wait for Keir Starmer’s first session of the G7 gathering in Évian-les-Bains was undoubtedly awkward. A meeting about the future of Ukraine had been due to start at 9am but more than half an hour later, Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron were nowhere to be seen.

On a live Reuters feed, Starmer could be seen standing next to the leaders of Canada and Japan as they milled about making small talk. “Are they, are they having a meeting?” the British prime minister could be heard asking. If he was referring to the missing attenders, and they were indeed having a meeting, it was clear he hadn’t been invited.

Quandela’s spin-photon quantum computing architecture advances into DARPA program evaluating utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum systems

WASHINGTON, June 16, 2026 — Quandela today announced it has been selected by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to participate in Stage A of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), a multi-stage program designed to assess whether any quantum computing architecture can achieve utility-scale operation by 2033.

Under Stage A, Quandela will present a detailed concept for a utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, along with technical evidence supporting its near-term feasibility. Within DARPA’s framework, utility-scale refers to systems whose computational value exceeds their cost. The QBI program is intended to rigorously evaluate approaches to practical quantum computing and provide the government with a clearer basis for assessing which technologies can realistically scale.

“Selection for Stage A of the QBI program reflects the progress and maturity of our approach,” said Yoni Elmalem, General Manager of Quandela Federal. “It highlights the growing relevance of photonic and spin-photon hybrid architectures in addressing the requirements for scalable, fault-tolerant quantum systems. Our focus is on translating validated scientific principles into engineering pathways that can support practical deployment.”

Quandela is developing a spin-photon quantum computing architecture that combines the natural connectivity and modularity advantages of photons with the high-speed logic operations and resource efficiency of semiconductor spin-based technologies. The company believes this approach can enable modular, high-performance quantum systems designed for scalability.

“QBI establishes a structured framework for evaluating quantum computing approaches against clear performance and scalability criteria,” said Niccolo Somaschi, CEO of Quandela. “This aligns closely with our engineering methodology, which emphasizes measurable progress, architectural clarity and system-level scalability from the outset.”

Companies that successfully complete Stage A may advance to subsequent QBI phases focused on research and development planning, risk reduction, and independent validation of system performance.

About Quandela

Quandela is a global quantum computing company that designs, builds and delivers quantum solutions for research and industry. Its offerings include energy-efficient quantum computers for data centers, full-stack quantum computing solutions accessible through the cloud, and quantum algorithm services for academic and industrial customers. Quandela’s mission is to make quantum computing accessible in order to address complex industrial and societal challenges.

Source: Quandela

The post DARPA Selects Quandela for Stage A of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

We would like to hear from small business owners in the US about how they’re adapting to challenges such as inflation

An index of US small business optimism reportedly fell in May to the lowest level since October 2024, which Bloomberg says has erased “almost all of the gains seen since President Donald Trump was elected for a second term”.

The National Federation of Independent Business optimism index fell 0.6 points to 95.3, according to data put out last week. The measure had previously hit a six-year high in December 2024 following Trump’s re-election.

Fashion house pays tribute to Chinese style with its 75th anniversary catwalk show in Shanghai

“New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down.” For the British designer Ian Griffiths, who encountered this line in the New Yorker, it summed up why China’s biggest city was the right place to celebrate Max Mara’s 75th anniversary.

“Max Mara is a product for metropolitan women, and it would be patronising to assume that a metropolitan wardrobe should be western-centric,” Griffiths said.

The FDA sent a warning letter to Happiest Baby Inc., alleging the company sold some unauthorized products and cited unsanitary conditions.

Move to ChapsVision is to avoid ‘strategic dependencies’, says PM amid concern about reliance on US-controlled tools

France’s domestic intelligence service is to ditch AI data tools from the US tech company Palantir in favour of a domestic provider in an effort to avoid “strategic dependency”, the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has said.

“We must use our own AI models; we cannot accept new strategic dependencies in ‌the digital sphere,” Lecornu posted on social media. “We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools.”

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Reality Elite could show up in a lot more future headsets, but it's appearing in Google and Xreal's upcoming Android XR glasses first. It's promising significant boosts for graphics, battery and AI.

TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker argues that the U.S. government's abrupt export-control order forcing Anthropic to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline was "never about an AI jailbreak" threat. Instead, it was driven more by "personality differences" between the AI company and Trump administration. Security experts say the reported guardrail bypass did not justify the order and warn that the move sets a troubling precedent: the government can unilaterally disrupt American software products without court approval, potentially undermining trust in U.S. AI providers. From the report: Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity veteran and researcher who founded Luta Security, said in a blog post that Anthropic recently shared with her a private copy of a paper written by security researchers describing an alleged guardrail bypass in Fable 5. (The Wall Street Journal reports that the paper's authors are security researchers at Amazon.) Moussouris said that Anthropic reached out to ask for her take on the paper. Moussouris' blog post described how the researchers triggered the guardrail bypass, but said that the bypass itself "should never have triggered an export control." The difference is largely between asking an AI model to "review code for security issues" versus asking it to "fix this code." The end result is largely the same, even if the questions are posed slightly differently. "The behavior described in the paper cannot meaningfully be fixed, and any attempt would only weaken the model for defense," said Moussouris, who criticized the export control directive as hasty, heavy-handed, and misguided. Moussouris and dozens of other top security researchers and experts have since called on the Trump administration to revoke the export control order, calling the move to pull advanced cybersecurity capabilities from network defenders in the U.S. as "dangerous." Past administrations have made sweeping decisions on knowledge gaps. For instance, language used by the U.S. government during the 2010s to fix export law covering cybersecurity tools that could also be used for cyberattacks was so broad that inadvertently, it nearly outlawed legitimate security and vulnerability research. However, the Trump administration's directive appears retaliatory. Justin Hendrix, the editor of Tech Policy Press, said the Trump administration's move is "likely to raise alarms in foreign capitals about the reliability of American AI for critical applications." The message is that AI companies in the United States can't be trusted to operate without interference from the U.S. government. The Trump administration hasn't confirmed why it invoked its export control directive. Did the officials misread the report and freak out? Did Amazon CEO Andy Jassy say something to senior government officials that prompted the reaction, out of caution or spite? Was something lost in translation, or was this a way to pressure Anthropic, with whom the administration already has a fractious relationship? It's possible that the White House was unaware of the far-reaching consequences of the letter's demand and officials are scrambling to undo the damage of their own making. To quote Hendrix, "the climate is one of a cloud of suspicion that senior officials are picking favorites based on personal and political factors." The aftermath is that the government has set a dangerous precedent about how much control it intends to wield over the release of American-made software. This time the government took issue with Anthropic; tomorrow it could be with anyone else.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America’s Iran War casualties crept higher even as the U.S. was in the final stages of declaring a second ceasefire with Iran this weekend. 

The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a second ceasefire and the eventual reopening the Strait of Hormuz under a preliminary deal scheduled to take effect on Friday. “Iran has taken a major step toward final victory,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said on Monday, one of several Iranian leaders taking a victory lap after outlasting the Trump administration.

Trump’s war has already killed thousands of Iranian civilians — including more than 150, most of them children –  in a strike on an elementary school. The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. This tally, however, is missing hundreds of casualties, including two soldiers wounded in action earlier this month.

Related

Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran

For months, The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran War is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties. The true number exceeds 625.

When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics.

On April 21, however, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public comment from the War Department, dropping the casualty total to 413. Despite repeated questions over almost two months, the Pentagon has not explained the disparity in its casualty count. A defense official told The Intercept that it was impossible to tell whether Pentagon casualty analysts were “grossly incompetent” or had been ordered to manipulate the figures.    

Since the 15 wounded vanished in April, the DCAS casualty count has steadily crept upward to top out at 413, where it stood on Tuesday morning. This includes one sailor wounded in action this month. Central Command did not reply to a request for further information about the injury.

The official figures appear to be missing two soldiers who were recently wounded in action. CENTCOM spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told NBC News last week that two crew members from a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter downed by an Iranian drone on June 8 were receiving medical care. And a CENTCOM social media post said they were in “stable condition.” But DCAS lists no Army personnel wounded in action this month.

The official tally of war dead also appears to be an undercount. For weeks, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war. DCAS briefly raised the total to 14 last month before dropping it back to 13, without any explanation on the fluctuation.

The Pentagon list of the names of the dead is still missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count: Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service that month, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, in Caine’s words, “project combat power” in the Middle East. The ship returned to its home port in Norfolk, Virginia, last month after 326 days at sea, the longest deployment of any U.S. aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War.

The casualty numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

On April 21, two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions about why more than a dozen casualties had been disappeared by the War Department, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them. After almost two months, The Intercept has yet to receive a response from the duty officer.

The Pentagon did not reply to a request for clarification on Monday about whether the duty officer ever returned to their desk.

The post U.S. Casualties in Iran Are Still Rising appeared first on The Intercept.

They're fully standalone augmented reality and far more expensive than other smart glasses (but cheaper than Apple Vision Pro). I haven't tried them out yet, but did talk to Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.

JD Vance says specifics ⁠to be ‌worked out as Senate Republicans say there are many unanswered questions

Republicans have expressed tentative skepticism of the agreement Donald Trump has reached with Iran, and urged the White House to release more information.

The memorandum of understanding (MOU) announced on Sunday to end the war in Iran, set for a ceremonial signing on Friday in Geneva, is centered around reopening the strait of Hormuz and lifting the US naval blockade in the region, along with financial incentives for Iran if it meets certain benchmarks. Both Trump and JD Vance, the US vice-president, have digitally signed the document, along with Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf on Tehran’s behalf, a senior US official confirmed.

WAYNE, Pa., June 16, 2026 — Cornelis, a provider of high-performance networking solutions, today announced the successful deployment of the “Lynx” supercomputing cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

The 952-node Lynx cluster, featuring Dell PowerEdge servers, Intel Xeon processors, and the Cornelis CN5000 Omni-Path fabric, is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Commodity Technology Systems (CTS-2) program. It will provide additional production capability for NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program and NNSA’s broader national security missions.

“We are excited to see the Cornelis CN5000 400G network come to life at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,” said Matt Leininger, Senior Principal HPC Strategist at LLNL. “The collaboration between NNSA’s ASC program and Cornelis has been rooted in a shared commitment to advancing high-performance computing. Lynx reflects the results of that public-private R&D investment and will support the modeling, simulation and analysis capabilities that underpin the modern NNSA complex.”

Lynx is a key computing infrastructure investment for NNSA and is being integrated into LLNL’s high-performance computing environment, where it will support production modeling, simulation, and analysis for national security.

“Lynx represents an important milestone in NNSA’s work to evaluate and deploy next-generation high-performance computing technologies for mission use,” said Stephen Rinehart, Assistant Deputy Administrator for the NNSA’s Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing. “The system builds on NNSA’s Next-Generation High Performance Computing Network effort and strengthens the computing ecosystem supporting future ASC workloads.”

The Cornelis CN5000 fabric at the heart of Lynx utilizes the Omni-Path architecture, providing low-latency, lossless and congestion-free communication to maximize compute performance and efficiency for today’s HPC and AI workloads.

“The successful deployment of Lynx at LLNL marks an important milestone for CN5000 as a production-ready network for the most demanding and mission-critical computing environments,” said Brad Haczynski, Chief Commercial Officer of Cornelis. “With Lynx now in production in one of the world’s most advanced computing facilities, we have demonstrated that our CN5000 400Gbps solution is ready for broad commercial, academic, and government adoption. We look forward to CN5000 delivering the performance and price-performance organizations need to accelerate their HPC and AI initiatives.”

About Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides solutions to our nation’s most important national security challenges through innovative science, engineering and technology. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

About the National Nuclear Security Administration

Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that protects our nation by designing and delivering a safe, secure, reliable, and effective U.S. nuclear stockpile; forging solutions that enable global security and stability through nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and emergency response; providing nuclear propulsion to power a global U.S. Navy; and leveraging transformative technologies to address emerging challenges.

About Cornelis

Cornelis delivers high-performance, scale-out and scale-up networking solutions that accelerate AI and HPC workloads. Cornelis technology enables lossless, congestion-free networking that reduces training time, improves inference, and maximizes compute utilization. From foundation model training to complex climate modeling and real-time analytics, Cornelis solutions power the most demanding workloads across commercial, academic, government, and cloud environments. With a focus on performance, scalability, and efficiency, Cornelis helps organizations achieve faster insights and greater return on infrastructure investments. Visit us at International Supercomputing (ISC’26) Booth E02 in Hamburg, Germany June 22-26, or learn more at www.cornelis.com.

Source: Cornelis

The post Cornelis CN5000 Network Powers New Lynx Supercomputer at LLNL appeared first on HPCwire.

The chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect American workers from discrimination, moved to delete the agency’s affirmative action rule that was implemented almost 50 years ago.

Chair Andrea Lucas, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, proposed to rescind the “Affirmative Action Appropriate Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” rule on May 27. The rule has proved a barrier to her efforts to bring lawsuits on behalf of white men who say they were discriminated against at work — a barrier the rescission would get rid of.

The move, which was previously unreported, comes amid Lucas’s quest to characterize all employer efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion as illegal race discrimination. The agency has filed lawsuits under her watch on behalf of white men at the New York Times and Coca-Cola, as well as investigations into Nike and Northwestern Mutual.

“This proposed rescission is part of this administration’s continued assault on equality for people of color and for women,” said former EEOC commissioner Jocelyn Samuels, who added that the change reflects Trump’s “solicitude for the fortunes of white men.”

The EEOC did not respond to a request for comment.

Rule to Fight Discrimination

The rule Lucas wants to do away with was crafted shortly after the EEOC was granted litigation authority in 1972.

Racial discrimination had been rampant throughout American workplaces, and some employers wanted to act to correct those long-standing discriminatory practices and racial disparities in an affirmative way.

Responding to the call, the EEOC crafted the rule to allow for very narrow circumstances in which it would be permissible for employers to take race into account in such efforts.

To take advantage of the rule, employers have to do an analysis showing they had shut out women or people of color for a long time — in other words, that there were “prior discriminatory practices.” Only then can a hiring process favor, say, Black candidates for a job position.

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Lawyer on EEOC’s New York Times Lawsuit Has History Battling Discrimination Against Men

The rule also gives employers some cover. Under the Civil Rights Act, employers can’t be held liable for taking action done in good faith to follow an EEOC regulation that was voted on by the commissioners, such as the affirmative action rule.

At least one large employer in the Trump EEOC’s sights has cited the rule. In its motion to dismiss the EEOC’s lawsuit, Coca-Cola referred to the agency’s affirmative action rule as proof that the agency has encouraged the very behavior it is now penalizing.

Samuels, the former EEOC commissioner, said Lucas’s move to get rid of the rule “could be part of an effort to remove a potential defense.”

Upheld at Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has found narrow approaches to affirmative action to be constitutional.

In the 1987 case Johnson v. Transportation Agency and the 1979 case United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, the court allowed employers, in the case of what it called a “manifest imbalance,” to temporarily take sex and race into account as part of plans to increase representation in particular jobs until women or people of color are commensurate with their share of the population.

Those decisions still stand.

“The law is set by the statute and the Supreme Court’s interpretation,” said Charlotte Burrows, a senior affiliated research scholar at New York University’s School of Law and a former EEOC chair. “The EEOC can’t change that.” 

That’s true despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College that struck down affirmative action in college admissions; that decision doesn’t apply to Title VII, which governs employment discrimination.

That doesn’t mean the administration isn’t trying to change the law.

After Lucas asked the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice to weigh in, the department released an opinion that says, among other things, that the agency’s affirmative action guidelines “run further into unconstitutional territory.”

Lucas may be trying to blur the lines between affirmative action and DEI policies, but “they are two very distinct things,” Burrows said.

Employers can engage in a variety of perfectly legal approaches to diversity, such as having DEI programs that don’t give women or people of color more advantages but simply open the doors to more people.

“It is a messaging exercise that is part of this administration’s campaign to brand any form of proactive conduct on the part of employers to anticipate, preempt, and address barriers to equal employment opportunity as unlawful, race-based decision-making that disadvantages white men,” Samuels said. “This administration’s pronouncements have had really damaging effects on proactive programs that were designed to identify and address potential barriers before they ripened into discrimination.”

Assault on DEI

Lucas recently scrapped the EEOC’s previous Strategic Enforcement Plan that included as a priority that the agency “support employer efforts to implement lawful and appropriate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) practices.” It was crafted through a lengthy public process and was slated to remain in place through 2028.

Related

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

Instead, Lucas replaced the plan with a National Enforcement Plan that prioritizes going after DEI policies.

That move came after she had already directed agency officials to compile a list of cases in line with her own personal priorities, including “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” and recorded a direct-to-camera video soliciting complaints from white men who feel they’ve been discriminated against at work.

Such cases have been accelerated through the agency’s processes, according to the New York Times, although staff have struggled to find complaints with merit.

The post Trump Admin Wants to Make It Easier for White Men to Sue for Discrimination appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Elected officials hold a position of public trust as they represent the interests of their constituents. As a result, arrests can impact their ability to serve the office. Accusations of assault against a Wilmington lawmaker have resulted in the launch of a legislative ethics investigation.

The Delaware State Police is investigating a Wilmington lawmaker on claims he punched a woman in the face. 

A police report dated May 21 states that Rep. Josue Ortega (D-Wilmington) was sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle with the woman in the driver’s seat when he punched her “in the left side of her face.” 

The report also includes responses to a victim questionnaire, in which the woman claims Ortega had previously “threatened to kill” her or her children. 

Delaware State Police spokesman Tyler Wright said in an email that “this is an active and ongoing investigation, and there are currently no warrants for Rep. Ortega.” 

He said Ortega has not yet been charged with a crime, and was not arrested following the incident. He did not state why there was no arrest. 

Ortega did not respond to requests for comment, but issued a statement Tuesday afternoon in which he unequivocally denied the accusations.

“Any suggestion that I have ever engaged in any act of domestic violence is patently untrue,” he said. “A thoughtful and deliberate review of this record will reveal that I was the one who sought, and was awarded relief, by the Courts regarding the abuse I have suffered from my accuser.”

The case seemingly came to the fore after a Facebook user, who appears to be the alleged victim, publicly posted that Ortega had punched her and that it had occurred in front of her 3-year-old child. She added photos to the post that raised concerns.

In a statement published Tuesday, leadership in the Delaware House of Representatives called the assault allegations “deeply troubling and disturbing.” They said the House Ethics Committee will begin a confidential review of the incident.

“We have also sent a formal letter to Rep. Ortega informing him of our intentions to investigate the matter further and requesting his full cooperation,” House leaders said in the statement. 

It is not immediately clear when lawmakers first learned about the May incident. 

House Speaker Melissa Minor Brown (D-New Castle) did not respond to a request for comment, but in a Facebook post said, “I want to make it very clear to all Delawareans that violence of any kind is not something that will be supported, condoned, or excused in the House of Representatives.”

Who is Josue Ortega?

Ortega was first elected to the Delaware House of Representatives in 2024 to represent District 3, an area of west Wilmington that includes the communities of Hilltop, Little Italy and Hedgeville.

He candidacy was boosted at the time after his a primary opponent, Brandon Fletcher-Dominguez, withdrew from the race just days before the primary election. At the time, state investigators had said Fletcher-Dominguez didn’t have a permanent residence within the district.

Ortega is the son of a former Wilmington city councilman, Demetrio “Junior” Ortega. The senior Ortega is seen as a hero by many within the city’s Puerto Rican community. He had served as executive director of the Latin American Community Center and organized the city’s first Hispanic week celebration in 1977.

Before being elected in 2024, Josue Ortega worked in constituent services for the city of Wilmington and New Castle County.

Ortega has not yet filed for reelection in the fall 2026 election, nor has any other candidate. He currently serves on six House committees, including the Education and Transportation committees, among others.

The lawmaker scored perhaps his most noticeable legislative victory in recent days, when Gov. Matt Meyer signed House Bill 290, which recognized Puerto Rico Day as a ceremonial holiday for the state.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

The post Wilmington Rep. Ortega investigated for domestic violence appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Review: The sequel tackles the reality of our screen-obsessed world with emotional depth and humor.

The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" is facing another issue just days after more than 1,500 packages were found carrying malware. According to Phoronix, over 70 AUR packages have reportedly been modified to insert Russian spam and profane messages into users' shell configuration files. From the report: Nicolas Boichat with his AI/LLM detection bot detected some questionable messages appearing in AUR content. Russian messages were being added post-install to the bashrc / zshrc / Fish configuration, etc containing offensive messaging. Those commits happened on the 14th, after the recent malware fiasco. And then over the past day reporting on dozens of AUR packages having similar Russian messages containing offensive language. The latest update on that thread indicates more than 70 AUR packages having this Russian spam / offensive messaging. Among those various Python packages, Ruby packages, Llama.cpp, and others. At least the AI/LLM bots are proving helpful here in proactively picking up on some of the AUR abuses until the fundamental situation can be better handled.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LONDON and AUSTIN, Texas, June 16, 2026 — ORCA Computing a leading quantum computing company, today announced the successful deployment of its PT Series photonic quantum computer to a major enterprise customer in Japan, supported by strategic partner Toyota Tsusho Corporation.

Deployed in less than one week within a live enterprise environment, the system will advance hybrid quantum–AI applications across advanced science and engineering, logistics, manufacturing, optimization and generative AI workloads in the manufacturing sectors. This marks a major milestone in the ORCA and Toyota Tsusho partnership and the first installation and operation of an ORCA photonic quantum system within a private-sector enterprise.

The quantum computing capabilities of the ORCA PT-2 system will be integrated into the cloud services which support global operations. By integrating directly into its production infrastructure, the enterprise customer is bringing photonic quantum computing into the enterprise IT stack, enabling hybrid quantum–AI workflows alongside existing high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Later this year, the system will be upgraded to ORCA’s next-generation PT-3 platform, delivering increased processing capability and deeper integration with classical compute environments.

“Toyota Tsusho is proud to support the introduction of this quantum computing capability into the Japanese enterprise market,” said Mr. Norihito Ohigashi, the manager of Digital Infrastructure Department at Toyota Tsusho. “This collaboration reflects our commitment to enabling advanced technologies that will help shape the future of manufacturing, and intelligent infrastructure.”

“This endeavor demonstrates how quickly quantum computing can move from concept to real-world operation,” said Richard Murray, PhD, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of ORCA Computing. “Installing ORCA’s PT-2 quantum system within an enterprise environment in under one week highlights the maturity of ORCA’s photonic quantum technology. Together with Toyota Tsusho, we are laying the foundation for commercial quantum advantage in industrial AI applications.”

This announcement builds on ORCA Computing’s progress in delivering data-center-ready quantum systems and advancing hybrid quantum–classical integration across generative AI and enterprise environments.

More from HPCwire: IQM Quantum Computers Delivers 20-Qubit System to TOYO in 1st Enterprise Deployment in Japan

About ORCA Computing

ORCA Computing, headquartered in London, UK, with offices in the United States, is a leading developer and provider of full-stack photonic quantum computing systems. The company delivers an innovative approach to quantum computing, providing robust, high-performance, and data center-standard systems for machine learning, generative AI and optimization workloads. ORCA Computing has successfully delivered eleven on-premises quantum computers to leading global customers, including the UK National Quantum Computing Centre, Montana State University, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center.

Source: ORCA Computing

The post ORCA Computing and Toyota Tsusho Deploy Quantum System to Enterprise Customer in Japan appeared first on HPCwire.

Expands Hybrid Multi-cloud HPC Access to Thousands of Defense Users

CHICAGO, June 16, 2026 — Parallel Works, a provider of the ACTIVATE control plane for hybrid multi-cloud computing, today announced that the Department of Defense (DOD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) has awarded the company a contract to provide DoD scientists, engineers, and acquisition engineering professionals with a single, unified interface for accessing on-premises and cloud computational resources to address complex technical challenges.

The Parallel Works ACTIVATE High Security Platform (HSP) will serve as the control plane for connecting Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRCs) with a secure commercial cloud infrastructure, enabling defense researchers and engineers to deploy mission-critical workloads across environments through a single interface. Users will be able to test and deploy workloads on next-generation cloud infrastructure before those capabilities are integrated into the DSRC.

“AI-driven warfare and the ramp to digital modernization are demanding far more model-sharing options than legacy infrastructure can provide,” said Keith Obenschain, Chief Technology Officer at HPCMP. “There is an urgent need for controlled unclassified information (CUI) and ITAR-capable cloud workflows. ACTIVATE HSP provides users with flexible access to powerful computing resources, while meeting the security requirements for sensitive defense workloads. These capabilities are critical for accelerating mission outcomes with the speed, scale and complexity of today’s operational challenges.”

Thousands of users across the Department of Defense and research institutions will have immediate access to DSRCs through Parallel Works’ HSP. The unified, hybrid multi-cloud offering has been approved for the highest non-classified DOD security level, Impact Level 5 (IL5). It is one of only three SaaS / PaaS software programs approved to handle export-controlled workload environments, including International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).

By connecting secure cloud infrastructure, the platform creates a computing fabric capable of running large, distributed workloads across on-premises systems and multiple cloud providers through:

• On-demand access to elastic compute resources, eliminating queue delays.
• Access to added capacity, with a fabric that connects computational resources and runs across a variety of environments.
• Rapid deployment of mission-critical workloads, shrinking time to operations from days to hours.
• A secure environment for CUI and ITAR-regulated workloads.
• Access to AI and code-assist tools for model development and a variety of workloads.
• Testing of next-generation instances and capabilities in the cloud, before integration.
• Scalable, secure workload hosting without requiring internal IL5 expertise.

As the first major implementation under the HPCMP contract, the Naval Research Laboratory implemented Parallel Works HSP to advance the speed and reliability of its forecasting model workloads. By automating complex weather prediction workflows and securely orchestrating hybrid defense computing environments, the solution enables faster, more strategic decision-making in the mission-critical DoD operation. The improvements go beyond efficiency and ensure operational continuity and the proactive redistribution of workloads.

“The HPCMP contract allows our platform to support a broad range of mission-critical HPC and AI workloads across the DOD teams,” said Matthew Shaxted, CEO of Parallel Works. “It gives teams a secure sandbox to test, deploy AI and code-assist tools for model development, and run workloads on next-generation cloud architectures before DSRC integration, all connected across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, Google and Oracle.”

About Parallel Works

Parallel Works ACTIVATE is a leading hybrid multi-cloud computing control plane, empowering teams with seamless provisioning, management and sharing of compute resources at scale across on-premises and cloud environments with advanced cost control and budgeting features. ACTIVATE facilitates collaborative research and enhances productivity through intuitive interfaces and API-driven processes, enabling the operating system for complex enterprise computing environments. For more information, visit Parallel Works at parallelworks.com.

Source: Parallel Works

The post Parallel Works to Provide Unified HPC and Cloud Control Plane for Defense Researchers appeared first on HPCwire.

Ex-defence secretary John Healey and ex-defence minister Al Carns have given resignation statements to MPs

Speaking to reporters at the G7, Keir Starmer also defended the defence investment plan (DIP) draft that led to John Healey’s resignation as defence secretary last week. Starmer confirmed that Dan Jarvis, the new defence secretary, is getting some input before the publication of the DIP in its final version.

Starmer said:

The position on investment in defence is firstly that we increased last year defence spending from 2.3% to 2.6%, that’s the biggest increase since the 1980s, and that means £270bn will be spent this parliament on defence.

On top of that [the] defence investment plan which obviously gives us capability for the future. We will put even more money in relation to that. I’ve been really clear that’s required difficult decisions, I have taken the decision to reallocate money from other departments.

Oklahoma primary set to test Donald Trump’s iron grip on the Republican party, while closely watched runoff underway in Georgia

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Speaking to NBC News earlier, JD Vance claimed that nuclear inspectors will “absolutely” be allowed back into Iran as part of the deal with the US.

“Yes, absolutely,” Vance said. “In fact, one of the core parts of the agreement is that the [International Atomic Energy Agency] and the United States are going to help Iran destroy the highly enriched stockpile, and that’s something that’s spelled out very clearly” in the memorandum of understanding, he added.

Interest earnings on a CD account of this size will be substantial. Here's what savers can expect to earn right now.

Ministry of Defence investigates after shots apparently fired within 500 metres of vessel near Isle of Wight

The Ministry of Defence is investigating reports that a Russian frigate, the Admiral Grigorovich, fired warning shots within 500 metres of a British yacht sailing a little over 20 miles south of the Isle of Wight.

No injuries or damage have been reported by the yacht, which is continuing its journey. A boat from HMS Tyne has visited the yacht to gather details and check the crew are safe.

This week's Fed meeting could have major implications for credit card borrowers. Here's what to know beforehand.

The FBI said it disrupted an attempt to attack Sunday's UFC America 250 event at the White House, with court records detailing an alleged plot to use small drones carrying explosives.

General secretary of TUC calls Reform proposal ‘a smokescreen for slashing women’s rights’

• UK politics live – latest updates

A law proposed by Nigel Farage to “strengthen women’s rights” could cost female workers money by removing equal pay for work of equal value, unions have said.

A proposal, made by Reform UK days before the Makerfield byelection, to introduce a Women and Motherhood Protection Act that it says will restore equality before the law has been described as “shameless and deceptive”.

Hundreds of anti-regime protesters gathered outsideLos Angeles Stadium before Iran's match against New Zealand. The team's participation in the World Cup has been politically divisive, but alongside the large number of demonstrators, many fans expressed their support for Iranian players. Donald Trump said this week that a peace deal between Washington and Tehran was 'all signed' and that the strait of Hormuz would be 'completely open' from Friday

The sale will split ownership of the pizza chain between a U.S.-based private equity firm and a Chinese restaurant company.

Ukrainian president praises successful talks after Trump’s comments that ‘Russia should make a deal’ after G7 meeting

… and given the delay this morning, the meeting may or may not have happened already – guess we will find out at some point during the day.

in Évian-les-Bains

Ahead of ‘same job, same pay’ hearings, former call centre worker Nathan Brunne says pay gap is structural and widens at senior levels

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Workers at the Australian Taxation Office’s outsource call centres are paid up to 40% less than their public service counterparts on the same phone lines, according to submissions lodged ahead of landmark “same job, same pay” hearings.

The pay gap, detailed by Nathan Brunne, a former worker on the ATO phone lines employed by the private equity-backed Probe Operations, widens at more senior call centre roles, with team leaders at outsource operators paid about $31 an hour compared with more than $52 at the tax office.

Governor Michele Bullock delivers a strong message after the Reserve Bank holds the cash rate at 4.35%, ending a run of three rises

• RBA interest rates: Reserve Bank holds official cash rate at 4.35%

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It will take more than a ceasefire in the Middle East to prevent the Reserve Bank from hiking interest rates again.

That was the strong message from the RBA governor, Michele Bullock, after the central bank held its cash rate at 4.35%, putting an end to a run of three increases.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Linuxiac: Mozilla has released Firefox 152, the latest update to its popular open-source web browser, with updated settings, improved media controls, experimental JPEG XL support, and various platform-specific fixes for desktop and Android. A key update is the redesigned Firefox Settings page, which now features clearer groupings, improved navigation, and a more streamlined structure for easier customization. The release also expands built-in spellchecker support, adding dictionaries for Croatian, English (UK), Georgian, Persian, Slovenian, Tajik, Tamil, Tibetan, Turkish, Welsh, and Xhosa. [...] Importantly, Firefox now offers experimental support for JPEG XL, an image format with improved compression over WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Users can enable JPEG XL in the Firefox Labs panel within Settings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Child was fatally shot and his mother’s friend is wounded after Senatobia police responded to shoplifting call

A one-year-old boy is dead and another person wounded after a northern Mississippi police officer shot at a vehicle while responding to a shoplifting call, according to authorities and the child’s grandfather.

Kohen Wiley, the slain child, was in the car at the center of the shooting on Sunday alongside his mother and her friend, said Marquell Bridges, a local community advocate who is helping the family find legal representation.

The deal comes just days after SpaceX went public in the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion to help fund its expansion.

A Consumer Reports study published Tuesday claimed that Uber and Lyft sell nearly identical rides for a wide range of rates.

Activists say blanket ban could prevent teenagers from finding peers and role models with similar conditions

Disability activists have said banning under-16s from social media risks cutting off a “lifeline for friendship” for disabled children and could push them into social isolation by preventing them from making connections online.

Charities and high-profile figures in disability advocacy said they were concerned that a blanket ban on social media would disproportionately affect teenagers who may not be able to meet people easily in real life or find peers with similar conditions.

Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator, joins Democrats in bid to stop dismantling of Ocean Observatories Initiative

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A group of Democratic senators and one Republican, as well as two Democratic House committees, sent letters on Monday to the National Science Foundation asking it to reverse course on its plan to dismantle a sprawling ocean monitoring network, with House lawmakers going further and accusing the agency of acting illegally.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386m. Over the last decade it has tracked ocean circulation, marine ecosystems, climate change and extreme weather, producing data freely available to the public and informing more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run another 15 to 20 years.

Litter-picking creatures emerge from underground for global franchise targeting nostalgic adults and gen Alpha

Move over Paddington Bear. After almost 30 years off screen, the Wombles – the furry, litter-picking creatures who live beneath Wimbledon Common – are set for a comeback.

The characters, whose motto is “Make Good Use of Bad Rubbish”, are being revived after the consolidation of the brand’s intellectual property rights under The Blair Partnership, which will oversee its global development.

Sunday's plane crash ripped a hole in the close-knit community of skydivers in the Midwest: adventure seekers who bonded over the adrenaline they get with every jump.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Over at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, European allies don’t appear to share Donald Trump’s optimism that the strait of Hormuz will reopen by Friday.

One G7 official has told Bloomberg there are serious difficulties in finding a common position among the group about how to deal with the situation in Iran.

One senior US official said traffic in the waterway would ramp up over time, and it could take as many as two weeks for shipping to significantly increase — and even longer for it to return to the levels seen before the US and Israel attacked Iran in February.

There are mines in the strait that still need to be cleared and shippers have different risk tolerances about navigating Hormuz, the official said.

Bosses of the world’s biggest shipping companies want to see more than just an agreement in place, mines need to be swept, and all hostilities must end, before tankers with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cargo will be able to traverse the Strait without fear of a flare up in tensions that could close the Strait mid-voyage.

Thus, even if a deal is signed to end the US/Iran war, the situation is not without its challenges. Brent crude remains above $80 per barrel, and it is unlikely to fall below this level until we start to see cargo ships successfully get through the Strait.

Oprah Winfrey chose "Little Wonder" by Sophie Chen Keller as her latest book club pick. Read a free excerpt here.

Samsung lets you be the "guy in the chair" with an interactive fan site tied to the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day flick.

Any sense of relief is offset by doubts over durability of agreement and feelings of betrayal by Trump administration

In the rural town of Sirik, in southern Iran, temperatures over the past week have climbed to 45C (113F), and residents were still queueing to fill buckets of water days after US strikes reportedly damaged two drinking water facilities serving nearby villages.

Amid the water shortages and the looming fear of war came news of a possible deal between Washington and Tehran. But for those struggling to pick up the pieces in the aftermath, the announcement brought little relief.

Another story from the good old days from Raymond Chen.

During an exchange of war stories, a colleague of mine told one from back in the days when Windows included a processor emulator for x86-32 on systems that natively ran some other processor. (This has happened many times. And no, I don’t know which processor this particular story applied to.)

↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing

So the core of the story comes down to this:

All in all, it took this program 256 kilobytes of code to initialize 64 kilobytes of data.

↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing

The people working on Windows were so offended by this, they added code to the processor emulator just to fix this program.

Speaking of FreeBSD, the project released version 15.1 of their operating system today. As it’s a point release, it’s not full of massive changes, but it still brings the LinuxKPI-based wireless drivers up to Linux 7.0, support for the C23 version of the C has progressed considerably, Unicode has bene updated to version 17.0.0 and CLDR 48, and more.

Oscar-winning actor to write and direct fact-based movie that will follow a police officer mixed up in 2021 Capitol riot

Sean Penn will direct a new film about the January 6 riot set to star Bradley Cooper.

According to Deadline, the star, who recently won his third Oscar, will bring what’s been described as a “passion project” to the screen and act as both writer and director.

This article was amended on 16 June 2026. An earlier version stated that Sean Penn had won two Oscars, not three.

Yum! Brands, parent company of KFC and Taco Bell, to sell Pizza Hut as it faces dated stores and growing competition

The struggling Pizza Hut restaurant chain will be sold for $2.7bn by parent company Yum! Brands.

Yum! Brands said in February that it was considering selling Pizza Hut and the chain looked to close 250 US restaurants. The pizza chain has struggled with outdated stores and growing competition.

BOULDER, Colo., June 16, 2026 — Atom Computing today announced it has raised a total funding of more than $300 million to accelerate the development and deployment of commercial-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. The total includes a $100 million Series C investment round and a signed Letter of Intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for $100 million. The Series C round was led by Third Point Ventures, with participation from DCVC, Cisco Investments, and others.

Atom Computing has emerged as a leader in the race to build practical quantum computers using neutral atoms. The company recently announced a full demonstration of quantum error correction on its quantum computers, making it only one of two companies in the quantum industry to have done so, and the first company to do this demonstration using neutral-atom technology.

The company continues to build momentum using its neutral-atom technology. In 2023, Atom became the first quantum company to surpass the 1,000-qubit threshold for a universal gate-based system. The company is currently performing in Stage B of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) to explore paths to utility-scale quantum systems while also installing the world’s first commercial quantum computer with logical qubits in partnership with Microsoft. Atom Computing, named to Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, is also engaged in strategic collaborations with Cisco and NVIDIA.

“Quantum computing is entering a new phase where technical breakthroughs are translating into real-world systems and global adoption, fueled by our neutral-atom technology,” said Dr. Ben Bloom, CEO and Founder of Atom Computing. “We have strong momentum, and we are accelerating the development of utility-scale quantum computers and expanding access to our technology for customers solving some of the world’s most complex computational challenges.”

“Third Point Ventures has backed Atom Computing since their Series B, and leading this Series C reflects our deepening conviction in both the team and the technology,” said Curtis McKee, Partner at Third Point Ventures. “Neutral-atom quantum computing is one of the most credible paths to fault-tolerant systems at scale, and we believe commercial breakthroughs — in cybersecurity, defense, drug discovery, and financial modeling — are closer than the market appreciates. Atom Computing will be at the center of that moment.”

Atom Computing is using its recent funding for:

• Scaling next-generation quantum computers with higher qubit counts and improved fidelity
• Advancing the software, control systems, and error correction capabilities necessary for logical qubit operations
• Expanding global deployments, including on-premises systems for government, enterprise, and research customers
• Growing the company’s engineering, research, and go-to-market teams

“Atom Computing’s roadmap and execution towards a neutral atom fault tolerant quantum computing is truly impressive. DCVC has been with the Atom team from the start, and we are delighted to double down!” said Dr. Prineha Narang, a DCVC Operating Partner.

“Quantum computing is rapidly evolving from a research pursuit into a technology platform with real-world enterprise implications. As it matures, the industry will require scalable infrastructure, secure networking, and strong ecosystem collaboration to support real-world deployment,” added Aleem Rizvon, Vice President, Cisco Investment. “We are excited to invest in Atom Computing as it establishes itself as a leader in neutral-atom quantum computing.”

As industries increasingly explore quantum computing for applications in materials science, pharmaceuticals, energy, and logistics, demand is growing for systems capable of unlocking commercially relevant quantum applications. Atom Computing’s unique approach to quantum computing, utilizing arrays of optically-trapped neutral atoms, is widely recognized as one of the most viable paths to reaching commercial utility and positions the company to play a leading role in enabling practical quantum applications in the years ahead.

More from HPCwire

• Atom Computing and Phasecraft Partner to Advance Utility-Scale Quantum Applications
• Atom Computing Announces LOI with US Commerce Dept. for $100M to Accelerate Path to Fault-Tolerant, Utility-Scale Quantum Computing

About Atom Computing

Atom Computing is developing large-scale quantum computers to enable companies and researchers to achieve unprecedented computational breakthroughs. Utilizing highly scalable arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms, the company has developed systems with over 1,200 qubits, featuring advanced capabilities towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. Atom Computing’s on-premises systems provide customers with new computational tools and logical qubit capabilities to address increasingly complex applications and to grow their quantum ecosystem. In 2025 Atom Computing sold its first commercial on-premises quantum computer to QuNorth, a Nordic quantum initiative funded by EIFO and Novo Nordisk Foundation. Learn more at atom-computing.com.

Source: Atom Computing

The post Atom Computing Raises $100M Series C to Accelerate Deployment of Fault-Tolerant, Neutral-Atom Quantum Computers appeared first on HPCwire.

Expect to see more and more articles like this one, as more and more people discover that FreeBSD’s desktop/laptop support keeps improving rapidly.

FreeBSD 15 really feels like a breakthrough release.

It’s always been my favorite operating system for servers, but with the arrival of pkgbase, massive improvements to the LinuxKPI drivers, and the launch of the Laptop Support and Usability Project, it’s become my primary desktop, too.

↫ Cullum Smith

Since Smith tried FreeBSD 14.0, there’s now KDE Plasma 6.x, you can leave legacy X11 behind and use Wayland on FreeBSD now, and support for Intel Wi-Fi chips has greatly expanded. Apparently, battery life has improved as well, which is one of the hardest problems to solve for an operating system, especially with the wide variety of hardware combinations in the x86 world.

The rest of Smith’s article is a guide to setting up FreeBSD 15 with KDE and Wayland. It’s quite detailed with a ton of low-level tuning and fiddling, accompanied by clear and concise explanation of what the changes do, which I really like. Definitely a bookmark for anyone who wants to try out FreeBSD with KDE.

Luke Skywalker's lightsaber from the "Star Wars" sequel "The Empire Strikes Back" is expected to sell for at least $1 million at an upcoming auction.

Japanese technology company at centre of Post Office IT scandal is negotiating settlement with UK government over faulty software

• Business live – latest updates

The chair of Fujitsu, the Japanese technology firm at the centre of the Post Office IT scandal, has resigned after its board became aware of his “woman-related inappropriate conduct”.

The company said on Tuesday that Hidenori Furuta had stepped down after two years in the role.

A WHO official tells CBS News Ebola is still spreading in Congo after a month, as experts race to contain the outbreak in Central Africa.

Andy Lewis, also known for slacklining and tricklining, and Danny Joe Kregle of Arizona were killed in accident in Utah canyon

A weekend Base jumping accident in a Utah canyon killed two people, one of them a daredevil athlete best known for performing on stage with Madonna at the 2012 Super Bowl, authorities said.

The sheriff’s office in Grand county, Utah, confirmed one of the dead was Andy Lewis, an extreme athlete known for feats in Base jumping, a dangerous sport that involves parachuting to the ground after jumping from a tall fixed object such as a building, a bridge or a desert cliff overlooking a deep canyon.

At least eight states have banned the plant-derived product as more people use it and some claim it’s addictive

In 2024, Maizie Hepner, 24, started visiting a bar in Dubuque, Iowa that did not serve alcohol and instead offered beverages containing kava and kratom, psychoactive substances derived from plants.

The drinks were marketed as “herbal tea mocktails”. Hepner, who works as a server and bartender, said. “I asked the guy who owns” Kava Kava “if it was addictive, and he said, ‘Absolutely not’”.

Rejected citing ‘conflict of interest’, the ad took aim at Trump allies David Ellison, Paramount Skydance chief, and his billionaire father, Larry Ellison

Paramount Skydance refused to air an ad submitted by a press freedom group that heavily criticized the network’s leadership and merger with Warner Bros Discovery, with an advertising associate deeming it a “conflict of interest”.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation had hoped to air the 30-second ad during Sunday’s Ultimate Fighting Championship broadcast at the White House, which aired on the streaming service Paramount+ – though a client partner for Paramount told the organization’s ad-buyer that such placement was not guaranteed.

IPO mints Musk as world’s first trillionaire – now SpaceX is public, it will be harder than ever not to have a stake in its future

Hi and welcome to TechScape. Nick Robins-Early here, US tech and power reporter at the Guardian. I’m filling in for your usual host Blake Montgomery, who is out this week on vacation.

Today, we’ll be talking about the historic SpaceX IPO and the US government’s surprise order to limit the use of Anthropic’s most advanced AI model over cybersecurity concerns. I’ll also share a dispatch from Web Summit Rio, South America’s largest tech event.

SpaceX makes largest ever stock market debut, minting Musk as a trillionaire

After SpaceX’s huge IPO, Americans’ financial future will be bound to AI

How much money did Elon Musk make in SpaceX’s stock market debut?

• Players deny their decision comes from place of hate

• MLB says writing on caps is a violation of league rules

Major League Baseball has issued a statement critical of players who wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night hats after an incident at a San Francisco Giants game last week.

MLB celebrates Pride month during June and most teams choose a home game to acknowledge the LGBTQ community and its baseball fans. The Giants, who are based in a city with a large LGBTQ population, often make an extra effort.

Details of potential threat were not immediately disclosed, after event was held on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday

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Law enforcement officials disrupted “planned attacks” meant to target the UFC cage fighting show staged at the White House this past weekend, and multiple people were in custody, said Kash Patel, the FBI director.

The nature of the potential threat was not immediately disclosed, with additional details expected to be released once charges are unsealed later Tuesday.

Administration had claimed algae at Lincoln Memorial pool would be cleared after the renovation, but it has proliferated amid warm weather

Donald Trump’s $14.2m bid to turn the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool from what the US president described as a “filthy” and “dirty” site into a “beautiful” monument has encountered a hitch.

The water is green again.

Judge decides Timothy Hudson should face trial as an adult, though he will be held in an approved juvenile facility

A teenager charged with sexually assaulting and killing his 18-year-old stepsister on a Carnival Cruise ship turned himself over to the custody of federal authorities on Monday after a judge reversed his decision on pre-trial release now that the teen is charged as an adult.

The US attorney’s office in Miami confirmed that Timothy Hudson was in custody. US magistrate Judge Edwin Torres filed the order to revoke Timothy’s pre-trial release last Wednesday, but the order was sealed until Monday afternoon. The order stated that Hudson should surrender to US marshals at the federal courthouse in Tampa on Monday morning.

The iconic phone grip has been redesigned and goes on sale today at Apple Stores.

We have opened the AI Pandora’s box. Now we have to make the best of it

On 9 June, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off access for everyone.

The government’s actions won’t help. The problem isn’t any one particular model; it’s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn’t possible right now.

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University

Kimba is an AI-powered sleep technology system that releases personalized scents to help you sleep better. Here’s how it works.

President Trump, who is in France for the G7 summit, said he didn't like that Israel attacked Lebanon two hours before the U.S. signed an agreement with Iran.

A wildfire burning through Riverside county, east of Los Angeles, has grown to about 3 sq miles (8 sq km), Californian authorities report.

Evacuation orders were issued in parts of the county and shelters have been set up for displaced residents. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said more than 250 personnel and more than 40 fire engines had been deployed to tackle the blaze

Two Belarusians ⁠detained over attack on Robert ⁠Kuzovkov, who is also known as Semyon Skrepetsky

A Russian artist critical of Vladimir Putin and the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has been shot and killed in ⁠the eastern Polish town of Biała Podlaska, a prosecutor has said.

Five shots were fired at the ⁠victim, including one ⁠to the head, in the attack on Monday, ​said Marcin Kozak, a spokesperson for the district prosecutor in Lublin. Two Belarusians ⁠have been detained but not charged in connection with the case, he added.

Serena and Venus Williams are getting back together as a doubles team, at Wimbledon. The last time the sisters were a doubles duo was at the 2022 U.S. Open, where they lost their opening match​.

Verizon's plans offer the highest data speeds and options to upgrade phones every year.

With election denialists installed in key positions, officials using series of measures to change voting rules

The Trump administration is waging war on voting rights using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations, and an executive order to limit voting by mail, moves mirroring the US president’s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials.

Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the DoJ, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

Verizon is working to keep customers with weekly perks and some big giveaways.

Borrowers face stricter payment timelines after Biden-era Save repayment plan was ended by Donald Trump

The American student loan repayment system is set to undergo a significant overhaul next month, changing the way millions of borrowers pay off their debt.

The series of changes, which take effect on 1 July, are a result of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed last summer and a recent court ruling that ordered the end of the Biden-era Save repayment plan. Borrowers will be facing stricter payment timelines and less forgiveness, what will be the latest in a series of big changes to the student loan system in just a few years.

New simulations suggest Venus' extremely slow backward rotation may have been triggered by a high-angle collision with a fast-moving object roughly one-tenth its mass. The impact could have dramatically altered Venus' spin and melted nearly its entire mantle. Universe Today reports: Venus' bizarre and extraordinarily slow retrograde rotation on its axis has long puzzled planetary scientists. But in a new paper presented at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, the authors argue that their models indicate that a high angle moon-sized, high-velocity impactor likely triggered Venus's strange 248-day rotation. And it probably happened within the first 50 million years of Venus' formation. [...] The team found that an impactor that is about a tenth of Venus' mass hitting the planet at a high angle could drastically slow the early young planet's rotation. Depending on the actual impact parameters, we can slow down a rapidly rotating early Venus to rotation rates that are that are compatible with long-term evolution towards a slow rotating planet, says [Cedric Gillmann, the paper's lead author and a planetary scientist at ETH Zurich]. Or even in some cases with large energetic impact that happen with a tangential impact that would even put planets early on in already a retrograde but faster rotation, he says. In the simulations, giant impacts expectedly produce surface magma oceans, the paper's authors note. Their relative depths vary depending on impact properties: from a shallow melt layer in the order of 100km thick to a fully molten mantle, they note. If the surface can radiate heat to space efficiently, the magma ocean cools down quickly, they write. If Gillmann and colleagues are correct, Venus' likely impactor also melted some 99 percent of Venus' mantle. That is, the interior structure that extends between its core and crust. You will get rid of that impact heat pretty efficiently, and after a few hundred million years, you end up seeing an evolution that is very difficult to distinguish from a case where you don't have an impact, says Gillmann. What role the impact may have played in Venus' lack of plate tectonics, however, remains open for debate. But it's known that Venus' lack of a large-scale carbon recycling mechanism likely led to its current runaway greenhouse.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iran's World Cup team coach says it was ordered to leave the U.S. and return to its training base in Mexico only a few hours after opening its politically charged tournament with a draw.

Country acts amid Iran war inflation pressures, but US Fed and Bank of England expected to hold rates

• Business live – latest updates

The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has raised interest rates to a 31-year high as it tries to dampen inflationary pressures created by the Iran war.

Policymakers in Tokyo raised the BoJ’s short-term policy rate by a quarter of one percentage point, to 1% from 0.75%, and warned that companies were passing on rising oil costs to each other at a “relatively fast pace”.

Hania Ahmed, 9, was killed in a police shooting in Pakistan after robbers confronted her family as they visited a relative’s home

• Williams sisters have won six doubles titles at SW19

• French Open finalist Chwalinksa awarded wildcard

Serena and Venus Williams will rekindle their doubles partnership at Wimbledon this month after receiving a wildcard into the women’s doubles draw. The All England Club announced the recipients on Tuesday morning in one of the most highly anticipated wildcard announcements in recent memory considering Serena’s return this month after four years of retirement.

Serena, a seven-times singles champion, did not request a singles wildcard and the 44-year-old has remained coy about whether she plans to return for singles. Venus, a five-time singles champion, has also not received a singles wildcard. Venus has competed on the tour since her debut in 1994, only stopping due to health-related issues. She turns 46 on Wednesday.

What I’m Discussing Today:

• The Beautiful Game, the Knicks’ Glory, and Human Cockfighting on the White House Lawn: From Team USA to the Knicks to Trump’s UFC lawn party, last weekend showed us the best and worst of the wide world of sports.

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: How should we calculate the value of the human soul?

• SpaceX makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire: A trillion dollars makes for a flashy headline, but is it something worth celebrating?

• Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files: What happens when you’re more interested in protecting the boss’s image than pursuing justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.

• What I’m Watching: The richest man in the world builds a fantastic flying machine…and it’s not Elon Musk.

• Jukebox Playlist: Jon Batiste’s “Big Money” asks the right questions for this moment.

The Beautiful Game, the Knicks’ Glory, and Human Cockfighting on the White House Lawn

Last weekend was a helluva weekend to be a sports fan. It started with Team USA’s inspiring 4-1 victory over Paraguay at Friday night’s World Cup match in front of 70,000-plus cheering fans (including yours truly) at L.A.’s Sofi Stadium. As someone old enough to remember when soccer was an afterthought in the United States, it was truly impressive to see so many people turn out to watch what has long been known, in the rest of the world, as “the beautiful game.” In the U.S., it still has some growing to do: the average player’s salary in Major League Soccer is about $632,000, compared to $5.34 million in Major League Baseball and around $11 million in the NBA. Until soccer can match America’s major sports in salary, it won’t be able to compete with European programs in player development because the best athletes, given the chance to earn 10-20 times as much money playing baseball or basketball, will always gravitate towards the more lucrative sports. But soccer has come a long way since Pelé brought the sport’s unique excitement to America just over 50 years ago.

Still, if you ask me what’s the most beautiful game, I’m going to say basketball ten times out of ten. And it doesn’t get any more beautiful than last week’s NBA finals series between the Knicks and the Spurs, which culminated Saturday night in San Antonio with the Knicks’ first NBA Championship since 1973. That’s not a season I like to think about too much: my Milwaukee Bucks lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Golden State Warriors and their defensive center Nate “The Great” Thurmond, who held me to 22.8 points per game after I’d averaged more than 30 in the regular season. But enough about me and ’73. This year’s Knicks squad were 2-1 underdogs against the Spurs and their exciting young center Victor Wembanyama, and even though I grew up in Harlem I found myself rooting for Wemby, who reminds me a little of myself at that age.

Then again, maybe I’ve held a bit of a grudge against the Knicks ever since my rookie year, when they eliminated my Bucks in the Eastern Conference finals. Whatever, I’m over it now, after their breathtaking post-season run, led by the undersized but enormous-hearted point guard Jalen Brunson, who scored a team playoff record 45 points in the deciding game, sinking distant threes and amazing high arcs over the longest arms in the league. It came as a surprise to exactly no one when he was named finals MVP. I was also greatly impressed by OG Anunoby, who averaged 21 points per game in the finals, and saved game four at the Garden with his already legendary tip in. And I have to give a shout-out to center Karl-Anthony Towns, who won the league’s Social Justice Champion Award named in my honor in 2024 for his work expanding voter rights in Minnesota, where he was playing for the Timberwolves. I don’t have the time or space to talk about every player on the team, but they all shared in the glory Saturday night, and special praise has to go out to coach Mike Brown, who helped the underdogs overachieve when it mattered most.

From San Antonio, we go to that hockey Mecca Las Vegas, where the Golden Knights lost the Stanley Cup finals to the Carolina Hurricanes on Sunday, failing to recapture the NHL title they won in 2023. But the most talked about sporting event Sunday night was the UFC card held on the White House lawn, allegedly to celebrate the nation’s 250^th anniversary, but conveniently taking place on President Trump’s 80^th birthday. I don’t have a lot to say about that, except that it seemed entirely appropriate to celebrate Trump’s birthday with a sport that a much better man, the late Senator John McCain, famously dubbed “human cockfighting.” That this event was taking place in the backyard of what has long been known as the People’s House—while being shown on pay TV that fewer than 20 percent of the American people subscribe to—is entirely on-brand. So is the fact that Trump invested in the UFC just before announcing the event, once again exploiting the office of the presidency for personal profit. On a weekend in which the best aspects of sports competition were just about everywhere you looked, the repulsive view of a Death Star-style Octagon at our nation’s capital is the one we may be doomed to remember the longest.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“For what doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36

In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln praised the Union soldiers who had given their lives so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” That egalitarian ideal has always been something of a myth, never more so than today, when our government looks a whole lot like one “of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.” Or should I say trillionaires?

Which brings me back to those words above, spoken by the leading character of what Donald Trump claims is his favorite book (just ahead of The Art of the Deal). The word “profit” implies both a ledger and a contract, stapled together with 2000 years of moral authority. I think that framing is entirely intentional. We run our lives like balance sheets: what we’re worth, what we’ve been paid, what the whole project cost us. Fine, Jesus says: Let’s run the numbers. What have you actually gained, and what did the purchase cost?

The math is ugly.

The soul, in daily practical terms rather than theological ones, is the operating system underneath our individual actions. It’s the constellation of values and commitments that makes a person recognizable as a human being rather than a computer or a robot. Each time we compromise our ideals, we make a small withdrawal from our account, and by the time our accounts are empty, we’ve forgotten what our ideals were to begin with.

We have built a culture that celebrates the world-gainers with very little curiosity about what they traded to get there. Net worth has become our proxy for wisdom, which is how we end up inviting the wealthiest person in the room to lecture us on education, public health, and democratic values—subjects where accumulated fortune confers exactly zero wisdom or expertise. How did we arrive at a place where the size of a man’s balance sheet determines how seriously we take his opinions about the rest of our lives? Jay Gould, the Gilded Age railroad magnate, built his empire through documented fraud and market manipulation, and he died widely described as the most hated man in America. Check his ledger and he had gained the whole world; but the ledger couldn’t capture the loss of reputation and esteem.

I find Orson Welles’ treatment of this transaction in Citizen Kane as profound as anything written on the subject in the last century. The movie opens with a deathbed revelation: a man who gained everything the world could offer dies speaking a word that means nothing to anyone who knows him: “Rosebud.” If you haven’t seen it, stop here and go watch it—not only is it one of the best movies ever made, it’s also one of the most enjoyable.

Alright, if you’re still with me, you know that Rosebud was the name of Charles Foster Kane’s childhood sled, which symbolizes everything he gave up in exchange for all that money and power he acquired. The transaction never announced itself. Kane didn’t know, in any given moment, how much of his soul he was trading to get what he thought he wanted. But none of those things were what he wanted as he breathed his final breath.

I wonder what Donald Trump’s or Elon Musk’s “Rosebud” will be. A giant octagon on the White House lawn or a trillion dollars they wouldn’t be able to spend in a thousand lifetimes? I doubt it, but I don’t know anything about their inner lives. I’m not sure they do, either.

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A Liverpool fan and an influencer explain what it’s like to be hired for a Truman Show-style experiment

When Kevin Kotoko heard that he had been selected as one of Fox’s chief World Cup watchers he had no hesitation in accepting. What self-respecting football fan could turn down the opportunity to be paid $50,000 (£37,000) to take in all 104 games at this World Cup, after all?

The only issues were that he would have to watch every match in a custom-built viewing cube in the heart of Times Square and let his employers know that he wouldn’t be coming in for work the next day. “I quit my job,” admits Kotoko, a Liverpool fan who is from Florida and was working as a waiter in a restaurant. “I found out on Thursday that I had won the competition and so I told them on Friday that would be my last day!”

There is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy. That’s because extreme wealth is always an extreme power

The stock market listing of SpaceX has led to an outpouring of celebration, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Yet those who rejoice in Elon Musk’s fortune surpassing the $1tn mark need to be reminded of a simple and vital truth: the mere existence of trillionaires is a major political and economic problem, probably the defining issue of our time.

Simply put, there is a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and the very possibility of democracy. Extreme wealth is always an extreme power. It’s the power to stifle competition, the power to shape public discourse, the power to influence policymaking, the power to buy elections, the power to stall social progress.

Gabriel Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, a summer research professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the International Tax Observatory. He is the author of We Need to Tax Billionaires.

Janeese Lewis George’s ‘people-first platform’ appears to have given her an edge as how the next mayor will handle Trump is key question on residents’ minds

There’s a transplant from Mar-a-Lago at the center of DC’s mayoral primary race on Tuesday, but his name is nowhere on the ballot.

For the first time in more than a decade, Washington DC will have a new mayor this year as the city faces concerns about how to address public safety, housing affordability, and increased federal immigration enforcement in the district. How the next mayor handles Donald Trump is also key question on residents’ minds, with many closely watching to see if any of the president’s supporters are pouring money into the race, as well as the primaries for the city’s congressional delegate.

Josh Hokit’s comment, made after the match at the White House, was condemned widely, but not by the president

Donald Trump is facing growing pressure to condemn an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) competitor who used a White House appearance to push a sexist, racist and transphobic conspiracy theory about former first lady Michelle Obama.

At a UFC event on the south lawn on Sunday, the US president’s 80th birthday, Josh Hokit, a fighter, shouted into the microphone in front of Trump: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Why Should Delaware Care?
Speed cameras have been proliferating in Delaware after the state legislature passed a bill allowing for their introduction statewide in 2023. Speed cameras recently installed in New Castle County have caught thousands of drivers.

During a two-month period this spring, traffic cameras deployed on two roads near Marshallton recorded more than 20,000 speeding cars.

New Castle County Police Sgt. Gregg Bruno reported the data during a meeting of the County Council last week. He said the county had mailed more than 14,000 written warnings to drivers during a grace period from April 15 to May 16 — the first month the cameras were deployed. 

Since then, county officials have sent out more than 3,000 citations, and are processing another 3,515, Bruno said. Fines for the tickets start at $20, he said. 

The new data appears to support past complaints from Marshallton residents who have said their roads had been besieged by speeders. But left unclear is whether the larger community would push back against the increasing existence of government-deployed cameras in public places. 

Asked if the county might expand its speed camera program to new locations, New Castle County spokeswoman Natalie Criscenzo said officials are “focused on the existing locations and continuing to evaluate program performance and safety impacts before considering any potential expansion.”

The county’s current two speed cameras are located near Marshallton, along Milltown Road and along McKennans Church Road. They automatically issue citations or warnings to the owners of cars traveling 6 mph or more above the speed limit.

Last year, the New Castle County Council passed an ordinance approving the installation of ticket-issuing cameras on county roads. Weeks later, Delaware lawmakers gave their  authorization for the cameras when passing the state’s capital budget. They also allocated $60,000 to the county for the Milltown Road project. 

At the time, the state also authorized a speed camera program for Newark’s busy Main Street. 

Unlike speed cameras in construction zones, these cameras are permanently fixed, making their impact long-lasting.

The approvals followed outcry from Marshallton residents. After a County Council meeting last year, resident Jill Orensky recounted to Spotlight Delaware how in early 2024 she watched a Subaru veer off of Milltown Road and crash into her home, destroying its gas meter.

“We need streets for people instead of roads for commuters,” Orensky said then. 

During the county grace period this spring, the speed camera on 30-mph McKennans Church Road recorded a driver going 57 mph, Bruno said.

For Milltown Road, which has a speed limit of 35 mph, the highest speed was 66 mph. 

“The average (speed) really has consistently stayed within 10 mph over the posted limit,” Bruno said in his testimony to the County Council.

A total of 345 drivers had received repeat citations, “which is a lot,” Bruno said.

Asked about county revenues from the citations, Bruno said he did not yet know the exact amount of money generated.

“We are not making millions of dollars,” he said.

The Delaware legislature first passed a bill to allow for speed cameras across the state in 2023.

A speed camera installed along Route 1 near Lewes this November issued nearly 25,000 tickets within a month, according to a report from the Cape Gazette.  

The post New traffic cameras in New Castle County capture thousands of speeders appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
In Delaware, county governments are the source of development decisions, paramedic services and sewer system management, among other functions. The Kent and Sussex county budgets for the 2027 fiscal year have entered the final stages with balanced expenses and revenues, unlike the major deficit faced by New Castle County. Still, leaders in both counties say keeping up with balanced county finances as demand for services increases could become a challenge in future years. 

With the start of the 2027 fiscal year rapidly approaching on July 1, Delaware’s central and southern counties are slated to pass annual budgets without property tax rate increases or departmental cuts. 

This stands in stark contrast to New Castle County, which approved a 17% property tax hike last month to close a $42 million budget deficit. 

Kent and Sussex county officials said they have been able to work through this budget season without any major hiccups – unlike other jurisdictions in the state – thanks to a longstanding culture of lean spending combined with a growing tax base from residents moving to the area. 

“It’s definitely tough to keep up with your revenues when inflation just continues to increase, but we’re very conservative,” Sussex County Finance Director Gina Jennings told Spotlight Delaware. “We always look at ways to cut.” 

Kent and Sussex counties also do not have a county-run police department, which is a major expense for their northernmost counterpart. Spending on public safety, though, such as the counties’ emergency medical services and new ambulances, was still one of their largest expenses, respectively.

Sussex County also does not have a Parks & Recreation department – a service that cost Kent County $5.2 million last year. 

The Kent County Levy Court passed its $46 million operating budget on June 9. The budget for Delaware’s smallest county by population includes a property tax rate of 5.72 cents per $100 of assessed value, which is consistent with the previous two years. 

But the Levy Court also approved a 11% sewer user rate increase, which will raise residents’ sewer bills by about $50 per year, County Finance Director Susan Durham said. 

The Sussex County Council will soon vote on its $107 million operating budget, which includes a property tax rate of 2.14 cents per $100 of assessed value – unchanged in more than three decades. The county’s proposed budget also includes a sewer usage rate increase of $36 per household and a $90 water service charge increase. 

The Sussex County Council will hold a public hearing and final vote on its proposed FY 2027 budget beginning at 10:15 a.m. Tuesday, June 16. The meeting will take place inside Sussex County Council Chambers, located at 2 The Circle Georgetown. 

Despite the relatively smoother budget processes compared to New Castle County this fiscal year, Kent and Sussex leaders said they are concerned about long-term financial sustainability. As expenses and residents’ expectations of what services a county government should provide both rise, population growth – and therefore tax base – has the potential to plateau. 

Durham, the Kent County finance director, said she anticipates more difficult choices between continuing to increase funding for public safety and moving ahead with capital projects in future years. 

Kent County’s budget

Kent County’s $46 million operating budget, which grew by 6% from the past fiscal year, includes relatively standard increases to both revenue generated by taxes and departmental budgets. 

County officials seemed to be in agreement about the county’s budget, except for the question of the sewer usage rate increase, which became a point of contention during the final budget discussions. 

The Kent County Levy Court ultimately passed its budget unanimously.

The county will spend $19 million, or 41% of its total general fund expenditures, on public safety. That figure is up $2 million from last year, County Administrator Kevin Sipple said. The county is also allocating $1.5 million to its volunteer fire companies. 

Because the county does not have its own police force, its public safety dollars are directed to a combination of the county Emergency Medical Services (EMS), 911 communications and the emergency management department, which deals with disasters. The county is also funding the renovation of an EMS station, Sipple said. 

Kent County’s general fund revenues, which match projected expenditures at $46 million, will primarily come from a combination of county property taxes; its realty transfer tax – which is imposed at the same rate on property purchases across the three counties; and grants from the federal and state governments.

The property tax rate will remain stagnant this fiscal year, but Durham said property tax revenue is projected to increase from $14.6 million to $15 million because of new home construction. She described the county as having been in “a period of growth for over three years,” but not one that they can count on to help balance the budget in future years. 

Kent County completed its property tax reassessment in 2023, a year before New Castle and Sussex, so re-assessed home values did not factor into the increased tax revenue this year. 

Kent County also has library tax districts, which are generally consistent with school district boundaries within the county, to fund its five public libraries. Those tax rates all remained the same in this year’s budget. 

While Levy Court Commissioners unanimously approved the FY27 budget, tensions arose over the county’s sewer usage rate. Some commissioners said the rate already has seen a number of large increases in recent years. 

County staff recommended a 3% to 6% user rate increase this year, but elected officials pushed instead for an 11% increase – or $50 per year more on most residents’ bills. 

They described the jump as an effort to get ahead of the curve on debt service payments and funding future sewer improvement projects.  

The 11% increase ultimately was included in the approved budget, but Levy Court commissioners Terry Pepper and Jody Sweeney disputed the rate hike, saying it was an unnecessary burden on residents in already tight economic times.

Sweeney said he took issue with the argument made by another Levy Court commissioner that the higher sewer rate would only amount to one fast food dinner for a family. 

“This is what politicians say to justify increases, but to the family of four working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet, that McDonald’s meal may have been all they had,” Sweeney said at the June 9 meeting,  

The 11% user rate increase will generate about $460,000 more in revenue for the county’s sewer fund this year, Durham said.  

Sussex County’s budget

The Sussex County budget includes new initiatives this year, such as a building permit surcharge to help fund public schools and additional programs directed toward public safety. Still, county officials said the government’s longtime ethos of low taxes and limited government largely remains intact.  

The county’s $107 million general fund budget increased by 3.6% this year, which Jennings, the county finance director, attributed to standard inflation increases. 

Despite Sussex County’s position among some of the fastest growing in the country, the revenue generated by property taxes is only projected to increase by $130,000 from last year to about $17.9 million. 

This, Jennings told Spotlight Delaware, is because last June’s property tax reassessment substantially shifted the value away from growing parts of the county – like the Millsboro area – toward eastern beach communities, where less development is taking place. 

In previous years, population growth had created around a $600,000 increase in property tax revenue annually. 

As a result of reassessment, the county will need to rely on other funding sources, like the realty transfer tax – which provides money to both the county and the state when someone purchases a property – and other building permit fees to balance the budget and retain the county’s tradition of keeping property taxes “so low,” she said. 

A major new revenue source this year is a proposed building permit fee for schools, which will charge a fee of $5 per $1,000 of construction value for a building permit for all new residential and commercial development. 

The fee is projected to generate between $5 million and $7 million in revenue per year, to be given to public schools in the county for capital improvement projects like expanding classroom capacity, Jennings said. As the county’s population has expanded in recent years, a number of schools have struggled with overcrowding and a lack of funding for building expansion projects. 

On the spending side, the county plans to direct $48.3 million, or 45% of its operating budget, to public safety. 

County Council members and Jennings both described public safety, and in particular EMS services, as a focus of the FY27 budget. 

“We are really ramping it up this year,” Jennings said.

This push includes purchasing a new ambulance for each of the county’s 21 EMS companies over the next seven years and a new billing service for all the companies. Together, these initiatives will cost the county about $2 million per year, Jennings said. 

In recent years, independent libraries in Sussex County have struggled for funding while increasing the services they provide to meet community needs. This spring, the libraries undertook a campaign lobbying the county council to increase its library tax rate, which is their largest funding source. 

The county’s FY27 budget does not include an increase in the library tax rate. However, Jennings said the shifting in property values from reassessment amounted to a 10% increase in county funding for libraries, compared to the typical 3% to 4% increase to match inflation. 

The county is also directing $2.4 million from its operating budget to open space and farmland preservation programs.

It remains to be seen whether the county council will pass the budget in its current form, or make changes to county staff’s proposed budget. 

However, elected officials and county staff alike said more people moving to Sussex County has brought a greater demand for services and expectation of their government, which will soon have to be reconciled with the county’s historical commitment to lean government spending.

“We have typically been a county of low taxes, low services,” County Councilman Steve McCarron told Spotlight Delaware. “Every ask comes with a price tag.”

Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.

The post Kent, Sussex budgets include no tax increase, public safety focus  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
In recent years, the homeless community in Wilmington has grown in size. How to best serve that population while trying to connect them to services to improve their situations has proved to be a contentious debate in the city. A plan to sanction an encampment to coalesce the population was abandoned in just a few weeks.

As the sun set Monday, a tent encampment in Christina Park sat mostly empty, marking the end of a controversial chapter in Wilmington’s response to homelessness.

Government-issued tents lay collapsed on the ground, while a handful of private tents remained standing. Newly installed fencing circled the encampment, and a gaggle of police stood just inside its gates. 

Throughout the day, the officers had allowed people who had called the park home for the past several months to leave the enclosure while carting away their meager possessions. For some it was another moment of turbulence in their difficult lives.

For Ron “Philly” Simmons, a park resident who had acted as a de-facto leader of the encampment, the city “should’ve left us alone.” 

Most had another place to sleep that night after city officials and nonprofits had lined up immediate housing. But the question on the minds of many was what would happen after their housing benefits expired in the coming weeks or months. Wilmington officials had repeatedly emphasized that tent camping in public spaces in the city is illegal.  

Mayor John Carney said last week that the city’s experiment in sanctioning the encampment had accomplished its goals of directing unhoused people to a designated area where various organizations could provide coordinated services. 

But several homeless advocates have argued the closure shouldn’t have happened — or should have been delayed until permanent housing options became clearer.

Earlier this month, the Wilmington City Council even passed a resolution urging Carney to “immediately halt any forced removal plans at Christina Park.”

Still others expressed heartache with how the city ultimately carried out the evictions of the park’s residents.

While standing inside the park enclosure on Monday, City Council President Ernest “Trippi” Congo acknowledged that the optics of chain link fencing and police surrounding the encampment “doesn’t look good at all.” 

The end of a tent city

Early Monday morning, work crews installed the fencing around the perimeter of the encampment.

Afterward, only city officials and certain service providers were allowed to enter and assist park residents moving out of their tents. Congo said he believed the Carney administration installed the fences to prevent demonstrators from physically blocking the closure of the encampment.

“At several [past] council meetings, there were a lot of advocates who came and said directly to the administration, you will not force anyone to move,” he said.

Throughout the day, city and state officials floated in and out of the park, including Daniel Walker, Carney’s deputy chief of staff, who had become the mayor’s chief spokesperson on the issue in recent weeks. 

Also visiting the park were several politicians. In addition to Congo, there were city council members Coby Owens and Michelle Harlee, former-City Councilman Kevin Kelley, State Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton (D-Bear), and Curtis Linton, a union leader who is running a campaign for the New Castle County Council. 

Officials from the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health were also present.

Outside the gates of the enclosure, advocates from organizations that had opposed the closure gathered with food and snacks for residents.

In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, housing advocate Jacqueline Bryk said she and others were concerned that some residents could ultimately end up back on the streets — or even in jail — after their temporary housing terms ended. She then turned her concern to a critique of the Carney administration.

“At this point, I think the mayor is so convinced that there is a small group of people against him, and not that these citizens of Wilmington don’t want this,” she said. 

Rachel Stucker, executive director of the Housing Alliance of Delaware, asserted that city officials, when running the encampment, had not done enough to plan for where residents would go once the encampment closed.

“I think there wasn’t enough of the ‘where are people going?’ How are we getting them there?’” she said.

During a press conference last week, Carney acknowledged a concern that some people may move to sleep in other public places in the city after Christina Park is closed. He noted then that the city may need assistance from state prosecutors.

“We do need support from the (Delaware) Attorney General in terms of if there’s a need for a prosecution. I don’t intend or want to have to prosecute folks for this, but if they’re violating the law, if they’re camping in a park after dark,” Carney said. 

In an apparent response Monday, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in a press release that her office would not assist the city in prosecuting people for simply sleeping in Christina Park. Instead, her team would only prosecute acts of violence, and trespassing or destruction of private property, she said. 

“The City did not consult us in advance. After we learned about the evictions, we were clear with the Mayor’s office that, while our Community Engagement team would be available to assist with service referrals, we would not prosecute people for their nonviolent presence in a park,” the letter stated, saying such prosecutions would be a “moral failure.”

In an interview, Mat Marshall, spokesman for the Attorney General’s office, said prosecutions related to sleeping in other parks would be handled on a “case-by-case basis.”

Mixed reactions to the park’s closure 

While many present at the park’s closure on Monday were critical of Carney, a handful from outside his administration offered varying levels of support.

Kelley said the challenges of homelessness should be addressed by state officials, because “they’re the ones who have the resources.”

One Eastside neighbor who visited Christina Park Monday said he was happy about the closure. The resident, Edward Williams, called the encampment an “eyesore,” even while stating that it isn’t right for people to have to live outside in a park. 

In contrast, Wilson-Anton, the Bear lawmaker, called Carney’s decision to close the encampment callous, saying she saw no reason for the city to evict people from Christina park.

“I’m just appalled,” she said.

For the park residents who were moving out of their tents, some noted they had been offered stays up to six months at the New Castle County Hope Center. Others, like Simmons, said they were only given two-week hotel stays. 

Daniel Walker, Carney’s spokesman, said encampment residents had been offered an application to secure 90-day stays in temporary housing at locations, such as the YMCA and Sojourners’ Place.

Some refused initially, but as the encampment’s closure date approached, some began to reconsider, he said.

Walker said the city most recently offered two-week hotel stays as a temporary step before transitioning people into 90-day housing placements.

Still, two park residents told Spotlight Delaware on Monday evening that the city had not provided them with temporary housing following their departure from the park.

One was John “Jay” Simmons, a Wilmington resident, who said he had been staying at the encampment for two months. Simmons said he returned to the encampment on Monday afternoon after looking for work that day. He then asked city officials about being placed into a hotel. 

Officials told him they would check whether his name was on a list, he said. But they left the park before giving him an answer, he said.

By Monday evening, as the city’s sanctioned encampment entered its final hours, Simmons said he still did not know where he would sleep that night.

“I don’t know,” Simmons said. “I’ll probably set up my tent somewhere else.”

The post Wilmington closes Christina Park homeless camp as questions linger about future appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Running next generation AI workloads requires robust infrastructure capabilities. Organizations need extreme compute performance and flexibility to accommodate trillion-parameter AI models. These capabilities delivered in an open-standards architecture can boost cost-efficiency, enable seamless IT integration, and support vendor flexibility.

Today, a growing number of AI users are leveraging rack-scale performance to advance their AI initiatives. This powerful approach unites silicon innovation with a practical, open design that is optimized for diverse requirements and ongoing maintenance.

Efficient, rack-level solutions deliver:

• A unified rack built from repeatable GPU building blocks
• Massive memory and bandwidth per rack
• High-speed communication inside the rack
• Open Ethernet networking across racks

Rack-scale is engineered to simplify and accelerate AI in production. Within a rack, rapid GPU-to-GPU communication enables reliable in-rack communication as operations scale up. Across racks and clusters, high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity drives higher utilization and faster AI execution as operations scale out. Flexible utilization enables smarter GPU partitioning for multi-tenant use, leading to better business outcomes.

The bottom line: Rack-scale can help organizations achieve higher output density per rack, predictable scaling, and lower cost at hyperscale—critical components of an effective AI strategy.

A new breed of AI system

AI rack-scale systems from HPE are optimized for large AI environments, AI factories, and converged HPC/AI workloads. HPE’s purpose-built portfolio of rack-scale solutions offers integrated hardware, software, and support services that are designed to streamline deployment and help users realize more value quickly. HPE offers a winning formula to help organizations succeed:

• Fast time to market: Deploy solutions rapidly anywhere in the world with a proven ecosystem of technology partners
• Scalability Expand resources as data and model sizes grow, without disruptive infrastructure changes
• Efficiency: Increase energy efficiency, simplify management, and make AI operations sustainable for the long term

HPE is one of the first companies to offer a single turnkey rack capable of large-scale AI. The AMD Helios AI Rack design is a turnkey, open-standards platform for next-level training and inference performance. Featuring 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, the AMD Helios rackscale design enables high-capacity, high-speed data movement for demanding mixed workloads.

AMD Helios rackscale design represents a massive leap in AI capabilities, delivering 10x greater performance than the previous generation.[i] The latest AMD accelerator provides:

• Up to 40 PFLOPs peak 4-bit precision
• Up to 20 PFLOPs peak 8-bit precision
• Up to 432 GB HBM4 memory
• Up to 19.6 TB/s memory bandwidth
• Up to 600 GB/s scale-out bandwidth

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HPE invites you to explore the future of supercomputing solutions at ISC High Performance 2026. Join us in Hamburg, Germany from June 22^nd–26^th to experience the latest innovations.

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[i] MI350-047B: Based on engineering projections by AMD Performance Labs in September 2025, to estimate the peak theoretical precision performance of seventy-two (72) AMD InstinctMI455X GPUs “Helios” AI Rack using MXFP4 dense Matrix datatype vs. an 8xGPU AMD Instinct MI355X platform using the MXFP4 dense Matrix datatype. Results subject to change when products are released in market.

The post Unleash Rack-Scale Performance for Large-Scale AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Down from $149 to $73, this is the kind of deal your ears will appreciate.

An outspoken progressive running for Congress in the Tennessee district at the center of Republicans’ efforts to sabotage voting rights and maintain control of the House earned the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday.

Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson found himself the unexpected front-runner in the Democratic primary when two-decade incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen dropped out last month, after new gerrymandered maps throttled his chances of winning reelection. The redrawn 9th Congressional District and sudden shakeup mean that rather than running against the last Democrat representing Tennessee in the House, Pearson is facing a Republican machine bent on delivering an all-GOP delegation for President Donald Trump.

The new map hurts the chances for Pearson — or any Democrat — to win in November, but the candidate said he’s running on a platform focused on wealth, income inequality, and corporate overreach that aims to appeal across party lines. “You’ve got a number of disaffected Republican voters, you’ve got a number of distraught MAGA voters, and you’ve got fired-up Democrats, which is a perfect recipe for success for us,” Pearson told The Intercept. “Because our tent is big enough for everybody who is feeling that this status quo was rigged and broken against working-class folk, and want to see a future that is more just.” 

It’s a message similar to the one that buoyed Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. 

“As billionaires and Big Tech take more and more control over our lives and our government, we need leaders like Justin J. Pearson who have the experience and track record of standing up to the rich and power-hungry elites,” Sanders said in a statement. 

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Tennessee is one of several Republican-led states where officials rushed to protect Trump and the GOP’s chances of keeping power in what is expected to be a particularly difficult midterm cycle for Republicans mired in an unpopular war on Iran and an ever-increasing cost of living. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Trump said he spoke with Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who called the next day for a special session to redraw the maps. 

Using a practice known as “cracking,” the new map breaks the majority-Black district concentrated in and around Memphis across three red districts, diluting the power of Black voters in the area. Pearson said he believed the antidemocratic move, while detrimental to his chances, was unpopular with voters.

“A lot of people were really upset about the gerrymandered maps,” Pearson said. “I had about half a dozen Republicans who said they’re going to be voting in our campaign and I’d be the first Democrat they’d be voting for in their lifetimes.”

Pearson, who launched his campaign against Cohen in October with the backing of the progressive outfit Justice Democrats, received Sanders’s endorsement the day after getting one from the Working Families Party, and four days after he returned from a listening tour in rural and Republican counties in the newly drawn district. His campaign said more than 750 people attended the gatherings.

Attendees expressed frustration with being unable to afford housing, healthcare, and the things they need to live their daily lives, Pearson said. He said voters couldn’t afford “more of the same” when running against Cohen, and has now directed that message at his likely Republican opponent, state Sen. Brent Taylor.

“Both of them were millionaires, both of them benefited from a status quo that’s broken,” Pearson told The Intercept. “Both of them don’t like me.”

Also running in the August 6 Democratic primary are state Sen. London Lamar, who launched her campaign with Cohen’s endorsement after he dropped out, and Jim Torino, a former executive at a healthcare company focusing on people with disabilities and founder of a social welfare nonprofit. Perennial candidate M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams filed to run but has not filed any reports with the Federal Election Commission. 

Pearson is the top fundraiser in the Democratic primary race so far, with just under $2 million, according to the campaign. Most of that has come from contributions under $200, according to the FEC data; the campaign said its average donation is $31. Torino has raised $117,000, and Lamar has not yet had to file any reports with the FEC.

In addition to Sanders, Justice Democrats, and the Working Families Party, Pearson has backing from groups including MoveOn; Sunrise Movement; Indivisible; IMEU Policy Project and its Peace, Accountability, and Leadership PAC; as well as Reps. Summer Lee, D-Pa.; Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.; and Ro Khanna, D-Calif.

Pearson said he believes federal legislation is needed to force states to support working people and improve public safety.

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“We need to put this ban on AI data centers, we need to increase the minimum wage nationally, because the states won’t do it,” Pearson said. “I’m in a state House, they refuse to do it. We need to have national gun safety laws passed, because states refuse to do it.”

In May, Pearson drew the ire of his Republican colleagues when he marched with protesters before the special session to redraw the state’s maps. Three years earlier, Republicans voted to expel him and another Black Democratic lawmaker after they and one other Democratic colleague led a protest against the legislature’s inaction on gun control after a deadly elementary school shooting in Nashville. Local officials reappointed Pearson and his colleague, state Rep. Justin Johnson, to the state House shortly after the vote.

Pearson, Cohen, two other Democratic congressional candidates, four registered voters, and the Tennessee Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s maps last month, but they dropped it last week, citing a political environment hostile to their cause. Pearson said other cases before the federal courts had “a higher probability of success,” pointing to voting rights suits from the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Still, he expressed hope for his long-shot campaign in Tennessee. He pointed to a stop on his listening tour in the city where the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865, and where Pearson, who is Black, welcomed 150 people at a rally — his largest crowd throughout the tour. 

There is a “renewed vigor and enthusiasm because of what the Republicans have done — to show up in spite of them, in spite of what they’ve tried to do,” Pearson said. “I think that’s not something they probably calculated for when they did this racist redistricting.”

The post Bernie Sanders Backs Justin J. Pearson, House Candidate at the Heart of Tennessee Voting Rights Fight appeared first on The Intercept.

The first big Prime Day deal is live a week early, unlocking early savings on the Ring Battery Doorbell before the rush starts.

Making the case for COP in a fractured geopolitical environment 22 June 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 16 June 2026 Chatham House and Online

Leaders of the world’s foremost climate conference - COP - set out how environmental diplomacy can still deliver.

The COP global climate talks have anchored international action for three decades, but geopolitical tensions are testing their effectiveness. These pressures raise questions about what COP can still deliver. This event looks at climate leadership, and the role of diplomacy in sustaining progress.

Key questions:

• What role does COP play in global climate action?
• What outcomes would define success at COP31 in Antalya this November?
• What priorities should shape COP32 in Addis Ababa in 2027?
• How can climate diplomacy adapt to geopolitical pressure?
• What needs to happen outside COP to sustain progress? 

A BASE jumping accident in a Utah canyon killed two people including a daredevil athlete best known for performing onstage with Madonna at the 2012 Super Bowl, authorities said.

Across the US, thousands of people are injecting themselves with unregulated peptides in pursuit of weight loss, muscle growth and younger-looking skin. Despite being labelled 'not for human consumption', the substances are readily available online and have surged in popularity among people disillusioned by traditional healthcare. To find out why so many Americans are willing to risk unknown side-effects for the promise of a quick fix, Adam Gabbatt meets the users and influencers driving the peptide boom, and investigates what's really inside some of these so-called 'miracle' drugs

The NBA postseason remains a psychodrama of moments, memes and memories unlike anything in sport. We look back at the biggest takeaways

Sometimes it’s just your year. When infectiously optimistic young mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected this past fall, there was a palpable vibe shift in the city. That’s not to say that there’s a direct correlation between the New York Knicks being NBA champions and the era of buoyant positivity permeating the city, but it’s also not to say there’s not one. Other American cities will, inevitably, have their moment in the sun again soon. But 2026 is the year of New York (someone get that memo to the Mets).

The much-hyped deal, which is set to be formally signed on Friday in Geneva, doesn’t end the war. It’s essentially a 60-day extension of a ceasefire

When Donald Trump launched his war against Iran in late February, he had ambitious goals: to topple Iran’s theocratic regime, destroy its military capabilities and nuclear program, and instigate a popular uprising by Iranians. A week into the war, Trump said he would only accept Iran’s “unconditional surrender”. On Sunday, Trump settled for a deal that reopens the strait of Hormuz.

The US president celebrated having solved a problem he had created: reopening a vital waterway through which more than a fifth of the world’s oil supply passed each day – before Iran effectively closed it at the start of the war, increasing energy prices and disrupting the global economy. “Ships of the World, start your engines,” Trump wrote on social media in announcing the latest deal. “Let the oil flow!”

Mohamad Bazzi is a Guardian US columnist. He is also director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University

The desecration of a ruler’s symbols is among the oldest forms of political revolt

There’s a reason the first two of the Ten Commandments prohibit worshiping false gods and making false idols. And a reason iconoclasm – the desecration of the monuments of a hated ruler or regime – is one of the oldest and most powerful symbolic forms of political revolt.

The revolutionary power of iconoclasm is also why Donald Trump – who understands the manipulation of imagery as well as anyone on earth – has had a huge blue and white tarp draped across the facade of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts while the letters of his name are pried off under court order.

Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist and frequent contributor to the Guardian. Her Substack is Today in Fascism

It was before dawn on a Friday in January when a Gulfstream G600 with the burnt-orange Texas Longhorns logo on its tail landed at Dulles airport outside Washington, D.C. Its owner, a little-known oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand, had been summoned to the White House.

By mid-afternoon he was in the East Room, just three seats from President Donald Trump, who had recently ordered the military raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Now Trump wanted Hildebrand and two dozen other energy executives to commit to investing $100 billion in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry. 

Many couched their enthusiasm with caveats. ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “uninvestable” without changes to its legal system. The head of ConocoPhillips wanted U.S. government financing.

But Hildebrand, a major Trump donor whose wife had been named ambassador to Costa Rica, had already seen how loyalty could be rewarded. Even though he had no notable operations outside the U.S., he hunched toward a microphone and said in a halting voice, “Hilcorp is fully committed and ready to go to rebuilding the infrastructure in Venezuela.”

“That’s good,” Trump said. “You’ll be very happy.”

As the founder and owner of Hilcorp, a privately held company known for buying up old, low-producing “stripper wells,” Hildebrand needs Trump’s favor. Long one of the oil industry’s top polluters, Hilcorp releases unusually large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. 

Hildebrand had never been a leading political contributor. But in 2024, the Biden administration issued aggressive restrictions on methane pollution — rules that would impose steep costs on Hilcorp — and the once-obscure tycoon became one of Trump’s biggest oil industry supporters, giving millions to his campaign.

Trump has since named a former Hilcorp lobbyist to a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency,  putting him in charge of an effort to unravel the methane rules with help from trade groups backed by Hildebrand, a ProPublica investigation has found. That will bring a sweeping reprieve for the nation’s 700,000 stripper wells, boosting Hildebrand’s profits while saddling society as a whole with the climate fallout.

Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and natural gas. But in recent studies, scientists have identified them as the source of roughly half the sector’s methane emissions — in part because they tend to be thinly monitored, run-down and thus prone to leaking. As a result, these barely productive wells play an outsize role in climate change, disproportionately amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires. 

In a world where global warming fixes can seem impossibly daunting, stripper wells are the rare low-hanging fruit, said Andrew Logan of Ceres, a climate advocacy group.

“If you could lose 6% of production and cut emissions in half, who wouldn’t make that trade?” Logan said. “It’s a question of who benefits and who doesn’t, and who has the power.”

“Well Vents Randomly”

Kendra Pinto and Josh Eisenfeld drove a rented Dodge Ram to the site of a Hilcorp well in San Juan County, New Mexico, last August. As infrared camera operators with the nonprofit Earthworks, they were used to roaming through remote areas to investigate leaks at oil and gas wells. But the San Juan is especially lonely terrain, with bumpy dirt roads snaking between scattered scrub and rusting pump jacks, the nodding apparatuses that lift oil and gas from thousands of feet underground. 

A sign marked the site as Hilcorp’s Huerfano Unit 119 well, one of the company’s 11,000 in the region. It was little more than a patch of gravel hosting two unmarked storage tanks and what oil workers call a Christmas tree: the cluster of valves that caps the well itself. Drilled in 1969, the well now produces a small but steady trickle of natural gas, enough to generate around $50 of revenue per day. 

On paper, it runs remarkably cleanly. According to New Mexico’s oil regulator, Hilcorp has not reported any “venting” — releasing gas — from the well since May 2024. At the site itself, however, a wire fence surrounded some of the equipment, bearing a yellow caution sign that read, “Well vents randomly.”

Methane is invisible to the human eye. But on June 29 last year, a satellite detected a massive methane plume erupting from this very location. According to the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, a NASA partner that one oil executive defined as a “platform to disseminate the sins of our industry,” the methane was being discharged at a rate of 199 kilograms an hour. That’s equivalent to about 12 times the volume of natural gas the well typically produces over that time. The cause was unknown, but according to scientists who have studied the issue, such “super-emitter” events typically stem from some kind of neglect or malfunction — if not from an intentional release. Most last a couple of hours, but some can go on for weeks. Super-emitter plumes have also been identified at other Hilcorp wells.

Pinto and Eisenfeld observed smaller, more persistent leaks as well. When they trained their infrared camera on one of the storage tanks, wispy clouds of pollution could be seen streaming from a pressure-release valve. 

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“That shouldn’t just be constantly …” Eisenfeld said, trailing off. The finding was far from abnormal, though. Of the eight Hilcorp wells he and Pinto visited that day, seven were seen to be leaking. 

In response to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica, Hilcorp spokesperson Nick Piatek said in an email that the Huerfano Unit 119 well “is fully compliant with state and federal regulations” and that the company inspects the site monthly. He also suggested that the company’s approach caused less environmental harm than drilling new wells: “By extending and optimizing the life of existing assets with pre-built infrastructure, our model limits the need for new development elsewhere.” The company is “proud,” he added, of recent efforts to reduce its emissions.

Hilcorp is hardly an outlier in its approach to methane releases. America’s oil and gas system is vast, aging, and in many places largely left to police itself. Of the country’s roughly 1 million active wells, more than two-thirds are stripper wells, each producing the equivalent of up to 15 barrels a day. Many produce less than a single barrel a day. (Newer wells, by contrast, can pump 1,000 a day or more.) Each well site, in turn, is equipped with numerous valves, flanges and other fittings that can leak unless inspected regularly. Some components were explicitly designed to vent small amounts of gas — a legacy of an era when methane’s role in global warming wasn’t widely understood.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, turns into carbon dioxide when burned to heat a home or generate electricity. But when the gas enters the atmosphere directly, it becomes a much more powerful climate pollutant — one that is responsible for one-third of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. 

Methane exists underground alongside other fossil fuels and is brought to the surface whether oil or natural gas is being pumped. While it’s a valuable product in itself, capturing it is not always cost-effective. So companies often burn it off, or just vent it, sending it straight into the atmosphere. Apart from the climate impact, this is all sheer waste, as none of the methane’s energy is being harnessed for a human need. Yet with few exceptions, federal rules have allowed these practices at wells drilled before 2012 — which include the overwhelming majority of stripper wells. 

Methane leakage is such a routine part of oil and gas production that the EPA often assumes it is happening when asking the industry to calculate its emissions. Even so, those numbers drastically understate the actual emissions observed by plane and satellite. A study led by Evan Sherwin of Stanford, published in the journal Nature in 2024, took close to a million measurements to find that the true figures were, on average, nearly three times higher. Partly that is because companies have never had to report super-emitter events to the EPA. In one region, nearly 10% of all the natural gas produced was being lost to the atmosphere, the study found. 

But limiting methane pollution presents a rare opportunity. While carbon dioxide can persist in the atmosphere for centuries, methane breaks down relatively fast, in about a dozen years. Halting these releases, then, would bring a swift payoff. 

“Methane is the best lever we have to slow the march of climate change in our lifetime,” said Stanford researcher Rob Jackson. That is especially important, he added, as the planet approaches tipping points — temperature thresholds beyond which forests, coral reefs and ice sheets start to collapse irreversibly.

Unlike with other major methane sources, such as belching cattle or melting permafrost, the technology to curb emissions from oil and gas operations is already viable, and fairly cheap. In the fight against global warming, Jackson said, “It’s the best bang for our buck.” 

The “Dung Beetle Model”

To build a fortune on the discarded scraps of the oil and gas industry takes a rare instinct for hidden value, an appetite for risk and an obsession with keeping costs down. 

Among the nation’s stripper well owners, Hildebrand has done it best, amassing a fortune estimated by Bloomberg at $15 billion. Yet at a time when many billionaires are embracing celebrity, he has maintained an unusually low profile. At 67, he’s almost completely avoided speaking to reporters, and he didn’t respond to multiple interview requests from ProPublica. Even Trump, despite having invited him to the White House, seemed hazy on Hildebrand’s role in the oil industry. “I hear he does a good job,” the president said when reached by ProPublica on his cellphone.

While he avoids the public eye, Hildebrand circulates openly in the overlapping worlds of wealthy businesspeople, private clubs and Republican power brokers. He has been known to hold exclusive parties at his 1,200-acre ranch in Aspen, Colorado — which used to belong, in part, to the musician (and environmentalist) John Denver. He also owns a polo team called Tonkawa, a fixture of the winter season in the sport’s unofficial capital of Wellington, Florida, a short drive from Mar-a-Lago. A video of a 2021 match shows him in a white helmet and forest-green jersey, riding a bay pony as he swings his mallet, trying and failing to keep the ball from the opposing side’s patron, a Russian banker named Andrey Borodin. 

There’s a striking tension between Hildebrand’s status as one of the country’s most prolific polluters and his otherwise conventional life as a God-fearing, upstanding Texas businessman. He is less a rogue actor than the product of a deeply American system that rewards production at all costs. 

A devout Catholic and philanthropist, he is especially passionate about wildlife conservation, according to Stuart Stedman and Karen Starr Hunke, fellow board members at Texas A&M’s Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute. Yet they and others who know him through the institute said they’d never once heard him mention climate change — an omission that points to a far narrower view of environmental stewardship. 

The closest Hildebrand has come to addressing the issue publicly is in a rare speech he gave in 2022, accepting an award as a distinguished alumnus at UT Austin. A husky, square-jawed man, he wore a burnt-orange suit jacket and a burnt-orange tie. He cited an old quote he interpreted as a celebration of the oil industry: “Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth.” Then he quipped that “in this Green New Deal era we live in” — a reference to the Democrats’ climate agenda — such sentiments might no longer be welcome.

Born in 1959 in Houston, America’s energy capital, Hildebrand graduated from high school at a time when oil prices were soaring. Determined to start his own oil business, he studied geology and petroleum engineering at UT Austin, where he was in the Kappa Alpha fraternity. He worked briefly for Exxon and a few other companies, including that of a prominent Houston investor named Jack Trotter, before starting Hilcorp in ’89 with Trotter’s backing.

The oil business is filled with stories of crazy risks, near-bankruptcies and improbable rebounds. Hildebrand likes to recount that he used his wife’s car as collateral for a loan to drill some early wells. In a speech for his induction into the Texas Business Hall of Fame, he said they turned out to be “dry holes” — failures — but the return on Melinda’s investment would prove “infinite” (only a slight exaggeration).

He started buying stripper wells from larger companies, a niche that is relatively cheap to break into. As a well ages and the underlying reservoir is depleted, pressure in the well drops, and production along with it. The price for a package of these wells tends to be low — one friend recalled “when a big deal for Jeff was $5 million” — but to turn a profit, the new owners have to cut costs. Typically they do this by playing fast and loose with environmental rules, according to Clark Williams-Derry of the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who calls this the “dung beetle model.”

As Hildebrand expanded into other states, loading up on debt to make ever larger acquisitions, there’s evidence he followed this model. According to records obtained by ProPublica from state and federal environmental regulators, his company has racked up dozens of violations over the past decade. To cite one notable example, after a Hilcorp natural gas pipeline ruptured in Alaska’s Cook Inlet in December 2016, it spewed methane for nearly four months until it was finally repaired. Activists across the country call the company “Spillcorp.”

The penalties, though, have largely amounted to a slap on the wrist, rarely exceeding $500,000 — and often coming in far lower. “I would frankly put that in the category of just operating costs,” said Matt Bernstein, an analyst at the research firm Rystad Energy.

What set Hildebrand apart from other “dung beetles” was that he also found ways to squeeze out more oil and gas from aging wells, not only cutting costs but increasing revenue. His secret was what he has called a “pretty simple” formula: attract top geologists and engineers by offering Wall Street-style incentives, allowing them to effectively take partnership stakes in projects. According to a person involved in an early deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Hildebrand would offer 1.1 times what Hilcorp’s own analysis said an acquisition was worth, betting on the “magic” of his team. 

The 2010s saw the landmark Paris Agreement on global warming, the rise of teen activist Greta Thunberg and the first pledge by a major oil company to effectively zero its emissions. None of that dissuaded Hildebrand from doubling down on aging wells. In 2017, he spent $3 billion to mount his largest acquisition yet: ConocoPhillips’ operation in the San Juan Basin, where Pinto and Eisenfeld would later identify so many leaks. Once among the country’s top sources of natural gas, the region had since fallen into decline — and it was already notorious for its methane pollution.

Soon after, according to a Clean Air Task Force analysis of data companies report to the EPA, Hilcorp became the No. 1 emitter of methane in the entire U.S. oil and gas industry.

Washington Comes for Stripper Wells

President Joe Biden presented the first serious threat to Hildebrand’s business. As part of his ambitious climate agenda, the EPA issued rules aimed at cutting methane pollution from oil and gas operations by a whopping 80% — and they took direct aim at stripper wells.

For the first time, outside a patchwork of state rules, older wells would face requirements for regular leak inspections and limits on venting and flaring. Companies would be forced to respond to satellite reports of super-emitters, making repairs if necessary. A fee would also be imposed on excess methane emissions, costing the oil and gas industry an estimated $500 million a year. 

Even the Department of Justice got involved, filing suits to crack down on improper methane releases. One found that Hilcorp had failed to capture the emissions when it redrilled 145 wells in the San Juan — discharges large enough that Don Schreiber, a rancher who documented some of the events, described hearing a “jet engine” sound as the gas rushed into the air. This time, the penalties were more than a slap on the wrist; although Hilcorp did not admit to wrongdoing, it settled the allegations for $9.4 million.

With the new rules gradually being phased in, Hildebrand effectively made parallel bets. Getting a jump on compliance, Hilcorp started upgrading much of its aging equipment — and its methane numbers declined.

“That’s a win,” said Lesley Feldman of the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that advocates for cutting emissions. “That means the policy is working. And we’ve seen evidence of other companies doing this too.”

Yet while Feldman celebrated the reductions, she did question their magnitude. Hilcorp spokesperson Piatek said the company’s methane numbers had fallen by “nearly 80% in recent years.” But, Feldman said after examining Hilcorp’s most recent data, that decline is artificially inflated by recent changes to the reporting rules, which make comparisons to previous years misleading. The data itself may be suspect, she added, because the EPA has yet to publicly verify it — and Hilcorp has previously made huge upward revisions to its reported emissions. (Piatek didn’t respond when ProPublica pointed out the artificially inflated reduction.)

Even taking the numbers at face value, Hilcorp remains one of the oil industry’s top methane emitters, according to a ProPublica analysis of EPA data. 

Since he was still looking at substantial compliance costs, Hildebrand’s other bet was to step up his political contributions. Since 2020, he and his wife have given more than $15 million to Trump and other Republicans in federal races, placing them among the top donors in an industry that overwhelmingly supports the president and his party. (That compares to just over $3 million in the entire two decades prior.) The recipients have included Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. August Pfluger, both of Texas — two of the most vocal opponents to the methane fee, which they call the “natural gas tax.” 

During the 2024 campaign, Hildebrand also co-hosted at least three high-dollar fundraisers for Trump, who promised to “unleash American energy” by dismantling climate regulations. One was a lavish dinner held a short drive from Hildebrand’s Aspen ranch, at a home sprinkled with art by Andy Warhol (a tiny self-portrait), Damien Hirst (a mirrored pill cabinet) and Jack Pierson (mismatched lettering that spelled out the word “badass”). The home belonged to another donor later graced with an appointment: the investor John Phelan, who would briefly serve as Trump’s Navy secretary.

Hildebrand co-hosted two of the fundraisers in Houston. One was reportedly scheduled to take place at his own home, but, due to security concerns, it was moved to a hotel owned by the sports and entertainment magnate Tilman Fertitta, who would be named ambassador to Italy. The other was followed by a private roundtable where, according to Teofilo Lingi, an investor who was present, oil executives discussed the methane rules with Trump himself.

The Rollback

At a previous event with Trump, Hildebrand said, “I’m really here today to represent the independent energy companies, the family-owned businesses that are in this industry.” 

This mom-and-pop image clashes with the reality that the independents, as they are known, are highly organized into an alphabet soup of newly influential lobbying groups — with Hildebrand a member of several. Hilcorp CEO Greg Lalicker sits on the board of the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which also represents Diversified, the country’s single largest owner of stripper wells. At least until recently, another Hilcorp executive was a director at the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), which represents smaller producers, including many stripper well owners. 

In an industry long hostile to regulation, the independents have often displayed a more open contempt toward climate policy than the global oil giants. And they have historically had little say in emissions rules. “They didn’t want to be regulated, but they kind of knew that was a losing argument,” said Joseph Goffman, who held top EPA roles under both President Barack Obama and Biden.

Hildebrand received an early sign that was going to change when, less than three weeks after the 2025 inauguration, Trump tapped his wife to be ambassador to Costa Rica — even though she was primarily known for charity work and for opening a doughnut shop in their wealthy Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Melinda Hildebrand didn’t respond to requests for comment, but when ProPublica asked Trump why he appointed her, he said, “I don’t know, because you know, I get recommendations. … I see the list of people, but we only name good people, and I’m sure she’s very good.” 

Later that month, the Republican-controlled Congress effectively killed the methane fee, and Trump nominated a former Hilcorp lobbyist named Aaron Szabo to oversee the EPA’s climate regulations. 

Szabo, an otherwise inconspicuous former bureaucrat, helped to unite two distinct networks with overlapping ambitions. As a lobbyist for Hilcorp and other oil and gas companies, he had already helped to draft a letter from the AXPC opposing the new methane rules. He then became a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute and gave advice on climate regulations for the EPA chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint for the second Trump administration. The chapter specifically recommended dismantling the program to address super-emitters.

Now tasked with rewriting the methane rules, Szabo has been seeking input from oil industry groups including the AXPC, the IPAA and the National Stripper Well Association (NSWA), according to interviews with industry representatives and current and former EPA officials, records of closed-door conversations, and agency emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests by the watchdog group Fieldnotes and shared with ProPublica.

“It’s the first time in 20 years of my business that they’ll even answer the phone,” NSWA Chair Patrick Montalban told ProPublica, referring to top regulators. He described an informal atmosphere where independent oil executives called on old personal connections to open the doors. He himself had met not just with Szabo but with EPA chief Lee Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He and Wright, he noted, have both served on the board of yet another oil industry group. (Press offices for the departments of Interior and Energy didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.)

The IPAA’s Lee Fuller, on a private conference call with industry representatives, also spoke glowingly about a meeting with Szabo’s office last year. Previously, he said, the EPA had never even considered the group’s requests to create separate methane rules for stripper wells. This time, though, agency staff brought it up unprompted — which suggests that it was already on Szabo’s agenda. Presented with this opening, the IPAA later asked for stripper wells to be exempted from the methane rules entirely.

Hilcorp spokesperson Piatek declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the influence campaign. The IPAA also declined to comment but sent an email linking to a recent statement of support for deregulating stripper wells that nonetheless nodded toward “our shared environmental goals.” 

The heart of the stripper-well owners’ argument is that they simply cannot afford to be regulated. “Venting and flaring are essential for the survivability of low production wells,” an IPAA lawyer named James D. Elliott wrote in an email to EPA officials last year. He cited estimates that the methane rules would force 300,000 of the lowest-producing wells to shut down. Framing this as a blow to small-business owners, he didn’t acknowledge that it would have almost no impact on the U.S. energy supply.

The AXPC declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the group’s interactions with Szabo’s staff but sent a statement from CEO Anne Bradbury saying its members were “committed to building on a legacy of world-leading methane emission reductions.” In a “policy roadmap” published on its website in March, however, it asked the EPA to “incorporate greater flexibility for low-producing and mature assets.” 

Some members of the coalition have argued, inaccurately, that stripper wells are not significant sources of methane pollution. In a Zoom interview with ProPublica, NSWA board member Sam Bradley played a slideshow that he said he’d shared with Szabo’s staff. One slide purported to show the emissions from various sources. Stripper wells ranked lower than both the collective exhalations of the U.S. populace and what Bradley called “smoke and brisket” — barbecues. (In reality, these are negligible sources of emissions.)

Hildebrand and his fellow stripper-well owners appear likely to win exemptions. Speaking with industry representatives last month, the AXPC’s Wendy Kirchoff shared early details of Szabo’s plan to weaken the methane rules, confirming it will cover stripper wells, according to a recording reviewed by ProPublica. 

Szabo himself didn’t respond to questions sent by ProPublica, and the EPA’s press office declined to comment on the details. But the agency confirmed it is working on a proposal to “provide relief” to the oil industry, saying in a statement, “We heard consistently from American oil and natural gas producers (shocker that we meet with stakeholders) that the Biden-Harris Administration’s oil and gas methane regulations were unworkable and unnecessarily restricted American energy dominance.”

To protect carve-outs from rollback by a future Democratic administration, Pfluger, the representative from Texas, and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., have proposed a bill to simply exempt stripper wells from EPA emissions rules — allowing them to pollute the atmosphere at will, with scant economic benefit. The NSWA and the IPAA both helped to craft the legislation, according to an internal newsletter from a state trade group that represents many stripper-well owners. 

In effect, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are weighing whether to preserve the business model that made Hildebrand rich, no matter the cost to the global climate. As energy assets, his wells may be marginal. But as political currency, they have become more valuable than ever before.

The post Trump Plans to Protect Methane-Leaking Stripper Wells. This Billionaire Donor Will Benefit. appeared first on ProPublica.

The world’s most successful gamer content creators, many of whom have spent their entire adult life on the platform, have met up at TwitchCon in Rotterdam

Aimee Davies, better known as Aimsey to their fans, is 24 but looks much younger. Sitting in a bland meeting room above the annual TwitchCon event in Rotterdam, they’re a barely contained whirl of energy in a beanie hat and T-shirt, all smiles and lightning-fast chatter. Aimsey (who uses they/them pronouns) is also a Twitch veteran, having started streaming eight years ago at the tender age of 16. A million subscribers tune in every week to see them chaotically play Minecraft and share snippets of their life. They have grown up, from teen to young adult, carrying a vast audience with them into maturity. What is it like to experience that?

“When you’re 16 you want to tell everyone everything about you,” they say as music blares from the event below. “When I came out as a lesbian, I told the world. Every part of my identity, my mental health struggles … I thought if I could help one person feel like they weren’t alone, I wanted to do that.”

No 10 is worried about retaliation from White House over restrictions on under-16s’ internet use

Ministers have embarked on a concerted lobbying operation to prevent a backlash from the Trump administration to the under-16s social media ban announced by Keir Starmer.

Officials said they had spent weeks trying to reassure senior Trump officials and the US president himself that the restrictions were not specifically aimed at US technology companies.

Few analysts believe final settlement can be reached in 60 days – and even if it is, war and instability could soon return

In much of the Middle East, news that the US and Iran had come to a fragile agreement was greeted with relief tempered with doubt that any deal would resolve the turbulent region’s deep problems or even prevent a future return to war.

In Kuwait, a frequent target of Iranian drone strikes during the 15-week conflict, Iyad Joumma, a 37-year-old Jordanian engineer, spoke for many.

If you open up your battery box you’ll see the BMS has 4 different cables going into it. The smallest one that sticks out perpendicular to the PCB is what lets your BMS tell your ESC that your board is charging. If you unplug it, it has no way of knowing so you can charge your board as you ride if you get a backpack setup

This might break FM firmware as well, I can’t be completely sure.

Personally, I recommend the PintV Kit. That opens your door far beyond FM support and restriction, so the skies (or rather your wallet) the limit for battery possibility. Easy as to install

If you’ve got more dough to throw around just buy an atom. Its the combine price of a stock Pint and the PintV kit, and that really opens your door to far better Hill Climb Performance, NOOB VESC and more range.

Either way when it comes to VESC, your range is quite dependent on your Motor and Battery Current Limit, which is an inverse relation to Torque (hill climb performance).

Its possible that you would get marginally better range from a Pint S-Series motor (straight from FM) but no guarentees.

Thinktank says decoupling electricity from gas prices has also helped shield Spain from hikes caused by Iran war

Spanish households save €10 a month on electricity bills because of wind turbines and solar panels installed in the last five years, a report has found.

Typical energy bills would be 19% more expensive if electricity costs were still as tightly coupled to gas prices as in 2021, according to Ember, a climate thinktank. It found Spain’s “strategic” expansion of renewables since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 has shielded Spanish households from the latest rises in fossil fuel prices caused by the Iran war.

A Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket's upper stage broke apart shortly after last week's June 9 launch, likely creating 100 to 150 pieces of debris in a busy region of low-Earth orbit crossed by the ISS and lower-altitude Starlink satellites. Most fragments should reenter within months because of atmospheric drag, but experts say the incident adds to a worsening trend as China leaves more large rocket bodies in orbit while expanding its launch rate. Ars Technica reports: The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public. "The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing." So far, the Space Force has not added any of the debris fragments to the official catalog of human-made space objects. [...] The bad news is that the Zhuque-2E's breakup is the latest chapter in China's growing contribution to the space junk problem. After decades of leaving spent rocket bodies in orbit, launch operators in most countries now reserve enough fuel to steer their upper stages back to Earth for controlled reentries. Rocket bodies attributed to Russia and the former Soviet Union account for the bulk of the launch-related debris in long-lived orbits, followed by China and the United States. But the Russian and American numbers are declining or holding steady, while the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in these long-lived orbits has grown by more than 150 percent in the past five years, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell. The increase comes as China ramps up launches of its own megaconstellations designed to compete with SpaceX's Starlink. Rocket bodies are the most concerning sources of space debris because they are typically fairly large in size and mass, often with residual propellant and high-pressure gases that can trigger an explosion. There is no way to maneuver or dispose of them if left abandoned in orbit after releasing their payloads. McKnight characterized the recent breakup of the Zhuque-2E rocket as a "slight space safety issue," but the trend is not good. China's Long March 6A rocket has an especially bad track record, including two explosions that littered a higher-altitude low-Earth orbit with more than 1,000 debris fragments, where they will remain for decades or centuries. "Three of the top four breakup events in LEO are of Chinese origin, with two of these events being from Chinese (rocket body) explosions in the last four years," McKnight said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’ve notice recently (after some general maintenance) that my board has this sort of ‘shudder’
Its super mild when I switch between directions, but its definitely noticeable when I jump dismount
It seems the motor is rapidly firing to try and keep itself upright for the 400ms of fault delay, holding its previous speed before I dismounted, but its indecisive of which direction it should be going.

Higher full switch fault delay does yield longer shudders.

Jumping off at a higher speed (like body varials) still works fine, as the board keeps its speed. Quickstops and Half-Sensor fault stops don’t yield this behavior either.

Another way to describe it is that the board doesn’t have enough of a middleground voltage to play with, like its snapping from maybe -5V to 5V (I have no earthly idea how much voltage) when it needs to instead have like 1.5V, so it rapidly switches between the 2.
Or rather, because everything is pulses (PWM not analog), the mosphets don’t have enough Hz to create a smooth, low speed. My understanding of these things is comically limited.

Its a Pint X-V, with the white PCB version of controller. I believe this is identical to the floatwheel adv1 controller.

General Maintenance included:

Update VESC firmware to v6.06, not sure what I was on previously

Update Refloat Package to 1.2 (also not sure what I was on before but Data tab didn’t have that graph and there was no Haptic Feedback or BMS tab in RefloatCfg)

Attempted IMU recalibration (got some extremely weird RTData so Reset to Default Settings)
Full board disassembly for cleaning, and replaced bumpers

I’ve had my board for about 3 months now, I’m quite familiar with navigating VESCTool and what normal ride feel is like. Its not a complete problem, like my board is still rideable, but I’m a little concerned for hardware wear and tear.

Appreciate any advice

Tech is helping to identify and save new specimens and could open ‘genomic goldmine’ of fungi data

The rise of AI and digitisation could be a turning point in the “race against extinction” faced by botanists trying to identify and save vital plants before they vanish, according to a major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

New technology is enabling scientists to track how flowering times have shifted by weeks around the world, rapidly identify new specimens and even get crucial genetic data from 180-year-old fungus specimens, potentially opening a “genomic goldmine”. Digitisation and online access to millions of specimens that were until now only accessible in archives is also producing new insights, especially in the global south.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 16.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 16, No. 631.

Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard

Half of the world’s children are exposed to at least three overlapping climate hazards threatening their health, education and survival, according to a Unicef report.

Globally, children face increasing threats from heatwaves, storms, floods and droughts as the climate crisis worsens, with more than one billion facing at least three of these at once.

Brian Gu says he sees Chinese car firms competing on quality rather than launching price war as at home

Motorists in the UK and EU should not expect a sharp drop in the cost of electric vehicles despite increased competition among Chinese manufacturers, one of the country’s biggest electric carmakers has said.

Brian Gu, the vice-chair of the manufacturer Xpeng, said that Chinese carmakers could compete on quality to win customers in the EU and UK, rather than unleashing a brutal price war as they have in China.

So-called ‘good behaviour’ legislation fiercely criticised by opposition politicians and rights groups

Sweden’s parliament has voted to escalate the country’s crackdown on immigrant rights, backing laws that allow authorities to revoke residency permits based on a vague criteria of bad behaviour and obliging most public sector workers to report anyone suspected of being undocumented.

The new legislation comes ahead of parliamentary elections in September, pitting the centre-right government, which currently depends on the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats to govern, against a far right that has said its intent is to create one of Europe’s most hostile environments for non-Europeans.

How the Iran war will transform America’s military role.

The alliance has survived 80 years of disagreement—and it will survive again.

This blog is now closed – see our full report on the US-Iran agreement and an analysis of what it means

The agreement between the United ⁠States and Iran should allow for the “immediate reopening” ⁠of the ⁠Strait ​of Hormuz, EU Commission President Ursula von ⁠der Leyen said on Monday.

“The priority now is ⁠its swift and full implementation ​by all parties,” ‌von der ‌Leyen said about the ‌announced deal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group made up of dozens of cybersecurity experts, including several well-known veterans of the industry, published an open letter to the U.S. government asking it to lift the export control order on Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models. According to the open letter, "this action has taken the best models away from [cybersecurity] defenders" who now can't use the models to find vulnerabilities and make their software and products more secure. "To pull the best capabilities away from defenders without a good reason when our adversaries are rapidly advancing is dangerous," read the letter. On Friday, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to limit the export of Fable and Mythos, citing national security concerns, without explaining the specific reasons behind the order, according to Anthropic. In response, the company suspended access to the models to all users worldwide. As of this writing, the letter is signed by 76 cybersecurity experts, including Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief of security; Casey Ellis, the founder bug bounty platform Bugcrowd; Jon Callas, famed cryptographer and former Apple security design and architecture manager; Paul Vixie, computer scientist ; Dino Dai Zovi, the former head of applied security engineering at Block; Katie Moussouris, the founder of Luta Security; and Rachel Tobac, the CEO of the security awareness training firm SocialProof Security. [...] Anthropic said that the White House export control order may have been based on a report that there was a method to bypass -- or jailbreak -- Fable to unlock its powerful Mythos-level capabilities. According to Katie Moussouris, one of the signatories of the open letter, the method was demonstrated by Amazon researchers in a paper that is not public but that she has reviewed. But Moussouris said in a blog post that the paper did not actually demonstrate a real jailbreak. Instead, she wrote, the researchers simply asked Fable to fix open source code with public and known vulnerabilities along with "deliberately planted vulnerabilities," after the model initially refused to "review the code for security issues." "The behavior described in the paper cannot meaningfully be fixed, and any attempt would only weaken the model for defense," Moussouris wrote. "Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works. That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day." Moussouris' critique was echoed in the open letter, which also said that the group of experts believe the model capabilities in the Amazon paper "can be replicated" on OpenAI's GPT-5.5, on Anthropic's own publicly available Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet, "and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7." Moussouris told TechCrunch that "the bugs used to demonstrate the techniques in the paper can be found using the other models. The method in the paper is a guardrail bypass technique. Other models that lack the Fable guardrails often won't refuse the straightforward request to look for security bugs, so they don't need a bypass." The letter also asked for transparently and fairly enforced regulations created by "a democratic rule-making process" that are based on scientific research done by industry and academic experts, and "used only to the minimal extent necessary to ensure the safety of the American public."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The closures, so employees can watch a recorded lecture, will cost the company an estimated 2.1bn won ($1.4m) in sales

Starbucks Korea will simultaneously close all its stores for a mandatory history lesson, after a disastrous promotion that evoked memories of a pro-democracy massacre sparked public and political backlash.

More than 2,000 stores will temporarily close at 3pm on 22 June, the company said, so staff can watch recorded lectures on modern Korean history and engage in “social sensitivity” training. The half-day closures will cost Starbucks an estimated 2.1bn won ($1.4m) in lost sales, according to data firm IGAWorks.

Bluetti's new FridgePower helps protect refrigerated food and perishables when your home loses power.

Dr. Peter Stafford, his wife, Rebekah Stafford, and their four children all arrived safely on Monday, according to Serge, a Pennsylvania-based Christian missions organization.

Experts say criminal networks favour Sri Lanka due to ease of getting tourist visas and limited regulation on sim cards and internet connections

Experts have warned that Sri Lanka is emerging as a hub for transnational cybercrime, after a crackdown in south-east Asia pushed Chinese-run criminal networks to relocate their vast scam operations.

Sri Lankan police spokesperson Fredrick Wootler said the country was witnessing an “alarming increase of cybercrimes” perpetrated by people entering the country as tourists, and then illegally setting up scam operations targeting people across the world.

The teen was initially released pending trial after being charged as a juvenile, but after he was charged as an adult, a judge ruled he was no longer subject to rules regarding juvenile detention.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 16, No. 1,823.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 16, No. 1,101.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 16 No. 835.

The all-out splurge, the killer deal, or the Goldilocks middle ground. We've tested every Apple Watch to help you land you perfect match.

The Federal Aviation Administration said British Airways Flight 271 landed safely at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas after the crew reported a cellphone fire on board.

35% of American households are using AI to find information. 14% of people trust that information.

⚽️ World Cup kick-off: 6pm EDT/11pm BST/8am AEST
⚽️ Spain 0-0 Cape Verde | Player guide | Bracketology

2 min The Saudi Arabia attack is led by Salem al-Dawsari, who scored the winner in their astounding win over Argentina four years ago.

1 min Saudi Arabia kick off from left to right as we watch. The match is only four minutes behind schedule, so you can all go chill, relax.

⚽️ Kick-off time: 6pm local/11am AEST/2am BST/9pm EDT
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Wallchart | Mail Martin

By Maree Mahony

New Zealand, known as the All Whites, are back at the World Cup for just the third time, thanks to winning the Oceania region’s sole qualifying spot. Since their last World Cup in 2010 New Zealand have evolved from part-timers to professionals and there is belief they have the skillset and experience to make the knockout rounds for the first time.

The aircraft was on a routine test mission at Edwards airfield, located in the western Mojave Desert, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

This live blog is now closed.

• Gavin Newsom says Trump directed DoJ to investigate him and his wife

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JD Vance also dodged the question when he was asked by CNBC who would be at the signing of the agreement on Friday.

Without addressing who would be present for the US side, he said they “expect the negotiating team from the Iranian side is going to be the Speaker of the House [Mohammad Bagher] Ghalibaf, and also the foreign minister [Abbas] Araghchi, along with a number of security officials and people who represent the different constituencies within their country.”

I think it’s a great day for the American people … our expectation is that the strait is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term.

That’s the sort of thing that we’re going to figure out in these technical negotiations. There are a lot of very important details to figure out that we’re actually going to sit at the table and discuss together and figure out a path forward on these details.

And what we’ve said is, OK, let’s talk about how exactly we’re going to do that.

They want access to an unsanctioned economy. We’ve talked about, ‘OK, we’re open to that,’ but that would require a long-term commitment to the inspection and verification regime.

Health advocates criticized Kennedy’s move demanding answers from journal that removed ‘flawed’ vaccine study

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed a paper suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision was “of great interest to me”.

Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, and said Kennedy appeared to be trying to intimidate and influence the journal’s editorial process. The journal Toxicology Reports had removed the paper this spring after editors determined it was so seriously flawed it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.

But overall interest in news has increased, particularly among women and young people, 2026 Digital News Report finds

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The majority of Australian adults under 25 have never used newspapers or radio as a source of news, according to the 2026 Digital News Report which tracks the changing habits of news consumers.

However, overall interest in news has increased, in particular among women and young people, after years of decline. Since 2024, the interest of 18 to 24-year-olds in news has risen sharply (+12) to 47%.

The Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) is set to expire in September without an apparent replacement, potentially ending requirements for federal agencies to report on data-center efficiency, resilience, energy and water use, and contractor sustainability. Wired reports: Despite the public backlash, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the government agency that sets guidance for how agencies implement policies in line with the president's agenda, is not providing any plans for how federal agencies should manage the sunset or continue to implement reporting beyond the timeline of the law. This, current and former workers at OMB and the General Services Administration (GSA) say, signals that the Trump administration is set to take an even more hands-off approach to data center oversight and regulation. A replacement for the requirements laid out in FDCEA would, in other administrations, have been in the works for months ahead of its expiration. An employee with the GSA, the agency that oversees the government's IT services and helps to implement the FDCEA, says that the lack of any sort of plan is highly uncommon. The employee spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. "Never in the history of data center policies has a policy expired without another one having been painstakingly worked on for three years behind the scenes," says the GSA employee. "The technology has changed so much it's not about getting everything right, it's about doing the best they can and updating to a new policy. They claim they're going to make sure private companies pay their fare share, but they haven't explained how they'll do that." [...] There has been a burst of data-center-related legislation introduced in Congress this year, from bills that mandate environmental reviews of data centers to bills designed to protect local moratoriums. However, it appears that none of these bills are designed to address the requirements in FDCEA, nor do they specifically address federally run or leased data centers. [...] A search of reginfo.gov, the OMB website that contains reports on the president's Unified Agenda, also turns up nothing for the FDCEA. "By letting this expire, OMB is going to enter into this new age of prioritizing rapid AI development over any sort of centralized control or rigorous standards," says the anonymous GSA employee who spoke to Wired. "In the absence of a new policy from OMB, [GSA] has no directive or measurable standards with which to point agencies towards managing data centers efficiently."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Welsh singer, best known for 1983 hit Total Eclipse of the Heart, had emergency intestinal surgery in May

Welsh pop star Bonnie Tyler is no longer in a coma but remains “very unwell” in intensive care at a hospital near her home in Faro, Portugal.

The 75-year-old singer received emergency intestinal surgery in May and was placed in an induced coma to aid her recovery.

B-52 crashed shortly after takeoff at Edwards air force base in southern California’s Mojave Desert, officials say

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Eight people are presumed dead after a B-52 bomber crashed shortly after takeoff on Monday morning at a US air force base in California’s Mojave Desert, officials said.

“An Air Force B-52 Stratofortress carrying eight people on a routine test mission crashed today shortly after take-off at 11:20 a.m,” Edwards air force base said in a statement Monday afternoon. “Initial indications are that the crash was not survivable. “Emergency response personnel are on scene, and officials are working to account for all personnel.”

Images of Merlin, a two-year-old duck, parading on the streets of Mexico City celebrated by fans on social media

Julián Quiñones and Raúl Jiménez may have scored the goals, but a duck stole the show.

As Mexico celebrated its World Cup-opening victory over South Africa on Thursday, Merlin, a two-year-old duck dressed in the national team’s colors, became an unlikely internet sensation and the tournament’s first unofficial mascot.

Take to the virtual skies without having to download the desktop app.

alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: The FBI released an urgent security warning to the public about a fast-acting scam targeting Microsoft 365 users on Teams, Outlook and OneDrive. The agency warned that the hacking platform Kali365 seeks out OAuth device codes, allowing scammers to sneak past multi-factor authentication codes, and without the need for a password, to access Microsoft accounts. Scammers will send a phishing email impersonating a trusted document-sharing service with a device code and instructions on how to verify, according to the FBI. "Kali365 lowers the barrier of entry, providing less-technical attackers access to AI-generated phishing lures, automated campaign templates, real-time targeted individual/entity tracking dashboards, and OAuth token capture capabilities," the FBI stated. The platform is sold to scammers with a $250 per month subscription. The FBI, which first detected Kali365 in April, described the hacking platform as an "emerging Phishing-as-a-Service platform." Hackers with limited skills can access advanced phishing tools through the platform, according to NordPass.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his administration has “cut” by 97% “the flow” of illegal drugs entering the U.S. “by water, by ocean and sea.” But available federal data do not support that claim.

There is no comprehensive data on the total amount of drugs trafficked to the U.S., including how much authorities don’t capture. Without that information, drug policy experts have told us that it’s not possible to know if the president’s claim is accurate.

“[W]e do not know the true amount of drugs coming into the country because we don’t know the amount that comes in undetected (the known unknown),” Katharine Harris, a fellow in drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in an email.

She said the amount of drugs “seized” — which is what the federal government reports — is not equivalent to total drug “flow.”

However, Trump, based only on cherry-picked seizure data, continues to claim that his administration has almost completely stopped drugs from being brought into the U.S. by way of water.

“We cut the flow of fentanyl across our border by 59%, which is unheard of,” Trump said in May 22 remarks in New York. “And we cut the flow of fentanyl and drugs into our country by the ocean and the sea, in other words, coming in by water, by ocean and sea by 97%.”

Then, on May 28, in an interview with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Fox News, he said, “We have drugs down 97%. Fentanyl and various drugs down 97% on drugs coming in by water.”

The president has made the 97% reduction claim more than a dozen times since late December.

We already addressed in February Trump’s unsupported claim that fentanyl coming across U.S. borders is down by more than half. 

The amount of fentanyl seized by Customs and Border Protection decreased by about 50% in the first full 15 months of Trump’s second term, going from 26,398 pounds seized in President Joe Biden’s last full 15 months in office to 13,216 pounds seized in Trump’s first full 15 months, according to the most recent CBP data. Also, based on provisional data, the National Center for Health Statistics estimates about a 22% decline in overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, or fentanyl, between 2024 and 2025 — from 48,913 to 38,084.

The seizure data is often used as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected. To some, fewer pounds seized indicates that fewer drugs are being smuggled in — not more.

The fact that the seized amount has declined could mean that less of the drug is being trafficked into the U.S., but it could also mean that authorities are catching less of it. In October 2024, we wrote about then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim that the Biden administration had cut the flow of illegal fentanyl “by half” because the amount seized by border officials had increased in Biden’s first two years as president.

But experts said there was also insufficient data to support her statement.

“If you don’t know the denominator” – meaning the figure for the total flow of a drug to the U.S. – “you can’t have an answer,” David Luckey, director of the RAND Rural America Partnership Initiative and professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy, told us for that 2024 story. 

Trump’s claim about drugs coming by water is flawed for similar reasons.

When we asked for the source of his claim, a senior administration official sent only a hyperlink to the webpage with statistics on drugs seized by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations, which does aviation and maritime law enforcement.

Sometimes — such as in June 10 remarks in the Oval Office — Trump sounds as though he’s claiming that there has been a 97% cut in fentanyl coming by water. But that’s not really what he means.

Administration officials have told other fact-checkers that the president’s claim is based on the decrease in the amount of all drugs seized in July 2025 compared with November 2025. 

There were 4,476 combined pounds of cocaine, fentanyl, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine interdicted by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations last November, about a 98% drop from the 224,805 pounds seized four months earlier in July. But that particular comparison was cherry-picked. 

That July, there was a huge one-month spike in the amount of drugs seized – mostly marijuana. The total weight seized had increased 1,140% from 18,132 pounds in June. Using July as a starting point made the change in drug seizures under Trump look like a much larger decline.

“Picking a different month” to start “would have shown a smaller decline,” Harris, of the Baker Institute, said of the White House’s calculation. She added, “Generally it’s more informative to look at these trends over at least a 12-month period, especially when the data are available, in order to account for things like seasonal variation and outlier events.”

In fact, as of April, the most recent data available, there had been 547,603 pounds seized by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations in Trump’s first full 15 months back in office. That was an increase of about 81% from the 302,548 pounds seized in the last full 15 months under Biden. 

Even if the unusually large amount of drugs seized in July 2025 is excluded from that 15-month tally, the amount seized under Trump was still almost 7% higher than under Biden.

If an increase in seizures indicates more drugs getting into the country undetected – as some Republicans have said – that’s the opposite of what Trump has claimed is happening.

In addition, the U.S. Coast Guard says it — not CBP — is “the lead federal maritime law enforcement agency” responsible for water-based interdiction of illegal drugs. 

In fiscal year 2025, which included about eight months under Trump, the Coast Guard said it seized a record of almost 510,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean – more than three times its annual average of 167,000 pounds.

In September, the last month of that fiscal year, the U.S. military began striking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that it claimed were bringing drugs to the U.S. 

But the New York Times, citing epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public health experts, reported in May that cocaine is still widely available in the U.S., as drug smugglers have seemingly adjusted to the boat strikes by transporting their product in large shipping containers or using land routes through Central America.

Harris, the drug policy fellow, said the amount of drugs seized “can be paired with other data points, like the purity, price, and availability trends for a particular substance, to infer whether there has been a reduction in supply.” If drugs are more scarce, less potent and prices are higher, she said that could indicate a supply interruption.

“But the seizure data alone cannot substantiate claims about the true drug flow,” she said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Trump Makes Unsupported Claims About Drug Flows appeared first on FactCheck.org.

G7 told ‘we will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes’, with Russia’s finance networks and shadow fleet targeted

Keir Starmer has vowed to “choke off” Russian revenue with further sanctions and to provide hundreds of millions of pounds worth of energy support for Ukraine, as he met world leaders in France for the G7.

After a torrid political week at home, the British prime minister sought to put himself on the front foot on the international stage at the meeting of the group of seven, which kicked off on Monday in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains, on the shore of Lake Geneva.

Elections chief says bid by ex-teacher to challenge senator with same name was filed ‘to confuse or mislead’ voters

There will still be one Dan Sullivan on the ballot, but election officials in Alaska determined a second man by the same name cannot run against him in the high-stakes Senate race.

A man named Dan Sullivan, or Daniel J Sullivan Jr, filed to run as a Republican against incumbent Alaska senator Dan S Sullivan, also a Republican. Republicans filed complaints against the other Dan Sullivan, saying the candidate had coordinated with a Democratic campaign to confuse voters.

It's next to impossible to attend high school or college without a laptop. Here are my favorite laptops that I've tested and reviewed for student budgets.

The lawsuit claims that the AI company is misleading customers about its $200-per-month Claude plan.

State’s attorney general alleges TikTok exposed children to harmful sexual content and addictive features

Florida became the latest state to sue TikTok on Monday after the attorney general accused the company of violating a state law that limits social media access for teenagers.

In a press conference, Republican James Uthmeier said TikTok exposed children to harmful sexual content and addictive features, such as unlimited scrolling and push notifications. “It’s designed to keep kids stuck on those screens for hours,” Uthmeier said at a press conference. “Our evidence suggests that so many kids are on TikTok for upwards of six, seven, eight or more hours a day. We are going to get our kids their lives back.”

In the leadup to America’s 250th birthday, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House became a platform for a long-debunked claim targeting a former first lady.

After winning a bout, UFC fighter Josh Hokit used his post-fight interview with Joe Rogan to amplify the claim that former first lady Michelle Obama isn’t a woman.

"And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?" Hokit said.

News reports said the remark drew some laughter from the audience.

PolitiFact has fact-checked various versions of the claim that Obama is or was a man, dating back to 2020. There remains no evidence. Obama, born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, was never a man. 

In attempts to prove the conspiracy theory, people have circulated altered images of Obama, an out-of-context video clip of Obama’s podcast interview with actor and comedian Marlon Wayans and an unverified voter registration card. Other fact-checkers have also debunked the narrative.

UFC CEO Dana White told Time in a text message, "I understand that the Obama’s are public figures but I’m completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families."

Other powerful women, such as France’s first lady Brigitte Macron and former Vice President Kamala Harris, have also been targeted with claims they are men. Experts told PolitiFact such conspiracy theories seek to undermine their power and achievements.

We contacted Hokit and receive no response.

We rate his claim that Michelle Obama is a man Pants on Fire!

Donald Trump posts ‘Let the oil flow’ as US-Iran peace deal sparks immediate drop for Brent crude

• Analysis: Oil and gas unlikely to return to prewar prices for months even if Hormuz reopens

Global oil prices have tumbled to a three-month low and stock markets closed at a record high amid fresh hopes that a US-Iran peace deal could end the greatest energy supply crisis in the history of the market.

The price of Brent crude dropped about 4% to about $83 (£62) on Monday amid optimism that the strait of Hormuz could reopen shortly and bring a return of Gulf oil exports to the market. Wholesale gas prices fell 6% in Europe.

An election official ruled a candidate with the same name as Sen. Dan Sullivan was involved in a "determined effort and a deliberate attempt" to confuse Alaska voters.

Preliminary agreement between Washington and Tehran has prompted anger in Israel, and criticism of Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu has hailed a historic victory over Iran and ruled out any immediate withdrawal from Lebanon, saying that Israel’s forces would remain there “for as long as necessary”.

“We established deep security zones around the state of Israel. We did this in Gaza, in Lebanon and in Syria,” the Israeli prime minister said in a televised press conference on Monday. “And I want to make it clear: we will remain in these security zones … to protect our country.”

The dispute over an unconventional order raises questions about how the government will regulate advanced AI models.

Google is removing Chrome's last remaining workarounds for Manifest V2 extensions, effectively ending support for legacy ad blockers such as the original uBlock Origin. 9to5Google reports: CyberNews points out a Chromium commit that removes support for the "kExtensionManifestV2Disabled" flag, which is referred to as "dead code" seeing as Chrome no longer supports Manifest V2 extensions. This removal acts as the final stop for many Manifest V2-based ad blocker extensions that were still in use today -- the flag was effectively a loophole to continue using these extensions. A Googler on the commit explains: "MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won't be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire." This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers, though the comment notes that "other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire." Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit. Chrome 150, set to be released later this month, will remove this flag, while other leftover bits of Manifest V2 will be removed in the v151 release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israeli officials disparaged the peace deal and said Israel’s fight against Hezbollah in Lebanon would go on.

President’s son says screenshots that appeared to show him asking analyst Daniel Cormier for information were ‘fake’

Eric Trump has denied cheating allegations after screenshots shared online appeared to show UFC commentator Daniel Cormier receiving a message from an account under Trump’s name asking whether any of the White House’s UFC fights on Sunday would be rigged.

Several screenshots posted – and then later deleted – on Cormier’s X account showed alleged messages from Donald Trump’s 42-year old son that said: “Anything you can tell me about the fighters tomorrow? Who you got winning?”

California governor says Trump is ‘coming after me because I am considering running for president’

Gavin Newsom said on Monday that Donald Trump directed the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to investigate him and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

The California governor said in a video statement that federal agents had knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees in recent days as part of an effort to find a crime, demanding records and “abusing the grand jury process”.

Augmented World Expo this week will give us the best look yet at the state of the art in high-tech eyewear.

Senior U.S. officials say President Trump and Iran's top negotiator have already remotely signed a memorandum of understanding ahead of an expected signing ceremony.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the Justice Department is investigating he and his wife, Jennifer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers. Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux. AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public. [...] There's no indication that AMD ever advertised or marketed TSME as being available in consumer CPUs. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and Epyc CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed. It uses a single key and allows the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME is firmware-managed. It encrypts all RAM with no OS involvement. When active, it provides protection against physical attacks, including cold boot exploits, DRAM interface snooping, and memory module removal. It activates silently when enabled in the BIOS, making it the more practically useful of the two protections. Ben Kilpatrick, a self-described "privacy-conscious Linux hobbyist," discovered that TSME had stopped working on his consumer Ryzen processor despite remaining enabled in the BIOS. He spent months investigating, persuaded MSI engineers to test multiple CPUs, motherboards, and firmware versions, and filed a public AMD bug report that traced the change to newer AGESA firmware apparently disabling TSME on consumer chips while retaining it on Pro and EPYC models. "AMD engineers' comments, such as those mentioned above, and the years of TSME working just fine in the lower-cost tier processors, have understandably conditioned Kilpatrick and other users to reasonably regard it as an expected part of the chip package," reports Ars Technica. "AMD quietly removing it and providing no acknowledgment or explanation strikes these users as something of a betrayal." Joe Fitzgerald, an expert in silicon-level security, said in an interview: "They could have not realized they did it leading to their cagey responses, or they could have done it intentionally and tried to get away with it, leading to the same cagey responses. But I really feel like an explanation should be in order, even if it was 'TSME was never supposed to be supported. We did ship some firmwares that erroneously enabled it, but you shouldn't use them since we can't guarantee it'll work properly.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stelo can now be marketed for children 2 years of age and older who do not use insulin.

Research relationships with Intel, IQM, Qblox, Quantinuum, QuEra Computing, Quantum Machines, Rigetti, and Riverlane to accelerate hybrid classical-quantum computing

LAS VEGAS, June 15, 2026 – HPE today announced it has expanded relationships with eight companies to integrate high performance computing (HPC) and quantum computing systems to pave the way for practical and scalable hybrid classical-quantum applications in the future.

As a global leader in HPC with the HPE Cray supercomputing platform, HPE is in a unique position to advance quantum computing and provide the critical HPC and networking infrastructure necessary to enable hybrid application workflows and integrate emerging quantum technologies into existing supercomputing environments. By partnering with quantum processing unit, quantum error correction, and quantum control leaders, HPE is pioneering a hybrid approach that combines classical supercomputing with quantum computing, enabling faster, more efficient solutions to apply to some of the world’s most complex scientific and industrial challenges.

“By bringing supercomputing and quantum technologies together in a hybrid platform, we will accelerate the transition from research to real-world application,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. “Our new strategic collaborations will extend world-class HPC infrastructure to make quantum accessible, scalable and operational.”

Advancing Full-Stack Hybrid Quantum Supercomputing Across Multiple Modalities

HPE is collaborating with leading companies – Intel, IQM, Qblox, Quantinuum, QuEra Computing, Quantum Machines, Rigetti, and Riverlane – across a diverse set of architectural approaches with the goal of building out a full-stack hybrid quantum supercomputing platform. These collaborations will support the development of integrated testbeds for hybrid algorithm co-design, software interoperability, and system-level performance benchmarking across HPC and AI environments.

HPE is bringing together multiple quantum modalities – including neutral atom, ion trap, superconducting, and silicon spin quantum bits (qubits) – along with quantum error correction and quantum control systems. Through these efforts, HPE is enabling exploration of architectural trade-offs, validation of hybrid workflows, as well as development and benchmarking of quantum application workloads and workflows running on HPC systems and AI factories.

HPE continues to extend the capabilities of classical HPC while building a shared community committed to practical innovation in quantum computing. By enabling the seamless integration of quantum and classical HPC and AI, HPE is shaping the future of hybrid architectures, driving progress in scientific discovery, national security, and industrial innovation.

Explore hybrid classical-quantum computing at HPE Discover demo #629 or attend a quantum computing session at the show:

• “The future of AI and quantum in the public sector” June 16th, 1-1:45 p.m. PT in Titan 2303, PNL P1604.
• “The next leap: Innovating with quantum, agentic AI, and HPC” June 17th, 12:15- 1:15 p.m. PT in Titan 2201a, TB1394.

About HPE

HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com.

Source: HPE

The post HPE Advances Quantum Computing at Scale with Expanded Industry Collaborations appeared first on HPCwire.

Third annual Cleveland Discovery and Innovation Forum convenes global leaders to examine the future of advanced computing in biomedical research

June 15, 2026 — The third annual Cleveland Discovery and Innovation Forum, hosted by Cleveland Clinic and IBM, highlighted progress in applying quantum computing and AI to healthcare and life sciences research. The forum brought together global leaders in healthcare, science and technology to share insights into how advanced computing is accelerating discovery and shaping the future of patient care.

“AI-Powered prevention: Aligning visions, strategies and policies for impact.” Panelists (l to r): Alex Shalek, Ph.D., MIT; Stacey Adam, Ph.D., Foundation for the National Institutes of Health; Aled Edwards, Ph.D., Structural Genomics Consortium; James Kozloski, Ph.D., IBM; Steve Nissen, M.D., Cleveland Clinic. Courtesy of Cleveland Clinic

The one-day event, held today on Cleveland Clinic’s Main Campus, featured more than 30 speakers from academia, industry, foundations, venture capital and government. Discussions focused on the growing impact of AI and quantum computing in tackling some of the most complex challenges in healthcare and life sciences research.

“The Cleveland Discovery and Innovation Forum highlighted how AI and quantum computing are advancing research across every stage of disease – from prevention and early detection to treatment,” said Lara Jehi, M.D., Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Research Information Officer. “Cleveland Clinic is at the forefront of applying quantum computing to life sciences research. Through this forum and our broader research efforts, we are helping define how advanced computing can unlock new scientific insights and ultimately improve care for patients around the world.”

The forum also highlighted five years of progress by Cleveland Clinic’s and IBM’s Discovery Accelerator, a partnership focused on advancing the pace of biomedical research through high-performance computing, AI and quantum computing. Since its launch, the Discovery Accelerator has supported more than 50 projects, contributed to multiple peer-reviewed publications and developed an innovative education curriculum aimed at building the skilled workforce needed for the future.

“As we mark five years of our collaboration with Cleveland Clinic, we are seeing how quantum and AI can work together to transform biomedical research — modeling molecular interactions, refining machine learning for personalized care, and pushing the boundaries of what’s achievable across healthcare and life sciences,” said Alessandro Curioni, Ph.D., IBM Fellow and Vice President, Algorithms and Applications, IBM Research.

The agenda included keynote presentations, panel discussions and fireside chats led by Cleveland Clinic and IBM executives alongside international leaders. Featured speakers included Eric Isaacs, Ph.D., of Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Curtis Priem, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-founder of NVIDIA; Alex Shalek, Ph.D., MIT; Sergii Strelchuk, University of Oxford; Serpil Erzurum, M.D., Cleveland Clinic; Alessandro Curioni, Ph.D., IBM; and Percy Carter, Pfizer.

Sessions included panels on applied quantum computing and its role in building a world-class research and healthcare ecosystem, and how AI and quantum computing can realize the potential of personalized therapy as well as a fireside chat on visionary leadership and advanced computational methods in healthcare.

The forum also featured a project showcase from Cleveland Clinic and IBM researchers, including recent work modeling a protein of more than 12,000 atoms, the largest protein structure known to be simulated on a quantum computer. The findings underscore the growing potential of quantum computers as scientific tools for solving fundamental problems in biology, chemistry and life sciences.

Several research announcements and updates were shared during the event and highlighted Cleveland Clinic’s steadfast progress in shaping quantum computing applications in medicine, and building the Ohio Discovery Corridor through its Cleveland Innovation District. These included:

• 2026 Global Quantum + AI Challenge: Details were shared on the international competition launched by the Quantum Insider and Cleveland Clinic. The year-long program is designed to bridge the gap between quantum theory and real-world impact, and unites enterprises, start-ups and research teams to accelerate the adoption of advanced computing technologies in industries where innovation drives competitive advantage. Cleveland Clinic’s challenge is titled: Unlocking Undruggable Targets: Quantum Simulation of Allosteric Signal Propagation. The challenge will award $200,000 across five enterprise challenges, with $40,000 allocated per challenge.
• Cleveland Clinic Quantum Catalyzer Program: Updates on this year’s program, which provides quantum access to start-up companies, as well as Kipu. The Kipu project will focus on a breakthrough quantum algorithm to simulate protein folding, helping researchers better understand disease and develop new treatments. Earlier this year, the competitive program selected EntangleBio, Polaris Quantum Biotech and Singularity Quantum. This year’s selected companies will also receive up to $250,000 from K5 Tokyo Black Fund with an in-kind match from Cleveland Clinic.

About Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation, Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. Cleveland Clinic is consistently recognized in the U.S. and throughout the world for its expertise and care. Among Cleveland Clinic’s 83,000 employees worldwide are more than 6,600 salaried physicians and researchers, and 21,900 registered nurses and advanced practice providers, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic is a 6,725-bed health system that includes a 173-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 23 hospitals, 300 outpatient facilities, including locations in northeast Ohio; Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2025, there were 15.9 million outpatient encounters, 343,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 336,000 surgeries and procedures throughout Cleveland Clinic’s health system.

Source: Cleveland Clinic

The post Cleveland Clinic and IBM Forum Highlights Advancements in AI and Quantum Computing for Healthcare Research appeared first on HPCwire.

COLUMBIA, Md., June 15, 2026 — EigenQ, Inc. today announced a collaboration with TD SYNNEX intended to help public-sector, defense, critical infrastructure and enterprise customers assess and prepare AMD EPYC processor-based server environments for the post-quantum security transition.

As organizations plan for the migration from classical public-key cryptography to quantum-resistant approaches, many must protect data with long confidentiality lifetimes while continuing to operate large installed bases of production systems. The collaboration is expected to support practical modernization paths that help customers evaluate post-quantum readiness, identify deployment models and add quantum-safe security capabilities to new and, where technically appropriate, already-deployed AMD EPYC processor-based infrastructure.

EigenQ’s platform combines post-quantum cryptographic software, cryptographic-agility tooling, quantum entropy hardware and integration capabilities for high-assurance computing environments. When aligned with AMD EPYC CPU-based server platforms and ecosystem deployment models, the EigenQ approach is intended to support use cases including encrypted communications, secure workload protection, identity and access systems, key generation and lifecycle management, attestation, cryptographic agility and phased infrastructure modernization.

“Modern enterprises need infrastructure that delivers performance, efficiency and security while giving them the flexibility to prepare for what comes next,” said Derek Dicker, Corporate Vice President, Enterprise Business Group, AMD. “Our collaboration with EigenQ and TD SYNNEX aims to help organizations evaluate practical, ecosystem-ready approaches for preparing AMD EPYC CPU-based environments for the post-quantum security transition.”

“EigenQ is honored to work with AMD and TD SYNNEX to help bring practical post-quantum security capabilities to AMD EPYC processor-based server environments,” said Dr. José R. Rosas-Bustos, Chief Executive Officer, EigenQ. “Customers are asking for solutions that can strengthen resilience, support migration planning and protect existing infrastructure without disrupting mission operations. By aligning technology integration with scalable channel pathways, we believe this collaboration can help organizations prepare for the next major transition in cybersecurity.”

TD SYNNEX is expected to support EigenQ’s ecosystem motion by helping align partner enablement, distribution readiness and public-sector channel pathways for customers seeking to evaluate post-quantum security solutions for AMD server environments, subject to applicable approvals, program requirements and customer requirements.

“As customers prepare for the post-quantum transition, they need practical solutions that can be evaluated, procured and deployed through trusted technology ecosystems,” said Dennis Levenson, Vice President, Vendor Management, TD SYNNEX. “TD SYNNEX is committed to helping partners and customers assess emerging security technologies and bring scalable, operationally practical solutions to market. We look forward to working with EigenQ as it advances post-quantum security readiness for enterprise and public-sector environments.”

The collaboration is expected to be particularly relevant for organizations operating long-lived infrastructure in regulated, mission-critical or high-availability environments. These organizations often need a phased migration path that supports post-quantum readiness while preserving operational continuity, procurement flexibility and the economic value of existing systems.

“Post-quantum migration is no longer only a future compliance exercise; it is becoming an infrastructure planning issue for organizations that must protect sensitive data over long time horizons,” said said EigenQ Chairman Dr. Jesse Van Griensven Thé. “The market needs deployment models that meet customers where they are – across current systems, mixed environments and real-world mission constraints. This collaboration is designed to help address that need through technology readiness, platform alignment and practical ecosystem execution.”

Together, the companies intend to help customers bridge the gap between post-quantum standards development and deployable security implementation. By focusing on platform-level integration, rollout flexibility, ecosystem enablement and operational continuity, the collaboration is designed to support practical migration planning for organizations preparing AMD compute-based server environments for CNSA 2.0 alignment and future quantum-era cybersecurity requirements.

About EigenQ

EigenQ develops quantum-security and post-quantum cybersecurity technologies, including quantum entropy hardware, cryptographic-agility software and integration platforms designed to help organizations prepare for the quantum era. EigenQ focuses on practical deployment models for enterprise, public-sector, defense, critical infrastructure and high-assurance computing environments. For more information, visit www.eigenq.com.

About TD SYNNEX

TD SYNNEX (NYSE: SNX) is a leading global distributor, solutions aggregator, and original design and contract manufacturer that plays a central role in connecting the technology ecosystem. We support more than 150,000 customers across over 100 countries with a comprehensive edge-to-cloud portfolio spanning cybersecurity, analytics, artificial intelligence, mobility, and Everything-as-a-Service. We are a Fortune 100 company that helps partners maximize the value of technology investments and achieve measurable business outcomes through our global reach, expertise and enablement capabilities. Headquartered in Clearwater, Florida, and Fremont, California, the Company’s distribution business brings together a broad portfolio of IT hardware, software and systems, providing access to products across the global IT ecosystem. The Company’s Hyve Solutions business partners with technology companies to design, manufacture, and deliver traditional and accelerated compute, cloud, and connected infrastructure.

Source: EigenQ

The post EigenQ and TD SYNNEX Target Post-Quantum Migration for AMD EPYC Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

The Federal Reserve will meet again this week. Here are three CD account questions savers should ask afterwards.

Varley presented himself in court as a doting dad but prosecution said he used adopted boy as a sexual ‘plaything’

‘They were an ordinary couple,” said one neighbour. Their baby “was happy, he was smiley, he was beautiful”, said a friend. There were no big concerns about the teacher and the sales manager who were doing what thousands do every year – adopting a child.

In reality, Jamie Varley and his partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, were child abusers and Varley murdered the baby boy they adopted, Preston Davey, when he was 13 months old.

A five-year-old girl was swept away and a woman was pulled into the water, prompting authorities to urge precaution

Massive waves, coastal flooding and dangerous rip currents are roiling the California coastline this week as authorities advise people to take precautions while visiting beaches following two deaths last week.

Turbulent waters swept a five-year-old girl, who was walking with her mother and brother, out to sea from the shore of Treasure Island Beach in Orange county in southern California on Tuesday. Bystanders were able to rescue the mother and son, but the girl was not found and her body was recovered on Thursday.

Dan Jarvis says vessel tracked for several days as opposition suggest decision linked to his predecessor’s resignation

Dan Jarvis has told MPs that the Russian oil tanker seized on Sunday had been monitored for several days as he deflected suggestions that its seizure had been ordered by a prime minister under pressure after the resignation of John Healey last week.

The new defence secretary, flanked supportively in the Commons by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said the Smyrtos had been “closely tracked” as he faced a question from the Conservatives as to why the capture took place over the weekend.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a new operating system project written in Rust, so let’s look at Zinnia.

The kernel is written in (almost) 100% Rust and attempts to avoid unsafe code where possible. It implements a big range of POSIX APIs in system calls, but also exposes common extensions found in Linux and BSDs, like epoll and timerfd. This allows it to run a somewhat modern desktop using Wayland and X11 sessions.

Most drivers are implemented as modules. These are Rust ELF dylibs which get loaded and linked during boot from an initrd, similar to Linux systems. Zinnia can boot from any UEFI based system thanks to the Limine bootloader.

↫ Zinnia OS website

At least Weston and Xfce can run on Zinnia, even on real hardware, which is quite an achievement. The project was started in 2024 as a learning endeavour, but quickly grew out of control, as these projects are wont to do. The code’s open source.

We’re a little deep into June already, but it’s only now that Haiku published its monthly progress report for May. There’s a bunch of fixes for drag-and-drop behaviour in Tracker, AVX512 support can now be enabled thanks to changes to the kernel’s FPU handling, some low-level changes were made for the Rust and Zig compilers, and further improvements were made to the boot process on the Raspberry Pi 5 (although a lot more work is needed on that front).

There’s still no sixth beta since a few more blockers remain, but don’t let that stop you from installing Haiku – it’s stable enough as it is, sixth beta or no.

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has been updated with the release of Milestone 40.

This version has some major component updates. Perl in now 5.42 instead of 5.34, and the default Python is now 3.13. The GCC suite is now version 14.2.0, go is version 1.26, Xfce has been updated to version 4.18, node is v22, with v24 added and v20 removed.

↫ Tribblix M40 release notes

There’s a more detailed changelog, as well as the downloads page to get started. If you’re already running Tribblix, you can update in-place, of course.

Acquisition expands the AMD AI portfolio and helps customers with memory optimization technology designed to improve performance, reduce total cost of ownership and accelerate time to deployment.

June 15, 2026 — Modern data center infrastructure is evolving rapidly, and customers are increasingly facing a common challenge: access to memory.

As AI models, data analytics, virtualization and high-performance computing workloads grow in size and complexity, memory has become a critical constraint across cloud and enterprise environments. For customers, addressing these bottlenecks is essential to improving performance per dollar, increasing efficiency and accelerating deployments at scale. AMD is addressing this challenge by acquiring MEXT, a pioneer in AI-driven memory optimization technology.

MEXT has developed innovative AI-powered predictive memory technology designed to make flash behave more like DRAM, helping expand usable memory capacity while maintaining performance and efficiency. This approach has the potential to reduce infrastructure costs, improve resource utilization, and help customers more effectively scale general-purpose and AI workloads.

The acquisition adds to AMD’s ability to deliver differentiated, full-stack compute and AI solutions. By integrating MEXT’s technology across the AMD data center portfolio, the company expects to help enterprise customers unlock greater value from their infrastructure investments while accelerating AI deployment.

Just as important, MEXT brings a talented team with deep expertise in memory systems and AI infrastructure. Their innovation and technical leadership will further strengthen efforts at AMD to solve some of the most important challenges facing modern data center buildouts.

Demand for memory is growing across every category of enterprise compute. By combining AMD leadership in high-performance computing and data center platforms with MEXT’s memory optimization technology, AMD is taking another step to help customers deploy workloads more efficiently, cost-effectively and at greater scale.

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimised CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.

Source: AMD

The post AMD Acquires MEXT to Advance Memory Optimization for Compute Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

US president says strait of Hormuz will be open from Friday but questions remain over waterway fees and Israeli breaches of ceasefire in Lebanon

• Tallying the global cost of the US-Israel war against Iran

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has declared that the strait of Hormuz will be “completely open” from Friday, as western leaders gathering at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains battled to prevent the fragile US deal with Iran from almost immediately unravelling.

“The deal’s all signed. And the strait ⁠is already partially opened,” Trump said as he arrived at the summit in France, but Israeli breaches of the ceasefire in Lebanon and Iran’s claims about its right to charge fees in the crucial waterway revealed the agreement’s many loose ends.

NEW YORK, June 15, 2026 — IREN Limited today announced it has completed the acquisition of Ingenostrum, S.L. (Nostrum Group), a developer of grid-connected AI data centers based in Spain.

The acquisition marks IREN’s entry into the European market, adding approximately 490MW of secured, grid-connected power in Spain and an additional development pipeline. Nostrum also brings a team of more than 50 people across development, engineering, construction and operations.

The acquisition establishes a strong foundation for IREN to serve rapidly growing AI Cloud demand across Europe, one of the largest and fastest growing markets.

Nostrum’s operations will continue under the IREN brand.

Daniel Roberts, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of IREN, said: “Europe is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets for AI infrastructure, and Spain is among its most compelling entry points, with abundant renewables and strong fiber connectivity. Nostrum gives us secured power today along with a development pipeline and a great local team we’re excited to work with.”

Gabriel Nebreda, CEO of Nostrum Group, said: “We have spent years assembling one of Spain’s most advanced AI infrastructure pipelines. Joining IREN means we can now develop it at the speed and scale Europe’s rapidly growing demand for AI infrastructure requires.”

About IREN

IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud provider, delivering large-scale data centers and GPU clusters for AI training and inference. IREN’s platform is underpinned by its expansive portfolio of grid-connected land and power in renewable-rich regions across North America, Europe and APAC.

Source: IREN

The post IREN Completes Acquisition of Nostrum Group Expanding AI Cloud Platform to Europe appeared first on HPCwire.

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA." Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping. iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro -- a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA," that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros. iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design,' but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I'm failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I've certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time." Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs on YouTube also published a comprehensive video of his experience ordering, unboxing, and tearing down the phone. "From pre-order emails landing in Gmail spam thanks to botched DMARC records, to paying for the $47.45 Trump Mobile 47 Plan over the phone, the entire buying experience was a disaster worthy of its own review," writes Nelson.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The mayoral election in fast-growing Frisco was seen as a rejection of anti-Islamic rhetoric that has become prevalent among the state GOP.

The Trump administration is boasting about pending plans to conclude its war with Iran, having achieved none of the original objectives laid out by President Donald Trump.

With a commitment to a ceasefire and the scheduled signing of a “framework” later this week, Iran is expected to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. Negotiations over an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program are expected to take place in the 60 days following Friday’s signing ceremony.

If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.

Trump also teased the prospect of a U.S. protection racket under which Middle Eastern nations would be forced to pay monetary tribute to America if the U.S. and Iran do not finalize a nuclear accord.

On Monday, Iran’s government declared victory and appeared to vow revenge on the U.S. for the war.

Related

How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, his 80th birthday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” An hour later, Trump offered a caveat, stating the strait would only be opened “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.”

“This victory was achieved through absolute national cohesion, under the wise guidance of the Supreme National Security Council and all state pillars,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei announced on Monday, claiming that the conflict “cost the aggressors heavily.”

“Moving toward diplomacy does not mean we will ever forgive or forget the crimes against the Iranian nation; the pursuit of justice for our martyrs is permanent,” said Baghaei.

The White House did not reply to a request by The Intercept for comment on Iran’s declaration of victory and apparent vow of revenge for its dead.

The new “deal” is a complete capitulation for Trump who claimed, on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” No such surrender occurred.

Nor is it the first ceasefire Trump has claimed would result in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

“Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” the White House announced on April 8, essentially the same agreement publicized on Sunday.  That original ceasefire collapsed months ago, but the fiction was observed by the administration and mainstream news media outlets alike, until the new agreement was rolled out.

Pakistan says it will oversee a formal signing of a memorandum of understanding on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly session in Islamabad “the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations has been announced across all fronts, including Iran, America, and Lebanon.”  

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday that the agreement guarantees “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one.” Iran previously agreed to those terms when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew from that pact during his first term.

Trump indicated Hegseth was lying or uniformed in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. The president said the U.S. was still negotiating whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years but hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension.

Trump has consistently criticized the JCPOA. “Barack Hussein Obama gave them 1.7 Billion Dollars in ‘Green” Cash,’” he wrote during a social media rant in April. Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that the U.S. would release $12 billion in frozen assets to Iran before the start of nuclear negotiations. “The accord secures the unfreezing of all Iranian assets and addresses compensation for wartime damages,” said Baghaei.

Trump said that if the U.S. does not sign a final nuclear agreement with Iran, the United States might assume the role of “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. The proposed extortion scheme appears akin to the 19th-century Barbary States, which practiced state-supported piracy to exact tribute from other nations. The United States fought two separate wars against two of these North African states: Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, and Algiers from 1815 to 1816.

Related

A Point-by-Point Breakdown of Trump’s Failed Iran War Objectives

A recent Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, his stated objectives, and supposed American achievements found the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted.

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out his most ambitious objectives. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

Since April, the White House has not replied to requests for further information about Trump’s inability to achieve world peace. Trump has also failed to accomplish even his more modest goal, as the region remains mired in conflict. Israel continued its war on Lebanon on Sunday and said it was not involved in the new pact. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. … We are not party to this agreement,” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram on Sunday.

“He’s a very difficult guy,” Trump said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “He should be very thankful to us for doing this,” he said of the war, lapsing into typical hyperbole. “Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

The post Trump Celebrates Achieving Absolutely Nothing in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Mark Carney says Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise office hasn’t been ‘effective’ since its 2019 setup

Canada is eliminating a watchdog that investigates alleged human rights violations committed by Canadian companies operating abroad, after Mark Carney said the office hadn’t been “effective” since it was set up in 2019.

The move comes as Canada faces criticism from Donald Trump’s administration over its “unacceptable” efforts to combat forced labour.

Deal will leave things almost exactly as they were before feckless war of choice started

• Tallying the global cost of the US-Israel war against Iran

• Middle East crisis – live updates

If we get to a Friday signing ceremony without this uncertain new US-Iran deal being derailed by any of its inherent ambiguities, then nuclear talks can finally restart in the same place – and at almost exactly the same point they were before this conflict started.

The world will have irrevocably been changed in other ways. There is no going back for the 120 Iranian children in Minab killed in their primary school in the war’s first hours, nor for their bereaved parents, or any of the thousands in Iran, Lebanon and around the region whose lives were erased or blighted by a feckless war of choice.

Clandestine operation run by Chinese national in Prato moved €80-100m a year through intermediaries

Italian police have dismantled an underground bank used by drug traffickers through which several hundred million euros are believed to have moved over at least three years.

The clandestine bank, whose logistical base was located in Prato, north-west of Florence, has been run since 2021 by a Chinese national, officials said.

President Trump is in France for the annual G7 summit, as the world awaits a signing of a deal with Iran.

About half a dozen parents told CBS California Investigates they had not been informed of the daycare's probationary status, even though the state requires the facility to inform all current and prospective parents.

Scott Vincent Borba was an accomplished business leader, making millions after he co-founded e.l.f. Cosmetics. Then he left everything behind to become a Catholic priest.

IMG_5889.JPG IMG_5890.JPG

Actually went for a little ride after work taking advaantage before it decides to rain again!

Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc appear to have operated under instruction of online handler ‘El Money’

Two men found guilty of conspiring to carry out arson attacks on property connected to Keir Starmer appear to have operated under the instruction of an online handler with links to Russia.

Roman Lavrynovych, 22, from Ukraine, and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, from Romania, were found guilty at the Old Bailey on Monday. Another Ukrainian man, Petro Pochynok, 35, was cleared of the same charge.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from NBC News: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a sweeping ban on social media use for those under 16, joining other countries around the world seeking to protect children online. "It's a big step for our country," Starmer said in a recorded video message released Monday. "Social media is making our children unhappy and unsafe, and as a parent, as much as a Prime Minister, I just can't let that go on anymore," he added. The ban will include social platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, while there is no intention for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included, the government said in a release. [...] Starmer's government called Monday's announcement a "landmark" move, saying the new measures would be brought to Parliament before Christmas, with protections expected to come into force next spring. Beyond the blanket social media ban, the restrictions will also include blocks on functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s, it added. "It's not an easy thing to do. I'll be honest about that," Starmer said. "We haven't rushed into it. We've looked carefully at the evidence, and we'll have to adapt our approach as technology changes, learn from other countries which are taking similar steps." He went on to say that it will face resistance from some of the most powerful companies in the world. "But we will take them on, and we will win, because the need for action could not be any clearer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pet insurance can do more than reduce your vet bills. It can also make room in the budget for other spending.

A recent paper submitted to ArXiv by famed HPC scientist Satoshi Matsuoka, Director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, has shaken the tried-and-true FP64 HPC relationship to its core. The paper is entitled: FP8 is All You Need (Part 1): Debunking Hardware FP64 as the HPC Holy Grail: A Tensor–Memory Equilibrium Model and Implementation Strategy for Ozaki Scheme II on Memory-Bound Workloads in the Post-FP64 Era.

There is quite a lot to unpack in the paper, let alone the title. Matsuoka is basically positing that FP64 (64-bit double-precision arithmetic) hardware is not the best way to perform certain HPC computations that require 64-bit precision on newer Nvidia GPUs. Instead, he demonstrates how FP8 (8-bit floating-point operations) found in abundance on modern GPUs can be combined using the Ozaki Scheme II to achieve faster computation at the same 64-bit precision. This rebuke of legacy 64-bit floating-point technology is Matsuoka’s flag-in-the-sand moment, and it will have consequences throughout the HPC industry. This article attempts to summarize some of the paper’s major points; however, consulting the paper provides greater breadth and support for Satoshi’s arguments and predictions.

Using a simple yet strained analogy, Matsuoka is saying: stop using F1 autos to get around the HPC track as fast as possible. Instead use a bunch of ebikes! In this sense, Matsuoka’s proposal seems absurd and would never work, given traditional HPC beliefs. The “F1-FP64” car has delivered floating-point performance to HPC applications for decades and is considered an integral part of any performance race. Historically, CPU and GPU vendors have consistently delivered generational increases in FP64 performance. That trend is changing because, in a market driven by Gen-AI, many FP8 e-bikes are preferred. While HPC applications require higher precision FP64, Gen-AI training and inference require lower precision. To accommodate the larger market, Nvidia has regressed FP64 performance on newer-generation processors (AMD has no such plans) and created an F1-FP64 gap that Matsuoka posits can be filled by lower-precision FP8-ebikes.

Hardware trends

The HPC market has often borrowed technology from larger markets. Back in the early days of Linux Clusters (Beowulf), HPC shifted away from custom supercomputing processors and toward commodity hardware. The cost of creating next-generation processors required large sales volumes, which were not available for specialized supercomputing and workstation processors. The commodity desktop/server market could justify these volumes, and HPC took advantage of this trend. GPU-assisted computing began as video cards evolved into true HPC acceleration devices. Server GPUs (not necessarily desktop video cards) offered a large FP64 capability needed by HPC applications and helped establish a viable market — initially dominated by Nvidia.

Enter the age of GenAI. LLM model training works faster with lower-precision floating-point numbers during training and inference. This reduction in precision corresponds to a commensurate decrease in the memory required to represent numbers, without any loss in training fidelity. In addition, the reduced amount of data requires fewer math operations and is much faster. For instance, performing standard 64-bit arithmetic operations requires manipulating 8 bytes per operand. Using an 8-bit floating-point format requires 8 times less memory and only requires manipulating 8 bits. These reduced floating-point sizes range from 32 bits to 4 bits (FP32, FP16 (BF16), FP8, and even FP4).

The GenAI market has pushed GPU and CPU designs to emphasize lower precision “AI-format” operations over FP64. The current trend in FP64 vs lower precision for Nvidia is evident in Table 1, which compares recent Nvidia and AMD results.

Table 1: Comparison of floating-point precision performance for Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Data taken from the Sotachi paper (Table 2) and AMD documents. The “emulated” result is explained below.

As shown in Table 1, FP64 performance on Nvidia GPUs has regressed, and on the B300 it is effectively non-existent. The AMD GPUs, however, are maintaining the FP64 growth. As shown in the lower-precision results, Nvidia is driving GPU performance growth in these areas. This migration of GPU silicon from FP64 to FP8 and FP4 is clearly due to the GenAI market.

The HPC community has recognized this trend for years. Outside of AMD, the HPC community is asking: “Where will we get our FP64 performance? It seems we have become second-class citizens in the Nvidia GPU space.” To answer that, we need to consider using what is now available in abundance- lower-precision hardware to produce high-precision results.

The Ozaki Methods

Back in the Spring of 2025, I wrote “Have You Heard About the Ozaki Scheme? You Will” as an introduction to a family of error-free transformations (EFTs) that allow higher-precision arithmetic to be emulated using lower-precision hardware.

In 2012, five years before Tensor Cores were placed in Nvidia GPUs, Katsuhisa Ozaki, Takeshi Ogita, Shin’ichi Oishi, and Siegfried M. Rump published a paper entitled “Error-free transformations of matrix multiplication by using fast routines of matrix multiplication and its applications.”  In the paper, the authors describe a technique for fast, error-free splitting of floating-point numbers. Using this technique, they first develop an error-free transformation of a product of two floating-point matrices into a sum of floating-point matrices. 

The Ozaki-I scheme, as it is now called, is a method for performing high-accuracy matrix multiplication by leveraging INT8 Tensor cores on modern GPUs. It achieves this by splitting high-precision input matrices into multiple components and then performing matrix multiplications on these components using low-precision arithmetic. The results are then combined to obtain the final accurate high-precision matrix product. 

A second EFT method, Ozaki II, is now available. The Ozaki-II scheme offers advantages over the conventional Ozaki-I scheme by providing superior computational efficiency and better scalability for large-scale, high-fidelity numerical computations. In early 2026, Uchino, Ozaki, and Imamura observed that the original Ozaki-II algorithm cannot be directly adapted to FP8 matrix-multiply-accumulate units. They introduced a quantization trick that emulates modular arithmetic over FP8. This adaptation is why Ozaki-II remains viable on Blackwell Ultra and the upcoming NVIDIA Rubin GPU, both of which have reduced INT8 support compared to increased FP8/FP4 hardware.

Testing assumptions (HPC dogma)

Matsuoka’s argument hinges on assumptions about roofline graphs for applications running on specific processors. The roofline graph shown in Figure 1 is an easy way to visualize the behavior of HPC applications. In general, all applications running on a processor are subject to one of two limitations. The first is memory bandwidth, or the speed at which data needs to be moved into and out of the processor for a given application. The diagonal line on the left side of the graph in Figure 1 represents this performance region. The second limit is the peak speed at which the processor can perform. This region is the horizontal line at the top of the image.

Figure 1: Roof line graph example (Image from Wikipedia)

As shown in the figure, App1 is in the bandwidth-limited zone, while App2 and App3 are in the peak performance zone. Several conclusions can be drawn from this graph: App1 is clearly memory bandwidth-limited, and increasing processor performance will have no effect on App1 (save your money on faster processors). In the case of App2 and App3, they are running at peak performance, and increasing memory bandwidth will not affect performance (Again, save your money on faster memory). The ideal spot for an application to live is on the ridge point, the intersection of memory bandwidth and peak performance. At this point, the processor is being “fed” data as fast as it can process it, which represents a good balance between the characteristics of the processor’s memory subsystem. Remember, most HPC applications are memory-bandwidth-limited and lie on the diagonal line in the figure.

As shown in Table 1, Matsuoka points out that the regression of FP64 performance dramatically changes the roofline for newer Nvidia GPUs. He points out two important consequences of these changes.

Consequence 1: Previous memory-bound kernels become compute-bound. The classical roofline ridge point is given by the peak FP64 throughput divided by the HBM bandwidth. On B300, this ridge sits at 1.3 TFLOPS/8 TB/s = 0.16 FLOPS/Byte, forcing every dense linear-algebra kernel narrower than a General Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) into the compute-bound regime. In other words, there is more than adequate memory bandwidth for application needs, because only a small amount is consumed by the arithmetic units.

Consequence 2: Low-precision tensor units are dormant. By design, the B300 carries 10 PFLOPS of dense (NV)FP4 throughput (15 PFLOPS sparse) and 5 PFLOPS of dense FP8 (10 PFLOPS sparse). When running a typical FP64-only HPC kernel, these units are idle and contribute nothing to the kernel’s time-to-solution. This situation is the Dark Silicon manifestation of the AI–HPC divergence.

As Matsuoka aptly points out, despite the rapid maturation of Ozaki-I and Ozaki-II for dense General Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (GEMM), all published performance studies have focused on the compute-bound regime, where the Ozaki technique most obviously wins due to the sheer number of lower-precision Tensor Cores.

He indicates that no published analysis (to their knowledge, as of May 2026) has asked the question: When is Ozaki-II profitable for memory-bound kernels? As mentioned, most HPC applications live in this region of the roofline. The conventional wisdom that EFT methods like Ozaki-I and II cannot help bandwidth-limited kernels because they inflate operand counts deserves a careful look on hardware where the FP64 compute roof has collapsed below the memory roof.

Based on the analysis presented in the paper, Matsuoka dramatically labels native PF64 processing as the only way to achieve HPC-level performance, as dogma when using Nvidia B300 generation (and beyond) GPUs. The often staid HPC community has something to discuss.

Performance numbers

To demonstrate and support his position, Satochi examines performance using four standard HPC primitives.

1. GEMM (General Matrix-Matrix Multiplication)
2. Batched GEMV (General Matrix-Vector Multiplication)
3. 7-point Stencil (localized neighboring elements)
4. SpMV (Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication)

Table 2 reports speedups within each GPU, that is, how much Ozaki-II/FP8 accelerates each workload relative to that GPU’s own native FP64 performance. Satoshi suggests this view is correct for evaluating emulation on a single chip. Still, it is not the correct view for evaluating whether FP64-emulated execution regresses or progresses relative to the prior-generation HPC baseline.

The appropriate baseline for that question is the H100, the last data-center Nvidia GPU whose architecture was balanced for HPC rather than for AI inference. Table 2 therefore reports absolute achievable FP64-equivalent throughput for the same five workloads, with all GPUs normalized to the H100 native FP64.

Table 2: Achievable FP64-equivalent throughput per workload, in TFLOPS, and relative to H100 native FP64 (last column block, in parentheses). Native throughput uses the FP64 tensor path for dense GEMM and the FP64 vector path for the memory-bound primitives.

As Matsuoka  states in the paper, “Three patterns in the above table (table 4 in the paper) support a single thesis: Ozaki-II does not regress performance against the H100 baseline; on the contrary, it restores or improves the prior-generation scaling on every workload.” He also states, “Ozaki-II is not just a compensation mechanism for Nvidia’s FP64 regression; it is the mechanism that converts the silicon-area savings into bandwidth-scaling and into AI-grade tensor throughput, both of which the application then sees as faster FP64.”

Cheap lunch at the AI cafe?

Using the Ozaki-II library requires recoding many of the standard libraries (e.g., DGEMM). Indeed, any HPC applications that wish to take advantage of the emulated FP64 performance on new Nvidia hardware will require adaptation to the Ozaki-II scheme — there is no free lunch. This situation is not unlike the past when applications were migrated to CUDA. Ozaki is a bit more complex and may slow adoption. However, as Matsuoka points out, the reported success of GenAI-assisted coding may provide a rapid path forward for enabling applications with Ozaki-II emulation. He states in the paper:

This represents an unusual moment in which two ostensibly unrelated AI developments—the architectural pivot of GPUs toward low-precision tensor cores, and the maturation of AI coding assistants—combine to make the emulation strategy practically realizable on the timescale of the FugakuNEXT, Doudna, and Blue Lion deployments.

This assumption/suggestion covers a lot of ground. While GenAI coding assistants are reporting increased productivity, their use is not without issues. Time will be needed to see if this prediction plays out.

AMD sticks to FP64 with emulation options

As noted in Table 1, AMD GPUs are following the traditional FP64 trajectory by increasing performance with each new generation. As a result, AMD is less focused on emulation than Nvidia. Indeed, in the HPCwire article AMD Hints at Big FP64 Increases in MI430X GPU as Ozaki Underwhelms, AMD Fellow Nick Malaya points out several issues with error-free transformations, such as the Ozaki methods.

First, the software is not IEEE-compliant, and it does not produce the same results as running the code on actual FP64 hardware. He states in the article, “In some cases, that’s okay, but in a lot of matrices that are common that we’ve observed, the accuracy implications are pretty profound. In fact, you can give it matrices that differ by a few orders of magnitude in terms of the elements in the matrix…Ozaki has accuracy problems.”

The second major problem with Ozaki concerns its expectation for square matrices. If the HPC workload does not use square matrices, the performance drops below native FP64 hardware performance, Malaya said. In addition, Malaya also states that traditional HPC applications are vector-based, for which Ozaki methods show little benefit, and that fewer than 10% of these applications have been covered in a matrix format that allows Ozaki methods to be used.

Finally, AMD will support Ozaki emulation on its chips, Malaya said. “There’s no reason not to. It’s software. We can release it and support it. And you can have libraries that allow you to dynamically switch between the native and the Ozaki method and probably estimate it,” he said. “But we’re not finding it compelling as, ‘You can replace all the 64-bit hardware pipes.’ You need those FP64 pipes to fall back onto.”

To be Precise …

HPCwire is honored to be cited three times in Satoshi’s paper. It is gratifying to report on the significant advances in HPC. There are, however, some points that could use clarification.

In the paper’s introduction, Matsuoka wrote that there is “an announced reliance of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission on Ozaki emulation” by reference to an article entitled Genesis Mission Will Lean Heavily on Ozaki Scheme for FP64 Capability written by HPCwire Managing Editor Alex Woodie. And further on, he states, referencing the HPCwire article: “DOE’s Genesis Mission explicitly identified Ozaki emulation as its fallback path for FP64-accurate scientific computing on AI-centric hardware.”

Although the article title may give that impression by using the phrase “Lean Heavily,” the article was a bit more nuanced. As part of the interview, Darío Gil, DOE Under Secretary for Science, stated;

“In discussions I’ve had with both [AMD CEO] Lisa Su and with [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang], they have expressed a strong commitment for FP64, that it will continue,” Gil said in an interview last week. “For us, it’s very important, because we don’t view this [as a] substitution. These are complementary.“

As the article continued, Gil said, adding that the two types of computing will work together to support Genesis Mission’s goal of pushing the limits in AI-powered science and engineering. To be clear, Gil never explicitly stated Ozaki techniques as a “fallback” to traditional FP64 methods, nor did he announce a reliance on Ozaki emulation in the interview. As more research and testing continues, HPCwire will provide updates and analysis of the situation.

Begun, the HPC precision wars have

This paper is undoubtedly the first of many addressing FP64 emulation. The FP64 bifurcation will continue because GenAI provides a strong economic justification for emphasizing lower precision, which has changed the broader Nvidia hardware market. Matsuoka paper represents a solid new HPC path forward in that regard.

There is much to be learned, however. From one perspective, jumping in an AMD F1-FP64 car and racing your existing application around the HPC track has a definite convenience factor. On the other hand, connecting FP8-ebikes may provide higher absolute, high-precision track speed as the Gen-AI skew continues in Nvidia hardware. We sense a disturbance in the FP64 force.

The post HPC Precision Wars: Satoshi Matsuoka Plants the Ozaki Flag appeared first on HPCwire.

Interest earnings on a CD account of this size could be substantial and available to savers in just a few months.

The US-Iran ceasefire is welcome. But the US president is trying to disguise a failed war of choice as a diplomatic victory

The US-Iran agreement to halt fighting for 60 days is welcome, because even cynical diplomacy is better than war. But Donald Trump should not be allowed to call this a triumph. He has bought a pause after an illegal war of choice that failed to secure its declared aims, devastated Iran, destabilised Lebanon and sent shocks through energy and fertiliser markets, leaving many people poorer and hungrier. A campaign launched to display US military strength is likely instead to be remembered for demonstrating its limits.

A deal with Iran is better than war with Iran. But the US president is hailing as victory the partial easing of a crisis that he, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, helped create. The measure of success will not be the reopening of the strait of Hormuz, which war had closed, but whether the next two months produce a verifiable nuclear settlement and put out the flames fanned by the US-Israel attacks.

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.

Instructors hurled Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas into 40-metre abyss without attaching safety equipment

A 21-year-old woman who died when two rope-jumping instructors threw her from a bridge without first harnessing her to security equipment has been buried in Brazil’s São Paulo state.

Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas was rope jumping on Saturday at Ponte do Esqueleto, an abandoned bridge in the municipality of Limeira where tourists practise extreme sports. The young woman, who aspired to become a physical education teacher, had asked to be launched from the bridge airplane-style, with two instructors hoisting her above their shoulders as she spread out her arms.

Vice President JD Vance denied that Iran will receive "billions of dollars of assets" as part of the U.S.-Iran deal that was announced Sunday and is set to be signed later this week.

RUEIL-MALMAISON, France and TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 15, 2026 — Schneider Electric, a global energy technology leader, today announced a strategic collaboration with Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn), the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, to help define and scale the next generation of AI data centers.

Credit: Schneider Electric

As AI adoption surges, the demands on digital infrastructure are being fundamentally reshaped. This collaboration brings together Foxconn’s unmatched expertise in advanced compute platforms, AI rack integration, and global manufacturing with Schneider Electric’s leadership in power systems, cooling, and energy management. Together, the companies aim to deliver integrated, ready-to-deploy solutions that enable customers to build and operate AI infrastructure with greater speed, efficiency, and predictability across regions. Production will begin later this year.

“At the pace AI is evolving, the industry requires a new model for how infrastructure is designed, built, and delivered,” said Young Liu, Chairman of Foxconn. “By combining Foxconn’s strength in AI systems and global manufacturing with Schneider Electric’s deep expertise in power and energy, we are creating a path for customers to deploy AI capacity at scale—faster, smarter, and more sustainably.”

“AI demand continues to accelerate, and as compute scales to keep pace, the energy behind it becomes a fundamental enabler,” said Olivier Blum, CEO of Schneider Electric. “If we want to scale AI responsibly, these systems must be connected. This is where energy intelligence becomes essential. At Schneider Electric, we are advancing energy tech to build the most efficient and sustainable AI factories by bringing integrated power, cooling, and digital capabilities into AI data centers. Working with Foxconn, we are helping customers build capacity with real speed, resilience, and efficiency, as energy technology partners to an industry that is firmly entering the era of intelligence.”

Through this collaboration, Foxconn and Schneider Electric will co-develop next-generation reference architectures for AI data centers. The partnership will also explore innovations in closed-loop energy optimization, modular power and cooling skids, and standardized design frameworks, creating repeatable, high-performance blueprints for AI factories worldwide. By aligning manufacturing excellence with energy intelligence, the two companies are setting the foundation for a new class of AI infrastructure that is scalable by design, efficient by default, and ready to meet the accelerating demands of the AI era.

About Foxconn

Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn) (TWSE:2317) is the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and leading technology solutions provider, ranking 28th in Fortune Global 500. In 2025, revenue totaled TWD8.1 trillion (approx. USD260 billion). The Group’s market share in electronics manufacturing services (EMS) exceeds 40% and covers four major product segments: smart consumer electronics; cloud and networking; computing; and components and other. Operating over 240 campuses across 24 countries, Foxconn is one of the world’s largest employers with approx. 900,000 employees during peak manufacturing season. We are committed to sustainability in the manufacturing process and serving as a best-practice model for global enterprises. The Group is guided by its 3+3+3 strategy, actively investing in industries of electric vehicles, digital health, and robotics; in technologies of artificial intelligence, semiconductors and next-generation communications; in intelligent platforms of Smart Manufacturing, Smart EV and Smart City. Foxconn is dedicated to becoming a comprehensive, world-class enterprise, with AI as its core driving force. Learn more at www.foxconn.com/en-us.

About Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is a global energy technology leader, driving efficiency and sustainability by electrifying, automating, and digitalizing industries, businesses, and homes. Its technologies enable buildings, data centers, factories, infrastructure, and grids to operate as open, interconnected ecosystems, enhancing performance, resilience, and sustainability. The portfolio includes intelligent devices, software-defined architectures, AI-powered systems, digital services, and expert advisory.

Source: Schneider Electric

The post Schneider Electric and Foxconn Collaborate on Next-Gen AI Data Center Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

The accomplished musician, who recorded over 70 albums in his career, died peacefully in Germany after a short illness

The South African jazz composer and pianist Abdullah Ibrahim has died at the age of 91.

His family announced his death in a statement released on Monday.

Eleven skydivers and the pilot were killed in a plane crash in Missouri shortly after takeoff on Sunday.

Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion, combining Fox's sports, news, entertainment, Tubi, and Fox One offerings with a streaming platform that reaches about 100 million people. The companies say the merger would create the "third-largest player in US television by share of viewing," while Fox insists Roku will remain open to competing apps after the deal closes. CNN reports: Fox has dabbled in streaming over the past few years -- finally launching its Fox One competitor last August -- but has lacked a serious streaming business with the ability to compete in a space dominated by YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock. With CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery receiving initial US regulatory approval to combine with Paramount, Fox's purchase of Roku became more urgent. [...] The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027 with the companies forecasting $400 million in savings. "This is a defining moment for Fox, and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decade," said Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch. "Today, we take the next step: bringing together the most valuable live content portfolio in video consumption with the preeminent streaming platform through which America watches it." Murdoch said Roku will continue to offer competing apps. "It's essential that Roku remain open and partner-friendly business. We don't see that changing at all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Agent opened fire at car, striking it, as suspect fled scene and has not been located, Stafford Township police say

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in New Jersey was reportedly struck by a vehicle and shot at the car as it fled the scene on Monday morning, according to local authorities.

The police department of Stafford Township said in a statement that it had been provided with information that ICE “was attempting to apprehend a suspect when the suspect fled from the scene in a vehicle, striking [an ICE agent]”.

A new analysis projects how much Americans will pay for electricity from June to September, depending on their state of residence.

Don't miss these handpicked discounts on some of our favorite products ahead of Prime Day.

Markets rally on expectations that the agreement will ease global energy supply concerns, though analysts warn gas prices may remain elevated for some time.

BrianFagioli writes: Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered Stanford University's 2026 commencement address, but despite leading one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, he spent very little time discussing artificial intelligence. Instead, the speech focused on optimism, working on hard things, and following your interests. The omission is notable given how many graduates are entering a job market being reshaped by AI. While Pichai briefly referenced a "rewiring of technology," he largely avoided discussing AI's impact on careers, automation, or the future of work. Was the Google CEO intentionally steering clear of a controversial topic, or was he simply trying to deliver a timeless commencement speech rather than a technology-focused one? Hyping AI during a commencement speech has been a surefire way to get boos -- unless you're Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who reminded college graduates that they already posses "AI" of their own: "actual intelligence." You can read Pichai's commencement speech here. "If you're not from here, California is advertised as being really lush and green. But when I looked out the window, it was more... brown," said Pichai during his speech. "I guess I said this out loud, I'm not sure why. My host, Mrs. Jane Earl, gently corrected me. 'We prefer to call it golden,' she said.And that's exactly what I mean by choosing optimism. It's about reframing for the positive: Where I saw brown, she saw golden. This slight change of perspective had a huge ripple effect on how I thought about the world around me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of metropolitan areas around the country with basic homes worth at least $1 million has tripled since 2020.

Eleven skydivers and a pilot were killed in Sunday crash as aircraft for Skydive Kansas City was taking off in Butler

The Missouri skydiving community is mourning the loss of several of its members after a plane crash south of Kansas City killed 11 skydivers and a pilot.

The crash occurred around noon on Sunday in Butler, Missouri, as an aircraft supporting operations for Skydive Kansas City was taking off, the company said in a statement on Monday, as reported by the local news outlet KCTV.

The US and Iran have reached a tentative deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, but competing claims from Donald Trump and Tehran have left the details shrouded in uncertainty. Questions remain over the reopening of the strait of Hormuz, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. Nosheen Iqbal speaks to the Guardian’s senior international correspondent Julian Borger

As practical quantum computing edges closer, global leaders begin making plans to demonstrate its advantages

June 15, 2026 — With the first practical quantum computers expected to arrive in about two years’ time, global quantum computing leaders are thinking about how these systems should first be deployed for the largest scientific impact.

Quantum computing leaders gathered this spring to discuss how near-term quantum computing and hybrid quantum-classical computing can deliver early demonstrations of utility for solving complex chemistry and materials science problems. Image credit: Ben Watson, PNNL.

This spring, the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) brought together quantum computing leaders for the second annual Quantum Computing for Chemistry workshop, organized by the PNNL Quantum Algorithms and Architecture for Domain Science (QuAADS) initiative.

Karol Kowalski, director of QuAADs and an expert in advanced computational chemistry, opened the event with a challenge to the assembled group: identify scalable and adaptive algorithms capable of operating across varying system sizes and qubit counts to solve practical problems.

Participants explored how near-term quantum computing and hybrid quantum-classical computing can deliver early demonstrations of utility for solving complex chemistry and materials science problems.

Bindu Nair, Associate Director of DOE’s Office of Science Basic Energy Sciences program, addressed the role of DOE in supporting quantum computing and driving its advancement globally. Quoting DOE Undersecretary for Science Dario Gil, she said that “we are at an inflection point in computing and because of that we are going to be able to do science in ways that have never been done before.”

“The charge to you,” she added, “is to come up with what the parameters need to be to make a quantum computer useful to this community so that you can demonstrate something useful in quantum chemistry.”

DOE has made a large investment in quantum computing through the National Quantum Initiative and its Quantum Centers, she added. Now that it is coming close to paying off, the hard part begins.

Up Next for Quantum Chemistry

Meeting participants spent two days investigating how and when a quantum calculation could solve complex problems in chemical conversions, materials science, energy storage and other pressing needs.

The participants stressed the importance of running quantum chemical simulations that cannot be done with classical computing alone. Further, they stressed the need to choose chemical systems that can also validate simulations through laboratory experiments.

Speakers from Microsoft, IBM, IONQ and Xanadu presented case studies from their research organizations.

From these discussions, several participants noted the potential for further acceleration of quantum computing through computing code developed by AI.

Marwa Farag, a quantum algorithm engineer at NVIDIA, discussed the use of AI to design better quantum algorithms. The approach involves using AI models to demonstrate significant speedup and improved accuracy when designing quantum algorithms for modeling chemical systems.

She also pointed to NVIDIA’s work in hybrid quantum-classical computing with the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform. A recent collaboration between PNNL, academic and industry partners demonstrated the utility of such an approach.

Victor Batista from Yale presented applications of quantum machine learning for chemistry, including predicting chemical reactivity, binding affinity and molecular properties. The work involves using quantum circuits and variational algorithms to achieve accurate predictions and optimize molecular designs.

Similarly, Daniel Claudino from Oak Ridge National Laboratory presented a hybrid software framework for integrating classical high-performance computing with quantum computing. The framework manages resources and enables efficient communication between quantum and classical systems, he said.

Francesco Evangelista of Emory University and Nick Mayhall of Indiana University, Bloomington, among others, discussed strategies for enabling realistic quantum computing simulations to predict the energy and properties of complex chemical structures.

After two days of discussion, Kowalski, who is also a Laboratory Fellow at PNNL, summarized the key outcomes of the meeting, emphasizing that there will also be a formal workshop report published in a peer-reviewed journal, similar to the report from the first workshop held in 2025.

How Many Qubits?

Kowalski stressed the need for more than 100 logical qubits to achieve meaningful quantum utility. He reiterated the need for identifying problems that are both conceptually interesting and not easily solvable by current classical methods, as well as the role of experimental validation in supporting quantum computing results.

And he noted that AI, an emerging tool to quantum computing, may help speed initial insights into chemical systems and predictions, as well as serve as an accelerator for quantum algorithm development.

“This workshop demonstrates PNNL’s commitment to support DOE’s goal of elevating quantum computing into a trusted, mission-relevant tool to advance science,” said Marvin Warner, PNNL’s Chief Scientist for Quantum. “Practical quantum computing requires sustained commitment to working collaboratively across industry, academia and our national laboratory partners. At PNNL, we have invested in doing what’s needed to advance the state-of-the-art quantum computing workflows and outcomes.”

Learn more here about PNNL’s commitment to using quantum computing to address a range of science challenges.

About PNNL

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Source: Karyn Hede, PNNL

The post PNNL Prepares for Quantum Advantage appeared first on HPCwire.

Nigel Farage’s party has announced three uncosted proposals since the byelection campaign started, according to Conservative rivals

Starmer acknowledges some teenagers will get round these restrictons. But that does not make the rules pointless, he says.

Will it mean that no child ever looks at social media again? No.

But look, this might shock you, but it doesn’t shock parents of teenagers; they get around other laws too.

Some technology companies want us to think that social media is unchangeable, part of an almost natural order.

But we have to resist that kind of learned helplessness. We have agency, we can change it, and we will.

These types of debt collection mistakes are rare, but they can still have major consequences for your money.

Garelli bike recovered by police in Italy after they spotted it without licence plate during roadside check

A moped stolen from a northern Italian town in 1984 has been traced and returned to its rightful owner after four decades.

The case of the missing moped – a dark grey Garelli that these days might be classified as vintage – was finally cracked by police in Volpiano, a suburb of Turin, after they spotted a 64-year-old man travelling without a licence plate during a roadside check.

Fox said it will buy Roku for $160 per share in a cash-and-stock deal that it expects to complete in the first half of 2027.

Proscription of direct action group has led to more than 700 people being charged under Terrorism Act

Protesters arrested for allegedly supporting Palestine Action have expressed anger at the court of appeal’s decision that the ban on the direct action group was lawful.

On Monday, five judges overturned the high court’s February ruling that proscription was unlawful, meaning that more than 3,000 people who have been arrested under the Terrorism Act since proscription, more than 700 of whom have been charged, could now face prosecution.

A free climber dubbed the "Spider-Man of Yemen" died after falling almost 400 feet into a volcanic crater.

Some war-weary residents displaced from the south found relative quiet, with guarded optimism that Trump will pressure Israel to adhere to a truce.

Professor alleges Institute of Astronomy has a ‘bad history of misogyny’ and staff were mistreated

The University of Cambridge’s prestigious Institute of Astronomy has been accused of tolerating misogyny and a “cycle of bullying” in an employment tribunal.

The claim, brought by a professor of astrophysics, Wyn Evans, also alleges the University of Cambridge has retaliated against whistleblowers.

While officials welcome ceasefire, many people are uncertain it will last – and return to find homes destroyed

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Hours after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced, residents of south Lebanon began to race back to their villages. One man filmed as he drove into the entrance of Harees, his arrival interrupted as the car in front of him suddenly veered off the road. An Israeli armoured vehicle was parked in the middle of the road less than 100 metres ahead; he scrambled to turn around.

“It was packed with explosives. I guess they still want to blow things up,” said Abdullah al-Ali, a municipal official in Harees. Ali said that the entrance to the town had been blocked off after two other explosive-laden vehicles left by the Israelis were discovered in the area.

Agreement contains no restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missiles, nor does it call for regime change or surrender

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The basic structure of the US-Iran deal reached late on Sunday – a return to the prewar status quo – has been on offer from Iran for more than a month. So has the specific architecture: an immediate unwinding of the consequences of the US-Israeli war through the reopening of the strait of Hormuz and a deferral of the actual negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, the ostensible cause of the war. The concept of a 60-day ceasefire to resolve these issues has also been a fixture for more than a month.

But it has taken the mounting pressure on the US and Iranian economies for both sides to recognise politically that a return to all-out war was unlikely to resolve the impasse, and if so, compromises would have to be struck.

Ukraine’s president dismisses Moscow’s claim that it did not target Kyiv’s Pechersk Lavra monastery, ahead of meeting of G7 leaders in France

• Kyiv monastery set on fire in night of Russian attacks across Ukraine

• Macron frames Évian G7 agenda in hope Trump will stay for whole summit

Meanwhile, Unesco has formally condemned the Russian strikes on Ukraine that hit the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, “one of Ukraine’s most significant spiritual and cultural landmarks.”

In a statement, the body said:

“The strike reportedly caused significant damage to the exterior and interior of the Dormition Cathedral. Adjacent historic structures, including elements of the Lavra’s fortification complex and Ivan Kushnik Tower, were also reportedly impacted.

Unesco condemns attacks against cultural property, educational institutions, students, education personnel and media professionals protected under international law. Damage to such institutions deprives communities of access to culture, education, and shared spaces that are essential for recovery and social cohesion.

Residents of West Oakland, which suffers from toxic waste and high pollution rates, rally against a coal export facility

West Oakland, a California neighborhood known for its rich history of Black activism from the Pullman Porters’ union to the Black Panthers, might not seem like the site of the country’s next great coal project.

But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is pushing for – with the injection of $75m to build a sprawling coal export terminal in the nearby port of Oakland.

AI agent traffic grew 7,851% in a single year. Now, for the first time, bots outnumber humans on the open web.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Voters in Switzerland have rejected an unprecedented far-right proposal to cap the country's population at 10 million in a divisive referendum dubbed "the Swiss Brexit." Some 54.79% of voters were against the proposal by the Swiss People's party (SVP) and 45.21% were in favor. Turnout was 58.86%. A different outcome would have obliged the Swiss government to limit the population, currently 9.1 million, to 10 million by 2050, enacting tough restrictions on family reunification, residency permits and asylum if the number had reached 9.5 million before that date. Under the proposals, if the threshold of 10 million people was exceeded before 2050, the Swiss government would have been obliged to withdraw from the country's free movement agreement with the EU -- ending its access to the bloc's single market. The SVP, which has the most seats in parliament, has for years fueled anti-immigrant sentiment, especially concerning workers from neighboring EU countries. The party had insisted that a so-called "sustainability initiative" was needed to address the increase in population, which it argued was putting pressure on Swiss infrastructure, housing, social programs, natural resources and way of life. "Voters were worried about negative consequences for Switzerland's relationship with the EU and for the labour market," said Urs Bieri, from the polling firm GFS Bern. "People are also worried about things like having enough care and health workers. Also, there's a feeling that in the current international environment it's not sensible for a small country to do this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It makes sense to assume an inherited IRA is protected like your own retirement money, but is that really the case?

The Insta 360 Luna Ultra has a lot in common with the DJI Osmo Pocket 4. I've used both cameras, so let's see how they compare.

The Fed is set to meet again on June 16 and June 17. Here's what may happen to mortgage interest rates afterwards.

Schoolteacher Jamie Varley described as ‘serial manipulator and a serial liar’ in Lancashire court

A schoolteacher described as a “serial manipulator and a serial liar” has been found guilty of sexually abusing and murdering a baby he adopted.

Jamie Varley, 37, of Staining, Lancashire, had denied the murder of 13-month-old Preston Davey and 25 other offences but was found guilty after an eight-week trial.

Markets welcome US-Iran peace deal but prices may stay high as buyers race to refill depleted emergency crude stockpiles

• Oil prices hit three-month low and markets rally

After more than 100 days of the greatest recorded disruption to the world’s energy supplies, the global oil and gas markets have breathed a sigh of relief.

Hours after Donald Trump confirmed that a US-Iran peace deal would lead to the reopening of the strait of Hormuz for tankers carrying millions of barrels of oil and gas, the price of Brent crude tumbled to lows of $82 a barrel. Wholesale gas prices fell about 6%.

The dispute rejected by the Supreme Court involved the scope of students' free speech rights and schools' ability to restrict expression that could be viewed as reflecting their endorsement.

Judge Pauline Newman, who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, has been suspended from hearing cases because of concerns about her fitness to serve.

Fox says Roku will continue to operate independently.

As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms nearly every aspect of modern life, preparing students for a future shaped by computing is more important than ever. From June 1-5, 2026, students from grades 7–12 had the opportunity to explore that future firsthand through Cybersecurity and Computing in the Age of AI (CCA-AI), an immersive academy designed to introduce participants to cybersecurity, AI, programming, data science, and emerging technologies. Thirty-one students from Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas participated in the program facilitated by Texas A&M University’s High Performance Research Computing (TAMU-HPRC) team led by Executive Director Honggao Liu, Ph.D.

HPRC Associate Research Scientist Wesley Brashear, Ph.D., played a pivotal role by developing the academy curriculum, teaching several sessions, and overseeing camp logistics. Python was a cornerstone of the academy, giving participants hands-on experience with one of today’s most versatile programming languages. As an ideal language for beginners, Python powers applications ranging from web development to AI and scientific computing. Dr. Brashear and HPRC Assistant Research Scientist Josh Winchell, Ph.D. overhauled the academy’s approach to teaching programming by deploying a project-based learning strategy to help students understand how they can use Python in school projects or personal hobbies.

Academy staff preparation was managed by HPRC Associate Director Marinus Pennings (User Support and Helpdesk). Nineteen HPRC professional and student staff were required to complete Child Protection Training and pass a background check prior to participating. K-12 training experience was an important addition to the resumes of eight TAMU student counselors who assisted. It was the ninth summer program for children that HPRC professional staff have hosted since 2017. Previous camps were financially-supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, and Texas Workforce Commission. While Dell Technologies provided laptops and sponsored this year’s tee shirts, everything else was covered by a registration fee and an HPRC subsidy (staff supported by the National Science Foundation-funded ACES project). “We found that parents were willing to pay a nominal fee to cover catering and incidentals; past events have been so popular that we’ve seen returning students and their younger siblings,” said HPRC Director of Advanced Computing Enablement Lisa M. Perez, Ph.D.

The academy welcomed students from all backgrounds and skill levels to experience hands-on learning and collaborative projects. A campus tour and admissions talk helped participants envision themselves on a path toward academics and careers in computationally-intensive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Throughout camp activities, students were challenged to think critically, solve problems creatively, and work together on teams. Guest speakers shared their personal insights into careers in cybersecurity, AI, research computing, and technology innovation.

Discovery-Filled Week

Monday morning launched with student arrival, orientation, and introductions. Since participants reflected a range of ages and experience, care was then taken to break them into synergistic groups where beginners could learn from more advanced peers.

Following introductions, everyone enjoyed an interactive cybersecurity-themed escape room challenge where students worked together to solve puzzles, decode clues, and think like cybersecurity pros. Rather than simply listening to lectures, they became immersed in a realistic scenario that demonstrated how critical thinking and teamwork are essential skills in cybersecurity and life, in general; important not only for future STEM professionals but for informed digital citizens of all ages.

The afternoon featured hands-on experience with Raspberry Pi clusters. Raspberry Pi computers are small, affordable devices that enable students to explore computing concepts in a tangible way. By connecting multiple components into a cluster, students learned how parallelism enables supercomputers to quickly solve large and complex problems.

That afternoon, teams began work on cybersecurity-themed group projects they would refine throughout the week, and present on Friday at the closing ceremony. Tuesday’s guest speaker introduced practical applications for computing technologies. Such presentations help bridge the gap between classroom learning and professional practice by demonstrating how learned concepts are applied.

They then returned to Python, building upon skills introduced the previous day. Through guided exercises, they learned how to write code, solve problems algorithmically, and develop simple programs.

Hacking Pi

One of the week’s most exciting activities was: “Hack the Raspberry Pi,” where students learned how security professionals assess a threat landscape by identifying vulnerabilities in software, hardware, and networks, as well as people who have access to the infrastructure. The exercise demonstrated that cybersecurity is not simply about defense but also about understanding how systems function.

After lunch, students shifted gears to robotics with Sphero Bolt Cybersecurity Lab activities led by Dr. Winchell. These programmable devices allowed participants to apply coding concepts in a highly visual and interactive way. Students programmed their robots to navigate unique paths designed on the floor with blue painter’s tape, thereby reinforcing the connection between the human, software, and hardware. Subsequent activities taught them about network vulnerabilities by sending messages to control their opponent’s Sphero Bolt device over bluetooth.

In the afternoon, all were introduced to AI/Machine Learning (ML) concepts. Through engaging demonstrations and activities, they explored how computers learn from data, recognize patterns, and make predictions. Such foundational concepts helped to demystify technologies that increasingly influence our everyday lives. The AI/ML activity inspired students to think critically about opportunities and challenges presented by “intelligent” systems.

By Wednesday, teams had coalesced and were ready to tackle more advanced concepts. The morning focused on coding and collaborative project development, allowing each team to refine their ideas while applying newly acquired technical skills.

Later that day teams presented their developing projects and received feedback. Learning how to effectively communicate ideas is a critical component of STEM education, and this pitch session gave students valuable experience in proposal preparation and presentation. They then continued with Raspberry Pi cluster activities and a final Python session where they applied data science skills learned in previous sessions to datasets of their own choosing.

One of the most anticipated activities of the week followed: building a chatbot. Guided by instructors, students learned how conversational AI systems operate and explored the underlying concepts that enable computers to interact with users through natural language. The activity offered a practical AI demonstration while fostering creativity and problem-solving.

Exploring Campus

Thursday included a TAMU campus tour led by an official Aggie Guide from the Howdy Crew who identified landmarks and explained Aggie traditions. Participants began to envision themselves as university students while they learned about academic opportunities and educational pathways. Later that morning, project work continued, ensuring teams had time to strengthen their presentations before Friday’s ceremony. By this time, all had begun to demonstrate growing confidence in their newfound technical and presentation skills.

Friday provided a memorable conclusion; students visited a data center on the university’s West Campus, where they gained a rare behind-the-scenes look at infrastructure and supercomputers that power AI and modern research. For many, the tour transformed abstract concepts into tangible reality. They witnessed firsthand how servers, networking equipment, storage systems, and cooling technologies work together to support research and countless online services. This experience highlighted the scale and complexity of modern computing while reinforcing concepts introduced in a much smaller scale throughout the week. They then returned to the classroom to finalize project preparation and complete surveys while the experience was fresh in their minds.

Showcasing Student Achievement

The academy concluded with a closing celebration where each team presented its project before peers, instructors, family members, and invited guests. Their presentations showcased an impressive range of creativity and technical understanding of coding skills, cybersecurity concepts, data analyses, AI applications, and innovative solutions inspired by topics explored throughout the week. Team synergy was demonstrated through collaboration, communication, confidence, and problem-solving skills that extended beyond newfound technical aptitude. Each student then received a certificate of participation.

Preparing for the Future

The CCA-AI academy was designed to help students envision themselves as future innovators, researchers, engineers, and technology leaders. As AI, cybersecurity, and advanced computing continue to shape society, the need for a skilled and informed workforce grows in importance and urgency. Programs, like the CCA-AI academy provide early exposure to these fields while helping students develop skills that will serve them well throughout their lives. Participants left with fresh technical knowledge, new friendships, and a deeper understanding of technologies that are transforming the world around them. Some may pursue careers in cybersecurity, while others may become software developers, data scientists, engineers, or AI researchers. Regardless of what the future has in store for them, the experience provided a valuable foundation for success in an increasingly digital world.

Notes: Academy t-shirts (design) and catering were arranged by Senior Administrative Coordinator Sheri Stebbene (HPRC). Photos were taken by HPC Systems Engineer Steve Tran (HPRC) and Dr. Perez. For more information about TAMU HPRC programs, resources, and services, visit this website.

About the author: Elizabeth Leake is an HPCwire contributor and founder of STEM-Trek, a global nonprofit that supports underrepresented STEM scholars with travel and professional development. She is also a project manager of advanced cyberinfrastructure at Texas A&M University. 

The post Cybersecurity and Computing in the Age of AI: Empowering the Next Generation of Innovators at Texas A&M University appeared first on HPCwire.

Three children were found by authorities when they entered the suspect's apartment and were taken to a medical center to be evaluated, officials said.

Outpouring of public grief for Lidia ‘Taty’ Almeida, leader of group of mothers that has marched every week since 1977

The human rights activist Lidia “Taty” Almeida – who spent more than half a century searching for her son after he was forcibly disappeared by Argentina’s military junta – has died aged 95, prompting a public outpouring of grief.

Almeida, 95, was the president of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, made up of women who have marched around the square outside Argentina’s presidential palace every Thursday since 1977, demanding the return of children who were disappeared during the country’s 1976-1983 dictatorship.

The Trump administration and Carter Page reached a $1.25 million settlement only of his claims against the federal government in April.

Homeowners association in Madison incites protests and calls for humane solutions after voting to kill geese

A homeowners association in Madison, Alabama, has incited protests and calls for humane wildlife management solutions after voting to kill off hundreds of local geese.

Dozens of people gathered in the city’s Edgewater neighborhood to protest against the non-unanimous plan by the homeowners association (HOA) there to euthanize the Canada geese at Lady Ann Lake by fatally gassing them in a chamber. They called for more humane alternatives such as using horns to scare off the geese or relocating the birds.

Despite a last-ditch legal bid to block the event, the White House spent the night as a marketing department for the private fighting company

A warm Sunday night on the South Lawn – with bright lights, fireworks, a fighter plane flyover, thousands of spectators, and the first major professional sporting event ever staged at the White House – produced many memorable scenes. One might linger more than most.

Justin Gaethje, the American interim lightweight champion, stood alone in the Oval Office in his fight shorts, draped in an American flag, studying a framed Declaration of Independence before he turned to walk out to the cage.

An infuriating story about something most of us don’t really stop to think about: e-books and the rendering engines companies and software use to display them.

It’s the year 2026. Thanks to the horrendous [Adobe] RMSDK which Kobo decided to use as their backbone for all book rendering (probably for DRM reasons), a single line of perfectly valid CSS turns a perfectly valid EPUB file into a “corrupted file” on Kobo and just drops the whole book. No clear error message, no fallback. Just a massive fail.

↫ André Klein

The level of obnoxiousness goes even deeper: Kobo devices ship with a better, actually maintained renderer for e-books as well, but in order to have a book use it, the book file in question needs to have a specific file extension. Remember that e-book files are just packaged websites; there’s no reason to do any of this nonsense with two rendering engines, one of which is shit and frozen in time.

I have never had to do anything related to creating an e-book – I just put books on my own Kobo and read them – and even I am getting annoyed just reading this.

CNET talked to the browser maker's new boss about privacy, choice and his vision for keeping the internet open and fair.

QuEra’s Libra system will bring cloud-accessible fault-tolerant quantum computing to early commercial and research workflows

BOSTON, June 15, 2026 – QuEra Computing today announced Libra, its first fault-tolerant quantum computer, arriving on Amazon Braket in 2028, alongside a deepened multi-year technical and go-to-market partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring fault-tolerant computing to customers worldwide. See the AWS announcement here.

Libra, QuEra’s Libra arrives on Amazon Braket in 2028

Fault-tolerant quantum computers are designed to run longer, deeper, and more reliable computations than today’s noisy quantum systems. For enterprises, research institutions, and governments, this creates a path toward workflows that may eventually support molecular simulation, materials discovery, optimization, and other problems where classical approaches face scaling limits.

Libra, QuEra’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer and the first system in the expanded QuEra/AWS partnership, is a megaquop-class system, meaning it is designed to perform on the order of one million reliable logical quantum operations. That matters because practical quantum applications depend not only on the number of logical qubits, but also on how many logical operations can be performed before errors overwhelm the computation. With projected specs of over 256 error-corrected logical qubits and a logical error rate of 10⁻⁶, Libra is designed to give AWS customers cloud access to fault-tolerant quantum computing in 2028 and support early practical commercial and research workflows.

The Libra architecture has been validated in multiple peer-reviewed publications. It builds on QuEra’s track record of building and deploying quantum computers, including Aquila, the 256-physical-qubit system live on Amazon Braket since 2022, and Gemini, a neutral-atom system with logical-qubit capabilities co-located with the ABCI-Q supercomputer in Japan.

“Fault-tolerant quantum computing is moving from a scientific milestone to an engineering and deployment roadmap,” said Andy Ory, CEO of QuEra Computing. “We have executed this roadmap in the open, with peer-reviewed milestones and validated system advances. Libra brings fault-tolerant computing to the cloud at scale in 2028. It is an important step forward, and subsequent generations will scale even further, as we will reveal in our roadmap webinar later this month. We are inviting leaders to engage now so they can build the talent, use cases, and workflows needed to be ready when these systems come online.”

An Expanded Strategic Collaboration with AWS

QuEra and AWS are expanding their multi-year strategic collaboration to bring QuEra’s fault-tolerant systems to AWS customers. Under the expanded agreement, Libra will be available on Braket starting in 2028. Braket provides customers a single environment to develop and run quantum applications alongside their existing classical infrastructure, with native integration to HPC and AI/ML resources, for hybrid quantum-classical workflows. The collaboration deepens a relationship that began in 2022, when Aquila became the first neutral-atom quantum computer on Braket.

“We believe fault-tolerant quantum computing will become a foundational part of how customers solve their hardest computational problems on AWS. QuEra’s technology has demonstrated a clear path to that future. By bringing these capabilities to customers through Amazon Braket, they can combine QuEra’s fault-tolerant quantum processors with the scalable AWS HPC and AI services they already rely on,” said Eric Kessler, General Manager, Amazon Braket, at AWS.

Built on Proof

QuEra ushered in the era of quantum error correction in 2023 and has continued to advance fault tolerance since. Because fault tolerance is a prerequisite for commercially useful quantum computing, QuEra has focused on getting there. Every building block of the Libra architecture has been validated in peer-reviewed research.

Teams at QuEra and at the labs of QuEra’s scientific founders at Harvard and MIT have published eight peer-reviewed papers in Nature and Physical Review Letters demonstrating the foundational capabilities behind the system, including:

• Logical qubits, the building blocks of error-corrected computing
• Below-threshold error correction, where errors shrink as systems scale
• Transversal logical operations, fast and low-overhead gates between qubits
• Fast decoding for real-time error correction at scale
• Sustained operation of thousands of qubits with continuous atom reloading
• Resource-efficient error-correcting codes that lower the physical-qubit cost per logical qubit

In the run-up to 2028, QuEra continues to stand up successive generations of fault-tolerant systems in-house, each more capable than the last, to perfect the design, accelerate the roadmap, and give strategic partners hands-on access to working fault-tolerant environments ahead of broader release.

About QuEra Computing

QuEra is putting quantum to work. As the scientific and commercial leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, we help enterprise innovators leverage quantum to gain competitive advantage, support HPC centers as their users tackle classically intractable problems, and enable government programs to build national and sovereign capabilities. We do this by combining our quantum systems, available on-premises and via the cloud, with application co-design and collaborative research. Born at Harvard and MIT and still advancing together, QuEra builds neutral-atom systems on a public, peer-reviewed path to fault tolerance, and operates globally from Boston, New Mexico, Tokyo, and the United Kingdom. As quantum computing moves from “one day” to “Day One,” QuEra delivers practical impact today while leading the path toward large-scale, fault-tolerant systems. See what’s possible at www.quera.com.

Source: QuEra

The post QuEra Announces 2028 Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer and Expanded AWS Partnership appeared first on HPCwire.

Marius Borg Høiby found guilty of ⁠two ​counts of rape, one count of domestic violence and other ⁠crimes

Marius Borg Høiby, the son of Norway’s crown princess, has been sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of several offences including two counts of rape.

The verdict was handed down by the Oslo district court on Monday morning in a courthouse packed with journalists, nearly three months after Høiby’s closely watched six-week trial.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer hopes to have a ban on kids using social media that is "designed to be addictive" enacted by early next year.

BOULDER, Colo. and LONDON, June 15, 2026 — Atom Computing and quantum algorithms company Phasecraft today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to explore how application-focused algorithms can be used to benchmark progress toward utility-scale quantum computers.

Through this MOU, the companies will collaborate on accelerating the delivery and adoption of quantum solutions in key application areas, such as the development of materials for batteries and photovoltaics. Through adapting Phasecraft’s advanced algorithms and software to Atom Computing’s neutral-atom quantum computing hardware, the collaboration aims to accelerate the path towards useful applications in materials science and energy.

Atom Computing continues to lead the quantum computing industry through its pioneering work in neutral-atom quantum technology. The company recently demonstrated a breakthrough in quantum error correction using toric code and announced a $100 million Letter of Intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce. Atom Computing is also deploying the world’s first commercial quantum computer with logical qubits and performing in Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), where it is demonstrating its pathway to utility-scale quantum computing.

Phasecraft is the leading UK and US-based quantum algorithms company, developing advanced quantum algorithms to solve real-world problems in materials discovery, chemistry, and optimization. Its focus is on making quantum computing practical today by designing software that works with existing imperfect hardware, bridging the gap between current technology and future large-scale quantum systems.

“Unlocking the true commercial potential of quantum computing requires a tight synergy between breakthrough hardware and hardware-optimized software,” said Dr. Ben Bloom, CEO and Founder of Atom Computing. “By fine-tuning Phasecraft’s industry-leading algorithmic methods to our neutral-atom architecture, we can pave the way for a new generation of commercial applications in materials science and sustainable technology.”

“We are excited to collaborate with Atom Computing to advance quantum applications in material science,” said Prof. Ashley Montanaro, CEO and Co-Founder of Phasecraft. “Real-world quantum utility will come from combining advances in hardware with equally powerful advances in algorithms. By bringing together Atom’s scalable quantum computing platform and our hardware-adaptive algorithms, we can accelerate progress towards applications in energy storage, solar technology, and advanced materials.”

By aligning cutting-edge neutral-atom quantum computers with purpose-built quantum software, this collaboration represents a decisive step toward realizing quantum advantage in critical industries and accelerating innovation across the global energy and materials landscape.

About Atom Computing

Atom Computing is developing large-scale quantum computers to enable companies and researchers to achieve unprecedented computational breakthroughs. Utilizing highly scalable arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms, the company has developed systems with over 1,200 qubits, featuring advanced capabilities towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. Atom Computing’s on-premises systems provide customers with new computational tools and logical qubit capabilities to address increasingly complex applications and to grow their quantum ecosystem. In 2025 Atom Computing sold its first commercial on-premises quantum computer to QuNorth, a Nordic quantum initiative funded by EIFO and Novo Nordisk Foundation. Learn more at atom-computing.com.

About Phasecraft

Phasecraft is the quantum algorithms company whose mission is to accelerate the practical application of quantum computing by redesigning quantum algorithms for the imperfect quantum computers of today. Phasecraft was founded in 2019 by Toby Cubitt, Ashley Montanaro, and John Morton, expert quantum scientists who have spent decades leading top research teams at UCL and the University of Bristol. Phasecraft works in partnership with leading quantum hardware companies, including Google, IBM, Quantinuum, and QuEra, academic and industry leaders, to develop high-efficiency algorithms to move quantum computing from experimental demonstrations to useful applications. Learn more: www.phasecraft.io.

Source: Atom Computing